UCHANU: Central Trip Experience...

Our trip to Central Việt Nam was absolutely amazing. While I had lots of really memorable and awesome experiences, one that really stuck with me was of going for a bike ride with Sharon in Huế and meeting some really nice women along the way. Having been bombarded with a really tourist-centered environment near our hotel, it was really nice to ride our bikes into the more rural areas, where it was much different. A lot of the areas seemed relatively untouched by "development", with (comparatively) no foreigners around, and, to be honest, it was nice to feel like we were experiencing a more "authentic" part of Huế. Craving some trà dá (iced tea), we stopped at a little shop/cafe that seemed promising. We ended up enjoying tall glasses of ice water with the really sweet woman who owned the trà dá place. Ultimately, while I bought a water bottle from her in the end, she wouldn't let us pay for the water with ice. This experience was really meaningful to me because we were able to communicate with her a lot using the Vietnamese that we knew, and our interactions felt really genuine, warm, and equal. This was a nice contrast to all the tourist-centered interactions I felt like I was having with local people during most of the Central trip. I think especially of our stay at an ethnic minority village where the women danced and sang for us, as tourists who were paying to be their and watch them "performing their culture". That experience of them kind of putting their culture on display in exchange for our money definitely made me feel uncomfortable, and made me feel that we were not meeting on equal terms...So, I really liked the feeling of me and Sharon's interactions with this woman. It was also really nice to be able to communicate so much without the help of peers with greater Vietnamese fluency.
After finishing our water, we continued riding, and eventually stopped at a cool tomb. We noticed a woman collecting fire wood, chatting with her a little bit...and she actually asked us to eat with her! So we sat down with her, and she shared her cookies and tea with us, even offering us rice and meat, which we politely refused. While we weren't able to communicate as much with this woman, it was still really nice to be able to interact in a spontaneous and genuine way with a local person. I really appreciated her generosity and warmth with us.
Ultimately, these experiences really reinforced my knowledge that I get the most out of experiences when I am directly engaging with the country and people (through bike riding or striking up a conversation with locals), rather than indirectly trying to communicate through other people, or just following what other people are doing. I really hope that tourism and "development" will not extinguish too much of the things that make Central Việt Nam so wonderful and unique. I really wish that tourism-related development could just stop where it is now...and I hope that I can visit the woman at the same trà dá shop when I return to Việt Nam in the future...

Service Learning: Ethics

I will first talk about experiences and thoughts that are on my mind before discussing the topic of ethics...
A major issue me and my groupmates have struggled with is what we are going to leave behind for the children at Xa Mẹ. Trying to think of creative ways to help the children learn English, on Monday of the week before last we brought in an outline of a human body drawn out on a large piece of paper along with markers. Our plan was to ask the children which body parts went where, and then to let them draw the body parts and the English and Vietnamese words on the poster. However, while the children started out drawing body parts on the figure, they soon began drawing all over the poster more freely, in a way that didn't follow our plan. Also, it was difficult to implement our more structured plan of having asking the children what went where, since they just started drawing on the poster immediately. From this experience, we learned that: the children love drawing, and it is difficult to implement structured lessons/activities with the children (ie we need to think really creatively about how and to what extent we can and should structure learning and teaching). After filling the poster, the kids ended up drawing freely with the markers on paper that I had. Later that night, Kristine, John, and I talked about how we felt that the children being able to express themselves (ie through drawing) is important and can help improve their self-confidence. We also decided that it would be a good idea to have time and materials for the children to draw with every time we come. The next day, we brought the markers again, let the children draw, and helped some children with their homework. Some children expressed interest in having us teach them English, which we decided to start doing in a more planned way when we came back.
We are still struggling with trying to figure out the ideal amount of structure that should go into our time with the children. While we want to help the children learn as much useful information and skills during our time here, we also recognize that it is difficult set up a relatively controlled learning environment. Because several children did express interest in learning English, we decided that we will try to teach English basics in the most effective and useful way possible. This will require a certain amount of structure, but we think that it will also require a lot of creativity to think about how we can make the activities and lessons as interactive and fun as possible. This way, we hope that the children will actually enjoy learning and remember what we teach them. We also want to think about focusing on information and skills that will actually be useful for the children to know. We are trying to be as flexible and creative as possible, in order to have the biggest positive impact on the kids that we can.
Today, we plan to start out our "real" English lessons with the alphabet and letter sounds. We are bringing in a big poster with the letters of the alphabet, as well as small pieces of paper with English words and pictures, which the children have to match with the letters. We are going to have to see how today goes before really knowing what to plan next, since every service learning day is pretty unpredictable...We may decided to focus more on letter sounds tomorrow, or may move on to basic phrases.

