2.2015 Encore

ENCORE A Guide to FulďŹ lling Senior Life in Whatcom County Wednesday February 18, 2015

Roger Van Dyken of Lynden has built a connection with a family in Vietnam, include daughter Bong, who is now 15. The eort is meant to reverse the enemy relationship of the Vietnam war, in which Van Dyken was involved.

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A supplement of the Lynden Tribune and Ferndale Record

Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

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YMCA to introduce line dancing class Instructor has life’s worth of dancing experience, once performed for Queen Elizabeth

By Cameron Van Til sports@lyndentribune.com

Louise Herring is still enthusiastic about dancing after a lifetime of doing it. (Courtesy photo)

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LYNDEN — Beginning in March, the Lynden YMCA will feature its firstever line dancing class.

And one would be hard-pressed to find an instructor with more dancing experience than the one who will be leading it.

Louise Herring, 77, has been dancing since age 9 and has delved into a wide variety of genres, including tap dancing, baton twirling, juggling fire, acrobatics, ballroom dancing and line dancing. Through these, she has been in the midst of some well-known groups and individuals.

As a teenager, before Queen Elizabeth was coronated in 1953, Herring

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Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

ENCORE performed for her in Vancouver, B.C. Also, Herring has served as the opening act for notable groups such as the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots.

In the 1960s, she helped teach ballroom dancing in Portland, Oregon with Arthur Murray, a famous dance instructor whose students included Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Duke of Windsor.

As for line dancing, Herring began about 10 years ago while living in Georgia, where the genre is very popular, she said.

During her time there, Herring not only performed, but choreographed line dances as well. In fact, 10 of the dances she’s choreographed have been featured on “Kickit,” an online archive of line dances that people from all over the world, literally, can learn.

“I’ve been so very fortunate to have had people call from Singapore, the U.K. and Florida,” Herring said. “It can be taught everywhere.”

Recently, Herring has been teaching line dancing as a volunteer to a small group at the Lynden Community Center on Friday afternoons.

She also led some line dancing during December’s Silver Sneakers’ Christmas party after Silver Sneakers instructor Karin Martin asked her if she’d be

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interested in doing so.

“It was fun,” Herring said. “And that’s kind of where the idea (of the class) came.”

Herring said that her YMCA class will start completely from scratch at the beginner level, so even individuals who’ve never line danced before will be able to participate.

But, as Herring explained, some participants may already be more familiar with line dancing than they know, thanks to some patterns Martin has taught them in the Silver Sneakers program.

And once one learns the lingo — “the vines, jazzbox and coaster steps,” for example — it’s just a matter of putting the basics together in different ways and routines, Herring said.

“It may be similar patterns, but it’s different orders and fits to different music,” Herring said. “There are so many good songs, and it’s good exercise, good cardio and good for the memory.”

And unlike most other forms of dancing, “you don’t have to have a partner,” Herring said.

The class will take place on Mondays from roughly 10:45 to 11:15 p.m., directly following the Silver Sneakers program.

Louise Herring got into line dancing only about 10 years ago while in Georgia. (Courtesy photo)

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Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

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Roger Van Dyken, Vietnam veteran, now befriends in former war zone Lynden man has been returning each year since first uncertain 2009 visit

By Calvin Bratt editor@lyndentribune.com

Roger and Marlene Van Dyken, far left, stand as part of a group of former U.S. Air Force “Misty” pilots and wives with a Vietnamese couple who had fought against them in the Vietnam War. The visit was in 2012. (Courtesy photo/Roger Van Dyken)

LYNDEN ­— Roger Van Dyken knew the physical features of this narrow neck of country from his service in the Vietnam War. As a 22-year-old intelligence officer for the U.S. Air Force back then, he had closely studied the lay of the land and its transport routes in order to direct bombing attacks.

Now he was entering that same northern part of Vietnam, over 40 years later, as an American civilian. He did not know what to expect, and he prayed for clarity and guidance.

The year was 2009. Van Dyken and Dr. Dean Echenberg, an Air Force surgeon in their war days, were on a train heading into former North Vietnam, the very Quang Bing province across the demilitarized zone which had been targeted for bombardment so many years before.

