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Published: February 23rd 2008
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I have been lucky enough to be in Vietnam for Tet (also known as Lunar New Year and Chinese New Year). Tet is like Christmas, New Years, and everyone in the whole country's birthday all rolled into one. During the holiday, everyone takes at least 1 week off to spend time with their family and most businesses are closed for 1 - 2 weeks. The preparation and celebration blows any western holiday away. Everyone buys tons of flowers, especially these yellow flowering trees that go for 1 million dong! Near where I was staying, the whole park was transformed into a gigantic flower market with bonsai trees, dragon fruit, orchids, bushes shaped like dragons, and every other sort of flowering plant one could imagine. It was so beautiful!
To celebrate New Year's, my other volunteer friends and I got all dressed up and headed out on the town. There are two main streets in downtown Saigon that were the center of the celebration. The streets were decorated with flowers, lights, gigantic chinese lanterns, stages for performances, and 8 foot rats (its the year of the rat). After a delicious dinner that included 3 fish bowl sized cocktails (split between all
of us) we headed downtown to watch amazing drummers and dragon dancing while we strolled and waited for the fireworks with thousands of locals. All of us agreed this was better than the western 2008 new year. At midnight, fireworks went off and we all started hugging each other. Apparently hugging at the New Year is a western custom because we got a lot of really strange looks from everyone around us. A few locals did jump in with us and start hugging, though. After that we headed back to the tourist area and danced to 1990's music until the power went out in the building and we were forced to go home. The night ended in true Vietnam style, with a major malfunction of basic infrastructure!
Being in Vietnam during Tet was a unique and irreplaceable experience, but the real reason I am here is to volunteer at an orphanage. My first two weeks of volunteer work were spent at Dieu Giac Orphanage (www.orphaned.org). The orphanage is part of a Buddhist Temple and is run by Buddhist nuns. There are over 130 children there and even a few disabled children affected by Agent Orange that is still in
the environment in certain areas of Vietnam. The first day at the orphanage was a trip since all the kids were on break from school for Tet. They were all running around like crazy in the play yard. At first, all we noticed was that any safety standards we had should be thrown out of the window - the kids fall down, hit each other, and are constantly risking major injury by playing on the jungle gym dangerously. They are the toughest kids I've ever seen. But it was really reassuring to see that they are well taken care of in terms of having clothes and food.
At Tet, many visitors come to the orphanage to make donations. They hand out lucky money, sodas, candy, and cakes to all of the children. It was a trip the first time I saw someone walk in and start handing 10,000 dong bills out to all the kids, even the babies. I am still not used to seeing Coke in the babies' bottles. I made special friends with a baby named Minh (Minh means bright in Vietnamese). Every day when I got in I would pick him up and play with him
until I got to put him in his hammok at naptime. Before I left in the afternoon, I got to help his "mom" give him a bath. He is so sweet and when I left Dieu Giac on my last day I was tearing up saying goodbye to him.
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Al Ammo
Allison Bauer
Looks So Cool
Wow, those kids are so cute. It sounds like you are having such a good time. You look so pretty smiling in the pics with the children. You only have 7 more days, so enjoy. I can’t wait to see you. I love you, talk to you soon. Kap kum clap.