Operation: “The World” is a Go

 (1/2-1/15)

So many things have happened it’s hard to know where to start. We are two weeks into our volunteering and are half way done. Time has gone by fast and we can’t believe that we only have two weeks left. I will run through our typical week so you can get an idea of what we do here in Vietnam. We are stationed in Quang Ngai, Vietnam which is the 4th largest city in Vietnam but still feels like a small town to us. The people here are great! We feel like movie stars as we walk down the street. Quang Ngai is not a touristy town so we get lots of stares and “Hello’s” along with “What’s your name?”. They are not used to seeing white people and find us somewhat of a novelty.

We live in a rented house just outside the main street with one other volunteer, Jarrah, from Australia.

We have a translator, Tuan, who comes with us to our placements. A cook, Mrs Be, and a night watchman, Mr. Mahn. We get up every morning around 7 am, toss the mosquito net aside, and make our way downstairs to our breakfast waiting for us on the table.

Mondays and Wednesdays we take a taxi to two small villages (Binh Hoa and Nghia Hanh) outside the city. Both of these places have rehabilitation centers where the parents can bring there kids. The rehabilitation center is not what you would imagine by western standards. It’s a large room that maybe has an exercise back and parallel bars where everyone sits on the ground waiting for us to arrive.

This was a little frustrating at first as we felt that they were waiting for some kind of miracle to be performed on their children. You want to do so much but sometimes have to realize that just by being there and walking with them or encouraging them is more than they get all week. I continue to remind myself of the prayer, “God, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

We bring milk and fruit for the kids and plenty of toys and books. We try and play with the kids and stimulate them as much as possible. Most of them have some sort of disability and we try our best to work with them. GVN, the organization that we are volunteering through has received a sponsorship for a physical therapist to be at these centers as well and do exercises with the kids. We are very excited for this and think it will make a huge difference. We see some issues with the kids that would not be a big deal if they had the proper exercises or medical attention, but they don’t and it ends up impairing them worse than it has too. Most of these people come from poorer areas and the toys that we bring might be the only ones they have. For example, one day we brought little toy cars and noticed even the mothers being super protective over the car that their child was playing with and wouldn’t let it out of their sight. We ended up just giving them the cars at the end of they day because we couldn’t bear the thought of having to ask for it back when it maybe cost us 10 cents a car. We usually bring toys to and from the places. We spend about two hours there and then had back to the house for lunch and a few hours break.

At about 3:00pm we bike to the Social Protection Center in town. The SPC is an orphanage with about 80 children ranging in ages from 2 days to 20 years old. We only see about 30 children at a time as most are in school or older and do their own thing. We teach English with the 6-9th graders and bring toys and games for the rest of the kids.

There are about 4 children who have disabilities that we try and pay extra attention to since they don’t get any from the “mothers” at the orphanage. There are also two babies who I love but do receive lots of attention so I try not to spend to much time with them.

This is little Phuoc. I believe he has cerebral palsy. He loves to be held and make sounds back and forth. This is a great example where it doesn’t matter what language you speak.

I have already found favorites and it has been hard not to let is show. There is an adorable little four year old, Ty, who has a stellar smile.

Our goal is to get him in school. The administration doesn’t want to send him saying he is “mental” because his mom was labeled as “mental” we do not know to what extent she was disabled or crazy? But from what we can see and from what past Vietnamese speaking volunteers have seen he seems to have a normal mental capacity for a four year old. The “mothers” said he doesn’t always understand or listen to everything they are saying and he sometimes walks on his tip-toes. This sounded normal to us for a four year old. There are no other children his age there so he spends most of the day hanging out with the disabled children.

Tao is a lovely girl who is categorized as disabled. We are not sure to the extent of her disability. We are also trying to get her in to a disabled school. They say her brain has stopped working and won’t progress. But we brought her to Mrs. Kahn’s class and saw huge improvements. We believe she just needs some attention.

We don’t always understand the politics of the orphanage and find it frustrating when they put road blocks up for us. We think they would do well in school and really needs a chance to get away from the orphanage for a few hours a day. We visit SPC every day in the afternoon for a few hours and then go home for dinner.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we bike to a disabled school where we help the greatest teacher ever, except for my parents, Mrs. Kahn. There is one classroom that Mrs. Kahn teaches of about 10-12 mentally disabled students and then another class for deaf children. When we arrive the kids all run up and give us hugs wanting to be at our side at all times. We love it!

