Vietnam Day 53 (7/30/09)

Today at the toilet site was more of the same. We mixed cement and then sat around while the contractor finished siding the other two walls. We had another held up today when it actually did rain and some of the newly laid cement started to drip. We quickly covered the walls by perching planks of wood over the top then mixed in the remaining cement before it could harden and patched up the dripping walls. This is ending up taking much longer than I expected - we thought we were going to be done by last weekend but my new prediction is that we'll finish by next Tuesday. If I'm right, I'll be bored for another week yet. All of my blisters are going away with all this sitting around. I thought about going over to help the road group for a couple of days just so I could feel useful, but then I really do want to see my project through to the end. At least there are occasionally entertaining visitors coming to the school. Yesterday a couple of people from the local chapter of the Youth Union came by and gave us a care package of coconut candy and sweetsoup fixings. Later a woman from the People's Committee complimented us on the path we'd made before. She said she was impressed that we'd never done anything like this before and were still able to do such a good job (at least that's what I'm extrapolating although if the direct translation was correct she actually said we did nothing at all before).

There was also a pig harvesting day which we were inadvertently thrown in the middle of. The owners were all sitting in a circle in front of the school chatting while the sellers weighed and painted a number on each pig before leading it to a canoe which was docked right next to our toilet. The pigs seemed perfectly fine but it was sad because I knew they were on their way to be slaughtered. But that's the fate of most the world's pigs I suppose. The riverboats here are awesome - they're thin wooden oversized canoes decorated with colorful blues and reds and painted eyes on the bow. As long as I stay here I may not get to do much but at least there are interesting sights and of course, lots of Vietnamese sweet tea.

I only taught about fifteen minutes of science class today. The rockets looked really great and were all decorated so creatively (one boy even made the tip of his rocket with the tip of an eye-dropper rather than paper) - I was impressed and the kids had a lot of fun with the launch. We then moved over to the little kids who were supposed to be having "fun time" which was completely unorganized today. We kept them occupied for about fifteen minutes with Wen and Khang's catapult (which we probably should have cleared with the People's Committee because they were looking on with concerned faces).

When we got back, Kendra, Van, and I got sugarcane from across the street and just sat outside the lobby talking about the differences between our perceptions of Vietnam and America. In the process, we met the owner of the hotel when he politely asked us to move our bikes so he could park his big-ass Chevy. You could tell this guy was loaded because an imported car like that is ridiculously expensive here and he was wearing clothes only recognizable to our generation because of "That 70's Show." It was kind of jarring to look at him because it's so different from how everyone here dresses. In Saigon, everyone wore Western clothes and that's true here only to a much lesser extent. Overall people are more comfortable here wearing traditional Vietnamese clothing like the single-colored shirt-pant combos for women. By comparison, the hotel owners pale yellow paisley shirt and polyester hot pants were a bit jarring.