Wednesday, June 28, 2006: Slow Down!

Wow—time is going so fast! There’s so much I have wanted to write about for the past two weeks and I haven’t had any time to say all the things I’ve wanted to say! There’s my continuing fruitless struggle with the Vietnamese language, up to twenty ours a week of teaching at the Ho Chi Minh City Hospitality School for Disadvantaged Children, lesson planning (I have a new appreciation for teachers—planning for 20 hours of teaching takes almost as long as the actual teaching!), our Vietnam culture and politics class, spending time with my roommate who wants to know everything he can about American culture and whom I’m barraging with queries about everything possible to know about the Vietnamese culture, and even the occasional night out. Phew—I’m getting tired just thinking about it all! My last entries have been more extended musings, and Amanda has warned me that they are becoming very “David-like.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’ll try to limit further ramblings. We actually haven’t had a whole lot of time for sightseeing, so that should be easy!
To begin, a few friends have asked what learning Vietnamese has been like and if I could share a few words. I’m sorry to say that there will be no Evan-style “Guide to Vietnamese in one short blog entry.” I’m not sure that even someone really good at the language could explain the six tones and how to apply them. My phrasebook describes the “broken, low-rising tone” as “Voice starts low and abruptly rises high, broken by a glottal stop.” If that means anything to you, I’ll give you anything to take my place in class. Authors love to offer little antidotes of what can happen with Vietnamese if you screw up your tones; one of my favorites, (appearing here without the tone marks that my computer can’t do, so ultimately meaningless) is the line, “ba ban ban biu ban bon ban ban.” All of the bas and bans sound different, and if every tone is correct this would mean that “three busy friends were selling four dirty tables.” (Granted, you’d probably never need a statement like this, but it’s fun to use). David Lamb writes how when Robert McNamara was speaking at the National Cathedral in Saigon during the war he intended to say “Long live South Vietnam.” He missed the tones and it came out as, “The Southern duck wants to lie down.” The tones become particularly annoying in cases like fruits, where four different fruits are the word “dua.” Use the wrong tone and your juice or snack will be very wrong.
So, needless to say, I’ve banished any illusions of being conversational. However, with hours of struggling, I can now bargain in the market, order food, talk to my taxi driver, or carry on a bit of small talk conversation all without resorting to English. It is a lot of fun to try to speak Vietnamese, and the people love you for your effort. I am corrected endlessly, and even if I can’t hear the difference between the corrected version and my original version, I smile and pretend.
The sightseeing we’ve done so far in the city has been largely war-related. Here, the Vietnam-American War is called the American War and was just one part of a much longer conflict between the French, and a civil war between the Communist Northern Vietnamese and the Southern Vietnam Army. We’ll be studying the war a lot more as the trip goes on, as we spend several weeks in Ben Tre, the village the Americans completely wiped out with the famous line, “To save the village, we must destroy the village,” and My Lai, in the Central Region, where the infamous massacre of the elderly, women, and children took place. I’ll save most reflection until I learn more, but I want to write down a few observations while they are fresh.
One of the most popular attractions in Ho Chi Minh City is the War Remnants Museum, a museum dedicated to remembering the atrocities committed by the Americans. I knew going into the museum that I was in for some propaganda, but it didn’t do much to dull the pangs of guilt I felt seeing pictures of bombed schools, churches, and hospitals from the war. There is a graphic display of the affects of Agent Orange, the defoliant that the Americans used to kill the vegetation in the countryside in an attempt to reveal the entrances to the tunnels that the Viet Cong were using as their underground bases. It’s unclear if the administration knew of the very, very toxic nature of Agent Orange, but its affects were devastating. There were walls with pictures of horribly maimed adults and crippled children that looked like some sort of horrible joke. In one particularly chilling exhibit, two jars featured pickled human fetuses that were hideously deformed, almost beyond recognition.
Of course not all the atrocities during the war can be attributed to the Americans. In fact, there was a mock prison camp set up on the museum grounds that was run by the South Vietnamese Army and featured all sorts of terrible torture. Yet, the bulk of the large-scale devastation was caused by the Americans. As I walked through the museum, I kept feeling a voice tell me that “my country did that.” Just a week ago we were at Cambodia’s Killing Fields, remarking how the cruelties under Pol Pot’s regimes seemed inhuman, and here were similar atrocities committed by American soldiers.
The museum was filled with Vietnamese and non-American Westerners, and for the first time since I arrived in a country that for the past several decades as been a bitter enemy, I felt the invisible stares of those around me. I don’t actually know if people were staring—maybe I just wanted them to. I felt like every single Vietnamese person had a right to hate me forever after seeing what my country had done to their nation. But, I wondered, what responsibility do I really have for America’s actions nearly 20 years before I was born? I decided to directly ask my roommate what he thought—did most Vietnamese people today still blame the Americans? Was there any anger or resentment towards me, even deep down?
The response I got was immediate, direct, genuine, and surprisingly poignant in its simplicity. Quy said that “That is the past, ancient times, not now.” “But don’t you blame Americans some for destroying the country?” He said that people didn’t think about it that way. Now the countries were working together, and that was what mattered. This is a sentiment that has been echoed so far by everyone we have met. I’ve talked to someone who fought with the Americans and heard from those who were ardent Communist supporters all along. The answer has always been that now is what is important. I don’t yet understand how such forgiveness is possible—is it really based on a need for economic cooperation or assistance? Is it based out of a stronger character than we have in America, where we are known for holding grudges for lifetimes? Somehow I think it is closer to the latter, as the Vietnamese are fiercely independent and don’t want to be dependent on anyone, politically or economically. I really don’t understand this yet though, and hopefully I can think and write more about it as we go on.
The second war sight we visited was the famous Cu Chi tunnels. The sight has a war memorial very similar to our Vietnam Wall. It was quite odd visiting the “enemy’s” version of what is such a hallowed sight in our country, but it was a powerful reminder that at the end of the day, everyone fighting was just a person, and it didn’t matter what color the dead soldier’s skin was---that death was going to have a huge destructive impact on an entire family, and who knows what potential was lost?
The sight is sort of the center to hundreds of miles of tunnels located north of Saigon where the Viet Cong army lived, worked, fought, cooked, slept, kept hospitals, armories, weapon factories, and command centers, all underground. Our tour began with the most blatant propaganda film possible about the “evil Americans” and their terrible misdeeds, as they bombed and destroyed young, innocent children, on purpose. There was graphic footage, carefully selected, to only show American soldiers beating up the innocent. The propaganda was painful, but the weirdest part of the presentation was that we were watching with our Vietnamese roommates. No one really said anything about the film afterwards, as the Vietnamese again demonstrated their tact, but those weird feeling of guilt returned for me.
We spent the next hour climbing into the tunnels and exploring the narrow, endless passageways. Even rebuilt to accommodate the larger frame of Westerners, we could barely fit in. I have a great picture of squeezing into an original opening and looking like I am being swallowed up by the earth. After just a few minutes of crawling around I was exhausted, but there were times when the North Vietnamese had to stay in the tunnels for weeks without surfacing. The air was hot and stale, and just the general claustrophobia of knowing that you can’t get out without risking getting stuck every second (or during the war, shot and killed) would be enough to drive anyone crazy. As we wandered through the swamp to tunnels with entrances concealed so cleverly that I couldn’t find them standing right on top of them and as we heard about the patience and determination of the Vietnamese people, there was no doubt to me why we had lost the war. There’s no way Americans could match the shrewd, small Vietnamese men and women who somehow managed to use the tunnels to be everywhere all the time. It is impossible to describe how amazing these tunnels are and I really have no idea how it could be possible to live underground for so long. Regardless, I now see very clearly why we lost the war. What I don’t understand yet is what we were doing there in the first place. Again, hopefully I’ll learn more and have lots to report later in the summer.
Our trip to the tunnels was paired with a visit to the Cao Dai Holy See at Tay Nin. This was definitely one of the oddest sites I have seen. Cao Dai is an indigenous faith in Vietnam that gained popularity in the time of Civil conflict between the North and the South because of its general preachings of tolerance and inclusion. The premises, though, at least to this uninformed Westerner, seem borderline religious. In order to be inclusive, the religion includes several levels of deities; its highest platforms include Moses, Christ, and Confucius together, while spirit intermediaries include Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon Bonaparte. There were a host of other upper and lower level deities that seemed like they were picked at random from a history book or People Magazine. I think this is evidence that in an effort to include so much that no one could feel left out, you reach the ridiculous quite quickly. The temple of the Cao Dai is an elaborately constructed, brightly colored, huge church, filled with symbols, diagrams, numerology, and statues of deities. The main symbol is a giant left eye, plastered all over the inside and the outside of the building. At the center of the church is a giant globe; at one time the believers got caught smuggling heavy weaponry into the globe via caskets for funeral ceremonies and it turned out they were planning a rebellion. The group sought to generate support for a third faction in the war, supporting independence without the Americans or Communism and since then has been looking for ways to fight. Now the government keeps a very, very close eye on the group, even confirming their highest leaders. We watched the daily prayer ceremony, replete with gongs, bright robes, various bows, marches, and gestures, and endless prayers set to loud, buzzing, traditional Vietnamese music that became quite painful to stand after just a few minutes.
