Oct
At the end of this week, new Roadmonkeys from California, Connecticut, New York and Colorado will board planes for Hanoi, convening on Saturday to begin Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy expedition No. 3, to Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
I and my co-leader, Michael Stephen Kessler, will be taking this small group via mountain bikes into some of the most heavily contested areas of the country during the war with the United States. We’ll make a day ride to the site of the almost unbearably gruesome My Lai killings, by an isolated and frustrated squad of American soldiers in March 1968. As I discovered during my scouting trip to this region in March, My Lai sits incongruously 1 km from a serene white-sanded oceanfront beach area.
The Roadmonkey expedition will pass through the town of Quang Ngai, on the central coast, then turn west on Highway 24 to take on the rolling hills and valleys that will swallow us into the jungly digestive tract known as the northern Central Highlands.
Students at the Kon Ray boarding school, Central Highlands, playing a local version of jump rope.
Five days of cycling through mountain passes, alpine forests and hot summer valleys (the seasons are different here than in North America) will put us in the frontier-like city of Kon Tum, the capital of a province that is home to dozens of ethnic minority tribes. The town names sound different here from other parts of Vietnam; tribal languages continue, and a visitor can see the differences from the majority Kinh (Vietnam’s dominant ethnic group) in the faces of local people here; it’s quite fascinating. There is also a poverty rate in this area that one doesn’t see, or see so viscerally, in other parts of Vietnam. I’ve thought of the tribal peoples as similar to North American native tribes in the economic and community challenges they face: education, health, environment, viability of traditional mores and sustainable development.
Roadmonkey’s volunteer project in Vietnam will be building an organic farm, 400 square meters in size, at a school for ethnic H’re, H’mong and other minority students in the Kon Tum region. Our non-profit partner for this project is the East Meets West Foundation, a large, organized and extremely effective American organization that has been building and creating health and education opportunities for Vietnamese people for two decades. My great thanks go to John Anner, EMW’s executive director, for inviting Roadmonkey to partner with his excellent group of managers.
Those managers include Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh Thu, EMW’s program director who began the Roadmonkey partnership with great effort and elan, and Ms. Vo Thi Hien, in Da Nang, who is as pleasant and easy to work with as she is organized and effective. These ladies are wonderful people to plan a complicated and challenging 4-day volunteer project with!
Teachers at the Kon Ray school where Roadmonkey's volunteer project begins, Nov. 6.
The current group of Roadmonkeys — six women and 1 man — raised more than $8,000 for our volunteer project at the Kon Ray school. That is truly amazing, and part of a growing tradition at Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy: our clients have raised more than $30,000 in tax-deductible contributions from their own social networks since last year, for the three volunteer projects they have completed in northwest Vietnam (Nov. 2008), Tanzania (July 2009) and now Central Highlands, Vietnam (Nov. 6-9, 2009).
That is, after all, what adventure philanthropy, and Roadmonkey, are all about.
Our November project is particularly urgent now, only a few weeks after Typhoon Ketsana roared through Central Vietnam, killing dozens of people and causing enormous damage. The Kon Ray school, in fact, saw its water-supply system washed away in the typhoon. Roadmonkey’s projects focus on sustainable programs. But in this case, given the urgent need for humanitarian and other relief, we and East Meets West have agreed to donate a percentage of the $8,000 we’ve raised to emergency projects to get the school and its people and students back on track.
Tomorrow I fly from New York to Los Angeles, to convene with my expedition co-leader and gear up for the 12-hour flight to Asia.
More soon from the road to Vietnam…
Paul von Zielbauer
