saigonsays

Coracle Consulting in Vietnam: Your Next Training Partner

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026saigonsaysLeave a comment

Speaking at the ASEAN Youth Organisation’s Re:City Hackathon, Saigon, August 16th.

In spite of my recovering Achilles, I managed to get out and about last month and, inside of a week, attended two events in Saigon and one up in Hanoi. As can often happen – when you’re away from your emails and your screen, and actually talking in-person with people – I was confronted with some recurring themes and lessons.

In this case, about leadership and about soft skills.

The first Saigon event was the ASEAN Youth Organization’s Re:City Hackathon: a great weekend, where Vietnamese teenagers and twenty-somethings were tasked with building commercial energy-saving ideas in 24 hours flat. A few days later, I headed to a Eurocham breakfast down the road, where two Hogan Assessments consultants pressed home the importance of workplace leadership and employee skills training. And then, the following morning, up by West Lake in the country’s capital, I listened to various HR specialists at a NordCham session, discussing why good people leave companies and how to remedy this.

At each event I was able to draw on some answers to a question that my company, Coracle Consulting, has been asking over the last 7 years: why is it often so hard for organisations to grow the leaders they already have sitting inside them?

It seems to me that Vietnam’s growth story has been creating more senior roles than there are ready people to fill them. I regularly meet companies who talk about how they promote the person who’s “already doing brilliant at the job”. That’s logical on the face of it, but the two skills aren’t the same, and treating them as one is where a lot of promotions go wrong

At the AYO Hackathon, where I volunteered as a communications coach and panel judge, there were sixty young people, aged 16 to 24, most of them with zero background in energy. Inside of their 24-hour deadline, many teams gave brilliant and wholly investable pitches to a live audience, financial projections, business models and all. I’m not sure any of the students could boast of being technical experts, but they demonstrated the importance of following a clear process, being open to learning in real time (about things like how to communicate under pressure) before then practicing their ideas and arguments over and again.

To me, funnily enough, some of these “soft-skills” are what newly promoted managers are never taught, and are just expected to somehow already have. Before promotion, your job is largely to be good at your own work. After promotion, your job can be to make other people good at theirs. You need to delegate, give feedback, have the awkward conversations, present upward, make calls with half the information you’d like, and try to get buy-in from people who don’t report to you.

All these things require skills that are not often taught in schools, nor in the workplace.

Which was more or less the theme at the Eurocham breakfast. The key note speakers, Allison Howell and Krista Pederson, walked through the (sizeable) gap between what employees say they want from their leaders and what leaders actually think they’re delivering. They also had smart things to say about AI’s disruption of leadership work, however the leadership gap was the line that stuck with me. Technical or positional authority doesn’t automatically come with the interpersonal instincts people are actually looking for.

And lastly, as speakers from ABB and Contagi explained, the very next day up in Hanoi, if you don’t fix these pieces, then people leave. The consensus in that room, more or less, was that this problem isn’t going away. If anything, it’s becoming more urgent as competition for good people intensifies.

In a recent Vietnam Enterprise Workforce Capability Readiness report, apparently 76% of companies surveyed now say they’re planning to invest more in leadership capability. Retention, succession and leadership capability get treated as three separate line items in most HR strategies. But having sat in those three rooms in one week, I’d argue all three are really just part of the same problem.

I’m not suggesting that any of this requires waiting for someone to fail as a manager before doing anything about it. Communication, presentation, emotional intelligence, negotiation, problem-solving, personal accountability – these can all be built into someone’s development from the get-go and long before they get promoted. Technical skills still matters enormously, and none of this is an argument for replacing it with “soft skills” but it’s an argument, in fact, for adding a second layer on top of it as someone’s responsibilities widen.

Vietnam has no shortage of talented, ambitious people. The opportunity isn’t attracting more of them from outside, I believe it’s helping the ones already inside your organisation grow into the roles you’ll need filled next year.

If your organisation is wrestling with any of this, then drop Coracle a line, as these issues are exactly what we’re spending our time at working on. Get in touch to share your experiences, or for a free consultation on how we could support your situation.

timbishop@coracleconsulting.net / http://www.coracleconsulting.net

What Drives Someone to Climb Everything: The Nirmal Purja Story

August 2, 2026August 2, 2026saigonsaysLeave a comment

Nirmal Purja, in 2019 during his 14 Peaks Challenge.

When I started typing this on Friday, the man in the photo, Nirmal Purja, was missing along with nine others, following an avalanche that struck Broad Peak, one of the world’s highest mountain ranges in Pakistan.

Sadly, Purja’s death – and that of others in the group – was confirmed yesterday.

Soon enough, the lives and achievements of each of the ten climbers will be fully shared. And I’ve no doubt that, collectively, the miles they’ve undertaken, across some of the world’s most challenging terrains and topologies, will all be recorded for posterity.

When mountaineers are asked why they climb mountains, the famous refrain is “because it’s there.”

For Nirmal Purja, whose profile has been across these headlines, not only had he climbed mountains his whole life, but he’d dedicated a lot of his time to raising awareness about climate change in the process.

