Where in the world??

Hello from Cape Town, South Africa!

Yes, I've been awful at updating the blog. The end of Vietnam is all written on my laptop, but without a South African power converter, I can't post it! Fear not--this should be corrected soon.

In the meantime, the Tokyo whirlwind tour, short pitstop at home, and flight to Cape Town were all successful. It's day 3 here now, and all is well. I'll be here until the 30th, and then up to Uganda to begin the semester. Our group has been e-mailing each other, and the people seem pretty cool--I'm very excited!!

Lots of African stories coming soon...stay posted and I'll stay safe :)

David

Tuesday, August 1: A week in the life, Take two!

Hey all--we're back in Saigon now, finally beginning to wrap-up an amazing summer. I'm working to get the blog all caught up very soon. In the meantime, here is a long and rather jumbled series of reflections from week two in the Mekong Delta.
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Week one in the Mekong Delta countryside felt like at least a month. Week two finished before I knew it! I guess we found and proceeded over the “hump” I described after week one, because suddenly the days have melted together, teaching has changed 180 degrees, and I don’t even wince in pain any time I stand up now. Life isn’t exactly a breeze yet, but the country rhythms are gradually becoming infused in our own lives.

On Monday I was jotting a few notes on my computer, and I wrote: “I had fun teaching today. I really did—I had a chance to work with everyone one-on-one and after our culture show over the weekend, the ice finally seemed to be really broken.” For starters, we split the class. Our Sunday night meeting was an almost comical brainstorming session of the best way to do this, examining rotations of students and teachers so we could have the best interactions, but in the end we went with simplicity and did a random division. Que and I would teach English to one group and “other skills” to the second group and Chris and Phuong would do the opposite.

The split made a huge difference; with twenty-eight students in a room, it was suddenly very manageable and easy to keep order. Furthermore, our biggest troublemakers effectively removed themselves from the camp. About six students showed up fifteen minutes late absolutely plastered. Hilary was standing at the school entrance and they began swearing at her and heaping verbal abuse until she kicked them out and threatened to call the police if they returned. Fine by us! The first thing we did in our small group was establish ground rules for the next two weeks. In retrospect it was a huge error that we had not done this at the beginning of camp, but you learn from mistakes, and now I know!

The first three days of the week we used our second hour of the class for some low-key activities. We did English activities, sang songs, and played some outdoor games that allowed everyone to have fun. They were working hard and learning lots in English and seemed to be having a blast in the second half. However, that’s not to say things were perfect or easy. Class was fun, but all of us felt that we could be doing more. There’s nothing wrong with having fun with our students, but as we had said, we had hoped to teach so many other units. For Thursday, we wanted to try something new with a conflict resolution class. All four of us initially were happy about the idea. In fact, it was at Phuong’s urging that we resurrected the lesson plan. However, when we tried to actually plan the lesson, we ended up in the most monumental debate of the trip. The essential question was whether or not the students were capable of learning new material and how we should teach them. Que was adamant that “these students will not understand.” “Why?” we quarried. After all, he had been a rural student, and he said the ideas weren’t too complex, so if he could do it, why couldn’t our students. He insisted that terms were too hard, students would not learn, and if they did, he would need to explain everything and reasons behind it—students would not be able to synthesize at all by themselves.

It’s difficult to cohesively express these debates in writing. I talked about a lot of the issues last time. I think, though, that it was a credit to our group that we did not accept the easy way of just doing games and English, and we struggled to finally come up with lesson plans that everyone was happy with. And to Que’s credit, even when he didn’t like a lesson idea, he tried his best when we were in the classroom. Usually, to everyone’s surprise, the activities worked really well. Even when something didn’t go as well as planned, I think the students gained exposure to the ideas, and at least offered some food for thought.

It was an immense relief that teaching could once again be fun. I began to look forward to the classroom instead of dread it. I knew many of our students’ names now, could joke with them, picked up on some strengths and weaknesses, and could push them each to learn just a bit more. I really admired the way so many of them worked and practiced their English. Clearly, despite the debates, they were really talented students.

With teaching being easier, I also had a bit more time to enjoy other activities. I picked a new road to run on Monday and Tuesday, winding along one of the Mekong’s main channels and then winding past the region’s one hospital, past a few factories, across several bridges and through two more quaint villages with children playing soccer, families farming their fields (this road has the only rice and crop fields I’ve seen in the area), and groups of men and women gathered for an afternoon meal. Solo running seems to be the best time for revelations, and I had two while jogging along the river road.

