Volunteering in Da Nang

Here are the blog entries from my other journal while I was in Da Nang working as a volunteer.

Sorry about the photos not exactly matching the entries. I can't work out how to put them with the matching text.

The Beginning
March 1 2007

Well I have arrived in Vietnam and thus far haven't been hit by a car, bicycle, truck, bus or any other large object crossing the road. I feel that this may just be chance given the complete lack of any order or rules in the traffic. I feel that the traffic lights are just there for decoration, and are not so much a rule rather a recommendation.

The house in Da Nang is really nice and there are eight of us staying here at the moment which is great. The food is absolutely wonderful.

We went and saw the children at the Malnourished Baby Centre yesterday. There aren't many there at the moment because some were recently adopted and others are still at home with their families for the Tet Festival. The children are all very cute and very keen to be around us. I think that they will be a lot of fun.The building is very basic but very clean and the mothers seem to care a lot for the children.

We also went out to Marble Mountain and China Beach for a look around. The Mountain has a lot of steps which are enormous and very difficult to get back down. The shrines are really lovely and strangely enough they actually had roses in pots growing up there. I'm not sure if they had done them specially for the Tet festival and if they will all be dead next week but they looked really quite healthy.

The beach wasn't all that nice but the wind didn't really help. We went to a resort and paid an exorbitant sum for a drink and then had a really quick swim at the beach. There was quite a strong undertow so we didn't go in very far and there was also some form of slimy animal in the water as well. Thankfully none of the taxis here seem to mind you being wet as we only had one towel between all six of us.

We are having orientation today and finding out what else we are doing for our time here. It seems that they have changed the program in the last couple of months and there are now more places that we go to during the day.
Da Nang is very noisy but quite nice and the traffic isn't as bad as Ho Chi Minh City.The weather also isn't as bad as I thought. It's humid but not unbearable. But we have been told that it will get worse in the next couple of months.

That's about all my news for now. I'll write again later.

We've started
March 6 2007

We started with the kids properly on Friday after our orientation. We go to lots of places here in Da Nang so I'm yet to visit all the different children.

The kids are lovely and very friendly. The occasional child is frightened of us but most come running to greet the bus when it arrives.They find it strange that we don't speak vietnamese but many of them seem to understand some english even if they don't speak any.

We spent the weekend in Hoi An and the others got heaps of clothes made. Hoi An looks lovely at night with all the lanterns lit. It is nowhere near as pretty in the daylight. There were lots more westerners around in Hoi An, it was strange to see so many wandering around and the level of english spoken by the locals was much higher than here in Da Nang. We had some really good food down there as well.

The weather was much hotter over the weekend and we went to the beach on Sunday. Not quite up to Australian standards but still quite a nice spot. Surprisingly the water was actually cool which was nice and refreshing.
We went last night to the big cash and carry and got some supplies for the children (textas, glue and things like that) as well as some formula for one of the orphanages. I was surprised by the range of formula available. I would have thought that most babies here would be breastfed. The people who run the place clearly don't trust their employees not to be stealing from them as they pat down everyone as they leave the building and they have to have stamps and receipts for any stuff that they take outside to transfer to another part of the building. It did sell a lot of western stuff that the vietnamese wouldn't be able to afford so I guess that's why.

I am still alive
March 13 2007

Sorry I haven't written for a bit. We went away for the weekend again.

Last week we had Vietnamese women's day which is a really big thing here. We had a special afternoon tea out at Social Support and we had to perform for them. With no notice! We had terrible trouble thinking of something that we all knew the words to that wasn't a children's song and in the end we sang Happy Birthday and the first verse of Waltzing Matilda. We looked and sounded totally ridiculous but the old women seemed happy and clapped along.
The next day the cooks bought us sponge cakes to celebrate Women's Day. The icing was so sweet, as just about everything is in Vietnam.

On Friday night we went out to karaoke again and I had my first ride back on a motorbike. Won't be rushing to repeat that experience again. It's scary enough when there is no traffic late at night.

We went to Lang Co beach for the weekend to go swimming. It's not a bad beach but I wouldn't say that it is any better than the beaches here in Da Nang, or any cleaner for that matter. It also had a strong undertow and the waves were dumping on the sandbar. The water was nice and cool though and I actually got cold for the first time since I arrived in Vietnam which was really pleasant. Otherwise there was pretty much nothing in Lang Co and I wouldn't rush to go there again.

I've agreed to go to Cham Island for April and teach english there. It should be good fun once I get over the lack of a shower (either hot or cold). The pictures of the beach that Mary and Andrew brought back on the weekend look really lovely and it seems a lot cleaner than here in Da Nang.

We're getting into the swing of things with the teaching. It's easier now that we know a bit more about the kids abilities. Some of them could do really well if pushed a bit harder. We'll have to work on them.

Today we are off to the Disabled Children's centre to make paper mache and then this afternoon I'm going back to the Malnourished centre to play with the babies there.

Impressions of Da Nang
March 15 2007

I've been asked by a few people to describe what it is like here in Da Nang so I'll give it a go. The volunteer house is in the city on a busy road with a park on the other side of it. The house is the typical multi-storey single room wide house that they have here in Vietnam. They seem to build them even in the suburbs where there is plenty of space to have a wider house. We have a little courtyard at the front with a large always locked gate (It is a little like Fort Knox!) and then the living/dining room. The kitchen is out the back downstairs. We're sharing rooms upstairs, two in each room. We share bathrooms between lots of us because only two of them have hot water (some of the time). The shower is just in the bathroom rather than in a cubicle at all, so when you turn it on the entire room gets wet including the toilet seat. The rooms have bars on all the windows and the balconies are always locked so we can't go out on them. They are a little bit paranoid since there was a break in at the end of last year.

The places that we go are scattered around Da Nang, some quite a distance away. Social Support Centre is right on the edge of the city. On the other side of it are rice paddies all the way to the hills. To get there we drive through streets with wandering cattle, goats, dogs, cats, chickens and geese. Social support is a home for homeless people. The government collected a whole lot of people who had no family to look after them and put them all together to form a giant family. There are children, the elderly, the mentally ill and the disabled all living together in little houses. They all eat together in large dining rooms and everyone seems to look after each other. They grow a lot of their own vegetables and learn trades and other skills. We teach the children and a couple of the people who work there English and in return they beat us at soccer each week.

The Red Cross Orphanage is on the other side of the city but also almost on the edge. They have babies and children. There is quite a high turnover of babies as many are adopted by american families. It is much older than Social Support and not in as good a condition. Today we did craft activities with the children and made things out of felt. They seemed to have a really good time though there was some fighting over the felt. Sharing is not one of their good skills. They don't really have much in the way of gardens at Red Cross though they do have random chickens wandering around in the bushes. One has chicks at the moment.

The Malnourished Baby Centre is in the centre of town and is just in a normal looking building. It is all on one level and has a little bit of a covered play area outside for the older children. There is also an area outside at the back but it does have the biggest rats I've ever seen in. Inside there are lots of beds and cots and not much else. They don't have a huge amount of furniture and the older children often sit on the floor to eat. The mothers sleep with the babies at night, everyone under the one mosquito net. Not all of the babies here are for adoption. Some still have family who just can't look after them at the moment and are trying to get things organised so that they can take them back. Once a child has been in the orphanage for more than 12 months they usually get put up for adoption even if they have family.

