The desire for a peaceful life of the fishing village on the Lam River

Life is hard

In the boat about 10m wide²is the home of 8 members of Mr. Pham Ngoc Hiep's family (38 years old). This is one of the fishing households on Lam River, passing through Xuan Lam Commune, Hung Nguyen District. Although life is very difficult, having to live together in a cramped space, Mr. Hiep and his wife now have 6 children.

The small boat was already old, so to have enough living space for the whole family, Mr. Hiep had to go ashore to pick up wooden planks and patch them together. “During the rainy season, it was very dangerous. At that time, my wife and I had to take our children ashore and ask the locals for shelter,” Mr. Hiep said.

This fishing village has 13 households, anchoring their boats along the Lam River right at the foot of Yen Xuan iron bridge. Like many other households here, Mr. Hiep cannot remember how many generations his family has lived on the river. He only remembers being born on a boat, then growing up, marrying a woman from the river, continuing the life of fishing. Mr. Hiep's little daughter is only a few months old, and his first child is in 11th grade this year. Although life is difficult, Mr. Hiep and his wife are proud to be able to provide for their children's education. Because in this fishing village, for generations, no one has been able to send their children to a high school like his daughter.

“I don’t know if I can survive this time. I’ll just take it one day at a time. I’m trying to send my children to school in the hope of escaping the same fate as my parents. Poverty from generation to generation. Now I just hope to be given land on the shore and settle down,” Hiep added. Next to Hiep’s boat is the boat of Nguyen Van Viet’s family (43 years old). Unlike many fishing households, Viet’s family is “better off” as they have a house built right on the riverbank, where they can stay when they’re not fishing. It’s called a house, but it’s actually just three roughly built walls, covered with a shabby corrugated iron roof. The front is left bare.

Mr. Viet said that a few years ago, a storm damaged his family's boat. With no place to stay, Mr. Viet had to ask the commune government to build this house on the land managed by the commune. Mr. Viet reinforced the old boat and brought it to shore and set it up next to the house. So that every time the water rose and the house was flooded, the whole family could climb onto the boat to take shelter. "Last year, the water rose up to the roof of the house, and thanks to this boat, we didn't have to run into the village to take refuge," Mr. Viet said. According to Mr. Viet, fishing is becoming more and more difficult because there are fewer and fewer fish and shrimp in the river. Many times, the couple worked hard all day long to cast their nets but couldn't catch any fish, so they had to borrow money from neighbors. Most fishing households have no savings and live day by day. “Because of poverty, few children here have the opportunity to study properly. The parents’ generation is illiterate, and most of the children today only finish primary school, only learning to read and write before having to drop out. It is rare for a family like Mr. Hiep to send their children to grade 11,” Mr. Viet added.

Dream of settling down

In the fishing village, besides Mr. Viet, there is another household that is allowed to build a house on the riverbank to take shelter. That is the household of Mr. Nguyen Van Quang (65 years old). Mr. Quang's house is actually just old corrugated iron sheets that he collected from everywhere and brought back to patch up. The house is only more than 10m wide.², about 2m high but must contain up to 7 family members. During the flood season, Mr. Quang's house is submerged under the Lam River.

Mr. Quang said that a few years ago, his wife had a leg injury and could not walk, so living on the boat was very inconvenient and dangerous. Therefore, the family asked the government for permission to build this temporary shack. Mr. Quang and his wife only had one daughter, who grew up and married a man from the river, and then lived right on his boat. Not only was it difficult when aquatic resources were increasingly scarce, life on the boat was also full of dangers. Many children had unfortunately met with accidents.

“Just last year during the flood season, the whole family was eating when my youngest son, who was only 4 years old, fell into the river. I had to dive down 3 times to pull him out, he was already purple. Luckily, I was able to save him,” said Nguyen Van Viet. The residents here said that their dream for many generations was to be granted a piece of land to settle down on the shore. That dream became more urgent as in recent years, the fishing industry has encountered difficulties.

“It is almost isolated here, with only fishing households interacting with each other. When children grow up, most of them marry fishermen. That is why they suffer from generation to generation. The most painful thing is when there are weddings and funerals, when there are only a few fishing households,” Viet said sadly. For many generations, the fishing village has only known how to fish. But in recent years, life has been difficult, causing many households to want to change jobs. Unfortunately, no one has the capital to do business.

“The young people in the village also want to go abroad to work, but they don’t have the capital to do so. Because they don’t have any valuable assets or land to mortgage, they can’t borrow from the bank. They also don’t have any connections outside, because only fishermen hang out with each other. They don’t know who to borrow from,” Viet added.

While the fishermen are dreaming of having a piece of land to "set up", also in Xuan Lam commune, a few hundred meters away, there is a resettlement area that has been completed but is "unoccupied", people refuse to live there, causing waste. That is the resettlement area for people in the Lam River landslide area in hamlet 9. In 2011, the Provincial People's Committee approved the investment project to expand the scale of the project to build infrastructure for the resettlement area for households in the natural disaster and landslide areas in Hung Lam commune (now Xuan Lam commune, Hung Nguyen district). The project has 100 residential plots (each plot is 315m2)²) located inside the Lam River dike to arrange new accommodation for 100 households in flood-prone and landslide-prone areas outside the dike; most of which are for residents of hamlet 9, with an investment cost of more than 24.2 billion VND from the central budget and the district and commune budgets for emergency evacuation from disaster areas.

The project is invested by Nghe An Rural Development Department, with a 24-month implementation schedule. After the project was launched, the Commune People's Committee notified people in 4 hamlets outside the dike. After that, 100 households registered to go to the resettlement area in the hope of escaping the flood. Although it was an emergency project, people kept waiting year after year. It was not until the end of 2021 that the resettlement project was completed and handed over to the locality. However, since then, the resettlement area has remained abandoned, with no households living there. In some areas, people have even taken advantage of the land to grow vegetables. According to households who registered to receive land, due to having to wait too long, most of them have spent money to raise their houses to cope with the floods. Therefore, up to now, not many people have the need to go to the resettlement area. The investor's representative, Mr. Le Van Luong - Head of Nghe An Rural Development Department, said that due to the limited capital allocation, this resettlement project had to be prolonged. "We have asked the locality to hold a meeting with the people to survey their wishes. If the people no longer have the need, the competent authority will have a solution. It could be auctioning the resettlement area," Mr. Luong said.

Mr. Nguyen Van Phan - Chairman of Xuan Lam Commune People's Committee said that the fishing village has 13 households with about 100 people living in very difficult conditions, longing to be given land to live on shore. "The government also really wants to move them ashore to make it easier every time there is a flood. If they can be arranged in a resettlement area for the abandoned landslide area, that would be great. But the commune cannot decide on that issue, it must ask for the province's policy," Mr. Phan said, adding that although it is an urgent project, it was not until 2020 that the investor started to fill the land and level the ground. Because this resettlement area took too long to build, people could not wait, so most of the people who registered to relocate rebuilt their houses and raised the ground to adapt to the flood. Currently, there are only about 10 households in need of this resettlement area with up to 100 plots of land./.