First, I had been wondering how much more I would learn being here for weeks two and three; after one intense week and a homestay in the village, I thought that we had asked as many questions, heard as many stories, and met enough people that there couldn’t be much in they tiny town we did not know about. Looking back, this idea seems silly, and I think I learned an important lesson. It’s not necessarily the concrete lessons to learn that count—it’s more the intangible feel of a place that doesn’t reveal itself until you’ve been their long enough to know a routine. That’s the very beginning of understanding the local way of life, which is a far cry from knowing the local way of life. Further, only then can you appreciate the little things that aren’t routine. The live music at a coffee shop or the assembly at the war cemetery along the highway—so many things are not remarkable at first site but have their own stories. As I ran by some of these stories—volleyball games, a new road being paved, new blooming flower pots—I felt like I could begin to hear the local rhythm.

The second “revelation” was an idea that the incoming freshman Robertson mentioned to me in Hanoi. He pointed out that when you’re moving along the streets here, it always feels like you are going really far. In reality, its not that you are moving so much—it’s that there is so much to see while you are moving that it feels like you are traversing countless kilometers. Unfortunately, such a feeling doesn’t help when you are trying to distance train, but it’s really true. There is so much to see everywhere! Like the local rhythm, even out here in the country, every inch of land seems to be used for some purpose. Vietnam has one of the world’s highest population densities. While the statistics are absolutely abhorrent in the cities (in Hanoi’s old quarter, each person has just over a square meter of space on average), even in Vietnam’s long thin countryside, people, animals, and plants spread to fill all available area.

An interesting night entertainment for my roommate has been people watching. It seems that as the only real hotel in town, our lodging serves as the local brothel. There are quite a few heavily made-up women that are escorted in by men that don’t seem particularly attached for a one-night stay. The fact that our room was equipped with condoms would add credence to this theory. I haven’t seen them, but apparently there have even been a few Americans taking part. Hilary heard that a couple were in town to get married, with wives ordered through mail or Internet—a practice that is still disturbingly common.

It’s hard to have the sort of casual interactions with the locals that I would really enjoy to learn more about general lifestyles and habits because of the language barrier, but luckily my roommate has had some extensive conversations and he can report back.
One of the issues he mentioned was the mail-order brides. Que said that in his hometown, the local police force is one of the country’s best, and they try very hard to prevent the practice, especially stopping Korean and Japanese brokers from coming in, as many of the women who are taken report back later of abuse and mistreatment. Here, though, he said the local police force was known for being highly inefficient, mostly because so many just accept bribes. When your police force is corrupt, it’s hard to know who can be responsible for stopping corruption!

That being said, the general infrastructure here is really good—Que said far better than in his province. The organization is clear and strong, with the local government well planned and structured. There was, though, a growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor. Many of the richest people we have met or heard about grow rich because of outside remittances. Families with Viet Kieu (oversees Vietnamese relatives) seem to be by far the wealthiest. For example, our hotel was financed by an American relative of the family. There is no way that anyone but a very few could afford to build such a facility without outside assistance and personal loans from banks are still very rare. The remittances perpetuate the stereotype that all Westerners are really rich—an annoying label to be forced to bear, though certainly true in comparison.

For overseas Vietnamese, though, it creates a real pressure to succeed. When returning, their new wealth has to be displayed. Stories abound of returning Vietnamese going through elaborate routines to deceive their families and friends of their wealth and prominence in foreign lands, when the reality is that usually they are struggling mightily. From rented jewelry to doctored pictures with American politicians, I have read about a whole spectrum of ruses used. Remittances do make a huge difference, though, and it will be interesting to see what the response is to the wealth disparities. In an area where in the past the poverty and lack of resources was relatively uniform, I wonder if there will be a growth in social hierarchies or more differentiated lifestyles. Just as it would be interesting to see what infrastructural development happens in a decade, it would be really fascinating to look at the accompanying social stratification effects and their larger impact in community organization, corruption, and government structure.

