A Trip to Ba Vi

The weeks since my last blog post have been filled with interviews – Linh, Tung, and I have conducted 30 so far (we’re halfway there!), and things show no sign of slowing down. The parents we’re meeting with come from all income levels, and each family has been very kind to us. We’re always offered tea, usually some type of food, and oftentimes are introduced to many members of the family (from the grandparents down to the newborn baby) before we start. We are also finding out some very important information regarding parents’ perceptions of HIV transmission. So far, nearly every parent we’ve met with has been certain that if a child has HIV, other children can contract the disease easily through cuts on the skin. What they do not know is that the chance of this happening is so small that it has never happened before. For many of them, this fear is what causes them to object to integration of children with HIV into public schools.

The first place we conducted our interviews was in Ba Vi, the rural district that we’re using for my project. We spent three days shortly after the Tet holiday traveling around Ba Vi, conducting interviews with people who live in the town (ten in total) and experiencing what life is like there. It was an incredibly powerful experience. Ba Vi is located about 60 kilometers away from urban Hanoi’s city center. The differences between life in downtown Hanoi and that in Ba Vi could not be starker. There are few cars, no form of public transportation, animals everywhere, only a few hotels – it was unlike anywhere I’d been before. The people were generous and welcoming. As we were looking for households, the addresses we were going on contained no house numbers, and oftentimes consisted of only one word (which conveyed a village or sometimes a street). Anytime my translators and I got lost while we were searching for these houses (which happened at least ten times per day), groups of people would crowd around to help us find our way.

We also learned early on that our interviews were going to run much differently than expected. Prior to our trip to Ba Vi, I had envisioned interview settings consisting of a small room, a table, and a few chairs for my translators, myself, and the interview participant. When we arrived at the first house in Ba Vi, however, we saw that the house consisted of one large room, with a table, bed, cupboard, and TV. This was the format of nearly all the houses we traveled to during our trip. That made privacy much harder to come by, and it was all we could do to make sure that no one else was answering the questions aside from our participant. We also found that many of our interviewees in Ba Vi had never seen multiple choice questions before; some also could not read the questions. Despite these minor complications, the interviews went very well and we learned a lot those first few days. Many of the people in Ba Vi know little about HIV/AIDS, and one participant told us it was a “rich person’s disease.” Others told us that it can spread from hugging, touching, kissing, etc. We saw that there is much work to be done to help educate them and ensure that the HIV-positive people living there will be able to live in harmony with the rest of society.

In terms of accommodations during our stay, our hotel (which was fantastic) was a steal – for two nights, plus three days’ worth of lunch and dinner, we paid only 1.3 million VND (around $65 USD). Our meals were delicious, and consisted of rice, fried tofu, sautéed beef, sticky rice, fried banh chung, fruit, and of course some pho. We lost power the last night and our hotel was filled with candles, which added to the ambiance of being in the countryside. Below are some pictures of the scenery.

^The last photo is a picture of our hotel.

After we returned to downtown Hanoi, we began conducting interviews with the parents in Ba Dinh. Here, many participants speak English and nearly all of them are familiar with multiple-choice format. The interviews in Ba Dinh have been lasting nearly twice as long as those in Ba Vi, and many of these parents can list the ways HIV is transmitted and/or have friends or relatives who are infected or affected by the disease. Yet even in this urban Mecca, the fear of transmission through saliva or cuts on the skin remains high. A medical doctor we met with a few days ago told us that for him this possibility is a serious concern, and a nurse at a kindergarten told us the same thing last week. I hope that through the work of Save the Children and other NGOs tackling this issue, in time, their fears will subside.