Put yourself in a child's shoes, however torn and ragged they may be:

~Your country has roughly 85,262,356 people. Wow. All those people makes you wonder how fat their mosquitoes are...

~8 out of 10 others kids in your class have no religion at all.

~90 out of every 100 of your father's coworkers can read.

~Bacterial diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever are a few of the major infectious diseases that your best friend Da`o could die of any day.

~The "slash and burn" techniques that the farmers use in the nearby towns are okay if the land is left to recover for a long period of time, but with the rate your country is growing, this will soon force farmers to shorten the land-rotation cycle, causing extensive deforestation, soil degradation and erosion.

~Mama and Papa still talk of when they were little, and 3/4 of the kids at their school had no food, and lived in poverty.

~You walk outside your door every day to a lake filled with trash and heavy metals WAY above the safety line, and Mama has to walk 4-5 miles to find good water.

~Papa is always warning you to not get yourself hurt, to be careful, because taking you to the hospital wouldn't do you any good with the lack of equipment and expertise demonstrated by the hospital staff.

However, conditions have become considerably more humane since the 1980's. The Environmental Law passed in 1993, which helped in increasing necessary environmental protection initiatives. It was followed by many other laws that are supposed to better the environmental conditions in Vietnam, including the formation of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment in 1993. According to this, your country cares very much about the environment it lives in, and is doing its best to better its surroundings.