Dong Vi is surrounded by paddy land, full of water supplied from dams upstream and delivered to the paddies by a fine system of canals.
Many paddies look ready to plant, while others await plowing.
The water buffalo (carabao in the Philippines) used to do the plowing,
but it has been supplanted for the most part by these small paddy tillers, which pull the operator along at quite a clip as they churn up the mud.
Many families own their own tillers, but a large tractor like this is probably rented or shared by several families.
A farmer uses a wooden rake to smooth the paddy surface, leveling out the high and low spots.
A line of bamboo stakes marks the border between two plots. Planting rice must be back breaking work!
Rice paddies are home to much more than rice. They are a rich ecosystem of aquatic organisms, including insects, snakes, frogs, crabs and snails. I spotted a clump of bright pink snail eggs on water hyacinth in one of the village ponds.
The snails are also in the paddies. There are several varieties, some edible and others not eaten. They are a pest, as they will climb and snip off the growing tips of the rice.
Lâm told us that farmers will spread a pesticide in the paddy to kill the snails.
Lâm plunges his arm elbow deep into a hole in the side of the paddy, hoping to bring out a crab. No luck today, but he must have caught many crabs during his years growing up in Dong Vi! I asked him about snakes, and he assured me that any snake that can live in a flooded hole is not poisonous. Beware the dry holes though.
Thank you for accompanying us on this trip to Dong Vi!
Plastic cold frames line many of the roads in Dong Vi. This one is held down securely by banana trunks,
while these tentlike structures are secured by bricks and cinder blocks.
These are nurseries for rice seedlings, planted into mud spread on the pavement and covered over primarily to protect the seed from mice and rats, though the frames certainly provide some warmth in the cold northern winter.
I’d never seen rice nurseries like these. Instead I’ve seen rice planted in dense, vibrantly green seedling beds out in the paddies.
When it’s time to plant, the farmer pulls up seedlings and bundles them for later planting. This woman is tossing the bundles onto a pile behind her.
However, rice farmers have also developed this way of raising the seedlings. I think the yellow is rice bran, added (if I understood correctly) to increase the heat under the plastic, perhaps through the process of decomposition?
We peeked under one tent to see the seedlings almost ready to plant out. The plants have formed mats of roots in the mud they grew in.
I saw sheets of this rice turf being carried out to the fields on the back of a bicycle. Lâm told me they can even roll the turf up to take it out for planting!
Let’s go plant some rice! We may need to walk along the dikes that separate the paddies,
When we ventured out on the streets of Dong Vi, I saw that Lâm’s father is not the only master gardener in the village.
Small beds are planted intensively, and crops are no sooner harvested than the space is prepared for the next rotation.
I have never seen such intensive land use. Even the median strips between road and ditch or paddy or pond have been planted. The next five photos show you variations on this theme.
Betel palms are planted at regular intervals along the road to the temple. Between each palm grows a salad bed, and in the ditch next to the wall, taro plants are thriving.
Even the space around a bonsai tree is used!
The temple planters have become salad gardens.
Lina and I took the photos for this post.
I have written often about plants and food. Here is a post from our trip to the mountains in Vietnam last winter, and below it four posts from the Philippines.
When we arrived at Lâm’s house, I knew we had found the home of a master gardener. Lâm’s father has filled the space around the house with an exuberant garden of greens: lettuces, mints, mustards and many that I cannot name.
A bed brimming with sweet potato greens (a great vegetable) in back and another green in front.
Vietnamese cuisine features an extraordinary range of fresh greens, many designated for particular dishes.
At least ten fruit trees grow around the house. Here is chico or sapodilla.
The starfruit at Lâm’s house are a bit sour, but his aunt gave us a bag of sweet starfruit. And a great smile!
Lâm and Gia Hân choose pomelo to bring home from a long walk.
I tasted fresh cinnamon for the first time in my life. When you chew on the leaf stem, you have a wonderful surprise!
This vegetable puzzled me. It looked strangely familiar – and then I learned that it belongs to the genus Pueraria, known to us as kudzu. Kudzu is a familiar sight in the Southeast, where the vine climbs and strangles trees. It is a familiar sight along highways and might be the most noxious invasive we have in the US. Yet here it is grown as a crop!