The Disabled Children's Centre is also in town in two buildings with a courtyard in between. It is sponsored by an American Group and is for children affected by Agent Orange as well as other disabled children with things like cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome. It's a fairly old building with concrete floors in most of one side and tiles in the other. They have some old desks from a school but little else in the way of furniture. The children get dropped off when their parents go to work and collected at about 4pm. They are all lucky to have families that can look after them. We teach them some English songs and games but don't do any formal lessons with them as many don't really speak much. It's unfortunate because some of the physically disabled children are very bright but haven't got any education at all.

Dai Loc is quite a way out of town and we pass through a couple of villages to get there. It's another orphanage so all the kids live there all the time. I haven't been through the whole building as we tend to stay in the front section but what I've seen seems to be in desperate need of a coat of paint. They don't have any grass so we have to play games on the concrete out the front (not good for the soles of the feet). The class rooms is fairly basic but thankfully not as hot as some of the others.

So that is all the places that we go to each day. We do most of them twice a week in groups of between 3 and 7.

Da Nang itself is not a particularly attractive town. It sprawls over a fairly large area. It gets fairly grotty at times though there seems to be a huge number of people who clean the streets and look after the gardens on the roundabouts and median strips. They are enormously brave as they stand on the edges of the roads with their brooms, with the traffic whizzing past. The garbage seems to be collected every day by people wheeling big bins around on bicycles. There are lots of people by the sides of the road selling things from lotto tickets to fruit and meat. They ride all the stuff in on their bicycles in the morning and set themselves up with their umbrellas on the kerb. The kerb here isn't really for pedestrians at all. It is a place to park your bike and set up your stall. The Vietnamese rarely walk anywhere. They seem to take their motorbike even if they are just going down the street. The women are paranoid about getting sun on them while on the bikes so they wear veils on their faces, hats and long (to the shoulder) gloves and socks so that they don't get any sun on their skin at all. Yet no-one seems to wear sunscreen here.

There are very few large shops around here and most shops seem to sell only one or two different things. You don't find a hardware store, you find a shop that sells tools and another that sells materials and so on. It strikes me that you could end up having to go to a lot of shops to get all the things that you need.

That is about all my news for now. If anyone has specific topics that they won't covered or questions, feel free to email me. Mum has my address if you don't know it.
Hope all is well in the rest of the world (I haven't seen the news in over 2 weeks so I have no idea what is going on)

Meeting the kids at Hoa My
March 19 2007 

Friday morning we got out to Dai Loc to find the place crawling with dentists. A group of volunteers from the US and Canada were there teaching local volunteers to do some basic dental checks and repairs. The locals seemed to be picking it up really quite quickly. The dentists said that the state of teeth here was pretty poor compared to the Western world but pretty good compared to the rest of Asia. So we gave up on trying to teach our class anything as they kept having to go out and see the dentists, and just played games with them instead. We are attempting to learn a game that we have called 'ninja cock' ( I have no idea what the real name for it is) which the people here all play. You regularly see people of all ages playing it in parks around Vietnam. It is similar to hackey sack back home only you use a cock made from feathers and plastic instead of a little bag. Needless to say we are not very good, though, we do provide a great deal of amusement for the children. We are slowly improving and may make it to the level of a five year old before we go home.

Since the dentists were going to be there all day we decided to come back to Da Nang for the afternoon and spend time with the Malnourished babies instead. We spent a good part of the afternoon trying to learn the babies' names, both how to say them and spell them. I'll have to see how many I remember today.

Saturday morning, three of us got up really early and went to My Son (about an hour south west of Da Nang)which is a collection of Cham ruins. It used to be really spectacular but the Americans destroyed large sections of it during the war so there aren't many intact buildings left. It is a UNESCO world heritage site now so they are getting some money to start working on restoration projects. The first set of buildings are the most intact and looked wonderful. There was still mist in the valley when we arrived and the jungle comes right up to the edges of the buildings. It was quiet for the first time since I arrived in Vietnam, just the sound of water and birds. Not a single car horn to be heard! There were probably only 8 other people in the whole area when we arrived so we managed to get lots of photos without people in front of the ruins. It isn't as big as we expected or as big as it looks on the map that they give you. A lot of the more intact statues have been moved to the Cham Museum here in Da Nang to protect them from further deterioration but there were some statues still around. At about 9.30 huge tour buses of Americans arrived from Hoi An and we were very grateful to be leaving.

We went out for lunch in Da Nang at a very cute little restaurant with Chinese style gardens. The service as always here in Vietnam left a little to be desired but I'm trying to let it bother me less. There are lots of people working in Vietnamese cafes and restaurants, the place is crawling with waiters but yet everything seems to take forever to turn up. When they give you the menu, they stand there and wait for you to order immediately. I don't know whether Vietnamese people are better at making their mind up or not but it usually takes us a while to know what we want. Then the food takes so long to come out you wonder whether they are killing the chicken fresh for you in the kitchen and most of the dishes come out at different times. You don't bother waiting for everyone to have a dish before you start to eat here or at least half the table will be eating something cold. They do seem to always be on hand to offer more drinks and always feel the need to pour things for you which is nice. Getting the bill doesn't seem to be easy either which is strange. The food is always really good in these places though so you just have to relax and go with it.

We walked back to the house from the restaurant. It actually isn't that far. People here are completely unable to tell us how long it would take to walk somewhere because it seems the Vietnamese don't actually walk anywhere. They get on their bikes even if it's only a short way. It only took us 35 minutes to walk back and if the footpaths hadn't been covered with other stuff it would have been even faster. You see, because the Vietnamese don't actually walk anywhere, the footpaths aren't actually for pedestrians. They are for the parking of bikes, sitting on and eating, selling of wares and washing of dishes. There is often no room at all for walking so we have to walk in the gutters on the road. This is fine on the smaller streets but can be a bit nerve wracking on the larger ones. On the way home we walked through the shiny religious items section of town and the furniture shops section and then the motorcycle section before reaching the park and cutting through to get home.

The furniture here is unusual. It does not seem to be designed for comfort at all. Most of it is solid wood without any cushions or padding. It looks really pretty and is all dark and shiny but it is incredibly uncomfortable to sit on for any length of time at all. Definitely numb bum inducing in a very short period. The stuff we have in the house seems to be better than a lot of the stuff I've sat in but still is not something that you would sit in all evening.

Sunday we went to the beach here in Da Nang for a couple hours. The water was very rough and surprisingly warm so we didn't really swim just waded and sat around in the sand. In the afternoon we went to Hoa My orphanage which is joining the GVN program at the end of April. It has about 46 children who are mostly teenagers and we will be going to help them study for their English exams. We had a party there last night just to meet the kids and have a look at the orphanage. When we arrived there were lots of people there from an American organisation that donates clothes, shoes and equipment to the children so the kids were very excited. We again showed our complete lack of ninja cock prowess and had some of the kids laughing a lot. After dinner we played pass the parcel and musical statues with the kids, at which we were much better. We then piled ourselves back into the cars and came home so the kids could go to bed. I think that we'll have fun at Hoa My.

So now it is back into another week of fun and games with the kids, and after-lunch sleeps at home. I think I'm getting far too used to this lifestyle.

Food Glorious Food
March 20 2007

I've been asked by people to describe the food that I'm eating while I'm here. Vietnam is one of those places which has managed to stick pretty much to its traditional food. There are no Maccas here, no pizza joints, none of the kebab shops that have sprung up elsewhere. Some restaurants here in Da Nang will have a single Western dish on the menu (often steak and chips; don't ask me why)but otherwise stick with Vietnamese all the way. There are a few Chinese restaurants around but that seems to be as near to foreign as things get here. In the more touristy towns you can get pretty much any foreign food that you'd like (and which we tend to do when we go there, there are some foods from home that you just miss!).

