Cochinchina's Nieces
July, 2007. Sweat pools around my collar, coming from places I
didn't know had pores. The man behind the shabby table with the
obsolete computer gestures at the visa in my passport with
increasing agitation. I begin to understand that this is not
going to be routine, that the armed men on their national
service might be asked for more than a tough pose. I try to act
normal.
I follow his finger, which has come to rest on the date from
which my visa is valid: it is tomorrow. I make what-now
gestures, vaguely remembering the general advice to smile. After
an increasingly suggestive pause he shrugs, and with exaggerated
care stamps my passport and waves me through. Thus for four
hours I am an officially sanctioned illegal alien in Ho Chi Minh
City.
A week later em Huy brings me
to Disability Resource and
Development (DRD), my mother organisation for the coming
year, on the back of her motorbike. I grasp her waist with
trepidation as she breezes through peak-hour traffic, already
knowing that the helmet that marks me out as a foreigner isn't
going to save me.
DRD occupies a large cinderblock edifice surplus to the Open
University's requirements in a decent location on the fringes of
District 1. The office itself has a lino floor, the standard
office machinery, air conditioning and erratic electricity which
periodically gives us the afternoon off. The door is locked with
a hefty bicycle chain and padlock, additional to an omnipresent
guard at the gate. I soon discover that the gents' is not
intended for use, and playing the foreigner wildcard I brazenly
use the women's. One day a truck passes
with The Godfather theme as its horn
tune, and I imagine Uncle Ho smiling quietly to himself.
The cramped conditions, general discomfort and absence of the
boss makes it both necessary and easy to bond with my
coworkers. Chị Hạnh has traded chemical engineering for a
calling closer to her heart: advocacy for people with hearing
impairments. Em Cử, whose name taught me to be careful with the
squiggles, is the employment officer, tasked with linking
employees with employers, and making their workplaces
accessible. Em Loan is the Assistant Director, stopping up all
the gaps.
Almost as organisational policy, everyone at DRD has a
disability; some ailments were unfamiliar to me, as polio and
the like were conquered long ago in the Western world. Mine are
short-sightedness, being the first volunteer at DRD, not knowing
Vietnamese and lacking a wife. I soon learn DRD is matriarchal,
and that capturing the requirements for their new website lay
beyond my capabilities; here successful discourse requires
patience, deference, concrete artefacts and a thick hide. My
counterpart, DRD's IT minder em Huy, lacks the technical
training to help in this process, and is not disposed to
learning it. I decide to satisfy some Platonic ideals, to chase
standards-compliance, universal accessibility and software
engineering instead of other banalities I cannot measure. My
typical day consists of
finding Trung Nguyên
cafes
and elaborating
details of theories barely of interest even to other computer
scientists.
I also visit several disability-related projects around the
city; on her tiny but powerful Yamaha Mio, em Loan takes me to
Handicap
International's spinal injury rehabilitation project, which
operates out of a hospital in District 8 that is the closest
thing I see to the cliché of a tropical idyll. Em Loan
once was a peer counsellor here, mostly providing guidance for
young men after their motorbike and industrial accidents. I meet
Eric, an affable Belgian, and he explains carefully how things
will go, how the finance will be perpetuated. I am reassured
that there are such experts in Vietnam.
Initially I decide to walk the streets, for vaguely
environmental reasons: to get some exercise, to immerse myself
in the city, to avoid contributing to the smog and congestion. I
learn to cross the road. Against all advice to walk slowly, one
can walk as quickly as one likes, provided one is predictable,
allowing drivers to react, or not, as the case may be. It is not
fun though: the footpaths are full of stalls, tables and parked
vehicles, and the agents of vice are certain that all Westerners
are always looking for hookers and blow. The zebra crossings are
sick fictions, the little green man a fabulist, and the
turn-right-against-the-lights rule means that crossing at
corners is always perilous. Here traffic consists mainly of
motorbikes, and fluidity dominates; otherwise
wheelchair-accessible public spaces are fenced off to prevent
them being overrun by those who believe that the shortest path
between any two points is a straight line.
