Coming Home to Vietnam: Dr. Judith Ladinsky (1938-2012)
By Elizabeth Kemf
As we drove along a narrow road which sliced through miles of rice paddies, I had the uncanny feeling that I had been in Vietnam before…The warm dampness…the women standing ankle-deep among the paddies swinging water in hand woven baskets from one channel to the other seemed strangely familiar. I felt as if I had come home…
Elizabeth Kemf*, “Month of Pure Light: the regreening of Vietnam”
Street children in Ho Chi Minh City first told me about Dr. Judith Ladinsky in 1988, ten years after her sojourns to Vietnam began. Born in Los Angeles in 1938, she was 50 years old at the time. The children I had come to know in only three years of my work in Vietnam led me to her, a middle aged woman, perspiring heavily in the heat of the torrid mid-day sun. Her long gray naturally curly hair was pulled back from her soft round face and huge brown eyes veiled by her enormous clear glasses. She received me together with dozens of other people trying to talk to her. It was always like that for as long as I knew Judy. She was sought after and followed and taken care of wherever she went, from Madison, Wisconsin where she was a professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences in the University of Wisconsin Medical School for over 30 years and was director of the Office of International Health, to Vietnam where she was cherished like a national treasure.
In 1984 Judy became Chair of the Health Committee of the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam. She worked tirelessly to improve health and educational conditions for the Vietnamese people, until her death on 12 January, from stroke-related complications, less than two weeks before Tet, or the Vietnamese New Year of the Dragon. Judy was often invited to the homes of her friends on the eve of Tet, at midnight, to join in the last meal of the year and to be honored as the first guest, a gesture that guarantees the family good luck until the next lunar New Year.
Judy never missed Tet in Vietnam and traveled to the country, with which she fell deeply in love, on her first visit in 1980. During her 112+ sojourns to her adopted home she was accompanied by tons of medical supplies, books and journals, which she distributed with her Vietnamese colleagues to medical trainees and professionals throughout the dragon-shaped county. She explained that she raised funds for the country’s first mammogram machine, persuading a company to donate it. She also described the extreme care she had to take when transporting eyes – for the blind – in refrigerated containers, packed with ice. Sometimes when she was lucky the bags might be stored in the actual fridges on the plane during the duration of the long haul flights from Wisconsin to Vietnam.
Judy used to joke with me about a speech given during a banquet honoring her service to Vietnam. U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, Douglas “Pete” Peterson, remarked that he wasn’t really the Ambassador, because Judy was the “first U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam”. Judy’s work was honored officially several times. In 1999, Vietnamese President Tran Duc Luong recognized Judy for her work in science and technology, and in 2001 she was praised for her commitment to improving education. In 2004, the Vietnam's Ministry of Health awarded Judy a medal in recognition of her dedication to the health of the Vietnamese people. That same year, Judy was also acknowledged for supporting the training of Vietnam's women scientists. She did so much to help the country’s educational and medical systems – working across 12 time zones for well over thirty-three years – that she compromised her own health.
Judy suffered her first stroke in the 1990s but this did not prevent her from assisting with lab development, training medical technicians and surgeons, and teaching both in Vietnam and Wisconsin. She also led and personally administered a TOEFL Program throughout Vietnam twice a year in order to enable hundreds of students to get training unavailable in Vietnam.
Judy orchestrated assistance when it was not fashionable or politically correct to help the war-torn country after the US/Vietnam conflict ended in 1975. She tunneled through the bureaucracy, and her office at Madison was a hub of activity. She was constantly on the phone, engaged in conversation or at her computer writing fund proposals of letters of gratitude and reference, as she fostered cooperation between the erstwhile enemy countries. In her capacity as an affiliate with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin (UW) at Madison, Judy arranged for me to give a guest lecture in Madison. There, I met her devoted assistant, Dr. Nancy Volk, Associate Researcher, without whom she would have never been able to transport so many much-needed medical and educational supplies to Vietnam.
One afternoon when I entered her office I found her struggling under the weight of a platter of pulled roast pork, seasoned Vietnamese style. The students buzzed around the steaming piles of food and tucked into a free meal, which Judy not only provided at school but also in her home, where she held an open door policy to students and professors, especially from Vietnam.
Judy helped hundreds of students obtain visas to study in the U.S., notably graduate and medical students for whom she secured International Health rotations in order for them to gain hands-on experience in acquiring medical skills and to learn about global health issues. Since the early 1970s, Judy focused on community-based preventive medicine, with a link to rural clinics to centralized specialty care. The Village Health Worker (VHW) program was first taught in six provinces in northern Vietnam beginning in 1983, under the auspices of the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam, founded by Ed Cooperman.
She was applying this model in 21 villages with a population of around 15,000 ethnic minority rural people when I met her in the Central Highlands. Multi-disciplinary American health care workers, including Judy, trained physicians from Buon Me Thuot. The Vietnamese doctors then trained villagers who became primary and preventive health care givers. Each VHW was provided with materials, medicines and monthly supervision by the physician-supervisors. The health care component was complemented by an economic development project based on a system of small loans.
