WATCH OUT FOR THE....!!!

OSHA would have a field day in Viet Nam. Construction workers in flip flops, loose electric wires dangling from every pole, open sewers, and the most rudimentary of construction equipment you'd find almost anywhere outside of rural Cambodia. A few months back, I was having tea with a co-worker on the outside patio of a cafe near our school, while some men worked on a construction project on the second floor. We watched as they hauled up plastic buckets filled with dirt from the sidewalk with a rope, mere feet from the cafe's other patrons. Without warning, one of the buckets came crashing down and smashed open on the floor with such force that it would have done serious bodily harm to anyone who happened to be in its path. Luckily for the men working, and any potential victims, no one was hurt and they simply continued their work with a new bucket.

Having forgot about that incident, I found myself sitting on the sidewalk outside of Steven's school this morning after I had dropped him off, watching a construction crew on a house being rebuilt across the street. I watched as a woman in flip flops (and socks) loaded bags of dried cement onto a hook. The hook was attached to a cable that ran the eight stories to the roof of the building where it looped around a metal bar and ran back down to a manual winch operated by a man on the sidewalk. I marveled again at the simplicity with which the Vietnamese conduct their construction projects. Just before I started off for home, there was a crash and the air filled with thick white dust. Startled, I watched as a woman who had been walking down the street quickly hurried through the cloud brushing the white powder out of her hair and covering her face with the other hand. As the dust cleared, it was apparent that the bag hadn't taken anyone with it when it came crashing down and soon the woman was back at it, loading the next bag in line.

Rationalizing that it would be quite a coincidence for me to have been witness to the only two times anything had come crashing down off of a construction site, I made a mental note not to loiter anywhere anything was being hauled any distance from the ground.