Some decisions have a way of coming back to nip you in the butt later in life – for me, that fateful mistake was not learning to ride a bike until I was fourteen. As a result of this decision, I had almost no experience riding a bike before coming to Ben Tre. The morning bike ride to the school started out reasonably well for the first few meters, but then we came to the market. I’m obviously not confident enough to ride through such a tiny space so I got off and walked like before. As it happens, I’m just as incompetent at walking a bike as I am riding one and I accidentally walked the front wheel right into the back of a little old woman’s foot. I felt so terrible and I was really apologetic, but no matter how many times I said “xin loi” she just kept scowling at me and ranting in Vietnamese. While I stood there apologizing, the rest of the group kept going and by the time I looked up they were out of sight and I was lost. I called Van Anh and she gave me directions out of the market and went with me the rest of the way.
The street wasn’t bad but when I hit that little cement path I got really nervous and wobbly. On one particular turn I lost control of the handlebars and turned right into a ditch. I stopped the bike from rolling all the way to the bottom, landing on my side with my cheek in the mud and the bike on top of me, my legs tangled in it. For a few moments I couldn’t move – I was in complete shock, my mind went blank and I started inadvertently tearing up. I came to my senses as Alice grabbed my shoulder to help me out. It took a while for me to actually get out because the bike was wedged in some plants and I was trapped underneath. I moved very tenderly, checking each limb to make sure I wasn’t hurt. Eventually I managed to untangle my legs and pushed myself up from the muddy slope. It was low tide so I didn’t get wet, but the mud was disgusting, squishing between my fingers and sticking to everything.
When I got back to the walkway I found a lot of people waiting for me. Along with Alice and Loan, I was greeted by the concerned faces of two men who help us repair the school as well as a few other random cyclists who’d stopped to help. It really was an amazingly fast response and it was nice to know we have that support system here, though frankly I was mostly embarrassed to have all these people see me pulled out of a ditch covered in mud. After my bike was retrieved, I jumped back on and continued on. However, I was really gun-shy after my last fall so it was taking me so long I eventually stopped altogether and rode on the back of Loan’s bike. I felt like such an infant for being scared of a bike but I was really emotional by this point.
I tried to use the time on Loan’s bike to compose myself but we were closer to the school than I thought so I didn’t quite have it together when we arrived. Of course the first people I saw were the schoolchildren there to watch us and, since I teach them in the afternoon, I really didn’t want them to see me like that – I rushed inside, pulled myself together and went back out to check on the toilet situation.
We planned to start digging the septic tank today and a couple of guys from our project came out to help. However, help turned into them doing all the work, leaving me with nothing to do but go inside the school and help sand. Finally, I reasserted myself and went back out to claim a shovel. It was at this point that we spoke with the community members again and found out we needed to make the hole about ten times bigger than we’d planned so that we could lay a foundation for the bathroom floor. This was the perfect opportunity for me to jump back in there and get my hands dirty. At first, the local man who’s been helping with the toilet project didn’t want any of us (including the other guys) to do anything because he didn’t want us to hurt ourselves. Eventually we just had to give it a go and he backed off and just offered assistance and supervised. I think he was actually impressed and/or surprised that I could do the digging.
We worked in teams to carry dirt from the hole over to the wall of the school to make a path to the toilet. The little girl Nhi who helped us yesterday came out to help us again. She’s one of the most adorable little girls I’ve ever seen and I was so excited when she learned my name. She’s an amazingly hard worker, helping us not only with cleaning the school but also with moving the big piles of dirt for the path – the first time she helped with it, I had playfully prompted her to team up with me to move one of the sacks, not expecting her to do it but she picked up the heavy load with me and kept on doing it for the rest of the morning. I was so proud when she picked up the shovel and tried to dig after watching me for a while – she didn’t do too badly considering how thick the dirt was. I really wanted to show her that women can do more than just the roles traditional outlined for them. As we were finishing up, our local friend supervising the toilet work singled me out to go around the edges making the edges straight. I was really excited that he asked me because it was a pretty tough job – I had to slam the shovel down into the ground with both considerable force and decent aim. That was the most difficult part of the day. I must say I did pretty well, though all I wanted after we finished was a cold glass of water and a defibrillator.
It turns out my bike was broken (though it remains unclear whether that caused my crash or if my crash broke it), so we left it at the school for someone to fix and I rode on Phat’s bike to go to lunch. Phat (the former assistant of CET, not Phil’s roommate Phat) is just awesome. He’s really nice and helpful about all of my bike problems and is just a really fun person to hang out with. On the way to lunch, we talked and sang “In the Jungle” as we rode. Lunch today was as excellent as yesterday, though it seems the theme today was pumpkin since we had pumpkin shrimp soup and it was also added to both pork dishes as well as Alex’s vegetarian dishes. At the coffee shop, I was so tired but I made the effort to stay awake because this was our last opportunity to talk to Rylan and Chi Hao. They were leaving for Chicago to work out details on Rylan’s new job at Loyola and they wouldn’t be coming back until after we left. It was quite sad to see them go, but it’s hard to make anything truly sad with Rylan walking around chatting cheerfully.
While we were at the cafe, it started pouring buckets. This was possibly the most intense rain I’d seen since coming to Vietnam. We moved our bikes in and sat in the cafe enjoying the spray that blew in and shouting to each other, trying to hold a conversation over the deafening pounding of rain on the tin roof. It stopped long enough for us to get over to the school, but when we got there we found most of the grounds flooded. There was one spot in particular where we had to cross that was deep enough I thought water might get into even my high-topped hiking boots. We were about to give up and ford the river but then we found a few bricks and created stepping stones so we could tip-toe across.
Today we met the older students, which actually made me more nervous than yesterday because middle-schoolers are generally less eager to learn than are elementary school students, not to mention less entertained by silly activities. We managed alright though, first teaching the same introductory English lesson we did yesterday and then jumping right into the science class. We started the class off with a bang, taking them outside to demonstrate the experiment where you drop Mentos into soda and it fizzes over. We had a little trouble explaining the scientific mechanisms behind it because of the translation issue but we found a pretty simple way of getting the point across. I still don't know how much the kids learned but at least they were entertained (and after all, the main goal of our class is to show them that science is fun).
To get back to the hotel, I rode on the back of Khang's bike again, which made me feel a little helpless, but it was a good way to see more of the town. It was raining so we were all wearing ridiculously colorful ponchos and got a lot of stares for it. Still, I preferred those incredulous stares to the pitifully sad looks we got from two children standing near the road holding their hands over their heads in a futile attempt to keep dry. After dinner, Molly, Loan, My, and I did karaoke at the hotel - because there were fewer people to judge us, Molly and I sang at the top of our lungs making complete fools of ourselves, embracing the true spirit of karaoke. After that, a large group of us gathered in Kendra's room to eat grapefruit and mangaya (a cross between a mango and a papaya). We set up the iPod speakers and then, out of nowhere, Kendra turned off the lights and put her headlamp on the strobe-light setting and we had an impromptu dance party. Normally we would have been worried about waking the neighbors, but it's only fair since they keep us awake every night with dreadful, off-key karaoke.
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