We spent last weekend traveling to Pan Thiet beach with our roommates for a bonding weekend of “fun in the sun.” It really was a blast—we exchanged American and Vietnamese beach and hang-out activities and spent lots of time swimming and lounging together. Our first night we stayed in a very traditional Vietnamese campground, sleeping on mats in tents. The campground did most of the work for us though, pitching tents for us on a covered concrete slab. After a long drive through Friday rush-hour traffic from the city, we got to our campground, had dinner, and then had a huge bonfire (as an alternative to the noisy karaoke taking place at all the other campsites). There were campgrounds lining the beach strip for about a mile and we were the only white people around. It was the first time our roommates had had smores, but to procure the supplies Scott went to every grocery store in the city and then ended up paying about $4 USD for each bag of marshmallows. Well worth it though!
We awoke on Saturday morning to a beach teaming with life. I’ve never seen such a mixture of commerce and recreation, coexisting in a noisy, frenetic, fun and industrious atmosphere. The “festivities” started early, with jet ski engines revving right outside our tents at about 5:30 am. Vietnamese consider light skin beautiful, and thus try to swim early (about 5:30-9:30am) and late (about 5-8 pm) but not during the heat of the day. I was a bit in shock to learn this though, when the noise, light, and my roommate all insisted that I get up at 6:00 to experience the morning. However, there was so much to see! I went for a stroll along the beach and found hundreds of children and families already out swimming, building sandcastles, burying each other in the sand, and splashing water all over the place. At the same time, fishermen were paddling their round bucket-like basket-boats into the shore with full nets to empty. When these boats are out, it really does look like someone is splashing around in an oversized bucket, and apparently if you don’t know what you are doing, you’ll just spin around in circles and not go anywhere. These guys, though, really zoom around, and the nets they were emptying had hundreds and hundreds of crabs, shrimps, scallops, fish, and squid. Women were waiting by the nets to begin peeling the catch out and into waiting basins, where they painstakingly cleaned, strained, sorted, and organized until they had the most beautiful looking displays of seafood I had ever seen. Much of the catch was then somehow taken to be sold around the city and country. Pan Thiet is also the fish-sauce capitol of the world. Fish sauce, the orange, salty sauce that is standard on every table with every meal like soy sauce in China, is made here by pressing fish into an oil and then letting it ferment in huge clay pots. The stench from the fermenting areas is overpowering, but the sauce is delicious.
For a lot of the fresh fish, before the animals were even fully limp, teams of women were waiting with giant kettles and small charcoal pots to turn the catch into soups, stews, boiled or steamed specialties, or hearty breakfasts served on the sand. While we were eating our eggs and bread, a woman walked by with a yoke filled with buckets of scallops. We ordered a kilogram and she promptly set up a charcoal pot and a few minutes later, I was swallowing the sweetest scallops ever, that just fifteen minutes ago had been in the ocean.
Also along the beach I noticed a cluster of little stands selling beautiful carvings out of the shells that had washed up on the beach. There were some cheap-looking machine produced objects, and then there were elaborate, beautiful creations. As many of you know, I’ve been researching the different kinds of local art, and this seemed like a really interesting case study. There are no other western tourists, so the art may be produced for tourists, but they are Vietnamese tourists. However, the objects in the stands along the beach are mostly the handicraft variety—relatively cheap knick-knacks that make nice home decorations. I’d be interested to see if there is an up-market version of these shell creations, and if so, where and how are the objects sold. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to study this in the future.
We had a blast on Saturday on the beach. Pan Thiet has some huge sand dunes, and we went climbing and rented sleds from the local children to zoom our way down. There were some pretty exciting hills. One of the little boys led me to a summit and said, “This one very big, very dangerous. Maybe die.” Hmm… He was right! We careened down the sandy mountain until we were tossed high into the air by a sandy bump. We found one sledding run that dropped straight into a lake, and after we had taken the plunge we entertained the local children by tossing them into the water and giving piggy-back rides. I never thought sand could offer such a rush!
Our second night on the beach we actually stayed at a nice Western resort, and we finished out the weekend with some hiking and a lot of lounging in hammocks, beach chairs, in the bathtub-like ocean (albeit, a rather trashy bathtub), and at the pool-side bar. What a nice respite from the city before we headed back for our last few days in Saigon prior to our Central Region study tour.
The final event to write about would be yesterday’s field trip to the American consulate, where we had a briefing with the American Deputy Consulate General and the chief economic, political, immigration, and diplomacy officers. I knew that embassy and consulate offices were technically the property of the represented country, but it was a little odd to be told that we were sitting on American soil in the middle of Ho Chi Minh City. However, from the presentations and attitudes in the briefing, I felt a lot closer to Washington D.C. than anything I had experienced in Vietnam. Here, for the first time, I was hearing everything about Vietnam from a US perspective. Ideas were generally phrased as “Here is what Vietnam needs to do for their best interest,” but I wasn’t totally convinced that this didn’t mean, “Here is what Vietnam needs to do for our self-interest.” However, even if the latter is true, it isn’t necessarily wrong—after all, isn’t the roll of the embassy to represent the goals of the United States? If the assistance can be provided in a non-hegemonic, genuinely useful, flexible manner, there is no question that the US has an amazing amount of tools and resources that can make a big difference in Vietnam’s development.
Sitting in the briefing room, I had repeated flashbacks to past internships with the Federal Government. There is so much tangible excitement—the real feeling that change is happening and a difference is being made that can impact the US and the World for years to come. It was such a contrast to watching Richard, the director of the French NGO I’m working with, toil away by himself in an isolated office with virtually no support. Here, every imaginable resource is available at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse. I was fascinated and I’d love to learn more about the possibility of working for the Foreign Service. We also met the college interns who were working at the office for the summer, and it made me think of Dan, who is doing exactly this job in the Irish Embassy in Dublin this summer---can’t wait to hear your stories Dan!
Scattered throughout the trip we’ve had a few chances to check out the city nightlife. In addition to the backpacking bars, there are a couple of unique Vietnam night experiences. One is “Bia Hoi,” which translates to Fresh Beer. This is the equivalent of American microbreweries, except each Bia Hoi makes their beer fresh each day. The beer is not fermented, so it is only good for a day or two. The bars keep the beer in large vats and serve it up in huge glasses. The bar stays open until the day’s batch is done—which is rarely late, so the best time for fresh beer is afternoon or early evening. The Vietnamese tend to go out early anyway, perhaps still used to a nightly curfew (still on the books but in practice not enforced), so it works out well. To add to the fun, there are huge blocks of ice covered in sawdust that the bar girls chip into buckets and then bring around to you. Though the ice is often made with purified water, it’s a common sight to see the giant blocks on the back of motorbikes being carried around the city or being pulled or pushed along the ground, so the whole purification thing becomes kind of irrelevant. My philosophy at these bars has been to drink enough beer to kill whatever is living in the ice, and so far this has worked out!
The other night phenomenon here is karaoke. Everyone has seen karaoke in America, but they take their karaoke pretty damn seriously here! It’s the most common source of entertainment for all ages, and it really is a great idea—you get to chat, hang out, share a drink, and laugh while you sing together. All that’s required is getting over our American sensitivities. Interestingly, our roommates know more American pop music than we do, and everyone, but especially college boys, love the Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and the other boy bands that died about ten years ago at home. It’s kind of odd to hear twenty-something year old men crooning to American nineties music, but after a month, I can even sing along to some of these awful melodies! However, when karaoke becomes a national pastime, it is taken pretty damn seriously! There are these huge karaoke bars which are warrens of room after room connected by long hallway. Each group gets its own private room and karaoke machine, replete with a computerized scorer that instantly rates your singing ability (for the record, I scored a 98 out of 100—the machine said “You are pro,” which I guess goes to show that no machine is perfect!).
One exciting final note—last weekend Vietnam’s second most read newspaper featured a story about us, with a great picture and long interviews. My roommate managed to share with the entire nation an embarrassing story about how I practice my Vietnamese in the bathroom. When the article was translated to me, I was mortified. So, I think my next Chronicle column will have to reciprocate. Stay posted! And if you made it this far, thanks so much for reading. Leave me a comment or shoot me an e-mail to tell me how your summers are going. I miss everyone and can’t wait to talk to you all.

Friday, June 23: “Thây (Teacher) David”

My own experiences with the Vietnamese government have made up a substantial part of my time here. I am an English teacher, staff and student workshop director, and seemingly “consultant expert in all matters” at the Ho Chi Minh City Hospitality School for Disadvantaged Children, located in a very busy commercial neighborhood just a few minutes from the Saigon River and about a fifteen minute bike-ride from where I live.
A little background on the school is in order here; it is a unique trade school developed as a joint venture between the HCMC Department of Labor, Invalids, and Social Affairs (DELISA) and the Triangle Generation Humanitaire, a French INGO (International Non-governmental organization). In 1997, the government stated that it needed to develop better trade education programs, particularly for disadvantaged students, and it appealed for international assistance in the project. Triangle offered its assistance, and after several years of planning the school opened for its first class in 2002.
DELISA and Triangle had an agreement to operate the school as a partnership for five years, after which time DELISA is to assume complete control, administratively and financially, of the entire school. With the localization process scheduled to be completed next year, the Triangle representative who has been working with the school is doing his best to ensure the school’s autonomy. As part of this process, the Triangle Head of Mission, Richard, no longer has an office on site at the school, and does his best to remove himself from the day-to-day management of the school. Though he consults, all final decisions for anything the school does are made by the director, who is a state employee of DELISA and a Party member.
The curriculum is a twelve month program, including two two-month internships, where the students work at five star hotels and restaurants around the city, including the school’s on-site training restaurant, Sesame, a delicious Western-Asian fusion restaurant, catering to expats and foreign NGO workers with prices too high for an average Vietnamese salary, that really does serve four-star quality food and provide very careful, attentive service.