In terms of ethics, I feel that our responsibilities are to:
1. Have a net positive impact on the kids
Our main concern regarding having a negative impact is that the children will get really attached to us, and then we will in a sense traumatize them by leaving in December. Every time we come, I think that we all feel that the attachment between the children and us grows. It's really important to all of us that we are not only leaving the children behind with memories of just hanging out and having fun with us. We ideally want to leave the children with greater self-confidence, and knowledge and skills that will stay with them and help them after we leave. Hopefully we can integrate teaching English with helping the children express themselves and feel capable and proud of who they are.
We also decided that it would be really nice to leave the children with a kind of yearbook that would include pages on what we learned and did, along with pictures and personal letters from me, Kristine, and John. We also intend to start talking about the fact that when we are leaving about three weeks before our last day (they already know that we are leaving, but we want to remind them). We hope that these efforts will make our departure less abrupt and will remind the children of how much we care about them.
2. Following through and being dependable
I think that a major way that we can make sure that we leave the children with a net positive impact is by really being dependable and following through. While we can't control the fact that we have to leave, we can control what we do while we are here. I'm sure that a lot of the children have experience a good deal of insecurity in their lives, and may have problems trusting people. We should be positive role models to the children who provide them with a sense of security and consistency in their lives, rather than taking away from this.

Ultimately, a lot of ethical issues go into working with children in an orphanage. Given that these children don't have the strong adult presence in their lives that most children have, I think that they are more effected by our presence than the average child would be. It's a big responsibility and challenge to maximize the children's benefit from our presence, especially since we are going to be working with them for a very limited time. I really hope that we live up to this challenge, and plan to do everything I can to make it happen.

Poverty and "Development"

After eating lunch with Katie and Khương at a cơm place, we (actually Khương) "interviewed" a man who was sitting at our table. He looked about 50, and seemed very open about answering our two questions about poverty:
1)How do they distinguish between being 'poor' and 'not poor'?; and
2)In the last ten years, has the gap between rich and poor increased or decreased? What specific signs have led them to this decision? Do they think that the current gap is too little, about right, too large? What will happen to the gap in the next ten years?

Interestingly, the man talked about poverty in larger economic terms--ie what makes a country poor or not poor--rather than in more individual terms--ie what makes a person or a family poor. It is possible that he talked about poverty in this way because it may be talked about in more national terms in media and general public discourse. He said that the gap between the rich and poor has gotten bigger, and he linked this to the capitalistic economy and urbanization. The fact that he referenced a "capitalistic" economic system made me wonder about the current "face" of communism in Vietnam. What do the words "communism" and "communist" (in Vietnamese) mean here?

Considering perceptions of poverty, I wonder how people thought about what it means to be poor in the past. Also, thinking back to comments I've heard from many people about how they want a better life (ie a higher paying/less difficult job) for themselves than their parents had, or they want a better life for their children, I wonder if everyone can achieve this. If every cow killer doesn't want their child to be a cow killer (hypothetical situation based on an interview my group did), then who will kill cows in the future? It's hard for me to not think about the US, where a lot of jobs like this are filled by undocumented immigrants who are easily exploited by their employers. I wonder who will be killing cows in 2050...will giant meat processing plants replace family butchering businesses? Who would be working in them?

Anyway...I hope to learn more about poverty and upward mobility in Vietnam during my time here.