He’s famed for having summited each of the world’s 14 peaks that reach up over the 8,000 metre mark. He managed that in 2019, in just seven months – the previous record for such an achievement being eight years. The documentary of this feat is well worth watching.

Purja is Nepalese born and an ex-British armed forces soldier. Like many other Nepalese who guide climbers up and down Everest each season, it’s fair to say he’s “built different.”

The one time I visited Pokhara, in Nepal, on an expedition of sorts, was in 2002. While we only casually meandered around the famous tea-trails, rather than scaling vast heights, we still got to see just how hospitable, humble, and strong-as-oxes the local sherpas are. I recall them insisting on carrying our backpacks for us, with each guide squeezing three at a time into a wicker basket, whose strap was then slung around the guide’s forehead.

While we wore durable ankle boots, they were in simple footwear. They always went ahead to set up camp, ensuring a tea urn was at the ready for us, to wash down a round of snacks. We were all suitably exhausted as we turned in each night, leaving them to clean up.

This type of hospitality and kindness exists in many countries, and is often not only driven by the host’s desire to earn fat tips from tourists, but is more deeply rooted in the pride felt about one’s own country, and a desire that visitors will have a special time there.

Purja appears to have epitomised these humble traits and managed, in this lifetime (he turned 43 just eight days ago) to amass a portfolio of climbing that is perhaps unrivalled by anyone in our history. A phenomenal legacy in itself, added to which he also dedicated part of his adult life to the British Army and did more in recent years to raise awareness about the effects of climate change than some governments of the world can claim to have done.

What is it that drives an individual to such accomplishments, I wonder?

I looked into some old interviews he did and it’s quite clear that mindset is a key piece of the puzzle for Purja. He talked about it more than almost anything else. Asked what carried him through the military and onto the mountains, he pointed to the discipline of decision-making under pressure and what he calls simply a “positive mindset.” He’s said that people are largely limited by their own imagination – that if you can’t picture something, you’ll never attempt it, let alone achieve it.

Purja is explicit that his positive mindset isn’t a personality trait he was born with but a skill he built in the military and then deliberately carried into climbing. In that way proving that discipline can be transferred from one arena of life to a completely different one.

His record wasn’t necessarily broken because he had better lungs (although to me it’s also clear that he absolutely did have better lungs than most people) or better gear than anyone, but because he refused to accept that eight years was simply how long the task took. He removed any self-imposed limits on the whole thing and then committed fully, and planned relentlessly.

The other standout facet for me are from the side stories on his challenge, where he was generously trying to support others during his summiting. There were mini rescues of other climbers that he undertook, for example, and he seemed very conscious of trying to stay humble at all times while taking on this gargantuan goal.

Lastly, Purja talks about respecting what you can’t control. He explains he takes zero mountains for granted. Particularly poignant given he said this before setting off for Broad Peak itself.

It’s incredibly sad to read about the events of last Thursday on that mountain. For all the families and friends whose lives have also been altered in the process, and will never be the same, it’s an unfathomable task that they now face.

In that way, the accomplishment of Purja and his colleagues is both inspiring and quite maddening in perhaps equal doses.

However, for anyone attempting anything in their life that feels “challenging”, I think there’s a lot to learn from what people like Purja have demonstrated: which is that extraordinary outcomes are rarely the product of extraordinary luck – they can be, instead, the product of an ordinary decision, repeated with total discipline, until it stops looking ordinary at all.

Success Arriving On the Back of a Horse

January 13, 2026January 13, 2026saigonsaysLeave a comment

Saigon Diary: Jan 13th, 2026.

We’ve been back in Saigon for exactly a week now, in the space of which we’ve experienced pelting rain, pollution-clogged air, baking afternoon sun, and the coldest temperatures in ten years (17 degrees).

Over in Australia, where we spent Christmas, the country has seen some of the most prolific and deadly bushfires in recent memory.

In the UK, there was a cold snap this month, momentarily freezing not just people’s water pipes but their ability to go about their day-to-day business, hounded as they were by news outlets preaching Armageddon warnings about sealing windows and purchasing extra toilet paper.

The topic of the ‘the weather’ is a universal ice-breaker (pardon the double meaning) casually interrogated daily by everyone. And yet the signs couldn’t be clearer: we’re teetering on the edge of permanent humanitarian fragility.

These ever-mutating climate threats should be enough to alert us to the impending quagmire of turmoil that awaits us round the corner – country to country, there will be no exceptions – and we should be braced for more, not less, disruption. But we often pretend to ignore the symptoms (I’m guilty of doing that constantly).

Obviously the ability to survive in the future will largely tilt in favour of those with money.

If you’re reading this, then you’re already in the top echelons of society when it comes to being “comfortable”. Like me, you perhaps might “care” about climate change, but that isn’t going to stop you booking flights back to see your family in the holidays.

The current impacts of our warming planet are stark, and the issues chase at our heels like a snappy terrier.

