Tuesday, August 8: Pomp and Circumstance

It’s over; I’m back in Ho Chi Minh City, comfortably typing in my clean room sans mosquitoes and happily enjoying occasional western food and the atmosphere of my New York-sized city home. Yet, I didn’t really realize how strong a connection I had formed with so many people in Ben Tre and I miss them all already!
As a work week, Week Three was much easier than our first two. We finally had time in the evenings to relax, visit local coffee shops, explore the local market, and just chill. The house building was mostly final touches; again the floor occupied most of our time. For the front part of the house, the family had budgeted our donation well enough to be able to afford cement, a real luxury. I hadn’t realized just how much work goes in to a foundation. (To be fair, I can’t imagine it’s anything like as work intensive with the tools and concrete mixers in the states), but we spent hours trying to pound dirt perfectly level, add gravel, sand, water, and then sand again, packing and stomping and leveling after each step. A preliminary layer of cement powder was added to help the dirt set, and then finally, the master craftsmen spread our cement into a perfect, beautiful floor. They also finally finished the intricate work to anchor the roof joists, and then the tin went right up. By Wednesday, the house actually looked like a house!
We only had three days of actual teaching for the last week, as Thursday we planned a summer fair for the students. It was the last week and we had built a good rapport, so we decided to push the envelope a bit. On Monday we taught an introduction to First Aid. I’m still Red Cross Certified in Standard First Aid, but I was rather rusty, so our teaching group reviewed together and created an interesting lesson plan blend that combined Red Cross procedures with the resources available in a small Vietnamese hamlet, even sprinkling a few traditional Vietnamese remedies in.
I wonder how much good it does to teach a subject for one hour to a class that will probably never hear it again. Probably not much, we realized. It was a question we tossed around for awhile—was there any point to teaching? In the end, I was really happy that we did. The lesson was fun, and if nothing else, we definitely raised awareness and cleared up some misconceptions. Our students were not going to have any idea how to do CPR if the need arose, but hopefully they’d remember what a heart attack meant and how to get help. Maybe they could help someone bleeding or choking—they certainly loved to practice on each other! And I really hope they remember that broken bones are not remedied by “snapping them back into place,” which is what several students suggested when I asked in class.
Tuesday’s class was “pushing it” even more. The students don’t really get sex-ed the way we do in the states; class in confined to the most basic anatomy. I wasn’t sold on the need to go a lot further, but I was convinced that it was important for students to understand not sex, but puberty and the changes in their bodies. We discussed what a responsible relationship meant and what to think about and be careful of. With our squeamish kids, the class never would have worked with boys and girls together, but we split genders and got Rachel and DiDi to teach the girls. Phuong began by telling the boys to get all their giggling and screaming out in one giant yell at the beginning, and then they were great—really interested! We had their full attention unlike any other lecture, and there were tons of questions. Also, a definite success.
After two great days, the last day was a bit of a let down, and it was definitely more boring. We did a workshop in goal setting, on the Vietnamese talked about what comes after high school if you work hard, university entrance exams, and how to prepare and study. The problem for me, though, was that Que just never has been a good teacher. In this class, there was nothing I could do to add energy or excitement; I couldn’t even understand what was going on, so him sitting on a desk and mumbling softly wasn’t doing much for the energy. I wrote that night how frustrated I was even on our last day of class—he was a deadweight, didn’t understand the personal plan we had created for the students to make, and hadn’t said anything until we were in front of the students. Yet, at the end of the day, I reminded myself that it really didn’t matter. The kids had learned about things they had never even heard of and they seemed to have a great time. We couldn’t even get them to leave on Wednesday; they wanted us to write addresses and phone numbers and sign every single one of their little books.
Our final activity with the students was a summer fair on Thursday afternoon. We had been planning for a week, and we were really excited for the festivities. All of the students in junior and high school were to be combined and then divided into two giant teams. We made red and green wristbands, set up six stations, and assigned each pair of teachers to a station. Que and I had a tug of war with a giant rope and sack races.
Unfortunately, the draught that had plagued the region for the past several weeks decided to end about one hour before the Olympics began, and it ended with a bang, dumping torrential floods. A few modifications and we got things rigged up for indoor Olympics, and despite the pools all around us, we had a blast. For hours the kids were screaming and yelping in delight, and at the closing ceremony, I have pictures that belie their incredible energy and joy in a way I could never put in words.
