(Happy New Year!)
We arrived in Vietnam smack dab in the middle of their second New Year celebration of 2008- this time for the lunar New Year... so long year of the golden pig & welcome all to the year of the Rat! Tet, as it's called in these parts, is a BIG deal- everyone heads home for about a weeks length in order to celebrate with their families. Similar to our big holidays, except that they offer their meal to their deceased ancestors before feasting themselves. Flowers & traditional red & gold decorations are sold on every street corner to help the Vietnamese people to welcome the freshness of a New Year.
We spent our first two days in the capital city of Hanoi: the city of peace. CRAZINESS. Mopeds zipping left & right, constant useless honking, rarely a word of English spoken by the vendors that crowd every street, & just a general air of chaos circling the busy smoke-filled streets. Our very first night we found ourselves curbside, on little plastic stools, getting lessons on what exactly to do with a boiling hot pot & plate after plate of meat, shrimp, clams, & vegetables provided to us. The Vietnamese definitely know how to eat... & we are definitely not in Thailand anymore.
On the morning of the 13th we took a dizzying cab ride slightly out of the city to the remote office of Volunteers for Peace Vietnam to meet up with the other 16 volunteers that we'd be cohabiting with for the preceding two weeks. We all piled into a mini bus that took us to our new home in Viet Tri City, a couple hours ride through rice fields away from the capital. 3 Americans, 5 Japanese, 10 Koreans, 2 Danish, & one remarkably energetic Vietnamese coordinator living on top of each other in one small house. We sleep on floor mats, share 2 bathrooms, & trade off cooking/cleaning responsibilities. Did I mention it's freezing here? A local told us yesterday that he's fairly sure it hasn't been this cold in 40 years. You'd think after all the temples we've visited we'd have a little good luck! Besides the initial shock of the shift from vacation to basic living, we're actually having a great time. Every morning we walk down increasingly familiar dirt roads to the SOS Children's Village- home to 150+ orphans who live 10-12 in one of fifteen homes, each with their own live-in 24/7 mother. The homes are comfortable, the neighborhood clean & completely safe for the kids to roam, & everyone interacts as if just one massive happy family. When not playing Vietnamese games or just hanging around with the people, we teach English in groups to classrooms of children ranging from 1st grade to 11th, each with varying levels of both skill & interest. My group spends Saturday afternoons teaching the 16 year olds who were impressively eager to disentangle the intricacies of our upside-down complicated language. Several children since the opening of the village 10 years ago have already graduated from the high school school & moved on to universities, colleges, & vocational programs. We're truly enjoying being a part of such a hopeful community.
Nam!
I'd say the most challenging part of the program so far was mine & Jenny's cooking day. Everyday 3 people stay home to cook & clean from 7am-7pm- breakfast, lunch, & dinner for nearly 20 people. We managed to find likely the only packs of bacon in a 30 mile radius to make BLTs for lunch... while dinner proved to be more challenging. We'd considered trying to make some kind of breaded chicken only to realize in the midst of the busting local market with Vietnamese women pushing hunks of raw meat in our faces that in order to make chicken we'd have to follow through with the task of legit hacking off it's legs & neck! Instead we opted to make pasta bolognese that actually turned out great. Not the kind of food our fellow volunteers are used to, but the speed of their chopsticks seemed to indicate our success!
Today was our first day away from the village. Dubbed "Vietnamese Day," we all head to a nearby market after a 7 am noodle soup breakfast. We split off into groups for a scavenger-hunt style search for spring roll ingredients. We then went to the beautiful countryside home of Hua, a Vietnamese volunteer who has been spending a good deal of time with our group, to make the rolls. They came out beyond perfectly & after we all sat in a big circle on the floor enjoying our homemade feast, singing any song we could think of that everyone knew, & drinking authentic rice wine. In a few minutes we'll head back to the house to finish the day off with a Vietnamese movie. Tam Biet!
Our crazy leader w. his rice wine
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