Many tourist pilgrims make the trip to Sapa, in the northwest of Vietnam. Nestled in steep mountains, the town is full of wandering trekkers and backpackers, with a smattering of higher-end tourists, all of whom stay at the 4-star Victoria Hotel.

Can I digress for a moment and say how much I prefer 3-star to 4-star hotels? The 4-stars offer important amenities like clean beds and bathrooms, and that’s perfect for most people.

But I’ll take a good lower-range hotel any day of the week, since they are all owned and run by locals. You get the feeling of authenticity, and the rooms, fittings and lobbies are often quirky (or non-functional) in a way I find utterly charming. The rates are more in the $40 range, instead of $140 per night. The Victoria Hotels are comfortable, with great food and lovely locations, but I’m generally too cheap. Give me 2 or 3 stars, please.

Sapa is interesting in so many ways – the incredible scenery with terraced rice fields climbing steep slopes, the ethnic minority villages scattered through the mountains, the cool air driven ahead of the storms barreling in between the peaks and the myriad waterfalls and hidden valleys. It’s also interesting in terms of what happens to a remote area inhabited by ethnic minorities once peace and prosperity brings in tourists, businesses, good roads and money.

One thing that is easy to do is visit ethnic minority villages. You probably have to drive down a bumpy road, and pay an entry fee to a bored-looking clerk at in a dusty one-room shack, and then pull into a parking lot big enough for tour buses.

What’s the attraction? Well, it’s fun to be out in the countryside, but of course the main attraction is the local folks, sporting their colorful ethnic minority clothes. It’s a bit disconcerting to descend from your motorcycle and be surrounded by a group of Red Dau women speaking near-perfect English. I doubt they have been to Oxford, so they must have learned it from tourists. They want to sell you some highly-overpriced embroidered items, but that’s part of the tourist game all over the world.
So you set off, each of you with two or three tour guides. They suggest you come visit their home, point out the local café (which they are not allowed to enter) and wait patiently for you to emerge and agree to buy something. Inside the café is mildly interesting. Of course, it is owned by a Vietnamese non-ethnic minority from the flatlands, as is virtually every business in the area. All the guests are tourists, mostly Vietnamese talking loudly, enjoying themselves, smoking and drinking beer.
Next is a walk out of the town and into the village, scattered huts surrounded by fields – look, over there! Some very picturesque men and women planting rice, up to their calves in mud. One yells, “hey American! Want to come help?” How is it that they all speak English? The six or seven impromptu tour guides stand in the sun and suggest good angles and subjects for photography. Near-naked and very dirty kids tumble around their ankles.
So far, it’s a bit odd but very charming in a low-budget kind of way – as you can tell from the start of this blog, that’s what I like. But now it’s show time; time for the hard sell. What do you mean you don’t want to buy $30 worth of embroidered pencil cases from each of the women? They walked with you on a hot day, they have kids to feed, few tourists came by today, and so on. It can get pretty ugly.
Safely back in Sapa, the sun is setting and it’s getting nice and cool. There are tourists everywhere, in the bars, cafes and restaurants. Locals hang out in the parks, and women selling things accost you every ten steps with the refrain, “you buy something from me?” Of course, lots of people do, which is why the women continue to come into town every day. Many of them have babies strapped on their backs. You can have a beer on a restaurant veranda and look out over one of the most spectacular vistas in the world.
You have to wonder, however, what the people who have made this land their home for many centuries think when they look out over what are called the Tonkin Alps. Do they miss a time when things were simpler and poorer, when it was clear what a girl would do when she grew up? Do they resent the intrusion of Vietnamese people from the lowlands, and tourists from all over the world? What do people who make $1 per day feel about people who spend $100 on dinner?
I posed these questions and many more to a young Hmong woman, about 20 years old, who is a friend of my wife. She really didn’t know any answers, but she admits to being very confused about what to do with her life. All the old rules are changed, but the new ones are so hard to understand.