To continue in my rambling and disorganized week’s reflections on a completely unrelated note, the food is beginning to get a bit tiresome. I could do without seeing another bowl of white rice for some time, but somehow I don’t think that’ll be the case. We’ve eaten more in the market stalls. Gia or Hilary will order for our group in advance, and regardless of their regular menu, the places will go buy the ingredients and cook what we desire. Still, though, some non-Vietnamese food would be lovely. To get over a bit of midweek doldrums, Wednesday night featured a delicious pseudo-Western dinner. Hilary taught our guesthouse owner how to make macaroni and cheese, and even if it wasn’t real cheese (the substitute is a French processed blend called “Laughing Cow”), it was wonderful. The whole meal didn’t have a single grain of rice and there was even a coffee sorbet desert.

After dinner, Que, Phuong and I biked back to the village for a local music performance. Ma Chin’s hamlet was sharing a traditional music exchange with the neighboring hamlet and we were invited. We met the other Green Summer groups working in the hamlet and sat together in the hamlet’s small meeting hall. It was a quaint little performance hall—really just a long table with a keyboard and a far-too-large sound system with a far-too-sophisticated microphone system at the end. The hamlet meeting halls are the social and political heart of each hamlet, with a diagram on the walls of how the political structure works in the hamlet and information about the commune. The People’s Committee local dignitaries were present, and villagers from the elderly to tiny children were present, spilling from the hall, milling at tables outside to chat, or sitting across the way in a coffee shop where they could hear the entertainment with the benefit of a little distance from the frightful amplifier.

There were little cookies and tea and baked watermelon seeds that looked just like the way we prepare sunflower seeds but were far less tasty. Everything in the country that remotely resembles a public gathering for some reason has to be excessively formal. I mentioned this with the opening ceremonies two weeks ago, and I’m no closer to understanding the reason, but there were a spate of speeches welcoming everyone and acknowledging each participant. As the lone American student, I received a special acknowledgement!

The elders seemed excited to hear from the college students, so the Green Summer performers all had a chance to strut their stuff. Then, however, it was time for the traditional music. We left shortly after the old people pulled out the traditional instruments and began some kind of yodeling. It’s the traditional music of Southern Vietnam; the country is currently trying to get it added to the UNESCO protected heritage list with the Highlands gong music. Que and Phuong were proud of the traditional music but said that it was “kind of boring.” It was really interesting, but not exactly melodic; more like chants with some twangy string instruments. The ancient woman with a lazy eye who stood in front of us belting away was so passionate and loved it so much that it was quite fun to watch, but it seemed like a dying art. The boys assured me, though, that there were still young apprentices being trained.

When we left to leave, there was yet again a stir about a foreigner, me, traveling after dark. Ma Chin was very worried about my safety and she asked a man from the People’s Committee to follow us home. As we walked back to our bikes, she kept uttering cautions for me and other villagers would add their assent. I wanted to shout that “Damn it, I’ll be just fine!” I know everyone is just concerned and doing everything they can, but the overbearing nature is incredibly frustrating to be treated so delicately and have everyone question your capability to do something, whether it’s biking after dark or digging mud. I keep thinking about the violent crime in US cities and the far more imminent danger I have experienced than Vietnamese my youth my age living in these villages. But, tourists would only get hurt here if they got in an accident, so that is saying something for the stability the citizens and government have put into place.

Ironically, though we left the music exchange early, there was no desire to end music performance for the evening. The karaoke rooms at the hotel were empty and many of the roommates had already begun to perform, so I joined in to here them perform Vietnamese and American pop (in widely varying quality). I remembered the karaoke machine in the small minority village we stayed in the Central Highlands and its sharp juxtaposition to the gong show. Maybe apprentices are being trained somewhere to keep the traditional music alive, but the scene in the karaoke room is far more representative of Vietnamese music today.

July 27 is the Vietnamese equivalent of Memorial Day. Though its not a government holiday, it is a very important day of celebration and ritual. Ben Tre Province has a strong revolutionary tradition, so the ceremonies are particularly important here. The province is known as “The Province of Heroes,” and widely celebrated as the home of the Dong Khui movement. The movement was the precursor to the Viet Cong—fighters interested in the liberation of Vietnam from French rule. The group was fiercely nationalistic and is extremely proud of the fact that there movement was strongly existing prior to any capacity in Hanoi to issue such directives. Because there were so many revolutionaries here, it became a prime target for bombings, especially by the Americans. This is the special day for veterans and widows.

