Why?

I woke up this morning and cried. And I am still crying.

The mass murder of children is unspeakably evil. There are no words adequate enough in the English language or any language to describe it. It’s the most sick, lowly, barbaric, bombastic, savage and inhumane evil to walk this planet and it makes me viscerally sick. Every 10 minutes I just start to cry.

What do I say to the Vietnamese person who says “Why do Americans murder children?” or “Why do Americans keep killing each other?”. To know that my country, my fellow citizens are going through this and I am here where it’s another regular day makes me shake in rage, hurt and just smashes my heart.

I am a liberal on most issues, and if you don’t like that I apologize, but I need to talk and this is my only link right now to America.

I have always hated the gun culture in the US. We (humans) are the most evolved species on the planet...right? And according to ourselves we (America) are the greatest country on Earth? We have language to talk...right? So why do we need or even have guns?

For those hunters out there I am sorry but I don’t get it. I don’t get why anybody would kill another living creature for fun or sport (especially cute, furry, innocent, woodland creatures)…sorry. I know that some interpret the second amendment as guns for all, but clearly the presence of any gun is too much. Nobody except soldiers or policemen needs guns. We can't we protect our citizens - or even our children from them. Schools should be safe places to LEARN and GROW, not places to duck under desks and lock oneself in closets and have our children pray for their lives. The solution can't be TSA style security at every school. Not only would that impede learning, but also our country literally can’t afford it – unless we spend China’s money on it.

It was one crazy person who embodied evil itself (again). It’s the same story over and over again. What is shameful is that we choose not to learn because the NRA is too powerful and rich and thus we allow, we enable, history to repeat itself and allow domestic terrorism to go on. Why? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. America (and American politicians and lobbies in particular) we’re all insane.

         It's clearly established that our country is not completely free, no country is. As part of a society you give up some rights so that society can function (The Enlightenment, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire) hence limits on free speech. This has been enshrined in legal precedent. So why don't we extend the utilitarian principle to things that kill? Clearly the current mechanisms are pathetic and since some can't be trusted no citizen should have guns. Plain and Simple! (For those who argue that’s an impediment on liberty I agree but as a society some liberties must be removed to protect the greater good, especially our children).

What is so angering about this is that our congress (i.e. two year olds who didn't graduate kindergarten and can't be adults and do their jobs, which in every other business would result in them being fired – but that’s another rant) won't do a damn thing. So it will keep happening with more and more regularity. Columbine didn't do it. Virginia Tech didn't do it. Aurora, Colorado didn't do it. The Mall shooting not even a week ago didn't do it. Will this finally be the straw to push gun control and make America a gun free country? What will it take?

I can't imagine being a parent and getting that phone call, 10 days before Christmas no less. Will my own kids be safe? Or should I move to Canada or other countries with gun control to ensure that they see adulthood? Or stay in America and everyday have to pray they get off the bus?

I just can't imagine picking your child up from school in a body bag. It's beyond wretched and unfathomable. I am praying for the parents and that community. And I am foolishly hoping that this will finally be enough blood spilled to cause a change. But Congress can't even get their craniums out of their rectums long enough to deal with this Fiscal Cliff and the Republicans took down an innocent, highly qualified and competent scholar and public servant who did nothing wrong, wasn’t even involved in Benghazi, and just reading poorly written talking points given to her all in a political game – and she wasn’t even NOMINATED. It's so upsetting on so many levels that that’s how John McCain and Lindsey Graham chose to spend this urgent time.

I am not usually ashamed to be an American and I stand beside the victims and a community and country that must again face this horrific reality. What does make me ashamed is that we most likely, statistically won’t learn, won’t change, because the political machine is so politicized that greedy, inept, grubby and spineless politicians refuse to do their jobs and they get away with it.

NEWSFALSH democracy = compromise. Compromise is when you get something you want and something somebody else wants for the greater good. Consider this my performance review of politicians in Congress since I started to vote in 2008: you are all failing and highly embarrassing and it’s because of you that I ashamed to be an American. Now’s the time to make this right. Sit down, act like adults, do your jobs and get things done, like the rest of us do everyday. If you don’t fix this (and the fiscal cliff and start moving on Global Warming), if you don’t stop this to protect our children how can you hold your head up? You wanted this job and now’s the time to step up and put up. Enough is enough right now! No more lives should be cut short, no more blood spilled and no more families being ripped apart.