They came to Dong Hoi, the capital city of the province, needing a hotel to stay in. Over the next 24 hours, Van Dyken will say, the events that unfolded could only be considered divinely guided in giving him answers to his questions and a motivation that carries forward to the present.

The pair of travelers got a hotel where English was spoken. It turned out that the owner couple had also just recently started an NGO (non-governmental organization) to help the Vietnamese people, and they were eager to tell of its work and needs and

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Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

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to make connections with local leaders. The next day, a car and driver were arranged to take Van Dyken and Echenberg wherever they wanted to go.

“It just totally opened up,” Van Dyken remembers. “It was a phenomenal experience.”

Doors that he had hoped would be opened a crack were flung open wide. He began to get a picture of where he needed to be and what he might be able to do.

Returning for at least one month each year — he is there now in February 2015 with his wife, Marlene — Roger wants to help rebuild lives and hope in Vietnam. He is forging friendship with former enemies.

Personal connections The Vietnamese couple is Sy and his wife, Nga, who together have a daughter, Bong, now age 15, and a son, Bun, age 8.

The relationship with them has been lasting and productive — while also bringing pain from the past.

Already on the initial five-day visit, Van Dyken and Echenberg could see the effects of bombs released in the war. He knew of a north Vietnam transshipment spot that took advantage of a stretch of underground river and caves that is now a national park and a United Nations World Heritage Site.

It is beautiful country and could be “great for tourism,” although in war it was thought of simply as the Ho Chi Minh Trail See Van Dyken on C6

Roger Van Dyken, left, was in an Air Force intelligence unit gaining information for bombing runs when he was in Vietnam from October 1978 to October 1968. (Courtesy photo/Roger Van Dyken)

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Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

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Van Dyken: 'They want what America has to offer' Continued from C5 supply route.

When the fighting heated up in 1965, many North Vietnamese got away from the exposed lowlands and dug themselves into jungle and mountain hideouts with makeshift mud and bamboo huts — refugee camps in effect and all with their own bomb shelters, Van Dyken explained.

From later communication with Sy (pronounced “she”), Roger learned the story of three bombs striking right where the 5-year-old Vietnamese boy’s family and relatives were dug in. The bomb closest to them failed to go off, or they would all have been killed. Sy lost other relatives, however, and his father was involved in rescue, recovery and burial details.

“So Sy grew up hating Americans, from his perspective,” Van Dyken said. Without any larger grasp of political reasons, he wondered why a powerful country was bombing and killing in a small poor country. “Both of us have some ground to cover.”

Nga has stories of her own growing up poor and fatherless. But she feels a special link to Van Dyken in that her father, who died when she was a baby, would have been Roger’s age and both were boat captains — Van Dyken, of Lynden, is the owner of San Juan Sailing & Yachting of Bellingham.

There was a particularly poignant bonding of spirit in one year when the Van Dykens were allowed to be part of the Ho Van family’s Tet holiday celebration with Sy’s elderly father. Roger likened it to “inviting the enemy into your most special family event (and) he seated me at a place of honor.” The historical irony of it caused the father to weep, and to cling to Roger’s right arm.

“Something happened there at that moment,” Van Dyken said. “I learned a lesson in forgiveness from Sy’s father even though he is not a Christian.”

“Significant challenges” Finding ways to aid north Vietnam, still bearing many scars of its past, into a

better future poses “significant challenges,” Van Dyken said.

He has seen, in visits to Thailand and Cambodia and also in southern Vietnam, amazing progress being made as southeast Asia opens up to the possibilities of economic free enterprise (“doi moi”). Still, the old practices in local settings can be hard to crack.

He would like to implant ethical and humanitarian values in ways that can sustain businesses — somewhat in the networking style of Rotary or Chamber of Commerce.

The young people, in their education, are eager to learn and practice English, knowing it can be boost to their advancement. “They want what America has to offer,” Van Dyken said. "They want what we have, even though we were their former enemy.”

Sy and Nga represent a niche that is open to Western ideas and influence. As one small example, the Van Dykens were able to get the beds in the hotel made a little softer for foreigners than the hard pad the Vietnamese themselves prefer.