The supermarket has very little in the way of foreign food or ingredients. There is breakfast cereal which is all full of sugar and very american (oreos for breakfast anyone?)and some foreign lollies, cheese and that is about it. Most of the other things at the shops are distinctly Asian, including a large collection of things that I can't automatically recognise as a specific type of food, in fact, some that I can't recognise as animal, vegetable or mineral.

The diet here is predominantly fresh and most people it seems shop everyday rather than keeping ingredients at home. There are lots of markets scattered around town that sell fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, fresh noodles and rice. They look lovely all beautifully stacked on the side of the road under umbrellas. The fruit particularly is very brightly coloured. One of the weirdest looking fruits is dragon fruit which I hadn't seen before. It is bright pink in colour with green spines coming off it like small leaves. The inside is white with a texture not unlike citrus fruit but a flavour like a sweet melon. The entire inside is filled with small black seeds. Very unusual and very refreshing. Our favourite in the house is a Chinese pear which has slightly soft but still crispy flesh and a sweet flavour like a quince. The mangos here are a different variety to the ones at home with a much sweeter flesh and a less intense flavour.

The food in the house is really good. Mrs Quyen and Mrs Hai make us three fresh meals a day. Breakfast in Vietnam owes a lot to the French. They brought the concept of fluffy white bread to Vietnam and the Vietnamese have kept it. It is one of the only places in Asia to have also embraced yoghurt as a food. We often have yoghurt and fruit with bread and jam and this strange plasticky cheese that doesn't need to be refrigerated (which is just so wrong!). This morning we had one of our favourites, banana pancakes. They are more dense than the ones that we have at home but have a wonderful flavour as they are fried in large amounts of butter. Occasionally we have fried eggs and salad as an alternative.

Lunch we eat quite early before the Vietnamese (and me, I've taken to this quite happily) have their naps. We usually have stirfry and noodles but have also had soup, fried wontons, rice paper rolls with dipping sauce, fried omelette and rice paper wraps. Everything is very carbohydrate heavy, you would die in Vietnam if you were on the Atkins diet. Most meals have a large amount of either rice or noodles,with smaller amounts of meat or fish to give flavour.

Dinner is also eaten early so that the cooks can go home to their own families. Though, it seems that the Vietnamese do eat fairly early normally. We usually have a collection of dishes on the table with a mixture of vegetarian and meat. There is usually a stirfry of vegetables, often cabbage and carrots and assorted greens; a tofu dish that is usually fried, meat or fish in a sauce and rice, lots of rice. We usually finish with fresh fruit.

The Vietnamese are masters of the 'I can't believe it's not .....'. They are great at making soya beans into just about everything. We've had 'I can't believe it's not squid', 'I can't believe it's not bacon', 'I can't believe it's not ham'and really we can't believe that it isn't the food in question. We're not really sure why they bother putting in the effort but the mock squid really is quite nice.

The others are obsessed with a sauce called Chin Su which is a mixture of soy sauce and peanut oil. Everything gets doused in it at lunch and dinner and we are going through a bottle at least each week. The cooks must think that we drink the stuff!

The one thing that I've really noticed about the food here is the sweetness of things here. The Vietnamese love their sugar. The sweet section of the supermarket is by far the biggest of all and lots of the lollies are really really sweet. They love sweetened milk and sweetened yoghurt. This is really not the place to come if you are diabetic. The coffee here is made using straight very strong black coffee mixed with sweetened condensed milk and ice. The others say that it really gives you a kick start in the morning. I had a strawberry milk in one of the hotels one weekend and got given a mixture of ice, condensed milk and strawberry syrup, talk about sugar overload.

I've got to go as we are off to Malnourished. I might edit this one later, so look back in a couple of days.

Hue
March 26 2007 

Just to continue on the subject of food for one second. I have to say that we had really good pizza on the weekend. Now I love Vietnamese food but I really miss cheese, cheese that needs to be refrigerated, and it was so good to have large amounts of it melted onto dough. It was actually the best pizza that I had had in ages. The same restaurant also did apple fritters so it won my favour again there. If you are looking for a non-vietnamese feed in Hue, DMZ bar or Little Italy are the places to go.

We went up to Hue on Friday night. Mr Viet was taking his mother up to see a school friend so gave us a lift. It's a couple of hours drive on the highway and is quite windy at points as you have to cross a couple of mountain ranges. It was really quite a pretty drive as you rapidly get out of the city and into the countryside. We didn't do much other than have dinner and drinks on the Friday night, it was dark when we arrived so we weren't too keen to wander around.

Saturday morning we went to the Citadel which is the remains of the old temple and palace complex in Hue. It is really well preserved and they have been working really hard on restoring the buildings. The gardens are lovely and there are hundreds of bonsai trees. It was really pleasant wandering around away from the city noise for a while. The inside of the couple of restored building was incredible. The entire thing is made of wood but the colums are all painted with gold dragons and patterns. It would have taken forever to do.

After the citadel we piled into cyclos and went to the markets. Incredibly the driver said that they would take three of us in each cyclo so we stacked in and went. I suppose that they do carry wardrobes and other large pieces of furniture around on cyclos so they must be very strong.

I wasn't all that impressed by the market at Hue. It wasn't as pretty as some of the market areas here in Da Nang and it sold a mish-mash of things that I wasn't really interested in. The others bought some knock-off sunglasses and watches but not much else. It smelt terrible once you got into the market a bit because one of the most popular items for sale seemed to be dried seafood (mostly shrimp and squid). It doesn't smell particularly appetizing when spread out on a piece of paper on the ground in the heat.

We decided not to eat in the market after wandering around for a while and went to find a cafe where we ended up having a really nice meal. After that we had a little longer in the market and then back to the hotel for a rest. Some of us have really taken to this whole sleep after lunch thing.

The next morning we attempted to get up and out for breakfast early but nothing happens particularly quickly in Vietnam and it took us a while to check out. Thankfully we found what was possibly the fastest cafe in Hue (in fact probably all of Vietnam)to have breakfast at and made up the time. We went down to the river to get on one of the boats for a cruise. We went up the river through all the fishing boats supposedly to see some pagoda but we all managed to miss it. The fisherman and their families all live on their boats all the time. They have a central covered bit on the boat that provides some shelter from the weather (definitely wouldn't want to be on one in a storm)and a little area where they cook. When they aren't fishing they tie all the boats together and have like a floating village next to the shore. There were lots of people bathing off the ends of the boats while we were going past. The river is fairly polluted as they just throw everything off the ends of the boats into the water. I know I wouldn't be going swimming in it and the locals drink the stuff.

We then pretty much had time for a bit of a wander before going back to the hotel to catch the bus back to Da Nang. The tourist buses aren't actually that bad though for some strange reason every so often the aircon would blow hot air. Also the seats recline so far back that you do feel like the person in front of you is actually sitting in your lap. The man in front of me reclined and then put his hands over the back of the seat and I must say it was a little close for comfort.

I'm off to the island this week with Mr Viet to get introduced to the people that I'm going to be working with and have a look around. I'm really looking forward to going (except for the whole boat trip bit).

Youth Day
March 27 2007

Last night we went "camping" with the students and staff from the college where some of the others are teaching english. Yesterday was National Youth Day here in Vietnam so students from all over the country are having activities at the moment. They invited us all to come and see the performances in the evening.

