An NGO - EMWG

I used to work for an NGO on HIV/AIDS issue in Vietnam, and I have already owned basic knowledge and information about HIV/AIDS issue in Vietnam. As I always want to challenge myself with streams of brand new things, I decided not to choose HIV/AIDS Technical Working Group, but rather an NGO working on other issue so that I can obtain more knowledge and experience. I kept searching on Water Supply and Sanitation working group, Child Rights Working Group, and other working groups I’m interested on, but they seemed to provide us only general information. The websites are poor and not well developed. I barely found any useful information. Luckily, I grasped at Ethnic Minorities Working Group which has already caught my eyes. In spite of underdeveloped website, I still made my choice working on Ethnic problem since I love exploring different world, different persons, plus I always wish to see people from different culture.

To my knowledge, Vietnam has very big population which ranked the third in Asian, and the thirteen in the world. Its density of population is pretty high and unevenly distributed. Millions of people desire to settle in delta regions but there is only a small amount of people dwell in remote areas. Those people predominantly are minorities.

Minority population can be categorized as the group with little or even no academic learning. The Government has many attempts to invest in minority villages but the results are not as expected. One of the arguments can be the facility system is underdeveloped that makes it hard for people to learn. The second account is that they are so hard up that they have to work to earn money to make ends meet. “We do not have enough food to survive, how can we afford to go to school?” That’s the question they ask themselves as well as local governments when they are forced to attend classes. In addition, no teacher wants to come to remote areas to work as the salary is quite low and there is no entertaining activity there as there are in big cities.

Maybe due to their lack of academic learning, minority groups still maintain unsound customs. They get married when they are quite young, even at the age is prohibited by the law, many women are absolutely becoming young mothers. As a consequence, poverty and difficulties still exist in these families. There should have been more backward ritual activities and folkways, yet I can’t dig inside my mind more deeply to remember them.

Although the majority of folkways is weird, some of them are positively extraordinary. They have lots of special traits. I really appreciate the community life they lead. Nowadays, there are many culture villages everywhere, but somehow those villages are being modernized since they are designed for the purpose of serving tourists. They are kind of being commercialized. I can realize the gap because I myself had an opportunity to visit real villages as well as purposely-built villages.

There is a pressing problem in the Northern Vietnam. Lots of places in which minority people are living entail valuable natural resources. However, the infrastructure and facilities are so lagging that local people find it hard to make use of the land they are living on. That’s one of the reasons why there is a trend in exodus of Northern minority groups to the South. As a result, thousands of villages are left empty.