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KNOW ONE TEACH ONE
It was October 2011 when I found myself questioning my spur-of-the-moment decision to take the night train to cold and misty Sapa in the Vietnam mountains. I had arrived late in the morning and the place seemed deserted. I was already missing the hustle and bustle, the warmth and the visual marvels of Hanoi which I had instantly fallen in love with. Why couldn't I have just stayed in Hanoi!
Hanoi was everything and more that I had ever hoped and imagined an Asian city to be, it was mysterious, humid, exotic, and chaotic but in a really good way. I felt more alive there than I had done for along time. This was it! Everything I had dreamed about for a very long time was happening. I hired a bicycle, not so much to see this beautiful city, but to be able to join the waves of humanity that were flowing through the streets of the old town like a graceful mountain river.
The streets you see is where the action is. Nobody wants to miss out, everybody wants to be part of the action, nobody wants to be an observer. The streets are Hanoi and everything else is just a sideshow. Its like choosing whether to get on the rollercoaster and enjoy the thrill of the ride or to watch from the side.
Everything happens on the streets. Whole families cruise around on a single motorbike. Dad is steering, his son sits between his legs, and behind him is his daughter who is having her hair combed by her mother at the back. I am not sure if they are going anywhere, or if like me, they just want to be part of the action and get-out of a claustrophobic apartment somewhere and join the party on the streets.
On a bicycle I could just about keep-up with the flow of the traffic and I could hear all the conversations that are going on between the people on their bikes, girls on the back of their friends bikes, talking on their phones, or with each other. Keeping up with this open air conversation was possible because every minute or so the throng of bikes would slow or stop for a junction. There was no opportunity, due to the sheer volume of bikes on the road, for anyone to race ahead. You therefore have for some minutes your own randomly selected neighbourhood all gliding along as one.
A river of life in the form of thousands of motorbikes, scooters, bicycles and the odd car constantly flowing past is an accurate analogy. When you first arrive in Hanoi one of the first things you need to get to grips with is how to cross the road. It sounds simple but its a huge act of faith. No-one is going to stop for you that is the first lesson. The second is there are no crossing points.
It's not like in Italy where they also don't stop for you, even at crossings, unless you first step out in front of the oncoming cars, then they reluctantly and generally abruptly, stop. In Hanoi you step out and the bikes just flow around you like you're a stone in a river. A few steps and your miraculously on the other side and very pleased with yourself.
In the evenings the action on the street steps up a level. Life is too short to want to cook alone in the corner of your apartment. No what you want to do is take all your kitchen utensils and cooking gear downstairs and set it up on the pavement. Literally on the pavement. And why just cook for your family, why not everyone? This is what life in a city should be like I think, yes the weather helps.
So you have ladies effortlessly crouched down cooking with guests, paying or otherwise, sat on low brightly coloured plastic stools. Meals are cooked fish in an instant in woks on little gas burners. What's not to love! As if I knew my time in Hanoi was going to be short I would have several pavement meals each night. A pleasant surprise was that the beer flowed on the street and in the cafes, however basic, which just added to the joyful energy of the street life. The Hanoians were, as I suspected, not just using the street out of necessity, out of a lack of interior space for example, but celebrating it and toasting it with beer.
The other thing that really struck me was just how happy, healthy and lithe the people were. Lithe in English according to the dictionary means; 'thin, supple, and graceful', but I would add strong to that list too. Somehow to me it was an indicator of lives well lived, which is partly due to how physically hard many of the people in Vietnam work, especially the country folk who have to grow and store, in their roofs, enough rice to last a year, which is no easy task.
So why did I leave Hanoi and end up in cold, damp and misty Sapa? Well I only had a week. I had just been at a busy two week Organic Farming conference in South Korea, where I had a lot of work to present, and I wanted to see something of south east Asia before heading back to Germany where I was based at the time. After some days catching my breath in a beautiful village on the mighty River Han, not far from Seoul, I decided to fly to Hanoi before catching my flight home from Bangkok.
But the main reason that I ended up in Sapa of all places was because of an advertisement for the night train to Sapa that I saw through a window of a travel agent in Hanoi. I had never been on a sleeper train before and it's one of the most romantic things I can think of and this was my chance. The other reason I chose the train was because trains leaving the Hanoi Station B (Tran Quy Cap), cross a busy road, and then enter a long narrow and curving passage right between two rows of buildings. Its amazing and I wanted to be on that train!
The train left Hanoi Station B at 10pm the next day with me on it. Decisiveness is not a strong point of mine, so I was kind-of pleased with myself for making this happen. In fact, it was a travel website that I was looking at while still in South Korea, that said 'Make it Happen', in other words press-the-purchase-button', that spurred me to choose Vietnam over the comfortable and, undoubtedly sensible choice, of staying by the river Han in South Korea.
