Friday, July 21: Playing Teacher

We are teaching at the Dinh Thuy Junior High School, but the word “school” should be used loosely. It would be hard to make the facilities more Spartan. The building is a single-story “U-shaped” poured concrete structure divided into rooms that are packed with benches. The yard is dirt and patches of grass with only a flagpole. I guess we are lucky that the building has the squatter toilets it does because the Primary School has no bathroom facilities at all. The rooms are bleak enough to depress me promptly every time I enter. Our walls have a picture of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese flag at the front and two signs on the back that proclaim “Study Hard,” and “Teach Hard.” There’s no library to speak of, but there is a closet of books somewhere, and the teachers share a sort of office/ “lounge” combination. The most advanced technology in the building besides the teachers’ television is the florescent lights that sometimes work in each room. Nothing seems to work; the desks are long cramped benches and tables stuffed into a room and filled with at least twice as many students as designed to hold, so it’s not uncommon for one or two to break each day. Even the chalkboard is too shiny to write legibly on.

After all the planning in Ho Chi Minh City and on Sunday before teaching that we had done, we were excited for our first day of classes. There appeared to be over one hundred students waiting for all of us at the school, and Gia, our program coordinator’s husband, quickly organized them all with a song. Everyone clapped and shouted, “Vietnam! Ho Chi Minh!” Our next task was dividing all the students into manageable classes. We had learned recently that through some miscommunication, the high school had decided to schedule its mandatory review classes at exactly the same time as our camp, so there would not have any tenth through twelfth graders. No problem, we said—we’ll just take the eighth and ninth graders. On Monday there were twenty-six—twice the number we had planned for, but certainly still workable.
I thought we had planned well for the first day. We handed out paper and markers for each student to make name placards and we had a series of icebreaker/name game activities to get everyone comfortable—at least to Chris and I, it seemed very standard. In our planning meeting on Sunday night we had explained the games to our Vietnamese partners, and both said they understood perfectly. First we would go outside and form a circle to do a clapping/singing traditional Vietnamese game where everyone has to call someone else’s name. Then we planned an American game where we wanted everyone to say their name and a food that started with the first letter, with each successive student repeating the previous names and then adding their own.

Yet, somehow when we were in front of the students, the plans fell apart. We hadn’t spelled out exactly who would say what, so there was plenty of awkward fumbling among ourselves. For the clapping game we tried to get in a circle outside, but for some reason it took forever to get people organized. We realized the issue was that for whatever reason, the boys and girls refused to stand next to each other. In fact, in one case where a boy and a girl did end up being adjacent, they held a piece of grass between them so they didn’t have to hold hands. Chris and I were rather taken aback by this startling lack of maturity among eighth and ninth graders, although our roommates later revealed that though these students seemed a bit more sensitive than usual, the behavior was not atypical for students their age.

We went back inside for the name/food game. Chris and I gave the directions in English, but when our partners went to translate them, they went into excruciating detail, offering each student an example of a food that started with the letter of their name and then making each practice with the person next to them, one pair at a time, while the whole class waited. Nearly twenty minutes ticked by just giving directions for our icebreaker. It was a disaster! I grew increasingly frustrated, but there was little Chris or I could do. If all the teachers were American, a brief sentence might have corrected anything, but the communication process is so slow and literal between us and our partners, that it was impossible in front of our class to try to correct the way the game had spiraled downhill.

The class recovered a bit during the second half as we dove into lesson one of the textbook, but we still saw that a great deal of organization was necessary. I finished the day with a summary of all the activities we had planned: art projects, singing, problem solving, games, activities—it sounded great. I was already beginning to wonder if we had bitten off more than we could chew; scaling back ended up being a major theme of our plan revisions. When the clock finally reached 4:00, it was with immense relief that we said goodbye to our students. We had survived the day, but there was so much work to do. Little did I know that it would be one of our easiest days of the week.

Monday night we met to debrief and plan. It was immediately clear that some of our more ambitious plans would never work with this larger group of younger students—roundtable discussions of current events and debates about the WTO would be impossible. Teaching sex-ed to twelve year olds seemed a recipe for disaster. However, I thought that we’d still be able to keep our general plans the same. Despite the lack of smoothness, we weren’t too upset with Monday’s class structure. Name games were done; we were ready to dive into our plans. In addition to our hour of English each day, we planned our first week to be a teamwork and conflict resolution overview, with group activities, discussions on listening, and role-plays. I had taught a similar curriculum in my lifeskills class in Saigon, so we even had my lesson plan sketches to help. We didn’t get to any of the teamwork activities we had planned beyond the most basic introduction on Monday, so there didn’t seem to be much additional work to prepare for Tuesday. We ordered ten more photocopies of the book—a few extras wouldn’t hurt.
With some trepidation we biked into a huge crowd of students waiting eagerly for us on Tuesday. When we finally got the mass of shrieking children quiet, there were forty-six packed into the room. Twenty-six was manageable; forty-six was going to require some real rethinking of lesson plans. In addition to the forty-six inside the classroom, the gaggle of street urchins who gathered outside the windows to harass our students had grown in both numbers and persistence. We tried to make it clear that everyone was welcome to learn, but they had to make a choice: in or out. Somehow this didn’t get through and we were left with intermittent disturbances without an effective remedy.

Making snap decisions and coordinating tasks to keep all four teachers occupied cannot be done on the fly. Though we had decided exactly what we were going to cover, we had not gone into enough detail to decide exactly who would say what and when, so it felt like we did an awful lot of fumbling during the English lecture. This was definitely a failure on our part to really understand what adequate planning to teach as a team entailed. With twice as many students, it also took twice as long to get everyone quiet and focused. That ended up being an accomplishment in itself.

After English we tried to hold a discussion on teamwork and introduce the listening skills portion of our unit, explaining verbal and non-verbal communication and how to best listen and share ideas. The discussion part simply did not work—both teachers and students failed. I would ask even a general question like, “What is important to think about when you are working with your friends on a team?” and I would get an answer like “yes,” or worse—dead silence.

Facilitating a discussion seemed automatic to Chris and I. The Vietnamese were really just translating my questions here, so I didn’t see how we could fail so abjectly. In retrospect, though, I didn’t consider cultural differences that might be important before planning a “simple discussion.” Traditional Vietnamese classes never, ever have a discussion component at all. The teacher stands at the front of the board and lectures while the students copy. Tests are rote memorization; students merely regurgitate exactly what they are taught and critical thinking is never expected, asked for, or encouraged. Thus, not only have our students never had a discussion based class, but neither have our teaching partners. Now they were being asked to facilitate something they had never done with a whole group of students not prepared at all to offer their own independent ideas. There were awkward fumblings, pauses, and silences, and I ended up having to provide almost all of the answers for the students anyways, no matter how easy the question seemed.

I have this huge fear of downtime with our students in the classroom—when teachers are talking to each other, it only takes a matter of seconds to lose the students’ attention, but it can take minutes to get everyone refocused. Every second lost while the four of us passed the English book around or asked each other what to do felt like an eternity for me, and I vowed to myself that we would eliminate this problem for Wednesday. Furthermore, a discussion-based class does not really have work to keep four teachers busy. I was speaking while Que and Phuong acted, but that still left Chris standing around and waiting awkwardly.

Tuesday was a low—it was hard to imagine class getting worse. For Wednesday we went through the English book and selected specific activities, determining who would say what, when, and how. On Saturday night our whole group was putting on a cultural exchange performance at the People’s Committee and we wanted our students to participate. Chris and I decided to teach the Hokey Pokey and Que and Phuong would do a traditional Vietnamese song with the class. We practiced the games we wanted to play for teamwork among the four of us and decided at least for the day to just do the activities; we could figure out how to talk about them and debrief once we saw how they went. We talked about splitting the class into two with two teachers each, but for some reason, the Vietnamese roommates were vehemently opposed to this. We finally compromised into breaking up for activity time and staying together for English.

Then, fifty-three students were waiting for us on Wednesday. All of our book copies were swallowed and there were still only one or two books in each row. The classroom was packed to what seemed well beyond capacity (In reality, it was not even a little uncommon for Vietnamese classes to be so large). The ruffians outside the class grew even bolder, banging on doors, poking their heads through the wall slats, and generally creating about as obnoxious a disturbance as possible. To top things off, it was an absolutely broiling day, so the classroom was hotter than your average sauna. My shirt was instantly soaked, causing the girls to fan my back and giggle every time I walked by. It didn’t bode well for the two hour class!

We made it through Wednesday and Thursday with similar plans, but it required drawing on extreme reserves of patience and energy and a constantly artificial smile. English was indeed smoother with our more detailed teaching plan. As we get better at working together, I don’t think we’ll need to be quite so detailed, but it’s a nice crutch for now. The beginning of the Hokey Pokey worked well enough, though the lyrics didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to the kids. For our teambuilding exercises we broke into two groups, and for once it was refreshing to have a somewhat manageable class.

With the teambuilding activities, I saw the beginning of what culminated in a huge disagreement the next week. Que was firmly convinced that the students didn’t have the skills to problem solve unless they were told exactly what to do and how to do it. It turned out that Que wasn’t the only one; most of the roommates said that these were not skills taught in Vietnamese schools and the students would not be able to do it. Any time a teaching group was doing something other than English, this was an issue we had to contend with.

Picture this: you are setting up a teamwork activity where everyone in a group has to cross a large “river” or swath of dirt stepping only on the few “islands” or pieces of paper that you give them. The challenge is for the team to work together to come up with a solution to not having enough “islands.” It’s a great activity, except when the facilitator provides the keys for solving the problem in his directions. When you tell the students how they can share the islands, the whole thing is ruined. The students don’t learn anything and they complain that the game is boring. I was exasperated while teaching but there wasn’t anything I could do. I could not instruct the students myself. I couldn’t even stop Que when he began to stray. I was powerless and the activities were only a fraction of how effective they could be.