Vietnam’s economy has been the driving force behind the large social gains made over the past decade. With economic growth in the range of 8-9% a year for over a decade, Vietnam has been one of the star performers in the world economy, and to its credit the government has made sure that the gains of this growth have benefited the population. Although inequality is increasing, so is the general welfare; poverty (the level below which people can afford adequate consumption) has dropped from 60% of the population to 20% in just a decade.

There are some storm clouds on the horizon, however. Inflation suddenly accelerated in 2007, from around 8% to over 12%. The stock market went wild in 2007, but has crashed in 2008. Real estate prices are bursting through the clouds, in what seems to be a classic bubble destined to end badly. If the real estate market crashes, the banking sector is likely to follow, with unhappy results for the economy. The banking sector has been made more vulnerable due to a rapid expansion in loans, many of them more risky than previously thought sensible. Sound familiar?

This scenario will come as no surprise to Americans, who are watching the US version of this movie unfold in real time. Most Americans, however, are probably unaware that the weak dollar is causing Vietnam serious headaches, since it makes imports relatively more expensive. Over 20% of Vietnam’s exports go the U.S, where recession and a weak dollar are causing cutbacks in orders. The trade deficit has ballooned to over $4 billion, and exports of some products are dropping. More worrying to individual exporters, they are paid for the orders in dollars, but have to pay suppliers and salaries in Vietnamese Dong (VND). As the dollar has weakened, they are suffering losses. Indeed, most banks are now charging 2% fees to convert dollars to VND.

Inflation is also a major headache. For East Meets West, this is a particular problem, since the cost of building materials (the bulk of our budget line items) is up 20-30% in the past 12 months. Donors give EMW funds to complete a project, but those dollars buy a lot less in Vietnam then they used to. Some projects are having to be scaled back as a result.

Part of the inflation has been driven by rising fuel prices; the cost of a liter of diesel fuel has doubled in the past six months. As a result, fishermen are not putting out to sea, since the revenue from seafood sales is less than the cost of fuel. Bus lines, taxis, commercial transport are all raising their fares. Agricultural inputs are rising in price, which leads to rising food prices.

Another factor is the huge amount of investment pouring into the country; over the past two years the money supply has increased 135% while GNP has gone up 27%. Foreign investment in Vietnam was $23 billion last year, equal to 30% of the total economy; in the first two months of 2008  nearly $2 billion has already poured in.

Of course, the government of Vietnam is not sitting by idly while all this goes on. Strong measures to restrict the money supply, tighten credit, widen the trading band for the VND versus the dollar, support the banks, and dampen inflation are already in place, and having an effect. Still, giving the uncertainty in the world economy, and the likely recession in the U.S., the risks are substantial. And with its entry into the WTO, Vietnam is more exposed now to the vagaries of the world economy. Many people in Vietnam – me included –  are watching with worry to see what will happen.

I approach the issue of getting haircut the same way I approach most things when I’m not at work: I just walk out the door and see what happens.

In Ho Chi Minh City one day last month, I wandered down Pham Ngu Lao street and looked around for a haircutting place. I can’t stand fancy salons, being the kind of guy who prefers the traditional male barber. Of course, these are nearly impossible to find anymore, so for me the next best thing (in the US) is Supercuts. In and out in less than 20 minutes, and a reasonable haircut for under $20. The time in the chair is a key issue for me. I really hate sitting there for too long while some stranger messes around with my head.

In Vietnam, such a mundane task is a whole ‘nother thing. Given how little I understand about what is going on around me, I walked out that day with barely a clue of what to look for, but willing to go with the flow. I can read a little Vietnamese so I was reasonably certain I would not accidentally find myself in a place that catered exclusively to women (how embarrassing!), but wasn’t quite sure what my kind of place looked like.

My general rule – when you don’t know what is going on follow what everyone else is doing – didn’t work in Saigon. Unlike Hanoi, there don’t seem to be sidewalk barbers or small barber shops with groups of men sitting outside drinking tea and smoking. I can always get a quick haircut at one of those joints, although I keep aware of what happened to a friend of mine who fell asleep in the chair and woke up to find himself pretty much bald. I guess the barber figured that as long as the client was in the chair, best to keep on cutting!

