January 29, 2007 at 12:24 am (My Weekends in An Giang)
This weekend was Kristi’s (another VIA volunteer) 50th birthday party in Long My town, Hau Giang province, and all of the Mekong volunteers were in attendance. The trip started with a morning of bus rides; I decided to take the local bus to Can Tho to meet Tambi and Chioke. 3 buses and 2.5 hours later, I finally made it the 65 km from Long Xuyen to Can Tho. The bus to Long My is a little van that seats “15 people.” I was quite happy with my seat: only three people in my row! I should have known it was too good to be true. Almost the moment we pulled out of the bus station the old woman collecting the tickets waved down a passing xe om and a young guy got aboard and crowded into my seat. He then proceeded to have a long argument with the old woman, I believe about the fact that the xe om driver had told him a different price than he told the lady, so the kid was getting screwed out of a few thousand dong.
Long My was actually bigger than I thought. It does, as Jeff and Kristi said, really have about one main street that can be walked in about 10 minutes. We had coffee, lunch, and then went to the market, which was actually quite bustling. And oh, the stares. 10 times worse than in Long Xuyen: four foreign women, three of them quite tall (not me) walking through the market together on a Saturday afternoon. We were quite popular.
The party started for us around 4 pm, and the guests began arriving at 5 or so. We cooked food, had drinks and presents and got to know many of Jeff and Kristi’s friends and students. Jeff and Kristi work at a local NGO and most of their students are older than my university students, and many of them were doing really interesting work in the community. It was fun to just relax in someone’s home, yes, Jeff and Kristi have a HOUSE, with an apple tree out front and a nice garage-style door so the whole front of the house is open to the street. We slept on the floor with grass mats and pads and really cool tent-like mosquito nets. The ride back on Sunday was on Tyler’s motorbike, which was a totally different experience than the bus. We drove past endless stretches of small houses sitting on the side of the canal with rice paddies stretching behind them as far as the eye could see. I tried to take pictures, but don’t know if they really came out.
Despite Long My’s remote beauty, I think visiting made me realize I could never live somewhere like that. It’s SO small. Everyone knows everyone’s business all the time. I went to get coffee on Sunday morning and ran into three two people I’d met at the party the night before…but it was a lovely place to visit, good to see old friends, and fun to celebrate Kristi’s birthday in such high style!
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January 26, 2007 at 8:37 am (Uncategorized)
I have successfully set up an e-classroom for my second year students. And just now when I was on my way to the computer room for teachers to check my email, about 7 of them were in the library logging in and changing their passwords as I told them to. So, I got to spend about 20 minutes showing them the website, the links to fun activities, the pictures of their class that I posted, etc. It was great, and they seemed to catch on really easily and quickly, which was wonderful. I was worried they wouldn’t know how to use it. Who would have thought I’d become a tech-geek here in Vietnam, but using this thing is really cool and offers so many opportunities for me to share information with my students. I guess I always knew I was a huge nerd 
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January 17, 2007 at 1:51 am (Uncategorized)
This past weekend I discovered something amazing. I was out riding my bike, suffering the usual shouts of “hello!” and gaping stares from all around. I was getting frustrated with it. Sometimes it doesn’t bother me, but that day, I just couldn’t deal. So, I donned the face mask that sits in my bike basket, that is common for many Vietnamese women to wear to protect themselves from the sun. Lo and Behold, I became invisible! With the mask on, no one stared at me…no one even looked at me. The few people who did look at me and catch my eyes definitely showed that they knew I was something strange. But in passing, they did not have enough time to look twice. This opens up a new world for me in terms of places where I feel comfortable going on my bike. Tiny, rocky, windy countryside roads, watch out. My bicycle is coming through sometime soon. Mask and all.