After the games, we had a graduation ceremony for our high school class, replete with official certificates we had all signed. The kids loved them; the next day I already saw them proudly displayed in the house of one of my students. Three weeks ago, if I had thought I could live for the final day of class I would have told you that it would have been a thrill. Instead, it was sad to be saying goodbye to students who had become so excited and engaged in learning and playing. They had us signing autographs all day; it was fun to feel like a little bit of a celebrity! A couple of students had painted us pictures, another small group wrote a song about us, and one made Chris and I a cup to share. It felt really special to have the opportunity to have students who looked up to us so much. It will be impossible to forget the students of Dinh Thuy, and I think if I ever need inspiration to keep working or trying to make a difference, I can remember our students who saw us as larger than life and able to do whatever we wanted.
For them, I think if we were to return in ten years, most would still be living in the commune. Many would have families of their own, and almost all would probably be farmers. Most of the camp curriculum won’t matter at all, but I wonder whether their awareness of larger reality beyond their province of Vietnam that we’ve tried to instill will be important. Will they see changes when Vietnam joins the WTO? Will they be affected by Party leadership or global leaders? If globalization continues at a breakneck speed, the way they farm and what they grow and produce may change. The adults are certainly aware of world news now; I see them reading the newspaper and watching the news daily. I think that in the future, with increasingly connected trading networks, their economy will not be as insular as it is now. My hope is that they’ll have a voice in these changes, and even without a university education or vast travel experiences, they’ll be able to use that voice.
Many of the students really seemed to have a hard time with the goodbyes, so for our last two nights in the country, there were groups of youngsters visiting the guesthouse wanting to “hang out.” One night we took a gang out to sing karaoke and the next night we had coffee with a huge group. A few students invited us to their house, right on the river, and we enjoyed a nice breakfast with their father, who happened to be the principal of the school. We had said we wanted to feel like a part of the community, and it finally felt that way. In fact, one night when we were walking some students home, a group of men offered to light the way for us with their motorbikes, saying that of course they knew who we were and laughing about stories from our cultural exchange show.
In addition to the social events, the end of the week really was full of pomp and circumstance. As I’ve said, the Vietnamese can’t do anything without a ceremony, so the end of our tenure here required several affairs of commemoration and goodbyes. There was a general Green Summer closing and awards presentation, a closing ceremonial dinner, a house ribbon cutting, and a house dedication lunch party.
There’s not a whole lot to say about the actual ceremonies. There were lots of speeches and we got some nice certificates. The house dedication, though, had some unforgettable moments. The mother and father of the family we were building for were not intellectual people. In fact, they both seemed a bit slow and “simple,” having difficulty cohesively expressing their feelings about the project to reporters or verbalizing their plans. The father was actually a laborer to construct houses by trade, making barely enough to survive with their three children. Every day he wore the same tattered shirt that seemed constantly poised to disintegrate. He put on his one decent-looking polo shirt for the ceremony, but he seemed ill-at-ease throughout the speeches. Nonetheless, he couldn’t keep a big grin off his face. His daughter, a cute thirteen year old who had worked and laughed with us every day, rose to speak on behalf of the family. To her, we all seemed a little larger than life, and she couldn’t believe her heroes were leaving. She started to tell us about a dream she had always had as a child, but just a few lines into it, she was overcome with tears and was too choked up to continue. She had told one of our directors the story, and he translated: when she was a young child, she used to have a dream that someday she would find a magic lamp and rub it and her family would have a castle of their own. Now, at 13, she had a “castle”—a house that her family could call their very own, and she didn’t even have to rub a lamp. I don’t think there was a dry eye when the translation finished.
When the speeches were finally finished, I got to cut the ribbon across the door, and we unveiled the sign commemorating the “Robertson Scholar Green Summer House.” Here in the middle of the jungle of Vietnam, there would be a house forever bearing the program name—it was a pretty cool feeling! The ceremony was followed by a lunch that the whole neighborhood had been invited to. The cooking had been an all-day affair, with our group and ladies from all around coming to help. There was enough to feed half of the province; it was a spectacular feast. The quiet professional construction workers finally opened up as they cracked open bottles of rice wine. By agreeing to the first toast, I was practically a gonner! I could never keep up with their furious pace of shots, and I spent the afternoon under a rice wine haze.