Earlier in the week to celebrate, Jim won the coin toss in our group to be our representative to visit a Hero Mother. The Hero Mothers are a group of women who lost multiple family members in the revolutionary struggle and who were fairly recently awarded recognition and are now commemorated and compensated slightly by the government. The woman told the story of her husband and oldest son being killed within just days of each other—she didn’t remember if it was the war with the French or American. Maybe she didn’t remember to be polite, but it really is possible for all the years of bloody conflict to run together, and the fact that someone could forget is a key indicator of just how many years the Vietnamese have been at war for independence, fighting the French, Americans, Chinese, and Cambodians. Her house had been bombed many times; this province was heavily attacked by air and land for years to root out the loyal revolutionaries. Hiding in homemade bomb shelters became routine; rebuilding houses was a regular occurrence.

So, Vietnam has certainly earned the right to celebrate its Memorial Day. The first thing we noticed was that the morning speaker announcements did not stop. They continued unabated through the morning, offering Communist songs, memorials, and future goals. Histories were recounted and names of those killed were read. The big event was a special lunch held at the People’s Committee, and we were invited as guests. We shared the community lunch, and while we ate the older community members began to pass the rice wine.

Rice wine is a ubiquitous part of community functions. It’s potent and always consumed straight. It’s easy enough to chug, but very hard to sip and taste. Here, you were supposed to sip and taste. I, however, did not realize this initially, and I was the first person at the table who received the shot glass. I slammed it down, smiled, and handed it back, only to realize all the Vietnamese were laughing at me. Oops! However, being a good drinker makes you more of a man here, so at least it wasn’t an offensive faux pa, and now I know good form for every possible community function.

By the time we had arrived at the lunch, most of the older men were already quite plastered. They took great interest in grabbing us, touching us all over, and bringing their heads to our hands or faces. These men were easily of fighting age from the war; perhaps they fought against the Americans and were participating in their own personal drunken reconciliation. (To this comment, Rachael rolled her eyes and said it sounded like the bad title of a blog entry. To humor her, I didn’t give it title honors!) The old men were painfully drunk, though, and I’m sure whatever war memories they had were painful. As lunch concluded and we hung out in a local coffee shop waiting for class time, we noticed the younger men—especially the political leaders—were also plastered. The holiday ended up turning into a legitimate excuse to get trashed in the middle of the work day, but considering the men always seem to be lounging in a coffee shop somewhere, I’m not sure that it was particularly detrimental to their work schedule.

In the vein of varied lesson plans, on Friday it was time for “experimental learning.” We took our class to the coffee shop across the street from school, where Que and I played waiters to our crowd of youngsters. A free drink is pretty good motivation to encourage English speaking outside the classroom, and after order-taking, we had an open question-answer session. When the kids finished asking me when I was going to get married, if I had a girlfriend, and other highly pertinent questions for 8th and 9th grade students, I began to ask them about their future hopes. I was amazed that almost all of my students intended to stay in Dinh Thuy. When I asked who had been to Saigon, at least half of the students raised their hands, so I knew they had some exposure to the “outside world.” A few expressed weak inclinations of attending university at some point, but no one seemed to have any burning ambitions or radical lifestyle changes intended. Life in Dinh Thuy is peaceful and pleasant, but I was surprised that the younger generation showed so little inclination of urban pull. In fact, talking to our roommates, only a couple didn’t want to return to their hometowns. My roommate was one of those, though he hoped to move to a bigger city that was closer to home than Saigon. I guess I sort of assumed that all of our roommates studying international business and imports and exports would want to live in the big city, but that wasn’t really the case. This was yet again an example of super strong family ties.