The Vietnamese concept of camping is slightly different to ours so I'll paint a picture for you. They are camping at Da Nang Waterpark on the edge of the river. The entire student body plus most of the teachers are staying there for two days. The tents are really just tarpaulins stretched out on poles to provide some shelter from the sun. Inside they have a shrine to Ho Chi Minh and then various other decorations that they have made during the course of the day. They all have a tower out the front of their tent which is covered in fairy lights and banners with various Vietnamese phrases on them. The tents are split between departments at the college ie all the psychology students are camping together. The electronics department of course had the best lights.

We wandered around for a while and looked at all the tents and lights. One group were doing a traditional Vietnamese dance that involved having to dance in between bamboo poles that kept moving together and apart in time with the chanting. Definitely not an activity to undertake when drunk. Loud music seemed also to be a primary feature of each tent and they were competing with each other to see who could be the loudest it seemed.

The performance was great. We got to be the front row guests for the entire thing. It started off with some traditional Vietnamese songs many of which were from the war, and some traditional Vietnamese dancing. After that they had a special section in English just for us. A guy sang "Hello" by Lionel Richie (a particular karaoke favourite here in Vietnam), three guys did a really good version of "In the End" by Linkin Park, complete with breakdancing and then a large group did "Heal the World" by Michael Jackson. After this final performance we all had to go up on stage with the director of the college and pose for photos, which was kind of bizarre.

After the performances finished, they lit a huge bonfire in the middle of the concrete and lots of students dressed up in tribal type gear (banana leaves, palm leaves, grass etc) started dancing around it. It must have been so hot because we were a reasonable distance away and we could feel the heat from the fire. After an hour or so we left them to it and I suspect they kept going for a good part of the night.

Social Support Party
March 30 2007

Last night we went to Social Support for a party. GVN had organised everything and we all put in money so that they could have a really nice dinner. Huong said that they normally don't eat very well in the centre so it was nice to be able to give them a decent meal. We had lots of meat including duck which the children loved. They were just delightful, making sure that we had enough in our bowls and were getting the good bits (which of course we were then putting back into their bowls!).

The kids sang some Vietnamese songs for us and then gave us some bracelets that they had made and cried. It must be really hard for them having us change all the time. They wished the people who are leaving the best of health and happiness and hoped that they would come back and visit them someday in the centre. Then we sang for them (nowhere near as good as their singing) and we danced for a bit and took lots of photos. We must teach the kids how to use zoom on the cameras because they keep having to move closer or further away to fit everyone it. They gave us some flowering grass that they picked out of the garden as well.

They really are a nice group of kids and very friendly. I think that I'm going to find it very hard to say goodbye when it comes time to leave in June.

I don't think that I told you about my trip to the island on Tuesday. We ended up going just for the day because Mr Viet is very busy getting organised for the new volunteers who are arriving this weekend. We caught the tourist boat out to the island which is just as slow but less crowded so a more pleasant trip. It takes about 1 hour to get out there and is about 20km offshore. The trip wasn't too bad but I have heard that it can be very rough at times.

The village is on the beach on the lee side of the island and is just a little strip with a big jungle covered hill behind it. I think that there are about 1000 people in the main village. There are lots of fishing boats in the bay as this is the main occupation. The rooms where we are staying are at one end of the village and are really large, with double beds and private bathrooms (well a squat toilet and a bucket for having a shower). The place where we eat is on the waterfront and is a small local restaurant. I'm surprised that such a small village even has a restaurant but I'm not complaining. The waterfront is really polluted as everyone just throws their waste into the water and people wash dishes and things like that in it. There are hundreds of plastic bags in the shallows. Andrew (who is on the island at the moment) says that the water is pretty good once you get out past the rubbish.

I met some of the teachers who work on the island and who I'll be taking classes with. They all seem very nice and their english is very good. I'll be teaching children and adults. The village is hoping to start a tourist industry and to do this they need to learn more english which is difficult for them to do as they have to keep working as well to support their families. There isn't much to do on the island other than fish as most of their other supplies come on the boat from Hoi An each day. They are building a hotel at the moment on the waterfront so in the next couple of years they will start having tourists stay the night in the village. At the moment you can camp on one of the beaches a bit further around but that's all.

I think that I'm going to have a good time on the island but I did find it really hard to say goodbye to the babies at Malnourished on Tuesday afternoon. They are all growing so quickly and some may not be there when I get back because they are being adopted. Hopefully Truan will be crawling when I get back, she's mastered sitting up beautifully and she is so close to getting moving by herself.

Cham Island
April 7 2007

Well I've made it back from the island and had a really good time this week despite the weather. I'll try to write something coherent about the island but I have a fair bit to say so it might end up being a bit disjointed.

Cham Island is about 20km off the coast of Hoi An. There are actually quite a few islands but Cham Island is one of the few that have people living on them. It's basically a mountain poking up out of the ocean with a small number of beaches on the edge of it. All the people live on the lee side as the ocean is very rough on the other side. The villages are basically just strips along the back of the beaches before the land gets to steep and turns into jungle. The ferry runs from Hoi An once every day unless the weather is really bad and brings over people and supplies. They don't seem to grow much on the island so they bring a lot of food over from Hoi An. And a lot of beer. I thought that maybe they only brought beer over once a week and that was why there were so many crates but no it seems that they bring that many crates everyday. I guess that there isn't much to do on the island if you can't go out fishing.

The main occupation is fishing and when the weather is good they go out everyday and bring in quite a lot of fish. Some of this they eat and the rest they dry in preparation for the monsoon when they can't fish for months. Quite a lot of the people go to Hoi An and live with relatives for the monsoon because the island is completely isolated for several months as the ferry doesn't run. There are also a lot of people who work for the MPA (Marine Protection Area) which has been started to protect the crabs and other sea animals around the area. They make up a large proportion of our adult english classes.

It's pretty quiet on the island. Most people walk places because the village is probably only 10 minutes end to end if you walk quickly. There are some bikes and motorcycles but they aren't used all that much. There are a few trucks that are used mainly to transport building materials like bricks and sand so you do still have to pay attention when you are walking down the road. Nowhere near as noisy as Da Nang though.

We are living in a little building next to the MPA building. It has five rooms and Andrew and I have the end two. They are quite large with a table and chairs in the front and a double bed in the back corner and your own bathroom and laundry with a courtyard for drying things. The bathroom isn't large enough to shower in and doesn't have a functioning light so we have to shower outside in the courtyard but that is actually quite pleasant when it isn't windy. When it is windy pouring cold water out of a bucket onto your back isn't much fun at all and makes you consider how badly you need to have that shower.

We eat in a restaurant on the waterfront which is really pleasant. The food is all really fresh as the lack of refrigeration means that they have to use things really quickly. Basically if it has meat in it, it has been killed that morning, and any seafood has been caught that day. There isn't a huge variety but it's nice to have really fresh vegetables as well. They eat a lot of a really yummy dish with water spinach and garlic in it. I've eaten so much of it this week, I'm surprised that I haven't gone green.

We teach four different classes and they come twice a week. We teach the 10 and 11 year olds at the primary school and they are really good fun. They were trying to teach us some Vietnamese this week and we're really good and didn't laugh at us. I'm sure that they did afterwards though because we are really bad.