The farmer planted kudzu in raised hills, now covered by the canopy of leaves. The root yields starch used in cooking; the fiber is similar to hemp and has been used for clothing and basketry; and Pueraria is a common ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine.
This fruit, called gâc, gives the red color to rice prepared for festivals like Têt.
Buddha’s hand fruit is grown not for eating but as an offering in the temple.
And some plants are grown purely for their beauty!
I compared Dong Vi to an oasis in my last post. It also feels like a peninsula extending from the road into the rice fields. I will write later about the paddies and the culture of rice. In this post I will share some of the water scapes inside the village itself.
Lam’s house sits next to a pond. Across the road are two more. Each family has access to a pond where they can raise fish and from which they can draw water for their gardens.
Note the geometry of the ponds and of the roads and walls that border them. Nothing is haphazard.
The net is lowered on a pivot to catch small fish. Larger fish are caught on a baited hook.
We look back at the village from a road between the paddies.
These ducks live in and next to a pond
while others are confined at the edge of the rice fields.
A sentinelBanana trees surround a pond.Lotus flowers
Here is one of the more extraordinary sights of our time in Dong Vi. The flat bottomed boat is propelled by the woman in back, who operates (pedipulates?) two oars with her feet. Her back is supported as on a recumbent bike. The man standing in front is fishing with a net on a long bamboo pole. I wish I could share a video with you of the boat gliding gracefully along the canal.
A pond in nearby Nam Hai, the village where our friend Thuân grew up, serves a most unusual purpose. This is a theater for the performance of water puppetry, a traditional art of the Red River Delta that is still practiced in some villages such as Nam Hai as well as in theaters in Hanoi built for the tourist trade.
In the early 1990s, my family was fortunate to see an outdoor performance in Hô Hoan Kiêm, the lake in the center of Hanoi. Sitting outside on the edge of the lake watching the puppets cavorting in the water in front of us, we experienced the delight that villagers have shared for a thousand years.
Thuân took us to meet three friends who are all involved in keeping the art of water puppetry alive. We found them repairing and repainting some of the puppets.
They told us that most of the men trained in water puppetry are 50 years and older. The younger generation is not so interested.
Thuân is at the right, and the head of the water puppet association is in the center.
What a privilege to meet some of the elders of this art form! The man on the left is 82, and his neighbor is 75. They were kind enough to show us how the large round wheel in the foreground works. There are times when whole groups of puppets perform in synchrony (you can see this in some of the links that follow). The wooden wheel is held underwater – all the mechanisms are invisible because submerged – and multiple puppets are attached (here you can see two) so that they move together.
The puppeteers are invisible as they stand in the water, waist deep, behind a bamboo screen (the proscenium of the theater). They manipulate the puppets, all attached to long bamboo poles, with an ingenious array of mechanisms that allow the puppets to climb trees, do the back stroke, catch fish, catapult out of a boat … Please enjoy these links!
This link shows a full length performance:
If you’d like to see some water puppets, without the water, come over to Mariposa Museum!
“The village of Dông Vi wishes you peace and happiness.” We are greeted by this gate as we enter Lâm’s village on January 31.
We met Lâm and his wife Thuyên in 2016 in the park that surrounds Lake Hô Hoan Kiêm in Hanoi. [https://orionblair.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/hanoi-gallery/] In 2018 we met their infant daughter An Nhi. We’ve now come to visit them in their home in the village of Dông Vi and the commune of Dông La.
A commune in Vietnam is not a place where hippies live. It is “the lowest administrative unit in Vietnam” (Wikipedia), with several “unofficial” entities below it such as the village (thôn is one word for village) and hamlet. A commune is primarily agricultural and has a lower population density than a township.
The village of Dông Vi is laid out around cement roads, neat plots of land and many ponds. Bounded by a busy highway and rice paddies, it is an oasis of peace. There are no stores within its boundaries, in contrast to a barrio in the Philippines, which will have many small sari-sari stores scattered throughout. The village is the first place on this trip to Vietnam where I saw more bikes than motorcycles.
Gia Hân, An Nhi’s younger sister, leads the way down a road between paddies. The colorful flags tell us that we’re approaching a Buddhist temple.
The temple stands in a small park.
The colorful altar displays offerings for the New Year and perhaps also for the Festival of the Kitchen God, which fell on February 2 this year, eight days before the first day of Têt.
