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Every time I go there the country is richer. The fellow in whose house I stay while there was a sharecropper 14 years ago with a 200 sq ft+- house. Now his (same) house is about 1800 sq ft and the family is no longer spending every minute hustling pennies. His two older daughters have college degrees with my sponsorship and he is assisting his two young sons who are also working, to go to college. In 2003 in that town there were mostly very poor people and severe malnutrition on the periphery and there was a small number of relatively prosperous families, mostly shrimp farmers. Now there is a solid middle class in the town. In the same time period the young adults were very short and thin back then and now I, at 5"10' and not so slim don't stand out much. In 2003 I towered over everyone.

When I first went back I determined that I would eat anything given me to eat at least once. Some of it is pretty exotic. The rats are very large, bigger than some of the rabbits southern boys here take and cook up all the time and they are the same on the plate.

The country went thorough the 'starving years" after the 75 taking of Sai Gon but the Communists finally realized that if they persisted with classic communism- collectivization and dismantling of religion and all that- the communists were going to starve, too. China was not going to help and , in fact, invaded in a border war. The Viet Communists being Vietnamese were/are practical people and they saw that the country was sliding down the tube and they knew that if the country did not grow rich and strong it would become a province of China. They backed off and allowed first the Buddhists to have their pagodas back then finally gave the Catholics back their rights and promoted market capitalism and the country has been prospering since.