452,160 Minutes

The curtain rises on Act II and as the spotlights brighten an ostinato piano motif plays. Measures later the cast of Rent sings what are Jonathan Larson’s most poignant words as they ask the audience how to measure “five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes”, a single year in the life. After searching through seemingly mundane quantifiable indicators (sunsets, midnights, cups of coffee, bridges burned, etc.) they settle on measuring a year in the life via love.

With less then 16 hours left in my Fulbright I am now asking myself a similar question:

Four hundred fifty-two thousand one hundred sixty minutes, how do you measure a Fulbright?

This isn’t a question that I have been briefly pondering, I have been thinking about, writing and rewriting this last Vietnam-based blog post in my head for over three weeks now. Like the cast I started with the easily quantifiable measureable data points.

• 10 months
• 314 days
• 160 classes taught
• 480 hours spent teaching
• 2,055 pages of lesson plans, homework, handouts, presentations, tests, answer keys and other teaching materials written
• 2,580 pictures and videos taken
• 42 blog posts published
• 594.11 miles ran in moments of boredom, stress, anger, frustration, or training for the 10K
• 41 pounds (5.5" off the wasit) lost 
• 39 books read – including Les Miserablés, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Little Women, and The Color Purple among many others
• 58,584 miles traveled – 2.36 times around the equator

While those numbers are convenient I find that the light in which it casts my Fulbright to be cold, hollow and frankly slightly irreverent. For, now at the finish line I realize this journey, my journey in Nam has been about soul and service. Not miles, pages and posts.

There has been one quote (well it’s an excerpt really) that has stuck with me for quite a while now growing in gravity as goodbyes crash against me more frequently and my emotions become tangled, conflicting and often swell to the surface.

“It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are –

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”

 “Ulysses” - Alfred Lord Tennyson

That quote has stuck with me because it hits so many of the touchstones of this journey for me. To me it says that while it’s tempting to play it safe, the more one’s willing to risk the more alive one is and the more one can grow. And perhaps in the end what we regret most are the chances we never took out of fear, inconvenience or discomfort.

Regretting the feat not attempted was one of the major motivations for me accepting my Fulbright. Let’s be honest, the thought of me leaving a comfy guaranteed full-time job offer with benefits in this economy and taking a grant with the only promise being you won’t be in a capital, major or large city doesn’t fit with my personality, pragmatic logic – or life experiences. I’m a western urbanite to the very core so provincial life in a middle-income communist developing country was fraught with potential complications. The only detail I had was singular: provincial life. Pushing past rational trepidation, I threw off the bowlines and sailed away from that safe harbor to a continent, land, country, culture, language, food and city unknown and alone.

There have been trials, tantrums and tribulations here. That original optimism so publicly effused by that Bentham quote in my first post was eroded very quickly once I got to work and ran up against culture shock, seemingly endless miles of bureaucratic red tape, intercultural conundrums and frustrations, the loneliness and “spectacleism” of my constant ‘zoo animal’ daily existence as the only foreigner in a rural backwater for months on end. For it was the first time in my life that I have ever been a racial, physical, socioeconomic, ergonomic and cultural minority – a new perspective and at times frustrating, but ultimately enlightening.

There were moments that were so low that I just wanted to stop and yet I knew somehow, someway this had to get better. I just needed to hold on to that tightrope and crawl inch-by-inch if I had to because the wind had to stop at some point.

And it did.

When I stopped fighting Vietnam, when I accepted provincial life and stopped lamenting the things I was deprived of I could focus on what mattered, on what I had. Students who loved me, a grateful college, a co-teacher from heaven and fourteen brothers and sisters in a Fulbright family that I will treasure to the end of my days. A new found and unexpected family of truly amazing and astounding young people from varied walks of life all connected by a desire for humanitarian service – all of whom are forces of nature.

I started with students so imbued with the ‘teacher knows all’ mentality that they were too timid to try and too scared to fail. At first I floundered and midway through my teaching absenteeism was rampant, grades were cratering, standard deviations were rising and my own confidence was slipping. Both my students and me hit a wall – and I didn’t know what to do. So I stopped and Co Dung and I reworked everything from the ground up. That took real courage and gusto. After months of color-coded chalk and handouts, vocabulary files, games, having them stand on the platform in front of their peers, us as teachers going to them and kneeling next to their desks and being visibly lower than them ceding control, it slowly paid off.

This sea change occurred once I recognized that English, the technical language wasn’t going to be my goal. Instead I was given the vehicle of English. Thus my goal changed from providing English to giving my students a sense of pride in their learning, with less of an emphasis on grammar rules and vocabulary. So I worked hard to push them to develop a strong command of English that they would use in their lives – English to describe themselves and their families, their hopes and dreams and their homeland while also being able to ask questions of a foreigner if they chanced to meet one. And slowly Co Dung and I saw them blossom and open-up – tentatively at first and then a full-blown sprint at the end.

Since their sixth in-class test at the start of March they have caught the wind in their sails and rode an exponential high from Test 6, to Test 7 to the ETA Conference in April and beyond to Test 8, the fashion night ESC and their outstanding final exams. The average scores soared to previously unreached heights and their standard deviations fell and coalesced! Awesome students! 

I saw final exams full of spunk and personality. They worked the crowd, polled each other, had full conversations, asked each other questions replying with thoughtful and largely cogent answers and even corrected each other all in English. They gained self-confidence; verve and pride in themselves and some recognized the power they hold to their own success. They’re the living proof that education lifts one. It empowers the soul and sets it free and if students are given everything their teachers got thier personal and academic growth as students and young men and women will repay all that effort, sweat and occasional tears in kind until the cup runneth over.

