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.
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