We find the deaf boys difficult at times since they resort to violent means to get our attention and each others and this seems to be the norm. There is a range of ages and they are constantly hitting and kicking each other. Vietnamese sign language is quite different than American Sign Language so it is a whole new thing for us to learn. We try and make eye contact with them the best we can and use body language to communicate things. The disabled class loves to do crafts and the deaf class of boys love sports. So, we usually offer both when we are there.

Monday and Tuesday evenings we help teach English at the Foreign Language center. The classes range from intermediate to advanced. We mainly help them with pronunciation and conversational topics. We leave the grammar to the real teachers. It gives them a chance to converse and practice their English. Most of them are very excited to learn since being able to speak English in Vietnam opens many more doors to them and their families.

Thursday evenings we join Mrs. Kahn and her husband, Mr. Viet, at their English club. This is more laid back and strictly conversational. The number of students vary every week and we decide on a new topic of discussion each week as a class. We think they all speak English very well so we gave them some tongue twisters to spice it up a bit.

(12/30-1/2/08)

We flew out Dec. 30^th to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, to spend New Year’s Eve before we started our volunteer work. We may have mentioned how crazy traffic was in Bangkok…but that was nothing compared to traffic here. I have never seen so many motorbikes in my life. This was a small parking lot outside of a store.

It’s not just the motorbikes it’s what is on the motorbikes. We have seen families of five, refrigerators, mattresses, ducks, pigs, newborns (I didn’t like this one), fruit baskets, and whatever else you can think of. I would even have to say the kitchen sink. Crossing the street is an adventure sport here. Brian says it is like you’re a pebble in a stream of water. You slowly walk across the street and the traffic just flows on either side of you. I say it’s like playing frogger and I just hope that I don’t get hit!

We met an Australian couple that were in the same situation as us and had not booked a room in advance. Together we trotted through the Pham Ngu Lao neighborhood looking for availability. We found a hotel owner who had another location about 500 meters away where we each got our own room and bathroom, fridge, TV, and wireless internet for $12 a night. This was our first sign that things would be cheaper in Vietnam. This was good for us since the islands of Thailand were not as cheap as the rest of the country especially during the holidays. We learned this was prime travel time for a lot of Europeans. Thailand is like our Mexico or even Hawaii. It’s somewhere warm and tropical close by for them to escape to.

We went out for drinks that evening with our new friends and made plans to meet up for New Year’s Eve as well. This was one of the many restaurants we came across. We though it was quite funny.

They had streets blocked off for concerts all night and we were able to watch from a terrace of a bar and countdown to midnight. Happy New Year! Brian and I were making our way back to the hotel when we stopped at another hotel to ask if we could use their bathroom but before we could open our mouths they grabbed us and pulled us over to their little party. So we kept our mouths shut and enjoyed a glass of wine with food and great conversation with the other hotel guests and staff. It wasn’t until hours later when everyone was leaving to go to their room and us to our own hotel that they realized we weren’t staying there. Whoops! Fortunately, for us they thought it was pretty funny. Our next stop is Da Nang, Vietnam where we start out orientation for volunteering.

(12/15-12/30)

We enticed another one to cross the seas and join us. My sister, Elizabeth, elected to spend a portion of her winter break with us in Thailand. It originally was going to be Australia, but since we had to cut out the South Pacific she thought Thailand would still do the trick. The plan was to spend our time mostly on the islands in Thailand and soak up the sun.

We made our way back to Bangkok to pick up Elizabeth who was expected to arrive at midnight on Saturday. We had made reservations at the place we stayed at last time since we were familiar with the area and knew how to get around. We turned down three higher priced cabs before one finally decided to take us and use his meter. We knew their argument that there was traffic was bogus at this time of night. We arrived shortly there after at the airport and staked out a spot to look for Liz. We decided she was going to be harder to spot than we thought since her long dark hair and slim figure seemed to fit right in among the other young Asian females. I was starting to get a little worried as the time quickly passed after her plane landed and still no sign of her. Eventually she founds us there was another exit that we didn’t know about.

The next morning we took Liz to the crazy malls because Brian and I were crazing some western food. We felt bad that Liz’s first meal in Thailand was Burger King but we figured she would get plenty of Thai food on the rest of the trip. We then took the sky train to the riverboats and the boat to the Grand Palace.

