Hàng Ngày

Well, Jeff and I have been in Hanoi for over a week now, and we have this running joke that the Old Quarter historic area of the city is the “twilight zone.” Why do we say this? The streets in the Old Quarter are a bit, well, tricky. First of all, their names change constantly, some at ever block, and all of the street names are related to the types of goods that were traditionally sold on that street. However, the goods these days don’t necessarily correspond to the street names anymore. For instance, you have Sugar Street, which primarily sells clothing, “Shoe Street,” which is home to many coffee vendors, and “Silver Street,” which is the main drag for many of the cheap tourist companies. These streets also twist and turn in interesting and fun ways, meaning only one thing: when you want to find something you’ll never find it, and when you aren’t looking for anything, you stumble upon many interesting sights and products. We like to say, for instance when walking by a cute coffee shop, “Oh, let’s remember this place!” and then burst into raucous laughter.

So, the other day we sent our students out into this mess to have a scavenger hunt. They had a list of 10 photographs to take and 20 things to do or find out about. Jeff and I took the opportunity to sit on a bench in the park and wait for them to walk by so we could snap pictures. While sitting here we had quite an interesting 30-minute conversation with a heroin addict. You just never know who you’re going to meet around Hoan Kiem Lake. This guy was my age, born in 1983, and apparently had been using drugs for 9 years. We couldn’t really tell which parts of his story were true and which were false: we figured the part about having many girlfriends from many different countries who supported his drug habit was not true. But a lot of his story seemed pretty legit: coming from a rich family, several siblings all addicted to drugs, now he’s in and out of rehab programs, and sells books, postcards, and knick-knacks on the street to earn enough money to support his expensive “medicine” as he called it. Apparently heroin costs 300,000-400,000 VND per gram. That’s about $20-28 US. My monthly salary is $100 US. Wow.

Another interesting twilight-zone type experience was had with our good friend Vinh, who used to work at the hotel where we stayed last August. Vinh is a year older than me, weighs about 100 pounds, and crosses the street without looking at all like he’s parting the red sea. We have been to a few parks, the zoo, and Vinh’s boarding house this week, where we cooked him spaghetti for lunch. Yesterday, we got a call from Vinh that he wanted to hang out, and met him after visiting the “Hanoi Hilton” with the students. We had cheap lunch and coffee, and then began our adventure. Vinh was taking us to Melinh Plaza: the biggest shopping mall in Hanoi. We were not quite as excited as him, but are always up for an adventure with Vinh.

We got on the bus. We went for quite a ways, until we were out in this area that seemed quite industrial and kind of like a wasteland, and then got off and…transferred to another bus which took us out into rice paddies, across the river, and apparently in the direction of the airport! We finally got off after a 30-minute ride and saw this giant trade-fair type plaza. The funniest part: to get there, we had to cross this ditch via a “monkey bridge,” the narrow bamboo-pole bridges that cross canals in Vietnam. What a juxtaposition of old and new.

Inside the shopping mall was everything you could ever imagine. We saw motorbikes, electronics, furniture–including a 250,000,000 VND one-of-a-kind carved wooden table/fountain. Crazy. We walked around, had a beer (only 5,000 VND for a Halida draught!) and then headed home. Who would have known the day would hold such interesting adventures…

Well, Jeff and I have been in Hanoi for almost a week now, preparing for the arrival of the summer volunteers…and today was the day we have both been waiting for. The 2007 VIA summer Teach in Hue volunteers have arrived! We got explore the Noi Bai airport for about 1.5 hours while waiting for them. They were almost the last people out of the customs area, because they decided to wait together for luggage and all come out as a group. Talk about group cohesion, it was great to see We then had a little excitement piling their enormous bags into our little clown bus (supposedly a 15-seater, yeah right) and we were on our way to the city through rice paddies and gigantic billboard advertisements.

After a quick meeting to distribute maps, itineraries, and business cards with our and the hotel’s phone number, they were off. We didn’t even really need to guide them: some went to get phones, others to mail postcards, and others just to explore the streets of the old quarter. A little anti-climactic, actually…what to do? Jeff and I went off for a cool glass of sugar cane juice. They seem like a cool bunch, and tomorrow we’ll see how tough they are with our Hanoi city scavenger hunt.

No one’s words could summarize it better than my dad’s

So, I have signed a contract directly with AGU to work part-time at the Center for Social Science Research until April. I will be working with some teachers in the English department, some people in the Center, and most importantly, some third year students, to set up a mentoring program between An Giang University students and students in the community who are at-risk of dropping out of school. There is so much potential in the energy of these students, and the students I have talked to about this program seem excited to give it a try. While setting up the program I will be evaluating its initial successes and then passing on the torch to one of the teachers at AGU (or better yet, one of the students!) to continue running the program in my absence. From here it is an uphill battle in terms of the technical requirements of submitting research proposals at AGU, getting approval, and getting buy-in and involvement and collaboration from the community. It feels right (today, ha!) I was not ready to leave AGU. I felt like there were so many threads left untied, and that my decision to leave back in March had been during a time of real difficulty for me on various fronts. Now I feel confident and comfortable to carry on this work, although I know it will be challenging. Hope to visit home in August and see all of my wonderful friends and family