Unlike decisiveness, impulsiveness is a genetic trait that I do express from time to time. It was a slow journey as the train followed the meandering course of the Red River all the way to Lao Cai on the border with the Chinese province of Yunnan in whose mountains the Red River has its source. I had decided to go to Sapa but had no plan beyond the train.
I arrived in Lao Cai on a beautiful autumn morning at around 6am and I didn't pay much attention to my fellow passengers, especially the tourists, who were pilling into minibuses and hastily departing. Seemed like they had a plan. I was just in too much bliss from the journey, and being somewhere so different on such a beautiful morning, that I just sat and drank several really strong Vietnamese coffees on the station concourse as my peers disappeared into the distance.
Now Sapa is still 28 miles from Lao Cai and that's where they were heading. By time I dragged myself away from the coffee, most of the buses for Sapa had left. I managed to get a ride eventually to Sapa which at 1,500m above sea level was a hill station during the colonial period for the French to escape the summer heat and humidity of the lowland cities.
Sapa is nestled in the Hoang Lien Son mountains which form the eastern end of the Himalayan chain. The mountains are home to Fan Si Pan, Vietnam's highest mountain, once known as the 'roof of Indochina', and some of the last remaining primary rain forest in the country. As I left the gorgeous autumn sun behind in Lao Cai, which is almost at sea level, we climbed up into the mountains and by time I arrived in Sapa I was pulling on my jacket. What had I done?
Feeling sorry for myself I wondered the misty quiet streets of Sapa and found a nice play to stay with a lovely balcony with a great view of the mist. The streets were empty and that's when I realised that my fellow passengers were all on hiking tours and were already out exploring the mountains. Lonely and regretting my choices, I stumbled upon a little paper sign in an empty disused shop on the side of the road that read ' English Teachers Wanted, Call Su'. My adventure and purpose for being in Sapa was just about to begin!
I tracked down Su, in a building just down the road. She was from the Black Hmong, a former nomadic tribe, and one of a number of Chinese Hill tribes that have lived in these parts for hundreds of years. This building was a school set-up by Su to teach the hill tribe children English and to train them in tourism and hospitality and as hiking guides. Jobs are hard to come by and many hill tribe kids leave for the cities and also to China for work and sadly many are kidnapped.
This building was not only a school but a boarding school as it is too far and too costly for most children to travel to each day from their villages. It thronged with the vibrant sounds of young people enthusiastically learning English, a language that I could understand! I was about to start my job as a volunteer assistant English teacher!
The next morning I found myself walking to the school with a spring in my step, I stopped off at a cafe on the way and had what was by now, after 3 days in Vietnam, my routine Vietnamese coffee. The cafe was on a corner and it felt like the centre of a great little community in this part of the town. It felt like home and as if I had been doing this little commute through the narrow and winding streets of Sapa for years. It was already a home from home and the key was having a purpose to my day and stay in Sapa. My temporary english volunteering job had made me an honorary member of the community which turned out to be beyond my wildest imaginations and the cafe was also going toter out to be significant too.
I soon found out that teaching english is not as easy as I thought! The pressure of loads of kids waiting to be lead in various exercises was not exactly intimidating but more underlined my total lack of preparation and experience. Soon I was assigned to helping kids to read aloud which was much easier. The school had a digital camera and after talking with some of the older boys, that were learning English so they could become trekking and tour guides, we came up with the idea of making a booklet of photographs of plants and foods etc that grow around Sapa and which can be found in the local street market with their names in both Vietnamese and English along with a photo as an aide for their trekking guiding skills.
Again the process was not without its limitations with neither the boys nor me really knowing the names for a quite a few of the wild plants that were growing in the hills and villages close to Sapa so we settled for a much simpler version based on the plants, fruits and vegetables that we did know between us! I was to later learn that it's the girls in the tribal families that are responsible for collecting wild herbs and vegetation from the mountains and probably for cooking, and maybe even for the growing of the fruits and vegetables too!
After my first day I was about to really find out how lucky I was to have missed the early bus to Sapa and to have ended up at this little school run by Su. I checked out of my guest house in town and jumped on the back of a small motorbike belonging to one of the students who whisked me out of Sapa and down into the verdant sprawling emerald green countryside of the Muong Hoa Valley and eventually to a small village of traditional wooden homes nestled amongst the wooded valley edge. This was Red Dao territory! And this was my homestay for the night.
And what a homestay it was! As I entered a big room opened up in front of me which was all wood from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Three open wood fires were burning at various spots in the room. One had a kettle boiling on it, another had a wok attended by the lady of the house who was cooking our dinner with her daughter, while another daughter attended to a huge shallow bubbling wok full with leaves being simmered. It was a spectacular scene that will stay with me forever.
