Word: thies
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Long before a government report confirmed it, villagers living along the banks of the Thi Vai river in the Mekong Delta knew full well that the waterway was dead. They had complained for years that industrial waste discharged into the Thi Vai had poisoned their wells, killed all the fish and was making them sick. Yet it wasn't until cargo companies refused to dock at the river's main port - saying that the toxic brew was eating through the ships' hulls - that Vietnam officials were willing to get tough on polluters...
...predictable result: pollution of the country's lands and waters on a shocking scale. According to Vietnam's state media, thousands of large - and small-scale industries - discharge at least 33,000 cubic meters of waste into the Mekong River system every day. Midwife Le Thi Thanh Thuy, who lives a kilometer from the Vedan plant, tells pregnant women living along the Thi Vai River not to drink the water. Even some well water burns people's skin and isn't used to wash clothes. "They are so poor, they don't have enough money to buy rice," says Thuy...
...What angers villagers is that the pollution is there for anyone to see. Le Thi Nung doesn't need a scientist in a lab coat to tell her that the river is full of poison. Her village in Dong Nai's district of Long Thanh once depended upon fishing and small farms. "After Vedan opened, the pollution killed all the fish so I had nothing to feed my seven children," she complains, adding that the factory brought few of the promised benefits, only cancers and stomach ailments. With no other options, Nung's 19-year-old daughter married a Taiwanese...
...Environmental degradation is beginning to threaten some of the economic gains Vietnam has made. Once lucrative shrimp farms are dying, and the country's efforts to market itself as a tourist destination are undermined by images of poisoned rivers. And while it is doubtful that the Thi Vai river's chemical stew could actually eat through a steel hull, the threat that ships would not stop at the Go Dau port, delivered a clear message about the potential economic impact of pollution...
...Australian sportswear manufacturer brought $20,000 worth of clothes to Danang, but they got away from him too. The host country kept on smiling, then stole my eyeglasses. ''We smile because we are happy to see you,'' a waif of a foreign affairs officer, named Le Thi Thu Hanh, said. She flashed a wonderful advertisement for dental hygiene. Indeed, said a Taiwan businessman, ''the Vietnamese would declare another war tomorrow and immediately declare themselves the losers if they could just get the Americans back.'' Venture capitalists were all over the place, maneuvering for the lifting of the embargo. A fellow...