I sought Judy out as I was hoping the project could be expanded to help provide care for the villagers with whom I lived and worked, who could not afford bicycles or tractors, not to mention a 10 to 20 U.S. cent bus ride round trip to Ban Me Thuot. In 1999, I met Judy and another US medical doctor in Vietnam’s Central Highlands where I was carrying out my PhD research on Indochina’s Elephant Kings, the Bunong Budong (Mnong), Ede and Lao minority groups, in a village not far from the Cambodian border. The National Park of Yok Don, adjacent to the village of Ban Don, where I was partially based, lent us a jeep to travel to town to see the selfless doctor, and also lent one of its volunteer interpreter staff (a science student) to accompany us.
She and her team were staying in a modest hotel in Buon Me Thuot, the provincial capital of Dak Lak, known up until the late 1980s as the “town in the trees”. When I first visited Buon Me Thuot in 1988, there were four main streets, a hospital, a couple of guesthouses and the home of former Vietnamese Emperor, Bao Dai, where I was invited to stay. At the time, the settlement was surrounded by Ede villages, whose houses built on stilts were enveloped by thick stands of trees. Over ten years later in 1999, the town was losing its trees and tranquility. Luckily, Judy’s modest guesthouse was tucked back from a main street in a quiet area.
She and her colleague examined, free of charge, my local research leader, whose weight had dropped to 46 kilos. Like 25 percent of his fellow villagers, he was suffering from malnutrition and a number of other ailments. Judy concluded that he was on the verge of starvation. Years later, I married the malnourished patient, who regained his health, thanks to Judy. Late that evening, other patients were also waiting to be examined, even though it was well after most people’s bedtime.
Judy first went to Vietnam in 1980, and I in 1985, during an era when the country was recovering from decades of uninterrupted warfare, first with the French and then the US. At the time, the Vietnamese were filling in some 25 million bomb craters, removing – and dying from – unexploded munitions, rebuilding around 10 million homes, and rejuvenating 2.2 millions ha of forest and one fifth of the country’s farmland, lost as a direct result of mechanized land clearing, bombing, defoliation and napalm by U.S. and South Vietnamese troops.
Some people have said Judy was obsessed with the country and could not understand her zeal. The last time I spoke to her before she had a major stroke that confined her to a wheel chair, she told me she wanted to live in Vietnam permanently. Even a handful of the Vietnamese did not understand her, but I did. Our mutual unconditional love for the land and its people created a bond between us. I had a miscarriage in Vietnam in 1985, and it took three days and five vehicles to transport me from Cuc Phuong National Park to Hanoi for life-saving treatment. The people rallied around me, and a part of me always remains in Vietnam, in Cuc Phuong. Judy witnessed the environmental and health effects of the war 10 years earlier than I did, when conditions were much more challenging. We used to reminisce about the “old days” when vehicles broke down and the electricity failed; there was no heat, and often little food in the outlying areas. We recalled how the resilient the people were, and how they never failed their families, or us, whom they welcomed, like family. Judy lived the last nine months of her life in an assisted living facility. She had a sympathetic and kind caregiver, James. In Vietnam, the family is extended and the “assisted facility” is the home.
Judy was a facilitator and a caregiver personified. She enabled live-saving treatment of critically ill Vietnamese children in the US, moving mountains of red tape to ensure this happened. She donated her own life savings to ensure that children got medical care not available yet in Vietnam, and that the Vietnamese obtained the technology, training and equipment to take care of themselves. According to those who worked with Judy, “her achievements are too many to be listed. She changed many lives”. In October 2011 she received the prestigious 2011 Peacemaker of the Year Award from the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. http://www.wnpj.org/node/6128
The last time Judy and I spoke she and I dreamed of meeting in Vietnam in the springtime when she made one of her two annual migrations. I tried calling her earlier this week only to learn that she was in a coma, after a major stroke. I reached one of her caregivers, all of whom fell under the spell of her charm and grace. I asked if I could call his cell phone and if he could hold it near her ear so I could tell her that I loved her, and ask her not to leave us. He gave me the number of the nurses’ station and I made that request again, insisting that I was a family member. I felt she was, as so many did, my sister. I was told that she was gone. “Was anyone with her, I asked?” She replied that there were some Asians in the room and one other person. She was in the company of the extended family she loved so much.
She could not hear my voice, but I like so many others keep hearing hers, making me feel like the most important person in the world. That is how she made everyone around her feel. Nancy Volk wrote me and my husband to inform us that, “the end is near”. I replied: “I miss her voice”.
____________________________________________________________________
A memorial service to honor and celebrate Judy Ladinsky’s life will be held in the early spring, to be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory may be sent to: Madison Quakers, Inc. (Vietnam Project), 1112 Grant Street, Madison, WI 53711
Judy is survived by her sister, Nina; her husband, Jack; her daughter, Morissa; her son, Mark, and two grandchildren. For a recent photo: http://www.wnpj.org/node/6128?size=preview
*Dr. Elizabeth Kemf, author of Month of Pure Light: the regreening of Vietnam, on which several award-winning documentary films have been based, was a long-time friend of Judy Ladinsky. She has worked in Vietnam intermittently, since 1985, when the World Wildlife Fund awarded her a grant to carry out research on Vietnam’s National Conservation Strategy, which resulted in publication of the above book by the Women’s Press in the UK in 1990 and in Vietnamese, Tiet Thanh Minh, by Nha Xhuat Ban Phu Nu, Hanoi, 1992 and 2006.