However, the pretty, well-decorated, air-conditioned restaurant is an anomaly on the school’s grounds. The rest of the school is very poor. In Vietnam, education is supposedly free, but the schools generally are struggling very much to find the funding to operate, and students are usually asked to pay about 300,000 VND (about nineteen dollars) each year, and these fees go directly for paying for the supplies needed to operate the schools. Here, though, most students can’t even afford this, as they are all street children, selected to attend the school because of their extreme poverty and lack of any other education or training opportunities. As a result, the school has a very small operating budget, really only surviving because of Triangle’s infusions of cash.
The school is rather bleak. The classrooms are bare, cinder-block cubes, decorated only by the occasional poster of fruits or vegetables in English and French. There is no air-conditioning, and the fans seem to mostly just stir around the sweltering air. I don’t know how anyone can concentrate for eight hours a day in such an environment! There are no textbooks for the students, and though another non-profit that shares office space with Triangle donated a few decent computers, I have never actually seen them operating. The teachers all share one cramped office, filled with piles of papers and stacks of junk. The director and assistant directors have their own offices separated from the rest of the staff, and I rarely see them interacting with any of the teachers, let alone the students. Today the power was out, the heat was in force, and class continued without fans or lights—getting students to focus was nearly impossible!
There are supposedly one-hundred and twenty boys and girls between the ages of 16 and 19 recruited each year, although by the end of the program, many of the students have dropped out, and as far as I can tell, the current graduating class has only about thirty-five students. The “as far as I can tell” theme has been a common one for me. I’ve never encountered any sort of organization with such disorganization. Everyone gives me a different number of the amount of enrolled pupils, and I can see why. When I am at the school in the afternoon, students are just wandering around freely, and it’s impossible to detect any sort of order or scheduling. I teach about 20 students, although it is a different number every day, and the number even fluctuates throughout my lectures, as students come and go freely. When I’m not teaching them, sometimes another teacher has their class, and sometimes there is no class and the students go home. I do have a typed schedule that explains my classes, but then, all of a sudden I’ll be told that there is a meeting or some event and school will be cancelled or changed or classes will not be held. I’ve gotten to be very flexible!
The school also seems to be perpetually on the edge of collapse. For some reason, the staff doesn’t get along with each other at all. The director, a Party member, can apparently make decisions, but doesn’t know how or chooses not to enforce them, so administratively nothing gets done. Every other day another staff member threatens to quit, and indeed a number of teachers have left. Currently there are 22 people on staff; DELISA has approved a staff of 31, but no one is applying for the jobs, and current employees are not renewing their contracts. I can’t understand why job openings do not get a barrage of applications. When a job opened up in my high school school district, we had hundreds and hundreds of applicants within just a couple of weeks. Here, despite persistent complaints of a lack of jobs for qualified persons, positions go unfilled for months. I asked Richard, the French Triangle mission director, why this is, and he, too, has no idea.
The school must retain quality chefs and restaurant managers if it is to teach five-star style skills, but they can barely pay their regular teachers. Right now, Triangle is supplementing the extra costs, but it is really unclear what will happen when DELISA assumes complete autonomy. It’s really fascinating to watch the school in the localization process. Every International NGO states that their goal is really to train local staff to be able to offer whatever service themselves without the foreign intervention, but many times the international aid process is done with minimal or no actual involvement from the local people who are the beneficiaries. Here, the locals really are taking direct control and ownership of the school and the process, but the huge risks of such a process could not be illustrated more clearly. Despite preparing to take complete control next year, the school has not produced their own budget and the administrators don’t seem particularly concerned with how they will survive without the French funding, perhaps assuming that Triangle or the government will bail them out. However, without any sort of plan and with expenses forecasted to vastly exceed income indefinitely, this does not seem like a very stable solution!
This position has really allowed me to understand how international development assistance works on the ground as well. There is huge turnover in the international non-governmental organization (INGO) field, and sometimes it seems like it is impossible to keep someone around long enough to even understand what is going on in Vietnam’s complicated political system, let alone affect any change. We have seen this directly—of the places where Robertson students are interning, almost every one with an international staff partner has seen a staff change in the time between setting up our internships and actually arriving. This rapid turnover only exacerbates the incredibly inefficient and complex bureaucracy process. Nonetheless, I see why turnover is as it is. The layers of approvals, linguistic and cultural barriers, and additional stresses of living in a developing country all serve as disincentives for renewing a term.
Richard, the current Head of Missions for the Triangle Organization has only been with Triangle for five weeks, and he’s already frustrated. In addition to this hospitality school, Triangle is working with DELISA to open a school for the disabled. The building the government has provided is a four-story building without elevators. Since the pupils are disabled, the first thing Triangle did was ask for money to put in an elevator. The request was denied; the Party said that the students could “help themselves.” Neither Richard nor I have any understanding of how this should work—this is a school for disabled with pupils in wheelchairs and physically seriously deformed, and somehow the disabled are supposed to help each other get up to a fourth floor classroom? A lot of what the government does just doesn’t make sense, and as an NGO staffer, the task is to remain patient and unflustered and work time and again to try to get the government to see your proposal from your perspective and take some initiative to make it happen. There are countless small NGOs in the city staffed by one or a few foreign workers who are left to navigate the impossible bureaucratic maze with the help of only a translator or two and a perpetually insufficient budget. No wonder they don’t last long.

With all that as a background for what I’m actually doing, I have to say that the huge amount of frustration is more than balanced by my new-found love of teaching. When they told me I’d be teaching capacity building, I laughed. What the hell did I know about capacity building? But last Thursday as I sat in a classroom lecturing the school’s curriculum director on how to improve job placement techniques and what tips she could use to more successfully find employment for her students, I realized that there I was, building capacity, attempting to improve the organization and in some small way to help it’s graduates proclivity for success.
My first day of teaching was pure hell. Everything that could go wrong did. It was my first day with a bike in the city, I didn’t really know where I was going, and I promptly found myself going down the wrong way on a one-way street. Amid the loud honks and angry glares, I managed to get turned around enough that I was completely lost. By the time I found the school, I was ten minutes late and sweating copiously. The curriculum coordinator who greeted me speaks very little English. She pointed out the different classrooms to me and then deposited me in the school’s “library,” with the ambiguous direction to “wait awhile” and then I would meet the kids. “Library” is in quotations because the library doesn’t really have any books—just a few tattered recipe books and two copies of the English curriculum. I kind of dozed off for a few minutes, and when I woke up the bell was ringing and the curriculum coordinator came to pick me up to introduce me to the students. She brought me to a classroom and said, “These will be your students. Would you like to introduce yourself?” So I did, in an awkward sort of way, and then she asked if I’d speak to them for a few minutes. “Sure,” I replied. “Okay—you teach now,” she said. I smiled—“Um, okay.” And then she was gone.
So there I stood, dripping sweat with a pounding headache and a stomach threatening to rebel from the mystery meat I had consumed on the street, in front of twenty-some loud teenagers looking at me expectantly. I presumed this would be a five or ten minute thing. I began with introductions, but when I realized I couldn’t pronounce anyone’s name, I moved on, trying to gauge the student’s English capability. From what I gathered, they had had an English teacher initially, but he left four months ago, and now no one was teaching the language, save for an occasional visit from an English language school instructor. I was actually pretty impressed—the kids seemed pretty bright, as we moved through numbers, days of the week, time, fruits, vegetables, and where we are from. I had absolutely no material until I pulled out my beginning Vietnamese book and tried to use it in reverse. Fifteen minutes passed, and then thirty and sixty. I finally started to get into the rhythm, but I wanted to shout with joy when an hour and fifteen minutes later the coordinator walked back into the room and told me I could stop for the afternoon.
She informed me that I’d be teaching an hour and a half of English tomorrow, so I thought I’d better take another look at the sorry curriculum the school did have. She showed me an outline of where they taught and said to begin at month seven, but as sort of an aside mentioned that they had never learned months five or six. I decided a review might be in order, and spent the next hour examining the basic English lessons. The curriculum wasn’t so bad, but it required everyone to have a book and a workbook. I had exactly two copies of the student book, and forget about the workbook or listening tapes, so improvisation would be necessary.
As I sat investigating the curriculum, the school’s staff gathered. The ensuing staff meeting was of course all in Vietnamese, so I don’t know exactly what was said, but I was shocked by the way the meeting was conducted. Some teacher sat reading from some sort of long document that everyone seemed to have a copy of, but no one was really paying any attention. Teachers were texting each others (a national pastime in the way people here chat on-line), copying recipes out of library cookbooks, or just generally not paying attention. The school’s director wandered in and out but didn’t seem to particularly care what was going on, and the meeting went on and on and on. It was only my first day at the school, but I could already see so many of the problems I had learned about and it was clear that completing this teaching stint would be no small feat.
I keep reminding myself, though, that even though I’m sort of seen as this omniscient authority on all issues of capacity building, there is a real danger in believing this. I actually know very little! There are so many cultural differences in the Vietnamese government structure and hiring practices that I’m not always sure the advice I’m giving is going to make any difference—I’m afraid it could even be downright negative.