The truth, of course, is that this pesky dog is easy enough to muzzle if you can afford it.

******************************

Meanwhile, Chinese New Year is approaching over in this part of the world, and the Vietnamese are in countdown already.

Office outputs across Saigon are running on the faintest wisps of enthusiasm, as locals traditionally use the western festive season as the starting pistol to their own run up to what they call ‘Tet’.

New Year’s Day this year is late – Feb 17th – and it’s also a fairly prestigious one (the Year of the Horse) which means the excitement and build-up to the event itself is extra punchy.

For the Chinese, the Horse symbolises strength and vitality – the saying goes that “success arrives on horseback”. That’s enough, by all accounts, to merit this particular year one of the more popular for having children. Hospitals and schools routinely re-organise their resources to accommodate this reality: more babies are born in an auspicious year, meaning more children going to school further down the line.

Much like how we traditionally herald in the birthday of Christ, Tet customs are anchored in family and in catering.

Where some of us celebrate annual turkey culling in time for December 25th (complete with other foods and drinks we simply don’t touch again for the following 364 days – Brussel sprouts, bread sauce, mince pies, Eggnog etc) over here during Tet there will be millions of sticky rice cakes, pickled vegetables and braised pork and eggs curated and consumed.

The locals will meticulously tidy their houses prior to New Year’s Eve, hand out “lucky money” to children, and spend time worshipping their ancestors.

In contrast, for most Brits anyway, attention to the tidiness of one’s house often slips for a week or so during Christmas. Instead, decorations clutter the walls, living rooms are carpeted in discarded wrapping paper, and emergency chairs, you didn’t even know your parents owned, are deployed to seat guests and “blow-in’s” who might materialise at the mere prospect of being offered mulled wine and a honey mustard chipolata on a cocktail stick.

******************************

I’m fast approaching my fifteenth anniversary of living in Saigon, and in spite of a longing to be rugged up outside in the English cold, clutching my fingers round a hot drink while listening to carols and losing the feeling in my toes, the charm of Vietnam at this time of year oozes out of everyone you meet.

From shopkeeper to security guard, folks are mildly giddy at the prospect of Tet as it means they’ll also receive their “thirteenth month” bonus, will soon be spending time with their loved ones, and generally getting caught up in all the festivities.

As I think back to the mercurial weather we’ve had this last week, and look at the topologies of this country – the rising sea levels, the low-lying villages in the Mekong, the seasonal flooding up in the centre of Vietnam, and so on – it seems inevitable that any future solutions to safeguard communities to climate shocks are up against all odds.

There are simply too many vulnerable people in the country. There isn’t the infrastructure – yet – in place, nor the funds to fast-track technological solutions.

Which makes the act of celebration, on the national scale that Tet demands, all the more poignant.

This year, by hook or by crook (and while I can’t stop riding my spluttering motor-bike around town, and will inevitably end up flying here or there) I will endeavour to be more committed to supporting local organisations and efforts to turn learning into practice, when it comes to the environment.

Even if that, for today, is just to be writing about it and sharing my thoughts into the ether.

The organisations that are working on climate issues here are still nascent. But there are a growing number (I wrote about some of them in December who I met up north). They need more recognition and more funding. They need to collaborate wider.

If you would like to recommend any to me, or would be interested in learning more about those currently in operation, then drop me a line and I’d be happy to connect.

Until next time!

Living Planet

December 5, 2025December 5, 2025saigonsaysLeave a comment

This week I spent three days up north in Ba Vi National Park for a work gig, facilitating a group of organisations preparing to launch a sizeable programme to support both local communities and local wildlife.

Several participants were environmental specialists and turned up with cameras boasting enormous zoom lenses in camouflage casings, plus tripods, binoculars, and the enthusiasm of people who know exactly what might be hiding in the next tree.

Our training room looked straight out over the forest canopy. Every so often we paused mid-discussion so one of the pros could point out a flash of wings, or rare birdsong drifting through our windows.

“What a privilege”, I offered to the group, for us all to be gifted that time together, and in those surroundings. And it really was.

Vietnam, historically a place where biodiversity losses have been severe, has been investing far more in conservation in recent years. Some species here exist nowhere else on earth. The Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, for instance, lives on in a single province. The most recent census estimates around 250 adults remain.

One of our colleagues last week, from Flora and Fauna International, is a global orchid expert who has photographed 100,000 of them, and gives regular keynote speeches about orchids around the world.

He explained how local rangers and conservationists are fighting to protect the Tonkin. Hearing about the level of care, energy, and sheer patience involved was humbling and inspiring.

It also brought me back to a recurring question: just how would I describe Vietnam’s cultural relationship with animals after fifteen years living here?

It is, in truth, a study in contrasts.

On the one hand, conservation campaigns are growing, park systems are strengthening, and young people increasingly speak the language of biodiversity, sustainability, and stewardship.

On the other, daily life still carries a kind of blunt, transactional way about it.

The morning “wet” markets offer a menagerie of protein options. Fish are sold alive from tubs of water, and dispatched on the spot after being clattered with the back of a knife and scaled while still flapping, before being plopped into a plastic bag for the customer.

