Under the hot afternoon sun, a man wearing an old green T-shirt stands on an irrigation dam, looking down at a stream flowing through the hybrid rice fields.

Now, at 57, Ho Lay looks much younger than his age, still strong and quick on his feet. With his sun-tanned skin and a tobacco pipe in his mouth, he can be easily recognised as a Van Kieu man.

But it is no one’s guess that Lay is the chief of Khe Khe, a village inhabited by the Van Kieu ethnic minority people in Kim Thuy commune, Le Thuy district in the central province of Quang Binh.

When he was 20 years old, Lay was elected secretary of the commune’s Communist Youth Union.

At that time, his Van Kieu community was a cluster of 15 households, living in a small village deep in the jungle, called Tram Doong, close to the Vietnam-Laos border and 15km from the present-day commune’s centre. They led a poor nomadic life by slashing and burning trees, clearing land for farming and hunting for wild animals.

Lay wondered why his villagers had to live as nomads, while eight other villages in the commune had been living outside the forest for many years.

He told the villagers that they should move out of the jungle so they could live a sedentary farm life and improve their standard of living.

“What I was asking them to do was not walk in the park,” he recalls. “This would break our customs of slashing and burning and hunting for wild game.”

At that time, nobody believed that this was a good idea. Lay kept persuading them patiently until one day the villagers told him “all hands to the pump now.”

Early one morning, Lay left the village, taking with him a bag of rice grain, some salt, and a bush-hook. He then headed towards a local stream named Khe Khe.

“Since we want to settle down, we must grow wet rice at any cost. We need to waken the Khe Khe stream that has slept for thousands of years,” he says.

Between September 1994 and February 1995, with his strong will, Lay succeeded in living off a 15-ha farm. On it, he built a stable to keep pigs, goats and cows that was surrounded by orchard gardens and rice paddies.

When he returned to Tram Doong village, he told the other villagers, “Changing from bush-hooks and axes to ploughs and hoes would be like a revolution, and we could earn VND10 million a year from this model.”

Following Lay’s advice, all 15 households in Tram Doong and 12 other families from two nearby villages, moved to Khe Khe and formed a new village there in 1995-96.

Right after they set foot in the area Lay invited all of them to a meeting to explain that settling for a village and farm life means every family must have orchards, wet rice paddies, and a stable to keep livestock. Then he led them on a tour of his model farm.

With the passage of time the villagers have gradually come to realise that “Lay always lives up to what he said and what he has done is all for the good of the community.”

A few years ago, they joined hands with his family to build a dam on the Khe Khe stream. After two months of hard work, the Khe Khe stream came to life like Sleeping Beauty awakening after thousands of years of inactivity.

By 2000, the newly reclaimed area in Khe Khe had expanded to 8 ha and, with the financial assistance of district authorities, the dam continued to be reinforced year after year. Now it is capable of supplying water to 8 ha of wet rice that yield an output of 2.65 tonnes per ha.

As the total rice produce is only enough to feed about 70 percent of his community, Ho Lay has taught the villagers the techniques of growing cassava and potatoes, and raising chickens, pigs and cattle to make their lives ever more comfortable.

In recognition of his contributions to the Van Kieu community, Ho Lay has been awarded a “Medal for the Young Generation” and a certificate of merit for good production methods by the Vietnam Fatherland Front and the Vietnam Farmers’ Association, respectively.

“Ho Lay is the pride of the local Van Kieu community,” says the communal Party secretary, Phan Van Viet.

“Partly thanks to his contributions, the new settlement of Khe Khe has been recognised as the most successful village and farm model in Quang Binh province.”