For example, the Vietnamese style resume is pages of drivel by our standards, including information about hobbies, personal life, love life, health status, and countless other “useless” or “inappropriate” details by our standards. Yet, this is clearly the style, based on a long history in a country where who you know is a lot more important than what you know, and demonstrating to your employer that you are of a quality background means a lot more than where you went to school. That being said, Vietnam is moving forward rapidly, the graduates of the school are applying for jobs in five-star multi-national hotels, and the human resources directors are increasingly relying on western hiring standards. So, I have decided to teach “American style” resumes, interviewing, and hiring practices. Is this right? I think so, but I don’t know. What if my students turn in resumes that are deemed inadequate and end up losing their opportunities? It’s hard to know. I’ve asked the person who is in charge of job placement if this is what she is looking for, and she has repeatedly insisted that it is, so I’m going to take her word for it. However, it’s been really hard to participate in any sort of exchange of information—I’m expected to be the one giving the answers, and the staff all sort of freeze up when I ask them questions about what it is they’re looking for or how I can best teach or help them understand something.
When I teach English, I teach “immersion style,” talking only in English, using pictures and gestures to fill in any gaps. But when I am conducting staff development workshops or teaching my students about teamwork and cooperation, I use a translator. My translator is a really bright recent college graduate doing some volunteer work before she starts work at a multinational consulting firm next month. I spent the first several days here without a translator, leading to countless frustrations, difficulties, and miscommunications, and I’ve come to appreciate the immeasurable advantage of speaking the native language—nothing compares to being able to communicate directly with those you are working with.
Last week, in fact, the guard mistook me for one of the restaurant’s customers and would not let me in because the restaurant was closed for the day. I tried with my few words of Vietnamese to communicate that I was there to teach, but I failed and had to spend an hour biking home and finding someone to call ahead and let them know to let me in. Now I have an official badge noting my status as English teacher and a friendly relationship with the guard, but these frustrations are an incredible hindrance in effectiveness!
It’s been two weeks, and I’m starting to get really attached to my students. They seem to have been written off as lost causes, but they are really smart and generally excited to learn. They are extremely respectful; when I enter the classroom they all stand for me—I feel like an American judge or some sort of royalty. I’m “Mr. David” again, just like at the homeless shelter last year, but usually I am just called “Teacher.” At the end of the day, I have to give the class one collective grade (I haven’t quite figured out the purpose of this very Communist-seeming exercise), and they are crushed if they get anything less than an A (but no grade inflation from me! They have to earn that A!).
There are bad days though. Today, for the life of me, I could not get the students to focus. I was wondering if my activities on conflict resolution were boring, but then I looked across the hall at the teacher who was droning on, staring at her blackboard, writing tiny lines all over the board and forcing her students to copy them in silence. They looked miserable. So I don’t think the issue is that my lessons are any less engaging than the other staff—it seems the students just don’t have enough discipline. Another staff member told me this; he himself spent seven years in a Viet Cong reeducation camp, so if he says, “What these students and staff need is some tight discipline,” I believe him. The problem, though, is that I’m not really in any sort of position to discipline the students. I can’t pronounce or remember all of their names, and I really can’t do anything to reprimand them other than a firm scolding or moving where they are sitting. I don’t have any way to take attendance, so there’s not much I can do if half my class doesn’t show up, or if new people roam in in the middle of lecture—I have no idea if they are supposed to be with me or not! Similarly, when someone says they need to leave for whatever reason, I can’t offer much of a challenge. When my translator is with me, she does a good job helping to keep order, but warnings and calls to behave that have to pass through a translator seem to carry a lot less force. When I don’t have a translator, forget it! The students also very quickly realized that I’d have trouble reining them in, and would be quick to take advantage of me at any opportunity. I was warned about this and I have plenty of experience in saying “No” to just about any request from the homeless shelter last year, but it is still a challenge. Finally, the language barrier manifests itself in so many ways—it’s hard to keep students’ attention when they have to wait for everything to pass through a translator, and anytime someone has a question or is answering a question, I have to wait to get the English version and then the answer has to be translated back. When the students are doing group work, I have no idea what they are talking about at all—I feel like a little kid, asking my translator, “What are they saying, what are they saying?”
However, even with all these difficulties, I think I am able to have some impact. In English class yesterday, we practiced ordering food in a very hands-on way that the students will be doing just next month when they graduate and I could tell some improvement. When I was planning our conflict resolution class with my translator today, she told me that she had never really learned anything like this in all of her education, and she was really impressed with what she saw and thought it could have a great impact. Indeed, when I asked the students if there were any conflicts where they have worked now, they were quick to point to persistent problems but really struggled to find a non-aggressive way to address the situation. If they make an effort to use the skills we talk about in class, maybe they can avoid losing a job or getting into a damaging argument at work. In my staff workshop today, the job coordinator told me that she had taught her students how to do an American-style resume based on my lesson last week. She told me about how after students graduate, they don’t seem to be able to hold a job. We talked about how to set goals for the students (Beth--I stole the Personal Development Plan that we had to do for the Robertson program—never thought it would come in handy here!), and the teacher shared with me that many of the students had mentioned obstacles for keeping their jobs, but had never really planned ways to get around them. We brainstormed lots of different ways the school could support its students after graduation. Maybe its common sense stuff to us in America, but if introducing the basic tools we use at home can make a difference here, then I think I will have had at least a small impact.
When I taught team-building last week, I’ve never seen a more determined group of kids. They refused repeated offers for suggestions, insisting that they could figure out how to fit the entire class into a small block of space themselves, and indeed, they did, in the most creative way I’ve ever seen, layering each other and supporting each other in a most-impressive manner! I’d heard criticism that Vietnamese students never learn to problem solve or can’t think outside of the box, but my kids show as much potential as any group I’ve ever seen anywhere in America, and if only they were given the same resources and opportunities, I know they could go just as far.

Friday, June 23: My attempt to analyze the Vietnamese government

So now I’m two weeks into my life here in Ho Chi Minh City, and I’ve been working really hard to understand how this Communist government works, not just in theory, but in practice. It’s been fascinating to look at the history in Vietnam and see how amazingly resilient the nation has been, bouncing back from decades of war and internal strife. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone talk about how fast the country is changing. It almost sounds trite to hear it now, but whole buildings shoot up in less than a week. Vietnam becomes a member of the World Trade Organization in October, and there is a tangible excitement mixed with a little bit of fear.
There have been so many “classic moments” that really have shown me the side of the country that most tourists don’t get to see. The other night I was in my bathroom washing clothes when Viet, one of the roommates came in to chat. He started by showing me the correct technique for washing one’s clothes by hand.
(As an aside—it’s not as easy as you might think to clean two week’s worth of clothes in a bucket. You have to spread out the outfit, apply the washing powder directly, scrub with a brush, squeeze out in a bucket, rinse in the spout, and then wring out and hang up to dry. I’m not going to lie—one of my proudest moments was pulling my hand-cleaned clothes off the clothesline to dry!)
But after I learned how to wash clothes Vietnamese style, we started talking about what was different between our governments and what we liked and didn’t like. I was trying to explain how I liked our government structure, but not the current government, and how I was relieved that in a couple of years it would be completely different. Viet was rather surprised that one could be so invested in choosing the government. With the Communist party this is really a non-issue, and I’ve found that most people my age seem to be fairly apathetic about who’s the President or Prime Minister.
There is voting in Vietnam and voting is compulsory, so it’s not that the turnout is low, but most of the times voting just means that you “approve” the Party’s choices for new leadership. You can send a proxy to vote for you, so college kids generally let their parents vote, and it’s not unusual for someone to cast seventeen or eighteen votes. This isn’t to say that they don’t care, but just that it doesn’t really matter who the leader’s name is—the Communist Party will pick the administration and dictate at least very strict guidelines on what the figureheads can do. I was discussing politics with my translator, and when we were talking about the American elections, she was very animated. Then I asked what she thought about Vietnam’s President and Prime Minister stepping down this week. Her answer was, “Oh, I don’t care about that.” She went on to explain that it didn’t matter to much to her because the Party would do whatever it chose and she couldn’t have an impact no matter how much she worried about it. To be fair, there is starting to be a little choice on the local level, but it’s more like the chance to choose between two individuals who the Communists have approved to take on the job than really getting to choose the ideological background of your candidate.
Of course, these ideas of “elections,” violate everything we have been taught about freedom, but it’s not something that I’ve seen anyone broken-up about here. Certainly no one is protesting publicly, but even privately, no one I’ve talked to has seemed particularly concerned. Choice seems sort of inefficient. When I was talking to Viet, he wanted to know how our government got anything done with all the complete changes and transfers of power. That was a tough one to answer, because any look back at the past 20 years will show a general lack of consistent policy, an inability to quickly gain national momentum for any sort of movement (save for the post-911 moment). Contrary to Western myth, the Communist Party is not some omni-present force that stands on every street corner ready to shoot dissidents. In fact, you are allowed to criticize the government’s policies and actions pretty freely—you just can’t criticize the government structure.
That’s not to say that the Vietnamese idea is perfect. If anything, I’m more sold on Democracy after this trip. I value our unrestricted access to any sort of information anytime. Try to point your web browser to the “Free Vietnam” page anywhere in Vietnam and you run into the government firewall. The “free press” still is somewhat censored, religion is limited, public gatherings are closely monitored, advocating democracy would still land you in jail, and an active “social evils” campaign blocks pornography, gambling, homosexuality, and drug usage as much as possible.
Swinging back to the positives, when the government here decides that they are going to take a stand, they take a stand and mobilize the decision on all levels, from the national stage all the way down to the hamlet (the smallest unit of administration—everything is subdivided, so even local cities or provinces are broken into districts, villages, and hamlets). When the country decided they would work very hard to combat AIDS, they were quickly able to muster the resources, spreading the message as an edict to all levels reaching the vast majority of the population in ways that even the US has not been able to fully replicate.
