Water Village
Viet Nam
Summer 2005
I've traveled so much that I often begin a trip wondering if I will see anything new. And then I do and a usual, I am taken by surprise. This time, I am in Viet Nam and we visit a village that is constantly floating. The boats float with the tide and the necessity to be relocated to keep from crashing each other. So a man could leave for work in the morning and come home and spend some time finding the current location of his boathouse.
While so much of the day surprised me, I couldn't get comfortable with the children's oblivious regard for the dangers of the water. Small children were left unattended and roamed the boats without life jackets or supervision. Little babies fell overboard and some ten year old neighbor would scoop him up and put back on board before a parent ever knew a trauma had just been avoided.
This little boy followed our boat for much of the afternoon. I tried to encourage him to leave us as I worried that he would never find his family's boat again. But we couldn't shake him. He had never seen such funny looking people and he was not going to pass up this opportunity to stare at us to his heart's content.
