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).