Out of the Melting Pot and into the Rice Bowl: Tales From a Scholar on the Mekong Delta: T-minus 10 and counting

There are only 10 weeks of teaching left before the curtain falls on my time here at Dong Thap Community College. That’s 6 more lesson plans, 2 more tests, 1 final, 5 Elementary Staff classes, 5 Pre-Intermediate Staff classes, 3 English speaking clubs and 2 movie nights...

WHY ARE THEY ALL SINGLE DIGITS? Where has the last 8 months gone????????

Ever since I have been back from the US I felt the feeling of transition settle over me as I begin the leave Vietnam and start to contemplate what it means to return home to America. Frankly I am not enjoying the contemplation that much.

Don’t get me wrong there are times where I feel ‘over it’. I could pack up right now, board a bus, hail a cab, get on 3 planes and be home and be content. Then 10 minutes later the thought of leaving my students breaks my heart. I am sick of being an ergonomic outlier and having to always figure out what to do with my legs. Yet I love that whenever I enter a class my students all stand and say in unison “Good morning/afternoon teacher” and end class that way with a choral goodbye. In the US my legs will finally fit and my shower head won’t hit my upper back, but I won’t get a standing O for showing up or setting them free. Sure I can get dairy – GOD DO I MISS MILK AND CHEESE. But I will miss cà phê sữa đá and bánh mì opla and bò né terribly.

In the spirit of the impending departure I have been on a kick of ‘do do do’ and ‘go go go’. Thus I attended a fellow ETAs’ conference this weekend in Bac Lieu – which is southeast of my town. Traveling around the delta isn’t easy. It’s a long, hot, and in my case cramped journey – but the 6-hour bus ride was so worth it. I had a ball teaching, but more then that I got to see 4 other ETAs and a Fulbright Researcher and boy do I miss them. I really love seeing my Fulbright family, talking and understanding them and they understanding me, and laughing – like really laughing until it hurts. At this conference I did a lesson on poetry and pronunciation for the English students of Bac Lieu University. Pictures are below.

From left to right: Trevor, Me, Lindsay, Teresa and Quan

The start of the conference.

Teresa teaching

Lindsay teaching

Trevor teaching

Me teaching - and yes that's anatomy! Sneaking in the science!

More teaching

Me and a student - he had excellent pronunciation. He wants to be an English teacher like his Fulbright ETA Thầy Quan!

Post conference glow.

Waiting for the cab with Trevor's friend and goin' local with the Asian squat.

Us at dinner

Quan, Teresa and myself enjoying the cheese and crackers.

The after dinner game, thank you gifts and libations.

After teaching Saturday morning and afternoon we went out to dinner and had a wonderful time. Teresa, the Fulbright Research Fellow from Can Tho, brought crackers and cheese – Gouda and Camembert. Seriously no joke the best food I have had in 8 months. I plan on eating only crackers and cheese washed down by glasses of cold milk when I make it stateside for a week straight. Then we returned to the college and played a hilarious game of Bananagrams – made more difficult by the two bottles of red wine and mint milanos. At points I couldn’t keep up or spell I was laughing so hard at the jokes and wit. Seriously we are all so lonely and deprived of humor in our provinces that when we get together it’s a raucous good time.

What sucks about these little get-togethers is the long bus ride – alone surrounded by Nam and all it’s heat, crowding, dusty provincial flavor that the loneliness and the yearning for home settles in and you feel yourself crawl resignedly back into your shell of foreignness. I never wanted to go home in the beginning – I didn’t even want to go home for interviews. But now – when I have the swing of things with 10 weeks left (11 if you count the last week in Hanoi at the Embassy) – I find myself distracted, really distracted and at times desperate to be swept up and blend back into the crowd of fellow tall Americans. It ebbs and flows and finding ways to stay above it is becoming a challenge.

In the classroom Co Dung and I have started to reward participation and now we have uber competitive classes – so our students are not feeling the same slouch that seems to befoul me occasionally, but I am working to actively keep Thầy Tyler (Teacher Tyler) engaged and dynamic. But Tyler – just me in my room – I am letting him, at times settle into a listless despondence if it suits him.

This was a huge 4 month (okay to be honest 7ish month) transition from American college kid to provincial rural Fulbright ETA – and at the start of that process I didn’t know what or who lay ahead and it took a leap of faith and bravado to come halfway around the world with the only guaranteed fact being that I wasn’t going to be in Hanoi or HCMC. And now, like I was in May last year and like I was in August, September, October, November and December, etc. I am now transitioning emotionally (I can’t even think about that last week and my last classes), geographically from Vietnam to Rochester to San Francisco, and professionally onward to the new challenge and journey of medical school.

But when I need my center of gravity back here, in Nam, I just look at these fabulous pictures that were taken with my students in class two weeks ago (they just got processed with the crazy start of this week – my student is better I have been told). I have looked at these often this week and think that in the coming weeks I will continue to do so.

Perhaps the only people potentially even remotely excited about all the single digits are my parents. They won’t be happy it’s ending, but I think they would like to have me home, and at this point between school in another state, Australia and Vietnam they are allowed to want time with me. We have done this opposite sides of globe thing before, but with such a short time between June (when I come home) and August (when orientation for medical school is) I think they want to spend sometime with me before I move out after 24 years for good and head West.

Of course there is nothing quite like a game of badminton to bring you right back to Nam. I wrote this and took a break – a break to lose at badminton as has been my wont for the past 8 months. I did win 2 games. But lost 3 (or 4 – but who’s counting?). My housekeeper Chi Hua had a gay old time when she played me. I think it’s their form of entertainment. Let’s see what crazy things we can make Tyler do. Let’s hit it here, no there, front of court, now back, now front, left, right, left, left, at the net, way back – and so it goes. I look like a monkey on steroids. I sweat an ocean and we all laugh – even me because I am so exhausted and deranged that I am cackling hysterically. I am so going to miss this little community of mine. And so now the desperation ebbs... oy!

Enjoy the pictures of my students whom I adore below!

Goodbye for now readers!