This is a series of posts from my three month studies and travels across Vietnam. Basing out of Hồ Chí Minh City, I’ll spend a few weeks traveling, learning tiếng Việt, and exploring a nation on the opposite side of the world from home. The following is a sort of journal entry, reflecting my experience in visiting the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam and thinking about issues of water use there.
On the bridge my eyes could trace the PVC pipes running from the back of the houses alongside the river. The unmistakable sound of a toilet flushed, and a few moments later a pulse of water made it’s way into the Mekong. The famously brown waters of the Mekong may originate in silt, but that is far from the only brown stuff running through it. At that moment it was mere observation, but as thirst struck again on our bike ride along one of the islands of the Mekong the observation morphed into more of a meditation.
Vietnamese agriculture, it seems, presents a bit of a double-edged sword to the American environmentalist. On the one hand, there is all the poetry of a closed ecological loop. Đất nước means “land” in Tiếng Việt, but a literal translation is actually “land water.” The language here reflects the inseparability of water from other aspects of life in ways English fails to capture. Fish, for example, are a major feature of Vietnamese cuisine, and even more ubiquitious is nước mắm, or the fermented fish sauce whose particularly pungency ensures that the traveler is always aware of its local manufacture. Nước mắm can be translated literally into “water fish,” and nước is a prominent modifier of many words aside, always suggestive of a liquid. And you can see why: hardly a day goes by that I have not benefited from the nước as much as the Đất. Among the more mundane and routine meals one finds crab, snail, and catfish. But there is also water snake, spadefish, elephant ear fish, and manta ray. According to Christophe, one of the professors here, 95% of the food consumed in Saigon is sourced from the Mekong Delta just a few hours away. These include some of the foods I mention above (there was no shortage of shellfish at the local market, and as far as I can tell it was shells that were carved and embedded into wooden columns at the farmhouse of our hosts as decoration), in addition to another food you could nearly consider amphibious: the critical and present rice.
And rice is not the only food blurring the land-water distinction. Several large barges on the Mekong were fully employed in pulling the murky brown silt from the running river below us, to be distributed to fields and gardens around the area. There plants could take advantage of the nutrient rich soil to grow, either to be consumed there or shipped north to Saigon or the surrounding areas. Our journey was not only along rivers and canals, but across islands of banana orchards, past chili pepper bushes, under mango trees, and alongside fruits I could neither name nor recognize.
The water seems to always be running in Vietnam, whether it is rolling off of Ho Chi Minh roofs during the great monsoons, or passes gallon by murky gallon through the “nine dragons” of the Mekong. On this particular day it was running right through me, presumably a result of gía (bean sprouts) in the bún bò I had the day prior. Or rather it was the fact the beansprouts had been washed that caused them to be a credible source of my own contribution (and a very runny one) to the Mekong through the very PVC pipes I had earlier been tracking on their short descent from toilet to river.
To an American audience the notion that washing vegetables before eating them is a very sensible one. The problem, it seems, is that the Mekong is far from the only place where inputs and outputs of the human body are uncomfortably mixed. While I had anticipated some basic challenges in drinking water abroad, I had not anticipated the full degree to which no one drinks the water in Vietnam – at least if they are able to avoid it. This is not limited to expats alone, but to many locals who have the ways and means to get bottled water in their homes and offices. For those that cannot there is always boiling (tea being a ubiquitous way to serve the piping results), but even that is a challenge and time consuming, especially to those restaurants and individuals who prefer a cold drink. The general belief, at least from the students I have spoken to on the matter, is that the water here is never far from sewage. So when my gía are washed in tap water and served to me still wet, it becomes no great surprise when I find my body an active participant in the running waters of Vietnam in exactly the way I would have liked to avoid it.
We have some familiarity with issues of water contamination and purification in the outdoor industry, so at least I am not a stranger to the phenomena of diarrhea or how to respond. I was dehydrated and nutrient deficient, but away from the city (where I have a constant system of cycling pots of boiled water, jugs cooling in refrigerators, and my water bottle) I was forced to rely on bottled water, at 10,000Đ a pop. That is approximately $.50, which isn’t a budget buster (even as I have become stingy enough to think spending more than a $1 on lunch is excessive, and dinner is rarely more than a $3 affair) for any American visitors. According to the Vietnamese roommates sharing our compound, that’s about an hours work for a waitress in Ho Chi Minh City, which happens to be the place people are moving to for better pay and opportunities. So I am guessing, without any empirical support as of yet, that a typical Vietnamese worker is going to have to work a little longer for a bottle.
The implications of even this basic calculation are evident: water here is not cheap, and while as a visiting tourist I can get by without issue, there are many in this city whose only access to drinkable water depends on substantive purchases or the ability to get a good pot of water boiling on a regular basis. Factoring in time, fuel requirements, ability to carry water, and other such factors and that too becomes a fairly complicated business (though a cheap one – fuel costs for boiling water apparently rarely exceed more than 2% of household income expenditure for those purchasing fuel, and the numbers are even smaller for wood collectors (Classen et al. 2008). Thus the water market – I am beginning to suspect – is in may ways at best inconvenient (where boiling is required), at worst already a false-choice where the only clean water market is a private and incomes are already hardly enough to make ends meet. Of course – there are alternatives in rural areas: rainwater collection was visibly apparent as a major alternative – but despite all that the collection of clean, drinkable water in this “Land Water” place is more challenging than meets the eye.
It seems that there is water, water everywhere. But not a drop to drink.
For more on the Mekong Delta check out the video below. For more on water issues in Vietnam, check out the results of this survey here, read more about the challenges of boiling water here, or reach out to me and I would be happy to try and get you in contact with the folks that took us out on the Mekong Delta in the first place.
WORKS CONSULTED
Clasen, T. F., Thao, D. H., Boisson, S., & Shipin, O. (2008). Microbiological Effectiveness and Cost of Boiling to Disinfect Drinking Water in Rural Vietnam. Environmental Science & Technology, 42(12), 4255–4260. doi:10.1021/es7024802