Friday August 18: Final Fragments from Saigon

The last week in Vietnam was over before we knew it and even the journey home was quick. The final days weren’t jam packed with excitement—it was much more of a time for closure, hanging out with each other, visiting Saigon’s largely unimpressive conventional tourist attractions, eating good meals, shopping, and evaluating and packing away almost three months of adventures. My African adventures loom large and there’s not much to say here, but a few good stories from Asia shouldn’t go untold!
The best narrative is perhaps my second most unusual culinary experience (followed by Hanoi dog). Since reading about the snake restaurants in the city in the book we read before the trip, Jim and I had wanted to give them a whirl. Snake is said to enhance libido and cement friendships, so it seemed like a perfect ending for the journey. We were not disappointed!
Gia volunteered to take us and we traveled to a far district of the city to a “restaurant,” or grubby eating area on stilts. Almost immediately, a waiter brought over two giant live snakes for us to choose. Gia made his selection and the chosen snake was held prone over a big bin while a second waiter used a large pair of scissors to snip its head right off. A water bottle filled with rice wine had been placed nearby, and the snake was inverted so that all of its blood could be squeezed directly into the bottle, turning it a bright red. As the wine was set on ice for a moment to chill, the snake killer dug a bit deeper into the neck and emerged with the still throbbing heart, which he dropped into a small bowl. Next he made an incision closer to the back of the snake, dug around again, and pulled out the kidney.
For maximal libido effects, these organs have to be swallowed while still beating. Thus, Jim quickly took the heart and I the kidney into a shot glass of the blood wine. Making sure to not let our teeth puncture the organs, we let them slide down our throats. Definitely the most interesting medicine I’ve swallowed!
The rest of the meal was of course a bit anticlimactic. The snake meat itself was tough and chewy, like bad calamari. To be honest, I didn’t notice any particular libido enhancements either, but we polished off the whole bottle of blood wine and I munched away on the snake tail to finish off the evening. This concluded my culinary experiments, with new meats including goat, rat, dog, and the snake, as well as blood from ducks and pigs and a plethora of wildly colored fruits and vegetables with just as wildly unpronounceable names. Despite the adventures, I couldn’t help but spend the last week dreaming about the foods that I would voraciously consume on my brief hiatus in the States.
The last week was also a chance to finish up my work at the Hospitality School. I had been communicating with the Curriculum director while in Ben Tre, and I had been charged with writing and then administering the final English exam for the graduating students. I have to say that it did make me feel like a real teacher to be making my own tests. I’m happy to report that my students did quite well, with the lowest score being a 92. Of course, this could be because my test was too easy, but I feel pretty confident that by understanding everything on the test, they’ll be able to at least passably communicate with English-speaking restaurant customers.
I also did final capacity building consultations with the curriculum director and life skills teacher. In my last week before heading to the countryside, I had had the opportunity for very revealing round-table style discussions with the students about what they felt the problems were with their internships and what difficulties they faced at the school. Many really felt that the school was not adequately supporting them and that they were being discriminated against at work because they were from a school for street children. One girl even began crying when she told how she was never allowed to cook and was always relegated to standing in front of the buffet table even though she was a chef intern.
There were a host of problems with the way the curriculum and internship program were designed, but the most glaring failure is a lack of communication between the students and the school and a total absence of the infrastructure necessary to support a professional internship system. For example, if hotels refuse to participate in evaluation conferences, they should know that they will not have the benefit of student interns in the future. In a flurry of typing during my last week, I produced a set of basic documents and instructions to attempt to improve the system, with internship contracts and evaluation forms, as well as guidelines for a mentorship system with older students and repeated discussion and writing opportunities for students to reflect and grow. With the life skills class, we put together all the lessons we had done into a nice curriculum with opening and closing discussions, the occasional guest speaker, and more time for students to ask questions and get help. It all looked great on paper, but whether or not the school will implement anything remains to be seen (and I wonder how I will be able to see—perhaps a return trip is in order!). The teachers were certainly enthusiastic, but without the resources and time to actually put the plans in place, I honestly don’t have a lot of optimism. The school’s administration is so poor—I wrote about the Party member principal and his inaction earlier—that there won’t be any top-down pressure to continue to improve. Further, the support from Triangle, the NGO, has turned out to be virtually non-existent. Richard, the Chief of Mission, is apparently always busy, but with what, I don’t know—the only thing I see him doing at the school is eating. He has to potential to make the internship program great by recruiting western managed hotels and using his connections, but he doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if the school just continues its gradual slide since its very capable initial staff left.