Today is a sad day. Tomorrow will also be sad, but what is sadder is that most likely, statistically nothing will change and the NRA will prevent anything from being put in place to protect our own citizens, our own children. This is terrorism against our own kind, against our own people, our own children. IT MUST STOP – but I know that politicians won’t stand up to stop it and courts won’t support laws that will make America gun free. Until that day comes (if it ever does) we must all live in fear that a mass shooting, by a maniac will happen anywhere at any moment and that no place in America is safe. Not malls, churches, colleges or elementary schools. We are the most powerful nation on Earth and we can’t even agree to ban guns to protect our children or ourselves. How inspiring.

Throughout history we have made the choice to allow the possibility of massacres to occur indiscriminately and we could stop it. Why do we value life so little? It is for the dysfunction that will inevitably occur and put every American at risk again that makes me ashamed. Ashamed of my country, ashamed of my government, ashamed of my citizenship and ashamed of my passport. And we expect to be a world leader? That’s just delusional.

But right now I grieve and I cry. I cry for those who died, those dreams dashed, those futures slashed and those families shattered into oblivion. And I cry for my future children and grandchildren and their friends. I cry because they will most likely have to grow up in fear or pass through security to learn, to live, to play and to be free. I cry for my own safety. Who says I won’t be at the market and a rampage occurs and I die, or my parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors die or their families are plunged into eternal mourning? Or at the hospital, school, library, theater, mall, café, restaurant, or my own yard? WHY DO WE TOLERATE THIS FEAR, THIS UNCERTAINTY? Why do we allow it to go on and why do we continue to give allowances because the NRA has money? NOBODY NEEDS GUNS (except for soldiers or policemen)! The current system doesn’t work and even strengthened it won’t work and it never has. We just had two mass rampages in less then two weeks.

When is enough enough?

When will we be gun free?

When will be gun free so we can truly be free from fear, from random, evil, maniacal rage and a barrage of indiscriminate bullets? A rage that this time took 20 children from our schools not even 2 weeks before Christmas. A rage that ripped them from their family’s arms. When will stop enabling the rage to kill? When America? When?

A Quick Trip

Last weekend I took a quick trip to a nearby city, Vinh Long to do some guest teaching at the local community college. It was nice to see another part of the delta and see another community college. I gave two lessons. The first was on Saturday and we did a rhyming lesson, the next was on Sunday and I had them work on telling stories in the past tense. Both classes were a group of adult learners primarily pulled from two companies in town.

What was nice about these learners and different from my students was their attitude and countenance. Frist of all they all know why they are there – the immediate impact English will have on their current jobs. This is different from my students who are taking my class for their future jobs – jobs some of them can picture and jobs others can’t even start to foresee. Second their attitude is immensely different. By large my students at DTCC are still in high school and very few have made the emotional and intellectual leap into young adulthood. It was like night and day. It was a positive teaching experience and I am glad I went. Pictures are below.

After teaching Sunday I went to an ecotourism sight, which was interesting. The most memorable thing was the ‘zoo’. It was so sad. The stuff these animals in cages with cement floors. No foliage, no habitats – nothing. It looks like these poor souls are in purgatory just waiting to die. It'll break your heart. The lesson here is simple: DON’T VISIT ZOOS IN VIETNAM (or Asia according to my two guidebooks).

In my next post I will post some of the Christmas decorations that have gone up in tropical Cao Lanh. It’s so weird it’s hilarious.

Keep on keepin on readers!

The gates of Vinh Long CC.

Me teaching and proudly wearing my offical Fulbright polo. I am MAPing it people. (BTW MAP is the Fulbright acronym for "Make America Proud")!

Here I am being introduced by the Director of Foreign Languagees at Vinh Long CC.

Look at the teaching! Isn't it beautiful?

A little one-on-one time. I like the photo but all I can see is the pit-sweat. Clearly I haven't fully adjusted to life here :) What's worse is that the AC was on.

More teaching.

Me and the class. I am a skyscraper - seriously I am more the a head taller then anybody in that room.

Sojourning On

It’s time to ante up and put humor aside. Before I continue here it should be noted that some of the language used here is not pretty and is at best described as crude and unchivalrous. I am more educated and was raised better than that but sometimes an explicative is the only emotional utterance to truly capture the feeling.