I couldn’t be more proud and utterly humbled to think that me – a newly minted scientist with a bachelor’s degree – could have helped lead and inspired them along this journey to the self-realization that they can be creators and deciders in their own future should they work hard and diligently. They have sowed such joy inside my soul – a joy I never expected and now I just smile from the heart. I hope that they remember me as a teacher who inspired them to learn through self-empowerment because Co Dung and I executed lessons that considered their needs as EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, not standardized test takers.

This journey has also brought other changes – ones not in my students but in me.

For the first time in my life I was forced to face my privilege. Living in provincial Vietnam forced me to confront all the access and opportunities I was afforded as an American, as a man, as a Caucasian, as an only child of two highly educated and gainfully employed, still-married and much-in-love parents and as a member of the American upper-middle class. The willful ignorance or esoteric existential acknowledgement that is so pervasive in the western world was no longer an option.

That process of self-reckoning solidified my decision to pursue medicine and public health by witnessing the themes I had studied and wrote papers about in university and transforming into the life I was seeing around me. Service was no longer a choice for self-betterment; it was a requirement demanded of me by my station and my privilege. I spent everyday being amazed by Vietnamese parents who contented themselves with their lot while hoping and doing everything in their power to propel their children forward. Not taking handouts or assistance, but quietly, simply getting by and sacrificing while continuing to treasure family, filial veneration and trust. Things we in the West are way too quick to dismiss or pooh-pooh as we clamor over each other on the never-ending hedonic treadmill.

The refusal and inability to return to willful ignorance and using the uncomfortable emotions wrought by my privilege and wealth motivated me to give my students everything I could. That was one of the greatest challenges of Vietnam - would I see? Really truly see? Or would I just stay above the surface taking in the superficial? I believe I saw.

Do you want to see? Or do you want to just keep the blinders on and think it’s a world away happening to people you don’t know and send in your tax-exempt donation? And more importantly are you comfortable with that choice?

I can’t answer that for you, and it wasn’t exactly an easy experience for me, or one I asked for. Honestly grappling with the guilt, anger, frustration and defensive pride was (and still is) a long ever evolving process in courage and self-awareness. I found a way through teaching to give the best gifts I could – knowledge, pride and self-reliance and start to pay back to the wider world for the blessings bestowed upon me. This journey has awakened part of my soul and been a tangible clarion call, a duty in fact, for me to keep service at the forefront of my medical career.

I don’t ever intend to turn my back upon my privilege – I can’t now. I am going to keep confronting my privilege and use the resulting discomfort and obligation it demands to keep propelling me to be better. So I can continue to do better for those whose foundation and springboard isn’t or wasn’t as big as mine.

As I leave I feel pride in myself that I made it through and kept my humor and most of the time managed to keep a deft aplomb. But the biggest source of pride is in the change I see in my students. I can’t measure the footprint or depth of that change. I didn’t change the college or the educational system. Nevertheless in my little corner of the world in a dusty, underequipped and oft-broiling classroom 5 days a week for 3 hours at a time I changed, inch by inch and lesson by lesson the attitudes and self-image of my students. So while I didn’t change the world I did change some young people and watched them grow more as adults and intellectuals. And all you need to start a wave is a ripple. I caused a ripple for good, a positive ripple and I hope my students continue to ride this wave long after I am gone.

As the plane wheels leave the ground and I start the final 9,105 miles of a 58,500+ mile adventure I will remember the journey. I will take pause and stock of those initial moments of honeymoon bliss, the harsh adjustment, the nearly crushing loneliness, the hysterical moments lost in translation, the quiet moments of pride and the flicker of light in my students that through a constant, tireless pursuit Co Dung and I chased down and ignited into an explosion.

I never let the moments of darkness, loneliness or disillusion extinguish my hope or perspective – and I am so proud that now I leave with an adjusted, balanced, grounded and mature view and memory of this place. My will was tested and in the end it stayed strong. I put myself very far past my comfort zone, sought the best in myself, found my resolve for my students and never once did I yield in my mission, in Fulbright’s mission of education and empowerment.

I think I was a good steward of ambassadorship. I made myself proud and I hope I made my parents, family, friends, Alma mater and my country proud.

Goodbye Vietnam. There aren’t words to thank you or your people for all the gifts you gave me. To close the physical journey (and perhaps this blog) better then I ever could, Lord Byron:

"Fare thee well and if for ever, still for ever, fare thee well”

Some final pictures. My last weekend in Cao Lanh, my college took me, three students, my co-teacher and host to a nearby city - Can Tho for a final field trip. Three of my students above: left to right - Phuc, Qui and Tien. I will miss all my students most of all.

Me and my host Mr. Hung. He's become one of my close friends in Cao Lanh and I will miss him terribly.

My co-teacher, angel and colleague Co Dung. I loved every minute I spent teaching and planning with her. She taught me so much.

Final Fulbright Family Portrait. Left to Right: Back Row - Michael Turner (US Embassy Public Affairs Officer), Claire, Jess, Justin, Michelle, Trevor, Me, Jefferson, Lindsay and Amanda. Front Row - Anna, Amelia, Vanlam, Chi Diu (Fulbright ETA Assistant), Chi Nga (Fulbright in Vietnam Director) and Kate. On the Floor - Quan.

Feeling the love!