The Masks
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January 15, 2007 at 5:09 am (Lessons that worked)
While all of you in the US were having a lovely day off work…we had no vacation here, and the day would have gone unnoticed by me were it not for my handy New Yorker desk calendar (thank you mom and dad). When I looked at the date this morning, I realized that this would be a potentially interesting listening lesson for my class and scrambled all morning to get an mp3 file and a transcript of the I Have a Dream speech and make discussion questions and listening activities. I told the students about segregation in the US, about the Civil Rights Movement, and about Dr. King. We listened to the speech (complete with crowd interjections, which the students thoroughly enjoyed) in class and I should have brought a camera to capture their faces. They were captivated! When we finished listening, I asked them how the speech made them feel. One girl said “nervous” and one of the boys said “shiver.” I know that listening to the speech is very powerful for me, but it was amazing to see that the students got the same feelings from listening, even though they didn’t understand clearly the whole meaning. I was reminded of last MLK day, at PS 125, where Ms. Sherman played the speech over the loud speaker for the whole school to hear, and she and Ann were getting teary-eyed while listening. It makes me realize how proud I am of being an Americna sometimes, and how far we still have to go before the ideal values of America will really become true.
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January 13, 2007 at 5:07 am (Uncategorized)
This Thursday I to to go with Eric’s second year class on an exciting tour of Long Xuyen City. 6D1 is studying the experimental curriculum that is being simulatneously taught at Eastern Mennonite University, in the US. In May, some EMU students will come to AGU, and so the second years wanted to take some pictures of the city to show their new friends in the US. This trip reminded me a lot of freshman orientation for Columbia Urban Experience, when we had a scavenger hunt of the city, were given a camera, a list of things to find, and an unlimited metrocard and told to come back in 6 hours. We went in a cavalcade of 8 motorbikes, which was quite annoying for others on the road, but fun for us. We went to such famous places as Uncle Ton Duc Thang’s statue (former president and revolutionary), the giant rice-stalk statue (emblematic of the new method of rice production that the famous Rector Xuan entrepreneured in the 1980s), and the An Giang Museum. I had to restrain myself from posing in front of a model canon while the students stood behind: a bit inappropriate, I realized. It was great to get to know some other students who I may be teaching next year, and to see what they thought was important in their city. Below are some of the pictures!
The Rice Stalk Statue near “Love Park.”
Students in front of the An Giang Museum
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January 8, 2007 at 12:18 am (Uncategorized)
When I go to Saigon on Thursday to get a visa to travel to China, I will also be getting a new pair of running shoes. This morning I went out for the usual 5 am run. It was quite chilly because it rained all day yesterday, and the air felt really nice. There was hardly anyone out, and I had the roads of the new subdivision virtually to myself. When I got to the part of the road where it’s not yet paved, I noticed my legs felt heavy, and I seemed to be spitting up more rocks behind me than usual. I stopped to walk for a few seconds, and after about 5 steps I realized that it smelled quite strongly of tar, and my feet seemed to be sinking into the road more than usual. At first I thought it was just muddy from the rain, but after a while I realized that I was not walking through mud, but instead through wet asphalt. Probably the road builders had paved the road the day before, but neglected to seal it, and when the rain began, they just decided to knock off work for the rest of the day and leave their job half finished. They also neglected to put any sign on the road stating “warning, road construction, wet asphalt, don’t enter” or anything like that. So, after getting back to the part of the road that is paved, I had about 2 inches of asphalt on each shoe. I tried to scrape some of it off and keep going, but my feet were really heavy and a bit uneven, as I was carrying my own road on my shoes in addition to the road I was running on. I was able to scrape some of it off with a stick when I got home, but some of it was already beginning to set on my shoes, and I couldn’t really get them very clean: still uneven chunks of road on each shoe. I also got eaten alive by mosquitos while sitting trying to clean the road off of my shoes, and now will probably catch denque fever or malaria or some other gross and painful disease. All thanks to the shoddy mess they call road construction here.
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January 7, 2007 at 8:49 am (My Weekends in An Giang)
Tiger Island is a small island in the middle of the Hau river (the river that runs past Long Xuyen). This is the birthplace of Ton Duc Thang, Uncle Ton as he is fondly known by the Vietnamese people. He is famous for some sort of military or patriotic venture…I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really remember exactly what…but there is a large museum on the island next to his original house. Jenna, Phil, their kids Kalla and Aspen, and I decided to take an afternoon bikeride around the island because of the unseasonably cool (70 degrees and cloudy) weather.