By the end of class on Thursday I was ready to explode. Que and Phuong still said there was no way we could split up the classes, but the group was way, way too large to manage. Discussions weren’t working with the students so I was not sure at all what we could teach if we didn’t want to lecture. Discipline was lax; we didn’t need to run a boot camp, but I wanted everyone paying attention. Downtime and fumbling was certainly not in short supply, so really as teachers we were as much to blame for the environment as our students. And though it was beyond our control, there seems to be a limit to how much you can learn when the heat is stifling your breathing. Even the singing practice seemed to fail; teaching English lyrics was painfully slow and though the kids all knew the Vietnamese songs, the roommates never structured their practicing at all. I would have been happy to go home Thursday night and never see the school again.

Instead we had a meeting with all the Americans on Thursday night to brainstorm solutions. It was mostly a couple of hours of venting, but it felt so, so good. Hilary (our program director) had returned from her trip to Saigon, and she promised she would have the disruptive children outside of the rooms removed. That was probably the only tangible solution, but I think venting sometimes can be really healthy to reenergize.

We planned Friday to be just singing practice after our English hour. It seemed easy enough. There wasn’t really room or organizational capacity for all our students to sing on stage, so we could send some home and let the volunteers to perform stay. Choosing the volunteers, though, ended up being a sticky matter. The roommates only wanted girls, who generally behaved better, and they only wanted a few. Chris and I wanted as many participants as possible, and if the boys wanted to be on stage, we certainly hoped to encourage that as much as possible. However, again, we weren’t the ones who explained the process to the students. I was rather suspicious when our volunteers ended up being 18 girls and 2 boys, one of whom was a younger brother. That being said, it may not have been “cool” as a young high school boy to volunteer to perform. I’m not sure how to explain the somewhat wistful-looking boys standing behind the group while we did perform. In any case, that was the group we were left with.

Practice was not easy. The roommates were doing the organizing, but they had not prepared how they intended to do so nor had they communicated with us or each other. In the end, they got into a fight with each other while the class disintegrated. However, by the conclusion of our extended period the performances were coming along well enough for us to not need to fear Saturday’s show. And that was the end of week one.

One week in and we definitely were not succeeding to the best of our abilities. It was frustrating that so many teachers and students were clearly so talented and we had not figured out an effective way to communicate together. Friday night, though we were all exhausted and far more interested in relaxing a bit and sleeping, we had a whole-group many hour meeting to discuss all of our difficulties from the first week and make some tangible plans for improvement. Rachael pointed out that some of the difficulty could come from the fact that we had never really spelled out our individual expectations for what the students should learn; we just assumed that everyone was on the same page. We weren’t; some wanted camp to be intense learning while others just wanted our students to have fun and hear gain exposure to foreigners. We made some very solid plans, beginning with deciding that we would establish classroom rules and consequences. This was a rather obvious seeming oversight. If we wrote down rules and expectations and had them posted in the rooms, it would seem to take care of much of the discipline problems. If students couldn’t follow the rules, they wouldn’t be allowed to come back. The summer camp was a privilege.

We also finally decided that we would split our classes into two groups. I’m still not sure why this was such an issue for our roommates. Chris and I speculated that Que especially might have been a little worried because his English wasn’t at the level of Phuong and his translation is slow and requires me to speak quite slowly. They also claimed that large classes were traditional in Vietnam, so we shouldn’t try to change this. They knew they weren’t building relationships with the students the way they could, and it seemed to bother them, but not enough to split.

The idea that we shouldn’t deviate from the traditional Vietnamese way ended up being a major focus and frustration of the meeting. What really was our object? The Americans felt firmly that we were not just here to reinforce Vietnamese lessons; we had the opportunity to bring all sorts of new ideas and activities to the students that they might never get to experience again. In fact, the group with the younger students had started to introduce new topics, like first aid and the environment. Chris and I had so much we wanted to do that we just could not begin to touch the way class was structured that first week. Our Vietnamese partners agreed in principle that we should be bringing new ideas to the students, but every time we suggested something, they said that that was not how Vietnamese students learn. The ideas of teambuilding and conflict resolution, they said, were interesting, but too complicated to be taught to eighth and ninth graders. If we did it, we’d have to relate it to their lives.

It’s hard to disagree with what they were saying on principle, but they could not offer any specifics of what that meant. We went back and forth for the longest time, trying to understand each other, and frustratingly, never got specifics. The roommates wanted the general ideas to come from us as new American themes, but it was hard for us to know exactly what it meant to teach an idea in a way that would relate to the students’ lives. For them, because the ideas were new, they didn’t really know how to teach them in Vietnamese style either.

We didn’t really come to a satisfactory conclusion. We resolved to basically simplify our lessons so that instead of explaining theory or concepts, as much as possible would be explained with role plays or demonstrations. I hated to dumb down the lessons because I certainly thought the students were capable, but at least teaching the concepts was better than not touching on new ideas, and we knew compromise was a necessary process. A lot of times in the planning process for everything we have done (not just teaching), I felt like it was the Americans coming up with ideas and than convincing and cajoling the Vietnamese into agreeing. I don’t think any of us wanted to be doing this; that’s not really collaboration. So compromise means not always getting to do what you think is best for the students. We don’t necessarily know what is best for the Vietnamese students anyways, so I think we were happy with our plans. We also resolved as a group to loosen up a bit. The singing for the culture show had been fun and engaging, so we’d try to introduce some new songs. We’d also play more games, switching off between traditional Vietnamese and American games, many of which overlapped. This was a great way to expose the kids to a bit more English and just have fun.

As I’ve said, the teaching has been by far the most trying part of my day; I’d rather do construction for ten hours than teach for two. I don’t think it has to be that way, though, and as we finished the first weeks meeting, I still hoped we could salvage the final two. I had really enjoyed myself teaching in Saigon, and we have some really fun students here, so we’ll see.

Friday, July 21: A Week in the Life…

Well, the first week is finished. I’m officially exhausted—I’d swear I’ve been here at least a month. There have been some really positive experiences and some ceaseless causes for bottomless frustration. Most of the time, though, I’m just amazed that I’m here. Laying bricks, napping on my bamboo map at midday, or teaching throngs of students packed into the village’s primitive school, I often take a moment to reflect that I am in the heart of the Mekong River Delta, living and working in a rural province of Vietnam. Pretty cool!

Mornings begin around 6:00, with last-minute preparation and packing and usually a noodle-soup breakfast. Shortly after 7:00 we are ready to bike to the house construction site in the Dinh Thuy commune, making our way through the lively, thriving morning town market, across the water, and down the trails to the hamlet. The sun rises early, so by the end of the five kilometer journey, I’m usually pouring sweat, which continues unabated until lunch. By 7:30 every morning, our crew of twelve is hard at work with the day’s building.

The house we are building is a two-room brick dwelling with a covered porch and an area to construct the bamboo and straw kitchen in back. Kitchens in the countryside are almost always separated from the house for smoke control, as there aren’t any chimneys for the charcoal stoves. We are attaching the house to the house owner’s mother’s house, saving us a little work with the fourth wall, but everything else is starting from scratch. There are no power tools or even wheelbarrows, so we are learning so much. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how applicable many of these skills are—anything involving bamboo and coconut trees, which actually is most of it!

Starting from scratch here means really starting from the very beginning. All that was waiting for us was a few bamboo sticks pounded into the ground with a string to delineate where the walls would be. There were enormous mounds of sand, gravel, brick and stones with bags of cement conveniently dropped one hundred yards from the construction site on a very narrow dirt/mud road navigable only by carefully walking loaded down bicycles. There were no frames for the concrete but there were coils of rather thin medal that needed to be straightened, bent, and twisted together to form the rebar to strengthen the concrete. And then there was the mud—thousands of pounds of it needing to be moved from the foundation of the family’s current flimsy straw hut to the new foundation. The hours of hacking at the currently firmly packed ground offered my upper body a punishing workout! At the end of the first week the foundation still wasn’t completed, but the house frame was rising solidly out of the mud.

It’s rather neat that I could share extensive paragraphs on the technical details of building, but I don’t even think I would be particularly interested in reading it myself. None of the skills in and of themselves were particularly difficult—mostly there was a lot of tedium. The wire rebar frames are made by twisting knots with metal ties to pull together long poles. The master craftsmen showed me many times how to make the bars straight, twisting his ties very quickly and efficiently. Somehow, though, I could tug and pull on the poles forever and my metal forms would never look the same. I sort of feared the house would end up lopsided because of my slanting beam frames, but fortunately we nailed coconut wood shells that were filled with concrete and the frames merely reinforced the beam.

I worried a bit more about the effects of my brick-laying. In the demonstrations it seems so easy to create straight, orderly rows of bricks, but mine were slanted with the mortar sort of slopped unevenly around to compensate. After a few rows though, I think I at least passably mastered the technique, or enough that my work didn’t require extensive correcting.
When you don’t have access to fancy tools and measuring devices, you really learn to improvise. The assortment of hand-made devices and tools continues to amaze me. Coconut shells are cut in half and used as storage bowls and water scoops. All of our shovels are made from dried bamboo, while the temporary support beams are made from fresh-cut stalks. Instead of scraps of wood, we use sugar cane or coconut stalks for wedges and braces. We don’t have any levels, but there is this neat rubber tubing that the builders run along the area they want flat. They then fill the tube with water by sucking and blowing from a bucket and move the full tube until no water runs from either side. It certainly works as well as any level I’ve ever seen!

Absolutely nothing is wasted. When we took down the wooden frames from pouring concrete, they were separated and the nails were pounded out of each log. Many of the nails were so rusty that it was difficult to decipher their original shape. Sharp points were nonexistent; any point on the nail was a victory. Extra mortar that drips down is scooped back into the bucket for spreading, and uses are found for every empty concrete bag. Even the cut palm fronds are used as trail liners to keep down the mud.

