Month: April 2019

Today the team here were invited to the Irish embassy in Hanoi. I had never been to any embassy let alone an Irish one so it was another day of firsts for me. We met with the ambassador and the head of development to discuss our individual projects and the VIBE program as a whole. The Vietnam Ireland Bilateral Education Exchange program (VIBE) was developed as a catalyst to encourage and deepen third-level education linkages between Vietnamese and Irish institutes which will contribute to Vietnam’s socio-economic development. Ireland has been supporting Vietnam’s socio-economic development plans since 2005 and has also supported education and research here so the VIBE program is essentially a collaboration of the two. We discussed the VIBE program in the embassy, the research we will be conduction during our time here and the importance of these projects for rural Vietnam. We also talked about potentially having another meeting when we are finished our research to discuss further the relevance and importance of the VIBE program and what we have observed whilst conducting our research.

Now that I am all settled in it’s time to get down to business and switch off ”holiday mode” and remind myself of the fact that I am here to conduct my research for my masters thesis. The masters I am studying is MScCCAFS in NUI Galway and during my time here I will work closely with the Vietnam University of Agriculture (VNUA). The project I am working on is called the VIBE project and I will be mainly involved in is called ”sub project 2”. I will be studying red spider mites on the Cassava crop in Văn Yên District in the Yên Bái province of Vietnam.

The cassava here is mainly grown to be use as an animal feed and is not consumed by the local people. The red spider mites lay eggs on the leaves and when the larvae hatch they feed on the leaves. This can cause the leaves to fall off and can reduce the crop yield. There is however another species of mite, referred to as a ”predatory mite” which feasts solely on the red spider mites. One objective of my thesis is to observe how many spider mites and predator mites are present on cassava leaves and to also look at the predation capacity of the predator mites on the red spider mites. There is potential to use the predator mites as a biological control agent which could greatly help the farmers here. I am looking forward to getting started in the field this week.

Arriving in Hanoi was great, there were so many new things I got to experience for the first time. I spent my first days exploring and getting my bearings. I quickly found out that it’s bus no. 11 that brings you to the city center, not bus no. 54 even though they both leave from the same place and travel in the same direction? I guess the beauty of discovering a new place does not come without getting lost at least once. I eventually ended up at west bank, passing some stalls on the way. The freshest produce I have ever seen, all of the fish were caught this morning and the bananas are still green. The air is full of so many new and wonderful smells, its hard to actually describe but it is definitely something everyone should experience.

Walking along the west bank it’s had to ignore the elephant in the room which comes in the form of a thick blanket of smog where the distant skyline should be. It is a not so gentle reminder as to why I undertook this masters in the first place and that is the every growing problem of climate change. According to The World Health Organisation around 60000 deaths that occur every year in Vietnam are air pollution related. The evidence of this growing pollution problem is obvious when you take a minute to notice just how many locals you see wearing a smog mask whilst going about their daily tasks.

Today’s exploring has giving me back all my motivation and I am ready to start my research now more than ever!