Precious Babies and Prickish Students

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For quite some time now, my housemate Michelle has been spending Saturday afternoons traveling to Govap District to volunteer at an orphanage for infants, toddlers, young children, and teenagers. Many times Lindsey and Leanne make the trip as well and having heard moving stories and been shown beautiful pictures of their time there, Charlie and I decided to join the girls for an afternoon with the children.

Depending on scheduling and staff support, volunteers seem to be assigned to whichever age group necessitates the most care at any given time. When we arrived, most of the toddlers were zonked out for naptime - as we walked past we could see them sprawled out on evenly spaced cots, mouths slacked open, limbs overflowing their tiny bed. We were led into a courtyard and up a flight of stairs to the infant ward where, as luck would have it, we were just in time to help serve up a nice bottled lunch of formula.

The infants housed at the orphanage are unutterably cute - squiggly, squirmy balls of chub with the hugest, darkest eyes that manage to never break their studious gaze of a new and, I’m sure, peculiar face such as mine. We were each presented with a hungry bundle of baby and set to work delivering the goods; head back, bottle up, suck suck suck. With alarming speed, the level of milk dropped as the babies’ cheeks swelled and puffed with gravity-aided voracity. NOTE: I couldn’t help but grin upon realizing that we’ve managed to come full circle with regard to this type of Newtonian feeding, thanks to the rise of the collegiate beer bong. (Gravity: helping freshman get drunk faster and fall down harder since 1666!) As it turns out, I was handed a champ as our bottle-downing team was first to finish and it was then time to turn the bulging little gasbag around and, graciously I might add, allow him to belch any unwanted contents onto my thankfully covered shoulder. Burping a baby is more fun than I had anticipated as I found myself softly drumming out the beats of various songs onto the little guy's back and, wouldn’t you know it, halfway through “Whatever You Like”, the tiny mouth opened a crack and out dribbled a surprisingly steady flow of upchuck. Apparently, my baby felt the same way about T.I.’s songs as do many others in the music industry.

After helping my infant lose the spins, he was put back in his crib and I was left free to wander around the room in a glowing state of wonderment. The babies were all so differently tempered - some would reach and grab for my fingers, hair, camera, whatever they could get a grasp of, while others would send themselves into a transfixed shock upon seeing me, eyes wide, feet still. There were several with visible cranial scars that thin hair failed to hide and others held deep bruising on their arms, legs, and back. Two of the infants had cleft lips, one a complete separation that her tiny tongue seemed endlessly fixated upon running in and out. And one of the babies was so small, so withered, chapped, and desperately vulnerable that it scarcely seemed human; the only thing more anguishing than looking at it and holding its fingers was pulling out and turning away. The sadness of it all is gazing down on those eyes and bubbling little smiles and knowing that in reality, few of these infants are going to go on to lead healthy lives, have families, children, overcome their stripped childhood, know what it is to be loved. Nobody deserves their situation and I can’t remember anything making me feel quite so joyous, so loving, and yet so downhearted as the orphanage in Govap.

The girls have been more than generous to the orphanage with their time and energy and I feel indebted to use this entry to repost a Facebook message by Michelle requesting donations of hygienic, educational, and clothing necessities. Keep in mind, her address is our LanguageCorps address so if willing, feel free to put whosever name for mailing.



For those of you back home...

Many of the orphanages here in Vietnam survive solely from charity and donations. These orphanages need things like:

baby bottles
clothing for ages newborn-18 years old (keep in mind that people are smaller here)
toys
notebooks, pens, and pencils for school
books, toys, or computer programs that help children to learn how to read and pronounce words in English
tooth brushes and tooth paste
blankets
etc.

If you are interested in donating to orphan children in Vietnam please mail what ever you can to me and I will personally hand them to the children.

Please spread the word!

You can send to:

Michelle Patterson
47 bis/Vo Van Tan St.
Ward 6, District 3
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


...Michelle...

In addition, Michelle volunteers at another safe house for children called the Agape Childrens’ House, which was founded and currently run by a couple from Minnesota who Michelle has been lucky enough to meet with on several occasions. Donations are crucial for maintaining the shelter and if so compelled, can be made online at the following address: http://www.charitybox.com/agape/

Much appreciation from everyone!


Lest you begin to think that all Vietnamese children are cuddly bundles of dewdrops and rose petals, I am going to wrap this up with a particularly testing experience from one of my public school classes a couple days ago. I was hoping to include pictures of the campus but my camera is still missing and presumed pawned.

Foremost, I must say that the children in public schools are over the top friendly, to an almost disturbing level. Many times I find myself swarmed within minutes of sitting on a courtyard bench by no less than an army of uniformly clad students jumping up and down, blushing, asking questions about my age, my hobbies, and just how many girlfriends I have waiting for me back in the states. Any trip to a public school can make the most humble of fellows feel like Justin Timberlake trapped in a room full of fourteen year old girls.

Students at Duc Tri public school, located just off the backpackers’ district, uphold this level of friendliness but with a dash of instability sprinkled on top. These are children who will wave, shout “Hello!” with a big smile, and then cheerfully hurl a rock into the back of a friend running by. I will touch more on this in a future entry but the level of violence tolerated in children’s “play” in Vietnam is shocking. The equivalent of a high five among many children here is a shove followed by a swift kick to the shin. Suffice it to say that I commonly distinguished Duc Tri as, “The school where I once saw a student knock himself unconscious during break by running headlong into a concrete pillar.”

