Lily skills

The five dancers in this delicate water ballet are waist-deep in a hard day's work: Those spiraling skirts are really water lilies they're carefully rinsing and bundling for sale. Going back generations, women from communities around the Mekong Delta take part in the lily harvest each year. As southern Vietnam's rice fields flood and the plants proliferate, these workers pilot traditional wooden boats to gather lilies from the muddy shallows. The lilies fetch a price not only for their lovely blossoms of pink or white, but also for their stems, the key flavoring in a local sour soup.