I took a left turn down a side street for no good reason at all, and found a little place to my liking – tinted windows, one chair inside, some women sitting around looking very bored. The sign said “haircuts for women and men,” so I expected to find a man in there somewhere. No such luck.

The haircutter spoke a little English, so after about five minutes we established that yes, in fact, I  understood that the service offered here was haircutting and not, for example, shining shoes or cooking noodles.

I sat down in the chair, and we chatted about the usual things – how old I am, where my wife is from, how many kids, their ages, etc. She worked on my hair for what seemed to me to be a really unreasonable amount of time. I was getting pretty bored and antsy, but resolved to wait it out (my general policy in Vietnam). So she clipped and chatted, snipped some more, seeking every last hair that needed some attention. Tiny shards of grey and black fell into my lap.

After 25 minutes of this, I announced that it looked good, was just right, etc. She then asked me, would I like a shave? Well, sure why not. I didn’t have anywhere to go for a few hours.

She cranked back the chair, and in a second I was lying back in chair staring at the ceiling. Here comes the straight razor and the shaving cream –  nice and hot. She then proceeds to shave more forehead. Hmm, I’ve never noticed any hair growing on there, but what the heck. My eyebrows got some attention (she apparently, like my daughters, think they are too bushy but trimming them with a straight razor?). I tried to say something, but suddenly the blade was at my throat, and I didn’t want to distract her.

I couldn’t help wonder, though, how many men she shaved in a week, or whether she had done it at all. The blade scraped and rasped over my neck, chin, lips etc. giving me plenty of time to think about how I would look without one or more of those items if she slipped or sneezed.

I survived without incident, and then came the next course. Shampoo? Well, why not. This involved getting up and going into another room, actually another building entirely accessed through a side door. I followed my haircutter, forehead tingling, and tried to figure out what was going on. Oh, here we go. A table to lie on with a place for your head to rest while someone washes your hair.

My hair is pretty short, so how long could this take? The haircutter leaves, and I lie there looking at a new ceiling for a good 10 minutes while noises indicating things are happening come from the rear of the shop. Finally, another woman emerges with buckets of warm water, shampoo, conditioner and other tools of the trade.

For the next 45 minutes, I just about lost my mind – in a good way. Shampoo nothing, I got the most incredible scalp, neck and face massage I’ve ever had. Come to think of it, it’s the only one I’ve ever had. My hair got washed and rinsed with warm water at least four times. Gradually, it dawned on me that the fact that I’d been in this place getting a haircut for over two hours barely seemed to matter. I was in heaven. Why is this not mentioned in Lonely Planet? How does one find places like this?

I finally made it out of there in one piece. The whole experience cost around $4. I was a bit hazy, like the feeling of coming out of a long matinee into the bright afternoon sunshine, but supremely happy and relaxed. And this is one of the reasons I love Vietnam. I’m a lousy tourist, and can manage to have a bad time just about anywhere I go. Saigon has no charms for me. But every once in a while, I turn down a side street, and find an unexpected and purely quotidian pleasure. And that makes me happy.

The big UN Conference on Climate Change opened yesterday in Bali, hosted by the Indonesian government, which has some real skin in this game. For countries like Indonesia, the effects of climate change are no laughing matter – tens of millions of people will be affected by hotter temperatures and rising sea levels. Entire islands in the Indonesian archipelago may disappear.

The problem is no less severe in Vietnam. By some predictions, a rise in sea levels of one meter (possible within the next century according to recent reports in Science magazine) would wipe out 12 percent of the land area and directly affect 23% of the population. The most densely populated areas of Vietnam are the low-lying coastal regions, and with over 2,000 miles of coastline, “Vietnam potentially is one of the countries where sea level rises could have the most dramatic impact,” said Mark Lowcock, a senior official with Britain’s Department for International Development in a report issued earlier this year.

