The coolest city on 2 wheels

Orphanage - monastery in the background, boys rooms to the right, classroom behind, playground/courtyard area in foreground
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Before I started travelling I had a rough plan of where I was going but only 3 things were fixed - the 35 day trip around Nepal, the month volunteering in India and the 3 weeks volunteering in Ho Chi Minh. I'm now in the 3rd week of 3 weeks volunteering at the orphanage in Ho Chi Minh so I figured I'd give you an update on where I'm at and what it's all like.

The orphange is called 'Long Hoa' and is based probably only 10 miles out of the city centre but as I get local buses in and out it takes about an hour and a quarter, hour and a half to get to and from it each day. The orphanage is boys only and is situated in the grounds of a Buddhist monastery. Although the monks had a hand in setting it up it has a manager for day to day affairs, and by all accounts, the manager is only in it for the cash - he's not there for the boys and he's certainly not there to help volunteers. It's not that I've had any run-ins with him as such but I've heard reports from anyone that's been there a while that he's a bit of a bully, that he favours some boys over others (subsidising some heavily and making life difficult for others) and that he accepts volunteers for what they donate materially without caring about what they could bring personally if only he told them what they could do to help. He asked me the other day if I spoke French and I said 'a little' - up to that point I thought that, like the monks, he couldn't speak English and wasn't able to communicate with us - now I know that he could communicate but just didn't bother - nice!

Serena (21), Perth - volunteered for 3 weeks and 1 week overlapped with me
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Anyway - he's only one person at the orphanage - the monks and the women who help run it can't communicate with me verbally but in body language and via translation they've been very friendly and welcoming. The boys were a bit quiet at first (volunteers arriving and leaving week in week out is obviously disruptive and difficult for them) but as the weeks have gone by they've become more and more forthcoming. I think that this is partly due to the number of volunteers dropping over recent weeks from a high a few weeks back of 6 - 6 is far too many volunteers for the boys to get to know all at once - to last week when it was just Chris and I and this week when it's just me (Chris has taken advantage of the New Year holiday to travel round Vietnam for a bit while I finish at the end of this week so I chose to stay behind.)

C'est moi.
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The boys are aged 7-23 and contrary to expectation they are not all orphans. There are 110 in total and most came to the monastery from poor rural areas because either mother or father or both:

- died

- divorced

- remarried

Lan
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- was homeless/unemployed/ill

- simply could not afford to raise all their children

A couple were also picked up from the street. Of the 3 women who live in the orphanage and take care of the boys I think that at least 2 of them are mothers of boys who are resident there. Some boys are also going home over the Tet (New Year) holiday. The numbers who return home are few. This is partly because travel is expensive for them and coming from rural areas their homes are often several hours away. It is also that many don't want to go home - the orphanage is home and if you come to an orphanage at an early age and stay there many years without going home and the reason you originally came to the orphanage was the sadness or poverty of home then when it is time to go home for a bit there is little incentive there.

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Most but not all of the boys go to school. A handful of the younger ones don't go to school but do receive frequent ad-hoc lessons at the orphanage from a Vietnamese teacher. The older boys are in paid employment but pay a small amount to the orphanage so that they can continue to stay there until they can really afford their own place. One of the boys got married in September and another told me he played Sudoku in his lunch hour and was tired today because for the last 3 nights he's been up playing cards with the other older boys (lose and you're penalised with vodka shots or forfeits) so you see they're not so different to boys in the West and the orphanage is a good place for them - it's halfway between a children's home and an orphanage and in many respects the boys who stay there are better off than the kids down the street who have parents but who sit about all day, bored out of their minds but too poor to go to school etc.

Arrived at the orphanage 4 months ago with his brother, v. cute all the time.
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Facilities at the orphanage are basic - beds but no mattresses, squat toilets but no loo roll (exercise books, cards and anything they can find made of paper is used instead), plenty of food but not much variety and certainly not much fruit -as at home, I think poorer kids eat more junk than they should because processed junk is cheaper than fresh produce. The boys vary between looking after each other and watching their backs - mainly they seem happy together but weaker kids do get picked on every now and then (as with anywhere) and I have heard of a couple of kids being chucked out: one for violence and another for theft. The former had a history of violence in the family (father killed his mother and grandfather killed his grandmother before that) and was 15 when he got kicked out - God knows where, if anywhere, he was sent instead.

Serena (21) and Karmeesha (18) from Perth, Australia. Here for 3 weeks of which 1 overlapped with my trip.
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The boys have a lot of some things - it being a monastery they currently have more sweets than they know what to do with because companies are arriving everyday to donate goods to them to 'make merit' before the new year. One donated 4 wheelchairs (there are no disabled kids so...?), others just bring bags and bags of Oreos and other junk not realising that the smiling kids lined up to say thank-you are saying it and being photographed doing so for the third time that day and the twentieth time that week. It's quite demeaning for the boys and while they all love the red envelopes of 'lucky money' I think there's a bit of an overkill on sweets and an underwhelming amount of anything that's actually useful to them.

