Every little bit helps

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.

-Robert

Little to report

Please do keep checking back. The initial set-up weeks are on the boring side, but we expect some adventures to report on soon. Ilene is off on one now, and we've got a trip to the Mekong Delta this Sunday.

We've been establishing work routines and getting to know our neighborhood better. I'm getting used to the noise (or going deaf) and can usually sleep through the morning rush. This week, we had a couple days of uncharacteristic gloomy rainy days when the laundry wouldn't dry. That's over now -- the afternoon heat is killer.

The whole city seems to be holding its breath for or preparing for Tet. The park outside our building is the site of one of the many "flower festivals" in the week of Tet, and a little bit of progress is made each day stringing lights and building the decorations.

Ilene taught her first class on Monday and felt it was a good start. She's in Vung Tau now, a resort town on the coast a few hours southwest of here. It's a conference of all the Fulbright scholars currently in Vietnam. She returns tomorrow, and I'll try to get her to write a little about that. She's super busy. (In addition to everything else, she conducted an interview earlier this week via webcam with the committee at SCSU that will hopefully recommend her for promotion to full professor.)

A big chunk of our time is taken up with just holding together body, soul and home, like pioneers. Laundry and dishes and shopping and every other kind of housework needs to be done in small batches without letting anything build up. We only have 2 of any utensil. (Well, four chopsticks.) Slowly we acquire the the necessities and comforts there wasn't room for in the luggage allowance. Everything takes a little longer to accomplish because we don't know the routines here, then a little longer because we don't have the language skills to ask, then a little longer because everything takes a little longer here. The hunt for bottled water alone is something I have to concentrate on daily. Also chocolate.

A particular example of friendliness

It's pretty common for us to end up in conversation with strangers over a certain age -- war veterans or older. Usually it's when one of us is eating alone in a little shop where a tourist wouldn't typically be and end up seated next to one of these men alone. If I make eye contact and nod hello, they say hello in English and ask where I'm from. Ilene reports that the same thing happens to her.

These guys end up being enthusiastic conversationalists, interested to hear our perspective and to practice English that has been rusty for thirty-five years. Occasionally they are Viet Kieu -- that is, Vietnamese who have moved abroad -- and who came home for retirement or on a work assignment for the American or Canadian companies they now work for. Typically they worked with Americans in some way during the war, which usually means they had a hard time of it in the decade after. If they aren't themselves refugees who have returned, they almost always have children or other family living in the U.S. ("You know Louisiana? You know Maryland? Cali?") They often have complementary things to say about Americans. (The stereotypes here are often that we are "sincere" and that certain other nationalities I won't name are "not sincere" or "shallow.")

They're always curious why we're here. They're impressed that we're teachers. They're amazed with Ilene's Vietnamese. They're surprised to find us eating at a street stall and wonder if we always eat Vietnamese food. They run through the list of American celebrities that they like and don't like. (I'm sorry to say that the votes against Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Oprah and Tiger are so consistent that it looks like racial prejudice. Everyone likes Obama, though.)

They always try to pay my bill. That happened on the day we moved into the apartment when I went downstairs to find lunch. Yesterday, something like this was unfolding, and as soon as we got into conversation with the guy, I started waving for our bill so I could pay it before we had a chance to become friends and he offered to pay for us.

Ilene and I were together this time, and the guy was much older than usual -- maybe late 70's. He greeted us at first, somewhat hopefully, in French. His French is much better than his English, he explained, and whenever he had trouble thinking of or pronouncing a word in English, he tried it in French to see if we could understand him that way. He grew up in French colonial schools and spoke with a certain amount of regret for the educational system that has been lost. He's a retired educator himself and doesn't think much of kids these days or the schooling that they're getting.

He lives in the neighborhood, and before we left we exchanged phone numbers and agreed to get together soon.

Working routines

No tales of adventure the last few days. We are starting to establish work routines. Ilene will hopefully write some about her job soon. The class I am teaching met for the first time last night. I started work on the next book on Monday, so I have been putting in a writing session in the morning and spend the afternoons on errands. Today I go in search of haircut. Wish me luck.

