Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Vietnam Day 39 (7/16/09)

I was jarred awake by a loud knock on the door. It was 12:30 in the morning and I was hardly coherent. Van Anh answered the door and she told me it was the police. I remember mumbling "what do they want?" just before my head hit the pillow again and I fell back to sleep without waiting for the answer. At a more humane hour, I asked again and Van Anh told me the police are allowed to do random checks of the hotel (which traditionally occur during the witching hour) because it also offers karaoke and massages, which are often fronts for brothels. They were interested in us because they found out Alice was with us but the only names they had on their registry were the students, Van Anh worked it out of course, but it was a reminder that I'm in a communist country and monitored all the time.

After my casual breakfast of eggs and malaria pills, I got back on my mortal enemy the bicycle and set off to the school. I did rather well on the bike today, not crashing once, though I had to do some pretty tricky maneuvers a couple of times to achieve this record success. When I went around back, I found the toilet area much different from how we left it yesterday. The bricks had been built up all the way around up to ground level - apparently the bricklayer had finished this first step of the foundation after we'd left yesterday. We started our work day by carrying wooden planks from down the road to use as a base for the concrete floor. After that we had to wait for the rain to stop before continuing so we went inside to help paint the school. We were still using the splotchy primer that consisted mostly of river water. When I made the first stroke with the primitive but ingenious straw brush, the white milky substance cascaded down the walls.

I was so busy painting that I didn't realize people were out back working on the toilet again. I was kind of annoyed that I wasn't told that we could go back to work but it was alright, I just went back and found something to do. As the day went on, I experienced more and more examples of the different accepted roles for men and women in Vietnam. Not only was the bricklayer (our main contractor) reluctant to let me do any of the tough physical work, but Van Anh too kept calling for a "big strong man" to help her with things that I could have done just as easily (like shoveling concrete). I'm not sure if I have different expectations because of my upbringing or if the American girls are simply physically stronger than a lot of Vietnamese women (which seems highly unlikely given the work I've seen some of the women do), but for whatever reason no one ever wants to let me work on my own project but they always call for a boy to help them. I've been pretty good about being assertive and pushing my way in to do a job. I've developed a wonderful system for finding out when there's physical work to be done: I work next to the boys and follow wherever the contractor sends them.

I've had great success with this system and so far I've had a chance to mix concrete (combining of sand, powdered cement, water, and small stones - definitely not a job intended for women) and create a metal grate to act as a frame for the cement that will go on the floor. Making the grate was a very interesting process. We laid short poles intertwined with longer ones set perpendicular to each other and then we took tiny pieces of wire and used a hooked tool (that resembled those used in crocheting) to twist small metal wires at each poles' intersection to secure them together. I'm actually really surprised the contractor let us girls do that job. The other project is working on rebuilding a house and the contractors there wouldn't let any of the students put the frame together. The work I did today wasn't as tiring as in previous days, but it took longer. We had to finish the foundation of the house today before leaving or the concrete would dry up. This ended up being a much longer process than expected since the wooden base we poured the concrete onto collapsed mid-way through, so we had to start over, resetting the boards before laying the concrete down again. By the end we had everyone involved because all of the girls who'd been painting the school were done for the day so we created a very effective conveyor-belt system to pass the concrete.

Even with all those people helping we were still almost an hour late for lunch. Today the mothers made one of the best meals I've had here yet, a vegetarian curry with heavenly potatoes. After lunch, Van Anh and I took our turn washing the dishes. We took them around back where we squatted on the ground next to a tap and hand washed the dishes the best we could. All the while, one of the mothers was squatting next to us trying to take the dishes out of our hands while yelling at us because, as she said, we were already tired and cleaning was her job. Nevertheless, we were committed to helping and stayed until the job was done.

Teaching this afternoon was a little disorganized as usual - it's always unclear who's teaching what and when. A lot of us end up just standing around with nothing to teach because we have too many people instructing so Molly and I decided to make use of our idle time by going to the next room and trying to figure out what song to sing for the duet we're doing at the performance for the school children and People's Committee next weekend. We did actually get to help a little with the P.E. class afterwards, playing a game outside with the kids. Still, I feel like they didn't need me at all to teach the kids how to play the game - I just wish there was more I could really do to help instead of standing around feeling useless.

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