However, it isn’t very often that everyone in the huge bureaucracy is able to agree on a decision, and one of the biggest problems is that the bureaucracy is so huge and complicated. I just listed all of the local levels of government, and except for the largest cities, cities are grouped into provinces and everything is under Hanoi’s national leadership. The Federal government system is actually similar to ours, with three branches. The executive branch houses the President, Prime Minister, and all of the ministries, the National Assembly “legislates” at the bequest of the Party, and the Judicial System has a Supreme Court and lower court system. This system is reproduced for cities or provinces, districts, and villages as well, with executive People’s Committees and legislative People’s Councils, as well as a court system.
So far, everything is pretty similar to the US system. The real interesting aspect of the government is that each and every level of government has its own Party Committee in charge of appointing, directing, and overseeing the government, and the Party has parallel committees and ministries to oversee almost every government office. Many times it is unclear whether the Party or the government is responsible for a given task or has jurisdiction over a particular field. Then, to make things even more confusing, everyone in the government is also a member of the Party, and many have positions both in the Party structure and in the government, so personal responsibilities also get muddled. To add one more complication, the government is highly decentralized. Vietnam is a very long narrow country, and communication is still not quite up to Western standards, but especially in the past it would have been physically impossible for the Federal government to consolidate rule too much, and it has not been able to do so recently. Thus, as much as Hanoi’s officials may pretend to know exactly what is going on and be controlling activity all over the country, the reality is somewhat different. As a result of all this, even though there is only one official party, there is no shortage of conflicting opinions or leadership styles in the huge tangled web-mess.
After all that, I can’t leave out the biggest problem: the corruption. Vietnam is one of the world’s worst nations for corruption—kickbacks and extra fees exist on all levels and inordinately exacerbate the inefficiency problem. There are stories of major corporations adding large chunks of money to their budgets to cover the sideline fees that are necessary to do business here—or even worse, choosing not to do business here because of the corruption. One of our class readings was an extensive article on how the practice of “envelope exchange” works—the process is nearly a science.
We were privileged to hear a lecture from an influential history professor, esteemed Party member, and local politician who could not have been prouder of the Vietnamese government. Yet, he was very quick to point out the huge problems of inefficiency and corruption. He said there were two main problems that occurred: either the Party and the government in place disagreed and stalled progress on making any change, or the Party and the government agreed to be corrupt together and stalled progress on making any change. In fact, many times when corruption has been identified, it is because the second scenario devolved into the first scenario of disagreement and one side sought revenge.
Currently the Tenth Party Congress is underway in Hanoi. Change is taking place just as fast now as since the beginning of “Doi moi” or “renovation/renewal” that began in 1986 and was Vietnam’s economic liberalization, equivalent to Russia’s Glasnost and Perestroika or China’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping. In case there are any lurking misconceptions that Vietnam still has a Marxist “planned economy,” let me say that everything is capitalist in every way. Everything has a cost, and people look to make a buck in any way they can. You even pay for the napkin on your dinner table. My most ironic capitalist moment here was using my MasterCard to pay high prices to purchase a few of the old propaganda posters from Vietnam’s early “Pure Communism,” depicting the evils of capitalism.
I should make it very clear that just like contemporary Chinese, the Vietnamese do not see communism and capitalism as mutually exclusive in any way. Theoretically, they shouldn’t be exclusive at all—it would be ideal if everyone could trade and prosper in a market economy and also enjoy the safety net of socialism with guaranteed education, housing, and healthcare. These three fundamentals were Ho Chi Minh’s stated goals for every Vietnamese person when he established Vietnam’s Communist Party. The challenge, though, is to provide quality services equally to all despite the inherent aspects of capitalism that lead to stratified incomes.
This is the ultimate goal for the Party and what they are continuing to work towards at this Party Conference. This is the last chance to prepare for Vietnam’s October entrance into the World Trade Organization, which will bring trade and globalization to new levels in Vietnam. The Party is struggling to be liberal enough to embrace globalization and conservative enough to retain it’s stronghold on the flow of ideas and ideology.
This obvious difficulty leads to all sorts of smaller conflicts. For example, should Party members be allowed to participate in private enterprise and make money? Optimally, probably not—they’d be less biased officials if their only concern was the national welfare. But then, how could the Party entice new members. My roommate, Que, is facing this very struggle. He’s about to be offered Party membership at a very young age, which is a huge honor. Accepting is also an honor and a chance to play a role in shaping the country’s future. But unless the Party loosens its restrictions, it cancels the dream of becoming rich in the fast-paced multinational corporate world. Is such a sacrifice worth it? I don’t know, and neither does Que, but this is representative of the country’s imminent crossroads.
I will say, though, that I haven’t seen or heard anything from anyone, anywhere that would suggest that the goal of any of these reforms is democracy. A couple of the readings about the government here written by American authors were titled, “When Will the Party End,” and “Hanging on to Power,” but from everything I’ve seen and heard, this is just a narrow-minded American perspective that assumes Communism is temporary. Criticizing the current system here should not be misconstrued as advocating democracy any more than criticizing the US government should be seen as advocating communism. I don’t think I could live without the freedoms I enjoy in our American Democracy, but if you are raised to cherish different values, it may be that the lack of stability or consistency in democracy would prove unimaginable.
So as Vietnam goes forward, there remains a very strong nationalist spirit. All this debate about government structure seems to mostly come from curious outsiders—the public seems generally rather apolitical. The people support the Party and are immensely proud of their country, but they mostly just want to make money. There is the strong hope that corruption will disappear. If in a few years it is just as rampant, perhaps the support for the Communists will not be so strong. For now, though, there seems to be a willingness to support the government and wait a bit to hold the government completely accountable for social welfare for everyone. Viet said they were “too poor for that now.” If the breakneck pace of development continues, this may not be the case for long. Then, perhaps, the government would be expected to deliver more direct services to its people, but I don’t know. I think few can accurately speculate what services or values the Communist-Market system would look like or provide, but as Vietnam continues to hold out as one of the World’s few remaining Communist states, it will be an interesting ride.

Tuesday, June 13: Diving into the “Soul of Saigon”

***Hey there! Thanks for visiting. Here are week two's posts, taking us all the way to Vietnam, where we are now in full-swing with the summer program. Peter and Nick have been off to the beach for the last two days, but are returning to the city today and flying home tomorrow morning. Hopefully we'll get to hang out one more time, but it's sad to see them leave! For now, everyone all over the world take care (especially you South Africa folks) and stay in touch.

David

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A few days have passed now since we entered the country; we are actually finishing our orientation activities today and I am just returning home from my first Vietnamese class and a discussion with a former staff member of the NGO where I will be volunteering. I’m a bit overwhelmed already—especially with the language classes, where I just sort of sit befuddled. This is really a turning point in the trip, moving from Southeast Asia survey to intense Vietnamese language, culture, and politics study. I think I’ll have so much work to do that I won’t have time to create these rambling blog posts (that probably only my mom and dad are reading anyway :) ), but I wanted to share my first impressions of Vietnam while they are fresh!
Waking up in our guesthouse last Sunday was like finding myself in some sort of luxury dream. We are staying in a state-run guesthouse in District 1—the richest part of the city and the heart of downtown. The guesthouse itself is Ho Chi Minh City’s Foreign Affairs Guesthouse, run by the government. It is a large compound, actually with its own courtyard, which is very unusual anywhere in the city. The Office of Immigrant Migration is located in the compound, so everyone processing visas to leave the country must have a medical examination here, and foreign couples adopting Vietnamese babies often stay during the process. Our rooms are quite large and air-conditioned. It is still a traditional Asian wet bathroom with the showerhead perched up on the wall to spray all over the room (I’m a bit tired of trying to eke out a little space that will stay dry but still inevitably coming out with a drenched article of clothing), but there is even toilet paper here! We have a television with the Hallmark Channel in English and the maids even bring a plate of fresh fruits that I never recognize each morning. There’s no doubt that it is a pretty comfortable way to spend our stay.
Coming directly from Cambodia, the contrasts were startling. How quickly one’s frame of reference can change! All of a sudden even Vietnam’s poverty seems manageable, but it is still one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia and the world, with a per-capita income of less than a dollar a day. However, there is not the grinding, crushing poverty on the large-scale basis that you see in Cambodia. The hovels along the road here are more like the best tin shacks of Cambodia’s countryside, and a few new features showed real advancement—tall television antennas rose above almost every house and power lines seemed to cross at least most of the shacks. The wires ran low to the ground and unprotected—just a single wire wrapped that ran from the roadside poles along the roofs of all the houses in an area. It is certainly a fire hazard, an electrical risk, and generally quite dangerous, but it is power, and this advancement alone cannot be overstated.
There is a different feeling in Vietnam than in Thailand or Cambodia. I felt a much stronger current of energy and a palpable growth---something is happening here and everyone wants to be a part of it. My roommate is majoring in “Imports and Exports,” and his examination on Sunday is how ships can most effectively be used as transportation for exports. Talk about practical! Vietnam is about to join the WTO, and though there is some anxiety about what this will bring, there is also a huge amount of excitement. There is a feeling that this could be the new beginning for Vietnam’s “Socialist market economy.”
