Vietnam Day 46 (7/23/09)

I'm getting I'm getting so good at this biking thing. Today for the first time I went over every single bridge, from the rickety ones with the missing planks to the high stone ones not wide enough for two people. I wouldn't call them fun but at least I get to work faster. The first thing I did when I got to the school was go around to the back to see what the contractor needed me to do on the toilet. When I got there, I found the boys had already been called back to mix the cement. It was frustrating because I thought I'd been making progress in my effort to prove to everyone that I'm tough enough to handle all these jobs usually reserved for men. Now I'm back to being treated like a helpless little girl as I was on my first day here. It was too early in the morning to pick a fight so I went inside to help scrub dried paint off the desks and floors. For the next batch of cement however, I was really assertive and mixed the whole batch entirely on my own. It was a pretty good batch (if I do say so myself) and I left today feeling very confident about what I'd done. The school is actually near completion and we're trying to finish it by tomorrow and Van Anh and I will keep trying to work on the toilet over the weekend so that next week the school group can move on to cementing a small road.

There were even more children than ever at the cafe this afternoon. I was writing in my journal and literally a dozen people were hovering behind my head, observing the amazing feat of writing left-handed - the owner of the cafe told me I was very talented. At the school, the rain once again kept a lot of the students away so we combined the two classes of older students and I taught the science lesson with a film canister rocket - it was a huge success as the rocket shot up to the height of the roof, inducing many ooos and ahhs from the students. They certainly had fun, which is all I can ask for.

Molly and I continued practicing that evening and it's sounding pretty good considering we started learning it two days ago. The group songs were a little less enchanting. We're getting there, but there are definitely a lot of sour notes and we're never completely on tempo. Nevertheless, our singing seems downright professional compared to our dancing. There appears to be some sort of cowboy theme to the Vietnamese song so one of the moves requires us to clop around and wave our hands in the air as if we were swinging a lasso. We practiced this move while clopping around in a big circle and it would not be a stretch to say it was the silliest thing I've ever seen. Oh well, when else in life do you get to do something like this in front of a big crowd of people - might as well go with it.