Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The latest in weirdness!!


This is pretty f@cked up. My friend is down in Hai Phong, on a business trip. She’s meeting with a lot of government research bodies, and fisheries departments, and a lot of other folks from other NGO’s. And things are going well, the Vietnamese are very good with schmoosing. They like to go to a good restaurant and treat their guests well, and drink some wine and beer.

Anyway, my good friend is talking with a chap from an NGO, who has been involved in training fisheries workers. He’s telling a story about one of these training courses. During the course, one bloke puts his hand up, and out of the blue, he asks “can you catch AIDS from fish?”. The trainer doesn’t know WHAT to think… this guy is having sex with FISH? How does THAT work? What SORT of fish?

The story goes thus… apparently a lot of fishermen, who are usually quite bored in the boat, smoke opium to help pass the time. Recently, most of them have switched to injecting heroine. I don’t know why heroine has become so popular these days here, Vietnam has been next door to the golden triangle for so long.. maybe its access to syringes.. or improved economy has made Vietnam a viable market for dealers.. don’t know..

Anyway, so their all "blasting up" in their spare time on the boats. So where does fish enter the equation? They sell their catch by the weight. To improve profits, they inject the fish with salt water, using the same syringes they use for heroine injection. Hence the mans concern, and some

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home