Green joy of Chau Thang linden tree

(Baonghean) - Village chief Lo Van Dung, Xet 1 village, Chau Thang commune (Quy Chau) looked thoughtfully at the immense forest and said: "In the past, when we went hunting for rice balls, we brought more potatoes than rice, and had to endure slugs and leeches... The old forest is now greener and the new forest is greener, the people suffer less!...".

I have been back to Chau Thang several times. This time, during the hot weather, the villages have just finished harvesting, and every house is full of rice and straw. When I arrived at Xet 1 village, luckily, Village Chief Dung was home. I shook his hand firmly, congratulating him for being as healthy and agile as ever. The story of rice and livestock is still the same, he bragged a lot about the lush green forest, which is yielding harvests all four seasons. He said, without telling the story, the reporter would know that Chau Thang is now more stable and prosperous thanks to the forest. But to have the great joy of today, they have gone through many unhappy things! Since the people were assigned land and forests according to Decision 163 of the Prime Minister, everyone in the joy has been worried that the buffaloes and cows will be allowed to roam freely, and then bad people will come to exploit and steal, so who can we complain to? But we are determined to do it! The people gathered at the village chief's house, unanimously accepting the forest to be protected and protected, especially not letting the buffaloes and cows roam freely. More than ten years have passed since that day, the green forest has brought many benefits...

People of Xet 1 village, Chau Thang commune split bamboo before importing to traders.

"Having fun talking about today, I cannot forget the old days, reporter!" - Mr. Dung said and recounted: Before 1995, the lives of the villagers had to depend on trips to find and sell for money to buy rice. People had to go to the remote forests of Dien Lam and Chau Phong communes, and go to the deep areas of Chau Nga to cut and sell. Each "hunting" trip took two to three days, sometimes a whole week to return. Not to mention the suffering of being bitten by slugs and leeches, many times while cutting and searching, they could not remove the slugs and leeches clinging to their necks and legs, and there were also thorns scratching them, and snakes, centipedes...

In a day, to cut down a few bundles of bamboo, one had to walk dozens of kilometers. It was not easy to find a place with bamboo to cut down, and where there were, they were all small trees, no one would buy them, so one had to look for old bamboo trees. After cutting down the bamboo, one would carry the heavy load, bruised on both shoulders, to the main road 48 to sell (at that time, there were people who bought them on the side of the road). A trip to hunt for houses could earn at most over a hundred thousand dong, at least a few tens of thousands, which was also lucky, because at that time, every household went hunting together to cut down the whole forest. There was a house of Mr.Hanh in Bai village, every time he "hunted", he took his wife and children, even his breastfed baby, along because there was no one else at home. After the time Mr. Chien's nephew in Cang village was almost bitten to death by a snake, no one in the family with small children dared to let them sit alone anymore, they had to put them in baskets on the parents' backs...

Food was also very poor in those days. They called it two meals a day, but there was more sweet potato than rice, rice was mainly given to the children, parents ate cassava and wild vegetables. Each family was only given a rice cooker, they did not dare to eat the birds and squirrels they hunted, but sold them to buy rice. Children were given food brought before, such as meatballs made from frog meat, sometimes even when they were spoiled, they still had to feed their children. Despite the hardship, the villagers were united and loved each other very much, they would give each other a handful of wild vegetables. - "Didn't you grow rice at that time?". "Yes, we did a lot of work but the harvest did not give firm grains, the rice fields had many empty grains when the time came to harvest, people did not know how to use science and technology in production, they depended on nature. Hunting was still the salvation" - said village chief Dung - "People from other communes also came to our commune to search, but the search was exhausted, so the villagers had to go far away"...

During dinner, there was sour river fish and a bowl of fragrant sticky upland rice. Village Chief Dung happily said: "Now people have passed the hard life of the past. Now every family has their own linden forest, providing a steady income, on average every year, at least, a family earns around 80 million VND, and at most, hundreds of millions VND. Not to mention that every year, the villagers grow two rice crops and one color crop using new techniques, enough rice to eat all year round." Having said that, Village Chief Dung suggested that the reporter go to the forest tomorrow morning, go up there and see how the people in the commune are happily exploiting linden!Eagerly staying overnight in the village. Early in the morning, Village Chief Dung prepared a pot of corn silk water and put it in a basket. He said: "After a while of hunting, my throat is parched. But now, "hunting" only takes half a day to return, about three or four hours and I have a tire cart full of bamboo shoots.

Unlike before, we had to go looking for patches of forest and bushes to cut down. The forest of the village chief Dung's family is about 2 kilometers from his house. The old bamboo clumps have not been exploited yet, but young bamboo shoots have sprouted one after another. Village chief Dung boasted: "The bamboo forest can be exploited all year round, it was hard to believe that since the land and forest were allocated to the people, it has been so effective". In the next lot, Mr. Luong Van Thanh was cutting bamboo, excitedly saying: "Two trucks have been brought in since morning, village chief. We have been busy harvesting the crops for the past few days and have not been able to harvest the bamboo, traders are coming to collect it in the commune center".

Following the atmosphere of the locals' exploitation, we went to Xet 2 village. At Ms. Luong Thi Que's house, the villagers were sitting and bundling up their mulberry trees to catch the afternoon bus. The villagers said that in the summer, they usually "hunt" at night to keep cool, go on moonlit nights, and return home late at night. During the day, when they are not hunting, they stay home to saw mulberry trees and tie them into bundles. Just leisurely like that, whenever their backs feel tired, they can rest in the sun. Especially with an abundant source of mulberry trees, they no longer fear poverty. Every family is well-off, and the added joy is that they can take care of their children so they don't have to go to school hungry.

When the sun was already high in the sky, on the forests, in the corners of the village in Chau Thang, people were still busy exploiting and sawing bamboo bundles. Village chief Dung had just seen us off at the beginning of the village, then hurried back into the forest, his quick, busy gait as if rushing into the forest showed that he was very happy.

Thu Huong