Nguyen Van Mai’s family uses bamboo hand fans as they eat lunch during the hottest part of the day.
“An electric fan now costs only VND100,000 (US$6), but what for?” says Mai.
Yen Trung Commune’s Huong and Hoi hamlets have become part of Hanoi’s Thach That District since a city expansion project took effect earlier this month.
But none of the hamlets’ families is connected to the capital’s power grid.
Each household cooks by burning straw and wood.
Bui Thi Hien, a local of Huong Hamlet, fans herself and the cooking fire at the same time.
Hien says she has to light three oil lamps around her house every night, two for her children to study by.
“I always have to keep three to four liters of oil on hand at all times. The children will cry if the house is completely dark at night,” she says.
Hien’s family has a television cabinet but no TV inside.
“No electricity means no TV. At night I have to take the children more than a kilometer down the road to watch TV,” Hien says.
But Nguyen Hai Lien says using bamboo fans or oil lamps and not watching TV are just trivial challenges.
“Villagers’ real difficulties begin when the harvest season arrives.” Farmers must pedal rice separating machines and spin rice dryers manually, he says.
“Then we have travel more than a kilometer to find a rice husking machine,” says another local named Nguyen Van Dao.
Ironically, Yen Trung Commune was once part of Hoa Binh Province’s Luong Son District, where the Da River Hydropower Plant generates electricity for use all over the nation.
Though Hanoi officials discovered the problem earlier this year when planning for the capital city’s expansion project, nothing has been done.
When Hanoi People’s Committee Chairman Nguyen The Thao visited Yen Trung Commune on August 16, the local authority told him that six of the commune’s hamlets – a total of 137 households – were not connected to the state power supply.
In some hamlets, households have paid black market dealers to connect them to electricity supplies illegally.
These households can now use electric fans but they say they still don’t have enough power to run water pumps, rice huskers or any of the area’s other staple tasks.
Worse, the residents say they’re paying double what the state electricity company charges.
Upon hearing the complaints on his visit, chairman Thao promptly ordered the Hanoi Power Company to connect the six hamlets to the national power network by October this year.
Source: SGGP |
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