I must say that the views from the streets are about as far from traditional socialism as possible. I do not yet know enough about the social services, but capitalism is strong—the only thing that appears different is a lack of political freedom. There is tangible frustration about this continued heavy-handedness from the government in everyone I’ve talked to, and such discontent is only very thinly-veiled. The political and economic structures are very complicated; I’ve done as much reading as I can in the past few days, and I only have learned the basics. Really, I think, Vietnam has not quite yet settled into a political system that meets its needs and satisfies the majority of Vietnamese yet, and I haven’t seen a consensus on what this would be. There is not necessarily a mass clamoring for democracy—there is a big difference between freedom and democracy, but that is not to say that there is any love affair with socialism either.
I’ll be honest—this wasn’t what I was hoping to find. I wanted to find somewhere where socialism was working and could offer a productive model for how to provide for everyone’s social welfare while still progressing and remaining economically fit. I can already tell that that is not the case here. However, it is definitely safer here than a lot of other places in Asia and the world. You have to worry about traffic accidents and sickness, but not really about armed robberies. We were talking today about the muggings in the South Africa group—something like that would be extremely rare here. I’m not sure exactly why. The police presence is here, but it’s not particularly strong-seeming. Nonetheless, we do have lots of instructions about what to watch out for and avoid, and we’ll continue to be careful!
Yesterday we met the Vietnamese roommates who we would be living with for the summer. Generally only the very richest Vietnamese have a chance to study abroad, so this program allows “ordinary” Vietnamese college students to have an intense English and cultural exchange program while giving us an amazing inside resource to Vietnam and a direct relationship for the whole summer. My roommate is super! His name is Quy, and he is a 22 year old college junior who has worked as the coordinator at this school for the Communist Youth Union’s Green Summer Campaign, doing amazing service work that would make him a prime Robertson Scholar candidate himself. We hit it off right away, as we set off on our first assignment together: a “Soul of Saigon” scavenger hunt cum miniature ethnography.
We were issued a disposable camera and a small amount of money with the assignment to capture some theme of the city in a photo exhibition supplemented by as many interviews as we could do. The World Cup is more than a competition—it is a fiery passion here, and we decided to investigate how different groups around the city watch, from rich to poor, native to foreigner, and urbanite to rural dweller. We really did manage to capture almost all of this, and each little interview vignette was revealing and poignant. In some photographs, like under the big Saigon River Bridge, rich and poor were in the same picture, with shacks built almost literally in the shade of mansions worth more than a million US dollars.
We visited a street kitchen that is forced to close too early for the game’s end because it serves beer, a middle class coffee shop open all night whose occupants admitted that they just skipped work the next day, and farmers out in the countryside without much money who crowd around a television together to watch. We talked to a cab driver who loves the games but has to work every night, witnessed a group of men in District One filling out their tables much like we do March Madness, and the crowded backpacking district at night where the foreigners all gathered to take in the game together in a rowdy atmosphere.
I quite literally felt like I was diving in to the city’s soul as we zoomed around the city after dark in the packed rush hour traffic on Quy’s motorbike. I looked over the top of Quy as he navigated us through the city (I really like the whole feeling tall thing here…), and all I saw was vast seas of traffic amid the pervasive neon glow. Motorbikes would stretch across entire blocks in width and even several blocks in length of traffic. We stopped once for gas amid tens of bikes packed around the pump, made a number of quick U-turns that left me gaping and gasping, and just narrowly avoided collisions countless times. For awhile I conversed with a Canadian couple who threaded through the traffic with us, and I finally figured out the “no hands” thing, resting them calmly on my knees, but my heart was still thumping constantly.
The streets here really are ridiculous. This is different than the cars in Paris or Cairo or the bicycles in Beijing, because in Ho Chi Minh City, everyone is on motorbikes that they can easily thread in and out, but they realize they overpower pedestrians and bicycles and expect everyone to move out of their way. Traffic lights are almost completely arbitrary, following their directions is optional, line lines and traffic flows appear to be mere suggestions, and unless you want to grow old waiting, you just have to plunge right into the flow and walk or motor across. The key is not to hesitate or make quick moves—hitting you is going to slow down the drivers, so they seem willing to try to avoid you as long as you make predictable moves. Somehow, though, relying on blind faith doesn’t seem too comfortable when in the middle of traffic.
Our allowance for the “Soul of Saigon” project was 50,000 dong per couple (about three USD), representative of what a couple of day laborers would make in a day’s salary. We cut costs as much as possible, but even taking the public bus managed to eat away at our money and we went over our limit. For dinner, we had very, very cheap pho, or a sort of beef noodle soup that is ubiquitous and has a million slight variations. We rolled up into a street kitchen and in moments a steaming bowl was placed in front of each of us. A bowl of the soup and a coke came in at a little less than one dollar each. At this point I was so thirsty that I took my chance on the ice despite our warnings—better to get sick early. And now, as I write this post with quite the stomach ache, I am cursing my “bravery.”
I gave my roommate a Duke t-shirt (which, when it was too long, he had a friend trim and sew shorter in a matter of minutes), which absolutely thrilled him. It is a joy to be able to proselytize on the other side of the world! He gave me the shirt from the Youth Union Green Summer service project he organized, and then he bought us ears of roasted corn and whole coconuts with straws to suck out the milk. What an excellent way to end our first day together.
The scavenger hunt was really useful to show us how much more there is to the city outside of the posh district where we are staying. There is no doubt that the poverty patchwork here is as pronounced as anywhere, and I can’t wait to really explore it more. After just the introductions to my language classes and internship, I’ll wait to write much about them until I know a bit more. I will say that the language class is intense. This gorgeous Vietnamese woman spent two hours this morning just jawing non-stop at us and then forcing us to repeat. I promptly made a fool of myself. Between the six tones, countless alphabet sounds, and complicated combinations, I am about to decide the language is impossible. However, it is really fun to learn and our roommates love to practice with us. I’ll definitely talk much more about all this soon. For now, it’s like being back in school—I have so much to study!

Sunday, June 11: Misadventures on the “Scenic Route”

Jim and I were due to arrive for our program on the night of June 10th, so Saturday was to be our last all-day travel day. After way too many days of all-day bus journeys, we decided to shake things up a bit and travel primarily by boat today on the scenic route across the Cambodia-Vietnam border through the Mekong Delta. However, we remained on a tight budget, so we chose neither the express bus service nor the speed boat companies. Instead, we opted for a budget company’s combination of bus, boat, and minibus that was supposed to take about nine hours to reach Ho Chi Minh City through the border town of Chou Doc. I guess we should have known by now that travel times are as optimistic as possible and that anytime you are required to change vehicles or vessels multiple times you are opening yourself up for problems, but in our excitement to see the river delta, we ignored these obvisous warnings. As a result, the nine hours became a sixteen hour epic odyssey that just kept getting stranger After all those rather depressing discussions of Cambodian poverty and politics, I hope this is a bit more entertaining!
The morning actually started off really well, albeit significantly too early for our tastes. We arose at 6, drenched in sweat as usual in our tin shacks. Having long since given up on the shower’s inconsistent trickle, we used the hostel’s cleverly named “bun-gun” (a hose that replaces toilet paper) to rinse a bit, and then hopped in the waiting van to take us to the bus to the boat. We arrived at the bus station, where there was both a bus and driver. For unclear reasons, though, the driver chose not to get in to the waiting bus for an extended period of time.
Finally, though, we loaded up, picked up enough passengers at stops around the city to bring us to capacity, and headed to the highway. The bus had clearly been around for decades, but in its own rickety, bedraggled way, it seemed spacious. The air-conditioning was even blowing. Again, we should have known that the always proudly advertised air-conditioning is merely a rouse. We had never had a journey where it blew the whole time—why should this be different? Indeed, just twenty minutes down the highway, the engine inexplicably stopped. After another fifteen minutes of driver head scratching, we were able to begin again. Apparently the problem had been the air-conditioning, but we turning it off fixed everything.
The next three hours offered our last free Cambodian roller-coaster ride. Again the road was labeled as a national highway, but it looked more like a dirt track to me. The track, though, was full of trucks that would exceed the weight limit on any paved American highway. The cargo in most of them was people, who were packed like sardines in the backs of trucks, on the roofs, clinging to the sides, or hanging off the back. I could barely hang on inside the bus—I’m not quite sure how they managed to avoid falling right under the wheels of the frequent oncoming traffic that would barrel ahead in the wrong lane or in both lanes or off the road.
Running only about an hour behind, we got to the boat that would take us to the border. “Boat” turned out to be a generous term. The vessel was more like a rust bucket with a steering wheel. It sat so low to the water that I thought it was sinking when I first saw it. Of course the enclosed cabin lacked air-conditioning or shades to prevent the sun from beating down on our little greenhouse for the next four hours. The promised scenery was absent here—just dirt. Occasionally we’d see a shack or two, but really there was very little.
Two hours later we pulled up at the border checkpoint. The gangplank would be considered a safety hazard anywhere in the world—it looked about to snap and we had to walk one at a time and hang on tight while threading our feet carefully between the holes. Here we checked out of Cambodia and officially entered no-man’s land. When we had lingered long enough for everyone to buy something from the children selling overpriced soda, we were herded back to our bucket to cross this nether region where we had no country.
The bucket’s end of the line was at the Vietnamese entry point—a little collection of shacks on the shore still a full 2.5 hours from the nearest Vietnamese town. The country displayed its finest right on the border, offering two scams for all entering tourists. First we had to pay a mysterious “quarantine fee” to get a ticket that assured us we did not have SARS. Since SARS was never in Vietnam, I hadn’t been particularly concerned, but it was nice to have a ticket that confirmed my self-diagnosis.