Vietnam ain’t no joke and trying to function here in both a basic and professional sense is at times simply impossible. To start with I am tired, dogged tired – the way I felt toward the end of my undergraduate career. Part of it is my type A personality which pushes to make everything I do, every lesson plan, handout, homework, test perfect in both substance and aesthetics. The other part of this is that I am doing too much. 5 classes, 3 speaking clubs, movie nights and soft skill seminars have left me with practically no time to breathe.

I have gotten some of this under control by clamping down on the soft skill seminars after the disaster that was Public Speaking and backing off on the speaking clubs. These are just the adjustments to working but complicating this even more is the unfortunate and frustrating cultural mechanics. This can only be explained through a story.

To start I cut my Thanksgiving weekend in Hanoi short to return to Cao Lanh and administer an ESC for “staff”. I put staff in quotes because the club members are leaders of the local party, teachers at other colleges, business that support the colleges etc. This is part club and part let’s show off our ETA as Dong Thap Community College is the only institution in the entire province to have an ETA. It has tones from the scholarship donors that they are cashing in on what they pay for.

Well Co Dung and I spent hours planning this, finding articles, translating them, making games and the like. On my bus ride back from HCMC to Cao Lanh I was fuming. First I was tired. I had to leave my friends on a Holiday and return to do this pony show that I wasn’t interested in doing at all. Plus I was told that 58 people had signed up. The thought of managing and correcting 58 adults/donors was daunting. And it was set for 8 a.m. on Sunday – I was not a happy Fulbrighter. But I convinced myself that these feelings were childish and pathetic – so I shoved those honest reactions down and said this is your job, get with it. Well I get to the club and 6, that’s right 6 out of 58, just 10% of the club showed up. We waited and waited and nobody else showed so on with the overly planned show! It was such a farce, and I said on Monday to my director – no more! It was over planned and a waste of my time. If only 6 are going to come then what’s the point of bending over backwards killing my sleep-deprived self to plan a club for 60?

Well, the debacle of the staff ESC(English Speaking Club) was an omen. Later that week my co-teacher and I showed up to give an English Speaking Club on Healthy Life and zero students showed up. We waited and waited and finally it was called off. In the end it was realized that no students were available to come as the youth union had pre-planned activities that night. So why for the love of GOD was the ESC scheduled for the night that was planned well in advanced when NO STUDENTS WERE FREE???? After having a bitch smoothie (i.e. a smoothie over which you vent and unwind and bitch) I cooled off and said it’s Vietnam. The rubber stamp, last-minute dysfunction that I heard so much about from other ETAs.

Then a weekend passes and I think the abnormality of last week was just that a blip on the radar. WRONG! On Tuesday morning during my Vietnamese lesson a teacher walks in and starts talking with my director (who was giving me the lesson, but that’s beside the point). After a 10 minute undecipherable avalanche of tonal gibberish my director turns to me and says tomorrow morning you will only have 2 periods to teach. The dean wants to use four periods thus I just lost an hour of class time. What am I to say? Nobody consulted Co Dung or me and it’s a dean…so let’s just slash the piddle English class. Right?!

I put on my best ambassador smile (to mask my aghast and anger at being told what would happen to me and my students without input) and said sure I can work it out. So throughout the day Co Dung and I are communicating with the director reconfirming the start time for Wednesday. Wednesday arrives Co Dung and I show up at the new start time to accommodate the Dean. Well we got to the building and one of our students comes out and starting speaking to Co Dung in very fast Vietnamese and my only thought was “Oh, shit, what now?”.

Turns out the previous night the Dean chose not to use our period and didn’t bother to tell anybody – including Me and Co Dung, the teachers he usurped for his lecture. Thus that morning our class waited and waited and then left! So class was canceled. What is absolutely infuriating is that Co Dung or I weren’t consulted or acknowledged in this process. We are the only ones who can determine if we can skip to reduce class time (and we can’t) not the dean – who I have never met. Then he just decides not to show and not tell us so our students lose out. How rude, unprofessional and pathetic. You’re a dean – act like one, not a two year old in the sandbox. Not to fret this Dean will re-enter my story.