I remember writing at the beginning how I didn’t know anything about capacity building and I didn’t think I could handle the work of an NGO officer after watching Richard. I think differently now—in just a few weeks, I got so passionately attached to the school I was working with and excited about possibilities for change, working only with local actors. I understand that over time if it is repeatedly not possible to put these opportunities in place, I could burn out, but now I could definitely see spending a few years doing this sort of work to really learn about all angles of the NGO environment. At the end of the day, though, it is sort of staggering to realize that this is only one school in one district of one city in a very poor country in the middle of a very poor region of the globe. To have an impact that can be felt and lasting, it seems that at least some top-down work is necessary. As I left the school, the teachers gave me a beautiful leather journal they had purchased with a letter from the director thanking me for my “smiles that brought hope to the students.” Hope alone won’t do it though, and I hope someday to be able to follow-up and see how the students are doing.
With work concluded, we did do a few last sightseeing jaunts. One was to visit Cholon, the very large China Town that makes up all of District Six. Unlike other China Towns in the world, there are few outward signs with Chinese characters to suggest that you’ve crossed cultures (advertising ethnic differences in earlier Communist persecution years would have been like asking to be harassed). However, there is a very distinct food and culture that we got to experience with Ho, Scott’s roommate. The dumplings were delicious, and the Chinese Buddhist temples were the most religious sites in the city other than the Catholic Cathedral in District One. My favorite part of the temples was there large congregation of turtles clustered around all the sides.
We also visited the Saigon Waterpark, which was remarkably well equipped and safe. There was even a really cool giant toilet slide that whirled us around until we fell through the hole in the center! The only question was water cleanliness, as children don’t really wear diapers and there were lots of children. The water didn’t seem heavily chlorinated, but there was definitely at least one infant being pulled out of the pool with full pants. Hmm….
After not having shopped for two months, I also had used my opportunity to pick up a few Vietnamese necessities, including coffee, an Ao Dai for Emily, and snake wine for my father. My parents were kind enough to fund the purchase of two hand-tailored, made-from-scratch suits for me. Designing them was a bit overwhelming—how am I supposed to know how many centimeters a pant cuff should be? However, the cashmere and wool French and Italian suits came out absolutely stunning!
Saying goodbye was hard and spread over the last several days, with last drinks, last meals, and last nights of chilling. The final day happened to land on a very special day—August 14th! I celebrated my twentieth birthday on our last night in Vietnam. (As I’ve mused to many now, if we cross the international dateline on my birthday, does that mean I’m 21?) The gang organized a cake for me and we had our farewell dinner and birthday cake before sad goodbyes all around. The connections we formed in two months are really amazing—I feel like a part of me will always be attached to Vietnam now. Maybe this will change as I visit other places, but something about life in the city just felt so natural, so buzzing and fun, and so fulfilling. I tried to keep the goodbyes light, because I can’t imagine not coming back—“See you again,” is so much better than “Goodbye.”
And with that, it was done. Right before midnight we stamped out of Vietnam at customs, our visas were cancelled, and we boarded a luxurious Japan Air flight to Tokyo. I thought about writing some sort of concluding thoughts, but I think they will need to come later. (And not just because I’m busy and behind!) I’ve thrown out two months of observations here in rambling prose and eventually I’ll have plenty to sift through and think about and absorb.
To conclude on an exciting note, though, as we finished in Vietnam, final arrangements were being concluded for the Peace Corps to begin offering placements in the country. This was the result of prolonged negotiation with government officials, and though final details remain to be ironed out, offers the potential to bring lots of Americans for learning and exchange in a program that offers value for both nations.