After a month of bargaining with every shyster xe ôm
(motorbike taxi) in District 1, I decide to rent a vanilla 100cc
Honda Wave α. Training involves a few laps around the
undercover motorbike park at DRD and some advice: keep my feet
on the pegs, use the foot brake and not the front-wheel hand
brake, start in second gear, get up to top as quickly as
possible. Then we're off down Trần Hưng Đạo to the busy
roundabout out front of the Bến Thành tourist market. Em Dũng,
fearlessly enthusiastic in his role as instructor, roughly
doubles the weight on the bike, making the accelerator spongy,
the steering and balance more challenging; I feel guiltier about
imposing my bulk on the people who had been driving me
around. Upon returning to DRD I am told in translation not to
look over my shoulder, to forget about those behind me and just
go for it.
In contrast to the rigid individualism that pervades the roads
of Australia, Vietnamese traffic is an exercise in almost
mandatory cooperation. The vast majority of people, while
perhaps seeming pushy, slot gaps in an approximately fair
manner, greedily micro-optimising the peloton. This is efficient
only in quite limited circumstances, a fact known to every
computer scientist, and I find this lack of perspective both
cute and irritating. Size brings right of way, but there is
little malice in it — the taxi driver knows his haste is
not worth someone's life. I learn that my safety margin is
someone else's slip lane, but with enough friends one can drive
anywhere on the road. Turning left requires guts and mates, a
building of critical mass until we fission from the boring
mainstreamers and overwhelm those coming the other
way. Launching from the lights is like catching a breaking wave:
one is either in front, riding it, or underneath struggling for
breath.
Sometimes being on a motorbike in a Vietnamese city is
exhilarating, a thing of strange grace and beauty, but more
often it is a mystifying encounter with the values of a rapidly
changing society; the citizenry appears to be in an incoherent
hurry to get somewhere, anywhere, at almost any cost. The
destiny of the country may well be contained in its traffic, a
Faustian bargain with terrible health and safety standards.
A few weeks later I really learn how to ride down at Bạc Liêu,
in the heart of the Mekong Delta, on a 50cc Honda Chaly that my
future mate Darren had pimped. We go on a huge tour,
approximately thirty Westerners, containing the largest cohort
of Australian volunteers and hangers-on that town is ever likely
to see. The Chaly is difficult to start, and it prefers stalling
to idling after going through some humongous puddles. It is
confiscated by some local mechanics who clean and then decide to
replace the spark plug; they teach me that trust is not
discretionary here, it is assumed and only sometimes terminated
after violation. Darren finds out about this via some bizarre
surveillance network that extends all the way back to the city,
and backtracks to sort it out. Later I am nearly swallowed by
one of the nine dragons when I barely make a turn after cresting
a narrow bridge. My helmet rubs
a zebibah
of devotion into my forehead and I do wear it often. We drink in
the evenings and everything becomes much simpler.
Darren worked on the Bạc Liêu part of a hefty project that
brought clean water, sanitation and drainage to three towns on
the Delta. This new prince of the town is famous for burning
money, albeit less literally than the previous one. When we
visited the treatment works I quizzed him about sustainability,
and was told that each household would have an individual meter,
which struck me as ridiculous, for the Vietnamese are genius
mechanics: I imagine most are bypassed by now, and that those
charged with their reading are getting more from kickbacks than
salary.
Back in Ho Chi Minh City I come off the bike a few more times. I
run into a pedestrian out the back of Bến Thành market,
inflicting a mild bruise on his upper arm with the
handlebar. Eyeing me mildly, he picks me up, then the bike, and
hands it to me before continuing on his way. Apart from
embarrassment, the worst part is not some loss of skin but the
bruising of the inner thigh by the seat as the bike goes
horizontal. I drive a lot more cautiously after drinking, and
perhaps for that reason never had an accident where alcohol was
a factor.
The weeks drift by, and Ho Chi Minh City becomes Thành phố Hồ
Chí Minh, and soon Sài Gòn; amongst the young the name has never
been political. My driving improves, I begin daydreaming in the
traffic, alloting just the minimal attention demanded by the
other vehicles. I learn that tiêng việt without digraphs,
diacritics, tones and familial pronouns is like phở without
chilli.
Disability and disadvantage are highly public in Việt Nam, and
early on I decide that the people will get my labour but not my
money; being inept at public relations, I end up looking
hard. However I find the Vietnamese to generally have a great
sense of humour, and perhaps because it is harsh, with childish
glee taken in winning, I am reminded of the old, defunct
Australia, of Lawson and the bush, where keeping things light
made adversity bearable, partly by averting arguments about the
point of it all. There are also the parallel fixations of
gambling, drinking and smoking amongst the men, with the women
splitting into the wowserish and the transgressive, underpinned
by a univeral pragmatic tolerance and love of song. I wonder how
intentional is the irony of naming the main road between
downtown Vietnamese Sài Gòn and Chinese Chợ Lơn after the mighty
general Trần Hưng Đạo. Mind you, the Eurostar terminates at
Waterloo.