If the improvised tools are a bit less proficient than Western implements, the safety standards are behind even a few more notches. I was immediately glad I had taken Duke’s free Tetanus shot booster as the wires began to cut me from day one. Mid-week I looked down in horror from where I had been removing nails to discover that I had stepped on one and it had gone straight through my sandal! (Fortunately, no skin was broken.) When I see anyone else on our ladders or rigged scaffolding, I tend to wince or just hang on tightly to whatever part of their body I can reach. There are also large insects of all kinds, from the huge red ants that like to bite me to bees to something that I think is a worm but looks more like a cross between a snake and a small cat and carries a wicked bite. Of course, the ever prevalent mosquitoes have managed to chew up most of our feet and lower legs.

Physical labor really is fun, and I saw quickly how most of the locals look so strong. A few hours using a backhoe to slam away at a caked dirt foundation left me stiff and sore. Doing it every day for life would make me huge! I’ll settle for the three weeks. Friday left us in the middle of the giant mud transfer operation. While the floors are dirt in most houses, they are not just the ground, but nearly two feet of packed mud, caked and pounded to ensure a stable, level surface. In three hours of mud moving, our whole troupe managed to cover less than a third of the needed area. At least we knew there’d be plenty waiting for us on Monday.

The tradition for Green Summer volunteers is to stay in the community where one is working, living in small groups with host families. The students are supposed to become a part of their family, cooking, working, and socializing over their term. For us, though, since the homestay is not possible, we have lunch families where we bathe, eat, and nap each early afternoon. (We’ve debated many times about how we’d do living in the basic houses for the whole time—while it would be certainly more immersive, language barriers might stop us from picking up too much, and it is nice to return to hot water and air conditioning each night. In the end though, the question is moot--it is illegal for foreigners to stay overnight with people they aren’t related to without all sorts of permissions, so the best we could wrangle from the government was a one night home stay.)

The host families are assigned by mothers, and though the mothers have real names, in the Communist style of order and uniformity, they are called by what child they are in their family. My host mom is the eighth child in her family, but its bad luck to call the first child number one, so my host mom becomes the ninth. Thus, our Host Mother is "Ma Chin," or Mother Number Nine. Our host father was also the eighth child, so he is "Ba Chin," but mothers and fathers certainly can have different numbers. Since all use this naming practice, there are quite a lot of identical names, especially for the first few children. It still strikes me as a bit dehumanized when we are talking to "Mother Nine" or "Mother Four," but the Vietnamese don’t seem to find anything at all unusual in this.

Ma Chin’s house is only a few minutes ride from our construction site. As soon as 11:30 hits we hightail it to her house for lunch and naptime. The first order of business, though, is definitely a bath. When we leave the construction site we are always covered in mud and sweat. I can wring my shirts, shorts, and boxers out and watch sweat pour down. We bathe with the cisterns of collected rain water. This being the wet season, there is no shortage. During the dry season, people may resort to canal water, but since people also go to the bathroom in the canals, I don’t quite understand how such a bath would leave you cleaner than when you started. For now, we only wash dishes with canal water. I’ve become very adept at bucket baths. Usually a good bucket pour offers far more water pressure than any shower I’ve found here, and nothing feels more refreshing than the cold, clear water.

Before we are finished, Ma Chin always has a scrumptious lunch waiting for us. The program has given each lunch mother a small stipend to defray food costs (the Vietnamese groups don’t usually do so), so she spends all morning preparing hearty soups, eggs, stewed meats, whole fish, and big plates of vegetables. However, though the food is delicious, all week I have felt a bit uncomfortable at lunch. The idea wasn’t to turn a few village households into restaurants; we were supposed to have the chance to form relationships with a family and learn about their life. This hasn’t happened at all. The Vietnamese roommates have had a little more conversation than us Americans, but especially with the language barrier, we have not gone beyond the most basic conversation. Even doing the dishes (more buckets and rain water) doesn’t really make things more personal. I hadn’t realized that our whole group felt this way, but in our first week evaluation meeting, many of us raised the concern, including our Vietnamese roommates who thought they could become a lot closer, so we’ve made this a goal for week two.

The most important part of the day comes right after lunch: naptime. Since college began, my appreciation for the value of a good nap has heightened enormously, and this is plentiful new evidence. Days start early and end late and building houses and teaching high school have very little in common, but throw a nap in to recollect, and everything seems to work out. We spread bamboo mats out on the tile floor, share a few pillows, and get a little over an hour to read and doze. I feel like we have begun to bathe and eat progressively faster to enjoy this free time just a little longer. I’m finally getting to do some pleasure reading; this week I finished a book about Cambodian politics in the 1990s and started in on a collection of David Sedaris stories, forcing me to contain my laughter constantly! The only problem becomes the number of biting ants who want to share the break with us. I’ll drift off to sleep only to awaken with the sensation of my skin crawling. It’d be fine if it was just a bad dream, but alas, it’s only too real.

For as much as I enjoy napping, everyday Tao likes to remind me how much younger children do not. Tao is the five year old granddaughter of Ma Chin. Her parents are living in Ho Chi Minh City in a small rented flat without room for her and only get to see her about twice a year, so Ma Chin takes care of her year-round. A floor with six slumbering young adults seems to be the perfect playground. I’ll admit, though—her grin everyday when we arrive (or her stuck out tongue, depending on the mood) can brighten any day. As odd as it seemed to me, parents leaving children behind to move to the city is not uncommon. Usually the goal is to raise enough money to afford for the child to accompany the parents, but it becomes so expensive to pay for school, uniforms, and city cost-of-living that many parents just can’t do it.

Nap time always ends way, way too early and what follows has become the bane of my existence—summer camp. If I were to imagine a personal hell, it might include fifty-three screaming urchins crammed tightly into a small windowless room with only some slats in the walls. The hell might feature four teachers coming from very different backgrounds and cultures with very different ideas of what to teach and very few ideas on how to teach them. Finally, there would probably be a huge shortage of materials, no shortage of terrible student behavior, and a raft of carefully planned lessons conceived before the teachers met the class and discovered that everything would have to be scrapped. The team teaching and ever-growing number of students has \been my biggest collaborative challenge ever; I could write pages about it, or at least a separate blog entry—that’s next on my to-write list.

The 4:00 dismissal never seems to come soon enough. Once again, I’m drenched in sweat and exhausted. Most days during the week I spent the bike ride reviewing how we failed in class and venting—none of us seem to be in any kind of groove yet. We all exchange stories about how our class crashed and burned our what miscommunications between Americans and Vietnamese derailed the day’s lesson.

Luckily, I’ve found the perfect solution to blow off steam before dinner. We are hosting a race to raise money for the poor youth of the region next weekend, offering a convenient reason to whip myself back into shape. I had sort of forgotten how much I love to run. Saigon is quite possibly the worst city in the world to run in. It is ridiculously hot and humid, the streets are uncrossable, the sidewalks are usually clogged with sellers of every known and unknown commodity, traffic rules are irrelevant, and parks aren’t large enough for more than a quarter-mile loop. Here, though, you can pick any road and just go, and the sites are always interesting, with a free constant parade of curious admirers thrown in to the bargain. The kilometers are marked out on neat little stones, but the actual distance between markers varies wildly, rendering them rather useless. I was worried I’d be too tired to run in the afternoon, but instead it’s a highlight of my day, allowing me my only few minutes of alone time and letting me clear my head.

Dinner tends to be rather monotonous. There is only one real restaurant in town, though many times we eat at the hotel or in market stalls. It seems that wherever we choose to eat will make the day for the business, as the income from serving a group of fourteen far exceeds the average daily salary for the Vietnamese. This power is sort of disturbing—I feel like it would be easy to exploit locals, dangling the offer of our patronage. I’ve had brief notions of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that bother me, but so far, I don’t see any danger of turning into Curtz.

The nights are rounded out with seemingly endless meetings. The biggest one is planning for the next day’s class. I’ll talk about these more when I write about teaching. We have also been preparing for a cultural exchange performance with the entire community scheduled for Saturday night, featuring songs from the Vietnamese and Americans, a chance for our students to perform, and even a play that one of the roommates scripted. As the week progressed, we also added meetings for discussing group concerns and teaching issues among Americans and as an entire group.

There’s not much fanfare to the end of the night. I try to read or type for a few minutes before I fall asleep with mixed success. The English television channel selection is pretty much limited to the Hallmark Channel. I’m sort of addicted to the reruns of Judging Amy. Other than that, the channel sucks, plain and simple. Usually by 10:30 or 11:00 I am sound asleep.

So that’s the schedule! I imagine it will gradually become easier, but right now it is hard to imagine a more trying routine. Each morning and evening I feel that my body is a little bit more broken. Every joint and muscle seems to be sore from one of the day’s activities. We all feel it and we’re all exhausted. Three weeks seems like an awfully long time. That being said, I felt the same way at the beginning of my time in the homeless shelter last year. I’m hoping that we’ll move over some sort of hump soon and the days will begin to fly (or at least, that the pain will abate some).

July 16: Into the Countryside

"Everyone should attend a Communist rally once in their life," enthused Rachael. "There’s something so genuine about it." The Communist Youth Union Green Summer Campaign welcome ceremony had just concluded in Ho Chi Minh City, and as we loaded our bus to depart for our assigned hamlet for three weeks of house building and summer camp teaching, the excitement was contagious.

Every summer in Vietnam, the youth from every university head out into the countryside for several weeks of volunteering, working to build houses and bridges, lay paths and roads, teach students, and help train villagers in whatever they are studying. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, 55,000 students are participating this year; in all of Vietnam, nearly 200,000 are involved. There is a long socialist tradition of sending the youth of a country to help the disadvantaged. China offers an extreme example—as part of the Cultural Revolution, a whole generation of educated youth was forced to spend a decade in the countryside farming. Here, though, the program is a yearly highlight for both the youth who travel and work with their friends and the poor villagers being helped. The college volunteers are Vietnam’s brightest potential future leaders; nothing could possibly offer more exposure to who their constituency will be. Eighty percent of Vietnamese still live in rural areas, and the volunteers generally stay with families in the districts that they visit and make lasting connections.