-Robert

Classical concert

Last night we went to a concert at the opera house for the first time. (This picture is from a previous trip.) The occasion was to meet with another Fulbrighter who Ilene had so-far only corresponded with by email. She introduced us to a nice new restaurant I think I'll be spending a lot of time at and arranged for tickets to the concert, which was an east-meets-west kind of program. The Symphony Orchestra of the Ho Chi Minh City Ballet performed and guest soloists were from China, Korea and Japan. There were orchestral pieces composed by Chinese and Vietnamese featuring a kind of Vietnamese bamboo xylophone called T'rung and a Chinese lute called Pipa as well Terrega guitar piece adapted for Pipa. The event was a fundraiser for the Saigon Times Foundation, which supports "industrious students with disadvantages." It was a much better performance than what we attended on our last trip at the Conservatory, though this too was proceeded by a 15-minute lecture on the important connection between art and social values.

-Robert

Salsa night

Last night we painted the town red. Increasingly, Ilene and I feel like chaperons on these outings, though the young people we're running with don't need much looking after -- they drink the minimum and a late night ends at midnight. One of our friends has been taking salsa lessons and has become a regular at the Caravelle Hotel's rooftop bar where a Cuban band plays a couple nights a week. The crowd is a mix of hotel guests and young Vietnamese. The band jumps off stage to lure people on to the dance floor. The Japanese businessmen grab the asses of the hostesses. The middle-age Westerners try to get the phone numbers of the young ladies. The big screen TV runs a slide show of hotel services -- massages, drink specials, breakfast buffets, sightseeing tours. Every few minutes, a picture shows a smiling young man dressed in the costume of a Vietcong soldier popping out of one of the Cu Chi tunnels, one of the popular destinations for war tourists. Towering above on every side of the patio are the skeletons of the next generation of hotels and office towers. The sparks of the arc welders working late on Saturday wink inside.

Well fed

We had breakfast today at the home of our friend Tuan. One of his innumerable sisters runs a restaurant out of the front room, and she is a fantastic cook. She specializes in "broken rice" -- short-grain rice with a variety of heavier dishes with gravy, such as barbecue pork, stewed tuna steaks or hard boiled eggs. We had a sample platter and went away stuffed.

This kind of room facing the street is a combination formal receiving room and garage. (You can see the family altar and a motorbike in the background of the second picture.) It's pretty common to run some kind of small retail operation out of these rooms -- a quickimart or a small dining operation like this. She told us she has 100 customers per day, and basically what you see in the glass case in the background is the whole set up. Other sisters help at a stove in the kitchen in back, and the stock is delivered in small quantities by motorbike. I counted three deliveries while we were there. The breakfast rush is children getting breakfast on the way to school, and the lunch rush is laborers on break and some kids out from school.

I lost track of all the cousins in the household, but I do know the six-month old girl is the child of the brother whose wedding we went to in 2008.

Setting up house

I wanted to get some video or pictures to show the apartment before I told about it, but it's going to be a few days before I'm that organized.

So, we are in an old apartment building directly on a well-known traffic circle/landmark a little north of downtown. Very Vietnamese in style -- nothing like the towers built especially for the comfort of expats. 1 bedroom with a large living room and kitchen area and very simple furnishings and utilities. (The water is in cisterns above a drop ceiling and a pump turns on every time you use a tap or flush to keep the cisterns full.) We have tiny little washing machine and hang the clothes to dry out the back window. In front, we don't really have a view out on the street -- the unit is recessed a bit back in the building and the gallery outside our bedroom window belongs to the next unit, so we keep those curtains closed. In back we look out over a jumble of alleys. We like the location a lot, but it's a little noisier than I had hoped. Until I get used to it, I'll be waking up with the start of motor scooter horns about 5 a.m. If I really need a respite and feel like blowing a lot of money, a large Western-style department store with a bakery and movie theater is very close.

Our landlord is really sweet. She put in a lot of time helping the get the internet situation resolved and doing other little favors. She's a professor of law at a local university.

Between us, Ilene and I have carried 8 arm loads of essential supplies from the Co-op Mart a couple blocks away -- linens, brooms, fans, toilet paper, groceries, and everything else essential that wouldn't fit in the suitcases. It's looking pretty homey now.

That's been exhausting, and the week of traveling and apartment hunting was exhausting, and I guess I didn't realize it until now, but the month-long sprint preparing for the trip was exhausting, so we've hit the wall the last couple days. I've been laying on the couch eating Ritz crackers and special dark chocolates all day. Hopefully we can get some rest for a fresh start on Monday, but our social calendars between now and then are already packed.

Tonight my lack of language skills tripped me up again like it has in the past -- I accidentally ordered twice as much food as I intended, and at a pretty expensive place, too. It's always embarrassing to sit there and watch that second plate of food being carried out while it dawns on you how you screwed up the order. The good news is that I finally have an overload of protein in my belly, and I should be feeling better soon.