Service Learning: Relationships

It has been really interesting observing the children’s relationships with each other and the adults they come into contact with at Xa Mẹ. There appears to be a sigificant lack of adult involvement during the children’s evenings at the orphanage, and I had one really heartbreaking experience which highlighted this for me when I came to Xa Mẹ on my own this past Tuesday. After getting in a fight with another child, one boy (about 11 or 12 years old) was standing and crying to himself, apparently trying to handle his pain and control his emotions on his own. He did not reach out for or seem to expect comfort from anyone. I rubbed his shoulder and back in an effort to comfort him, but it he didn’t respond to it. I ultimately decided to try to play a game with him to help him feel better, so I sat down near him and introduced the children to a hand clapping game that involves counting and increasing speed. While he didn’t want to participate at first, he did watch, and after a while he was laughing along and even wanted to participate in the game himself. While it ended positively in a sense, his experience really helped me understand how much the children need to go through on their own. It was very painful for me to watch this boy crying to himself in this way, because I wished that he felt that he had someone to go to for comfort. I feel that this situation is the result of the children pretty much being on their own during the evening. Although I know that his age probably has something to do with his efforts to control his emotions when around his peers and a relatively unfamiliar adult, the fact that he does not seem to have consistent adult sources of comfort in his own home really saddened me.
While it is difficult to know how things are when we aren’t around, I have observed no especially warm interactions between the children and the woman who makes them dinner and (I assume) stays with them over-night.
On a different note, although I was a little nervous beforehand, I definitely appreciated having the opportunity to volunteer at Xa Mẹ on my own this past Tuesday. I found that, even though my Vietnamese language skills are extremely limited, I was able to communicate everything that had to be communicated (why Kristine and John couldn’t be there, how I felt about playing the games the children suggested, signaling children to stop fighting, and the fact that I wanted to comfort an upset child) on my own. I feel that this experience helped me to be more independent and confident when interacting with the children because I could not rely on someone else to help me communicate or lead activities. I am really proud that I was able to teach the children 2 or 3 new games, as well as the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” and lead them in stretching exercises after we ran around playing games. I feel that I got closer to children that I hadn’t been as close to before Tuesday. For example, the youngest boy chose to be my partner in playing elbow tag and interacted more with me than he had before. It was nice to know that cultural and linguistic barriers did not get in the way of the children and I becoming closer and developing our relationships further. I hope that my continued efforts at learning Vietnamese will help me develop relationships with the children even more. In the future, I hope to continue to try to communicate and solve problems on my own whenever possible, even when I could rely on Kristine and John for help. I think that this will help me be fully present during interactions and will help me develop both my language skills and my relationships with the children.

Interviews

I feel really lucky that Fantastic Năm has already been able to do several interviews. This past weekend Khương, Katie, and I traveled to Hải Phòng and were able to do three interviews. Phuong was able to do two interviews a week ago, although we are only going to use one. In Hải Phòng we interviewed a cow killer, a rat catcher, and a traditional cake maker. All of these people are in Khương’s family, and we were really lucky that the interviewees were generally open, and that we were able to record all of the interviews. We were even able to get video of a cow being slaughtered (although I’m not sure if anyone will want to watch this…). The interviews ranged in duration from about 15 minutes to 25 minutes. While it seemed to me that they went well, and that we got a lot of good information, I really just have to wait for the translations to be completed to know more details about what was said. My inability to understand the interviews was definitely frustrating for me. I just really wished that I knew what was being said (especially when everyone was cracking up), and could contribute questions while we talked to our interviewees. I also really wish that I could be more involved in the process as a whole, and feel I bad that the bulk of the translation work has to fall on my groupmates. I realized that I should really step it up more in terms of doing what I can do—taking pictures and video, researching the jobs, thinking of good questions, and making sure that the final translations are really strong. I hope to collaberate well with my groupmates for the rest of the course of this project, and to try to focus on my strengths rather than my limitations.

Service Learning: First Week at Xa Mẹ Orphanage

My first week volunteering at Xa Mẹ was challenging, intense, thought-provoking, and emotional. The children are great, and many of them are very affectionate and outgoing with John, Kristine, and myself. I found myself reflecting on what my goals are for the next few months I will spend with these children, and worrying that my presence could ultimately do more harm than good. This worry stems from my concern that the children will become really attached to us (of course we will be really attached to them, too!) and then really hurt when we leave. The fact that several of the children are particularly warm and trusting with us makes me worried that these children who really crave parental figures and parental love will be hurt by this temporary volunteer situation. I talked to my mom about my concerns, and her view was that I should not try to be somewhat distant with the children or limit how close we become because the experience of being loved by us and developing relationships with us is really important and positive, even if we cannot stay forever. While I appreciate her insights, I feel that I still need to reflect on the issue of becoming close with the children and then having to leave, because this is a particularly sensitive issue when it comes to orphans.

Additionally, my lack of Vietnamese language skills has brought a lot of challenges to my volunteer experience. Even though I have done my best to communicate as well as I can (through non-verbal communication, bringing dictionaries, and using the Vietnamese that I know), I still feel that I miss out on so much that is going on and also am unable to really talk to the children and find out more about their stories and who they are. While my language limitations are extremely frustrating for me in this particular situation, they have made me even more motivated to really step up my efforts to learn Vietnamese. To me now, learning as much Vietnamese as I can seems like a necessity rather than a somewhat optional exercise. I know that working really hard to improve my Vietnamese will affect my experience at Xa Mẹ in a really significant way, and I look forward to both finding new ways to communicate with the children using what I know and to being able to speak Vietnamese with the children more.