A young city
I spoke to Nicole Fall, a fine arts professor from the U.S whose father once fought in Vietnam. She travelled to Ho Chi Minh City to retrieve memories of her deceased father. “What is the most impressive thing about Ho Chi Minh City?”. Nicole replied immediately: “Young! It's a young city with many young people”. Though it was just her personal opinion, I find her comment to be exactly like what we Vietnamese think whenever we have a chance to come here.
In Ho Chi Minh City, it is easy to meet dynamic young people who stay up late and get up early. It’s 11pm but we can still see some groups of young people sitting in the garden and singing in front of the historic Independence Palace. Along Nguyen Trai street, the ‘sleepless street’ as many people call it, restaurants with late night dining and food options are still crowded after midnight. People here also love sports; they practice and play sports whenever they have free time, in parks, by lakes and other public places.
Ho Chi Minh City is also home to many widespread youth volunteer activities, most notably the Green Summer Campaign. The campaign is comprised of numerous activities, including raising awareness of environmental protection, offering free health check-ups and medicine to the needy, upgrading bridges and rural roads, providing basic knowledge of computer science, consulting on agriculture, and transferring science and technology to agricultural production. Not only in Vietnamese cities and provinces, the campaign has received a warm response in Laos and Cambodia and become a major activity of the Communist Youth Union.
Magnificent Saigon, known as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, was once a consuming city, dependant on foreign aid — but Ho Chi Minh city nowadays is the locomotive of the national economic ‘train’. Over the past years, the City has fought to overcome economic woes and made significant contributions to curbing inflation, stabilising the macro-economy and ensuring social security. It maintained a steady growth rate of 9.58% in 2014. The city’s economic sectors have witnessed strong recovery. All of 24 districts and 322 wards of the city have applied the ‘one-stop-shop’ policy with the aim to simplify administrative procedures. In addition, 94.5% of the city’s population have access to clean water.
Pioneering efforts in developing urban agriculture
During the meeting with Vo Van Thuong, Deputy Secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Party Committee, it was quite surprising for us discover that Ho Chi Minh City has the largest concentration of cows in Vietnam, responsible for 60% of the milk on the domestic market. It also tops the country in terms of aquatic exports with tens of millions of US dollars in turnover every year. Thuong suggested we visit Cu Chi, home to many orchid gardens, fish farms and interesting people.
Located about 40 kilometres outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Cu Chi is well-known for its historic tunnels. During the fierce times of war, local people and soldiers miraculously lived and fought for national liberation from within the intricate network of underground tunnels. Cu Chi today has witnessed great change.
The first stop is an orchid garden in Ba Song village, An Nhon Tay commune. The owners of the garden are a couple named Thanh and Huyen — they are very young. Thanks to modern technology, their 5-hectare garden became the largest in Cu Chi, earning billions of VND each year.
The next stop is a green farm in Xom Moi village. The owner is a young Hanoi-based woman named Huong. After graduating from the Water Resources University in Hanoi, she moved here and, together with her sisters, invested in this 6-hectare farm with 70 milk cows. She wanted to “live a healthy life the natural way and teach [her] own children”. Every weekend, many students from the city come here and experience the life of a farmer.
In recent years, Cu Chi has seen a new generation of farmers. They are young, energetic, and dare to think big. It is also the result of the city’s restructuring programme seeking to develope urban agriculture. In late 2014, eight communes in Cu Chi met all 19 criteria of the national target programme for building new-style rural areas. By the end of 2015, all 20 communes of Cu Chi are expected to meet all criteria.
Along with socio-economic development, Ho Chi Minh City is implementing the communication programme on teaching patriotism and pride for the victory of the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, as well as the city’s 40 years of construction and development. At the beginning of the Lunar New Year, Ho Chi Minh City is rushing to complete its key projects in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Liberation of the South and National Unification Day (April 30, 1975-2015).