I begin talking to em Bích, a volunteer
at Sozo and DRD, who I
come to realise is something of a counter-culture firebrand,
having helped
organise a huge
art installation and party on a junk at her uncle's place
soon after I arrived. She rides
a Yamaha
Mio with trainer wheels, colloquially
a xe
ba bánh even though it has four wheels. On it she can
keep up with everyone, but with me on the back she restricts
herself to a still scary 25kph on fat Lý Thái Tổ boulevard. My
curiosity is piqued by the freedom this vehicle has brought
her. I delve. I ask everyone's assistant, the generalist em
Loan, to explain.
Em Loan is a woman of roughly my age, second in seniority at
DRD, and very engaged with the local disability community. Like
em Bích, a childhood bout of polio has left her with a slow
gait; I doubt a Western system would consider her seriously
disabled, though I would expect the transportation authorities
to extend her some consideration. She was the president at the
Disabled Youth Association (DYA) for a term of two years, and
over several coffees she sketches for me her involvement with
traffic issues affecting her constituents, and the uncertain
status of xe ba bánh.
Em Loan begins with her engagement with Handicap International's
road safety project in 2006, which they developed in tandem with
the local transportation department. Funded by Handicap
International, DYA organised some road regulation training
sessions for about a hundred people with disabilities
(PWDs). Why make this specific to PWDs, I ask naively, thinking
that all drivers in the country could benefit from serious
edification.
Em Loan asserts that the average education level of PWDs is much
lower than that of the general population. This is largely due
to societal attitudes towards disability; for instance, until
recently the State held that a sign language could not possibly
communicate complex concepts, and so people with severe hearing
impairments generally spent only five years at schools that
shunned their main mode of expression. Moreover it is shameful
to bear a child with a disability, and such offspring are
considered an economic burden by the family. Some children are
hidden at home and not allowed to attend school, a violation of
the State's requirements; rumours circulate that this is a
practice common among highly-ranked officials. Some disabilities
may preclude people from participating in many of life's signal
moments, not the least being riding a bicycle in traffic and
getting married.
The bedrock of these attitudes is a combination of Buddhism and
Confucianism, which have an immanence that shames the vestigial
Christianity of the West; here the traffic makes some sense as a
koan about forgiveness, whereas back home it is entirely
banal. It is obvious why Westerners seek spiritual solace in
countries such as these, which have a wholism that is yet to
yield to the reductionist knife. However to these tone deaf ears
the Zen philosophy has elements that sound zero-sum and somewhat
illogical: every action having a reaction does not imply that
every result has a cause, and there is little reason to believe
that the dogma of the market, that there can be two winners in a
trading pair, is necessarily wrong. Clearly many abstract ideas
violate the law of nature, with compassion being vaunted as one
of the most human. The accompanying highly unnatural metaphysics
merely increases the allure to the children of the Western
Enlightenment seeking the Eastern, and vexes the natural born
not at all.
Confucian filial duty manifests in the ancestral shrines,
populated with Buddhas, and the social convention that all
elders are wise. A person's disability is taken by some as
indicating a travestied earlier incarnation; the burden the
person imposes on others has corresponding antecedents, such as
a need to develop empathy. However a naively optimistic Hồ Chí
Minh asserted, with wilful obliviousness, that "all men are
created equal" back in 1945, so clearly these sentiments are not
the entire story, and indeed the State has many statutes that
are sympathetic to PWDs.
Wearing a helmet became compulsory on December 15, 2007. Before
that it was rare to see one on anyone but a foreigner within the
city limits, apart from the women, vampires according to local
legend, who wore the arm socks, face masks and hats of the
midday purdah to ward off the sun. The State was successful with
this particular mandate apparently due to simple arithmetic: the
fine was equivalent to the cost of a new helmet. Most troubling
to me is the thought that those who rode and continue to ride
bare-headed or paralytically drunk simply do not know the
magnitude of the risks they run, that a head or spinal injury is
likely to be permanently debilitating, a risk exacerbated by the
general ignorance of first-aid, and a lack of follow-up care,
the occupational therapy and social re-integration that a
Westerner would expect. Here the hospitals focus on medical
treatment and physical therapy, and that is the end of things.
