Missy's Travels: Giao Xuan - weekend workcamp

Background: Giao Xuan is a small town in Nam Dinh province, where the Red River empties into the South China Sea. One of VPV's NGO programs focuses on Giao Xuan: they are trying to improve/maintain the fragile ecosystem while also promoting ecotourism in the area. Part of the work is currently focusing on sending groups of students and volunteers to Giao Xuan for weekend workcamps, and that's what I did this past weekend! There were six foreign volunteers and about 12 Vietnamese volunteers, so it was a pretty big group.

Getting to Giao Xuan is a hellish five hour ordeal, over what is definitely the bumpiest road I've ever been on. The pic below was taken at the very beginning of the journey...the bus got a lot more crowded at each stop!

After arriving in Giao Xuan about 6 PM on Friday, we were divided into small groups and sent to our homestays. After a quick walk around town, we all headed to one house for group dinner. The rest of Friday night was spent playing icebreaker games and preparing materials for the weekend.

roomies

Saturday was great, although I would have preferred waking up a little later - 6 AM on the weekend is just not my cup of tea. We had breakfast, and the foreign volunteers had some free time while everyone else went out to collect the bikes we would use all day. Around 8 AM we got on our bikes and started a tour of the village. We also used the tour to hand out flyers advertising a town meeting we would be holding later that evening. We stopped at a temple, the dyke that separates the town from the river delta, and the "beach" where there are hundreds of tiny stilt houses that fishermen live in. On the way back from our tour we stopped at the only school in Giao Xuan to have a meeting with some of the students and sign them up for the new Giao Xuan environmental club.

Saturday afternoon was supposed to be the main activity of the weekend - planting trees. And we did plant them, it's just that the things we planted barely qualify as trees. They were more like sticks with sprouts. And the location was less than ideal - we planted them in this very grassy area where some trees had already been planted and a lot of them were dying. So I'm not sure that our efforts will produce lasting results, but it was still great fun and all the Vietnamese students were so enthusiastic. After planting "trees," we went on a leisurely bike ride through the countryside - my favorite part of the weekend. This is exactly what I pictured myself doing in Vietnam, and it totally met my expectations. The scenery was pretty, locals were friendly and the kids were always excited to see us. They would run after us shouting "hello! hello!" So cute.

Sunday we held a town meeting to encourage locals to be more environmentally responsible, and raise awareness about the ecotourism project. Since it was all in Vietnamese I'm not totally sure what went on, but there was a skit, speeches, interactive games, a video and lots of singing. Basically the message was "take pride in your town and don't litter everywhere because it harms the environment and tourists won't want to visit." The foreign volunteers participated in a few activities, including a very unharmonious rendition of Michael Jackson's "We Are the World." After the meeting we went back to my homestay where we had an amazing lunch along with some incredibly strong home-made rice wine offered (read: forced upon us) by one of the locals. Then it was back on the bus for the long ride back to Hanoi!

While Giao Xuan was neither the prettiest nor the most interesting place I've been (although it was both pretty and interesting), it was by far the most authentic. There are still very few tourists so the town and the locals remain quintessentially Vietnamese. That is to say, there are no ventures that specifically target tourists, and the locals don't try to hawk their goods because they have nothing out of the ordinary to sell. I liked that a lot. If this ecotourism project succeeds, I hope Giao Xuan is able to retain its culture and attitude or, in my opinion, the best part of Giao Xuan will be lost.