Then, we learned that it would take Customs somewhere between half an hour and an hour to process our passports and during the processing time we were required to wait in the coffee shop, offering the only food in miles (unclear where the profits went). Finally, we all redeemed our passports. Peter found that his had been stamped with a required exit date the day before we arrived, but fortunately he caught it early enough that it could be changed without him paying the fine (heavy and calculated by the day).
Another boat was to take us on the town of Chou Doc. I hadn’t thought it possible, but when this boat appeared, I suddenly wanted our first boat back. This sat even lower in the water, and instead of benches, some chairs had just been set on the deck, stability unknown. We left the port and spent the next several minutes switching bodies around so that the boat could stop tipping and move forward straight, but eventually the balance was achieved.
Here, finally, the scenery actually was beautiful. It really did make the trip worthwhile to see the floating villages here in what appeared to be a lifestyle unchanged in centuries (except for the television antennas that rose above the settlements set just off the water all along the way). It was hard to tell if the people here were any better off than those in Cambodia, but somehow since we were floating down the river, it was really easy to romanticize their lifestyle in a way we could never do with hovels alongside the highway. Nonetheless, the villages seemed so peaceful. Everyone smiled at us and waved as we passed, looking up from fishing or swimming or puttering from house to house back and forth across the rivers. The Mekong Delta is a large network of tributaries and channels, and our boat floated along these channels towards Chou Doc. the delta town of 100,000 people. Nick was so excited by the classic Vietnamese conical straw hats, but everyone really was wearing them. There were all sorts of means to catch fish, from something that looked like an oil derrick to nets, to polls. Under all of the houses set up on stilts are fish farms, six meters deep, where colonies are grown and harvested. We didn’t see any large floating markets, but people seemed to drift from boat to boat, talking and selling snacks. It seemed like such a peaceful way of life.
We were jarred out of our idyllic daze upon arrival at the chaotic port. We wanted to save the dollar commission from the boat company to put us on a mini-bus to Ho Chi Minh City, but unfortunately that meant that we had only the Rough Guide’s vague map. An old man cyclo driver met us as soon as we stepped off the boat and first tried to offer us a ride. I didn’t want to point out to the senior citizen that there was no way his little bike could carry me and my 60 pound backpack faster than I could walk, but he followed us forever, trying to convince us to take a certain minibus company. When he lowered the price enough, we finally relented and purchased our tickets. The company loaded us up in their plush Toyota Land Rover, and we thought we were set for a great trip to the Ho Chi Minh City. Well, what seems too good to be true usually is, and it was—the vehicle took us only to the minibus station a few miles away. We then learned that what was supposed to be a three hour ride would actually take between 5.5 and 6. I cursed and cursed the woman in Phnom Penh who sold me the tickets for this “scenic route,” but there wasn’t much we could do now.
The minibus seemed downright luxurious at first—we thought the Vietnamese really knew how to run their transportation—and it left immediately! Yet, the problem this time seemed to be that empty seats were unacceptable. The driver kept stopping and packing more people in until our backpacks were jammed under our feet. However, at least the four of us had two rows (meant for 5 or 6 Vietnamese people, who are quite a bit smaller). Even that couldn’t last. Soon the driver motioned me to climb to the back with Peter and Nick. Jim joked that he was lonely and wondered if he could come back to. Just a few minutes later, the driver obliged. (He did not speak any English, so this was all grunts.) He seemed to get great pleasure out of toying with us, offering the small children in front of us larger seats, and ensuring that we couldn’t move a bit.
I never thought six hours could last so long. No one spoke any English, the bus was so hot that sweat was pouring down all over me, and we had to leave our legs crossed in ways they were never meant to be crossed. At one point we stopped at some massive rest stop for a break, and when we got back in, the woman in front of us decided that Peter’s stretched out leg could become a table. Poor Peter had a small child resting on his foot until the pins and needles became unbearable. It now being over twelve hours after we departed, even our reserves of patience were gone. We just gritted our teeth and counted the seconds.
Despite the promises to be let off inside the city, we were deposited at a bus station right on the outskirts. We piled out of the vehicle like refugees seeing free soil for the first time, and stretching as never felt so good. Some shady looking taxis were waiting for us, and we were quickly herded into the first vehicle. We were sick of arguing, so when the driver said he didn’t want to use the meter but wanted to charge about four times the going rate, he seemed a bit taken aback by our refusal. Next, he decided that he needed to get gas, but somehow forgot to turn off the meter (fares are calculated by time and distance). I called him back, with Peter mumbling in the back seat about how we knew his tricks and he better not try to fleece us.
Our driver got the last laugh though. As we took off, the meter steamrolled forward at an unquestionably rigged rate. I groaned inwardly—we had been warned about rigged meters, and here we were, stuck. It could have been worse—we only paid about eight dollars—but this was twice what the price should have been. However, we were way, way beyond caring. Finally, just before midnight, sixteen full hours after we departed, the cab pulled into the guesthouse and we were done. Our ten day travel saga across Southeast Asia has concluded. Peter and Nick will take off for a quiet finish on the beach and Jim and I will start our real challenge, living in the city!

Friday June 9: From Killing Fields to Corruption

We just returned from the most haunting day of tourism I have ever experienced, experiencing the carnage of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in cold, gritty detail and seeing today’s absolute poverty, disease, corruption, and desperation in its most visceral forms in the shantytowns surrounding the city. I’m currently baking in our little tin shack, missing air conditioning as sweat continues to cascade down my skin, and yet, still a bit shell-shocked from the today’s visions and ever more cognizant of the incredible privilege I enjoy to be a free citizen, let alone be able to see this.
We hired a tuk-tuk and driver for the day today, for the total sum of $10. When we got off our bus yesterday, there were throngs of drivers offering to take us to our guesthouse, fighting hard for the $1 fare. Our driver found out we were planning to tour the city, and was waiting for us outside when I woke up at 7:00, grinning and waving and not moving until we came down and hired him at 9:00 for the day. I handled the bargaining for our day’s “package,” but it was hard to try to drive too hard of a deal—it is so clear that the people we are bargaining with need the money so much more than we do, and how do you begrudge someone who has waited hours for you a dollar or two?
Before I talk about the day, I want to mention the arts development NGO I happened to run across that relates directly to the research I hope to complete while abroad. Operated by the Singapore Girls Brigade, a religious sort of Girl Scouts, this group has opened a store in Phnom Penh that sells sewn bags, clothing, and handicrafts. The patterns come from Singapore, Europe, and from customer requests, and then the Singapore volunteers train locals in a village about an hour outside of the city on how to make the crafts. The crafts then come back to the city where they are sold and exported to Singapore and globally through Internet orders. It’s a lot like Ten Thousand Villages, but there were two really neat aspects. First was how the group focused on more than just production, offering complete development assistance, creating a library, teaching English and other classes, and assisting with local needs. Second was how quickly tourists were snapping up the products. The store was small, but it was packed with all sorts of foreigners who preferred to buy what they knew was “village made” at considerably higher prices than similar products carried by street vendors. Clearly there is a market for handicrafts and room for distribution even in developing countries, but I don’t know that this sheds any light on whether fine art can sell or if the products could be designed by the Khmer (Cambodian) people and still sell as well as products designed by foreigners.
Our first stop on the city tour was Toul Sleng Prison, or the S-21 Security Compound, the primary detention center for all prisoners from Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge era. More than 17,000 people passed through this former school campus. Only seven survived; they were sculptors who could turn out busts of Pol Pot. The prisoners were chained together, packed into rooms, and tortured for hours and hours and hours until they would confess to their “crimes against the state.” Possible charges included having a college education, speaking English or French, preaching or even practicing a religion, doing skilled work, talking intellectually, or having past connections to any nationalist military forces. Thus, all Cambodians were targeted and anyone with any sort of skill was killed first. Indeed, a full forty percent of the country’s population was wiped out. Now the campus is still, set in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, where life seems to progress with few visible reminders of such a dark history.
The only real visible reminder is the remaining amputees. Outside the camp was a collection of them begging for money. Cambodia has the highest proportion of amputees in the world; one in 276 is an amputee. Most of these are victims of landmines; faceless, indiscriminate killers thickly strewn across the countryside through years and years of conflict. Most of these landmines were not intended to kill—they sought to maim, eliminating healthy fighters and creating permanent dependents that guarantee poverty for the whole affected family. I feel sick every time I see one of these men or women, pant legs dangling or stumps hanging where arms should be. As we left the prison, I had given money to one amputee and felt like my good deed for the day was done, so I walked with my head down, ignoring the persistent figure limping heavily on his cane next to me asking, “Please sir, some little money for rice.” But when I climbed into the tuk-tuk, I made the mistake of looking into his face. It was grotesquely disfigured. One eye was completely glossed-over, not seeing. Where the other eye should have been was a bloody, twisted mass of scar tissue. His lips were pink and puffy, his teeth exposed. I felt sick, disgusted, and full of a deep, deep sorrow. I quickly peeled out 500 Riel notes and dropped them into his hat, wishing I hadn’t looked up, pleading with my mind to erase the picture that had been firmly etched in.
We continued our journey through the Khmer Rouge legacy by driving out to Cheung Elk, or the “killing fields.” The “killing fields” were just that; fields where the Khmer Rouge took their prisoners to slaughter them in secret. The fields are set 15 kilometers from Toul Sleng, and each night the soldiers would gather up anywhere from ten to thirty men, load them in trucks, take them to the fields, and shoot them.