We are incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to participate with our Vietnamese roommates, and we are the only Americans to do so. The Communist Party is as excited about the opportunity as we are, and the past few days have been filled with ceremonies, beginning on Friday with a press conference at the Communist Youth Union headquarters to announce the American participation to the media and issue us our shirts and hats. We got a great book of propaganda, including official youth songs, mottos, and idealistic purpose statements and histories. The gathering had been billed as informal, but speeches from everyone seemed required, and I was called to explain how grateful we were to have the opportunity to live and learn in the Mekong Delta for the next month. Then, we changed into our new uniforms with the State television camera running and photographers snapping away.
Our last few hours in the city went quickly as we made lesson plans for our summer camp, combed the city’s markets for supplies, stocked up on appropriate construction clothing, and caught a few hours of sleep before waking at 5 am on Saturday to check out of the guesthouse and depart.

The opening ceremony for the entire city was a giant pep rally held outside a large stadium, where 6,000 representatives of the city’s youth gathered with huge banners and signs, dressed uniformly in our official blue polo shirts and green expedition hats. Music played, every important official in the city gave some sort of welcome speech, and we received flowers and hand shakes and wishes for good luck. After every line of every speech there was rousing applause. Then a performance began to illustrate the work we would do. I could not have imagined anything more stereotypically communist. To an tyuupbeat Soviet-sounding worker song, troupes of youth representing the volunteers paraded on the stage, dressed as construction workers, road builders, farmers and irrigators, and even a funky crew of brightly colored, shiny suited students carrying laptops to bring technology to the country. Everyone appeared strong and happy, doing great things and making their mark. I never knew that building a road or picking up trash could be quite so exciting! Rousing cheers emanated from the crowd and all 6,000 of us clapped along in time. You can say whatever about Communism, but they organize a heck of a rally!

Immediately following the ceremony, we moved en masse to the busses. Our group was bound for Ben Tre province, deep in the Mekong Delta. Ten minutes into the journey, the bus broke down—an inauspicious beginning. Luckily, half an hour of tinkering seemed to fix the mysterious problem, and we continued down progressively smaller roads and across two ferries into the heart of the Delta, finally arriving in the little town of Mo Cay in Ben Tre province.
We’re staying at a "hotel," run by a local family. It’s supposedly the region’s nicest hotel, but it’s really a family-run guesthouse, run by a family that doesn’t seem to know much about running guesthouses. The structure was designed well—it’s just the upkeep that has failed to come along. We all have rooms with just one big bed, and ours was covered in sand, with cigarette butts in the back and cobwebs above. It took us a few days to get the hot water functioning and the drains appear to struggle mightily even when we brush our teeth. We also seem to share the room with a few more animals than usual, including thousands of ants, but at least they don’t bite! All that said, as easy as it is to complain, the lodging is more than sufficient and is more luxurious than anyone in the town enjoys, so I shouldn’t really complain!

We are working in the Dinh Thuy commune, about a 5 kilometer bike ride from our hotel down a paved small road similar to a nice American bike trail. After arriving and a quick lunch, there was still one more opening ceremony to endure. It opened with a spirited song that everyone knew the lyrics too. I asked a roommate what it meant, and he said it was a traditional war song used to rally the troops during the American War. The translation included all sorts of lines about how to beat the evil invaders. I wasn’t the only American that thought the song choice was a little off, but all of the roommates tried to reassure us that now a whole plethora of such songs were used as general inspiration, and the original meanings were generally ignored. For the remainder of the ceremony, we entertained ourselves by trying to find the differences in the speeches that every low-level representative of every area gave, but there were few to point out. Chris actually gave an amazingly impressive thank-you speech on behalf of the Americans, but he spoke completely in Vietnamese! After six weeks of classes, we were all in awe!

For our three weeks in Ben Tre, we have two primary goals. In the morning we will be building a Compassion House. The idea is just like Habitat for Humanity; the local government chooses the poorest family in a given hamlet and the youth volunteers work with a few local expert craftsmen to erect a small brick house from scratch. Our group donated the cost of the house—about $500 USD (there’s a real bargain for you!).

Our second task is to run a day camp for the local youth. We weren’t given much advanced information about the camp—just that we should expect about 100 middle and high schoolers to teach from 2-4 every afternoon. The local officials do not seem terribly organized or prepared, so it’s unclear how many students will actually show up. We also didn’t get any real direction about what to teach, other than English class, as we are perhaps the only native English-speakers that will even come near the village all year. I’ll be teaching the high schoolers—we were told that our group would probably only have about 10 to 15 students because of other mandatory review classes. We split into teams, so four of us (2 Americans and 2 Viets) are responsible for the high school side of things. We had a fairly sizeable budget for teaching materials from the Robertsons, so in addition to photocopied English textbooks, we purchased all sorts of supplies for games, problem-solving exercises, art projects, and prizes. As I learned earlier, it takes a lot of time to plan even one hour of class, and now with four teachers attempting to work together in the classroom, the amount of coordination necessary is huge, especially since none of us really know what to expect.

For the rest of Saturday afternoon and Sunday we explored as much of the commune as we could. The region is known as the "Garden of Eden," for its incredible fertility and variety of fruit grown, including a large share of Vietnam’s coconut exports. The land is a vast, vast network of canals, connected by paths. Some of these are made of concrete or stone, while others are just packed dirt or mud. No maps have been made of the commune, but there are hundreds of kilometers of trails that wind and twist, usually just wide enough for a single bicycle. (We brought our bikes from Ho Chi Minh City and have no motorized vehicles, so all our transportation is now by bike.) Some of the canals are wide enough for boats to carry loads of ripe coconuts to market, while others are just a short leap across. In addition to farming, many families own a few animals, so there are chickens running everywhere, cows grazing, and pigs snorting as loudly as possible. If it weren’t for the houses and animals, a number of people in our group have noted that the area could be some sort of giant resort. The tall coconut trees sway gently while bunches of bananas and loads of other colorful fruit dangle from the trees. The wide fronds from the coconut palm trees often form sort of a tunnel overhead and all of the little bridges and paths lend the feeling of a tropical, super-muddy version of Monet’s gardens.
However, when we remember that this is not some kind of garden, but actually people’s permanent homes, we are quickly brought back to reality. The houses themselves vary widely, from flimsy straw shacks that appear to struggle in the slightest of breezes to poured concrete, shiny tiled houses that seem fairly nice. A few odd really nice houses stand out, but these are supposedly built with money sent from overseas Vietnamese. Nearly all of the houses have power, brought by lines haphazardly strewn between hamlets, held up by concrete posts or just bamboo sticks. This power is not nearly as new an innovation as the Highlands region where just a few years ago electricity did not exist. Where there is power, there is television, as I mentioned in my post about the Highlands, although at times people cannot afford to operate their televisions with the high cost of electricity. For this reason, enterprising individuals have set up sort of television watching cafes, replete with 1970s style lounge chairs and a small fuzzy monitor that people gather around with their tea or coffee.

There is certainly development happening, and its happening fast. Our group coordinator and a Vietnamese roommate here last year are always pointing out little changes. By themselves, they are not big changes: a dirt path paved, a restaurant or little store opened, animals added to farms, an ATM installed in town, and numerous new Internet facilities. The center of the rural commune has a sort of video game café with several televisions and some sort of gaming system that is a huge hit with the local youngsters, and there are two small Internet "cafes" (connection speed unknown). The general themes seem to be diversifying income from fruit farming to include more agricultural variety and much more attention to the service sector of the economy, and expanding communication networks.

Interestingly, Internet really is one of the first innovations brought to an area. The connection to the outside world is so prized and the desire to get information freely and chat and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world has gripped Vietnam. I am continuously amazed to see Internet connections advertised everywhere, even in the smallest hamlets or along roads where the only real area inhabitants seem to be the chickens and cows wandering about.

At the same time, few of the houses have what we would call running water, but there are large cisterns that collect rain water and feature a tap at the bottom. This is the rainy season, so supplies of water are not at all an issue; apparently this gets difficult in dryer parts of the year.
I have to say that it is difficult to imagine dryness. If there is one constant everywhere we go, it is the mud. Even in Mo Cay town, the streets are covered in mud, and a few minutes walk on any path through a commune leaves my feet and legs covered in a thick molasses. Somehow the mud manages to find its way to every part of my body very quickly, and all my clothes are quickly becoming permanently browned.

When I arrived in Vietnam, the incredibly cheap prices caught me immediately. Dinner for less than a dollar was unfathomable before this trip. Now, the prices are even lower. A coffee shop near where we work has fresh-squeezed limeade for 2,500 dong (fifteen US cents), an hour of Internet is eighteen US cents, and a whole fresh coconut is about twenty-three cents. Talk about stretching the dollar!

We are only three-and-a-half hours outside of Ho Chi Minh City, but it could be a different planet. Someone in our group compared the journey to going from New York City to the Mississippi Delta in a few hours. Whatever physical distance we have from the city, though, the government’s presence can certainly be felt, far more than in America’s rural areas. For the Communist Party and the Vietnamese government, it’s all about organization. As I’ve said before, the biggest strength of the one-party system is it’s power to organize, and there is no energy spared in making sure that the government’s tentacles reach every member of every household in the entire country. So we are in the Mo Cay Rural District of the Ben Tre Province, and we are staying in Moc Cay town, the administrative center of the district. However, we are working in the Dinh Thuy Commune, which has 11,000 people in 11 hamlets. We build a house in one hamlet and teach in the neighboring hamlet. And the house we are building is in a numbered neighborhood of the hamlet. That summary took me three days to iron out! With this distribution though, there is a representative of every neighborhood on the hamlet committee which sends a representative to the rural district committee and so on and so forth all the way up to the national government.
(To add a wrinkle here though, to prevent nepotism, after the first few levels and in the large cities, the representatives are usually not from the neighborhood they represent, so the residents don’t really know their representatives, who may only visit their territory once or twice a year.)

