Vietnam: For the children

Ho Chi Minh's masoluem, Hanoi. Photo / NZME

Our day-trip dollars become micro-loans to empower rural women, writes Naomi Estall.

I didn't actually get inside Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum because my friend refused to enter that forbidding grey stone temple. As a schoolgirl in Moscow she'd been dragged along to view long-dead Lenin, and said she'd seen enough of embalmed bodies to last a lifetime.

Still, travelling with a Russian did have its advantages. She was made welcome everywhere in Vietnam - the practical help the Russians gave after the American war is still remembered. Her engineer grandfather had been involved in building the huge hydroelectric dam in Hoa Binh Province on the Da River, about 70km southwest of Hanoi. And here we were, in Hoa Binh Province, on a similar mission, though infinitely smaller.

Travelling in developing countries is always a mixed pleasure: the delights of colourful street scenes mixed with the sadness engendered by seeing children too poor to go to school. There are the daily dilemmas: should I give money to begging children and so make it more profitable for their parents to keep them out of school? Should I buy touristic tat from impoverished street vendors? Perhaps we'd found a solution.

We meet our Vietnamese guide, Loan Nguyen, in downtown Hanoi, that beautiful, lively city of seven million. The air is hazy with the fumes from swarms of motorbikes and scooters. Little blue plastic chairs on the footpaths are full of slender Vietnamese, and less slender tourists, slurping pho; the tube shophouses of the Old Quarter in sharp contrast to the grandeur of French colonial edifices.

As we bump along in a minibus on our way to the commune of Phu Minh in Hoa Binh Province, yellow-starred red flags line the highway, hanging limply in the humid air. The flags are there to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the reunification of North and South Vietnam. We are there to witness micro-credit in action.

The writer in Vietnam. Photo / Naomi Estall

There are four of us: Russian, English, Swedish, Kiwi. We have each paid Bloom Microventures US$75 ($114) for this day-trip into the countryside and our dollars are about to be transformed into a micro-loan. Loan Nguyen is taking us to meet Bui Thi Hai, a young mother of two, who is trying to improve the lot of her family and pay for her children's schooling. Our tour fees will provide the capital she needs for her small business.

Bloom Microventures, a non-profit NGO operating in Vietnam since 2011, was started by London School of Economics graduates whose ingenious idea was to reduce poverty by using tour income as micro-loans for rural women.

"These women have no access to bank loans and are all in households below the official government poverty line," Loan explains. "We work closely with the local branch of the Vietnam Women's Union, checking applicants and sharing the risk of any default. The business ideas come from the women."

Low cloud hangs over the hills and small lakes of Phu Minh as we arrive. We've been on the road for 90 minutes, passing bright emerald rice paddies and fields dotted with gravestones.

A worker in a broom-making co-operative, Phu Minh Commune, Vietnam. Photo / Naomi Estall

Bui Thi Hai greets us with a smile, her shy 5-year-old daughter peeping out from behind her. A delicate woman, she must be stronger than she looks as she works on the steep hillside near her small house, planting cassava. The international price has plummeted so their crop can no longer pay for the essentials of life.

She welcomes us into her house, a single room, concrete-floored and spotless, with a lean-to kitchen. The only furniture, a sleeping platform and a cabinet supporting a small TV. It is almost shocking in its sparseness.

"In 2014 I was given a micro-loan. I bought some ducklings, raised and sold them. In less than a year I paid back my loan and made a profit," Bui says with quiet pride. "Now I am asking for a further loan of US$200 to grow my business."

We climb the steep path for cassava planting and then on to a broom-making co-operative. After a fine lunch of local dishes and a slightly unnerving encounter with a pair of docile water buffalo, we bump back to the clamour of Hanoi.

The Russian gift to the people of Vietnam, the hydroelectric dam, brought power to that small TV in Bui Thi Hai's bare room. But today's loan will bring power to Bui herself, the power to educate her kids and lift her family out of poverty.

Four months after our visit and receiving the loan, Bui Thi Hai sold 100 ducks and made US$150. She now has 150 ducks producing eggs. And her children are in school.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Air New Zealand will start flying direct to Vietnam between June and October next year, with three flights per week.