When we visited the Central Highlands I started to question what development really meant for people living in rural areas. I’ve started reading a book called Reasons for Success: Learning From Instructive Experiences in Rural Development. It talks about how for so long development authorities worked under the assumption that the key to development was improving urban areas, using a trickle-down theory to explain how rural citizens would be helped. The trickle-down concept seemed to boil down to eventually people would move to cities as technology improved and created more jobs, assuming that most people wouldn’t want to stay in rural underdeveloped countryside. I think it’s true that people don’t want to live in areas lacking basic infrastructure, but it certainly is not true that people don’t want to live in rural areas. Just as people choose to live in remote, rural areas of the US, most Vietnamese want to stay close to their roots, traditional family lifestyle, and long cultural traditions. The implication seems to be that development efforts need to shift focus or at least add a focus to include the countryside. A reliable power grid, running water, sewage management—all these things would make a huge health, safety, and comfort difference in rural areas and would benefit the most people in a country where 80% of the population is rural. As the book I’m reading says, the key is empowering the locals to succeed in the development work themselves. For my students who are so talented, the best use of their knowledge might not be a university education in Saigon in international trade—what would really make a difference is learning how to apply development principles in their own home towns to make the changes they want to see. How to enable that, though, will have to be the subject of future reflections.

Monday July 24: A Full Weekend

We had been highly anticipating our first full weekend in Mo Cay, hoping for a chance to relax and chill. It didn’t quite turn out that way, but we did have some amazing and certainly unique experiences, from the culture show to staying overnight in Dinh Thuy with our lunch families to a fabulous boat and bike trip on Sunday that took us all the way to the next province.

Most of Saturday morning was spent preparing for the cultural show, or “Giao Luu.” This performance is a part of almost all Green Summer groups, as the college youth perform a talent extravaganza for the local community. For many of the small communes, these shows are a summer highlight.

In addition to our students performing, our whole group was acting out a performance of a Vietnamese Cinderella show in Vietnamese. I was playing the part of the fish that the Cinderella character catches and the older sister kills. My main job, besides flapping my arms around for awhile, was to run around screaming what is loosely translated as “Oh my gosh, help me, help me!” My costume, though, was a true masterpiece, with a large fish head made out of huge pieces of cardboard that rendered me nearly blind and an oversized fin protruding from my back. We had guys dressed as princesses, a bird, Rachael as a hobbling old lady, and Chris as the Fairy Godmother. Rachael’s roommate had scripted and choreographed everything and we had begun rehearsing a few days before. After several practice runs, it seemed like a showstopper!

The morning’s relative relaxation was spoiled by having to bike into the village for camp on Saturday afternoon. However, as we were in the midst of our structural adjustments and performance practices, Saturday was going to be a fun rehearsal and costume preparation day. We had told the class that only the performers in the show needed to come, but more than forty students showed up anyways. The “costume” idea wasn’t very well defined—we just wanted to do some sort of art project to allow a bit of creativity that could be showed off Saturday night. I was supposed to design the American costume for the Hokey Pokey, but there was the small problem that I have no artistic talent whatsoever. Chris came to my rescue and we put together these awful-looking cardboard headbands with streamers hanging down that proved to be lots of fun to make and decorate.

At first it didn’t seem like anyone wanted to participate in hat-making; the girls were practicing singing and the boys just sat around. I asked Que to tell the boys that they needed to help, but he said they didn’t want to. I then said that they had to—it was not a choice. Que was afraid to translate this; he didn’t want the boys to be angry at him. At first I could not believe this fear. Somehow despite all our meetings and discussions, it was the first time that I realized that part of our class problem was that he was afraid to discipline the students. We discussed this after class, and he revealed that he was worried that if he yelled at the students, they might get family members or friends and attack him outside of school. It turned out that he had heard of such a story or stories from other young teachers and he was worried. Phuong, our other Vietnamese partner, had similar concerns, though to a much lesser extent. I was momentarily at a loss for words; if the only people in our classroom capable of controlling the students were afraid to do so, how could we go on?

This was yet another issue that we could not totally remedy, but with the help of our program director Hilary, we stressed that this is middle and early high school. To some extent, misbehaving children expect to get yelled at. Normal students do not attack their teachers. Phuong was more open to directly disciplining the students, and Que seems to look up to his teaching, so after confronting and discussing this directly, this can improve. It was hard to believe that we had not even known about this major obstacle.

Anyways, after we convinced the boys that they needed to help with the hats, they actually happily partook. In fact, they were quite creative, going far beyond the rudimentary pattern idea that Chris and I provided. Their drawings, though, looked like the work of kindergarteners. I could not do better, but my education included exposure to art and art appreciation of all sorts of mediums. Art is not a standard class at all here; you’d have to be in the art university to be doing art projects!