Frogs sit bound in twine, together in pairs, until sold, when they are abruptly sliced open and their skin pulled off like a wooly jumper being removed.

Every part of a pig is eaten. Colleagues of mine used to bring the ears to work for lunch. Once I’d overcame the mild shock of seeing a pig’s ear next to the sugar jar in the office kitchen, it dawned on me that there is something genuinely honourable in respectfully consuming all the parts of an animal.

An old pic of a Saigon market from my collection.

In so many other scenarios around the world, millions of animals are treated inhumanely, week on week, slaughtered at industrial scale levels, their body parts packaged in aesthetically pleasing ways, and half of their carcasses thrown away.

And yet, emotional distance can drift into callousness, and there is still a rather cruel vibe to how certain animals are treated here – although, as always with cultural norms, one person’s cruelty is another’s everyday practicality.

I’ll never forget taking my friend Maude to dinner in 2012 at a rooftop BBQ in Saigon. I accidentally ordered a dish that involved a glass bowl of cold water being placed on a stove in the middle of our table, and a handful of live prawns being tossed in. As the water warmed to boiling temperatures and they began scrabbling at the sides, we found ourselves staring at the bowl in disbelief, even as other diners treated it as a normal Tuesday night.

The momentum toward conservation in Vietnam is tangible. New interventions now prioritise biodiversity and environmental guardianship in ways that simply weren’t part of development work fifteen years ago.

Being up in Ba Vi, especially knowing how severe Hanoi’s pollution has been lately, reminds one that nature is sacred – and that our newfound concern for ecological impact is, historically speaking, breathtakingly recent.

Maybe that’s why birdwatching is exploding globally. People want to admire something beyond themselves. They want a reason to look up in awe.

And yet our attention is fragile. Life distracts. Work distracts. Ego distracts. As I wrote last week on the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest, we easily get tangled in our own “stuff” and lose sight of the bigger tapestry we’re part of – the birds, the bees, and each other.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/breathingspace/2024/04/its-a-small-world-were-more-connected-than-we-know/

On my flight back to Saigon this evening, I watched a documentary about David Attenborough’s life. As always, in admiration of the colossal effort he’s put in over sixty years to hold up this one truth – that we so willfully seem to forget – which is, very simply, that we’re living in unprecedented times.

To quote Attenborough:

“We are currently in the midst of the earth’s sixth mass extinction, one every bit as profound and far-reaching as the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

Watching the great man and orator in the documentary, mic-dropping as he has done at COP conferences, Davos, and the like for the past twenty years, was a timely reminder of how to better see the relationship we have with nature.

While climate change and global warming frame how we impact nature, of course it is our fragility, dependency and ultimately our sustainability which relies so heavily on the health of the natural world.

Each drop of water and gulp of air is because of nature, not government or big business. And each time another species sits on the brink of extinction, we are stepping that bit closer to the day when it will be our turn.

Thanks Be

November 27, 2025November 27, 2025saigonsays3 Comments

Many Happy Returns to my old man today!

A “1949-er” and, as the photos below demonstrate quite clearly, somewhat of a cool dude.

From ’60’s boy band heart-throb and ’70’s hipster chic, to ’80’s Bond pin-up – there have been many noteworthy wardrobes and styles my Dad has cut through the years, each worthy of an Esquire front cover.

There are plenty more pics from the archives to fill a dozen blogs: Dad tightly crammed into a brown wetsuit on Polzeath beach, during one of our annual pilgrimages down there with the Sparrow family; Dad dressed in a black and red striped 1930’s full body toweling swimsuit, while completing a fundraising swim, when we lived in Great Kimble; or, for variety’s sake, Dad dressing up for pantomime to play Dorothy (blond wig + beard) in The Wizard of Oz one year, and then Widow Twankie (silver wig, clean shaven) in Aladdin the next – you can take your pick.

As today also happens to be Thanksgiving, and we’ve spent the morning preparing mash potato pie, it feels more timely than usual to celebrate not only Dad’s latest trip round the sun, but to pay a brief homage to all of the rest of it, too.

Thanksgiving, as a traditional past-time, is about sharing gratitude to those around your table. But its origins run a bit deeper than that, because survival back then depended on a number of things that can often feel very distant to our lives today. Those first harvest tables were less a symbol of indulgence and more simply about relief. Quite literally: we made it through another year – we are still here.

Gratitude is a formidable thing in itself.

Talk of gratitude is there in religious texts, and has been passed down the millennia through scholars and writers alike who, collectively, seem to have agreed that to be grateful is, fundamentally, to recognise the sheer improbability of existence. There is a beauty and an awe in waking up each day to the miracle that anything exists at all.

There isn’t, of course, anything more powerful for us to agree upon, and so today it feels to me, over here in Asia, all the more pertinent to add my thanks and gratitude for all the magical things I hold close at heart, and which have been made possible thanks to my parents – even if one of them sometimes chooses to dress up in a blue and white checked gingham dress and a blond wig.

