Vietnam Day 23 (6/30/09)

My stomach bug kept me in bed all morning. I certainly wasn't feeling good but I guess you could say I was doing better than last night. Van Anh brought me porridge to get some food in me (a very Asian remedy to illness and a welcome one at that moment). Everyone kept coming by to check on me during the day, which was really touching (and relieved some of the boredom that comes with laying in bed all day). I slept almost the entire day away, which is really unfortunately given how few days I have in Vietnam.

In the evening, I felt well enough to go to our weekly discussion with Rylan. It might have been better for me to just stay in bed since I didn't get as much out of this talk. We were discussing sex and perceptions of virginity in our respective countries. It was really uncomfortable and no one wanted to give a very strong opinion at the risk of insulting someone else. Maybe in a smaller group it would have been better, but with sixteen of us sitting in a circle in silence it was just awkward. Near the end of the time we got down to business. We were splitting into groups and picking leaders for the three different projects we'll be working on in Ben Tre - building latrines, fixing a school, and building a playground. Rylan immediately declared me leader of the latrine project since it falls in with my environmental work, which is fine by me since that's the project I wanted anyway. My co-leader is Van Anh (roommie power) and our only but very enthusiastic follower is Hieu. We were discussing some less blunt ways to refer to our project, but eventually decided to embrace the term "toilet." In fact, we're planning on having "team toilet" t-shirts made. I'm really excited about my project - something about having a shovel in your hand really makes you feel like you're doing something significant. [By the way, I should mention that we're building the foundation for a toilet so it's not a smelly job or anything and it'll really do some good because the current bathrooms deposit tons of human waste into the already filthy rivers.]

We went out for dinner afterward, but since it was so late the restaurant had pretty much run out of everything except porridge. Since porridge was all I'd eaten all day, I wasn't really feeling it, though other people seemed to enjoy it a lot. Instead I scored one of the last bowls of special wet noodles with pork, my equivalent of American chicken noodle soup. It was pretty good but it couldn't heal my stomach entirely and I went to sleep still feeling pretty out of it.