Thinking out loud

A gift opens doors; it gives access to the great. Proverbs 18:16 We slogged through the mud to the village of Dia, about three hours northwest of Hanoi in the Tan Son district. The people here are an indigenous ethnic group called the Muong. Their ancestral home and former livelihood is now in the nearby mountains, a national forest no longer available to them. The Muong and their Dao neighbors are left to make their way as farmers. New gifts and new skills to use the land do not come naturally to them. The new farmers are learning to grow vegetables in the winter in addition to the two crops of rice they grow throughout the year. MCC works here in six villages in two communes, or townships, working and learning alongside the Muong in agriculture and education projects and in peacebuilding workshops. The village of Dia includes 55 households, about 200 people. With MCC’s help, Ha Phi Chung is raising rabbits. In the past six months, she has been able to sell sever...

Exodus 34:7 (GNT) I will not fail to punish children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for the sins of their parents. Paul and Esther Bucher are two of seven foreigners living in the Quang Ngai province of Vietnam. Esther is an occupational therapist. We watch her work and play with children at the Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) day care center in Pho Duc. In the 60s and early 70s, during the “American” war in Vietnam, the U.S. military sprayed millions of gallons of the herbicide and defoliant Agent Orange on the countryside of Vietnam. The purpose was to eliminate ground cover, destroy crops and force civilians into the cities so that the resisting Vietnamese forces could be killed more easily. Instead, more than 400,000 people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange and, since then, a half million more children have been born with disabilities caused by these chemical toxins. American soldiers serving in Vietnam duri...