We took the ten minute ferry across the river and it was like going back in time 50 years or so. All of the bustle of Long Xuyen (such as it is) was lost in that short passage across the water, and we found ourselves on one narrow (although paved) road down the center of the island. We rode past small bamboo-pole huts, fields of soybeans, children, dogs, chickens, ducks, oxen, and rice paddies. The beautiful green that I have tried to describe in writing before (and failed miserably) was all around us. We were swimming in a sea of vibrant green peppered with distant specks of conical hats bobbing up and down in the fields. I realized on this trip just how easy I have it being only a young, single woman foreigner in Vietnam. I have generally gotten used to the stares and gasps under people’s breath of “so beautiful!” “so white!” and “foreigner!” But this was nothing compared to the reception that Jenna and Phil’s kids get. Four year old Kalla and two year old Aspen are even paler than me (family, if you remember me at age 4, like that) and have this lovely strawberry-blond hair. People see those kids and literally jump into the middle of the road yelling “stop!” to Jenna and Phil’s passing bicycles. This happened twice yesterday, and I was shocked that these two adults tried to keep groups of middle aged Vietnamese women and children from pinching and poking their children to death. Personal space is a bit different here, and so putting your hands all over someone else’s children is completely normal, even if that person is an absolute stranger. I got a whole new perspective of the “feeling foreign” phenomenon, and am thankful that I am not so young and generally have the ability to get out of such situations.
However, there are times when I feel like I am being used simply as an English resource, even by friends. Today I felt particularly crappy in this way: I feel sometimes as if people see me as more of an English machine than a person. Sometimes it feels like people don’t understand I have feelings, I get lonely, I get annoyed, I get tired, and sometimes, yes sometimes, I don’t WANT to practice English with them! I explained this to one of my students and friends this afternoon after he helped me get out of a sticky situation. He didn’t understand why I am not willing to practice English with absolutley anyone who comes along, regardless of who it is. It took me a while to explain to him this feeling of being exploited by people. But there came a moment when it seemed like he really got it; he paused, sat back and said “I learned something new today.” Maybe learning this fact: that foreigners too are human, with faults and weaknesses and limits, is more important than the English I will teach him in class tomorrow afternoon.
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January 5, 2007 at 9:24 am (Uncategorized)
Yesterday my friend Trang asked me if I wanted to come over and learn how to make Vietnamese spring rolls. Although I had already studied this dish and in fact have made them on my own, I didn’t tell her, because it’s always fun to re-learn these techniques from the pros 
I went to her husband’s house and met her mother in law and adorable two year old son. After we spent about 40 minutes rolling spring rolls, there was a rush to change clothes and get out the door–I didn’t know why. When we were speeding down the dirt road on her motorbike, Trang’s son in my lap (so cute!!) she asked me if I’d ever been to a death anniversary. I said no. I should have known this was the clue to where we were going…about 20 minutes later we showed up at a large house where we went to the back and joined a group of mostly old women. They were all busy preparing lots of food for the party.
So, a death anniversary is basically the same deal as a wedding, I found out. This was the one year death anniversary of Trang’s great uncle’s death. The only major difference is that everyone must go to the family altar at some point during the celebration and bow and pray to the ancestor who passed away. There are also a lot of offerings from the meal placed on the altar. The food was delicious: homemade instead of the typical wedding catered fare. I ate way too much. The grave was out in the back of the house, with a giant memorial above ground that looked like a tomb, although apparently the body was indeed buried in the ground. I met a lot of old women who were difficult to understand, but they were very friendly nonetheless. I was a bit bothered that the women sat separate from the men, and in the back of the house while the men sat outside in the cool air and drank beer. Gender stuff never ceases to irk me here. You’d think I would get used to it…
On an unrelated note, I learned the name for what I have been calling a “dinosaur bug.” It’s called ‘con dê nhũi.’ So at least my langauge skills are improving a little bit.
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