Saturday, August 05, 2006

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.

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