Such organization is especially tight in the Mekong Delta, an area with a rich history of revolution, because with representatives at every level, no family goes unwatched. At least theoretically, information works its way up and down the chain from the national government to every family quite easily. This has helped Vietnam respond to the AIDS, SARS, and Avian Flu epidemics extremely effectively or to get the word out about major messages. The speakers attached to power lines on the roads are back, just like I mentioned in Hanoi. Each hamlet can decide how they use them, but it is rather odd to be in the middle of a muddy canal and have a loudspeaker begin screeching news and propaganda to you.

On the other hand, when it comes to providing social services or organizing district events, we’ve seen that all the organization in the world does not seem to do a whole lot. The district authorities seem completely inept in organizing the day camp, failing to pass the messages even to each other, let alone the students.

At times I think it is difficult for us to grasp the full significance of the project. There are moments when we have felt like objects on display or tools to demonstrate Vietnam’s healthy integration into a globalized world. We laughed through the press conference where at least fifteen photographers clamored to photograph us from every possible angle. No less than four newspaper articles have been published with stories or pictures of our group before we have even begun to work, and our photo was even emblazoned on the front page of Vietnam’s largest newspaper.

At the same time, it would be easy to argue that we are the exploiters, traveling to the heart of the Mekong Delta for a few weeks so that we can come home and make the claim that we understand the "real Vietnam" and maybe even allay a bit of the national guilt for destroying the very areas we have come to develop. (If this is the case, though, the thoughts are internal—certainly no Vietnamese seem to bear any sort of grudge at all, and there is nothing but joy that we are here.)

I wrestled with both sides before concluding that there don’t really seem to be ulterior motives on either side. The Vietnamese are genuinely happy to share their culture. Government officials have instructed our roommates many times that they have a very important duty to introduce us to Vietnam and they must work very hard to build bridges. We are gaining the opportunity to experience a culture from an inside perspective in a way that few other students or travelers are able to do, and at the same time, we are leaving both tangible and intangible results.

Friday, July 14: A weekend visit to Uncle Ho, Hanoi, and Ha Long Bay Paradise

In just a few hours we will be embarking on our three week expedition to the countryside, and I still have not relayed any of the stories from Hanoi!
The blog has gradually crept over 60 single-spaced pages now on my lap-top, and I realize that at this length, it’s not exactly casual-reader friendly. I had meant to write entertaining stories the way I used to send out mass e-mails when I traveled. Instead, this has kind of taken on a life of its own, as a place for me to reflect and really process what I see. I’m terrible at keeping journals. The last time I did so was when I was about 12, and they mostly consisted of me describing the menu at every meal on our family drives. So, really for the first time, I’m journaling. I can use the blog concept as motivation for me to actually do this, and perhaps a particular section will catch a visitor’s eye as an unusual or interesting issue, but if not, that’s okay! I think this has helped me to add another dimension to my travel and study and to really think deeply about what I’m seeing, and it’s been well worth the time.
For the next three weeks I’m going to be pretty much out of touch. We’re heading off on the Green Summer campaign with the Communist Youth Union to build a house in a small village in the Mekong Delta and teach a summer camp for local students. Our whole group is a bit apprehensive—I don’t think any of us have ever been so disconnected from the Western world as these next three weeks will be. But we’re also really excited. We had a press conference today at the Youth Union headquarters, where Vietnam’s largest newspaper and a number of other publications and a television station were present to interview us. We have our brand new Youth Union uniforms and hats. We’ve combed the city for creative teaching supplies. At 5:30 am tomorrow we’ll load up, attend a giant rally for departing college volunteers at a local stadium, and then travel by bus and ferry out to the delta. I’ll be back in Saigon the second week in August for one final week here of wrap-up. I didn’t get to answer all the e-mails from everyone before I left, so apologies to those I missed and best wishes to everyone finishing summer travel for safe trips home!


***

And now, stories from Hanoi:

The Vietnam Airlines “Student Special” allowed us to take the last flight of the night between Saigon and Hanoi for less than $150 roundtrip, so for our program’s one free weekend, we made this our plan. Oddly enough, all of our pilots on Vietnam Airlines flights have been Westerners, but I have to wonder if it is like the European Basketball League—something you do if you can’t cut it in a more lucrative market. The roller coaster flights would seem to indicate this was the case! Our arrival in Hanoi was smooth—the hostel had even sent a car to wait for us! We felt like we were VIPs with the waiting driver, but the hotel room quickly brought us back to reality (certainly sufficient though for a quick night’s sleep).
Saturday morning we were determined to see as much of the city as possible in one day, so we planned to awake very early. Fortunately for us, this was facilitated by the loudspeakers in the street that blare out traditional Vietnamese music, local ward news, new Party policies, and the morning and evening doses of propaganda. The garbled, god-awful screeching at 5:30 am was not exactly welcomed, and I can see why the citizens are asking that the government abandon this medium of communication now that there are regular newspapers, radio stations, televisions, and the Internet. The Party is holding strong so far though.
The Party can certainly be felt in Hanoi far more than in Ho Chi Minh City. Red banners fly ubiquitously and the city’s People’s Committee Headquarters dominates the lakefront. Just as most ignore the loudspeakers today, the banners don’t get a lot of attention, but it does present the image of a uniform political message. Interestingly enough, we’ve talked to experts who say that Hanoi, so close to the central government, is a much safer place to protest because the government does not worry so much about subversion in an area of the country it holds firm. There are still lingering suspicions of Southern Vietnamese that make a protesting atmosphere fraught with tension.
Anyways, we did get up early to pay our visit to the good Uncle Ho, or Ho Chi Minh, a founder, leader, and president of Vietnam’s Communist party. Just like Lenin and Mao he is interred. It’s inherently creepy to visit a sort of modern temple designed with the sole purpose of honoring a dictator who is/was a mortal enemy with the United States. There wasn’t anything in his waxy appearance that added to my understanding of Vietnam, but it was sort of the “must-do” attractions. Near the mausoleum are the houses where he lived in Saigon. Ho Chi Minh lived austerely and relatively simply, and he certainly had experienced poverty and sickness himself when he took over leading the fight for Vietnam’s independence.
The Ho Chi Minh Museum was a remarkable exercise in whitewashing Vietnamese history, but our small group managed to use the rough timeline as the starting point for our own, far more honest conversations about Vietnamese history. Looking at Vietnam’s long fight for independence in its entirety really makes one wonder again exactly what the US thought they could accomplish by coming in to back Diem. The biggest constant in the country’s history was the extraordinary nationalism displayed universally. In fact, Ho Chi Minh was not initially solidly sold on Communism. He was just looking for support in bringing independence to Vietnam. He was actually much more interested in working with the US than with the Soviet Union. Twice he wrote letters of appeal to the United States. In fact, at one point during Vietnam’s struggle with China, the CIA saved Ho Chi Minh’s life, rescuing him when he was sick and hiding in a cave in the northern mountains. However, as the Cold War furor died down slightly, ultimately the US decided that we could not support the committed independence fighters, while the Soviet Union recognized the opportunity to gain a crucial South East Asian ally and a new foothold on power. Though there were strong Communist overtones throughout the museum, it seemed to me that it still continued to emphasize the biggest victory in all of the decades of war as Vietnam’s independence and right to self government.
Hanoi is a much more walkable city than Ho Chi Minh City, laid out neatly around a central lake, where famed general Le Loi supposedly pulled a sword from the mouth of a giant tortoise that he then used to defeat the Chinese in an early invasion. Since then, the citizens found a large tortoise in the lake, killed and bronzed it, and created an island temple to worship it. My guess is that the turtle probably would have just assumed keep on living, but the shrine has become the city’s centerpiece. A few blocks from the lake was the Temple of Literature, Vietnam’s first university. It is a Confucian temple of learning and home to the site of Vietnam’s mandarin civil service exam under the monarchy. Also a few blocks from the lake is the gorgeous French opera house that serves as the country’s cultural capital.
Next to the opera house is a modern Hilton Hotel, but Hanoi’s most famous Hilton is its war prison, infamously nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by imprisoned GIs. Only a small corner of the giant structure has been preserved; the rest is a modern high rise now. The prison’s longest history was as a detention center for Vietnamese when the French ruled the country. There is a guillotine in the courtyard that was used to summarily execute Vietnamese revolutionaries throughout the colonial era. Again we were impressed by the extremely long history of Vietnam’s fight for independence. We are so preoccupied in America with what is the “American War” here, but that was such a very small part of their history. Granted it did the most physical damage to the countryside and still is the cause of many of the country’s most painful scars, but at least in terms of time, the war is dwarfed by other periods of conflict.
The French were cruel prison overseers, subjecting their subjects to squalid conditions and frequent torture. The North Vietnamese, though, feature a two-room exhibit at the end of the tour talking about how the prison was more of a camp for American prisoners where they could learn about the culture of the Vietnamese in a nurturing environment that was probably better than actually living in America. I feel like propaganda would be more effective if it made one doubt the suspected truth or offered another plausible explanation. This just made us laugh. A number of famous Americans were held and tortured here, including the US’s first ambassador to Vietnam after the war and Senator John McCain, whose flight suit is on display. It is interesting to think that a number of the Vietnamese who tortured the Americans may themselves have been torture victims under the French regime.
The Old Quarter of Hanoi was home to the artist guilds during colonialism, and each street is named for the guild it housed. The entire street was devoted to whatever it was named. Now, the names have stayed the same and each street still remains devoted to one or two products, but there has been a bit of shifting from the original guilds. Now there is a toy street, a shoe street, a towel and hat street, a food market street, and traditional medicine streets. The commerce is fascinating and the streets are narrow, colorful, and constantly exciting. I would have loved to walk around for hours. I really like the organization of Hanoi, with easily walkable quarters all centered around the lake at the middle of the city. At night when we were out, all the bars and coffee shops are right on the lake, and by day, all the restaurants and travel agents are also located right off the banks. The lemonade I sipped sitting by the water was about as peaceful as possible in a city of 5 million.
We also stayed right in the Old Quarter our second night, after a debacle of our original hotel shuffling us off to their “friends.” Despite bitter negotiations, the room rate climbed by one dollar (more of a principal thing!), and then when we didn’t book our tour from what seemed to be a disorganized operation, we were subject to a half-hour lecture from the hotel owner before she would give us back our passports! Apparently we had ruined her faith in all travelers by being the 0.01 percent of guests who did not book our tour from them, and she said she could never be nice to travelers again. I guess that sucks for the next guests, because we sure won’t be back! The web reviews had warned of “somewhat pushy receptionists” trying to sell their tours, but this all-out verbal diatribe was a new level of pushy!
I wouldn’t use this atrocious hotel staff as the indicator of Northern Vietnamese personality, but I have read numerous commentaries on where the Vietnamese are friendliest, and I would say hands-down, the South wins. Life in Hanoi and the north seems to move at a bit of a slower pace—there is not the sort of “hang on” feeling you can be gripped with in Saigon’s mega-business economic excitement. Yet, people seem a little less eager to stop and chat in Hanoi, even though the opposite would make sense. Really, though, everyone is far friendlier than your average American stranger. I can never sit alone for more than 5 minutes without a stranger venturing up to chat. Even when I am reading and want to be left alone, security guards, clerks, and passers-by will stop and try to practice their English (maybe this is extra motivation for being friendlier in Saigon—English matters more in the global business environment) or ask how I like Vietnam. If I pull out a map, someone will usually offer assistance in seconds. It’s hard to feel lost or alone in a land of friendly smiles!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our culinary adventures in Hanoi. We were sadly disappointed with the pho, Vietnam’s national noodle soup, which was supposed to originate in Hanoi and be miles above Saigon’s version. It was dull and boring at both restaurants we tried and neither one offered the wide array of accoutrements served with a bowl in Saigon.
For dinner, though, I really wanted to try dog. There is a row of 60 dog restaurants on one end of the city, all arranged on stilts along the highway. Dog meat is supposed to bring friends together, offer warmth and happiness, and also, apparently, improve the libido. The libido benefit wouldn’t help much in our group of 4 guys, and I wasn’t exactly seeking out extra warmth in the tropical heat, but for the happiness, I figured it was worth a try. We ventured to the restaurant Rough Guide labeled as the best. Immediately we became the night’s entertainment as the only Westerners in the vicinity. To eat dog, one sits on the bamboo floor with newspaper spread out as a table. Then, the meat arrives in about 7 different forms, from little rolled up sausages to cuts of beef that Scott compared (I think a bit unrealistically) to filet mignon. Most amusing were the giant drumsticks we got that looked a lot like a huge State-fair style turkey drumstick. There are some great pictures of us gnawing away! All-in-all, the meet was not that good, but it was an adventure and now a great story to tell. Coming out of the restaurant we heard a small dog barking from beneath the stilts, and my stomach lurched a bit. In order to avoid the $3 taxi fare, we walked the five miles back to the city, laughing every time a dog crossed our path…what a night!