I began to understand the enormous contribution that the road
safety project of Handicap International would make. Japan's
International Cooperation Agency (JICA) ran a complementary
project at the Chợ Rẫy hospital for people who had lost some
body function due to brain injury, trauma or stroke, and I was
fortunate to join the indomitable Yumiko-san and her group for
an enjoyable afternoon of games, song and chatter at Đầm Sen
Cultural Park. We took the public bus, on which PWDs registered
with the local Department of Invalids and Social Welfare can
travel for free. Unfortunately these are generally not
accessible, and the bus drivers are under such financial
pressure to meet the timetable that they often only slow down at
signposted zones, rarely coming to a complete halt, so
passengers must scramble. This behaviour seems even more
pointless when the bus gets stuck in a traffic jam barely fifty
metres up the road. Again, micro-optimised super-efficiency is
the enemy of the adequate.
Despite their knowledge, the staff of DRD did not wear helmets
before they were compulsory.
I am dumbfounded when em Loan tells me that so many people with
minor mobility impairments do not have driving licences. The
State provides many reasons for denying her one: her "percentage
disability" as calculated by the local Department of Medical
Assessment is too high, she is too short, and more
recently they
think her chest is too small. (This last proposal provoked
one wag to suggest that the traffic cops were envious of those
working in vice, and another that padded bras would become
bestsellers, as if they are not already.) It seems common for a
person to be assessed as too disabled to get a licence, and too
functional to qualify for a pension.
Thus most people who come to DRD have no formal aquaintance with
the traffic rules. The DYA / Handicap International sessions did
raise awareness in several quarters, and while the road safety
department agreed that training PWDs is a good idea, they
baulked at issuing full licences. Each PWD instead received a
card of tentative validity: good for T.P. Hồ Chí Minh only, it
does not allow the bearer to buy or sell a motorbike and it
remains unclear if it is acceptable to the police. Perversely,
people who have acquired a disability retain their licences, as
these are for life.
Like em Bích, many DYA members in attendence drive self-modified
xe ba bánh, three- or four-wheeled motorbikes, and
having detected a willingness from the authorities to parlay,
they express interest in getting these registered. The variation
amongst drivers and their vehicles is huge; at the top end of
bikes is the type ridden by em Bích: a new 100cc Yamaha Mio or
125cc Nouvo with a pair of well-engineered undriven trainer
wheels. These bikes have automatic transmissions and hand brakes
as standard, with room on the back for a wheelchair or
passenger. Performance is impressive, as an Australian
wheelchair user demonstrated to me one soggy afternoon by doing
wheelies around a carpark. He is entirely autonomous, getting
between the chair and the bike without assistance, and is
adamant that his mobility in Vietnam is superior to that in
other Asian countries; I wonder if it is this good in
Australia. Such a xe ba bánh costs a total of about
about twenty one million Vietnamese Đồng (VND), roughly
$AU1,200.
Chị Hiếu, a wheelchair user who joined DRD in March 2008, drives
what might be the quintessential xe ba bánh. Hers
started life as a standard low-end motorbike illegally imported
from Cambodia, which was then modified by one of the two
specialist companies in Sài Gòn. Generally the rear wheel is
replaced by a pair, with only one being driven. If necessary,
hooks are added so that the rider can store their crutches along
the body, though chị Hiếu gets help to attach her wheelchair to
the back with octopus straps. The foot-pedal gear shift is
replaced by a long lever, clutching being taken care of by the
centrifugal contraption standard on these sorts of bikes, and
the foot brake is moved to the left hand grip. Many have a
reverse gear added. The modification costs four million VND
($AU250).
I ask chị Hiếu about her driving experiences, and she is quick
to tell me that the impact has been huge: ultimately it gained
her employment and a husband, and I can say that her year-old
daughter has an unearthly beauty. She is thankful to em Loan for
pressing her to try a friend's xe ba bánh, and
encouraging her to be independent. I ask if other road users
show her any particular courtesy, and she demurs: she is treated
the same as everyone else. She is yet to tangle with the police,
as is em Bích.
Three-wheel
"all terrain vehicles" have been banned in the West for a
long time due to their appalling safety record, and I have no
doubt that these machines are even more dangerous: the rear
track is narrow, and cornering requires significantly more
care than on a two-wheeler as the centre of gravity is quite
high. Nevertheless em Bích assures me that learning to ride a
xe ba bánh is easy, provided you have no two-wheel
habits to unlearn.
