I will never get used to...

Walking into a room and everyone turning to stare. You would think after 5 weeks in Vietnam, 5 weeks of being the token foreigner, 5 weeks of being the tallest, usually biggest, almost always whitest, woman in the room that I would be used to this by now. But I'm not.

Today I went to my second Vietnamese wedding. One of the teachers at the vocational college has become a good friend of mine so when we went for coffee this morning, she asked if I wanted to come to her student's wedding with her. I had also taught this student. The bride and groom are first year students at the vocational college and only 18. They are both from poor families in the countryside and the groom is already working. The bride will finish this term at the college and then begin working as well. The wedding was very loud but it was neat to see several of my students outside of class. Rather than being in a big fancy hall, it was outside, with many tables set up under a corrugated metal roof. It was a "small" wedding by Vietnamese standards but there were still at least 200 people. The bride was very pretty but oh so young.

I've been in Vietnam now for five weeks. I know the names of most of the streets around my house, I know how to get to the universities where I teach, to the river, to the beach, to the supermarket and to a few great coffee places. I know where I can go to get "comfort food", including Mexican, Italian, pizza, pasta, mac and cheese and grilled cheese and what dishes I can eat at the many "street shops" where you can get a great meal for $0.25. I have a better appreciation for certain parts of US government, especially when I witness rampant corruption in the adoption process and various other places. However, I have a great appreciation for these people, who welcome me so warmly and want nothing more than for me to stay here forever, marry a Vietnamese man and have little half Vietnamese babies. I also have a greater appreciation for westernized values in marriage, because I would probably be jailed for shooting my Vietnamese husband when he refused to help me with the housework or cooking because that's a "woman's job".

I've been trying to spend as much time as possible in the baby orphanage near my house, even though it breaks my heart to see how sick some of the babies are. It seems almost all of them have something: sores on their heads, pneumonia, flu, diarrhea, you name it, they have it. There are about four "mothers" at any one time taking care of up to 20 babies in 8 or 12 hour shifts. Now I don't know about you, but taking care of screaming babies and toddlers all day and all night seems an impossible task to me. The orphanage is a cosponsored by the Vietnamese government and a Canadian adoption agency, and I'm really not sure who is supposed to be in charge financially, but whoever it is chooses to treat only at the last minute. I've heard, however, that the hospital where the babies are taken is so underfunded that they would in many cases be better off in the orphanage than in the hospital. I wish I could take all of the babies home with me or that I could somehow start an adoption agency that isn't so corrupt, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I just finished week four of teaching and I'm slowly figuring out how to work within the parameters of the programs, the schools and my own energy level. The heat is sometimes so overwhelming that I struggle to finish a class. I really love when the class is engaged and having fun learning but sometimes it is really hard to just maintain enough energy to teach 2-3 classes per day. I'm getting there though. Slowly but surely. I teach at four different places, DaNang University, Duy Tan University, DaNang Vocational College and Friendship Foreign Language Center. The hardest thing is scheduling but I think that's just something that needs to be worked out.

There's this thing in Vietnam that we call "rubber time". I always ask if we're going by rubber time or American time when I'm meeting up with friends because if it's rubber time, then add 20-30 minutes to American time. Classes usually start late, I will usually meet people later then the set time, everything is just on a different schedule.

I've started trying to learn Vietnamese, but it is so different than English, that I really struggle with it. I hope to have a few things down before I leave. The crazy thing is, now that I've reactivated the language part of my brain, my French and Spanish are coming back. Because, as everyone knows, French and Spanish is infinitely useful in an Asian country (oi troi oi! oh my god!)
 
Hasta La Vista

Photos are 1) Kareoke; 2) the bride and three of my students; 3) two of the students and my friend Chi Lai (the teacher); 4) one of the "mothers" with Viet, who was adopted last week and was a favorite at the orphanage; 5) "my" baby, Ly, who I spend most of my time with; 6) the orphanage