At Duc Tri school, I am assigned to teach for three hours in the afternoon, two classes of an hour and a half each. The first of these classes is comprised of a manageable bunch who are, for the most part, content in playing games, singing songs, and, if there’s time, learning a little English on the side. The following class is a touch more rough around the edges, a few girls who make life miserable for several others and a mixed-gender group in the back that typically acknowledge my requests to kindly curb their socializing by sharpening their pencils into harpoons that can be flung into the soft flesh of classmates once my back is turned. A Vietnamese teacher’s aide is always present in the class to provide translation if necessary and, as is more often the case, assistance in the areas of order and discipline. My aide for this class is a very nice man in conversation but I suppose his twenty-odd years of teaching have more or less caught up to him and he spends most of the class sitting at his desk smacking his plastic ruler and barking futilely at classroom chatterboxes. It is fair to say that he is generally disliked among the students. That said, the class is for the most part usually subdued enough for the first 45 minutes that I don’t need to resort to any of my “Code Red” tactics to keep them under control. However, the second half of class follows a half an hour break in which the entire student body participates in a school wide game of Let’s Injure Each Other and the staff are able to put on display their proud indifference to dislocated joints and rivulets of blood.

Walking into a classroom of children directly after this break time can be best described as being dropped into a glass jar full of hornets that has just been vigorously shaken for the past hour or so. Students dart, scurry, and crawl around the room like creatures of the night, biting and clawing at anything that strays into their field of vision. Desks have been stacked up, chairs overturned. In one corner lies a clump of hair matted in dried blood and in the other, a small fire flitters, unattended. The accompanying sound to such a ruckus closely emulates a cross between a rusty nail scraping against glass and a pack of drunk hyenas falling down a flight of stairs. I’ve always felt the whole scene is just a pig’s head mounted above the blackboard away from really completing the definitive representation of human beings at their most lawless.

Anyhow, on one such afternoon after break, I reentered the classroom to the awaiting circus and found that my teacher’s aide had not returned from the lounge yet. I decided to give one shot at focusing the classes’ collective attention on something other than the small boy on the ground in the middle of the room who was currently being used as a soccer ball.
“ALRIIIIIIIGHT!” I bellowed. “WHO WANTS TO PLAY SCATTERGORIES?!?!”
I would have had more success making myself heard standing front row at a Metallica concert. This was uncontestable volume; they knew it as well as I, and so, deciding to wait for the aide and his knowledge of Vietnamese derogatories, I sighed deeply and took a seat at his desk. Upon doing so, the earsplitting noise and hullabaloo suddenly deceased into a low rumble of murmurs and nervous glances in my direction. Several girls looked over at me and audibly gasped. I actually saw one boy’s mouth drop open like a broken nutcracker and he seemed to teeter a bit off balance.

As I sat at the desk trying to imagine what sacred cultural institution I had just broken, I felt a sudden burning sensation on the underside of my thighs and buttocks, dull at first but quick to escalate to the point of searing. My first reaction was to smother the flames but upon realizing there were none, thought to myself, “Bollocks, I’ve sat on a scorpion” and shifted my weight on the chair to see if it was still alive. However, upon attempting such an investigation, I was dismayed to find that I was in fact attached to the chair by a long glistening strand of something gooey. I was sitting in a pool of scalding hot glue that was in the process of melding my trousers with the wooden seat of the chair, a unification I severed immediately and without restraint by leaping to my feet and unabashedly massaging my charred behind.

As the class stood stunned and the teacher’s aide walked in just then, I realized that I had unwittingly taken the assassin’s bullet and that if things had gone to plan, it would be the aide and not me with a hardening coat of glue on his trouser bum. And in that moment, amidst the smell of burning flesh, I felt a great sadness for the old man, devoting his livelihood to children from a vastly different generation who disliked his authority enough to smear piping hot glue all over his chair for a laugh.

I instinctively decided to delay any confrontation and went on teaching the class to a curiously subdued group of students, some of whom looked like they had just witnessed a gruesome murder. No harpoons were thrown. No hair yanked from its socket. Under normal circumstances I would have been twirling around the room singing praises on high for such dutifulness, but there was a bitterness I was finding hard to swallow and felt an overriding sense of guilt on their behalf. During a partner exercise that kept the class busy for a while, I walked over to the aide and, turning around, made a vague reference to the glue, saying, “What a class, huh? They’ve gone and ruined my trousers!” I don’t think he understood what I was getting at because his face creased and he gave me a sly smile as if to suggest I was drawing some sort of parallel between the stains on my backside and the ones found on Monica’s infamous blue dress. As class drew to a close, I was still in a state of indecision as whether to confront a school figure of authority on the matter or not and was busy turning the issue over in my head when a small girl, one of the softest spoken in the class, was pushed in front of me by several of her classmates who stood behind her, avoiding eye-contact. Blushing, she said, “Teacher, for you”, handed me a folded up note and before I could say anything, shuffled out of the room with her friends quickly in tow. Sitting alone in the classroom, I unfolded the note and read it to myself:


We very sorry because the joke. We’re did not do that but we don’t know who do that. We’re don’t know have a glue on that chair. In the break time someone put the glue on the chair but I know he/she isn’t do that with you because nobody hate you, you never angry, you never shout with us, you always happy and smile. We really really sorry about that joke, please forgive us, please come back, you’re the best teacher we ever have.

We really sorry

Class 717


Needless to say, I had a smile on my face all bike ride home and once in my room, as I taped the note to my ever growing wall of mementos, I resolved to let the incident go. Call me a pushover, but forgiveness is a pillar of Vietnamese culture. Besides, I needed new trousers anyway.

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