One predicted outcome of global warming (an aspect of climate change) are more frequent and dangerous storms. Over the past two years, Vietnam has been hit with over a dozen typhoons, and this year flooding in central Vietnam has been extensive. A friend of mine says that the Perfume River irrationally flowed down the street near his house in Hue before returning a few weeks later to its proper role of bearing tourists between the tombs of the kings and the Linh Mu Pagoda.

In early November, I was in downtown Saigon when the Saigon River decided that it too, had had enough of tradition and flooded parts of the city, jumping the dikes in numerous locations. The water in the street outside my hotel was over 18 inches deep. I wonder what the guys digging the new subway line thought of that? The People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City might want to think of the new subway as more of a submarine way.

One of the biggest fears of Vietnamese scientists and policy-makers is that large areas of the country will be inundated – from one side by the East Sea (what everyone else in the world calls the South China Sea) and from the other side by the rivers and rainwater runoff coming down from the mountains. The Viet Nam Institute of Hydrometeorology and Environment reports that in recent years rains are significantly heavier than normal in areas that are typically wet, and less than normal in areas that are typically dry.

If that soggy combination of rising sea levels and floods caused by heavy rains does come to pass, cities like Ho Chi Minh City and the surrounding area – including much of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s rice basket — could well be under water in fifty years. Given that more than 10 million people live in and around Ho Chi Minh City, and that the area is home to the country’s most dynamic economy, most productive agriculture and biggest manufacturing facilities, the effects of climate change on Vietnam’s political economy will be profound.

The United Nations said bluntly a few days ago that climate change could reverse 20 years of progress in Vietnam if the country does not figure out how to respond. Since despite whatever happens at the UN meeting in Bali Vietnam is going to have to cope with the effects of climate change, the policy and community responses have focused on adaptation. This involves everything from changing agricultural practices to building flood-safe homes and schools, improving river and sea dikes, re-locating vulnerable populations and reforestation, particularly of mangrove forests. Mangroves are costal forests that can both mitigate the effects of storms blowing in off the East Sea and provide habitat for economically important sea life.

Of course, slowing climate change by reducing greenhouse gases should be part of every country’s obligation, but each country will have to figure out how to adapt on its own. For poor countries like Vietnam (despite impressive growth Vietnam’s total economic output is about equal to the annual retail sales of the Target retail chain), this means in large part helping poor people cope with the inevitable floods, storms, droughts, heat waves and other negative effects of climate change.

http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008/papers/chaudhry_peter%20and%20ruysschaert_greet.pdf

November 2007 |  I came back to Hanoi from a short trip to the US just before Thanksgiving and found that my 14-year-old daughter Eva had hacked off all of her long blond hair. Actually, she didn’t do it herself; a friend did the cutting for her at her school, as part of a fundraiser for an environmental project in a nearby national park. The deal was this – several high school students would volunteer to cut off all their hair, and the rest of the school could vote for which student then most wanted to see bald by putting in donations. Each Vietnamese Dong counted as one vote. Eva won by a landslide.

If she wanted to stand out, she has achieved her goal. In a land of short, slight women with long black hair, Eva is now a short, slight woman with very short spiky blond hair. Is this a reaction to what Eva perceives as the boring school environment (compared to the eclectic San Francisco Bay Area where she grew up)? Is it a desire to be noticed, or a way to deny her own burgeoning womanhood? Or possibly a physical rebuke to me, for dragging her here to Vietnam (and hinting broadly that we might stay here for more than 12 months)?

I know what it isn’t about, and that’s a desire to do something to preserve Ba Vi National Park, since she couldn’t even remember what the funds were being raised for, replying in typical teenager fashion to my query, “Oh, it’s for the environment or cancer or something. I think it’s in Vietnam, whatever it is.”

I should point out that Eva has gorgeous hair, luxuriantly thick, glossy and smooth as silk. When she was little, I would insist on brushing it; it was once long enough to reach the middle of her back. When she was little, it was platinum blond, but now it’s a honeyed brown. So why would she allow a friend to hack it off, using a pair of school scissors I might add?

