A snapshot of the Mekong Delta
Posted: Friday, September 28, 2007 11:18 AM
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
CAN THO PROVINCE, Vietnam –
One of the great gentlemanly travel writers of a bygone era, Norman Lewis, once observed that "the lives of the people of the Far East are lived in public.... The street is the extension of the house and there is no sharp dividing line between the two."
Here in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the street is the river.
And the people's lives are played out on the muddy waters of the world's ninth longest river system.
One afternoon, off the River Can Tho, everywhere we looked there was human activity.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| One of many lime traders plies her trade at the floating market on the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.
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An elderly man with a caved-in chest was washing his neck. A woman swung in a hammock hooked up inside a boat cabin. Teenage girls, fresh from a meal at a nearby hawker stall, rinsed their feet and hands in the water. A young man squatting on a makeshift dock was sorting eggs. Thin long boats cruised the canals, more than a few of them sporting a potted green shrub and the day's washing. On some, dogs or cats lounged in the shade – one even sported a rooster pecking around the deck.
Further along the river, the pace stepped up. A lone fisherman gathered his net from the water, the skeleton of a new bridge (one of two in the immediate area) looming over him. We chanced upon a crane unloading loose rock and gravel from a barge onto a construction site by the riverbank. Not far, on another barge, four men sifted slowly through a pile of wood logs a dozen feet tall.
Read the rest of Adrienne Mong’s blog about life along the Mekong Delta in the Daily Nightly blog. Her story about the water issues along the Mekong Delta is part of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams special series "Thirsty Planet" that has been airing all week. Mark Mullen’s special report from the Mekong Delta will air on Friday evening.
