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Outlook: Agent Orange: A Vietnamese grandmother's last battle

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Tran To Nga at a press conference

12/10/2021 GMT

Agent Orange: A Vietnamese grandmother's last battle

BBC World Service - Outlook, Agent Orange: A Vietnamese grandmother's last battle

Tran To Nga is fighting to get compensation for victims of the toxic herbicide

Grandmother Tran To Nga was sprayed with Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. She wants recognition of the health problems she and subsequent generations have suffered.

When Tran To Nga was growing up in Vietnam during the 1950s, she had a close relationship with her mother - an important figure in the resistance movement against the regime of South Vietnam. During the Vietnam war, mother and daughter grew even closer, both fighting for the resistance in the depths of the jungle. It was at this time that Nga was sprayed with Agent Orange - a toxic defoliant used by the US military to strip away the leafy canopy of the trees and expose their enemies hiding beneath it. Two years later, her first daughter was born with severe health issues and died, and Nga is battling serious illnesses herself, which she believes are a result of her contact with Agent Orange. She tells Emily Webb about her fight to get compensation for the survivors of Agent Orange, and about her decades-long search for her mother who disappeared in 1966. Nga's story is featured in a documentary called The People vs Agent Orange. 

25 years ago a group of musicians in their 60s, 70s, and 80s came together to create an album that would become a sensation. The Buena Vista Social Club was a collection of decades-old Cuban songs and was named after a long-defunct club in Havana where musicians once gathered. It became an unexpected triumph, leading to concerts around the world. Outlook's Clayton Conn has been to meet Eduardo Llerenas - a Mexican musicologist without whom it might never have happened. This story was first broadcast in November 2017.

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com

Picture: Tran To Nga
Credit: Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images

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