Following our afternoon of hats and singing, we had dinner at Ma Chin’s before the culture show. The show had been well publicized and we expected a good crowd. It was said to start at 6:30, but we learned long ago that Vietnamese times are to be taken with a large block of salt. Our guess of 7:30 ended up being right on the money. By that time, the audience was packed and overflowing out of the meeting hall; many of our students, their families, local politicians, and shop owners were all in the audience.

The show was far lengthier than any of us Americans had realized; we opened with the Green Summer song, local children sang and danced alone and together, traditional folk songs were done with acts combining our roommates and locals, and then there were our performances. The Americans prepared two songs: “Summer Nights” from Greece and James Taylor’s “Carolina on My Mind.” We had a karaoke machine to play background music, but we were still off on melodies most of the time. It didn’t seem to matter; the locals loved the singing and cheered extensively. It’s definitely the easiest audience I’ve ever had! They even brought each of us flowers as we performed.

The flowers were heaped on performers, but recycled frequently. For every act, the children would pile the performers arms with flowers and then at the end the performer would hand their flowers to the children in the front. It was a great way to bring performers and audience together. The whole evening was constant fun. Our students put on a stellar show of the Hokey Pokey and their Vietnamese dance, choreographed entirely by Phuong. It was a super chance to hang out with our students and laugh in a casual setting, really breaking some of the classroom barriers. In fact, our youngest student, the little brother of a high schooler (but smarter than anyone else), was on my lap for most of the show! Our audience had slimmed a bit by the end, but those left roared with laughter during our Cinderella rendition. Unfortunately both my head and fin fell off while on stage, but I think this made me an even bigger success in the crowd’s eye. Some of the children were imitating us for days! Music really can bring together a community. Though we are helping only select groups this summer here, the Saturday night show offered something for everyone. We learned more about Vietnamese performances and the locals heard brand new stuff. Everyone had a great laugh!

I’ve mentioned before that we’ve been interested in staying with a local family, really getting to participate in village life without removing ourselves to the guesthouse each night. Vietnamese law does not permit foreigners to stay with locals, though, so we’ve never really had the option. However, after much wrangling over the two years the program has been in Ben Tre, Hilary was finally able to get a one night visit approved so that we could stay with our lunch family. The show finished rather late, so it was quite dark when we headed back to her house.

The government remained a bit uneasy about the whole thing, so they followed every contingent of our group all the way to each house. This isn’t really because they are worried about what we’d do; it’s more of a worry about what could happen to us. Vietnam has finally realized the economic jewel that tourism provides and they will do anything to prevent an accident from happening. In Egypt, my family of four was assigned an armed guard by the government, but it made sense there—there were lots of violent attacks with white people targeted. There is virtually zero violent crime in Vietnam. However, one could say that that’s due to the government’s vigilance. In any case, our escorts led us quite safely through the dark hamlet trails for a peaceful night stay.

It was really pleasant and relaxing to all sit together with Ma Chin and Ba Chin and little Tao, playing, chatting, and learning more about their lives. It must be a bear for our Vietnamese roommates to always have to be translators—almost no one out here speaks any English. Maybe the next generation will change that as the government just mandated English classes to begin in third grade. Judging by our current students’ abilities, though, there is a ways to go.

Our hosts talked about their whole lives farming. Their children all live in Saigon now, though they all make their ways home to visit—Ma and Ba have only been to Saigon a few times. Urbanization seems to be fairly recent, and I wonder how it will affect families in the future. Ma Chin’s mother is ninety and lives with the family with every need taken care of. Who will take care of Ma and Ba? The country is still eighty percent rural, so it’s not like everyone is moving to the cities. In fact, the family bonds are a strong force to keep people in the country. However, it does pose an interesting question for the future.

Ma and Ba don’t seem to have any major regrets from their lives of coconut farming in Dinh Thuy. After saving for a long time, they were able to build a brick house with a real luxury—a tiled front room floor to receive visitors. After chatting over small shot glasses of tea, we settled in to sleep. We spread out bamboo mats and tied extra mosquito nets up as there was no shortage of ferocious biters. There was one fan, but my roommate managed to curl his body around it perfectly to rob everyone else in the room of its effect. However, as long as we didn’t think about the heat, it was surprisingly comfortable. I slept soundly without blankets or covers, but I was definitely exhausted. I read an interesting commentary by reporter David Lamb about how mattresses were just being discovered in the cities and they were a huge hit. He half-jokingly questioned whether Vietnamese productivity would decline when they realized the joys of thick mattresses and perhaps would sleep later than 4:30 or 5:00 am. Luckily, there’s no reason to start worrying yet out here—a mattress would be an extravagance that almost no one in the hamlet could afford.

