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Published: August 7th 2007
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Thuy Xuan
Hard at work learning English It’s been a long time without an update, partly due to the fact that now that I’m settled down in Hue, not a great deal of exciting blog worthy things happen. That is not to say I am not learning or experiencing things etcetera. I am just becoming accustomed to the slower way of life and where I before blogged at lunchtime, I now take a nap, as is tradition in Vietnam. I’m going to split this into two separate blog posts, this being the first.
The Vietnamese day starts at about 5am, when the day is not yet hot. My day starts at a lazy 7:30 or 8am. Lunchtime is from 11am to 1pm, the hottest part of the day and conveniently time for a nap (which is sometimes rudely interrupted by the need to plan my afternoon lesson). The streets are quite empty at this time of day save for the western tourists who trudge on sweating their life away and the cyclo drivers who follow them trying to get some business. In the afternoons I usually go to Thuy Xuan orphanage, a slightly plush orphanage for Vietnamese standards and partly run by a French charity. The kids
TX Younger
The group doing some painting (well they can't learn all the time can they!) here are great! This is my favourite place to teach, probably due to the fact I spend a lot more time there than the other places. Last month I taught only the younger children, ages 7-11, but this month I also teach the older boys, 16-19, which as you can imagine is quite chaotic but really good fun! Their English varies quite a lot so while the younger ones are on basic vocabulary, the older ones are able to have conversations.
The other weekend, I went to Chi Lang, another place I visit to do fun things and not teach, another volunteer here teaches there. Basically the idea was to paint one of the walls in their courtyard with some bright colourful thing and after some sketches by me we decided upon jungle animals. The Vietnamese seem to love having meetings so we had a meeting to discuss the painting and (with 3 people able to translate for us) the person in charge suggested that instead of animals we should do scenes of mythology and Vietnamese legends. Now, I can paint animals but I really didn’t think my artistic talent could stretch to that! We did what we usually
Phi and Man
Phi (left) is a very good student and very talented at art! do when we don’t like a suggestion and pretended that we didn’t understand so thankfully the animals went ahead. On the first day, we cleaned the wall and painted it a very blank ‘Vinamilk’ (creamy white) colour which you think would be a simple enough task. Wall cleaning was not popular and the chalky paint they use on buildings here dusted every child in orange paint. The idea was then to throw water on it to catch the dust. This turned into throw water at the wall just for the sake of it or alternatively at each other. Painting. We used 4 or 5 rollers I think and set them off painting the wall. This turned into painting the wall, the floor, the tree, the twigs, the floor, the chairs, several other walls and finally each other as one boy got his back rollered in paint. We were, I might just point out, two English volunteers, one with basic Vietnamese and the other with none, with 20 Vietnamese children from the youngest 5 to the oldest 15 I think. The mothers (the women who look after the children) had taken a day off so there was a frantic rush to
get the place cleaned up and looking respectable before they came back. It sort of worked, I think we did a good job. The rather large milk coloured lake that had formed during the cleanup was partly hidden by the tree, the children had taken showers, and the chairs, being plastic, were washed off. We dreaded the next day when we would actually have to paint the animals. I started off chalking the outline which gathered a crowd and had it completed in about an hour. The paint we were going to use was enamel paint and there’s a funny story we have from the paint shop. While there I was worrying about using white spirit on the children, because this kind of paint isn’t washable with water, Yanh (who used to live at the orphanage and was helping us with the translation and bargaining) turned to me and said, “oh don’t worry about that, we have petrol we can use”. We got some white spirit nonetheless and it was funneled in a bottle of drinking water. What can I say apart from welcome to Vietnam? The country where there are more rules in the supermarket than on the roads
Chi Lang wall before
During the cleaning process. The thought of hard work had scattered many of the children. (long story!). The painting was much more organised and I think a lot less things got painted than the day before. Each child painted something different but we left the snake (the most popular animal to paint) till last. If I had a pound for every time I heard “em, snake, em, em?” or “later” I would be very rich! It was at the very end when Hilary and I were painting the black outline that she turned to me and asked “is this mouse supposed to look like this?” And somehow we had ended up with a three legged, gay, ballerina mouse with a radio transmitter for a nose.
A few days later we took the same kids swimming, always popular. Swimming for girls here must be done in shorts and t-shirt. This time, we had a new gadget (one that had been tested by us previously); a special underwater bag for your camera bought by Hilary’s sister for her birthday. Never has a plastic bag been so much fun!
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fiona
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Wow!! That wall is fabulous, you are a talented lady Nic! The kids are so cute too, looks great, bet you don't want to come back! Sorry to see your old blogs disappeared, still, it's good to hear from you, take care xx