In Vietnam, there are communities of minority ethnic groups where women are only seen as birth givers. Often times, women in these groups are raised to be sold to other people or given birth to their first child by 14 and continue giving birth to many children until they die from complications of child birth, because the medical knowledge of the doctors in these communities are so limited.
Today, our schedule was different, because instead of starting off our day with a presentation and language class and ending it with a tour of a company in Vietnam, our day was flipped around. We left the hotel around 9:30 and watched a presentation given by the company VinaCapital, which is a non-profit organization that works with various groups to work towards empowering minority women in rural communities. The presenter, Mr. Rad Kivette, explained the different methods they use to try to empower these women.
Their first attempt was through a western approach, which didn’t work as they thought. They tried offering scholarships to the top students in minority communities, but this only caused those students to leave their communities and bring their families with them, which is not want they wanted to happen. VinaCapital continued funding these scholarships, but instead used a different approach, because viewing women as invaluable except for child-birth is embedded in the culture. Changing the culture of a society isn’t going to happen overnight, but instead takes lots of work. They started programs in schools across Vietnam, empowering the girls and teaching them about sexual reproduction and their rights as citizens of Vietnam. The presenter said that they wanted the girls to know what is part of the law and when someone is committing a crime-assaulting them-then they can let these people know that its against the law. Honestly, I don’t think that aspect of the teaching will work, because as much as I agree that they should know the law, I don’t think that’s going to stop someone from assaulting them if they just say, “did you know that this is against the law.” I think if someone is doing this, they’re doing it because they want to and there’s a lack of police presence in these communities, so they can’t talk to the police about this. However, if the amount of police presence is increased, it could lead to other problems, such as increasing violence, because the police could have a bias against these groups.
The other approach they’re using is funding specialized medical equipment for the hospitals in these communities, so that the young women who do give birth can have the care that they need to. Women in these communities tend to die in childbirth and the children they give birth to also tend to die, due to the lack of medical care. This aspect I really like, because it not only benefits the young mothers but also all mothers in general, so that they can have better care.
This organization has an amazing mission, and I feel like this could be a great benefit to the U.S. This is a U.S.-based organization and I fell like in the presentation there was an idea that the U.S. is an amazing country where this doesn’t happen, but unfortunately it does. In the indigenous communities, there’s a lack of access to good medical care and a genocide of the people in general. Across the U.S., there’s a disparity between the type of care a minority woman gets compared to a white woman. Maybe this type of education can be applied to U.S. healthcare workers and the clubs can be created so that young women in indigenous communities can feel like their voices matter too.