I have been in Hue for four days now, checking out the city and making connections for the upcoming VIA summer program. I had intentions of spending most of the days wandering the city on my horribly rickety bicycle, but unfortunately, that plan came to a quick halt when I came down with some sort of head, throat, body ache illness. Tuesday morning I woke up and felt like a 90 year old woman who hasn’t taken her arthritis pills in weeks. I could barely move. Unfortunately, tuesday was one of my busiest days, meeting with the rector of the University of Foreign Languages, the head of the English Department, and a professor at the University of Agriculture to talk about the curriculum for the volunteers and potential educational excursions and opportunities for them to get involved. I tried to “rally” as my dad would say, and put on a smile for the meetings despite my pounding headache which made it difficult for me to hear myself and others speak.

So, just wait a day or two, I figured. I never get sick. This will pass, it’s just getting used to the weather here (even hotter than LX, although breezy with the river near by). However, when I woke up this morning still feeling under the weather I called my new best friend Loc in International Relations to come take me to the hospital.

We arrived at a small clinic that was absolutely packed with people waiting to see doctors. Of course, being the only person there with red hair and freckles, I was put in front of everyone in the line. Normally this would make me feel conflicted…but today I didn’t care. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. We asked for an English speaking doctor/nurse, and were called into a little private room. The woman pointed to a bed and I laid down while she used a stethascope on my chest, then had me sit up while she checked my breating from the back (by the way, for this procedure, as is standard, I had to raise my shirt up to my neck. They didn’t seem to care that Loc was in the room with us, although he was discreetly looking the other direction.)

Then came the diagnosis. After looking at my throat for about 3 seconds, she was finished and said “viem hong.” I couldn’t find this in the dictionary, and was told it meant “sore throat.” Hmm, seems like a fairly simple diagnosis, no checkin my temperature, no asking about other symptoms, nothing. So then comes the instructions for what to do. She starte telling me what kind of medication to take, etc. and I couldn’t figure out what language she was speaking, because it wasn’t English and it wasn’t Vietnamese…it was German! I don’t know if she was confused about my nationality (I’d told her I was American), or didn’t actually know English, but we then proceeded to have the check up and diagnosis in German. Lucky me I still remembered enough to understand what she was saying through her thick accent. I didn’t want to tell her the Vietnamese would probably be easier for both of us…but the communication ended up working just fine, and after 5 minutes I was on my way with an expensive bag of pills and liquid to take “zweimal, fruh, und am abend.”

So….just joking about leaving in two days. Well, I’m leaving to go to Hue. But I’ll be back again in September. More later. The May 31st New Yorker cartoon calendar page picture had some joke about “The Langmore Regional High School Inner Debate Team.” There were pictures of these lanky high school students curled up in huddles on the floor in the agony of their inner angst, self-doubt, and inability to make decisions. I thought it was funny, so put it on my door and crossed out “The Langmore Regional High School” and wrote instead, “The Recent Barnard Grad.” Vui, ha?

“Every party has its end.” And for me, the party in Long Xuyen is ending in about a week. This after months of going back and forth on the pros and cons of staying, finding ways to stay in various capacities outside of my traditional volunteer English teacher role, weighing my connections at home and the potential connections to develop here, considering what next year might look like if I stayed or left…my head has essentially been spinning with these questions since March, and in some ways I think it has made me think too much, and not just enjoy my time here. Such is life. Now I am in my final week here and I feel…dau kho (very very sad). Sad no only to leave people but also because I know, and they know, that I could stay if I really committed myself to this place and the ideas I have for projects that could happen next year. My choice is also a choice to not invest myself more deeply in this place, at least for now. I don’t know if other people see it that way, or if they just see me as another foreign volunteer, they will get two new ones in the fall, and that will be it. I don’t know if people feel the “disappointment” in me that I have in myself for not staying longer. I would expect not: students and teachers and friends have all been quite understanding of my need to return home for awhile, and even of my promise to come back here in the future (although I suspect they don’t necessarily believe that I will return). No one is angry, disappointed, bitter, etc. Some people are sad, I’m sure, but not any more so that I am. I guess the disappointment, the doubt is mostly on me, is mostly something that I feel in myself for not staying. But why? Why do I feel disappointed in myself for not staying and for not committing more of my time, energy, and life to this place right now? I’m not sure why. Maybe that is something that will come to me in the next week or so. I expect not For now, I’m trying to just enjoy my last week, get my things in order (including my brain!) and say “see you later” to the people who have become dear to me here: the people who have become my family and close friends in such a short period of time; the people who have taken me into their lives and who I’ve let into mine; the people who I hope to remain connected to in the future, and the real reason it is so hard to leave. That handful of people here, including some students, some friends, some teachers, have made my life here worth living and would make it possible for me to live here for a long time–maybe even forever if some of the students had it their way! And so the party will adjourn, but hopefully only for now, and will be continued at a later date and time…perhaps in another location, if my students get the scholarships they all so desire…or perhaps this is truly the end of the party and all that I am taking with me are pictures and unforgetable memories.