On holiday in Lanzarote, fresh from tennis with Dad, and inhaling bottles of Sprite.

Later today, Mum and Dad are heading into London to meet my niece for a slap-up lunch, and then onto watch another great dame – Sir Stephen Fry – play Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. I couldn’t find a fitting quote from the play to end this on. It is, after all, a satirical romp, that doubles down on gratification rather than gratitude. And, while gratification is also a popular word on the bingo card of Thanksgiving, it is not the same thing.

Gratification is more akin to a feeling of achievement – cooking and eating and sharing a meal, being one example many millions of people will carry out today.

There is gratification in reflection, and also in the joy of what is yet to come, but I would say that gratitude is, instead, a way of seeing all of this. The two can be mutually reinforcing, perhaps.

In any case, the last word from me on this today is from poet, David Whyte, whose take on gratitude I find to be the most gratifying.

Happy Birthday Pops x

“Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing.

Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.”

David Whyte, Consolations.

Against All Odds – An Chị Em’s Work in Vietnam

November 7, 2025November 7, 2025saigonsaysLeave a comment

Quy Nhon this morning after a night of storms: photo credit Nico Greeve.

The first drops of rain from the tail of Typhoon Kalmeagi have just this afternoon started to fall in Saigon. We’ve been on high alert for 24 hours, after the government cancelled all after-school activities for four days.

In the end, the forecasters didn’t quite get it right for the south, as Kalmeagi smashed its way through parts of the centre of Vietnam last night, with no repercussions for us down here.

Photos from Quy Nhon, further up the coast, courtesy of a friend visiting there, show quite clearly that Kalmeagi meant business. An awfully high death-toll in the Philippines earlier in the week confirmed as much.

Our storm seasons out here are forever stretching in their longevity. The end of October used to be the marker for a switchover to drier times – but that is not our norm anymore.

12 years ago to the day, a bunch of us flew into Manila, as Typhoon Haiyan was about to wreak havoc about 400kms away. In the end, Haiyan was one of the heaviest recorded storms on record. None of our crew were affected at all, but millions of Filipinos lost their livelihoods and many were killed.

Image courtesy of Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty images

As I’ve previously documented, since living in Southeast Asia now for almost 15 years, it will never be possible to fully appreciate how fragile life out here is for the vast majority of Vietnamese, Filipinos, Cambodians, Laotians, and the many other countries nestled into this very special corner of the world.

Daily flooding in our local neighbourhood is already a constant source of disruption for many living in precarious structures, where floors fill with river water gushing up through the sewers at high tide. Let alone the damage they have to buffer when the monsoon rains slam down like stair-rods through their corrugated iron roofs.

Typhoons and cyclones take this destruction to the next level of suffering. The Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 was one of the first times the world has seen in real-time just how scary the power of nature can be, particularly when up against frail infrastructure.

I took a train down from Colombo to Galle in Sri Lanka about six years after the tsunami, and heard stories of how hundreds Sri Lankans had run way from their beach dwellings and onto a stationary train, to seek cover from the wave, only to perish as the force of the ocean flipped the carriages over.

Here in Saigon, locals often seem to shrug off the perils of the weather – they are, instead, more preoccupied with making a living than they are of re-upholstering, again, their furniture and securing their belongings.

Local flooding recently in our neighbourhood.

Over my years at CARE, learning about how solutions to protect communities from seasonal bad weather are designed and scaled, it does just feel like a never-ending saga for the billions combating some of the world’s most destructive natural disasters.

That saga could one day be softened if governments were to make high-level decisions about their collective stewardship of the environment. The world’s largest corporations could also have a more profound impact on the welfare of vulnerable communities, through tougher regulations and fairer access into markets for those currently excluded.

There are lots of moving parts to this, and much ground to yet be covered. The Boxing Day Tsunami was over twenty years ago and still the vulnerability of many millions seems ever increasing, along with the regularity at which these weather-based events are happening.

And, in the meantime, it is the resilience of local communities and the efforts of a small number of entities that continues to make the most life-changing daily and incremental improvements and adjustments to the lives of these communities.

One entity here in Vietnam is called An Chị Em – which translates as “Brothers and Sisters”.

Their work is in the mountainous communities of Trà Bồng in Quảng Ngãi Province. They are a social-enterprise, set up by Colin Dixon, a long-term resident and friend, and their core mission is to partner with vulnerable communities facing economic, climate and infrastructure pressures.

They span emergency aid (responding when storms, floods or isolation hit), sustainable development (including clean water and housing upgrades) and education sponsorship (giving children whose families are marginalised the chance to stay.

An Chị Em are taking a local approach to finding solutions that ensure they are building back better: not just in terms of improved resilience, but also in terms of dignity. Better-built houses that resist seasonal storms, access to clean water so that time isn’t wasted fetching it, children freed from the burden of interruption when disaster strikes, and communities that are less exposed to the elements.