It’s hard to sleep in when everyone around you thinks that 7:30 is unfathomably late. Thus, we were up early Sunday morning, but we had an exciting adventure itinerary in store. Gia, Hilary’s husband, was formerly a professional bike tour guide and he had planned a day of boating and biking for intense exploration. As I’ve said, we are in an area that sees virtually no tourists, so the “local boat tour” was a coconut farmer’s little wooden diesel-powered vessel carrying people on a joy ride for the first time. It reminded me of too many moments on this trip when I have looked at a vehicle or vessel and then looked again to see where the real vehicle was. The trip was a blast, though, as we explored the province’s narrow canal waterways opening into the broad Mekong River. Families were tying coconuts they had harvested together by the stringy part of their stalks so they were floating in the canal in nets of about a hundred fruits. Then the fruits were loaded into little boats and taken to the river where larger barges steamed to packing and distribution centers.

At one point near where a canal entered the river, we saw one of the packing centers. There were thousands of coconuts in an open shed with a row of posts on the water with metal spears at the ends. Men stood at each spear, bare-chested and streaming sweat, stabbing coconuts to remove the husks at absolutely breakneck speed. The de-husked fruits where then loaded into bigger boats to be carried away. We passed large barges steaming down river piled to the brim with coconuts. It’s amazing that such a single fruit can so singularly drive a local economy. Families have cows and chickens and pigs and small storefronts and there are a few other fruits that are sold, but basically it all comes down to the coconuts.

Thirty kilometers away in Tra Vin Province, the story was completely different. There wasn’t a coconut tree in sight—just miles and miles of rice fields. It was amazing that one day’s bike trip could take us to to such a completely different landscape. After the boat ride we hopped on the bikes and pedaled due south, even deeper into the delta. For all his experience, Gia was terrible with estimating distances, so it was hard to know exactly how far we were going, but we turned off of a paved road onto a narrow dirt road winding past small hamlets—little more than clusters of houses with a few storefronts. All of a sudden, the dirt road led to a wide Mekong crossing, where, right smack in the middle of nowhere was a ferry crossing. One of the ferries was out of commission and looked like it should never be in commission again, so we had to wait quite a while for the boat, but when it arrived, it was packed and it quickly filled up for the return journey. It was the oddest ferry I’ve ever seen; who’s ever heard of a large ferry running from nowhere to nowhere? Apparently there are other ways to get to Tra Vin—since it is a fairly large province with a good-sized city capital, I’d hope so—but this is how the locals move between Ben Tre and Tra Vin directly.

The river was as wide here as I’ve seen, so we were on the boat for nearly half an hour. When we steamed into Tra Vin, we did not see the dense jungle we had left behind. There were still plenty of waterways, but instead of canals, they were the wet troughs of rice patties. Perhaps it is part of the legacy of an economy organized through central planning, a relic of colonialism, or maybe it is just that crops grow only under particular conditions that differ widely from bank to bank, but the one crop province idea is certainly interesting. I suppose that if central planning were effective and profits were shared well, then a bad year for one crop in one province wouldn’t be so bad because excesses elsewhere would be shared. However, in actual practice, the government does not distribute aid and profits according to need on a national basis, so the one-crop technique seems dangerously vulnerable.

While we were biking in Tra Vin, we happened to see a funeral procession go by. It looked much as a procession in America would, substituting cars for motorbikes. The procession was accompanied (literally and figuratively!) by wagons set up as little traditional bands or orchestras, with instruments packed in and played by one or two people. I also hadn’t realized that dog meat was found so far south, but we passed a number of restaurants offering the canine meat, and I learned that it is enjoyed frequently in the delta as well. Two other random sites stood out. First, the town of Tra Vin, though it looked rather sleepy, as a provincial capital was fitted out with traffic lights. I couldn’t place why they struck me as so odd, and then I realized that nowhere in the towns I am living or working is there a single light! This is not because they are low-traffic intersections. I think it’s more a realization that no one follows traffic laws anyways, so the lights and the power to run them would just be a waste. The other odd site was a random American in Tra Vin. The province is even further out of the way than Ben Tre and not close to any border crossings, but it turned out that the fellow was on his own backpacking through Southeast Asia, and he wanted to meander through the countryside on the way up to Saigon. That’s how I want to travel—see it all and really immerse myself in local life every time!

