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.