Our final task in Dinh Thuy was distributing the money we had raised at the fun run to the district’s poorest families. Half of the funds were going to build a bathroom at the local kindergarten, which currently had no facilities for more than a hundred students. The other half of the funds were earmarked for the poorest families with children spread throughout the eleven hamlets. Hilary and Gia and interviewed the families on Thursday to find the neediest, and we had a long route of seven families to visit and present with half a million dong. This is only a little more than thirty dollars, but it is several months income for a family. I have to say that it felt a little awkward to be the foreigners riding our bicycles up to each family, presenting an envelope of cash, and pedaling back into the jungle, and our group quickly nicknamed the excursion the “poor tour!”
We expected the families to be poor, but the stories we heard were about as sad as one could imagine. There was a mother who had lost her husband and was raising her own three children and her dead sister’s three children all by herself. There was one family where both mother and father had lost a hand in machine accidents and found the job market for those lacking appendages to be virtually non-existent. Many of the families were already living in Compassion Houses built on previous Green Summer campaigns, and none of the houses were close to the main road. The bikes had to be frequently parked for arduous slogs through thick mud, and the pouring rain made the slick roads nearly impassable.
All the clichés about it being hard to imagine living the way these families live would apply. Their situations were so depressing. What amazed me was how open and friendly all of these families remained. None of them had any idea what the purpose of our visit was to be. We came unannounced, so all of a sudden, ten or so Vietnamese and foreigners would ride up to the door and knock, but no one every asked what we were doing. Instead, we were offered tea, chairs, and always invited in to chat. The families were happy to share their stories and answer questions just because we asked—there was absolutely no expectation of receiving anything when we arrived. One mother even rushed to help all of us wash our feet when we made it through the mud bogs to her stoop. Before formal greetings were finished, she was running around with buckets and scrubbing with her hands while she sent her son to scurry up a coconut tree and knock a few fruits down for us to drink. It didn’t matter that the families had so little to give. It felt so wonderful to bring some to tears of joy and thrill everyone, but at the same time, the money seemed a little less important in the strong communities we were visiting. I had no doubt that families with so much generosity and heart would somehow be okay in their close-knit villages, and it was a really, really good feeling that one doesn’t necessarily find in American towns.
As nice as the ceremonies all were, the noticeable shortcoming was the lack of a translator. Since I couldn’t understand what was going on for the vast majority of the time, I had the opportunity to do a fair amount of reflecting.
I finished Robert Templer’s Shadows and Wind, a highly negative examination of the Communist Party and Vietnam since 1975, essentially berating the country for every leader and political and economic decision over the past thirty years. I strongly disliked the book; most of the criticisms Templer leveled on the Vietnamese government could be just as easily used to describe the United States or the European Union—excessive bureaucracy, a sensationalized press, a lack of government communication, and self-righteous, short-sighted foreign policy. There were some good points, though, and if nothing else, the book has forced me to think critically as well as blanketing praise on rapid development efforts. There is corruption, inefficiency, and even downright laziness. In that vein, my end-of-countryside reflections began critically. On Thursday, as we finished the real physical labor on the house and pulled off our Olympics festivities, I began to consider the question of a national work ethic. Is there such a thing?
Every tour book has some sort of cheesy phrase about the incredible work ethic of the Vietnamese and how everyone is so hard working. I frequently make the same observation when I’m asked the ubiquitous interview question, “What do you think of Vietnamese people?” But can we really ascribe a national characteristic to an entire population? Are Vietnamese work habits inherently different from Americans? I’m not so sure. When basic survival is dependent on ridiculously hard work, of course people will work hard. The families we met on the “Poor Tour” seemed to labor until the absolute exhaustion was palpable. But what happens when you don’t have to toil until exhaustion for mere sustenance?
Our roommates, almost all of whom are from very humble rural backgrounds, have worked incredibly hard to be where they are now at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Now, though, work in the countryside is no longer their means of survival. I had wondered what it would be like working on a construction project with them; would they put us to shame with their constant work? The answer ended up being no. They worked hard, but it always seemed to be the Americans taking initiative, looking for extra work to do, working through breaks, and volunteering to help out with extra tasks. I got so frustrated on Thursday at lunch when the Vietnamese assigned to do dishes said they were just too tired, jutted off for their naps, and made Ma Chin take care of it all.