On Sunday we departed early for our two day excursion to Ha Long Bay—our last UNESCO heritage sight in Vietnam. The three hour journey from Hanoi could not have been more boring—no scenery, no space in the vehicle, and a couple petting each other in what was supposed to be my leg room. However, we were more than rewarded by the bay’s spectacular scenery. At the pier we boarded our junk as a group of 20 and set off into the bay. It is difficult to describe the amazing bay landscape—some day when I have something other than a dial-up connection, I will post some pictures to offer some justice to the unusual and spectacular scene. Giant rock formations jutted out of the ocean depths all over the place, forming a sort of enormous rock garden. Some of the islands were actually quite large, including the one we stayed on, while others were just bare rocks. I think if a giant were to finger-paint, the result would look something like Ha Long Bay.
The islands are prime locations for caves, and there are a few spectacular caverns. However, as a UNESCO World Heritage site, international funding for restoration and preservation has largely removed the raw natural appeal that we enjoyed in the other caves we visited. The largest cavern looked like something from Disney World with psychedelic colored lights set out all to illuminate and entertain, designed to be safe for families and the elderly (or at least people of my parent’s generation…). Nonetheless, the raw impressiveness could not be dimmed.
We spent the night on the bay’s largest island, Cat Ba Island. It was actually quite large, with a 50 minute bus ride to cross from the sheltered pier to the fishing village where we stayed in the pleasant “Sea and Sand Hotel.” Even with new flows of tourists, the town has retained it’s quaint charm and appeal as a local beach destination. We found the local beach only a few minutes outside of the hotel area and were promptly rewarded with great waves crashing into the protected rock cove with the bay’s jutting rocks all around. There was even a walkway built out over the water hugging the cove that allowed us to follow the sheer rock coastline projected directly over the ocean. We liked swimming so much in the afternoon that Jim, Scott and I decided to get up early to hike and then swim again! This didn’t leave us much sleep since we heartily explored the island’s quite impressive night life, but sleep is for the weak!
The second day on the water featured the highest diving I have ever gotten to do! Our boat was three stories, with the top deck a bit more than 30 feet from the ocean surface. We stopped to swim and there didn’t seem to be any reason why we couldn’t just jump straight off the top deck into the water, so we did! The drop was long enough that after you realized you were falling, you still had a few seconds in the air for your stomach to flip and wonder what on earth you were doing. Then we hit the water, fought the super strong current, and raced back up to jump again! Thus, we were sufficiently exhausted when the boat steamed back into port at 11:30 to wrap up the expedition.
We were on the budget tour, so organization was not a strong point. At every boat landing and bus change our guide and entire group changed, as we were sort of shuffled around to make numbers work. On the last ride home, our guide of the moment almost couldn’t find a minibus to load the four of us onto for the trip back to Hanoi. Fortunately there isn’t much to the guiding operation. Anyone can take you into a cave and say “Look at that rock—it’s a lion. That one is a tiger. And that one with two red lanterns placed where eyes should be is a dragon’s face with two eyes.” Well, thanks for that enlightenment! But at $27.50 for a night in a nice hotel, transportation by van, the sailing trip, tickets to the caves, and all meals, who can complain?
Back in Hanoi, we had a serendipitous meeting with an incoming freshman Robertson who just happened to be living with his father in the city until school began. Definitely a pretty cool post-high school summer! His father actually ran the USAID economic portfolio for Vietnam’s development, so we met him at the USAID office—a secure satellite office of the embassy. This is also the office where President Bush’s AIDS relief plan is managed in Vietnam. Two summers ago in Washington in my internship at the Health and Human Services Global Affairs Office, I remember very well toiling over the budget for Vietnam’s recently announced plan. I was excited about the possibilities it offered. Now, two years later, that plan is just beginning to become a reality, and soon the money will flow faster than it can be spent. It actually seems as if the program is a bit over funded in a country that has responded extremely well to the HIV threat and kept it from becoming epidemic. Nonetheless, the office will receive 36 million for AIDS relief. To contrast this, the entire USAID economic development budget for all of Vietnam is about 7 million dollars. We learned, though, that there is currently a really positive relationship between the USAID staff and the Vietnamese government, and at least from the optimistic US perspective, it seems like real collaboration is happening instead of just preaching to an uninterested or incapable audience.
Getting back to the airport in time managed to be a bit of an adventure—we were told that the 7 o’clock shuttle for a 9:15 flight would be way too much time, but we were under the impression that the shuttles left every fifteen minutes. When we arrived at the office at 7:25 for a 7:30 shuttle, all seemed to be going well. We were promptly directed to a van, loaded up, and the door closed. Except, the van did not move a bit and all the staff vanished. It was not until a bit after 8:00 that enough people had gathered for the van to leave. (I still don’t know if it was on a time schedule or just left when full.) Fortunately, Vietnamese airport security is not particularly formidable, so within eight minutes of entering the airport doors, we were standing on our airplane. Tragedy was averted, leaving us just one more week in Ho Chi Minh City before the countryside!

Friday, July 7: The Way “They” Live

***At long last, here are the posts from our Central and Highland Region exploration two weeks ago. A brief post about our Hanoi trip will follow soon, as we're now frantically preparing to depart for the rural province where we will work for 3 weeks with little to no connection to the outside world. Thanks for reading, and please leave some feedback for when I'm back to the city next month!***

