The An Hien communal house (Photo: Ngoc Anh/VOV5)

An Hien was honored as being imbued with Vietnamese cultural identity at a recent national conference.

Tran Quang Huy, Secretary of the hamlet’s Party cell and head of the hamlet’s Fatherland Front, says villagers have embraced the movement “All-people Solidarity in Building a Cultural Lifestyle".

“An Hien has been a role model as a cultural village and was recognized as the first cultural hamlet in the district. An Hien upheld the title ever since. One outstanding achievement is that we have no social evils,”  said Huy.

For an agricultural village, An Hien has a quite modern infrastructure. Its production areas have been moved far from its residential areas.

There is a stadium at the village’s center and its cultural house, graveyard, and library all meet new-style rural standards.

Villager Tran Quang Dien said roads have been decorated with flowers, houses have been numbered, alleys have been named, and posters promoting solidarity in building a cultural lifestyle and new-style rural area have been hung on the electric poles.

Dien told VOV that “The stadium was built using private donations of land. All village roads and alleys have been paved. Ponds, lakes, and sewers have been embanked, above which trees are planted. All the works was done from private donations. We have never had to launch a mobilization campaign. We just informed villagers via Facebook or loudspeakers and they contributed voluntarily.”

Dien attributed the achievement to the tradition of being united and took an example, “If any family in the village is in trouble, others are ready to come to their aid.”

An Hien has four people who earned doctorates abroad and the most people with bachelor degrees in Hoang Dieu commune and wants to preserve the tradition of solidarity to make it a hamlet of peace and good living.

A club for mindfulness meditation was established in An Hien, initially with 14 members. Now the club has 21 members.

Every evening village elders gather at the cultural house to practice mindfulness meditation. In the afternoon, they play sports.

There is a club for poetry lovers whose members often organize exchanges and performance program readings at village festivals, said Dang Xuan Toan.

“Our living conditions have improved. Roads and schools are clean. A library has been set up in the cultural house with more than 1,000 titles. It’s very crowded on weekends, when both children and old people gather there to read or borrow books for free,” said Toan.

An Hien has a team of enthusiastic and dynamic officials. A new hamlet project can be implemented only if all villagers agree to it.

Last year An Hien’s Party cell was one of two branches in Hoang Dieu commune to win the “Excellent performance” title, said Nguyen Van Hung, the hamlet chief.

According to Hung, “What people in An Hien want now is to develop the hamlet in line with the enhanced criteria for new-style rural areas. There are no longer any poor households here, except for four near-poor ones which will hoepfully be removed from the list this year. All villagers expect a per-capita income between 2,400 and 2,600 USD a year, soon to increase to 2,700 USD.”