The owners of our guesthouse never would have been able to construct such a facility on their own. Their American relative invested the money for construction. The hotel has made them far richer than most others in town, so one would think that in appreciation they would work really hard to manage the facility. Instead, they mostly rock away in their hammocks (pausing to treat our program directors really well but conveniently forgetting to clean anyone else’s rooms…).
There also seems to be an element of getting spoiled. I can’t imagine growing up without air conditioning in the sweltering heat, a bed with mattress, reliable power, reliable means of transportation, and confidence that there would be food on the table every night. However, for many of our roommates and generally a large segment of the population, this was the reality. As such, you’d think the roommates would be very comfortable with whatever our lodging situation would be—it couldn’t be worse than what they grew up with! However, this wasn’t the case. It was not the Americans that complained about heat, bugs, or rooms in disrepair, but the Vietnamese.
My wandering observations are hard to condense into any kind of thesis, but I wonder if one could draw some kind of relationship between a nation’s development status and the work habits of its people. Do people work less hard as a country gets more developed? Certainly our life in America is easier now than it was for the colonists, but I’m not sure that Americans collectively work less than we used to. Perhaps a better thesis could be that one works hard in proportion to their potential for individual gain. If you live in rural Vietnam, once you have achieved comfortable subsistence, there is a limit to the gains you can achieve without outside assistance. Maybe when you reach that point, since upward mobility is limited, hard work ceases. Thus, when the roommates are back in the city and there is no ceiling to growth potential, they work like crazy. When they are in the countryside, it’s a bit different. In America, you can pretty much take out what you put in, so there is always an incentive to work harder. Perhaps this is just stating the obvious, but it would seem that if the government could continue to incentivize rural growth by creating an infrastructure offering easy access to travel, services, and home electronics, with good roads, a more reliable power grid, and better Internet commerce, national banking, and dependable shipping.
And complicating all of this is the significant alcohol problem in the countryside. The way men bond is by drinking. The main entertainment activity is drinking. The way colleagues relax is drinking. Everything social, especially for men, involves drinking rice wine. The Vietnamese are small and I haven’t been particularly impressed by their tolerances. At the same time, the drinking process requires sharing shots and complex social exchanges where it is very difficult to refuse a drink. The result is that people are very drunk, very quickly. Party officials got trashed at every function and meal we had together. The soccer game featured a rowdy drunk spectator contingent. And old men (and not so old men) frequently wonder down the village paths sloshed. I can personally confirm that rice wine hangovers are absolutely brutal. My head as never felt as leaden as after a night of over consumption of the vile brew. This definitely limits working productivity, and if it is an almost daily activity, I could certainly see why local officials are labeled as inefficient! Drunk driving is rampant, while supposedly domestic abuse is commonplace. What at first seems like a nice social custom quickly shows itself to be a terribly unhealthy, unproductive, and dangerous practice. However, there seems to be no deterrents, social education, or interventions provided by the government or citizen groups.
In addition to when people work, as we finished the house, I began to think about how people work. We only built one house for one family, but I have to say, our group was rather unimpressed with the way the supposed master craftsmen carried out the project. The work generally seemed shoddy, the planning was poor, and the whole project could have been avoided if there had been a little better planning when the house was first built so that the second floor that currently stands unstably could have been supported and habitable. We were worried that our laying of bricks might somehow compromise the structural integrity of the house, and some people in our group were even a bit reluctant to try. However, when the masters did it, the job they did was crooked and bricks were coming loose left and right. I was working to painstakingly repair a corner brick and the foreman came over, slopped a wad of mortar into the hole, and haphazardly set some brick chunks in. Thirty minutes later the hole was there again. I must say, when we were cutting interior wall studs, the future owner was just sort of nailing pieces together at convenient points and the father of the house owner came over to watch, berated his son for his laziness and stubbornness, and instantly constructed a solid interlocked joint. From one family I can’t even begin to generalize or speculate about quality of work declining from the old masters to our generation, but I wonder if this is the case. There are certainly those who would make that argument in the United States.
