Vietnam Day 43 (7/20/09)

It was definitely harder to get up this morning and when we left for our work site, I could feel it was Monday. We actually came to work expecting there to be more progress made on the toilet since the contractor had aid he would work on it over the weekend but not only is the work not done (which is fine of course because I would have wanted to help anyway), but the contractor isn't even here today since he's helping with the house project. Without him, we can't proceed on the project so we just helped paint. I started out with the same watery primer from before and then we broke open the new yellow paint which fortunately wasn't fake this time. It was much more satisfying to use colored paint than it was to put up primer because now we could see our progress as we went along rather than waiting for it to dry before seeing a visible difference - it was such an encouraging sight that we worked even faster than before and painted the entire interior and a good portion of the outside walls in just one morning.

At the cafe this afternoon, the girls reappeared with even more flowers to stick in our hair, once again putting in so many that they wouldn't all fit and were falling out. Ha also made these extraordinary origami cranes out of newspaper and gave them to us as gifts. Today they made us leave our restful cafe, grabbing our hands and leading us across the street to the People's Committee building. We all raced there and played around, then proceeding upstairs where we found a small war museum full of photographs. These things really are everywhere, though this one was more in celebration of victory than in acknowledgment of tragedy like many of the others we've seen. As we walked through the museum, I was reminded why Ha's my favorite student - she's so sweet-tempered and patient. She was the only one of the girls to stop playing long enough to walk around and really look at the pictures, thoughtfully reading the placards next to each one.

None of the science group (Van Anh, Wen, Khang, and myself) went to the school today because we didn't have a class and could make better use of the time by testing our upcoming experiments. We first stopped by the carpenter's shop, nothing more than a work table and oven under a thatched roof awning. The carpenter (who has quite the beer-belly which he unfortunately feels compelled to share with the rest of us by wearing nothing but boxers) had nearly finished constructing the waist-high catapult Wen plans to use for our final class. When we got back to the hotel we tried to salvage my floundering film-canister rocket lesson plan. I needed Alka Seltzer to make the rocket but apparently they don't sell that in Vietnam and the antacid I picked up in Saigon turned out not to be effervescent. However, Van Anh went to the pharmacy here and got an energy drink capsule that works famously. If the kids react to the rocket the same way Van Anh and Khang did, we'll be in good shape - they were so excited they made me do the experiment half-a-dozen times over. As we finished, a slightly drunk guest at the hotel stopped to meet us, vigorously shaking our hands and giving me and Wen his business card. He then made a very strange offering, dropping to a squat and breaking off pieces of the durian he'd just bought, afterwards making us promise to have dinner with him at some unknown place and time. It was a generous offer (and the durian is always appreciated), but I'm not sure we'll ever see him again, let alone have dinner.