Living In A Construction Village

One of the selling points of our new house was its isolation, all the way at the end of a cul-de-sac with no neighbours apart from empty blocks of land.

In crowded Ho Chi Minh City, finding somewhere quiet can be a very difficult task. So once we assured ourselves the area was safe (as safe as you can get in a big city), we moved in.

It was so peaceful. Apart from the distant chugging of old boats up and down the Saigon River and the occaisonal crash when something big was dropped at the port.

The river itself could only be seen out the side window of the third floor. The huge wall that separates us from a fancy gated community blocks most of our river views. The house was built facing in the wrong direction, anyway.

It seemed a nice place to bring a newborn home to.

But the owners of some of the blocks of vacant land had other ideas.

A few days before Sonny and I were due to return to Saigon, work started on a house across the road from us.

A week or so after that, work started on a house next door to the first under-construction mess. And the following week work started on two more houses in access streets.

People who’ve never lived in Vietnam might think “oh, that’s a bit annoying”.

It is, at times, something far more than annoying. It’s not just the heavy equipment, the sound of cutting metal and the construction materials all blocking the street. It’s the presence of all the construction workers.

Behind our house is a row of home-made shacks. There’s another couple of shacks across the road from our house. There’s the bones of another structure on a block of land across from us.

Part of the village, as seen from our first floor living room

We are suddenly in the middle of a village. And in Vietnam, villages are quite noisy, with young men shouting, showering and generally being exuberant … in the street, right outside our formerly silent front door.

Their exuberance is just one of the reasons I suspect we had a few weeks of random heavy machinery noise at 3.30am. I think they were joyriding in the equipment left in our street during the early stages of construction.

Their home-made shacks don’t have walls and so the full volume of their very loud conversations and their very loud television shows is blasted into our living room. Their shacks don’t have bathrooms so everyone soaps up and washes down in the street. Don’t ask me what they do for toilets. I don’t want to know.

Our street is often blocked by huge cement trucks, piles of dirt, towers of bricks and workers bending steel cables or straightening giant coils of wire. They do their best to clear a way through their equipment every time we need to get in and out of our house. They really are sweet … but they’re still there.

Trapped again! Unable to get out of our street.

A project like this has a bevy of interested parties, as you would expect. They like to park their bikes in the shady area in front of our house, which is fair enough. But try telling that to our dogs.

This new village has created so much work for our dogs. There’s so many things that need to be barked at, day at night. And there’s lots of interesting smells that need to be investigated every time we open our front gate. Oh, and the food scraps that our new neighbours leave out for them, they need to be scoffed. You can imagine how much time I spend trying to get the dogs back in.

Thankfully, Sonny isn’t much bothered by all the noise. The only thing that bothers him is when I sneeze, which I seem to be doing a lot of with all this construction dust in the air.

But I don’t want you to think I’m a bitter old complainy type. It’s also quite interesting to be in the middle of a construction village and to see how houses are built. I see the women, who work as hard as the men during the day, do all the cooking and cleaning. I see young men, who in Australia would probably feel quite disenfranchised at having to live off the minimum wage, just getting on and doing their work diligently and living their lives with joy. I see my new neighbours being kind to our dogs and our kids and me. One guy likes to practice his suprisingly good English with me and Miss M every time we drive past.

Our new neighbours even respect Darling Man’s “farm”, planted on the vacant block next to our house. None of their shacks or their construction work encroaches on the enormous garden planted there, even though it’s obviously not our land. At one point in the construction process, the workers were even watering the garden for DM, rather than let their waste water go down the drain.

We are quite lucky to be in the middle of this village, really. I hope whoever moves into the completed houses is as nice. Although I also hope they are a bit quieter than this current lot.

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By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.