For everyone, there also seems to be no thought towards long-term planning. For example, as we were mixing concrete and mortar, the lead workers greatly reduced the amounts of cement powder we were supposed to use to save money. As a result, the mixture was weak and didn’t stick well at all. There was no way the bricks would last more than five years. I understand that the cement is very expensive, but in the long run, a little extra now would be cheaper for the family and far less stressful than constant repairs. However, it really made me realize that to some extent, long-range planning is a luxury that only comes when there is a large pool of initial capital available.
My final thoughts were once again about the Communist Party and rural governance and communication. As we heard from all of the Party organizers at the house dedication ceremony, it was quite obvious that they were instrumental in making the project happen, identifying the family, securing logistics for our group, and following up daily. There might be corruption and inefficiency, but the real strengths of the Party are its clear organization and communication. Every house in the hamlets has a neatly labeled address and fits in all the way up to the national level. Primarily this guarantees stability—it would be nearly impossible to plan any sort of uprising without authorities quickly becoming aware. However, when someone needs something, the government will know. Granted, they may not do anything about the need and crushing poverty is certainly not generally alleviated, but there is a network in place to help those in the most need.
Vietnam is in no way a socialist country. It has one strong party, but it doesn’t even really pretend to offer the services that socialism should guarantee anymore. There are lots of excuses, but at the end of the day, the people are on their own. Taxes are low and capitalism is encouraged. A one-party state has the stability and organization advantages. With it come a lot of disadvantages, and there is nothing like what Uncle Ho promised everyone in terms of education and health care. If someday the government had the resources and made the conscious decision to make providing these services a priority, they would have the necessary network for distribution. In the meantime, the people are pretty much stuck with still somewhat limited freedom and virtually no tangible benefits except for enviable peace and stability.
For the record, I also finally found a food I do not like. For lunch on Thursday and Friday, we’ve had condensed animal blood. Thursday’s soup featured giant chunks of what appeared to be a rubbery chocolate. Chocolate or anything good tasting, it was not. Rubbery, squishy, crumbly, and retched would all be more appropriate adjectives to describe the condensed pig blood. To be fair, it was nowhere near as foul as the fermented tofu on the table, but the image of condensed blood did far more to curdle my stomach than anything in the actual taste. For Friday’s lunch, we upgraded to duck blood, but despite the slightly darker color, there was no upgrade in taste. This will be one food to add to my still very short list of “to be avoided!”
The goodbyes were harder than I thought they’d be. Ma Chin gripped each of us tightly, and though Tao didn’t seem to understand quite what was going on, she jumped up on to my shoulder for one more ride. Students from all grades came with gifts the night before we left and were waiting en masse to escort us to our bus on Saturday morning. It was especially sad because we would almost certainly not see any of these students again. There were promises to e-mail and call, but my guess is that a month from now we won’t still be in contact with anyone. It’s amazing how people can enter your life for such a short time and have such a profound impact, even if their part is short and small.
So that was it. We had been counting down days until we returned to Saigon for a long time, and suddenly it was Saturday morning and the bus was outside of our guesthouse waiting. The thick jungle seemed like a world away from New York-sized Saigon, but in little more than three hours, we rolled back into Ho Chi Minh City.
Over three weeks of hamlet life, I had somehow built up an image of Saigon as a glitzy metropolis—the sparklingly modern antithesis to the town of Mo Cay. I saw quickly that it wasn’t quite exactly the picture I had painted. There are certainly glamorous parts of the city, but at the end of the day, it’s still a sprawling developing mass that has a ways to go. Even so, being back in a city of more than eight million felt incredibly energizing. I couldn’t possibly imagine eating one more bowl of rice for dinner, and we had been dreaming about the choices for our first meal back all week. We settled on California Burrito, with giant stuffed tortillas filled with cheese and sour cream and other goodness that I hadn’t seen in forever. It was no Cosmic or Qdoba, but it tasted like heaven. The night finished with a classic rock set at a little club called Yo Ko, the Vietnamized version of John Lennon’s wife. I still find it odd to see small Asian men belting out The Beetles, but it was a sublime night of cover songs and relaxation. Getting the bill blasted me back to reality. A 3,000 Dong (twenty cents) drink in the countryside became nearly 40,000 Dong here. Now that’s inflation! As I went to sleep without any mosquitoes, I knew it was unquestionably worth it.