After being served hot tea I was invited to have a bath in a tall wooden handmade barrel in the corner of the room. The house which was embedded in the lush hillside had its own fresh mountain water supply via a large diameter bamboo pipe that delivered fresh spring water continuously into the home. The daughter sieved out the herbs and small branches from the simmering wok and poured the aromatic hot water into the barrel. My bath was ready!
It was the most relaxing 30 mins of my life, I felt every care and worry, every ache and pain evaporate into the air along with the incredible herbal aromas from the bath. I was melting into a jelly like blob and my mind was no longer my own. It was a kind of bliss that I hadn't felt for a long time. According to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT), what I was experiencing in wellness terms was, "a combination of hydrotherapy and aromatherapy that increases blood circulation, gently detoxes your pores, soothes the skin, while calming the mind, and reducing pain in the body". Exactly that and more.
It turns out that the Red Dao are famous for their healing herbal baths with each Red Dao family having its own herbal bath recipe, which is held by the women in the family and passed from mothers to daughters. I can confirm this. The following morning at dawn I heard a rustling in the trees just outside the house. It was the daughter halfway up a tree harvesting leaves to repeat the process of making the herbal stew for the bath. Red Dao baths may have 10 or more ingredients, including rare plants.
Commonly used herbs according to VNAT are; 'elderberry, Vietnamese balm, fig leaves, wild pepper leaves, bur-reed, tropical dogwood, and cinnamon'. I was certainly 'barking up the wrong tree' asking the boys at the school for the names of the local plants, not that I would have asked the Red Dao family for their secret recipe! And the the wood from which the bathing barrels are fashioned is also important as the Pơ mu cypress wood 'adds a grounding fragrance to the hot water'.
As I sat next to the open fire after my bath, I realised just how much I missed the life in Australia that I had left behind. The trips into the wilderness and the camp fires with just nature to accompany you and the tranquility and restorative nature of, well, of nature! But, while this was a moment of quietness in what was a break from my job, this was the Red Dao's life, they don't have jobs, or at least they didn't till recently, and they don't take vacations. They are how we once were, way back. Along with their 'brothers' in the other Chinese Hill Tribes such as the Black Hmong they are almost totally self sufficient.
Like most rural people in Vietnam the hill tribes grow rice which supplies the vast majority of their daily calories and is a source of income for farming families in the various river deltas of the country. In recent years, rice production in Vietnam, especially in the low-land areas of the Mekong river delta, has expanded, and is now a major export crop with family farmers evolving into rice production businesses.
Rice production, by its very nature of being a labour-intensive crop, is an inherently physical livelihood dependent not only on the skill and efforts of the farmers but also on the climate. In the Muong Hoa Valley rice growing it is particularly tough given the rugged and elevated terrain and the climate. It is therefore unsurprising that the lowland Vietnamese never colonised these highest of valleys until as late as the early 1960s, when the New Economic Zones migration scheme was set-up by the new Socialist regime.
The tribes have, for centuries, worked and shaped the landscape producing rice in the paddy fields carpeting the rolling lower slopes of the Hoang Lien Son mountains. Sapa itself, before French colonisation, was a market place where the hill tribes traded their goods. This meant that the Hill Tribes lived for centuries in more or less isolation. This isolation was both splendid and not so splendid. Like with other tribes around the world the difficult terrain was both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, the isolation enabled them to continue their way of life without encroachment and assimilation by the masses who live in the more clement regions of the world. In an intimate collaboration with the immediate nature around them, they created an amazing culture in which they grew hemp for fibres to weave and embroider their own clothes, and plants to dye them in their characteristic red and black colours as the names of the two main hill tribes suggest. These are considered basic skills that children are expected to master before they can marry.
On the other hand life is tough in these regions and even more so when just about everything you need has to be produced from the land around you by you and your family. With sub-tropical summers, temperate winters and 160 days of mist each year, which by the way isn't mentioned by the travel agents in Hanoi, the influence of the climate on agricultural yields and health-related issues are significant. In this context you can easily understand that far from being a luxury, the Red Dao bath, with its healing herbs, was an important salve during the cold winter months.
Life in these circumstances becomes a series of daily fights for survival that go on for weeks, months, years and centuries. These daily acts against the odds, when added together have created a remarkable culture and partnership between people and nature and is a testimony to the ingenuity, craftsmanship, faith and resilience of man. Looks can be deceiving. Nothing about the Red Dao and Black Hmong today, who epitomise both style and rugged resilience, belies the centuries of daily struggles that they have had to master. These people survive in tough conditions with the utmost of style.
