The project: Capacity-building

Collaborating with local people and the provincial government

The girls, dressed in their intricately embroidered blouses and indigo blue hemp skirts, are busy down on their knees, concentrating hard as they carefully trace the thin wavy lines onto sheets of paper.

Across the room, the boys form their own huddle, and with fingers deft at whittling crossbows and arrows from forest hardwood, they skillfully cut out cardboard, following the fine lines traced by the girls.

Pots of paste and pieces of torn rice paper are strewn about the room, but despite appearances, these secondary school students are not in art class. Instead, they are up the hill at the headquarters of the nearby nature reserve, taking part in a unique exercise designed to involve local people in the management of the surrounding forests.

Using 3D models for better management
The students are helping to construct a 3D model of their commune, only the second time in Vietnam such a tool has been used in conservation. The construction of the model is one of the activities of the WWF Greater Mekong Programme's project, Management of Strategic Areas for Integrated Conservation (MOSAIC).

Its aim is to enhance the ability of the communities and authorities to manage local resources and conserve nature while still ensuring longer term social and economic benefits from the forest.

Conceptualizing their land with pins and yarns
"It's an amazing tool for extracting information from local people," says Le Van Lanh, secretary general of the Vietnam National Parks and Protected Areas Association, who is helping create the 3D model. He adds:

This is evident a few days later, when 70 people from 9 villages belonging to Tabhing commune, located within the 300 square kilometres depicted by the model, arrive to complete the work of the students.

They have no problem conceptualizing their land represented by the model and after determining the most important areas, set to with pins and pieces of yarn to mark the areas covered by natural forest, the location of the rice fields, pastures, grasslands, barren land, household gardens, and cinnamon plantations and where the hillsides have been slashed and burned.

"It was like opening up the floodgates," says, James Hardcastle, the project's conservationist.

With lengths of coloured yarn, the villagers, mostly Ka Tu people, lay down the roads, streams and dirt paths that run through their territory in the buffer zone just outside Song Thanh Nature Reserve. An array of bright beads and pins represent the local school, post office, graveyards, traditional long houses, uranium and gold mines and even the old helicopter pad, just one of the many remnants of the American war which still scar much of this landscape of central Vietnam.