Underground bar, Saigon - me, the Irish girls (Alice and Esther), Chris, Jess and Steve. Jess is 23, from Somerset, here for 6 weeks (2 down, 4 to go), currently travelling round Vietnam woth Chris before finishing here (in a different orphanage) and carrying on with travels til Sept. Steve (65, UK) did 2 wks in a cooking house and is now off on his travels for a week before going back to the UK. The Irish girls have already gone home - they finished just before I arrived, went travelling for a week and came back for the weekend before they went home.
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The younger boys horde anything given to them, the older boys share. The older boys have the latest mobiles while the younger ones have a football and a few toy tanks and soldiers, skipping ropes etc. There are also TVs in each of the 4 rooms the boys sleep in and a few CD players knocking about. You start to think that they are almost spoilt but then nothing really makes up for having no parents - for being essentially alone in the world from a very young age.

In the last week a new volunteer has arrived - Caroline from Paris, France. Caroline was born in Saigon but moved to France as a young child. She was brought up in France but also spent time, at the age of 18, in San Diego so she is now trilingual: French, English and Vietnamese. Caroline came to Vietnam last July for 3 months to investigate the possibility of setting up a project to benefit the orphans. She has a husband in France and 2 adult children but, having always dreamed of helping orphans and being a 'big Mama', she is now back for 9 months before possibly moving here permanently (her husband has yet to be convinced but she is on a mission and will do it with him or without him.) She gave me a newspaper article about her which described her as 'a bulldozer with a mother's heart.' It's a pretty fair description and she'll be great for the boys. She has the drive to get things done and because she speaks the language she is able to turn what she wants to do into a reality. She is working with a French organisation 'Enfants du Fleuve' to process donations for the children - she is aiming at finding a sponsor for each child to pay 23euros a month towards their care. Because the money does not go to the monks or the manager she can ensure it is spent on the children and she updates sponsors with the children's progress etc so a bit like Plan International. So far 11 of the 110 children have been sponsored - 4 by herself or her family. She has also pretty much adopted one - he was in need of a kidney operation and dialysis so she paid for the operation and now covers his treatment and treats him generally as a mother would. She asked the boy first whether he was happy to become her 'son' and so ensured that the decision was his and that he was not shamed or patronised by her help. I feel very privileged to have met her while I am here and think that with her there the boys will in many respects finally have a mother - someone who exists just for their benefit, who runs herself into the ground to make sure that they have what they need from fun and games to medical treatment and who is always there to listen if they need someone to. Of course many of the boys may prefer to remain self-reliant but she will try (I think successfully) to give them more opportunities and to ensure that there is help for those who need and ask.

Chris and kids inside the orphanage. Chris is 24, from Essex/East London, supports Chelsea, works in a children's home in the UK and is here for 3 months. Currently done 1 mth, 2 mths to go. Spending this week travelling round Vietnam while Tet makes things at the orphanage topsy turvy
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In my 3 weeks at the orphanage I think that the boys have grown to like me but it's too short (obviously) to really make any lasting difference to their lives in the way that Caroline will. I feel significantly handicapped without the language so for anyone doing a project like this I'd recommend doing at least a week's intensive language lessons as prep (it really helped in Nepal and broke a lot of the barriers that I'm conscious of here). The hours are also far from ideal as we arrive at 10 and leave at 16:30, in which time many of the boys are working or at school or sleeping as 11:30-14:30 is nap time, ie. a 3 hour lunch break. We could of course work harder and stay longer but there without Caroline to direct our efforts it could have been a lot of wasted effort and, being here a short time, it is unlikely that, at first, the kids would want to spend too much time with us - at first we are of course strangers and they prefer to spend time often with the other boys - their friends. If this all sounds a little gloomy, it's misleading. I am really enjoying it. I'm playing football and badminton and watching lots of dodgy old Jackie Chan films and basically just mucking round with the kids - especially with the ones who don't go to school who are around more while I'm here. The advantage of the hours from a personal point of view is that I'm back in town by half five so I have an hour to get to yoga/pilates before eating dinner and either hitting a bar and having a few drinks or heading home to my luxury middle class house where I sit on the net like this.

Entry down an alley from a busy highway
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At the weekend I went to Mui Ne - a beach backed by sanddunes. On the downside, I got sand in my camera and left my passport at the guesthouse so it's currently doing a tour of the south in the hands of the tour agency's bus driver who is returning it to me tomorrow. On the upside, it was a great weekend with lots of fun (not least of which were the 2am motorbike ride on arrival or the sunset jeep trip to the dunes).

When I travel I love it and wonder whether I'm missing out on seeing things by  going back to the orphanage. Then I go back to the orphanage and find the boys are really happy to see me (or just very polite) and remember why I love the city and wonder if I should just cancel the travel and stay at the orphanage for the last 3 weeks of my trip. I'm also finding that the closer I get to home the more I start actually wanting to get back to 'real life' back home instead of watching other peoples lives out here. It's a case of permanent indecision about what to do and when. The only thing I'm certain of is that I couldn't give up having a life of my own - a Western life - at the age of 24 to volunteer out here for the long-term in the near future. I wouldn't rule out more and longer projects later but for me, unlike Caroline, now is not the time. I'm getting a lot out of it while I'm here but mentally, I'm gearing up for home.