There are three adult classes: two basic and one advanced. The advanced class know a lot of words but have to work on their pronunciation but the basic classes have to work on both. They are all really enthusiastic and very keen to talk with us as much as possible. It's very different to the children in Da Nang who see the classes as a bit of a drag and it makes it so much easier to teach. There is quite a variety of people in the classes. There are lots of people who work for the MPA but also lots of people from the community who are keen to learn English for when tourism takes off on the island. My basic class has a fishmonger, a nurse, some officials, a lawyer just to name a few. They all chat to us in the street and practise what they have already learnt which is great. We get calls of hello everywhere we go.

A lot of our classes are in the evening so we have a fair bit of time during the day. Things pretty much stop entirely during the lunch break on Cham Island. If the weather is fine you can go to the beach but if not there is really nothing to do but stay inside and play cards and read books. We're hoping for better weather next week though it was nice to be able to sleep at night without getting really hot. Monday was sweltering without a breath of wind and really unpleasant. I was looking forward to a cold shower before bed only to find that the water out of the tap was warm.

Thankfully the change came through during the night so we got some sleep. Unfortunately that meant that the next three days were windy and wet and we were stuck in the house. We did go for a walk one day in a brief gap but then got caught at the beach in the pouring rain. There isn't really any shelter at the beach so we had to just stand there in our raincoats until it stopped and we could walk back to the village. We did make it swimming three times though in the week and it is much better for swimming than Da Nang or Hoi An. The water is really calm and gets deep quickly so you can actually swim properly.

That's probably enough for now. I'll write about the rest of the stuff later. Happy Easter all!

Cham Island Continued
April 8 2007

I can't believe that I forgot to talk about the radio yesterday. Every morning at the crack of dawn (we are talking before it's actually daylight here), the radio of Cham Island goes on. Because there is no power on so people can't have their own radios, they just have one really big, very loud speaker that broadcasts to the entire village whether they want to hear it or not. I'm told that a lot of what they say is about the weather given this is very important to most of the people on the island but they do also play music (of the strangling cat kind most of the time) and give some Vietnamese news and government announcements as well. It goes for about an hour most mornings and is so loud that it wakes me up even through earplugs. If I spoke Vietnamese it perhaps would be slightly less annoying because at least I'd know what the weather was going to be like for the next few days but given that I don't, it is just really, really annoying being shouted at every day.

The ferry arriving everyday is the highlight of a lot of people's days. It is the busiest you will ever see the village. It gets in at about 10 am most days and everyone flocks to meet it with their baskets and carts. Because there is no electricity on the island, they rely on the boat to bring ice every day for their eskies so that they can have cold drinks and store food short term. The boat also brings a lot of things that aren't found on the island, including building materials. On Friday morning, they unloaded what I guess is the Vietnamese equivalent of a pre-fabricated building. There were bamboo poles, and sheet after sheet of palm leaf roofing tiles as well as some corrugated iron.

The students are doing really well in their classes and learn very quickly. They seem to be quite good at saying some of the strange English letter combinations once you explain how to do it. I think the hardest word that we taught them all week was chrysanthenum which a lot of native speakers struggle to say and spell and they really did quite well. We were talking about ordering flowers in the florist and they had made a list of all the flowers that they can get in Vietnam and which they would send to people. I was quite suprised to find so many chrysanthenums here as I would have thought that it was too hot for them but they also seem to be able to grow roses as well, at least in the cooler months.

We went to Marble Mountain again yesterday and it was really lovely though very hot once we had been hiking around for a while. We climbed up through the back of one of the caves onto the top of the hill and the view was spectacular. I managed to get stuck partway up with my stupid short legs and after the Vietnamese family finally stopped laughing at me they came and helped me up. It didn't help that I was wearing a dress that was not the most appropriate for climbing rocks.

We had lunch at a restaurant called Pizza Plus which is run by an American couple and employs mostly deaf staff and people with other disabilities. The food was really good and service a lot better than the average Vietnamese restaurant. I was very impressed and very full of cheesy goodness.

Last night we went bowling at the supermarket up the road. The whole top floor is games and a restaurant. We were fairly spectacularly bad for the most part but some of us hadn't bowled in over a decade (or at least that's our excuse and we're sticking to it!). I managed to get one strike by total fluke. You could have divided my score into anyone elses and still ended up with a number greater than 2. It was good fun though and we'll have to go again one evening.

Today Da Nang Waterpark then tomorrow morning back to the island. Next instalment, next weekend.
HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!

Another week on the island
April 16 2007 

Another week on the island and not much has changed. The weather was better this week so we spent a lot of time at the beach working on our tans. We are both a lot browner now. We have been studying hard in the art of building sandcastles that can survive the surf and practising cards.

The island has actually been slightly busy this week because the committee of the island was having a party meeting. I have no idea what they were discussing at it just that the agenda was really long. They have been reading it out on the radio each morning and I can recognise the numbers being called out. It was taking nearly an hour to read the whole thing so I suspect that it was complicated. It was slightly annoying that they felt the need to read it out very loudly at 5 am. I'm sure that it wasn't the first thing on everyone's mind when they woke up in the morning.

We took a children's class by ourselves on Thursday because our teacher had had to go back to Hoi An. Thankfully, one of the other teachers came in with us at the start of the class to talk to the kids. She must have said something incredibly scary (like White people breathe fire or eat babies) because the kids all sat there really quietly for at least 20 minutes. We actually did quite well given our lack of Vietnamese and the kids only speaking a handful of phrases, man it was tiring, though. I can understand why primary school teachers are tired all the time.

The women on the island find it really strange that I drink water while I'm eating and they have taken to pointing it out to other people (I'm slowly getting used to complete strangers coming and watching me do ordinary things in an ordinary way). I have noticed though that now I think about it I haven't seen a single vietnamese woman drinking straight water. They drink tea and coffee and cordial and juice and milk even but I'm yet to see one of them have a normal plain glass of water. The men drink it quite a bit and you often see the kids drinking water but obviously women here just don't do it.

You can tell that there isn't much to do on the island by the number of people (both children and adults) who come and watch Andrew and I while we are doing pretty much nothing. We will have an audience while we are playing cards, reading books, eating dinner, listening to music, pretty much anything. They don't say anything, they just stand there and watch us for a while and then wander off. It's kind of like being in a zoo at times, only, thankfully we have the keys to the door.

We've had another weekend in Hoi An and it's nice to be around other westerners and not get stared at all the time. It's also good to have more western food. I had steak for lunch yesterday and it was so good. It was totally worth the $10 it cost. It was even Australian steak.

That's about all my news. It's hard to say much when you have spent probably half the week either lying around on the beach or playing cards or reading a book or some other relaxing activity. Life is definitely very tough at the moment!

Just a quick one!
April 23 2007 

We've had a busy weekend so I'm just writing a quick hello before I head back to the island this morning. It's hard to believe that the month has gone so quickly. Andrew and I only have 2 more weeks on the island left.

This week there was a concert on the island because of some visiting military officials. Most of the population had to turn the lights off in their houses so that we had enough power to run the lights and sound system from the generator. It was put on by some of the soldiers from the army base and they were really very good. Mostly traditional Vietnamese songs and dancing but some bits were a bit more modern. The only bad point was the fact that it was hotter than hell on the island on Tuesday night. There was no breeze at all and you felt like you had been wrapped in a giant wet blanket. We were playing cards by candlelight and I only wanted one candle because two was producing too much heat.

The rest of the week was filled with classes and trips to the beach. Except on Friday when it turned out that they do use the helipad on the road to the beach for something other than grazing cattle and we were turned back by some soldiers.