The road to the fields was absolutely atrocious. We were remarking about how bumpy the pavement was as we left the couple of well-paved main streets, but as if to demonstrate that this was the least of our concerns, we then turned down a steep embankment and began to proceed on a dust and trash ridden throughway through the slums that spread for miles. This seemed even worse than the conditions in the countryside yesterday because here the population density is at best comparable to New York and in many places far more crowded, but the same lack of electricity, hot water, and sometimes even enclosed lodging that we saw in the countryside exists here as well. The smell of raw sewage pervaded, the streets were absolutely covered in filth—bags of trash appeared to have been sitting outside for days, and most of the trash never made it to a bag.
Like Tuol Sleng, there is not much setting off the fields from the surrounding neighborhood. Over seventeen thousand Cambodians (and about a dozen western journalists) died on these fields, but today they are eerily quiet. A giant memorial stupa was built to house the skulls of the more than 8000 victims whose bodies were unearthed in 1980 during an international excavation. This is as creepy as it sounds—over 8000 skulls are arranged on 10 stories of platforms on top of a base of uncovered clothing. We gave a guide a few dollars to show us around, and he matter-of-factly pointed to a few skulls and explained that “this person was caned to death, this person was bashed with an axe, this person’s face was crushed, this person was buried alive…”
We thought this was chilling, but then we began to walk around the actual fields. The mass burial pits were marked with very simple signs that just said “mass grave.” The land is not really protected, so it has become public grazing grounds, and there were cows grazing while young boys and men nonchalantly lounged around the pits. There were a few specially marked sights—the pit where the decapitated soldiers were all thrown, discovered with 400 soldiers and no heads, the tree where babies were known to be bashed or ripped apart, the adjacent area where their mothers were then raped, the “magical tree” where a speaker played party music so the neighbors would think the field was just for wild gatherings, and a map with the remainder of unexcavated graves.
Early on the tour I tripped. I looked down and saw a human bone. Our guide remarked, “every rain storm reveals more of the bones. They just keep coming up.” Then, we saw the colorful shards of clothing poking through the soil, and he continued, “their clothes also resurface. Some are on trees. We found a few skulls there too.” I had read how the first escapees from Cambodia to Thailand were unable to convince anyone of their stories of what was going on. I now understand why. As one official had said, “It is not that I think you are lying. I just cannot believe you.” Such atrocities are incomprehensible.
There were no permanent sanctions or punishments for any of the perpetrators in any way. Our guide told us that the guards were almost all children. They were the easiest to brainwash. All of these events are so fresh that these men are only about forty now. He said that they almost never speak of the events—maybe a bit if they are drunk. The government officially pardoned all of the soldiers (with the exception of a few leading officers, but Pol Pot died insisting he knew nothing of what had happened), as Cambodia needed them to fight again against the Vietnamese. Who knows what scars these very young soldiers endure today—in many ways, they too are victims.
Yet these genocides happen again and again and again. Just a few months ago I was standing on the grounds of Auschwitz in Poland. I surveyed the grounds of the camp, stepped into the gas chambers, and left in shock and horror. Today it was magnified exponentially. I don’t think I’ll be able to hear about genocide again without picturing these sights, but short of bringing the rest of the world on a field trip, how do you get the word out about what is going on in forgotten corners of the globe like Sudan and make ordinary people ten thousand miles away begin to care?
The return trip from the fields were even rougher than the journey out there. At one point we swerved around a pothole bigger than my kitchen table, leaving us stuck in thick, gooey mud alongside the “road.” We all had to pile out of the tuk-tuk and push until the wheels could move again. The whole time though, I could not help thinking that the road was really intended as a one-way road. Of course the road would have been better in the other direction—only empty trucks came back the way we were headed.
Then again, though, the genocide was thirty years ago. That should be plenty of time to fix a road. The problem is the amazing amount of corruption that still exists and the absolutely non-functioning government. There are virtually no public services provided by the government. Education is a privilege with a high price tag. We talked to a few of the children shepherding cattle around the Killing Fields, who told us that they had to pay their teacher 1000 Riel each day—no money, no class. That’s about twenty-five cents per child per day in a country where the average income is way under a dollar a day.
Other than the charity hospitals run by foreigners, there is no such thing as free health care. Later in the day we went to Phnom Penh’s Central Market. I almost vomited when a middle-aged man approached me begging for money; one whole side of his face was missing. Some sort of giant growth had overtaken his entire face, engulfing his forehead, eye, nose, mouth, and chin, and whatever it was and swollen so much that it just sort of dangled in front of him and he had to hold up that half of his head with his hand while the other hand was holding his hat for money. In America, regardless of your income or assets, such a growth would get emergency attention long before it ever got to that point. Here, I suppose this man will go on literally holding his head in his hands for the rest of his life.
The government doesn’t do anything for even the poorest of the poor—in fact, they make things worse by skimming off the majority of foreign aid money that is coming into the country. If you can’t make it on your own, you just won’t make it. I read that the only positive thing that can be said about the current Cambodian government is that it is not the Khmer Rouge. That doesn’t mean there aren’t government sponsored murders and robberies, oppression, censorship, false imprisonment, and a farcical judicial system. In fact, we talked to a number of tuk-tuk drivers who told us how much they hated the Prime Minister, how much he stole from the country, and how he did such bad things. If it weren’t for a collective memory of such recent historical pain, I think the country would be on the brink of rebellion.
Later in the evening I picked up a copy of Cambodia’s English language newspaper, The Cambodia Daily, to see the headlines. The front page alone offers enough indication of the country’s woes. The first article was entitled, “World Bank to Gov’t: Return $7.6 Million,” and detailed how the World Bank reluctantly determined that all funding to Cambodia would be frozen until better accountability could be installed to stop drastic disappearances of money. It is a problem because the small percent of money that has gone to the people has made a huge difference, and the article discussed all of the accomplishments of clean water and road infrastructure. However, the losses have just grown too large. The article then attempted to get a comment from the government—the result was pathetically hilarious. No less than eleven officials were “out of town,” “uninformed,” or “unavailable” in some way; one hung up his phone repeatedly. The one official who did comment said the World Bank was “stupid.” It’s easy to get angry at the World Bank for cutting funding, but in such an environment, how can they be blamed?
The second article was entitled “None Resist as Tonle Bassac Site is Cleared.” Tonle Bassac is an area around the Mekong River where hundreds of poor occupants lived in squatter-style camps. Recently, though, the government decided that poor people are bad for the country’s image and that they cannot live in city limits. As a result, they declared that they were going to clear the area. To the government’s credit, they provided the residents with a field to move to (albeit well outside of the city) and offered them each “a piece of tarpaulin, 10kg of rice, and a bottle of soy sauce.” As an enticement, after five years of residence the residents will get land titles. However, the field is so far out of town that those with jobs but without their own transportation are out of luck. There is no plumbing or electricity at all in the new area, so you can imagine how quickly health conditions will deteriorate. And there are no concrete plans to provide these services in the near future. The forced move was conducted by heavily armed riot police and young men with baseball bats who promptly destroyed every family’s housing. Reporters were blocked from the area and journalists were forced to erase all pictures. All aid workers and human rights observers were also kept far from the area by more heavily armed police. Human rights still have a ways to go, and as long as the poor are deemed a cosmetic problem, there are still fundamental changes necessary.
We read in all of our tour books how willing Cambodians would be to share all about their lives, even telling the most personal stories about how they have been affected by past regimes and in the present. We had read plenty of stories in books and the museum, so we decided to try for ourselves. We were not disappointed! What followed were some of the most amazing oral history interviews I could imagine. Our own driver for the day had been separated from his family during the Khmer Rouge. They all fled to the Thai border and then had to split up and move from house to house. His father was wanted by the regime but managed to escape and is now a refuge living in Minnesota.
Even more amazing was a driver who I started chatting with outside a bar where we were watching the World Cup with some great girls we met from Yale (actually on their way to Beijing for the Duke in China program—it’s a small world!). I invited the driver to come have a beer with us and asked him about what it was like during the regime, and he just began to talk. Both of his parents were taken to Toul Sleng and murdered. He was sent to live with his grandmother and the two of them also fled to the Thai border. The Khmer Rouge came and his siblings ended up being captured and killed as well, but he managed to escape, and was finally able to get back to the city when the Vietnamese Occupation began. He saved up to buy a tuk-tuk and now drives most of the day and night, working 16 or more hours a day. He said he takes tourists to the prison and killing fields all the time, but he cannot ever go in. He wasn’t afraid at all to tell us how much he hated the current Prime Minister and told all sorts of stories of the corruption. If only there was a way for these passionate, intelligent individuals to have a say in running the government—there would be a possibility for change!
The night ended with us all embracing our new friend (and us planning to meet the Yale girls again in Vietnam the next day), and so concluded our last night in Cambodia. I have written on and on about this country, but I have never been so captivated in my life. The history is more terrible than anything I could ever have dreamed of as the country as been passed around like yesterday’s scraps for centuries. There are such absolute extremes of rich and grinding, hopeless poor. Yet, the people are all so ebullient and have such a grateful, humble outlook on life. Further, never have I met a group so willing to share their darkest life stories to complete strangers, and conveniently many speak such good English. English really is considered the way out and the golden key for jobs and success, so everyone works so hard to learn it. There is huge potential for development here if only the corruption could end. The country is rich in resources and full of citizens who are so committed to their education and improvement. I think in ten years Cambodia will have found the answer and have got on the same train that Japan, China, and now Vietnam have found. I want to watch and be a part of this process and maybe even do something to help it along. These past five days in Cambodia have sparked so many questions and lit up so many possibilities, and I cannot wait to return.