Project Complete :)

We woke up on the 21st to sunshine & warm weather! Combined with the end of the New Year celebrations, Viet Tri came to life on the streets. It's truly strange how comfortable we've gotten with life here. We cross the streets calmly inch-by-inch making eye contact with the dozens of mopeds flying at us, have the labyrinth of little streets in our neighborhood thoroughly memorized, do not blink at a passing bicycle covered in 20+ squacking chickens or think twice about cows... anywhere, & spend endless hours lounging & playing around with our new best friends- children who for the most part do not speak a word of our language. Yet, somehow it's challenging to actually step back & realize how different this situation really is.

baby Binh!

Nam!

Tinh!

We got the chance to be part of an exciting transition at the village which only takes place every few years. A new group of orphaned children from a Hmong Hilltribe village (21 total) were brought to SOS the other day. They do not understand Vietnamese & seemed so frightened the first day as they were led around by their new siblings that we thought it would take a decent amount of time until they were able to adapt. However, by only the second day we were spotting the new kids skipping around with smiles on their faces.

New Kids On The Block

Today was our last day in the village, so we put together a big American Field Day. We had an egg toss, running race, tug-of-war, limbo contest, potato sack race, & big scavenger hunt. Perhaps it was all the prizes we found, but the kids were more than eager to play & had a great time. The scavenger hunt was especially entertaining- watching the groups attacking the apple trees, scampering through their homes to get chopsticks & other knick knacks, & scouring the ground for the three live insects we stuck on the bottom of the list :) After the games, the 3 of us convinced our coordinator to let us stay behind to eat lunch with house #13 in order to get in a little last minute time. The new addition to their family, Lang, seemed happily at home sitting confidently in the big circle at lunch. We gave the mother a thank you letter that we'd attempted to translate into Vietnamese which they all got a kick out of. After a few hours of playing around, the kids walked us to the front gate to say goodbye. It was hard to walk away & a few of the kids ran up to the gate & waved the entire time we walked down the long stretch of dirt road back to our house.

Tomorrow we leave for Hanoi at 5am &, along with our whole group, we'll then get on a bus to Halong Bay for an overnight boat tour of the famous group of thousands of limestone islands. Happy to kiss those floor mats behind, however I think leaving the village today we all would have signed up for some extra time here.

With our favorite kids