Vietnam's slum dwellers
During the Vietnam war Saigon had a reputation as Sin City - an exotic meeting-place of east and west as well as a key battleground of the war.
Now officially called Ho Chi Minh City, it has had almost 30 years of peace. It is a showcase of Vietnam's revival, bursting with energy and, in parts, with new wealth. But the slums are an ugly reminder of the legacy of the war. Efforts to clear them began 15 years ago, but up to quarter of a million people still live in them. The slums grew up during the war, when refugees from the countryside streamed into Vietnam's biggest city to escape the bombs and the fighting. Many settled on the damp ground along the city's network of four large canals.
These are natural branches of the Saigon river, whose waters rise and fall with the rains. They snake through the city towards the west and north. The Thi Nghe canal runs just a few blocks from the modern heart of the city. On one bank is a slum, where people live below the official poverty line of US$1 a day. Here drugs, crime and prostitution flourish. Some men, with families to feed, scrape a living as pedicab drivers.
But there is frenzied activity in its alleys. Women are busy cutting bamboo sticks for sale, minding small stalls of fruit, and gutting fish from plastic buckets on the ground. Men hurry along carrying scrap metal to sell, or to repair the flimsy shacks they live in. The canal stinks, with a sickly smell of human waste and rotting vegetation. Inside the huts old men and women sit or lie still on narrow bunks. The canal water often breaks its banks and floods this area, especially during the summer rainy season, leaving a layer of mud that breeds disease.
Record land prices
Clearing Saigon's slums is a huge project, and the city is setting an example for the country as a whole. The World Bank has praised Vietnam for its success in reducing poverty, and as Vietnam opens up, more international aid is arriving to help. The government has re-housed over 35,000 people in the past 10 years.
But Luong Van Ly, of Saigon's Planning and Investment Department, says 50,000 households have still to be re-housed, most in new high-rise tenements in the suburbs. It will take many years. The biggest problem, Mr Ly says, is finding the money to compensate the slum-swellers for the land. Saigon's economic boom has raised land prices to record highs.
The government is naturally sensitive about the slums. Officials did not allow the BBC to interview slum-dwellers or their helpers in the worst slum areas, like the one around the Thi Nghe canal. Instead, they prefer to show off areas where the slums have been cleared. One is the Nhieu Loc canal district, on the road used by visitors arriving in Saigon from Tan Son Nhat airport. US President Bill Clinton came here on a visit four years ago, to see the progress being made.
It is now part of an Urban Upgrade Project, which aims to bring clean water and sanitation to 1.5 million residents of Saigon who lack them. Today the canal banks are lined with trees. The houses on both banks are newly-built. But the water is still badly polluted.
Le Hung Vong, a journalist from the English-language newspaper Vietnam News, explained that the new housing was now linked to a modern sewage system. But wide areas of slum dwellings are not. In those parts, sewage is still dumped straight into the water, so it stills flows through parts of the city. "Before 1950", said Mr Vong, "people here on the Nhieu Loc canal say they used to bathe in the water. It was clean." And how long will it take before they will be able to swim in the water safely again ? "Maybe in 2020", Mr Vong says. "Then they will be able to enjoy the water. No more bad smell!"
By William Horsley - BBC News - October 24, 2004
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