The couple’s NGO, in its early phases, was trying to bring clean water to a village, fund training for blind people and bring toilets to schools.

On this waterfront site of Dong Hoi, Van Dyken wants to see a children’s playground created. (Courtesy photo/Roger Van Dyken)

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Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

ENCORE Roger would like to promote methods of grassroots democracy — village or neighborhood people getting together to work through problems and needs, prioritizing and then organizing for or petitioning for improvement action.

He is open to new partnerships in NGOs, and one exciting possible goal is to create the first public playground for children in the province of 1 million, on the Dong Hoi waterfront. In Van Dyken’s ideal scenario, the park would be a gift from the pilots who bombed Vietnam in the war and it would be maintained in part by Vietnam’s own veterans of the war.

Veterans’ own healing Van Dyken did not really want to return to Vietnam in the first place.

Raised in California, he had finished college when he got pulled into the war as it scaled to its height in 1967 and 1968. “I was raised in a patriotic home and when the nation calls to war I felt it was my duty,” he said. He was attached to what was nicknamed the “Misty” (after their radio call sign) Forward Air Controllers jet fighter unit.

“I can’t say enough about the caliber of the pilots I was working with,” Van Dyken said.

Still, once his war duty was over, he didn’t want to think about it any more.

Roger married Marlene DeJong of Lynden and was a 42nd District state legislator for three terms.

Decades passed. It wasn’t until their oldest daughter, Aminta, and her husband adopted a Chinese girl, then taught at the university level in China and took furloughs in Thailand, that Roger began thinking more seriously about what duty he still might have in Vietnam.

He passed through the country briefly in 2007. “As I left Vietnam I had the strange feeling I was supposed to do something in one of these spots. I didn’t like the feeling. I did not want to deal with the ghosts of the past.”

He contacted some of his former war buddies, and that led to the door-opening trip of 2009.

In 2012 about a dozen of the Misty fighters went back to Vietnam and met with some of the North Vietnamese antiaircraft gunners who had tried to shoot them down.

“There were some very powerful moments. We had tried to kill each other and here we were meeting in peace and friendship,” Van Dyken said.

Also, a supreme commanding officer of the North Vietnamese had tea with the Misties. In fact, it was his idea that the children’s playground be built as “some visible symbol” of their shared goodwill now after once being enemies.

“That is my ultimate goal,” Van Dyken said. And he would like a plaque or monument to say: “May the children forever play in peace and know war no more.”

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Van Dyken stands with friend Sy’s father, who lost siblings in the Vietnam War. (Courtesy photo/Roger Van Dyken)

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Lynden Tribune | Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Ferndale Record

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New furniture arrives at Ferndale Senior Activity Center

New furniture is already proving its worth and popularity at the Ferndale Senior Activity Center. A lift chair was included in the package of items for the new lounge/media area. (Courtesy photo/Karma Wells, Ferndale Senior Activity Center)

By Mark Reimers news@ferndalerecord.com

FERNDALE — A new set of lounge furniture was delivered in December to the Ferndale Senior Activity Center, thanks to the combined contributions of the Lucky Seven Foundation, Samuel’s Furniture and Tulalip Quil Ceda Community.

The seating and reading areas of the Ferndale center have long been underused, said Lawana Chapman, treasurer of the Jet Oldsters of Ferndale Association. That’s partly because the meager furniture there happened to be old and difficult for seniors to use.

The old lounge chairs, for example, were much too low to the ground to be usable, Chapman said. Likewise, the

small “library” area was virtually empty.

The new lounge area includes firm yet comfortable chairs, including one lift chair, all with a new TV screen for media consumption. Likewise, the library has both new furnishing, chairs and a relaxed atmosphere, perfect for reading.

The Lucky Seven and Tulalip support was originally just a lump sum.

However, when Elie Samuel, owner of

Samuel’s Furniture, was approached to make the purchase and delivery, he volunteered to make up the difference and donate the rest of the needed furniture.

“We’re so fortunate to have these generous community partners contribute to the comfort and safety of our area seniors,” said senior center manager Karma Wells.

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