Em Loan fills in the pre-history: before about 2007 the State
was not too concerned with the formulation or enforcement of the
laws regarding self-modified vehicles. This changed when
motorised traffic started choking the streets of the major
cities: claiming that xe ba bánh took up more than
their fair share of road space and inflicted disproportionate
damage on other road users in accidents, the State decreed that
there would be no more of these vehicles on the road by the end
of 2007. I am confused, for the vehicles of PWDs look quite
innocuous and not too numerous, as do the marvellous xe
lôi of Châu Đốc. Em Loan corrects me: the ban is targeted
at those used for carting goods around.
These machines look like a chainsaw attached to half of a car
chassis, and for mine are the scariest things on the road. The
rider sits low behind a sizeable tray, usually carrying such a
ridiculous amount of stuff that he is barely visible from the
front. Steering is cyclo-like: the poor labourer has to pivot
the entire tray, which is mounted on two wheels, while sitting
above a farting two-stroke that is supported by a single
wheel. There is no safety gear at all; no chain guard, no bumper
bars, no rags on the loads that sometimes extend two metres fore
and aft. It is unusual to see one with registration plates. I
am in hearty agreement with the State that these lethal things
must be killed.
In this case the big stick of State proved ineffective. Why, I
ask em Loan: all such vehicles are bleedingly obvious in
traffic, and the Australian in me expected the police to latch
onto this revenue stream with all twenty digits. She tells me
that the cops on the streets of Vietnamese cities know how tough
many people do it; the disability rate here is almost certainly
in excess of
the worldwide
typical 10%, and while the State has been amazingly
successful at reducing poverty, the remainder of the task is
Herculean. No
xe ba bánh driver is well-off, and the pointy end of
the law does not want to alienate the community, just milk the
sufficiently affluent for karaoke money.
Of course the most conspicuously affluent people are the
Westerners, and as the police mostly turn a blind eye to the
vast majority who drive without a licence, their enforcement of
the State's crackdown in 2009 came as a shock to many expats:
for once the marginal extra revenue and pressure from above must
have outweighed the hassles of the paperwork, the culture
barrier and having to impound the riders' machines, though I
grant that the opportunity for some grease may have helped tip
the scales. Just how did the State get the law enforced in this
instance? I hazard a guess that the status quo notoriety of
allowing tourists a lot of freedom dominates any substantive
safety concerns, increasing the mystery.
This relative flakiness of formal, Enlightenment-style
institutions in the developing world is a source of great alarm
to the average Westerner who is so accustomed to the safety of
anonymous interactions with rule-governed systems. No-one really
wants to haggle over a visa fee, do they? How about bargaining
with a traffic cop over running a red light? As institutions
mature, their operational policies become more codified,
curtailing the discretion of the flak catchers, which is
problematic in the absence of functional law reform. There are
fine lines between discretion and corruption, of course, but in
failing to enforce the xe ba bánh ban the cops are
certainly doing the right thing; perhaps it is the best response
to a State which has a strong grip on reality but a much weaker
one on evidence and persuasion.
The State, long acculturated to coercion by the struggle for
post-colonialism, sometimes tries to induce behaviour through
incentives, though mostly only after the stick fails. (You could
argue that the West has the reverse problem of finding the
stick, as evidenced in the fallout from the ongoing global
financial crisis.) Thus the successive attempts since 2007 to
get rid of the cartage vehicles have featured increasing payouts
to encourage drivers to either buy much safer small light trucks
or get educated. The five million VND (circa $AU300) now on
offer has failed to persuade many of them to change livelihoods,
and the district-level implementation has been a recipe for
patchwork and graft.
The weakness of a multi-tiered bureaucracy is well known, and
there is a similar problem with the State's well-intentioned
employment law that requires all workforces to include a cohort
of at least 2-3% with disabilities. Em Cử told me that between
the difficulty of finding suitable PWDs and the paucity of the
punitive tax for failing to meet this statute, most
organisations unreflectively pay up. These funds are supposed to
finance locally-organised vocational training, which has
apparently not been set up in Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh; or perhaps
it has been, but disbursement procedures have not — at
some point it becomes too difficult for me to discern just what
the blockage is.