I think it’s all part of the struggle to adjust to Vietnam. I know it’s not easy for my family. For me, I have my work, my work colleagues and my hobbies (riding my bicycle, drinking local beer). For them, they have to figure out how to have fun, make new friends, adapt to the food and the language, figure out how to get around, and somehow learn to enjoy it. Add to that the rice-cooker summer climate in Hanoi, and no wonder the kids often prefer just to stay inside all day on the weekends. Not that we let them run the air-conditioning; that’s too expensive. We bought each kid a floor fan, and they have to carry it around with themselves wherever they go – to bed, eating dinner, reading in a bamboo chair.  If you forget your fan, you have to run up or down the stairs, which is enough to make you break out sweating in a heartbeat.

Eva is having the hardest time of all of us (in addition to my wife Devora, there are nine-year-old twin girls). The twins have each other and make friends quickly, Devora is determined to make the best of things and really likes Vietnam, and as I said before my life is pretty well set here. So that leaves Eva.

Eva actually likes Vietnam just fine. She enjoys the food, and loves going around Hanoi with me on my motorbike. We spent a great day yesterday browsing the Old Quarter (Hanoi has one of only two old towns left in Vietnam; the other is in Hoi  An). We shopped for Converse sneakers and Simpsons DVDs, ate some bun thang and xoi thit heo (chicken noodle soup and sticky rice with carmelized pork), stopped in a café or two, and talked about nothing in particular.

But she misses her home, her independence in our community, a school system she could understand, and most of all her friends. She misses them with a profound ache. She spends hours a day chatting with them over the internet. I feel bad for her, but as I keep reminding her I’m her father – it’s not my job to make her life easy, only to make it more interesting. To her credit, she hasn’t started hating me yet, although she has announced that no matter what the rest of the family does, she is moving back home next summer.

On the other hand, she has to admit that she gets to do things there that would be inconceivable at home. For her 14th birthday, I took her to a nightclub and bought her a rum and coke (rum on the side, and most of it going into my glass). We danced, and laughed along with all the other hipsters. In the US, we’d never be allowed in to a place like that, and if we did manage to sneak in me, Eva and the bartender would probably spend the rest of our lives in jail.

She may never adjust. But I am hoping that her hair grows back the way it was before.

It took a few tries to find the right way to get to work. My office is essentially right across West Lake from the house, but lacking a motorboat or a canoe I ride a 125 cc Honda motorbike through the Hanoi streets. This takes a certain amount of courage, a willingness to tolerate permanent lung damage, and a zen-like ability to feel other motorbike riders enter your personal space.

When people say that Hanoi is becoming unlivable – as more and more do – it’s the traffic they are mostly referring to. Finding the right way to get to work was mostly an exercise in locating streets that would not be completely blocked by traffic during rush hour, where vehicles could be counted on to move along at something approaching walking speed, if not a little bit faster.

The traffic erodes everything – the quality of the air, the serenity of the tree-lined streets, the taste of food eaten in sidewalk cafes, the mood of the riders and drivers, the cleanliness of homes and clothing, which by the end of the day are coated in road dust in grime. Millions of motorbikes compete with buses, private cars (many more than even just a few years ago), bicycles and more.

And more. During rush hour, you can be cruising along a busy street trying to avoid colliding with the 25 other motorbikes sharing the lane with you and come upon any one of the following: A woman wrapped from head to toe, wearing plastic flip-flops, rolling an enormous hand-wheeled garbage cart; junior high-school boys in white shirts and little scarf-ties slowly riding four abreast; an old man in a pith helmet and cut-off shorts walking across the road in the middle of the street, one withered hand waving above his head in a vain attempt to attract attention; a young hipster dressed in fashion jeans, reflector shades in place and an American brand cigarette dangling from his lips – driving straight at you, going the wrong way in your lane.

The other day I was motoring at about 30 miles an hour along Au Co, a road atop the dike that keeps the Red River out of downtown Hanoi, when suddenly traffic in front of me came to a screeching halt. I jammed on both brakes, and just barely avoided jamming my Honda up the tailpipe of the guy in front of me. I couldn’t see any reason for the sudden stop, until I slowly inched my way forward. There, hand in hand, were two little boys, no more than four years old and about two feet tall, walking right across one of the busiest streets in Hanoi – nowhere near an intersection or crosswalk. I used to worry about killing myself, riding a motorbike. Now I mostly worry about killing somebody else, that I just won’t see them until it’s too late.

