heat day

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June 5, 2007
Can Tho
Hot and Humid, about to Rain
4:08pm

I’m so thankful air conditioning units. We just spent the last 6 hours walking around and talking to people in Vietnam summer heat. Ten minutes ago (before I washed my face) I was the Queen bitch. The heat just sucks the live of you. I have a rash that several of us have had. It’s caused by the heat. Its red and when you run your finger over it…there is a sharp pain. They are small…like a insect bit. I have two right now.
But today’s activity was to go out into the rural area and talk to people and learn about them and their ‘neighborhood.’ I use this loosely b/c it is not what we are used to. It is a long street with houses and businesses on it. Anyway, we got there is was hot. We had our Vietnamese students with us. Two American, two Vietnamese. We walked around and had them ask questions for us. Our professor gave us some fixed questions. OH MY GOSH THERE IS LIZARD IN MY ROOM.

So the questions. The people would never give us a straight answer. Mainly because they do not have a concept of a neighborhood or boundaries. We wanted to this one house and had coconut milk. We wandered off the fixed questions and I guess we started a fire by asking if someone has ever stolen from their house. The niece followed us to the neighboring vegetable fields. She told us about how people came in a stole her things and that she wanted some money. And she started crying. A little surprising.
By the time lunch came around…we were all hot and ready to go. We had headaches and just really tired. We went to a local restaurant and had lunch. I have a plate of rice, chicken, banana, and veges for 17,000 dong (which is like $1.06). food is so cheap here. We went to a temple afterwards and I had my fortuine told. I had to pray/ask the gods for request/question. Then I shook a can of sticks with numbers on them back and forward until just one fell out. so much easier said than done. I finally got it. Then I had to drop to the ground two pieces of wood. One was smooth round the other was flat. I had three chances to get one of the pieces of wood to fall on the smooth round side and the other on the flat side. I did on the second try…so the stick that fell out was 51. I went over to this cabinet and looked for a sheet that said 51. all the Vietnamese students were congratulating me. It said that if I fell ill I would recover, I would do good in my studies, I am lucky, my wish would come true, and something else I can not remember.

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