Much of the temple has been restored. Not so this old bell tower.
Lina and Gia Hân pose in a portal.
A stupa commemorates a revered Buddhist monk who taught at this temple.
Lâm told us that his village has not only a temple (chua) but a communal house (dinh) ”dedicated to worship the village God Thành hoàng, the village founder or a local hero. They also play the role as a meeting place of the people in the community.” (Thanks again to Wikipedia.) Here is the dinh of Dông Vi.
Lâm also pointed out a miêu, a site for the practice of “ancestor worship” or “Vietnamese folk religion.” The interweaving of “folk religion” with Confucian, Taoist and indigenous belief systems is the subject of many scholarly works – and not of this post! Suffice it to say that old traditions survive and even thrive. Genealogy is very important in a village like this, as it determines formal relationships between families and between individuals in families, down to the form of address one uses in speaking to another person.
Here, Lâm’s father draws back the screen in front of the family altar. Many houses have a shrine to remember and honor their ancestors. It may be elaborate or very simple. I think that these Vietnamese altars and the places in American homes where we display the photos of our parents and grandparents are not so different in spirit.
For all the respect given to past generations, there is no doubt that the hopes and efforts of Lâm, Thuyên and their parents are focused on the future: on the well being and education of these two little girls.
Lina, Natasha and I visited this extraordinary pagoda in Hanoi today. Extraordinary because of its size – it occupies many hectares – and the quality of its restoration, for what we saw was a restored (and to some extent recreated) ancient structure that had been in disrepair. No longer!
An imposing portal faces the street.
One panel of the massive doorway
A much older entrance to the side invites us in.
A succession of temple buildings occupies several courtyards, this one in front, beyond a pool,
and this one in back.
Curling dragons remind me of the prows of Viking warships.
A magnificent altar of wooden Buddhas includes the infant Buddha standing on a lotus pad with one hand pointing to the sky, the other to the ground. All of the altars in the temple complex display offerings of flowers, fruit and packaged sweets.
Two guardians flank the altar. Highly ornamented panels, newly carved, are attached to deeply cracked wood pillars – remnants of the original temple.
Two other flanking altars are each home to three brightly enameled figures. I don’t know the iconography of Buddhism well enough to tell you who they are. They may have some connection to Confucian / Taoist / animist belief.
Another Buddha altar framed with elaborate wooden scroll work:
Photos of the deceased patrons of the temple receive offerings too.
Huge bonsai (if that is the correct word for something so large) line many of the paths. This is a Ficus and, below, a pine.
Adjoining the temple grounds, a garden holds over a thousand bonsai. Natasha told us this is an exhibition space. These plants are not for sale but they advertise the skills of their creators, identified by tags or calling cards.
The temple grounds hold hundreds of pomelo trees. Pomelos are a large, thick-peeled and dry-fleshed grapefruit – or, more likely, a grapefruit is a smaller version of the pomelo, bred to be more juicy. It is a common temple offering, as well as a popular table fruit here and throughout Southeast Asia.
In a back corner of the grounds, I found an old stupa, perhaps holding the relics of a venerated monk, as well as some sealed earthenware jars holding … (?) .
The gate takes us back out onto the road.
The pagoda stands at the entrance to a peninsula between the Duong and Red Rivers. Rumor has it that its recent restoration saved this large parcel from being bought, razed and rebuilt by a development company owned by Vietnam’s richest person. The company may well acquire the land to the northwest and build a huge development, but the plan to buy and destroy an even wider swath of buildings was thwarted by this grand pagoda, and (I am speculating) by the wealthy and powerful people who subsidized its restoration.
One year ago a television arrived in Lina’s home in Silang. Her brother Toto watches it a lot, and on our return this year I’ve observed a steady stream of shows, most of them from Vietnam and all streamed on YouTube, about “bushcraft.” These range from videos of survival skills to homesteading – building, farming, cooking.
They are filmed in rural areas and often in hilly country where forests are still plentiful. Some aerial footage must be taken from drones: pretty sophisticated! The homesteading variety often show a handsome new house built on piles, a style common in the mountains among minority peoples. I am sure that the producers have “monetized” their videos in order to be able to afford such houses. [For a glimpse of a highland Hmong village, see https://orionblair.wordpress.com/2023/02/22/hua-tat/, a post from February of last year.]