This weekend we stayed in Da Nang and took some of the kids from Social Support to the Waterpark for the afternoon. They had a great time and so did we. One kid unfortunately ended up with a cut on his foot and had to go to hospital for stitches. I'm sure that he's already come up with a far more dramatic story as to how he got them. We also finally made it to the Cham Museum which has some great sculptures but is slightly lacking in signs so you don't really know what some of them are of.

So that's a really quick summary of my week. I'll try to write a decent length entry next weekend.

A short week
April 28 2007

Andrew and I only had a short week on the island this week because of the public holiday on Thursday. So we only did two classes each for the entire week. We had to come back on Wednesday morning's ferry because there was a storm coming and they were concerned that the ferry would not run on Thursday. It did run in fact and we saw it coming into town in the afternoon while we ate lunch in the Cargo Club.

It was really windy on the island early in the week. Hot with a really hot and moist wind. It was kind of like having someone breathing on you all the time. The wind had also blown lots of rubbish onto our usual beach so to go swimming we had to wade out through all the plastic bags and paper and other unidentifiable rubbish, as well as the seaweed that had been broken up by the bad weather. The water has also got more cloudy this week because they are building a new road at one end of the beach and it is knocking lots of dirt into the water. So all in all, swimming was a less fun experience this week. I think that we'll have to make the effort to walk around to the other beach next week. It should have no rubbish left by now.

There is now a cafe outside the MPA building and it's such a shame that it didn't open a couple of weeks ago. They could have made a fortune out of the two of us especially when the weather was really hot. It is being run by a couple of the tour guides who are in our classes. It's a really good spot for a cafe as it's a bit higher up on the hill and has a nice view over the village and the water. It also gets a bit more breeze. The whole thing is outside in little huts and they have brought in flowering plants and lanterns. It's going to be really pretty at night. The only annoying thing is that it is right outside my room and they seem to open at about 6 am and turn their stereo on as soon as the radio goes off. I suppose Andrew and I are the only two people still in bed at 6am on the entire island though.

So Andrew and I spent half the week in Hoi An enjoying television, 24/7 electricity, aircon and western food. It is so nice to not sleep in your own sweat! We have now come back to Da Nang to say goodbye to the leaving volunteers and hello to the new ones. We have one more week on the island orientating the new volunteers and then we are both back in Da Nang for good. It's only going to be a short week next week as well because both Monday and Tuesday are public holidays as well. It's going to be sad leaving the island where everyone knows us and coming back to Da Nang where they don't but it will be nice to have a bit more contact with the world. It seems that quite a bit has happened in the world in the last month and I've missed all of it.

Back in Da Nang
May 7 2007 

Well, I've left the island for good now and it's really very sad. I'd got used to the lack of traffic and having people know my name and now it's back to the anonymous city again.

Andrew and I thought that we weren't even going to make it onto the island on Tuesday. We went to the wharf in Hoi An as usual to find that the ferry wasn't there and were told that maybe it was at the military station. We drove out there and at least found the ferry but then were unsure as to why we had to sit there and wait for ages. In the end after nearly an hour they announced that the ferry was broken and they hadn't been able to fix it yet so we all had to get off. There wasn't another ferry that we could use so we were settling in to wait for them to fix this one when the MPA kindly offered us a lift in their high speed boat. So in the long run we got there earlier than we would have had the ferry been running normally. The ferry did get there in the end after lunch but didn't make the trip back. They worked on it for most of the afternoon and it eventually got started and headed back over the next morning.

The weather was magnificent for our last couple of days. Clear, gentle breezes, not too hot. It just made it that much harder to leave. The wind had also blown all the rubbish off the beach so it was the cleanest I had seen it and you could see for ages under the water. In fact for the first time I could see fish in the waves when I was swimming.

The two new volunteers were a bit apprehensive about the island (I feel that the bathroom frightened them a bit) but I think that they will settle in really quickly just like we did.

We had some fun with our final classes. We were teaching the advanced class about tourism and were talking about activities that you could do in Hoi An or on Cham Island. Andrew did a very good demonstration of cycling but the class just looked at him blankly for a bit. He even added ' on a bicycle' which didn't seem to help because he was then asked 'in the water?' This then confused us because we'd never seen a bicycle that you could ride in the water. We were trying to explain when someone then asked whether you did it with a duck. We lost it at that point and I'm not sure whether they understood why we were laughing. The next day we discussed it again and it turned out that they were talking about pedal boats that were shaped like ducks and that you could use on the river in Hoi An.

We spent lots of time having coffee as all our classes wanted to take us out before we left. They all gave us their best wishes and want us to come back and visit them some time. Hopefully, we can.

So now I'm back in Da Nang and start again with the babies this morning. I'm going to be teaching more classes in the next couple of months. I think that they think that I'm an expert now that I've been on the island for a month. I suppose I have mastered speaking very slowly and clearly. Some days Andrew and I found that we even did it to each other without meaning to.

Hope all is well wherever you are. Zoe

Rain Rain Go Away
May 16 2007 

So much for it being summer at the moment. It is raining all the time. We went to Hue for the weekend and it absolutely bucketed for most of the weekend. We even had to buy and wear those ridiculous looking ponchos!

Last week was good fun. I'm really enjoying being back around the kids again. It's nice spending time with adults but they just aren't as crazy as the kids are. We went up to Hue on Friday afternoon and enjoyed a good night's sleep in airconditioning. Saturday we split up into groups and set off to explore the city. Four of us went to the Citadel and got soaking wet before we were even halfway there. We bought four very lovely purple ponchos for the grand sum total of $1.50 and then became very warm and damp underneath the ponchos and wet on the outside. We wandered around inside the citadel and went to a couple of the lakes within it. Thankfully the rain stopped after a while and we were able to ditch the ponchos and cool off a bit.

In the afternoon we all went to the market which wasn't as smelly as I remember it being last time. Obviously all the dried fish had been sold! The others had a wonderful time stocking up on presents for people back home. After another great dinner in a Western Restaurant (cheese really should be a food group all of its own!)we had another great sleep in the aircon, only to wake to the sound of a thunderstorm. Now really for me this is a novelty and I haven't hear rain that heavy at home in a long time but it would have been nice if it could have held off for at least part of the day.

I foolishly headed off into the easing rain thinking that it was lifting and would stop completely. I was probably less than 1 km from the hotel when the sky opened and I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of water over my head. I was very damp despite the purple poncho. The cyclo driver who had been following me down the street and previously had been annoying was now a saviour as I decided that maybe walking the rest of the way to the pagoda was probably a bad idea. So off I set in the cyclo, wearing my poncho and with the front of the cyclo covered with something that looked not unlike a small ute cover to try and keep some of the water off my front. Again I was being optomistic and hoping that the rain would easy once I got to the pagoda but no, it actually managed to get heavier. At this point the roads were starting to fill with water and I thought that they had a pond in the courtyard of the pagoda. I wandered around and had a look and it was a very lovely garden and graveyard. Unfortunately because of the weather, the actual pagoda was locked up because anyone sensible would be inside rather than coming to look at the Buddhist statues! So I got back into the cyclo and headed back to the hotel. The driver tried to convince me to go to another pagoda but I was soaked to the skin and sick of looking at things in the rain.

I got lots of good photos of people in the rain. The Vietnamese mostly ride motorbikes so they have lots of tricks to try and stay dry. They wear massive ponchos that have a clear section in the front of the poncho for the lights to show through while keeping your hands dry and are big enough at the back for a second person to hunch under them and stay dryish. They do look quite ridiculous though!

After drying off a bit in the hotel I was not so keen on going out into the rain again, so sat around and read my book for an hour or so until lunchtime. Thankfully by the time we finished lunch the rain had finally stopped briefly but it was then almost time to head back to Da Nang.

