When it comes to understanding how money works here, my meter seems to be off. At home, I've spent a lot of time helping to communicate the message that when it comes to philanthropy, every little bit helps, but sometimes I can't understand how so little a little bit here can mean much. I'm assured that it does.
Yesterday, we joined a day-long "charity trip" organized by the English conversation club that we've been involved with. This kind of thing happens a fair amount before Tet in the way Americans might contribute to toy drives or food drives before the holidays. This trip was to a hamlet in the province of Ben Tre, which is in the Mekong River delta about three hours drive from here. (Ben Tre is famous for two things -- the sweetness of the coconuts and all coconut products and for a battle in 1959 between Vietcong guerrillas and the South Vietnamese Army that is generally considered the first battle of the civil war. The heroine of that battle is memorialized with a street named after her a block over from us in HCMC.)
When our friend Tuan invited us on this trip a few weeks ago, he said they were hoping to raise 3 million dong -- about $170 -- to buy school supplies for the children at an elementary school we were visiting and that there were about 120 pupils. They have been passing the hat at the weekly English club gatherings. I assumed that, as often happens here, I had misunderstood in some way, but I heard right. Four busloads of us went six hours round trip to distribute what by my reckoning were pretty modest gifts.
This was on a Sunday, and all the kids turned out in their school uniforms along with teachers and the principal and a lot of their parents and grandparents. When we arrived, they were all lined up in the school yard to yell "Hello!" The kids mostly eyed us suspiciously, and then the college kids organizing things started the games and loosened everyone up. There was singing and poetry recitations and bags of salty snack foods and balloon inflating contests. Parents stood in the ditch outside the school yard wall peeking over the edge and laughing. Most heartbreaking was girl about 12 years old standing outside watching. She was too old for this school and, I suspect, any other.
Finally all the "dignitaries" lined up (that's me and Ilene, a couple other foreigners on the trip and all the senior citizens) and the children were marched by us one rank at a time for us to hand over the goods -- a plastic bag for each child with two notebooks, a box of crayons, a few pencils, a pencil case and a plastic toy. If you went to Big Lots and bought what all this in bulk, it would have cost you about $1.50 per child to do this. It cost more to keep my hydrated for the day.
Like me, the college kids were taking a lot of pictures, and even from the position of my comparative wealth, I could see how enormous a gap there was between those city kids and the children we were visiting. With their cameras and cell phones and fashionable jeans, they looked almost foreign in that setting themselves. And these are people who I feel embarrassed to let know that I sometimes treat myself to a $4 cheese sandwich when I get homesick.
I was talking afterward to an older woman who had joined the trip. She is a school administrator who is really smart and accomplished, but I think in her whole life she will never be able to buy the trans-Pacific plane tickets that we buy routinely. From her perspective, it was wonderful to be able to make these gifts. How, I asked her. How poor could you possibly be that so little could be meaningful?
Those notebooks and pencils are a lot, she insisted. Their parents just can't afford it. The school tuition is free. The school clothes were donated by someone else. The plastic bag of school supplies are make-or-break. As it happens, that represents about a half day's income for a household in rural Vietnam. She was inspired herself to get more involved with this school. She wants to see if she can get them some books. (You can see in the slideshow on the right that there aren't any books in the classrooms.) Or some training for the teachers who she guesses are following the model of whatever meager education they got themselves in similar circumstances.
I've also spent a lot of time with nonprofits at home communicating to donors that you get back more than you receive, and that's always the case here. It's good for the spirit of course, but this time we got paid back immediately with a fantastic spread of food at a neighboring church. They set up a dining room in the driveway, hung up some tarps for shade, fired up the kitchen in back and stuffed us with shrimp and chicken and coconut and rice all raised in the delta. You wouldn't believe how good this food tasted.