Here’s “Girl Asian Build Life” reviewing her work of the last year.
The protagonists are usually young, most of them women. They all come equipped with a machete that never needs sharpening, which they wield in all sorts of ways – most commonly in chopping down bamboo or small trees to build something. Many also swing hoes and hammers. They dig pits with shovels, for foundations or to trap wild pigs. They pour cement, in the more “civilized” settings. They are almost always working yet they never look exhausted. The camera pans away at intervals to ducks and flowers, then returns to the action.
From “Ms. Tu – Family Farm” and the episode titled “Wild Free Life, Solo Bushcraft Building ….”: notice the subtitle “Bushcraft Relaxing” (?!).
The sound track for these videos is the sound of tools: machete on bamboo, hammer on nail, hoe or shovel on dirt, peeler on vegetable, chisel on mortise and tenon. Dialogue is very rare. It intrudes most often if a little child is part of the film.
This “Top 1 Survival Video, Daily Life Fishing …” has 3.4 million views!
Well I guess they rest sometimes!
The sounds and actions are often sped up by stop action filming, which is kind of comical. Whether sped up or not, the actions are repetitive. It’s not enough to see one bamboo stalk trimmed of leaves, or one nail pounded. We watch a young woman shelling hundreds of corn cobs by hand, tossing the cobs into a huge pile. There is little abbreviation. In a few videos I’ve seen and heard power tools at work: the exception.
The title of this episode from “My Daily Life 2,” “Solo Bushcraft Survival Shelter – Bathing Alone in the Wilderness,” sounds titillating, but it’s eminently practical: digging, building, cooking.
These shows are monotonous but oddly fascinating. Sometimes the intrepid homesteader or survivalist demonstrates a really interesting skill. I was fascinated to watch a man building a home and firing tiles using only stone age technology. (It took him months to fire his roofing tiles.)
Sometimes, a skill seems rather useless to me. Why would I want to build a swimming pool around my underground house? The two sisters building a One Pillar Pagoda in their front yard have my admiration for their industry yet I suspect the project was dreamed up for the purpose of making a film, not because the structure meets an important need. Tourists coming to admire it, perhaps?
In “Daily Life TH” we watch a young woman wade into a stream in spate. She has two large fish on a string.
She stumbles, falls and is swept downstream whooping and crying for help. A young man conveniently reclining on the bank downstream leaps in to rescue her. Drama or comedy?
Whatever the particular challenge, there’s something mesmerizing about watching these highly repetitive and also predictable shows. Young woman harvests a huge stem of bananas; struggles to drag the bunch out of the grove; falls and gets back up; packs a carry basket with said bananas; walks to town with bananas and ducks in a bamboo cage; spreads her wares out at curbside and sells them; walks home with empty basket and some money. She does stop for a snack on the way home, which I found very reassuring!
“Bushcraft Shelter Under Big Rock, Alone Camping Outdoor Bathe”: there’s that theme of bathing again!
Toto’s channel seems to come from Vietnam (mostly – I did see one white guy in a distinctly northern forest building a log shelter sunk partly into the ground). These proliferating shows must satisfy a desire among young and (I’m guessing) urban people to imagine themselves in rustic settings, leading a natural lifestyle, building their own homes and growing their own food. Perhaps even defending themselves from marauding wild pigs! If I wanted to learn some of these skills, I could do much worse than watching these shows, taking them with a grain of salt though: they make complicated tasks look rather simple. It’s also a good idea to have someone filming in case the machete slips! Remember the old caution, “Don’t try this at home (alone)!”
The medium has changed, yet is this so different from the 1960s and 70s when my generation read Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening from Rodale Press to learn how to “go back to the land”? I searched through The Whole Earth Catalog to find a kit for a pottery wheel, which duly arrived and was assembled – and never turned a single pot. The fiberglass kick wheel, once full of gravel for weight, serves as a tiny garden bed today. I suspect that the makers of these videos have aborted some experiments too.
The words “mission” and “missionary” have negative connotations for many people, including Christians. We may associate them with heavy-handed proselytizing, disrespect for local cultures, even with colonial exploitation of peoples and resources as has so clearly happened in the Americas. Many people, whether believers or not, abhor these practices. We may fail to see the good that is done through mission work.
