Watering coriander fields in Vietnam
I do not recall what urged us to stop by the side of the highway on our return from Ha Long Bay to Hanoi. Maybe it was to take photos of a picturesque landscape, or we actually paused on purpose to meet the woman who was watering her fields. Memory fails me now. Whatever the reason, there we were, standing amidst green farmlands, invited for a while into the reality of life in rural Vietnam.
Since early in the morning, the middle-aged lady was manually watering her coriander, mint, and butter lettuce fields. As opposed to corn or rice, such plants require shorter farming cycles, allowing a small farmer to rotate the capital faster, hopefully making some meagre profit. The specific fields stretched alongside the riverbanks, and the irrigation “system” was unexpectedly labour-intensive. The woman would balance a pole on her shoulders with a watering pot hanging on either side. She would walk down the river, fill the cans, and return to water the plants, repeating the process over and over. The scene was exotic and primitive. We were a group of Middle Easterns and Europeans, and nothing in our memories could relate to such a process which, we thought, had been replaced thousands of years ago with canals or other systems that do not weigh so heavily on the shoulders of a person – let alone a woman. But the women in Vietnam are tough and independent, and, coming to think of it, they represent the most interesting entrepreneurial initiatives we encountered in the countryside.
Despite our invasion, the lady – whose name, unfortunately, I did not note down – remained calm and genuinely welcoming. She smiled cheerfully and showed us around – our guide acting as an interpreter – allowing us all to experiment with the watering system one by one and, thus, step for a few minutes into the shoes of a Vietnamese farmer.
We soon found out that our untrained shoulders could not easily balance the pole, and we had to slightly crouch, maintaining an uncomfortable position to keep the rod in place. The filled pots were relatively bulky and difficult to manoeuvre correctly, while we had to make sure we watered the plants evenly, walking at a slow pace alongside the coriander lines, keeping the flow continuous, steady, and balanced. It sounds easy, but the process included a lot of unfamiliar coordination, leading us to some disappointingly poor results, which the woman rushed to amend. She laughed playfully at our clumsiness and kept correcting our posture as we giggled and puffed. And, for those few minutes, we were all friends, connected by the land which we, as humans, have tried so hard to domesticate, only to be reminded that, despite any expertise, we are still novices.
My humble attempt to water the fields.
Photo credits: © Konstantina Sakellariou