It is really hard to explain just how profound this experience with the Red Dao was. Having your body and mind reset to zero by the bath and while soaking up what is just an incredible traditional scene of the most profound beauty and serenity you cannot imagine what it has taken previous generations of these tribes to get to this point. These are not people to be pitied but rather evidence of what we could be or could have been had we not lost our physical and spiritual vitality. Now however they are hitting up against the modern world and are left with no choice but to engage and navigate their relationship with it.
The difference in the lifestyles of the tourists and the Vietnamese who have moved there to set up businesses is stark. The hill tribes have the natural resources in terms of their lands, villages and homes set amongst spectacular landscapes but the newcomers and the tourists have the money and the trappings of modern life. The cultural exchange goes two ways.
The Hill Tribes of the Sa Pa area, by our modern standards and expectations, are poor even by Vietnam's rural standards. The Hill Tribes now find that tourism is both their saviour and their threat. They don't have extra land and the conditions to just grow more rice to increase their incomes but they do have their culture and their landscapes which are now becoming their biggest assets.
Su writes on her Sapa Chau website that 'the land is being divided into smaller and smaller portions as it is handed down from father to sons', something I am aware of from my time in Ethiopia where rural populations have exploded in recent decades and children and young adults are forced into regional towns and capitals in search of work with many exploited and living on the streets. Su explains that after centuries of rice cultivation 'the land is not as fertile', as it once was, 'due to the erosion of nutrients as rain washes them down the steep slopes where the crops are cultivated'. These are key factors that push children away from their traditional lives and with Su's intervention her students 'have better job opportunities after completing higher education' than they would if they left the Highlands without any preparation for the modern world.
Su is mindful however of not only the children and their futures but also of the hill tribes themselves, and has devised a smart holistic approach to her social enterprise that starts with getting the ethnic minority high school age students back to school by supporting the hill tribes through five linked and synergistic businesses, which goes something like this:
Su teaches the kids in her boarding school English and life skills and volunteer teachers like me and tourists wanting to go on hiking tours (1) stay at the kids parents houses in the villages (2). The homestays provide a good alternative income for the villagers, especially as often the children who are studying and become tour guides etc are no longer helping with the farm. I think I paid back in 2012 around $25 per night including my dinner and bath! I am guessing it might be double that now.
The hill tribes also sell their handicrafts, which are fantastic by the way, via a store in Sapa (3) which helps keep the skills and traditions alive and provide more jobs and enhance the livelihoods of the villagers further. Sure enough the great little cafe (4) that I had 'discovered' on my way to 'work' was also part of Su's social enterprise empire, and along with their hotel (5) in town, catered for the ever growing number of tourists visiting Sapa and another important component in Su's holistic approach to diversifying the skills and livelihoods of the hill tribes.
Talking to the staff back in 'my' cafe in Sapa I discovered that some of them were from Hanoi and had come to Sapa to train the local hill tribe kids in hospitality and it turned out that they were also beneficiaries of social enterprises. They had trained in Hanoi at the KOTO restaurant which is part of a charity, or not-for-profit organisation, founded by Mr Jimmy Pham in 1999 for at-risk and disadvantaged youth.
After three days 'teaching' the kids English and 3 nights at different homestays of the Red Dao and Black Hmong it was time for me to leave as I only had a few days left before having to head back to Germany. It was with a heavy heart and with much gratitude that I left Sapa. One of the tour guide students, who I had been helping with his English, gave me a ride on his bike down to the bus station and we said goodbye.
I was leaving Sapa much richer, more relaxed and a bit wiser than when I had arrived. I felt blessed that such experiences can happen spontaneously, without any planning, but had I done some research in advance, I could have booked the homestays, and even volunteered at Su's school, online but I am happy and feel blessed the way it happened.
Unfortunately I don't have any photos from my time with the Red Dao but the Vietnam based photographer Christian Berg has some fantastic photographs of the Red Dao women collecting herbs for their healing bath from the countryside around their villages. The beautiful images perfectly encapsulate the vivid memories I have of visiting these incredible people.
Back in Hanoi I tracked down the KOTO restaurant which Jimmy opened in 1999 as a hospitality training centre, giving at-risk and disadvantaged youth the opportunity to break the poverty cycle by forging a better future for themselves, their families and their communities. In the words of Jimmy himself;
“KOTO stands for ‘Know One, Teach One’, and reflects our belief that if you’re in a position where you can help someone less fortunate, then you should help them; and the greatest thanks you can receive is to one day see that person be in a position to do the same for someone else.”
And on that note, I close the article knowing that at long last I have written about this beautiful experience and the KOTO principles that came to define one of the best weeks of my life.
KNOW ONE TEACH ONE
Links and references
https://www.daoscare.com/post/...
https://www.koto.com.au/about-...
https://4c6c52aa-edb8-4bcc-b04...
https://vietnam.travel/things-to-do/red-dao-herbal-baths
https://www.christianbergphotography.com/about