The day was quite full; we didn’t get back until right before dinner time. Scott and I tried to get a hard bike workout in since we didn’t have time for a run, and it was actually really fun! I definitely see its value as an alternate exercise to running, and it makes me far more eager to actually go out and get the bike my parents have promised me at school for a year now! The night ended with final touch-ups on planning for the next week’s teaching and once again a long night’s rest.

In all our travels this weekend and since we’ve arrived, I’ve been quite cognizant of the stares from the locals. We are stared at everywhere we go and in everything that we do. Foreigners basically never travel to the area of the country we are in, so especially for the younger children, we are likely the first white people they’ve ever seen. Every few feet we receive hellos, waves, “how are you’s,” and just open-mouth stares. From the older residents, I occasionally notice a stare that doesn’t look entirely friendly—maybe its confusion, but I wonder if there might be a little suspicion of white people from those who remember the war. But the vast majority of the time there is such excitement to see us that whole families will come out to the roadside to wave and shout at us. It’s even different from being a novelty in China or Egypt—here we are like the embodiment of a textbook photograph mistakenly transplanted to the other side of the world. I can’t imagine what the locals must think when I’m running down the highway without a shirt. In fact, when Rachael was running yesterday, a young woman reached out to squeeze her, just to make sure she was real. It is so nice, though, that people are genuinely friendly. There aren’t persistent touts trying to sell us merchandise. When someone comes to talk, they just want to talk. The guidebook clichés about friendly, smiling locals has proved so true throughout the country, but especially in the south.

The attention our group receives from reporters has continued unabated. At this point the number of interviewers and photographers has become sort of a running joke. We are constantly posed in the most artificial positions for journalists, followed for extended periods of time, and asked incredibly banal questions that I cannot possibly fathom being used in any even slightly interesting story. My favorite question today was fielded by Chris—the reporter asked him what temperature he liked his bedroom and if he and his roommate would fight about it. Both Jim and Chris were asked if they planned to marry a Vietnamese girl (What is the right answer to such a question?). Also, the reporters seem incredulous that Americans would ever have done physical labor before. (“Have you ever shoveled dirt like this before? Why??”) I’d love to see the final pictures where Rachael and I were posed wiping our brows with our sleeves so the readers could see just how hard we worked. I read that with state-owned publications, the qualifications to be a reporter were traditionally few or nonexistent. The job was not to be an intrepid investigator or break conspiracies or wild stories; it was to display prescribed images of the government and people producing and working in harmony. I think there are a few more qualifications to report now, but there still isn’t journalism like we know it in the West. As freedoms increase, maybe this will change, but for now, we can let the over-the-top melodramatic photography offer a bit of amusement during our hot work days.

The Sunday Women’s Magazine featured an extended interview with Rachael full of direct quotations. Apparently the interviewing process does not require direct quotes to actually have been said by the interviewee and getting a quotation that sounds good and fits into the government’s propaganda mold. So, the quotation from Rachael went something like, “We are so excited to be here, spreading the volunteer spirit from our hands to the mountains and leaving our footprints from the forests to the seas.” We almost vomited and then couldn’t stop laughing! In all seriousness, though, there is a point when articles are stretched to a point where it should be obvious that facts have been distorted, and I’d think this would discredit the publications. Couldn’t they censor without becoming vapid sources of propaganda? Perhaps this is a line that publications have not yet found.

Despite the stares and attention, though, after just a week, I feel like we are beginning to fit in some. Every afternoon I bike through the market and see the same sellers. I have a running sort of joke with one woman who constantly tries to sell me her spring roles, giving me a wider smile daily while she pats the pile. On Saturday I was running to the village and I kept seeing my students out and about, all of whom cheerily would call out a “Chau David.” We’ve met the members of the People’s Committee several times, and many stop by daily to check on our house building. It’s easy for us to be remembered; I haven’t seen another white person in town. I hope as the weeks continue, we can really continue to carve a small niche that moves us from travelers to residents, even if it is short term.