The traffic control systems just can’t keep up with this mess. Some really bad intersections have traffic police, a look of panic barely concealed behind cop bravado, waving red-and-white batons in a desultory way. At the most, they sometimes pull over one or two of the vehicles that blast through red lights, at least in the tourist areas. Things are getting better at the same time they are getting worse; there are more traffic lights, more people wearing helmets, more respect for traffic laws, less truly insane driving. But there are just too many vehicles now for the once-lovely city streets to handle.

And yet, somehow it all works, after a fashion. Sure, the streets are jam packed in some areas, and head injuries are the number one killer of young adults, but after riding the streets of Vietnam’s cities for a while, the miracle is that it functions at all – the traffic, I mean. How can 15 lanes of traffic merge with another 15 lanes coming from the right, without the benefit of traffic lights, lane markers, stop signs or traffic cops? People just have to look out for each other and avoid collisions – avoiding accidents being the one and only traffic law that really applies and most people try to follow.

Somehow, you just develop a sense of when someone is moving into your space. In the US, the temptation is to force them out of it – “it’s my space, I own it, you get out!” But in Vietnam, the only way to keep things moving is to give way, let the other one cut in front or pull out in front of you. By rights, given the congestion and endless surprises on city streets, there should be many more accidents than there actually are. But people rarely get upset at what I consider the craziest traffic behavior, especially things like stopping in the middle of the road to make a U-turn or driving against the flow of traffic, or the wrong way down one-way roads. I’ve rarely seen anything like road rage. And most of the time, you are far better off driving slowly and being patient.

Maybe all the laws that govern traffic behavior in the US and other countries have an unintended effect – they remove the need to actually behave, look out for others or give way to let someone else go by. So seeing someone violate any traffic rule or law is infuriating.

On December 15, all motorbike riders in Vietnam will have to start wearing helmets. This has been tried before, to no avail, but somehow the mood seems different this time. Most of my Vietnamese friends say that starting on that day, they will wear a helmet; they are well aware of the safety benefit. When I suggest that they might as well start now, enjoy a bonus month of keeping their heads safe, they look at me like I’m crazy. Of course, half the time I don’t wear a helmet either, and I already resent being told to do so!

A Post from John Anner
Executive Director of the East Meets West Foundation

Originally from the New York area, I have spent most of the past 21 years in San Francisco. Like many other folks who can afford it, one of the major forms of entertainment enjoyed by my wife and I and our friends is eating out. This is an expensive hobby. It’s not quite as bad as Paris, where dining in the top restaurants requires a prior trip to the bank to take out a home equity loan, but a good meal can easily set you back $150 each if you like wine and a pre-dinner cocktail (and we do, we do!).

In Vietnam, though, it seems to me that there is a powerful inverse relationship between how much a meal costs and how good it is. I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that nearly every restaurant recommended in the various Vietnam guidebooks is to be avoided. Not that the food is bad; it’s just that the relationship between quality and price is so contrary. Either that, or the restaurant serves some dumbed-down version of classic Vietnamese dishes designed to appeal to Western palates while at the same time letting the tourists feel like they have had an authentic Asian culinary experience.

No, the best food in Vietnam is the street food and a few restaurants that have got it right. Actually, just about any local dive off the beaten tourist track is bound to be good in the sense that it’s very inexpensive and fully authentic. Otherwise, it just would not stay in business.

A few weeks ago I was on vacation with my family in Hoi An. I took four great bike rides in the 90+ degree heat (I brought a high-tech carbon fiber racing bike with me from the US – a great conversation piece everywhere I go), each about 65 miles round trip. The most satisfying moment (aside from arriving in one piece back at the hotel and taking off my now-agonizing bike shoes) was breakfast. I would get up around 4:45, get dressed, drink a glass of water, and head out in the direction chosen for the day. Twice I rode to the ancient Champa archeological site of My Son, and twice up Hai Van Pass between Da Nang and Hue.