Their “brick by brick” approach in Trà Bồng as one small but powerful counterpoint to the anxieties of storm season. Their work can’t wait for government legislation, or private sector investments. They have to act now, and in each and every moment of tomorrow, and the day after.

I would urge you to take a look at their website (links above and below) and check out how you might get involved.

Thank you and have a safe weekend x

Born on the Edge of History

April 27, 2025April 26, 2025saigonsays1 Comment

US helicopter evacuating Saigon. Photo credit Hubert Van Es.

I came into the world a bit tangled, with the umbilical cord wrapped tight around my neck, gasping for air. My first act then being to terrify my parents, before nurses whisked me off to the emergency room.

Three days later, I was issued a birth certificate. It was dated 30th April, 1975 — the official date of the end of the American-Vietnam War.

Up until quite recently, I would have had a hard time confidently locating Vietnam on a map. I didn’t grow up thinking much about it, and was too young to have witnessed the street marches and anti-war protesting. Vietnamese cuisine (now found on plenty of city corners the world over) hadn’t reached UK high streets in the 70’s and 80’s.

For me, the story of that War was told through watching Hollywood movies, rather than it unraveling in real time as it had for my parents, in pixelated black and white TV footage of American GIs and the devastation caused by Agent Orange.

Me impersonating an Edwardian dandy, not reading about the war, circa 1977.

Vietnam, therefore, never felt personal to me, as I meandered through my twenties and half my thirties working for non-profit organisations in London dreaming, instead, of returning one day to Africa.

Fast forward to 2009 and 2010, and I took a few work trips with CARE International to Laos, Cambodia and then to Thailand. Visiting projects and speaking at conferences. My first real immersion into a part of Asia that was soon to become my home.

By February 2011 I’d arrived in Saigon on an 18-month secondment. We chose a kindergarten for our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Florence, the day after landing and had picked out an apartment — in ‘River Garden’ — by the end of the first week.

Fourteen years on, and Flo is about to sit her GCSEs out here, while her younger sister, Martha, spent last week performing in a high school musical.

I re-married just before the outbreak of COVID-19, and me, Issy and the girls enjoyed seven years living in our family home, not far from where I’m writing this now.

In February 2023, we moved back into River Garden. We’d come full circle.

On the pages of this blog site, I’ve tried to capture the ups and downs, the ingrained moments and experiences, that living in Vietnam has scored into the archives of our memories. This is my 160th post on Saigonsays.

Some days, I still marvel at how a temporary posting turned into a life. How the place I’d never imagined for myself became the very platform from which I’ve launched myself, day after day, for so many years.

I wonder about those last American helicopters, pitching off what is now called “The Reunification Palace”, taking their passengers to begin the next stage of their lives while, many miles away in England, I would have been sleeping, my breathing finally calmed, curled up in the safety of my mother’s arms.

Over the past week, outside our 15th floor apartment windows, we’ve watched configurations of helicopters and fighter jets have been marauding around the perimeter of the city. Red flags, with the single yellow star motif, dangling below the whirring blades. These rehearsals have been going on for some time, intensifying day by day in the run up to Wednesday’s celebrations.

Last weekend, I ran through the central business district dotted with shiny red and gold floats with large posters of Ho Chi Minh hoisted high, waiting for the upcoming parades. There have been ongoing road closures, as thousands of participants are expected at the various pop-up arenas currently under construction.

Anniversary poster in Central Business District, HCMC. Photo credit Tim Bishop.

Since 1975, Vietnam has become one of Asia’s most dynamic growth stories. Once reliant on rice and textiles, the country now exports everything from coffee and cashews to smartphones and semiconductors.

Industrial zones hum with activity, and foreign investment flows in through tech giants, auto manufacturers, and even renewable energy start-ups. In spite of the many immediate post-war years of poverty and crisis, it has emerged economically vibrant, particular since the US embargo was lifted in 1994.

Vietnam makes things now. And sells them to the world.

Ho Chi Minh City (still “Saigon” to many) has been a city in flux ever since I arrived. Construction cranes swing over tangled power lines. Glass skyscrapers rise beside crumbling French villas and wartime relics. The city’s long-promised metro line opened at Christmas and, so far, seems to have a steady footfall of passengers.

Grab bikes are taking on the traditional xe ôm scooter taxis, and once-sleepy alleyways (“hẻms“) like where our old house is nestled, are now home to craft beer joints and co-working spaces.

Grab driver in Saigon. Photo credit https://www.techinasia.com/grab-set-hike-ridehailing-prices-vietnam

Culturally, I’ve noticed some shifts, too. Once more closed and conservative, today’s Vietnam pulses with creative energy. Indie music scenes are growing in Hanoi and Saigon. Young designers are reclaiming áo dài silhouettes in streetwear collections. Rooftop raves, contemporary galleries, experimental film screenings — they’re no longer underground, but part of a new, confident generation.

Many returning second (and third) generation Vietnamese are here to claim their stake in a market that is primed for more growth yet. These returnees’ (“Việt kiều“) represent business owners and entrepreneurs who are globally aware, yet deeply rooted. They are inevitably more digitally fluent also, curating a fascinating new norm here, sometimes through Instagram, sometimes in makeshift studios, or simply from behind laptops in noisy cafes.