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We are back in Ho Chi Minh City now, after an eventful trek through the Central Highlands and a night in a traditional ethnic minority village ceremonial house, replete with bamboo wine, gongs, dancing, and 10 kilometers of trekking through the mud.
Eighty percent of Vietnam lives in rural areas, so despite our trip’s focus thus far on seeing all the major cities, our night in the village was really far more representative of how most Vietnamese actually live.
The Central Highlands of Vietnam are a rugged, mountainous region home to the majority of the country’s ethnic minorities, known as Montagnards. There are a variety of tribes living in hundreds of small villages in the region—Kon Tum province alone has 650 minority villages, only thirty of which have been visited by foreigners. While it would have been fascinating to be the first foreigner in one of the unexplored villages, the reason no one has made it there is because they are hidden many kilometers from any sort of road in deep, dangerous jungle. Even so, the village we visited, Kon Kotu, despite being one of the most popular village destinations, still only gets one or two Western groups a month, so our arrival was a big event!
The village is about 3 kilometers from Kon Tum, the small city that serves as the capital of the large province. Until three years ago, there was no electricity or permanent road leading even to this village so near the city, but the provincial government has been working hard (at least by Vietnamese government standards) to extend some infrastructure to the villages, and in 2003 they completed a paved path that nearly reaches the village, allowing motor scooters and carts to make the journey from the village to market year-round, even when the dirt paths have been completely washed away. The path is not a road; our van certainly could not make it near the village, and goods are still carried on horse-drawn cart, but for rough wooden carts, the smooth path makes a world of difference. We, however, walked the old dirt paths to the village, immediately covering ourselves in mud, but getting to watch adults and children of all ages working in the rice fields, tending crops, playing, or carrying traveling between villages.
The village was a small collection of houses arranged around the rong; the central feature of each village is their community longhouse, known as a rong. (There is even more potential for great puns here than the Thai “wat” temples!) Like all traditional village houses, the rong is set on stilts and covered with thatched straw. The floor is tightly weaved bamboo. The straw ceiling has a very steep pitch, towering high above any other village structure. The rong is the site of village meetings, community business, ceremonies of all sorts, and the “hotel” for honored visitors. Embracing the few tourists who make it out this far, the village has partnered with the government tourist office to make the stay comfortable, providing a few mattresses and mosquito netting to keep out the ginormous flying termites and persistent mosquitoes and flies.
Near the rong was the one village bathroom, containing a few toilets, but no running water. Interestingly, I learned that if you dump enough buckets of water into a toilet, the water pressure will cause the flush to happen even without running water! The one tap for running water is fed by a well and water directed from a mountain stream several kilometers away. Both sources are stored in a large tank to get the village through the dry season. Apparently, at some previous point in village history there had been running water or at least the expectation of such, as a number of pipes had been constructed, but it had been awhile since the water had flowed.
The houses themselves were a motley combination of straw and bamboo or poured concrete. Most of the dwellings were one large room, though sometimes there were a few rooms. There wasn’t really any defined arrangement for the houses, set in a few small clusters. The furnishings were simple but comfortable, and many times we wondered how large pieces of what appeared to be second-hand urban living room furnishings had made it out to the village. Also in the village was a Catholic church. The French missionaries did their jobs well, at least in the areas very close to their comfortable missions, and the people here are quite devout, praying together daily even though there is not a resident priest in the in village.
After depositing our backpacks in the village, we set off to trek to the suspension bridge that crossed the province’s large river and led out to most of the remote villages. The ten kilometers was the muddiest hiking I have ever covered in my life. We are in the middle of the rainy season, and pockets of rain drenched the land daily. Much of the trail was completely washed out; with every step through the brown goo, I would sink promptly. My shoes got stuck and I was forced to go bare-footed, wondering timorously about various parasites. I had nothing on my back, but we passed streams of peasants herding animals, carrying large baskets, or pushing bicycles, and I could only shake my head in astonishment. At times, progress was excruciating (but definitely a major thrill to become completely covered in mud), but our guide said that this was nothing compared to the rainiest months. After awhile, various shoe and stamina limitations reduced our group to just me, Jim, Scott, and our guide, and we sped up to nearly a run to reach the bridge and still get back to the village by nightfall.
I was nonplussed at first sight of the river crossing that we had hiked so many kilometers to reach, but then I realized that I was only seeing the lead-up to the actual bridge, which looked like something straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. Wires connected trees on both sides of the river, suspending narrow planks of wood between bamboo rails. The whole contraption swayed violently, with the ominously flowing rapid currents rushing beneath us. We stepped out gingerly to begin the crossing, doing our best to avoid looking down. It seemed that as we moved further and further out, the planks became narrower, the holes in the wood become larger, and the creaks became more pronounced. When the planks reached their narrowest width, the bridge suddenly became uneven, swinging dramatically to one side. I reached to grab the wire suspensions, only to notice that they were made from sharply studded barb wire. “Why on Earth would they do that?” I asked my guide. The reply—“Oh, there was no more regular wire,” left us just shaking our heads in amazement.
Step-by-step, we made our way across the water and all the way back. Every step was a rush—talk about natural highs! But what was an amazing adventure for us is everyday existence for anyone in the hundreds of villages on the other side of the water who wants to visit the region’s only town. Our guide told us of unlit crossings at night, crossing with small animals carried on backs, and of produce carried in baskets to market. I was most impressed by the story of the woman who clutched her child to her front and carried an enormous basket of produce on her back—I’m not sure what extremities were used to grip the bridge, but I would have loved to see that feat!
While there is something somewhat seductive about living so far away from “modern civilization,” there is also the sobering realization that if something goes wrong, you’re pretty much on your own. There’s no hamlet ambulance or fire fighter, and the idea of getting something “quickly,” takes on a very different meaning. Births take place in the huts unless there is some sort of extraordinary circumstance. Acute health crises almost certainly mean death; getting someone to even the small Kontum hospital could take a full day, and to get to the country’s only critical care facilities in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City’s would take days.
To get back to the village, we hiked back to a place where the river was not so menacing, where we met villagers who had brought dugout canoes to paddle us back. In their simplicity, the boats looked so strong and solid. Each craft was made from one very large tree trunk, hollowed out completely. We sat low in the water and just glided on back, guided by the villager’s bamboo rod. Almost too soon, we reached the village again, where we had a chance to rest and relax before dinner.
The government company did not permit tourists to eat the village food, fearing that if we were to get sick from the mostly root (with some mice) diet, prepared without concern for finicky Western sanitation standards, the results could damage tourism. Thus, our food was actually brought by motorbike from a local restaurant a few kilometers away, but there were plenty of interesting wild animal dishes to experiment with. While we waited for our meal, we had a bit of time to just lounge. At first we were all sitting around in the rong, but it felt odd to separate ourselves in the ceremonial house from the “real” village life, so I pried us away from our rest to stroll around.
We were quickly and warmly welcomed into a number of houses. Chris, Gideon, Jim and I found ourselves sitting and chatting with a few girls about our age. The girls had learned a bit of English in school, and amazingly, Chris really is conversational at this point, so he was able to keep the ball rolling! It would be easy to succumb to the temptation to write about “going back in time” or visiting a “primitive people,” as life in some ways has fewer complications in the tiny mountain hamlet. After our chats, though, it struck me how very similar we actually are. One of the girls asked for our help translating the latest Bryan Adams song that she had on DVD, and men, women, and children gathered to watch a dubbed Japanese soap opera that was not so different from its American counterparts. The men gradually drifted in from working to share a few sips of rice wine. Later that night there was to be a party, as a young cow had fallen into the river and drowned—seemed like kind of a stretch as a reason to let loose, but they were excited. The kids our age talked of school, and one told us how she was going to attend university next fall. Mothers watched while the children ran around and waved “hello” to the funny-looking white people. We were invited to drink, watch World Cup, eat, pray—without hesitation we were welcomed to make ourselves at home and it was easy to forget the hugely opposite worlds we were coming from.
After dinner, the villagers performed a ceremonial gong show for us, with the men playing a large set of gongs while the women danced, all wearing traditional ceremonial attire. Our guide said that the people were so glad to have us (to be fair, this is at least largely due to the fee they receive from our visit—a much needed local supplement), and this show was “all they can offer,” but it was splendid. UNESCO actually has recognized this art form as an endangered art that symbolizes our world heritage and needs our protection. It really was a treat to participate in the dancing—I felt like a character in some kind of movie. I’ve tried “traditional” dances in all sorts of contrived American settings, but there I was in the village, doing the real thing! It wasn’t commercial-feeling at all—we waited a long time as the villagers slowly gathered, practiced, and prepared, and then when they were ready, they began to perform around a roaring bonfire.
After the ceremony we all shared a cask of fresh, local bamboo wine, a sweet liquid with a yeast that somehow prevents hangovers. Two long bamboo straws emerged from the clay pot, and we gathered with a group of girls in the rong to drink together. Chris called the event “some odd version of Sadie Hawkins” as each girl selected one of us to drink with and we would suck out as much of the wine as we could in one gulp. We drank and exchanged songs (they were far better singers than us) until it was time to crawl into our mosquito nettings, where I slept soundly.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing the past, present, and future of the Montagnards, and indeed all rural Vietnamese. Urban migration is a huge force right now, as most developing countries experience with the growth of cities. A decade ago, the country was 90% rural, so even if the current 80% seems like a lot, clearly change is happening fast. I’m not sure what the goal is—or even if there is a goal—for these villages to “progress.” What does globalization mean to the residents of Kon Kotu or any other village? Joining the WTO? The new Party leadership? The residents here really couldn’t care less. This isn’t to say that they are necessarily uninformed, but just that the “outside” political and economic world don’t have much affect on daily life.
The villages actually have some sort of limited autonomy, similar to Native American reservations, but they are still subject to pretty intense scrutiny, as the Communists found persistent resistance from the Montagnards for years, even after South Vietnam fell. As I said earlier, the provincial authorities do seem to be doing their best to help the villages develop.
At about the same time the paved path to Kon Kotu was completed, power lines were extended from the city to the closest villages. The main power line actually looks quite fancy, with a sophisticated system keeping the wires elevated and clear along the main path. When the lines deviate from this main line, though, it is a different story. The naked or thinly insulated wires sort of haphazardly stream down from the main pole to each house, sometimes supported by a rudimentary pole or stick, but many times just dangling. They usually drape over the dwelling before being tied somewhere on the roof and going through a crack between the walls and the ceiling. I have seen this primitive stringing in all of Southeast Asia, but for the first time, I had a chance to closely examine just how dangerous the connections were, and I shuddered to imagine the impact of a lightning strike.
However the power is getting there, though, it is reaching the villages. That being said, while it adds convenience and pleasure to daily life, I certainly would not say it has transformed day-to-day living. The biggest impact has to be the televisions that have found their way to many of the homes. The families may not always even be able to pay their electricity bill, but they find some way to get a television and capture whatever stations the antennas they fashion to their roofs can bring in. I can’t speculate on social cohesiveness prior to televisions, and no one has ever mentioned previous problems—but I can say that now the television acts as a great unifier, bringing together entire families and groups of families to watch shows and chat together in the evening. Electricity also brings electric lights to some of the houses and public facilities, although all is used sparingly. It actually isn’t so hard to imagine life three years ago without these new conveniences.
Most of the young people in Kon Kotu do make the daily trip to Kon Tum to attend school, at least through the high school level, although the numbers going on to university are extremely small. Beyond Kon Kotu, few could make it to school even if they wanted to. I’ve never really questioned the value of education before; experts pretty universally agree that it is the key to development. But if these groups are content with village life, education doesn’t have a lot of value unless it is practical training in agricultural yields or village plumbing. Should education really be a priority here?
Again, what is the goal for development? What is best for the country? Is urbanization something to fear and seek to prevent, or a natural evolutionary development that should be embraced? In either case, I think the limited infrastructure reaching the villages will be a major incentive for the young people to stay. Most seem content with their television and motor scooters, with few having traveled to any real urban area of the countries. I’m not sure they would agree with a Western assessment of what they are lacking. I could be wrong though—if more travel to the city and see what is happening in their own country, maybe they will be enthralled and leave their simple mountain villages. This would be an infinitely interesting ethnographic study that hasn’t really been conducted yet. Vietnamese anthropologists have worked to understand cultural traditions and record the histories and lifestyles of these ethnic villages, but I haven’t heard much in the way of future direction.
I asked our guide if he thought the more remote villages would eventually also get power lines and roads. He thought roads through the dense jungle would be impossible, but maybe power lines would reach further in five years or so. He certainly didn’t forsee any economic transformations or shift to a cash-crop economy, even with the WTO. Such thoughts seemed ridiculous there, actually, but back here in Saigon, and I’m sure in Washington and New York, such proposals are being drafted somewhere.
What could improve daily life? Each village actually has one or two Vietnamese stores with a non-ethnic Vietnamese person sort of functioning as the middle-man for trade with the village. These “outsiders” are not particularly appreciated, but are seen as necessary, as the villagers just have no experience in the business transactions necessary to turn a profit with their own produce. Perhaps someone could train the villagers to eliminate these middle-men. Historically, the government has blocked all NGOs from coming anywhere close to the Central Highlands, as the situation was politically sensitive and they feared international aid workers would pursue a hidden agenda of promoting rebellion. This fear seems to be abating somewhat, and there are even a few Vietnamese health workers trained by international doctors who are working with the locals to teach health and safety practices. I think more of this sort of program could at least somewhat help the current non-existent health care situation. The government actually has instituted a number of programs to offer scholarships and special training to the Montagnards under the condition that they return to their villages for a few years after their schooling. While they sound like great programs, in practice few have been able to take advantage of them, so here is another place for some expansion. Beyond these few rather obvious ideas, I think the key to designing any sort of future plan would be to make sure that it comes from the locals. I really have no idea what they would say, and it might differ dramatically among the 650 villages. There’s enough work here to employ a small army of anthropologists!
Leaving the village, we spent a little time wandering Kon Tum, an interesting town with a history of French and Montagnards, regarded today as one of the central cities for ethnic minorities, who make up 50-percent of the population. There were a number of pleasant coffee shops, wooden churches, and a seminary, but the most memorable visit for me was the orphanage run by the local nuns.
There are 200 children, almost all of whom are from the ethnic minority villages, with only 7 nuns responsible for caring for everyone. The orphanage gets a few donations from a German group, but most of the money is raised from the harvests of the small farm behind the building. The nuns seemed content to let us wander around freely, smiling but barely breaking away from their busy scurrying. There were babies all over the place; two nuns were trying to spoon formula into four crying mouths while another was changing soiled pants (diapers are not really used here). Jim and I found one baby lying alone in a crib room with a cleft pallet, distended stomach, and body parts that didn’t seem quit proportional. There were sores all over her arms and legs and she was barely responsive. The tag over her bed said she was more than three months old, but she struggled to even grip our fingers. I don’t know how long a baby like this will make it here—in America a few simple operations and proper nutrition could give this baby as bright a childhood as any, but here, with virtually no resources, it’s hard to say. The kids were adorable, playing with brooms and toys, clinging to our legs, and clamoring to follow me and Jim out of their rooms. I wanted to adopt them all (and I don’t even particularly like kids!).
A quick hour flight brought us home to Ho Chi Minh City. Arriving back to the guesthouse after trekking and traveling for two days without a shower, it felt great to just turn on the hot water and relax. I didn’t notice anything amiss in the bathroom until I was drying myself off and felt something pinch my stomach. All of a sudden my groin was on fire. I looked at my towel and saw it was crawling with fire ants—there must have been a hundred all over the towel, and to my horror, they were now all over my body! I jumped, turned on the water as hard as I could, and frantically slapped myself until I had rid myself of the beasts. Just moments later, I was swelling and scratching all over myself. Fortunately Rachael saved the day with her antihistamines, and I’m okay now!
The night concluded with a forth of July party—America’s birthday, celebrated sort of oddly with a unique Asian-American party. The hamburgers were tiny, the buns were enormous, and the spring rolls were definitely a safer bet, but it was fun to share our Independence Day with the Vietnamese roommates on the other side of the world.

