I have been on cultural overload the past few weeks and have thus neglected the whole blog thing. Sometimes I experience so many new things in one day that I have such a brain fart, I go straight to bed. And apparently ignore clipping my nails as well. But here are some highlights from my journal that I'm required to keep for my culture course, and I promise to actually write from now on:
Maggie and I had the chance to go to an orphanage with Lana and her friend Erin. I’m not quite sure how Lana knows Erin, but she is an artist currently on a Fulbright scholarship. Her parents live here (she is half Vietnamese) but she grew up in the states. (Chicago if I remember correctly). She has a clover tattoo on her arm that says “Made in Vietnam”. Anyhow, we woke up early, walked with Lana to the bus station, waited for Erin, and took the bus to I don’t know where. We got off at one indoor market so that Maggie could buy a face mask, Lana and Erin could buy chè for the nurses, and we also all got some ca phe sua (vietnamese CRACK) (just kidding, means "coffee with milk (sweetened condensed milk)). This market was very Vietnamese—no tourists in sight— which was refreshing, although especially smelly and dirty. It was really cool, I got lots of sludge on my shoes (no more flip flops at markets). Afterwards we walked around the corner and found ourselves at the orphanage. At first they weren’t going to allow us to enter because there had been an outbreak of the H1N1 virus amongst the kids, and they were afraid that either we would bring in a new strain or that we might catch it too. But they allowed us in after some debate (naturally all in Vietnamese Maggie and I could not understand). From what I understood, this orphanage is specific to kids abandoned because they have a mental or physical illness or disability. We got to play with some of the older kids (meaning maybe around 4) with Downs Syndrome. They were really cute, and Maggie and I soon had a few of them stepping and piling themselves on us. One in particular kept sitting in my lap, I tried to ask him his name but he would respond in undistinguishable Vietnamese, or would just make noises. After 15 minutes the nurse came back and said that we had to leave because they were still afraid that we would bring or catch the virus—there were a few kids in the hospital with it. So we left, unfortunately. It would have been nice to spend more time with them. The experience affected me in weird ways. With situations like this I put up a guard and seem immune to feeling, when really the feeling is just buried deeper inside. I felt saddened, naturally. I wondered what the kids would do when they grew older. I also wondered if these families who abandoned these children had a little bit more money in their pockets, then maybe they would have spared their children and would have been able to take care of them.
One thing that is has been especially hard is that I can never blend in or slip between the cracks for even a second. When I walk down the street I create a stir; it's like a rock being thrown into a pond. I create lots and lots of ripples. Enough with the analogies: basically, people stare. Sometimes I stare back, in good humor. But after a while it gets very tiring because I cannot ever blend in. I am always being watched. Not only that but I'm thus constantly the target for street vendors, they call miss miss one dollar, one dollar... And it's even worse when we're all in one big group, like we are so often.
I have recently noticed from the road trip up central Vietnam is how much trash there is, everywhere. It was one thing in Saigon-- trash was everywhere, but that is somewhat expected in a huge, overcrowded city. But for the last few days we've been snailing up towards Hanoi and there's been no change in litter. We just crossed a bridge where the water was littered with full trash bags and where the whole river bank was full of discarded waste. Anywhere you look, too, there is litter. Including around people’s houses. I realize this could be from a serious lack of organized waste removal but one would think that people who often live so close to and in sync with the earth would want to take care of it, especially within the confines of their own land. This may be a completely incorrect observation, but I feel like this may have something to do with their development. If you think about it, back in the day, one didn’t really have to worry about where they put their waste because it tended to be natural and from the earth anyways. You could toss it anywhere because it could return to where it came, eventually disappearing. But now that we have all of this manufactured synthetic crap like packaging and plastic bags and other such things, when they are thrown on the ground, they stay. And accumulate. So people who to this day still live very close to the earth, say as farmers, and who are starting to, within the last few decades, enjoy the luxury of prepackaged and synthetic goods, are not necessarily worried about their affect on the environment. I could be wrong, though. The Vietnamese may simply have an entirely different attitude towards their environment that I have not yet begun to understand. I’ve seen that typically their trash is burnt, but you can’t really burn some of the trash that is created… burning is also horrible for the environment.
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