This trip has been planned for almost two years by Bel and Sonny Lapada, missionaries to the Tagbanua, and by Cora and Todd Doolittle of Denver, CO, who’ve been supporting their ministry in every conceivable way for many years.
Sonny and Bel met at college. Sonny left school because he felt such a strong calling to become a missionary. They trained with the New Tribes Mission and with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization that prepares missionaries to work with tribal peoples who often have no written language. SIL’s ultimate aim is to translate the Bible into the tribal language, but first come years of listening and learning, transcribing the spoken language into the Roman alphabet and developing a dictionary.
Bel and Sonny moved to Tara Island 47 years ago, when there were only three houses in the village we just visited. Bel is a Community Development and Language Development Worker and also a Field Medicine Worker. Sonny is a licensed pastor and also a Community Development and Language Development Worker. They lived on Tara for two years, during which time their first child was born, then moved to Buenavista and many other villages thoughout their career. They now live in Manila and make extended visits to the Tagbanua several times each year.
Sonny told me that their first years on Tara were spent getting to know people, learning the language and the culture. They held church in their own home. Bel provided free nursing, Sonny his own skills. They did not go out and proselytize, instead they lived their lives faithfully under the constant scrutiny of their neighbors. The first convert came forward after they had been there for three years. The church has grown exponentially since then. (I’ll say more about this later.)
Cora was a teacher/assessor for the state of Colorado, and the fifth sister in the family that includes Doctors Lyra, Kathy and Didingand journalist Ann. Todd is an IT manager with Dell. Todd and Cora met as students at Asian Theological Seminary in Quezon City in 1983, fell in love and got married the next year. After that, they served in Tanzania, East Africa as missionaries with Africa Inland Missions for 7.5 years from 1990 to 1998.
When Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan devastated parts of the Philippines including Coron, Palawan in 2013, they gathered medical professionals from Denver and Manila (including two sister-doctors and another sister). Together with Sonny and and Bel they formed Team Mabuhay Coron and conducted a medical and dental mission trip in 2014. They have come back three times (2016, 2019 and now in 2024) to conduct similar medical and dental missions. The Doolittles raise money for this work through churches and the New Horizons Foundation in Colorado Springs.
These two couples are the moving force behind our mission trip, though of course, as devout Christians, they would say that God is the moving force! In Todd’s words: “Whatever success these mission trips has brought, this is all because of God’s grace, mercy and provision. All the honor goes to God alone.”
It is so striking to me to hear that Bel and Sonny could wait so many years, so patiently, to see the fruits of their mission – by which I mean the creation of a vibrant local church, run by the Tagbanua in their own language and fully respecting local custom. The churches are humble, as you can see from these photos from Marupo.
But they are filled with spirit. They put to shame those congregations in other parts of the world who are more concerned with their buildings and their status than with Spirit.
Sonny told us a story of a conference that was held in a Tagbanua village, bringing together several hundred people for a meeting that lasted a couple of days. Non-believers stayed on the fringes, even back out of sight, watching and listening. They observed their fellow Tagbanua spending time together without argument, gambling, drinking … and months afterwards, some dozens of people came forward to join the church.
Sonny made a statement to us that was rather shocking. ”We don’t witness!” he exclaimed emphatically. Now the word “witness” has many meanings in English. In this context, it means to tell others of the Gospel and of the life and message of Jesus. It is assumed by many Christians that it is their duty to witness in this way, and if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this kind of witness, it may have offended you.
What Sonny means is that we, as missionaries, are present with our sisters and brothers in a spirit of love, to listen and to learn, and to share the love of Christ / God / Spirit (however we name it) in the way we are and in what we do. He also meant that this is what the Tagbanua (and I imagine people all around the world) will notice and appreciate, and it is what may lead them to convert to Christianity. I believe we “witness” when we are present with others in love, support each other in adversity and stand for justice with each other.
Can you see the love?
I’d like to circle back to Sonny’s story of spending years simply listening and learning. Please be patient with me!
I observed three major areas of health need (disclaimer: I am not a public health expert): clean water, birth control and nutrition.