Talk of the War is limited. The museums still draw tourists, and the Cu Chi tunnels remain a rite of passage where you can walk through the tunnels and get a visceral sense of the war’s intensity. Visitors can even fire rifles on site. A somewhat a surreal experience, where trauma meets tourism.

If arriving in Cu Chi by boat, you’ll get to glimpse the fragile backwaters still skirting the city. I’d encourage anyone traveling here to take to the waterway systems. It’s a reminder that, despite the optics of growth, much of Vietnam’s life remains delicately balanced.

Saigon backwaters. Photo credit https://www.hellotickets.com

Over my years here, I’ve met several people who fled Saigon in the late 1970’s. Some on boats, aged three or four, but still with early recollections of the part their families played in history. With so many since returning from far-flung cities like Melbourne, Houston, Toronto, and Paris, Vietnamese identity now stretches not only across continents, but also across generations.

Today, America is one of Vietnam’s largest trading partners. There has been military cooperation, as well as significant tech investments over recent years. Thousands of Vietnamese students flock to U.S. universities each year, and five U.S. Presidents have visited since 2000, starting with Bill Clinton’s historic trip to normalize relations. Obama’s 2016 visit lifted the arms embargo, and the humble plastic table where he and Anthony Bourdain shared bun cha and beers in 2016 has been preserved behind glass.

I remember too, ten years ago, for the country’s 40th anniversary celebrations, that the streets were lined with posters displaying the livery of many American brands, such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Domino’s Pizza. Slews of of McDonalds and Starbucks franchises have been around since then also, showing no sign of easing up their steady expansion.

McDonalds in Saigon since 2014. Photo credit https://edition.cnn.com

Two nations, once at war, appear to now be walking the same economic and strategic tightrope, cautiously, but in step. And, whilst I’m no economist, it feels like the government here often balances very well its relations with America and China, respecting the traditions of its political past and commitments to all its citizens, while also aiming high to be a serious contender on the world stage.

Others would agree on this. Matthew Sayed writing in the Sunday Times last week, reflects on his ten-day journey through Vietnam, observing a nation propelled by a vigorous work ethic and a forward-looking mindset. He feels these characteristics, along with the country’s impressive economic growth rate, contrasts with what he describes as an “internal decline” in the West.

I suspect there are arguments here both ways, but Sayed’s weighing up of the West’s “obsession with past grievances” alongside Vietnam’s “determination and resilient outlook on the future” strikes a chord.

Do Western leaders currently have the mettle, along with the strategic vision, to deal effectively with crises?

Perhaps that is a topic I’ll dive into soon, but certainly not until I’ve enjoyed some birthday indulgences.

So, Happy 50th to me. And to Vietnam.

April 30th is just another day. It will pass, as all days do. But it carries a weight and a wonder for me. While frantic evacuations off the top of the Reunification Palace were underway, and I was blinking up into my parents’ faces, it was fate, perhaps, that my trajectory would one day land me here: an Englishman in Vietnam.

A strange symmetry between history and coincidence.

Saigon has been the ultimate connector: where Issy and I met by chance; where we’ve built our livelihoods; and where Flo and Martha’s entire childhoods have unfolded. I’ve run through its streets relentlessly at dawn, wrestling with life’s big questions, and been fortunate to gather more than my share of good friends along the way.

I was born on the edge of history. And somehow, without ever really planning it, I’ve ended up living at its heart.

Saigon skyline – photo credit https://www.vietnamtraveldocs.com

Rewinding with a Bic pen

February 20, 2025February 21, 2025saigonsays4 Comments

For anyone who remembers cataloguing their home collection of VHS videos, or the precise tension of a Bic pen wedged into a cassette tape, rewinding a mix you’d recorded straight from the radio (god forbid you’d bumped the bed while recording, or ruined your masterpiece with an accidental cough).

For anyone who remembers when a five pound note was a big deal, or, when negotiating, as a teenager, with your parents to use the one landline in the house.

If you are nodding to any of these throwbacks, this is a safe space, read on.

Technology has evolved in ways I can barely comprehend, and yet I’m not convinced life is truly ‘better’ now than 50 years ago, the year I was born.

I’m English, and was born into a middle class family. Off to a good start, you could argue.

Whilst my work in international development to date has offered me many alternative perspectives, my childhood was framed within the comfortable trappings of a loving family, with two parents who worked hard and put my brother and I before most other things (although not quite above making us wear seatbelts at 3am on the way home from a boozy party when Dad was, let’s not pretend otherwise, two sandwiches short of a picnic and over the legal limit).

Life was different back then.

I’ve written before about the fortunate timing of my arrival to this world, coming as it did on the back of generations and generations of families who’d operated more in the “children should be seen but not heard” camp.

