Vietnam Day 50 (7/27/09)

Idle again. I'm writing from inside the nearly completed school waiting for Van Anh and Hieu to return with the toilet. I had a pretty productive beginning to the day and no guys tried to take over my work. I've recently come to understand the reason women are usually discouraged from doing physical work - in Vietnam everything is about the end result and everyone is expected to play to their strength to improve efficiency. That generally means women are supposed to do more skilled crafts while men are supposed to do the manual labor. That's all well and good, but I think I'm more suited to this manual labor than some of the guys - I can shovel more than them faster than them and have at least the same endurance. I just finished mixing the last batch of cement to perfection but now there's nothing more for me to do until we get more supplies. We still need to bring in the toilet for the girls (which is a porcelain bowl but it's a flattened one that you squat over rather than the ones we sit on in the US), the doors from the carpenter, and apparently we forgot to order the aluminum sheets for the roof so suffice it to say we won't finish today.

I love the ingenuity people use to get work done here. We constructed a large sifter so we could filter all of the pebbles and plants out of the sand so we could use it to make the cement that will provide a protective layer on the outer wall. We made the sifter by pinching a sheet of metal netting between random strips of wood and nailing the wood together. While he was hammering, I noticed for the first time that the contractor is missing the tip of his right index finger - yes he's a beast at his job now but it was interesting to see evidence of a time when he was as inexperienced as me (hopefully I'll have better luck). Sifting sand was actually the most tiring thing I've done on this project so far - we shoveled up sand from the existing pile and tossed the scoop at the metal sheet which was propped up with bamboo so that it was almost vertical so that the fine sand passed through creating a new pile. We finished the sifting just before leaving for lunch but we still have a pretty long way to go.

I feel like a terrible person right now. This week I was planning on finishing my analysis of the data from the survey I conducted in Saigon, but it appears I'm already late and didn't even know it. I as talking with Hieu today and apparently when he visited the Institute for Tropical Biology headquarters, our contact there gave us grades for our internship. He gave us ten out of ten on everything except data analysis on which we scored a six out of ten. I was rather taken aback, not only because of how odd it was that we were receiving grades for our work (a rather presumptuous way to give feedback), but also because I had emailed Mr. Vinh before leaving Saigon and told him I would be sending a more thorough summary. Now I'm afraid I've taken too long and he thinks I've forgotten or something. I held off because I haven't had a lot of time and I wanted to devote my full attention to it but now I just feel awful because he's been waiting longer than he'd expected. I absolutely hate having people mad at or disappointed in me and I'm afraid Mr. Vinh might be both. I'm trying to finish the summary by tonight so maybe Mr. Vinh won't go on thinking I'm unreliable...Good news! I just officially sent off the completed survey and it's not half-bad actually - at least it feels more useful than just raw data based on random questions. I inserted a lot of extra information not contained in the survey questions.

The whole group made a little culinary adventure this evening, riding over to a sweetsoup vendor to try egg sweetsoup, which only Van Anh has tried and has been deemed crazy by all of the Vietnamese roommates for saying it's delicious. However she's convinced, so all of us went to try it for the first time. Kendra and I shared the warm chicken egg sweetsoup rather than the cold quail egg one, which in retrospect was a good choice. It was certainly an odd mixture of ingredients, containing not only egg but also peanuts, red beans, tapioca, and seaweed. It was pretty good, though I personally think it would have been much better without the seaweed. All these different sweetsoups just keep getting more and more weird as I go along.