Mennonite Central Committee

First Person: Vu Xuan Hien

From the July/August 2007 issue of "a Common Place"

In 1992, my parents were ill, so I had to quit school. I was about 15 years old, and I’d finished the ninth grade. Since then, I’ve worked in a lot of different places. Usually, I came home to help my wife harvest our rice crop and then went back to work in the city.

I went to Hanoi in 1998 and worked for two years as a construction worker. We started work at 6:30 a.m. and finished at 6 p.m. I had to work hard and was paid only 8,000 Vietnamese dong (less than $1 U.S.) per day. If it rained, I didn’t get paid.

I got interested in raising pigs while I was in Hanoi. I decided to move home. I was fed up with moving and working as a day laborer and taking orders from other people.

I didn’t have much education, so I thought it was better to do farming. I was born in a farming family, so I saw family members raising pigs and I know the technique. The market for pork meat is good.

My parents used to raise two pigs at the most. I decided to raise 20 pigs in a shed adjoining my house, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with the manure. It attracted a lot of flies and smelled terrible. Even people passing by my house would complain about how bad it smelled.

I let the manure run into the irrigation canal, and people complained because it polluted the water. It also polluted the soil. It killed the trees, grass and bamboo that grew near the canal.

I learned to build a biogas system that turns manure into natural gas from another farmer. A local savings and credit organization (which MCC helped fund and organize) gave me a loan of 1 million Vietnamese dong (about $63 U.S.) to help me build the system.

The system is very useful. The manure flows from the pigpens into an underground tank. There, it decomposes and forms natural gas. We pipe the gas into our house to fuel a three-burner stove and a lamp. We share our extra gas with my brother’s family, who lives next to us, and another neighboring household.

After the manure makes gas, the remains have no smell. We spread them in our rice fields, and other farmers take some to use as fertilizer.

Thanks to the biogas system, the awful smell is gone and the pigs get fewer diseases. Because of these benefits, I decided to increase the number of pigs that we raise. Today, we have 70 pigs.

Vu Xuan Hien, age 31, lives with his wife Nguyen Thi Phuong and two children in Nhan Dao commune, Vinh Phuc province, northern Vietnam. He is one of 13 local farmers who have built biogas systems with loans from the MCC-supported Nhan Dao Commune Women’s Union.