I definitely like Hue, I think almost more than Hoi An. It's quite big so you don't feel like you are there with 50 billion other tourists all standing next to you. The cyclo drivers can be a little insistent but there are less people calling out "You, YOU!" so that's a bonus.

This week I went out to the Red Cross Orphanage for the first time in ages and the babies have grown heaps. There are a big group of them getting adopted in the next couple of months which is great. The mosquitos are really bad at the moment in all the orphanages because of all the rain and the kids are covered in bites. Hopefully, the rain will stop soon and they'll all go away.

That's all my news for now. I'll try to write more frequently in the next couple of weeks. We've been having trouble with the internet connection this week so it's been a bit hard. Clearly people here don't get up early to fix the server when it goes down overnight! Hope everyone is well, wherever you are and Happy Mothers' Day to all mothers out there!

Social Support
May 23 2007

We've been painting out at Social Support this week. Lynn, one of the current volunteers, raised some money before she came and it's being used to makeover the disabled children room at Social Support. There is a small group of children at Social Support who have mental and behavioural disorders and they were living in a couple of rooms that were in desperate need of renovation.

They have moved really quickly since they started and despite having only begun last week, they are hoping to have it finished for children's day next week. I expect that they actually will, given the number of people working on the project. In Vietnam, they have so many people working on building sites, so things seem to happen quickly even though they don't have fancy equipment. It does appear though, that at any one time only half of the people are actually doing any work and the other half are either sitting around or giving instructions. It must be hard and tiring working in the heat here so I guess they need to rest a lot.

We've been painting the doors and the windows for them which is time consuming but not particularly skilled. Next week we are going to paint some murals on the walls so that it's a bit brighter and more cheerful in the rooms. It's going to make a big difference.

Occ. Health and Safety would have a stroke if they saw what people do on building sites here. We have seen people standing on chairs on uneven surfaces, climbing the bars on the window to remove glass from higher up (that one really worried me, I did not want to have to remove glass from a man's chest!)and smoking while mixing turps into paint!

I'll put some photos up next week once it's all finished. It's going to look fantastic.

It's been a while
June 5 2007 

When you start getting emails asking you if you are still alive, you know it's time to write again.

It's been busy here and the internet has been down fairly frequently which doesn't help. We've finished the decorating at Social Support and it looks fantastic. We have done a town in one room with houses, a school, cars, bikes, gardens etc, and a seascape in the other with boats, islands, fish .... They both look great now that they are finished. Hopefully the kids will love them. Unfortunately things weren't ready for a grand opening on International Children's Day. The concrete in the playground was taking longer than expected to dry and this slowed things up. I'm sure the kids won't mind at all though once they get to move into their new home. It's so much less depressing now.

The new volunteers have arrived and are settling into the program nicely. They have been checking out all the places that we go and are wondering how this can be described as work. We've been wondering that for a couple of months now.

The malnourished kids have settled into their new building very nicely as well. They have been working on it for a couple of months and they moved in a couple of weeks ago. They have a much larger and airier space now and nice new inside bathrooms for the kids. The tiles are pale now, not dark brown like before and it makes a huge difference to the rooms. The older kids were very impressed. We found out yesterday that a couple of the kids will be going back to their families in the next couple of months which is great. I'm not sure if they have told them yet but I'm sure they'll be excited. It would be strange though, after having so many people to play with all the time.

Four of the babies from the Red Cross are being adopted this month so it'll be quiet out there after they go. I'm sure that lots more babies will appear to take their places. The Red Cross seems to have a fairly rapid turnover compared to some of the other orphanages.

We've been busy travelling as well on the weekends. We had one weekend in Da Nang in a hotel at the beach (we just had to have aircon) and then last weekend we went to Hoi An (again!) and stayed in lovely hotels with pools as well as aircon. Even more clothes got made this time. I'm not sure how we managed to fit it all into the taxi to come back. We did do some work over the weekend as well. Some of the kids from the Red Cross Day Centre came down on Saturday morning and we had a picnic at the beach. It was a really hot day and the kids did start to wilt a bit mid-morning but otherwise it went really well. The sand was so hot I actually burnt my feet running over it to get down to the water. They still hurt later that night.

I saw the most impressive episode of cultural insensitivity while I was in Hoi An on the weekend. Now all the guide books here talk about what women should wear and that it is important to cover yourself up when in public. The Vietnamese are very modest and while in Hoi An they are willing to accept a degree of more western dress, they still find somethings are too much. Well, I saw two American girls going shopping in the middle of town, not anywhere near the beach, in bikinis. No, they didn't even have sarongs or anything over them. They were wearing just tiny little bikinis, thongs, and backpacks. Walking down a busy street. Some people just shouldn't be allowed to get passports!

That's about all my news for now. We are going to a wedding next weekend so I'll write after that.

A little bit of everything
June 13 2007

Well it has been a busy week since I last wrote. Last Wednesday I went to Tam Ky to look at the kids in the orphanages there as the volunteers were a bit worried about them. Tam Ky is about an hour and a half south of Da Nang on Highway One. Not that you would guess that it is the main road, it looks just like all the others only with more traffic. The trucks seem to drive in the middle of the road to avoid the potholes and it is a miracle that there aren't more accidents. If you ignore the traffic, it is actually a really nice drive down to Tam Ky. You rapidly get out of the city and into the countryside with lots of fields and animals. It's the Vietnam that you see on postcards. It is also so lovely and green at the moment. In the background you get the mountains and of course the awesome tropical clouds, very picturesque.

The Tam Ky house is very nice though they are having trouble with the new coffee shop next door that plays music very loudly for about 18 hours each day. It also seems that they have only two CDs, one of vietnamese hits and one of bad French 90s pop. I suggested that they buy them some new CDs that the volunteers like since they are going to have to listen to it all the time. Mrs Hanh is the cook down there and is just hysterical. She spent the entire time trying to force feed every body. Just when you think that dinner is finished she appears with more food.

Tam Ky is very different to Da Nang. It is much smaller and more traditional Vietnamese. It seems to be very spread out along the main roads through town and you don't have to go far back to find yourself in fields again. I only went to one of their placement sites, the Baby Orphanage. Now this is a bit of a misnomer because most of the kids there aren't babies but are between 3 and 5 years old. They do have quite a few babies though and the centre I think has about 70 kids all up. It's a really nice orphanage with a big playground in the middle of the building so that the kids can play no matter what the weather is. I checked out all the little babies and all the kids that the volunteers were worried about and most of them look really good. They have the usual coughs, colds and rashes that all kids get but mostly are pretty healthy. There were only a couple that I was concerned about and they are organising for them to see Vietnamese specialists to have some further tests which is great.

On Friday morning, I caught the public bus back to Da Nang which was an interesting experience. The large yellow buses travel all around the countryside here and you often see them in Da Nang. I was lucky to get a seat near the front so that I got plenty of air through the open front door as there is no aircon. We got karaoke hits on the DVD player the whole way. The ones that have the video clips with fancy costumes and dancing girls. There is a man who hangs out the front door of the bus the whole way, helping people on and off as the bus doesn't always stop, sometimes it just slows down slightly. He did close the bus door twice when we went past traffic police. He opened it as soon as we went past. I got some great photos of the fields from the bus and finally got a picture of a water buffalo so I was really glad. At one stop they opened the luggage compartment under the bus and I expected to see luggage coming out but no, it was chickens, live chickens with their legs tied together, about 50 of them! Animals are treated slightly differently here to at home. The bus just drops you off near your house. I think that it kind of has a route in Da Nang but no stops so you just tell them when you want to get off. Very convenient if you have a lot of luggage.

