Caught up in her own crucial teen years in Maple Grove, Marianne Smallwood—like many kids—didn’t know a lot about her parents’ own childhoods. That changed a few years ago when she visited her father Paul’s native Vietnam and the fishing village in the Phillipines where her mother, Anita, grew up.
Seeing the poverty and developing prosperity of Southeast Asia was an eye-opening experience for Smallwood, one that has led her to dedicate her professional life to making existence better in developing nations. Earlier this year, Smallwood finished a Fulbright Scholarship in Hanoi, where she spent 10 months interviewing impoverished street-vendors and compiling an anecdotal study on their lives, relevant causes and suggestions for government policy-makers.

To Vietnam, with Love

Smallwood, a 27-year-old Osseo High School grad, got her first glimpse of the developing world when she visited the Republic of the Philippines with her parents, two brothers and extended family eight years ago. She spent much of 2003 as a University of Minnesota student in Hong Kong. After graduating, she returned to Vietnam, spending time there off-and-on since June 2006 and culminating in her street vendor study last year. (One tidbit from her research: 93 percent of Hanoi’s street vendors are women.)

“My brothers and I were very fortunate to be raised in the U.S.,” she says. “We didn’t know much about where our parents came from. We had never experienced firsthand the poverty of a third-world country. But, when I was speaking to [the study subjects], it all started coming together.”

Soon after graduating from the U of M, Smallwood took a job with General Mills as a business management associate. Eventually, the “pull” of her third-world dream led her to resign after two years to return to school. She started looking for opportunities to work and study in Vietnam. Through the Princeton (University) in Asia program, she found a one-year position as a systems development officer with ChildFund, a non-government organization (NGO).

In September 2007, she applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to continue working within an NGO and was accepted in April 2008. Hanoi has an estimated 15,000 mobile street vendors, which represents “not just 15,000 individuals, but 15,000 families,” Smallwood points out. “They have to be separated from their families for months at a time.” Smallwood was saddened by the realization that “the vendors’ lives seem pretty cyclical, and it doesn’t seem like anything will change; they are so used to a particular lifestyle.” The socialist government has implemented policies to “phase out” vendors and limit where they can work, making their lives even more difficult. Smallwood hopes her report can be a tool for positive change.

Smallwood recently began a two-year graduate program in international development at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts. Her goal is to find a position that combines private sector work and humanitarian aid, either in Southeast Asia or West Africa.