Service Learning: Acceptance and Tolerance

First of all, I am so grateful that, for the most part, the children really seem to accept and tolerate our presence in their home twice a week. Personally, I appreciate how accomodating the children try to be in terms of my limited Vietnamese language abilities. It is always nice to see how hard children try to communicate things to me so that I will understand them!

In terms of our acceptance and tolerance regarding the children, I think of the serious behavioral issues that have been an issue recently at the orphanage. One boy in particular (about 13 years old)—who I’ll refer to as “H” has been physically victimizing other children consistently when we’ve been at Xa Mẹ the last several times. This past Thursday, his play fighting with another boy quickly escalated to him scratching the boy’s neck so hard that it bled, and the other boy ended up crying. I was present when the rough-housing began, and told the boys to stop several times while physically trying to pull them away from each other. However, H resisted my efforts and continued fight-wrestling with the other boy. When the other boy was crying, I tried to communicate to H that this was not ok, and he responded by pointing to the place on his hand where the other boy had bit him. I really wish I could have communicate at the time what I wanted to say, which was that neither of the boys should have done these things.

A previous week, seemingly out of nowhere, H slapped one of the youngest boys in the face, causing him to start sobbing. We responded that time with Thuy Linh trying to talk to him about what happened. He wasn’t willing to talk, but she sat near him for at least 15 or 20 minutes. This past time, Kristine talked to him after the incident. She said that he seemed to genuinely feel bad about what happened. John, Kristine, and I talked briefly about trying to have a plan of action for dealing with this issue (this child, and others, consistently picking on other children) during the time that we have left volunteering at Xa Mẹ. We will discuss this issue further when we meet next. My idea for how to deal with it is to make sure to give H, and other children who display these behaviors, positive attention before the problematic behaviors start. I was thinking that maybe each day we could have a Vietnamese-speaking volunteer be responsible for making a special effort to talk to and hang out with these particular kids, to really give them attention before they get it for negative reasons.

The issue I just mentioned relates to tolerance and acceptance in that we should accept all of the children, and not ignore or shun anyone because of their behavior. We need to be warm and caring to everyone. But we can’t tolerate behavior that hurts other children and makes them feel insecure or unsafe “on our watch”. Unfortunately, we can’t always be there when these things happen, but we should at least do the best we can to respond consistently whenever these kinds of problems arise. Especially given the fact that these children are not living with their parents, and may have abandonment issues, we should be really sensitive to children seeming to have low self-esteem, or to be expressing their pain and frustration in destructive ways.