Wednesday July 5: Representing a Massacre and the Lessons of War

Despite the remarkable resilience of the Vietnamese today, it seems that we can never get too far from the painful history of war, and especially the war with America. The My Lai massacre has become infamous worldwide as a terrible example of the horrors of war and inexcusable and unexplainable evil. As we traveled from the Central Region along the coast to the Central Highlands, we visited the site of the massacre, where American GIs slaughtered 500 residents of the cluster of hamlets, primarily women, children, and the elderly. The operation had been designated a “search and destroy” mission to eliminate the Viet Kong from the villages and “neutralize” the area once and for all. When the soldiers landed on that Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, they quickly discovered that there were no armed soldiers in the area at all; somehow they had all escaped. Yet, frustrated with months of casualties without any real enemy to shoot back at, the Americans vented their fury with a vengeance, carrying out their “search and destroy” instructions to the letter, rounding up packs of old, crippled, young, infant, and pregnant residents, bringing them to irrigation ditches and road intersections, and executing them en masse.
The site was moving, to say the least. I bought a copy of “Four Hours at Mai Le” to read before we visited, so by the time we arrived, I was sort of sick from reading about American atrocities. Page after page was a litany of American crimes. My older readers (ie those alive during the war) probably remember this story vividly, and most likely have quite a different memory of what happened their. I’d be extremely interested in learning what the reaction was like in America at the time the story broke, in an atmosphere filled with both war protestors and troop supporters. From what I understand, there was never really any particular sympathy for the actual lives of either North or South Vietnamese army or civilians beyond the propaganda power for protestors to point to casualty counts. For us, the war is called a lost of American innocence, and as we mourn that tragedy, it seems that the much bigger loss here is somewhat forgotten.
However, the way the Vietnamese government has constructed the memorial and reconstructed the village at My Lai, along with the script our local guide had to read for us really made me sort of cynical, looking for ways to defend what the Americans did. The mock-up of the village is complete with slain concrete animals, entrails and all. There is unquestionable power in the irrigation ditch where GIs slaughtered hundreds of women and children. The mass graves that my country’s troops are responsible for speak volumes. The memoirs of entire families wiped out are enough to make the most hardened veteran cringe or cry. Defacing it all with captions about “the evil, terrible Americans,” the “sweet, peace-loving, innocent villagers,” and “the entirely unimaginable and unprovoked raid” takes away so much of that power.
History, after all, is not so black and white. The “peace-loving” village had been the site of hostile fire for weeks leading up to the attack. Yes, the soldiers had vanished before the raid, but to say that they were never there is just a lie. As the lies add up, the memorial lost a lot of credibility for me. This is unfortunate, because as I read my book, I realized that there was very little in the way of a real defense for American actions. The particular day of the massacre, there really wasn’t any enemy fire and women and children were gathered into small groups before being shot. The rapes that accompanied the killing can’t begin to be justified in any situation. Even more disturbing was the way the political process played out to shield the accused from suffering any real punishment. Nixon was so desperate to maintain his image that he robbed our country of moral credibility that cannot be restored.
What would have happened if the South Vietnamese had won the war? Certainly there would not be a My Lai reconstruction. Perhaps, instead there would be a memorial in Hue to the 3000 civilians massacred by the Viet Kong out of frustration similar to that of the Americans unable to determine who was on the “right” side. War’s winners definitely get to write the story of choice. I certainly was not proud to represent America at the sight of the massacre, but I think what I came away with more than anger at our country was anger at war in general and its enormous costs, ordered almost callously by politicians who never see a front line.
I guess more importantly though, would be to question what we (the US) are doing now. (The question can certainly be asked to many countries other than the US, but let’s start at home where we have even a tiny bit of input with our vote). In just over three months now, I have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and now this massacre site in Vietnam, and every time I shake my head and ask “What type of person could commit such a hideous travesty?” Why do we keep doing this? What’s going on in Iraq? The prison scandals are disturbingly similar to what we condemned the Northern Vietnamese for during the war. And at Guantanemo Bay, we are holding uncharged foreigners in small wire cages. Have we lost sight of what our actual goal is? Was there ever a clearly defined goal? How can we stop it all? Maybe when we can answer those questions, we’ll have some insight into genocides in other countries. The night of our visit we stayed in Quang Ngai, a major war city that was completely destroyed during the war. It was rebuilt with Soviet assistance into a hideously ugly industrial city with not much going for it. The dreary town was just depressing. We stayed in the skeleton of a once grand hotel, now moldy and musty,huge and empty. The whole night was sort of eery. We tried swimming in the pool but quickly came out after it felt like we were in a slimy soup. The karaoke rooms were dark and dreary. One man was singing alone. Eventually we just entertained ourselves with the odd art on the hotel walls and chalked the city up to the scars of war.