Day 13- Teaching 101

Almost 2 weeks away from home in strange places and it seems more like 2 months.. My theory is that the days have been so jam packed that they seem 2 maybe 3 times longer than they would normally. I think back to my time in japan and it seems like forever ago. There are a few things that I miss from back home, there aren’t many times that I find myself wishing for something that I’m used to but occasionally I do. I think the biggest thing believe it or not has been American breakfasts. Go ahead and laugh, I do. It sounds absurd to say but its true, I miss eggs and hash browns and a tall glass of orange juice. Here they have orange juice but its more like orange flavored water and its definitely not the same. The best parallel I can make is if someone who loves chocolate milk to crack open a yoohoo. Its just not chocolate milk. Here the breakfasts consist of a large loaf of bread, butter which looks more like the color of mustard, and vegemite (must be the aussies). There is also usually some fruit to go along like today was dragon fruit which looks like its straight out of the movie Avatar. But since I know I cant have the bread, ive been sticking to peanut butter on whatever fruit is there and a big bottle of water. I’m hungry 20 minutes later…

It makes for a long mid morning before the lunch break but today was an exception. The whole group of us went down to District 8 to visit one of the schools that VPV sends volunteers to. I didn’t really know what to expect but my thought was that we would sit and observe a class and just familiarize ourselves with the Vietnamese education system. As soon as we walked in the door we were swarmed by a group of 15 to 20 little Vietnamese boys. It didn’t take long before they were crawling all over me and seeing how many I could carry, or touching the girls hair and challenging all of us to thumb wrestling contests. They were the most outgoing people I’ve met yet on this trip. I half expected them to be reserved and unsure of us Westerners and our foreign dress, look and behavior…but they weren’t at all. They taught us today, not the other way around. We ended up playing a bunch of games with the kids for in total about 2 hours and it was pretty eye opening. They were all boys and roughly 7 or 8 all the way up to 15, with varying levels of English but surprisingly all could carry a broken conversation with us. I had a nice long talk with Hoang who was 10 and he asked me why I was so big, I told him because I ate little boys like him and he just laughed and said that wasn’t allowed. Towards the end of the session we all got laminated bookmarks as a gift from the kids. Each one had a picture on it that was drawn by one of them and coincidentally I got one drawn by Hoang. He was actually a much better artist than I am and I asked him and he said he loves to draw. All of the kids sleep in the same room that we were sitting in. It couldn’t be more than 30 feet by 10 feet. I haven’t really understood under what circumstances they came to the school, or as they call it- Peace Home- but I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time with these little guys.

It was hard to get much more exciting than the morning… after lunch we had a lesson on how teaching/schools work in Vietnam. It was a pretty basic lesson on how best to go about instructing a class and the jist of it was tons of repetition. Using very basic ideas and beating them to death with different vocabulary and different pictures to really drive home the point. We will each be paired with a different volunteer everyday and put in different classrooms as well with the idea being that the more exposure that each of the kids can get to different instructors the better.

Tomorrow morning we leave early for the Mekong Delta where Andrew, Matt and I will be staying for the next couple of days. The bus ride is only 3 hours and we have a boat tour, floating village, and some pretty awesome habitat to see so we are all excited. There will be lots of pictures im sure, which have been lacking the past couple of days. I wont have access to a computer however, so see you all in two days time…