The weekend was also busy. We went to the wedding of one of the mothers who works at Malnourished. It was a huge wedding, at least 200 people and it was really good fun. We attracted a lot of attention when we arrived and everyone wanted to get photos with us and have drinks. The ceremony happened earlier so we were just at the reception. We had a huge lunch, they just kept bringing out more and more plates. We didn't even go close to finishing it all. The bride looked absolutely gorgeous and had two dresses. The first was white and the second yellow. Unfortunately she had pink champagne spilt on both of them while they were going around the tables doing toasts. We had to get up and sing karaoke at the wedding and it was bad really bad. They gave us a huge round of applause as we went up and were really enthusiastic until we started to sing and were just so terrible. The looks on their faces were just classic. The bride and groom had come up to sing with us but we were singing in English so they couldn't really join in. Thankfully, the MC knew the song that we were singing and jumped in to save us. The only people who gave us a big clap were the drunk old guys at the table next to us. At least we'll never have to see most of the people there ever again!

The kids at social support have moved into the new disabled rooms and the playground is complete. We went there this morning and it was so good to see them all playing in the yard rather than tied up inside. The kids looked so much happier and the mothers did too. The playground has some equipment for them to play on and we got them some balls and stuff to play with too. The difference is incredible.

Sorry for writing such a long entry. I really should have written on the weekend but I was far too busy having a good time. I'll try to not save so much up again next time. Hope everyone is well and enjoyed the long weekend.

It's been a busy week
June 19 2007

It's been a really busy couple of weeks here in Da Nang. Last week we had one of the babies from Red Cross go to her new family in America. It was really nice to see her go. The mothers all posed for photos with her and gave her lots of hugs and kisses before she left. Her new mother had brought the most beautiful dress with her for her to wear as she left and she just looked so lovely with her hair done and bright new clothes. It's nice to know that the kids do have a happy ending most of the time.

On the weekend we went to the Da Nang tourist festival at My Khe beach. It unfortunately involved getting up at a truly ungodly hour (and I am an early riser most of the time) to get there but it was great once we were there. We were special guests at the opening ceremony. I think the festival finished today. There were dancing girls in little skirts (much to the pleasure of the many military men in the crowd)dancing away to very loud Shakira. Now I'm not a Shakira fan at the best of times but when it's six am and the music is very very loud it is even harder to deal with. The dancing was great though. They were followed by a group of men doing traditional drumming which I hadn't seen before. They were really very good. The kids though I felt stole the show with their very cute dancing with inflatable rings and swimmers. They did a really very long dance with heaps of energy, totally adorable. They then let go of balloons and there were paragliders and aerobatics and a sail past of boats and a giant inflatable pig. Really, the tourist festival had it all. I was impressed. And we even got to be live on the TV. The cameraman focused on us for a particularly long period of time. We were pretty much the only Westerners there. And in some ways it was good that it was so early in the morning because it turned out to be a really hot day.

Today is a Buddhist festival so we didn't go to our placements at all. So we went to Malnourished instead and had a fruit party. The orphanage can't afford to buy fruit for the kids very often but they love it so we took them lots of different stuff and sat down and ate almost all of it. We didn't think that the kids could consume that much watermelon in a sitting but they did. Even Chuan (my favourite who is 7 months old) had a go at lychees and watermelon. She tried dragonfruit and was particularly unimpressed. It's nowhere near as sweet as the other two. She liked the lychees so much that she was sucking the juice off my fingers.

Only seven more days to go in the orphanages as I leave next Friday morning. I can't believe that four months have passed so quickly. It seems like I only arrived a few weeks ago. It's going to be so hard to say goodbye to everyone next week. I feel that there are going to be a lot of tears.

Hope all are well wherever you are and I'll write again soon.

The End

June 28 2007

Well, incredibly it is the end of my four months in Vietnam. It seems to have just flown by. It's been a busy week with lots of farewells to the kids and each other as all but two of the current group are leaving this month.

We had another party at Social Support last night to say goodbye to the kids there. It was a great night. They really enjoyed the seafood dinner and despite what we had been told about them probably not liking pizza all that much, they managed to consume all twenty large pizzas in a very short period of time. The kids at Social Support are some of the most lovely children I've ever met. We were playing pass the parcel and one of the boys got the parcel for the second time and he wanted to pass it on so that someone else could get the presents that we had put in each layer. Most teenagers that I know at home wouldn't even think of that. The girls painted our nails and made us necklaces out of paper that are just beautiful. It was really hard to say goodbye to them all. Hopefully, I'll be able to come back and visit at some stage.

We had a fruit party for the kids at Dai Loc for their goodbye on Wednesday afternoon. It is incredible how much fruit you can buy here for really very little money. The kids seemed to really enjoy it, especially the grapes. The new classroom looks fantastic with its new tables and chairs and the freshly painted walls. Much brighter and more cheerful.

We took our cooks and all the other GVN staff out for lunch on Wednesday to say thankyou. We went to a local vietnamese place just around the corner from the house. Incredibly they all drove or rode there motorbikes to get there despite the fact that it would be less than 1km away. It's incredible how the Vietnamese stay so thin given the volume of food they consume each day and the lack of exercise. The food at the restaurant was really good and huge servings. I ate as much as I could and the plate still looked really full. I guess you have to train to be able to eat all that rice!

This morning I went on my last visit to Malnourished and it was really hard saying goodbye to the kids there. We spend a lot of time at the centre and we've all become really attached to the kids. I think the kids realise that something is up because they have been a little unsettled and clingy this week. It must be hard for them to say goodbye too. I'm hoping to come back and see them again when I pass through Da Nang in a few weeks on my travels. I feel that I'm going to miss them a lot. I bought the kids some lychees to say goodbye and they were very popular. It's incredible how much fruit they can eat in a sitting especially after having eaten an enormous lunch. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some tummy aches this afternoon.

So this afternoon it's packing suitcases and saying goodbyes to each other and the staff. Some people have already left today and the rest of us leave tomorrow. There has been lots of sitting on bags and taking of parcels to the post office to get in all the new clothes from Hoi An and the shoes and the bags and the necklaces. I feel that I could be having to pay some excess baggage tomorrow. Hopefully, the plane will only be half full. At least I got the suitcase shut without having to sit on it!

It has really been an incredible experience coming here to Vietnam and working with the children. I've been lucky to get a really varied placement and my time on Cham Island was wonderful. I don't think that I could have done more than one month but it was definitely an awesome place to go. Working with GVN here in Vietnam has been great and they have been very helpful the entire time I've been here. Really, I have heard very little negative said about the placement from any of the volunteers who have been here with me. This has been a great time out for me and I'm leaving here feeling much better about myself and where I'm going in the world. Vietnam is a great place to think. If you are thinking about volunteering somewhere this is definitely a place that you should think about. The people are friendly, the kids just divine and the experience extraordinary. It is very rare to feel like you have made a difference in someone else's life but here you get that. You may not be making big changes in the world but you are getting to make small changes in the life of a few special people and gaining a lot for yourself at the same time.

So I'm off now to travel the rest of the world and see more things. I don't know that anything else that I do will touch me quite as much as being here has. Luckily, I've got another month travelling in Vietnam to slowly wean me off it before I leave for other countries that I expect will be very different. There is nowhere else quite like Vietnam.