I, on the other hand, was given a voice by my parents, and better still given the confidence to use it at home, at school, and in public. A freedom and a privilege that still bedazzles me. In the UK, at least, and in my household (that’s the only reference point I can speak to) the mid 70’s were a pivotal moment for kids.

Rose-tinted this introduction might be, let me get back to technology…

“Tech” when I was an adolescent, was having a fourth TV channel – Channel 4, no less – which curated hip new programmes for young people. Tech was recording WWF wrestling and American football matches overnight, and then watching them at 6am, with my brother and a large bowl of Cornflakes before school.

This, this was living.

**The very snazzy Acorn Electron, circa The 80s.**

Just about the same time I got excited at the prospect of printing out movie names on a “tape gun,” and sticking these onto our VHS tapes (housed in a fake-mahogany drawer underneath a bulky television that occupied one third of our “TV” room) we acquired our first computer, an Acorn Electron.

This would have been at some point towards the end of the 1980’s. We were elated at the time. A brave new world, indeed.

Quality time spent playing Pac-Man on this computer was the sum total of my tech experience until I was fairly deep into my 20’s. All throughout university we wrote essays by hand and, aside from nights spent with my friends playing Street Fighter and Mario Karts, I was too wrapped up in parties and sports to be bothered with much else (although I do still have fond memories of rocking out to Culture Club on my Sony Walkman, on holiday in the Canaries when I was about fourteen years old. Does that count for anything?)

When I then left the UK to spend a year teaching in a village in Uganda, around 1996, I used up all my spare time writing and receiving dozens of letters each week. There was not a digital device within a hundred of miles.

I recall utilising the poste restante services of several post offices in Zanzibar and Mombasa during the holidays when I went travelling (this was where someone could mail you a letter to pick up from town to town, as you moved around). The build up of bubbling excitement on each occasion, asking if there was any mail for you in a far off African town, was palpable.

It was a fax machine that we used in Kampala back then, to communicate home. Just as it was a fax machine I then used to send out marketing posters to customers, during the first year of my inaugural “real job” working at World Challenge Expeditions, in London, in 1997. Our office had one computer, and we had to share it between twenty six staff.

In this same job I was given a car and, ultimately, an early Motorola phone. This was exciting, although I typically used it when I was driving, lodged between my ear and shoulder, a road atlas on my lap, whilst chowing down a service station sandwich (not cool, kids – do not do this.)

If these images have sparked memories for you then perhaps, like me, you feel rather luddite-y around your children, or around your younger colleagues at work, any time something to do with technology, coding, or gigabytes comes up in conversation?

I feel quite border-line on all this. On the one hand, I find myself actively trying hard to email, text, blog, build myself a website, and so on, whilst simultaneously lamenting a time now long gone, when I’d sit fixated by a friend’s hand-written letter to me from his or her respective university, catching me up to speed on their course, their love life, or their well-being.

We didn’t have any actual conversations back then about “well-being”. Nor many therapists or online-specialists to organise our thoughts, or to promote journaling, meditation or the merits of a decent granola. We connected through the compassion that can be found in words, and in the act of letter-writing or (and also a dying art-form, it seems to me) just calling someone for a chat.

***My first unwittingly taken ‘selfie’ in the summer of 1995. Ahead of my time, I was.***

I sound one hundred years old just saying all this, but I do hark for these simpler times.

My daughters connect a lot with friends via their phones. This is their time, and this is their way of doing what I did. And so it makes me very happy, intuitively, to imagine (and hope) that they are having an equally fulfilling childhood, as I know I did, when it comes to socialising. I’ll never really know, and it’s too much of a challenge to compare and contrast.

As ex-pats, living in the tropics, there are obviously lots of differences to growing up in rural England. However, I’ve long been at peace with the fact that my girls’ formative years are theirs, and not mine to live through vicariously. That they have social media in their lives is both good and bad, just as my brother and I had the television to keep us stimulated.

Social media is addictive, as is TV. But social media is also a platform for connection that, for now, offers so much more interaction and options, that I believe it can only be a good piece of progress, and I’m not fighting it. There are downsides to it, and I feel these will only become more pronounced, and how we all communicate will pivot once more towards something else. Right now, I think it’s fair to ask: are we all more connected, or just more plugged in?

Thirty years from now, my daughters will likely ruminate, as I am now, about the younger generation, and I can only imagine what might manifest then and how outdated AI will be by then.

Instead, as a holding pattern for me right now, I write letters and cards, when I can. I’ve been reading more poetry of late. I’ve been writing more thoughts down, the old fashioned way, and also stopping more to engage properly in what is going on around me.

All of which feels so familiar, it is as if hardly anything has changed since I was half the age I am now. It’s all still there, perfectly accessible.

Being more aware, and less dependent on your phone, is not unique, of course. Many people don’t have smart phones, and some are off the social media “grid” completely however technology is exponentially growing at a rate that I, for one, am failing to keep up with.

I’ll keep trying, but the truth is that I don’t think any technology can replace, for me, just how the trill of a phone ringing, or the metal clunk of a letter-box flapping, for those few seconds, used to made my heart skip a beat.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: