What a wonderful few days

Right now as I write this, I have a tiny puppy snuggling in my lap, I am drinking lemon tea, and I spent the afternoon playing outside with my favorite class. Do I have much to complain about? Not really.

The past few days have actually been spectacular. In retrospect, I am so happy that I was “stuck” in Ha Tinh this weekend and did not have an opportunity to go to Hanoi. I finally feel like I’m beginning to fit into the community here. I feel like I have a role and an identity, and it feels amazing.

Students have finally seemed to work up the courage to come to my room just to chat (and they’re even learning to text/call me beforehand!). I hung out with students this weekend, and went to several English club meetings. I feel like I am using my time wisely, and how Fulbright intended me to. (Yes, it is lovely to read my Kindle, download fun exercise videos online, and sit in cafes all day, but that’s not why I’m here. I admit it.) 

To repay Chi Hang for coming to my rescue on the Night of the Broken Motorbike, I offered to take her out to dinner on Sunday. We ate a delicious meal of fried shrimp, chicken soup, bok choy, and rice. I love spending time with her so much, and she is so busy, that any time together is just quite lovely.

After the dinner, she and I had to be judges in the semi-final round of the English Department Eloquence Contest. Students from each class were nominated to give speeches on “hot topics” such as the environment, sustainable development, jobs, and globalization. Of course, after hearing 22 students speak for 10 or so minutes each about somewhat dry topics in less than perfect English, I was tired and pretty bored. But I felt useful. I felt like the advice that I was giving my students was helpful for the speaking skills that they would need for the rest of their lives.

This morning I met Chi Hang for breakfast, and she introduced me to a new breakfast food in Vietnam: banh muot. Surely it can’t be the healthiest or most filling breakfast option, but oh my goodness, it is incredible. It consists simply of a plate of sheets of pho noodles, a plate of fresh, hot spring rolls, and a plate of pork. You wrap the noodle sheets around either the spring roll or a piece of pork, dip in fish sauce, and enjoy. I think we may have gone through four or five plates of spring rolls and at least two plates of noodles each. The meal was extraordinary, and I was so happy to share it with Chi Hang. She is the “foodiest” person that I know in Ha Tinh, and she is always excited to show me THE BEST places to get certain foods. So now I know that the place that she took me has the BEST banh muot in all of Ha Tinh, just like the place we went last night has the BEST chicken soup in Ha Tinh. She is a good friend to have around, and also to enjoy eating with.

Embarrassed (and slightly proud) to say that we went through four plates of noodles (two each), and four plates of spring rolls. It was INCREDIBLE and I will definitely be returning for more fried-carbs-wrapped-in-carbs.

After breakfast, we stopped by Chi Quyen’s house. Chi Quyen hasn’t been at school in the past few weeks, and it turns out that her sister died of breast cancer last week. Feeling horrible that I had only just found out yesterday, I begged Chi Hang to come visit Chi Quyen with me to pay respects and keep her company. In all honesty, she looked horrible, or at least as horrible as you would expect anybody in that situation to look. Already stick-thin, as most Vietnamese women are, Chi Quyen must have lost at least 10 or 15 pounds. Chi Hang told me that Quyen keeps forgetting to eat because she is just so upset. Quyen’s mother was there with her, and the whole scene was just so heart-breaking to witness.

As naïve as this may sound, I always forget that death and its consequences are universal. I guess I have some very first-world assumptions about death/illness in developing countries, that it is simply inevitable, expected, and understood, and therefore doesn’t hurt as much. Some self-centered aspect of me assumes that Americans are the only people who “feel” the hardship of death and that the rest of the world simply moves on. I’m sure this is related to the part of the American psyche that thinks that we are invincible. Allegedly, we’re the strongest country in the world, with the best health-care in the world (if you can afford it, that is), with the most developed technology in the world. I think Americans often feel that these national strengths would keep death and tragedy at bay, which is why I (naively) thought that death would cut us deeper than it does to other people who do not have the same sense of invincibility. But no, everybody reacts the same way, and it is so difficult to witness, no matter the country or the culture.

In any case, I was happy to spend time with Chi Quyen and offer my support, even if I know she has a long way of healing left to go.

This afternoon, I had the most delightful “class” with my 2B English class, who are very much my favorite students to teach and spend time with. I use the word “class” loosely because this was the make-up class that Mr. Duc requested I schedule to fill up some of the missing teaching hours. Out of spite, stubbornness, laziness, and sheer lack of planning time, I didn’t plan a lesson for class today. If Mr. Duc wants me to do make-up classes, fine, but it would be impossible for me to plan double the amount of lessons that I usually plan, so the make-up classes will have to be half-assed and less planned than my scheduled ones. However, the activity that we ended up doing was a dashing success, and I was thrilled with the results.

Inspired by many of my students' Eloquence Contest speeches on the importance of protecting the environment and cleaning up after ourselves, I created a pseudo-environmental and pseudo-English-learning activity that allowed us to play outside and have some fun. I divided my class into 6 teams and then gave them trash bags and plastic gloves. Then I asked my students to walk around campus for 45 minutes picking up as much trash as they could find. Whoever found the most trash was the winner. However, there was a catch. For every piece of trash that they picked up, they had to write down a word in English of something - ANYTHING - that they saw outside: students, benches, lights, bricks, garbage, attitude (I drew the line at this word because I explained that you can't see abstract nouns), stairs, motorbikes, etc. Then, Scattergories-style, every time more than one group had the same word, they had to cross it off the list. Some of the remaining words that we were left with were so specific and so nuanced, that I felt like the exercise had been a success in finding cognates and new vocabulary. 

Furthermore, like I said earlier, it was an opportunity to get out of the classroom and have some fun, and an excuse to not make a detailed lesson plan for once!!

I love these girls.

 Now, as I mentioned earlier, I am at a cafe drinking tea, and there is a puppy on my lap.

This is Cu, the 7-year-old who works/lives in the cafe and is the puppy's big sister.

The dog's name is something in Vietnamese (obviously) that I can't pronounce and can't understand. Up until now, I call every dog that I meet "Shadow" only because Shadow is the perfect name for summoning a dog in an enthusiastic, beckoning voice. However, if I am going to build a personal relationship with this sweet little dalmation, I think it would be inappropriate to call him Shadow. He needs his own name for me to call him, because I plan to spend a lot of time at this cafe. I am leaning towards Pepper.

Yes, I truly have gone off the deep end.