My Tho

Right now I am living in My Tho, which is located in the Mekong Delta. This is the rainy, hot season. Every morning we get up to get the ferry to Dragon Island where we are building a home for a family.

We walk through the town, where everyone sits outside their shops, the men smoking, the women holding babies. You can count dozens of children in My Tho before you leave your street. Most of the businesses are pharmacies or shops selling mobile phones, cheap clothes and food. You can't really tell the difference between a restaurant and a house because everyone just hangs out there in a really informal way, sitting on the plastic stools that are ubiquitous in Vietnam.

To get to the ferry you walk through a narrow alley that we have dubbed "fish lane" because it smells horrific. There is Vietnamese writing on the wall, but I notice today that someone has translated a sentence - "when you enslave the people you treat them like an animal". The kids run after us screaming "hello, hello hello!"