Today our itinerary was jam packed. Before meeting at the hotel lobby at 6:30am though, I took a walk around the park right by the hotel. It was interesting to see how the locals do things, and pleasantly surprising to see so many active people. Some were doing yoga, some Ti Chi, and some even doing Ti Chi with swords (which I’m sure must be called something else but I don’t know).
As a group we left the hotel at 6:30 and our first destination was the Sabeco Brewery, The largest brewery in Vietnam. Having taking classes in management, accounting and logistics, it was amazing to see such a large scale operation! A cool, non-pasteurized beer at the end of the tour highlighted the positivity around the company and a part of Vietnam which is growing.
Unfortunately, our next stop graphically depicted the suffering that is still holding Vietnam back. We visited one of Project Vietnam’s permanent mission camps, which at this point was being run by nuns and held 30-40 children. The facility highlighted how much the country needs aid from groups such as PVNF. It was hard to take it all in actually: the children in the facility were mainly abandoned; left in the streets mostly by single mothers that could not afford to take care of them and then brought to the mission camp by strangers. At least 10 of the children were completely bed ridden, disabled children, with defects like I have hardly seen before.
Even though we helped make some of the children smile, it was hard to get over seeing such an ugly reality. After a while in the local village, consisting of a small market that sold live fish and meet among other things, we head to the Cu Chi tunnels. These tunnels were dug by local villagers to protect themselves against the US bombings and air strikes. There was a lot of propaganda in place but the overall experience was very interesting… Shooting an AK47 in a Vietnamese firing range at the end of the visit added to the unique quality of the experience.