I first went to Vietnam in 1997,
three decades after I graduated from college, volunteered for the Peace
Corps and was assigned to teach high school in a remote village in
Nepal.
One day the
students asked me why we Americans were destroying the forests in
Vietnam. I couldn’t answer them. But when I arrived in Vietnam as the
head of the Ford Foundation office there, I found their assertion to be
distressingly true.
Moreover, the herbicides, collectively called Agent Orange, had been contaminated with dioxin, a chemical that is extremely toxic to humans in small amounts. Severe disabilities associated with Agent Orange/dioxin were occurring in generation after generation in Vietnamese families.
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