Vietnam, Its Tragedies — and Ours March 2016

Ho Chi Minh - his image is omnipresent
Ho Chi Minh – his image is omnipresent

We’re leaving Vietnam and I’m still astonished that we were here!  I keep remembering the history and the battles and pain and rage and guilt of those years.  We had a long discussion with our guide on our Mekong River cruise.  His father fought for the South Vietnamese, his uncle for the North.  His dad spent 8 years in a prison camp after Saigon fell; to this day he doesn’t speak to his Viet Cong brother.  So  much pain.  So much might have been.  So powerful to pass signs that say Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon, Tan Son Nhut Airport, Mekong River, China Beach.

People here are definitely not as poor as those in Cambodia – not nearly, although the South is definitely better off than the North, and  there’s a sense of forward motion that isn’t as present in Cambodia.

In both countries, it’s been important to think beyond the history so traumatic to them – and to us – and see them for what they are moving toward today.  Just look:

Japanese covered bridge
Japanese Covered Bridge Hoi An, Vietnam
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Cruising on the Mekong River
flower maket row
Mekong River Floating Market
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Hoi An Buddhist Temple

Lots more to come; Internet troubles right now…

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

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