Reaching out to loved ones

Ellen McCarty

FOUNTAIN VALLEY -- At the Minh Dang Quang Temple, tucked inside a

residential home on Westminster Avenue, Fountain Valley residents An

Nguyen and her 29-year-old daughter Baobinh Huyen cooked Rau Cai, a

vegetable soup, for Vietnamese monks and a nun.

It was a familiar ritual, but Monday’s mood was sadder than usual.

Weighing heavily on their minds was the flood that struck Central Vietnam

in early November. About 1.5 million homes were wiped out, more than 600

people were killed and a million people were left stranded without food,

drinking water or shelter.

The Vietnamese community here and abroad is panicking, Nguyen said.

“The churches and temples are trying to help as much as they can, but

they don’t have the resources we have here in the United States,” said

Dieu Linh, a Buddhist nun, speaking in Vietnamese as Huyen translated.

This week, letters and faxes arrived from Vietnam, begging for help from

the United States, said Thich Giac Nhien, the temple’s head monk.

“A dollar here means nothing, but it can save lives in Central Vietnam,”

Nhien said.

Fortunately, collecting donations hasn’t been difficult.

The temple’s driveway and garage overflowed with donations Monday. About

30,000 tons donated by residents were ready to be delivered to Vietnam.

Since Nov. 5, monks and volunteers have struggled to send donations to

Vietnam as quickly as they arrive.

So far, the Vietnamese community has delivered more than 100,000 tons of

canned food, clothes and medicine, and more than $500,000 in relief money

to the flood victims, many of whom are relatives of Vietnamese refugees

in Orange County, Nguyen said.

Huyen, returned from her visit to Vietnam just a month before the flood

hit. Fingering pictures of her aunt’s home and her smiling cousins in

Hue, a former royal capital in Central Vietnam, Huyen said that it’s hard

to imagine the destruction.

“I was shocked,” she said. “We have floods in Vietnam every year, but

never this bad. They never reach the city.”

Communicating by phone, Huyen’s relatives said they were forced to climb

into their attic for two days and two nights without food or drinking

water as five feet of heavily polluted water rushed through their home.

“My uncle wanted to save his little refrigerator, so he lifted it into

the attic, but others were not so lucky,” she said. “There is one story

of a family of nine in the countryside who died trying to save the

bicycle they use to carry crops to the city market.”

Wooden huts in the countryside are much flimsier than city housing, Huyen

said, and they were easily swept away in the currents.

For those who survived the flood, many now are starving to death or

suffering from diseases carried by animal carcasses in the water, she

said.

“They have nothing,” she said. “Everything was washed away with the

water.”

Once-vibrant communities now contain only remnants of destroyed houses,

she said.

To make matters worse, the countryside villages may have brought this

catastrophe upon themselves, Huyen said. She predicts many more such

floods in the future.

Because the countryside of Vietnam is so poor, farmers have cut the

forests along the rivers to make money to feed their families, she said.

Without the trees to serve as a buffer zone, the water easily spreads

over the farmland, destroying not just crops, but whole communities.

Although the rainy season is not yet over and there may be additional

flooding, Huyen said she is lucky to be able to talk to her relatives by

phone.

Many in Orange County still do not know if their families in Vietnam are

alive. With no way to communicate, they read the Nguoi Viet newspaper

every day in search of familiar faces and names, Huyen said.

Across the county, Vietnamese stores that are usually bustling remain

closed as the community concentrates its energy to save relatives who may

perish if relief arrives too late.