So how is the State influenced by those it regulates? This
Westerner naively proposes some courses of action: court cases,
direct submissions, committee memberships, cooperation with
other organisations; in essence, what has done the trick for
PWDs at home. Political expression is perilous if the State
takes sufficient umbrage, and it is unfortunate that disability
issues are still considered political, but then, most collective
behaviour is. However there are some sections of the community
that do have enough prestige to directly challenge the State;
for
instance, people
representing the legacy of the ten-thousand day war,
particularly PWDs in Hà Nội, are difficult to suppress. This
militaristic romanticism is unavailable in Thành phố Hồ Chí
Minh, which sometimes seems like Pluto, having a variable
classification, its own satellites, a chaotic and highly
inclined orbit, but nevertheless going about its business.
Thus em Loan prefers to raise awareness via newspapers and
television, as many reporters are sympathetic to
disability-related issues, continually on the lookout for the
safely subversive. DRD itself has been more directly involved in
discussions with the State, influencing the development of laws
applying to PWDs throughout the country.
At a meeting to discuss the issue of xe ba bánh
registration with DYA members on August 4, 2007, the local
transport department suggested something less than pragmatic: in
concert with the manufacturer Phana and the polytechnic
university, a xe ba bánh would be designed and
fabricated that could be registered. The blueprint I saw was for
something similar to
the Piaggo
MP3, which is much safer than the current ones. However as
always the economics was ignored: a new motorbike of any kind is
beyond the means of most PWDs, who felt it to be more of an
engineers' dream than what they needed. As far as I know the
design never got off the table.
Fortunately em Loan was persistent in her persuasion of Handicap
International's contact in the provincial transport department,
and after several months, on March 15, 2008, DYA held a
registration day in the forecourt of the HCM Communist Youth
Union building. Officials from the department came to examine
the vehicles, doing little more than measuring the track and
wheel base, ensuring the bike had at least one mirror, taking a
photograph and filling out some paperwork. About 110 vehicles
where processed, with feelings of progress, recognition and good
will. Smiles all round, and moreover it established a
registration protocol for other localities to adapt.
Thus the riders find themselves in the peculiar situation of
being flagrantly illegal drivers of legal vehicles, which
remains the case to this day. As George Orwell might have
observed, the prevailing attitude seems to be "two wheels good,
three wheels bad", though it is definitely becoming "two wheels
good, four wheels better" as the affluent pull ahead. If the
State was serious about improving the traffic it would more
severely restrict the other kinds of vehicles that so obviously
hog the road, but of course this is politically impossible.
We launched the website by inviting some journalists to a
show-and-tell at the Open University. It turned out that a minor
feature I implemented on a whim, a zoom layout, was the major
novelty, with some claiming that DRD's was the first website in
Vietnam to have it. Though it lay beyond my capacity and the
regulations of the program, I wish we could have advocated for
the accessibility of State information at the local and national
levels.
I returned to Sài Gòn in May 2010 to find that while the
immigration officials are as banally offensive as always, there
are no longer armed men on show in Tân Sơn Nhất Airport —
one must now go to the American, French or Korean consulates, or
the local People's Committee, to see bored kids with weapons in
public. The old DRD building has been razed, to be replaced with
a five-story edifice that will dominate the area. There is a
schedule of safety regulations and fines attached to the front
fence, and this reassuring sign of progress now seems common to
many large building sites. This time I ride a bicycle, and find
I get more respect from other road users than on the motorbike;
taxis give me space, I cruise around with fewer discontinuities
than usual. Is it the novelty of a large foreign bloke on a push
bike? Perhaps it is familiar from childhood that momentum is
precious. In any case I sweat profusely and shamelessly.
Unfortunately it seems that PWDs can no longer register their
xe ba bánh. I am saddened that things haven't stuck,
that progress is not monotonic even for small things like this.
Trading the patriarchy of big brains for the matriarchy of good
intentions and rubbery thinking for a year made me realise that
I am highly unlikely to find a socially beneficial vocation
where I could really use my skills; my peers (and now I) have
shifted into commerce, finance, system administration,
manufacturing arbitrage, the unreality of urban planning. The
AYAD experience remains too raw, and now too distant, to come to
terms with.
Acknowledgements
The author was funded by AusAID for the year July 2007 —
July 2008 under the Australian
Youth Ambassadors for Development program to develop a
website for DRD in Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Việt Nam. I wish to
thank everyone named in this article, those I have discussed it
with, and in particular Tim
Bourke, Peodair Leihy, Peter Rickwood, Nell
Robertson, Andrew
Taylor and Mark
Wotton for their encouraging comments.