Todd has been working since 2019 on water filtration systems for the Tagbanua, for the mission team realized that many dental and medical issues stemmed from drinking contaminated water. 700 water filters, small and easy to maintain, have been distributed and installed since then. I noticed very few prescriptions for anthelmintics (medicines used to treat for worms and parasites). Todd told me that perhaps half of the prescriptions in earlier visits were for anthelmintics. Anecdotal evidence, and the statements of the Tagbanua themselves, suggest that the filters are working! The Tagbanua report a significant decrease in stomach and skin issues. Todd is working with them to bring another 1,000 filters to the villages.
The Catholic Church’s insistence on “natural” birth control has clearly not stemmed the population explosion. You have seen so many children in these photos, and so many young mothers! Birth control pills are now legal and we brought some (though we ran out). Access to these pills is difficult for many, so the mission’s provision of free contraceptives is important.
We were served wonderful and healthy food, but our hosts served us far more than they would normally eat: the photos you’ve seen do not reflect the typical diet! There are still malnourished children, perhaps especially in places like Tara where it is difficult to get green vegetables. As I reflected on this, I remembered the work of my friends Jerry and Monique Sternin, who worked in Vietnam with Save the Children US at the same time as Linda and I represented the American Friends Service Committee.
The Sternins pioneered an approach to maternal and child health called “positive deviance,” which asks: “What is already working in this situation?” It looks for existing local solutions to a problem and builds on those. In the case of a coastal commune in the province of Thanh Hoa, not unlike Tara, they discovered that some very poor families had healthy children while others did not. Why? they asked. They found out that the parents of healthy children gathered tiny shrimp and crabs, and handfuls of greens, from the paddies on their way home, and put these in the rice. The added nutrients made all the difference: their children gained weight and were healthy.
I wanted to share this work with Bel and Sonny, so I looked up the Sternins’ work on the website of the Positive Deviance Collaborative. Here’s what I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYVGRe3OaLo I hope you watch the entire 13’17” video, a lovely description of their work and a tribute to Jerry, who died in 2008. But if you don’t, here’s the key passage that struck me so deeply and brings us back around to Sonny’s story.
Jerry tells of going out into the desert of Ethiopia to meet with a nomadic group called the Afar. For three days he and Monique sat with the Afar, a warlike group who, they were told, would not be interested in working with them. At the end of the three days, as they left, their interpreter told them that one elder had turned to another and said: ”This is extraordinary. They have come for three days to sit at our feet and listen. Even our children don’t pay us that kind of respect.” The Afar opened up to the Sternins and a fruitful collaboration began. (If you want to hear just this part, play from 9’28” to 11’35”.)
They have come to sit at our feet and listen. This is, I think, what Sonny and Bel have done.
“Mano po” is a gesture of respect to our elders.
I hope you have seen in these photos the spirit of friendship, humor and mutual regard that Lina and I witnessed everywhere.
A magic moment at the end of our first day of clinic: young men playing and singing music for all of us.
Should we ever return, I know Lingling’s welcome will be warm.
Lina was up early. A family was packing up their bangka to leave. Perhaps they had attended the clinic the day before and slept the night in Tara.
Fishermen were bringing in their catch.
A slight cheat: these rainbow-colored parrot fish (see their beaks with which they feed on coral?) were displayed in the Coron market. I read that parrotfish can carry the toxin ciguatera in some waters, where they are dangerous to eat.A cuttlefish (or perhaps a squid?)A breakfast dish of squid
After breakfast we went to church.
The guitarist accompanied hymns in the Tagbanua language, sung vigorously by the congregation that overflowed the church.
The Tagbanua pray with their eyes and hands raised,
as Bel and Sonny taught us to do.
Two young people were leading the service when we came in, and later the elders were in front. The service was held in and by the Tagbanua.
An old woman who sang beautifully twirled Girlie in the aisle!
I walked a mile north along the shore and then inland a bit, arriving at a high school that serves students who live further north or across the island. Tara is a bit over 2 miles long and no more than half a mile wide.
The hills are covered in dry grass.
These pastures held several cows. My map told me there was a “demo farm” at the end, but I didn’t go looking for it. This is the largest piece of arable land that I saw on Tara and it doesn’t appear to be growing any crops. Water seems scarce, unlike Marupo.
I later waded through shallow water to a beach at the west end of the curved bay and took this photo looking back across.
Journeys 