Global Village

Traveling each country has proven to be a living lesson in its culture, history and current events. We leave one village, walk through a few doors, and in a matter of hours are walking through another village thousands of miles away. The world as a global village is no longer a distant concept. Everywhere we travel I repeatedly find that behind the different cultures and customs we are all just regular people living our daily lives.

War, famine, and genocide have never touched the soil I grew up on; not so for many other countries in our global village. Visiting VN was a wake up call to the fact that anyone we met over 30 years old has experienced first hand the brutal affects of war. We visited war museums, the land mine museum and crawled through the Vietcong tunnel network near Saigon, but it was the people and personal family stories that made it all so real and touched us most. It was a living reminder that war is rarely the solution.

Thirty years later the lush countryside and bustling cities show little of the drastic aftermath of the American war in Vietnam; but Agent Orange still deforms babies and leaches into the crops, limbs and lives are still being lost to land mines hidden in rice paddies and groups of displaced confused expat US Vietnam Vets sit drinking themselves numb at 10 am in the cafes around Saigon. The poignant words of the song War just kept replaying in my mind, over and over. “War! What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!”