After about two hours, 40 or so miles into the trip, I’d start to get really hungry and pull over at the first reasonable restaurant I could find, in some little town or neighborhood. I had four of the best meals I ever had in any country, far from any real restaurant. One was My Quang, a classic dish in Quang Nam province made with soft flat noodles, chicken, herbs and a light sauce. Another was a deeply satisfying bowl of beef noodle soup, Pho Bo. The third was rice noodles with chicken (Mi Ga), and the last, well, not sure what it was exactly. It was a bowl of soup and noodles, flavored with herbs I could not identify, containing both wild boar (or possibly Muntjak, a kind of deer) and a square chunk of cooked blood.

And there I sat in these little joints, oozing sweat from every pore, wearing spandex bike shorts and a sleeveless red cycling jersey, shoes off for comfort, having some of the best meals of my life. I think I spent a total of $3, including drinks.

Want to know how to find restaurants like these? It’s easy. First, get rid of the guidebook. By the time it is published, hordes of other food-seekers will have found the restaurant and ruined it. Second, go to an area where tourists (including Vietnamese tourists) don’t usually go. Third, only eat in smallish places where there are a reasonable number of people also eating. Avoid big empty restaurants. Finally, try to eat in restaurants that only serve a few items. When you get the big menu with two hundred items on it, you can be assured that the chances you will happen to order the one or two dishes the cook that night really knows how to make are vanishingly small.

In return for such treats, the least you can do is give the locals something to talk about. Wearing bicycle racing gear and riding around in the hot morning sun is my solution, but you are free to come up with a method of your own devising.

It is exam season in Vietnam, and students from all over the country are desperately cramming for the university entrance exam. Unlike in the US and other developed countries, being extremely smart, having great grades, and doing well on your entrance exams is no guarantee you will get into college. There are only 300,000 open slots for about 1.8 million applicants.

And there is no doubt that Vietnam desperately needs college graduates. The country is booming, with the fastest sustained growth rate in Asia after China and a torrent of foreign capital, international business, tourists, remittances and other sources of wealth pouring in. All of these enterprises need good managers, engineers, technicians, skilled line workers and other high-level help. Many of them are not finding what they need in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the NGO community, of which East Meets West is a proud part, goes about its business of helping the disadvantaged, disabled, impoverished and marginalized — those individuals whose personal wagon is not hitched to the galloping horse of global integration. But sometimes I have to wonder — is this the best thing we can do to help?

Sure, Vietnam is still a poor country (although it might achieve middle-income status before the next decade is up), and the folks living in the countryside need a lot of help, as do all those on the margins of the modern economy. Social-benefit organizations like East Meets West fill important gaps, and those that are really good create durable, sustainable, systemic improvements in health care, education and other fields.

But Vietnam has around 85 million people right now. Probably half are poor or just above being poor. Can all the NGOs in the world really help 42.5 million people in one country? In the end, only a progressive government sustained by a thriving economy (or is it the other way around?) can accomplish the feat of bringing tens of millions out of poverty and providing them the basics of a decent life.

So I have to wonder, maybe we should think about what really matters for Vietnam’s future, and invest our resources there? It seems to me, as I see the hopeful students scurrying around Hanoi clutching lucky tokens and study materials, spending the morning studying and the afternoon praying for good luck, that the international community would be wise to think less about enrolling poor children in primary school, and more about making sure that large numbers of the best and the brightest of Vietnam’s dynamic young talent has the opportunity to make a real contribution.

If you have read this far, let me say at the outset that this blog is not going to be some sanitized and deoderized version of EMW’s publicity materials. I intend to address real issues, honestly and “without fear or favor,” as Adolph Ochs famously promised the readers of the New York Times.

I encourage you to join me in the discussion, which may cover anything and everything from the best bars and street food in Hanoi to the economics of donor-directed development aid. And I will certainly answer any questions about East Meets West!

Regards,

 John Anner, Executive Director, East Meets West Foundation