End of the first week

Warning, lengthy post ahead, I’ll wait while you grab a drink…

Well I’ve nearly finished my first week in Vietnam. I’ve made some good friends already, in 5 more weeks it’ll be hard to leave them. The family who owns the hotel I live in are very nice. The hotel itself has its ups and downs, but that is kind of part of the character of it. Electricity here is a transient being, unfortunately he decides to skip town during the hottest part of the day, and usually right as we’re pulling up from our morning of work. Just when we would love to sit in front of a fan and have a fruit shake, the electricity goes off, the place turns into a sauna, and fruit shakes are impossible without the blender. It’s been hard for me sometimes to connect to my loved ones back home, because without electricity, there goes the internet, but even so, I’m talking with them more than I expected. With the time being nearly opposite from home, as I’m coming back to the hotel for lunch, its midnight back home. Then when evening rolls around, the internet often goes to the same place electricity went in the afternoon. This has caused me to adopt a very odd sleeping pattern. I usually go to sleep around 9:30-10, and then start waking around midnight to see if the internet is back up, if its not, I’ll go back to sleep and wake nearly each hour until dawn. When I find it up, I’ll stay up for about an hour or so connecting with home, and then sleep a few more hours before I’m up at 6:00am. This sounds brutal, but surprisingly I’m handling it really well. I usually get a nap in the afternoons, provided we have electricity, sleeping without at least a fan is nearly impossible for me.

In terms of my experience here, it has been incredibly eye opening. The Vietnamese people are the hardest working people I’ve ever seen. The hardships that they take as a matter of course, most of us in America would leave the country over. The students at the center that I’m working at sleep two to a bed on basically a sheet of plywood, in a room that is quite long, with maybe one ceiling fan. There is no privacy. They have no refrigerator, no air conditioning, and one TV that is about 13 inches or so. Yet they seem very happy in life, and quite content with their situation. Another example is this younger guy that works at the hotel I’m living at. I woke up the other morning after not really being able to sleep very well, and decided I’d go downstairs to practice the guitar, an instrument I bought for 20 bucks if you can believe it. So I get downstairs and there’s this guy already at work, its 5am, and they don’t open until 7. I look over to the far wall, and there’s a bed made up across 6 chairs that he’s put together. That’s where he sleeps, that room is sweltering with no fans on, and of course he didn’t have any on. Since I was awake, I helped him prepare the restaurant, moving the motor bikes out onto the sidewalk, arranging the tables, mopping, etc. It turns out, he’s in school for international finance and works here when he’s not at school, and sleeps in the dining room. Can you believe it? He never complained once! I’ve got my interpreter on the lookout for a fold away cot, I’m going to hopefully make a gift of it to him before I leave. Hopefully it’ll help him get through school without a sore back. Another example are these very old women that walk the streets with a bamboo rod over one shoulder, and a basket or platform suspended from each end usually laden with produce, or some wares that they are hoping to sell. Women that old in the states are barely getting up from their soaps, let alone toting probably 40-50 lbs up and down the street in terribly hot weather. My respect goes out to the people of Vietnam.

The family that lives here has four children, which is a lot for Vietnam. Apparently, the man’s brother could not have kids, and so he picked up the slack for the family, at least that’s sort of how it was explained to me. In any case, the kids are 8, 5, 2, and one month. The 8 year old is completely enamored with me, and acts as if I’m a long lost friend every time I enter the hotel. She runs across the restaurant yelling my name and gives me the biggest hug, every day. Her name is Quynh. She’s also quite the photographer and makes her way around the camera better than I do. I’ve added a couple pics she took of me, I’m her favorite subject, lord knows why, as well as a picture of her. I have to admit, I like her a lot. Her little sister is 5 and has been a bit distant from me up until tonight when she warmed up a bit. Now, I have a feeling I’ll be getting two very large hugs each day I come back to the hotel, you won’t hear me complain about it, those kids warm my heart, and keep me from getting grumpy when I know I’m about to sit in the stale, humid heat, for another 4 hours.

In terms of the work I’m doing, its been both frustrating and encouraging. Encouraging because my students seem very eager to learn, and really seem to crave the knowledge we’re offering. They work extremely hard in mobility, often wanting to practice something again if they didn’t do the skill perfectly. They seem quite dedicated to making a difference.

The frustration comes in because they, they being the administration, do not inform us of events that are happening. Twice this week half the students have not been in class for various things, today it was entertaining a group of visiting Vietnamese from America. I eventually ended class 45 minutes early because I would just have to reteach it on Monday anyway. I was admittedly pretty frustrated. I really don’t like to have my teaching interrupted, especially when I’m finally getting the students to engage in discussion. That has been very difficult, they feel like questioning the teacher is disrespectful, and so are very reluctant to ask a question, even if I ask them for questions.

We’ve talked a good bit about disability in Vietnam this past week. The country still hasn’t undergone their version of civil rights. This is probably due to the fact that for the most part everyone is on even ground here; the women are probably harder working than the men, and seem pretty empowered. The group without a say, are those with disabilities. There are many with them, much of it coming from the Vietnam war and Agent Orange, which effects 3 generations of people. Kids born from grandparents in the war are still at risk for having birth defects. The country seems to take care of them, but they are sort of like lepers to the population. Here in Hue, they have a school for the blind with 60 students in it. Gabby, who’s blind, gets looked at like she has 3 heads for walking around with her cane. Due to this, I’ve begun to encourage the school to reach out into the community, and make them selves known. Many people here don’t even know they have this school, and I really think community support is the key to getting these kids working and having productive careers as members of the Vietnam society.

The tactic so far is to have the teachers, when they go out into the community to carry their canes with them. Canes are new by the way, the school had two when I got here, and Gabby had 20 she had donated from Thailand that she had not given to them yet. The idea behind carrying the cane out with them is to generate curiosity from the community and open the possibility of discussion with people about the school and to tell them what the cane means, so that they’ll hopefully be more cautious should they see the students on the roads. I’m hoping that this will at least work a little bit.

Another concept I’m trying to introduce is early intervention. This is where the child that is born with a visual impairment, or any disability actually, receives services as early as possible in his/her life so that skills can be taught in their natural order, rather than playing catch up when the child is someday brought to the center, sometimes as old as 12. This society is embarrassed of disability, and it is not uncommon for families to hide children with disabilities from their friends and communities, essentially making the child a kid in the closet. So when they do come to the school, sometimes they are quite scarred, and may not even talk. It is very sad. So if we can reach even one child born each year before this happens to them, this whole visit will have been more than worth the trouble. The students seem skeptical but are interested still in exploring the possibility. My real hope, is that out of this group of 20, a couple leaders will emerge, who will carry the school forward, even after we leave. In six weeks I won’t be able to change the world of this school too much, but I may be able to get the snowball rolling, and hopefully in a few years, it’ll be a totally different place, one where the kids are learning skills other than massage, making tooth picks, brooms, and chop sticks, and are looked at as contributing, valuable members of the community.

Here's a couple of Quynh's photos of me.

So that’s the news so far, there’s much more, but this is getting to be quite long, so I’ll stop it there for tonight. I’m putting up pictures on a picasa site, most of them won’t make it to the blog. If you are interested in looking through them, you can find them here: http://picasaweb.google.com/visionteacher. Thanks for reading, and keeping in touch, I love everyone and miss them very much.

~Mickey