International Photojournalist and Photographer

Ngan Van May was born more than 70 years ago in Ban Son, a remote mountain village around 150km North West of Hanoi in Vietnam.

Many of Van May’s family and friends trekked for days, on treacherous paths through the leech infested mountains and jungles which surround his village, to join with other North Vietnamese comrades and fight in the American war. His younger brother was killed in the late 1960′s in combat with the American and South Vietnamese armies in the DMZ area of Vietnam. He is now the only survivor of his siblings and is revered in the village as the elder statesman. He has 10 sons and daughters, of which 8 are still alive.

As a younger man he proudly served as the elected village leader for two terms. Eight years.

“You are the first western person to be invited into my home,” he tells my interpreter as we climb the steep stairway into his wooden house.

“Can you please take a photograph of me and my youngest son’s child so he will always remember me when I’m dead?”

Village life is now undergoing a dramatic change in Son.

A rough road is being constructed through the Pu Long nature reserve into the village to connect it’s isolated residents with the outside world, allowing them opportunities to trade with their neighbours more easily. A robust electrical supply and mobile phone mast to the village may follow the road’s completion. Currently, the electrical supply for the village is generated by a small water turbine and is distributed around the residents houses by a series of fine wires held above the rice fields on bamboo sticks. On a good night the electrical supply may warm one 20 watt light bulb in each dark home.

Mobile phones are useless in Son as their is no signal. Unless, that is, you climb a steep muddy hillside for more than 1 km. Search there for the microwave sweet spot which, if the wind is light, may provide an elusive connection with a furtive one bar of signal. Blackberry or iphone user? Worthless here as they are too complex to connect to the faint transmission from somewhere in the next valley.

Van May’s oldest son’s daughter, Ngan Thi Su, is eighteen years old. As they return from the jungle where her mother has been chopping wood for the cooking fire, she proudly shows us the hillside location where she can connect to the outside world with an old mobile phone.

Thi Su’s mother, Bui Thi Tinh has lived and worked – survived – in Son all her life. Her daughter is unable to keep up with her as she jogs down the steep, wet, muddy hillside in her worn out flip flops whilst carrying a heavy basket full of logs on a strap around her forehead. For 43 years she has planted and harvested rice, cooked food for her family, raised her children and chopped firewood in the jungle. For her the mobile is useless. Her hands and fingers are too calloused to finger the buttons on the handset but more importantly it does not cut firewood, harvest rice or hold water for cooking. She looks on and seemingly contents herself with thoughts, hopes, that modernisation and technological advances will provide a better lifestyle and a more prosperous future for her daughters and her young nephew.