After the Grand Palace we took a tuk-tuk to Chao San Road to do a little shopping and get a fruit smoothie. It was a hot day out!

The next thing on the list was to do a little island hopping. We flew to Krabi where we picked up a ferry to go to the island of Koh Lanta. Liz was super excited to get some sun and sand. We had a great time on the island laying out in the hot sun during the day and dancing with the locals at night.

We also did an elephant trek to a nearby waterfall. The boys in charge of the elephants were quite fond of Liz. I think they took more photos than we did!

The day before Liz’s birthday we took another ferry to Ko Phi Phi Le Island. We had read that this was supposed to be one of the most beautiful islands in Thailand and has the famous beach from the movie The Beach.

The island was gorgeous but not the paradise that we were expecting. It was overtaken by Swedes. We planned on staying on more of a secluded part of the island but changed our mind when we got there. The secluded parts of the island were only accessible by long tail boats and so it made it difficult to get to and from the main town which had all the entertainment and restaurants. We didn’t want to make Liz hang out with an “old married couple” on a romantic beach on her b-day so we stayed in town to liven things up a little bit.

On her birthday we went on a great snorkel trip! It was Liz’s first time snorkeling. We visited several different locations to snorkel and saw large amounts of tropical fish. Some very strange looking! We also visited Maya Beach where Leonardo Di Caprio filmed the famous movie “The Beach”. We did our best to re-create the scenes…

The snorkel trip was complete with dinner and a sunset aboard the boat. We then spruced ourselves up and went to the beach hang outs for the night.

We went green with Liz’s birthday gift this year and used leaves for the wrapping paper.

The next few days were the Christmas Holiday. We had a great Christmas Eve buffet at one of the western restaurants and planned to go scuba diving on Christmas Day.

This year’s Christmas picture was a little different for us.

We think eating all the western food on the island made Liz and Brian sick since the ingredients were most likely imported and not as fresh as the local cuisine. We woke up Christmas morning and Brian wasn’t feeling well so we postponed scuba diving for two days but then Liz wasn’t feeling well. Baking in the sun all day can definitely run the body down. Minus the sicknesses we had a great time on the island and we were able to get a nice tan.

We took another ferry back to Krabi and then boarded a bus to Surat Thani. We spent the night there and flew back to Bangkok the next day.

In Bangkok we visited the weekend market, which is the largest in the city. It has roughly over 25,000 stalls! I think we barely made a dent in it before it started to get dark and close down.

Here is what the street looked like as we were leaving the market.

Liz found some souvenirs for herself and friends to take home. Briand and I had to refrain from buying anything since our two small bags couldn’t fit another toothpick in them at this point. We made one last jaunt around the city and then back to the hotel for a couple of hours of sleep before we put Liz on a plane at 4:30am.

It was so great to have someone traveling with us especially over the holidays. It helped us to feel a little closer to home. We also enjoyed having someone else to play cards and exchange gifts with.

(A late update taken from the journal)

We have been on the island of Ko Chang for seven days now. We arrived on a Saturday and joined the masses of local Thais on their long weekend. We chose to stay in a bungalow on Kai Bae beach on the west coast of the island. It’s a little more affordable and less touristy than “White Sand Beach” just north of us.

Porn’s Bungalows doesn’t have much of a sandy beach until the tide goes out in the evening, but it is the home of one of the best restaurants. We spend our long breakfasts, lunches, and dinners relaxing at the very laid back haven. It has mostly low tables and floor mats to sit on with randomly placed hammocks and beach chairs filling in the gaps.

The atmosphere at night, with the Asian lanterns glowing along the thatched roof is something else.

We rented a scooter and made it around the island in two days. The landscape has many steep hills and jungle like brush. A little scary at times on the scooter, but still fun. Most of our time is spent along the beaches - kayaking, swimming, reading, or just listening to music.

We may have the occasional trip to town for a change of scenery, but we decided that we prefer to stay away. Each little town or inland market is the same. They each sell the exact same clothes and items, but you end up spending several more Bahts trying to unsuccessfully haggle over the price. Each restaurant tries to find its niche, offering such classics as Italian, Mexican, and European style foods. None as good or as cheap as the local Thai meals. All in all a great get away from the nearby Bangkok.