By KAJIRA WYN BERRY

Water … clean, clear, water. Water that tastes good. An essential for health. One that we take for granted, usually. Turn on the faucet and have a refreshing drink. After this trip, don’t think that I’ll ever feel blasé about this again.

You see, we — my son Duncan, daughter-in-law Melany, David Steel and I — are just home from almost a month in Vietnam, traveling for the most part in the Central Highlands, home to many of the country’s 54 ethnic minority peoples. We went with Care To Help, a small Seattle nonprofit headed by Scott Mantz, a landscape architect, and Yen Ngo, a college counselor, who initiated the project six years ago. They went to Vietnam, wanting to see the “real” villages off the tourist trail, and met a John Wayne fan, Mr. Viet Hung, who agreed to take them into the more remote areas. There they found many people ill from drinking polluted ground water. Children did not go to school even when there was one because they were too ill. They realized that these people did not need money: they need good health first, and so they needed good water.

So, Scott and Yen (who take no money for themselves) with Mr. Hung’s on-the-spot enthusiastic participation, have drilled 20 wells at least 300’ deep in various villages, providing clean water for between 8,000 to 10,000 people. They have raised enough money to build five schools and an orphanage as well. Since one of our dollars is exchanged for 16,000 of theirs, American money goes a long way in Vietnam.

We 12 Americans in all — two of whom spoke Vietnamese — traveled together to see how the children are faring, how well the wells are working and what the health of the villagers is now. We saw mothers and babies at the well, merry children playing in abundant water and studying hard in school, small garden patches being watered. We saw village craftsmen and women — basket makers, weavers — making beautiful, useful things after long hours in the rice, corn or coffee fields. Every tiny bit of land was growing healthy vegetables irrigated with clear water. Ducks, pigs, dogs wandered about. Smiling, kind people greeted us every day.

One of the village’s schools and its only orphanage are on pagoda grounds, administered and taught by capable, hard-working Buddhist nuns. We made many heartfelt connections that even now make me smile. After the group left Vietnam, David and I stayed on and went north to Hanoi and Halong Bay, where we spent three days on a large junk (a kind of Vietnamese boat) from which we kayaked amidst hundreds of limestone “karsts,” the last remnants of the Himalayas marching out into the South China Sea.

Most people spoke some English, even though it is an enormously difficult language for them. Vietnamese language consists of single syllable words strung together to form complex ideas. Even names such as HaNoi and HaLong are really two words each, equally accented. HaNoi means the dragon rising; HaLong means where the dragon goes down to the sea.

Vietnam was a surprise to us. It has breathtaking beauty at every turn. My mind is still filled with flashes of life and color and beauty that surrounded us for almost the whole month of November. The merry, loving children in the schools and orphanage we visited. The slippered ladies with the ubiquitous “ganh,” a bamboo shoulder stick that balances heavy baskets of produce or eggs or even babies. The stampede and thunder of motor bikes coming straight at you. Rice fields primeval green as a white bird flew over. Broad green valleys and startling high hills, every inch under cultivation. Skinny tall buildings that left arable plots of precious land for gardens. Water buffaloes with curving horns. Wonderful, fresh food — meals of a thousand textures and flavors. The mist-shrouded, mythic mountaintops that thrust from Halong Bay. And in Hanoi’s old quarter where we stayed, the smells of Asia: fish, flowers, diesel, decay. But perhaps strongest are the images of a beautiful people, as coffee-colored as their strong, sweet Vietnamese coffee, who we so enjoyed as we sat on tiny stools in some narrow alley.

It was a country of many contrasts: a Communist government with a population of entrepreneurs. They are a resilient, courageous, hard-working and now hopeful people. I was touched by so many of their open hearts. It was a country easy to love.

— Kajira Wyn Berry, an Islander, is the author of recently published Everlasting Sky, a novel about the first empress of China.