Vietnam Day 30 (7/7/09)

This morning I set out on my own to try to visit the Notre Dame Cathedral by myself. Of course I failed to realize this church has hours of operation – it still baffles me when any place of worship is closed at any time of day (say, 1:00 in the afternoon). I now had an hour to kill before meeting the whole group to go to the War Museum, so I took a seat on a park bench and wrote in my journal. The park was so peaceful (even despite the nearby traffic) with small groups of people and couples scattered across the lawn and paths, talking and drinking coffee.

We were meeting Rylan in front of the Reunification Palace and, since I was already in the nearby park, I got there first. When I found him, Rylan was talking to a couple of people, one of whom looked strangely familiar. It was Michael Catalino who I’d taken a class with at Duke last year. He’d graduated already, but by some freak coincidence we’re both now working on nearby projects in the Mekong Delta at the same time and his guide just so happens to be a friend of Rylan’s (as well as one of the people we’re consulting about the toilet project). I thought randomly seeing Nhu Ngoc Tran (the girl from Ninh Thuanh) in Dalat was weird, but this was freaking me out on a whole other level. The chances that I would bump into an acquaintance from the States while in Vietnam are astronomical, but I went with it – it’s always nice to see people you know, especially in a new city where there aren’t too many of those.

When everyone else arrived, we walked over to the War Museum. It was an appropriately cold stone structure with U.S. military planes, tanks, and artillery on display outside. Once inside, I realized why it used to be called the War Atrocities Museum – all of the photographs and artifacts there were commemorating different genocides that occurred during the war. There were small sculptures and children’s drawings depicting both war and hopes for world peace that were very moving. The rest of the museum, however, was nothing but photograph after photograph mashed together with a few samples of American artillery thrown in for effect. I’m sure all this was intended to make Americans feel a little guilty and show the world how terrible war is, but I don’t think it entirely succeeded. The My Lai Massacre section was poignant for me, because it sent me back to the day we visited Son My, but (as terrible as this sounds) the rest of the exhibits didn’t affect me nearly as much as I thought they should. There were so many photos packed together in such a disorganized fashion that I became desensitized to them. Additionally, the dramatic captions about the evil deeds of the Americans were so over-the-top that it just made everything seem less real, even though I know these terrifying things happened. Leaving, I wasn’t nearly as moved or affected as I had been at Son My, though I did feel a significant amount of guilt for not being more emotional after seeing images of so many people in pain.

After a quick banh mi dinner, it was time to plan for Ben Tre. During our afternoons there we’ll be teaching classes of young local children. We split up into different subjects, Van Anh and I taking on science with Wen and Khang. I think we might have inadvertently chosen the most difficult topic – we managed to come up with a lot of good ideas for science experiments we could do with the kids (3rd grade to 7th graders), but I’m afraid some of them might be hard to pull off with such limited resources. Nonetheless, we’ll just have to make it work somehow so we made a list of supplies and we’ll see what we can do.