On top of all this I had a movie night last week where my host gets the movie (from nefarious sources but I don’t ask questions) so that it will have Vietnamese subtitles. The movie starts at 6:30 pm. At 6 I get a knock on my door and it’s Mr. Lam my director, not Mr. Hung my host. He informs me that Mr. Hung is having a party and won’t attend so he (Mr. Lam) is filling in. A party? A party? What! Any who I took a deep breath and said "give me 15 minutes to change and I will meet you in the lecture hall". I show up with my laptop which had an introductory slide show and Mr. Lam says "Do you have speakers"? To which I said, "why"? Now that may seem an unintelligent answer but this lecture hall has huge mounted speakers along the walls. Thus I assumed (since we did this for the last 2 movie nights) that we would use those speakers. Apparently nobody could find the cord so I raced to get my tiny speakers that I used for class. I plugged them in and was told that they were too weak – YA THINK?! On top of that nobody had the movie. At first they assumed I had it. Once they realized I didn’t own Rio let alone a bootlegged Vietnamese subtitled version and that Mr. Hung, who was throwing a party had it the light bulb went off. So 40 students and I waited and waited for somebody to retrieve the movie – nearly half an hour later it arrived.

That ended last week – two bombastic clubs, one cancelled class, one near disaster movie night and one imperious, pretentious dean with a Napoleonic complex. By this point it was clear to me that things were administratively falling apart and that the machine that is DTCC was breaking down. I was feeling more tired and resentful then ever.

Today, Wednesday I showed up in the office and was told that my class wasn’t on the schedule. Steam came out of my ears and through a clenched, passive aggressive smile and I inquired the reason why. Well that dean decided to cancel my class, this time without telling me or Co Dung (at least last time we were told – though not asked) so he could use our class time since he didn’t want to get up and give his talk in the morning. He marked off 4 periods and wound up only using 2 (he has a serious issue estimating time) so as I saw my students leaving I told my director to get them to class, Co Dung and I were teaching. Of course this meant they had no textbooks but we made do. Tonight was also the night when we were supposed to hold the ESC that was canceled last month. Like last month there were youth-union activities and thus no available students so nobody showed up – AGAIN. FOR THE SAME REASON. They had a month to get their shit together and they made the exact same blunder. OMG.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE INCOMPENTINCE IS STAGGERING. It’s like herding deaf blind cats. How does this place function as a business? If it were in the US or Australia or Europe it would have folded long ago. And this chauvinistic culture which enables (and to some degree encourages men) deans and others in power to misbehave and treat their colleagues like scum only makes it worse.

Beyond these professional challenges and being overworked Vietnam as a whole is just getting up in my grill. I am sick of the heat, the sun and the bugs (I have so many bites that my legs and feet look like a relief map of the Andes). I am sick of men acting like pigs and treating women like sexual chattels. I am sick of begin expected to join in on the jokes that are disgusting, brutish, slovenly and frankly backward. I am also sick, literally physically ill of the smoking. The men here chain smoke. They just light them up one right after the other and they don’t even think about those around them. They know smoking is bad – they all tell me they should quit and then offer me a cigarette and smoke three or four in a row. I HAVE A RIGHT TO CLEAN AIR. AIR THAT WON’T GIVE ME CANCER! At this point I just say I have work and I get up and leave.I am tired of being a zoo animal. I have lived here for 3 months and won’t leave for another 6 and still people stare and gawk and yell (tây, tây, tây!) at me when I walk to the market or bakery or store. It’s the same white guy you saw yesterday and three months before, just go about your day and leave me be.

The physical manifestation of this is constant. I don’t fit. I literally don’t fit in Vietnam. I am a square peg trying to be jammed into a round hole. I realize I am an ergonomic outlier but being constantly reminded of it grates on me. The doors are too short, the beds are barely long enough, sheets are too short, counters are too low, stools are too low, chairs are too low and too narrow (some have gotten stuck on my hips), I can’t sit at a table and get my thighs under it and the shower heads come up to my shoulders so I stoop down and become a contortionist to wash my hair and neck. All of these are near constant reminders that I don't belong here, in this place and only buttresses my emotional spiral.

This process is making me resent people, resent the culture that hinders professional expediency and logic, and resent Vietnam as an ambiguous unit at which I can direct my rage. It’s the holidays. I am alone, I am tired and the things that make me me are not here. I can’t cook (the counters come up to my crotch so it is super painful and the ingredients are so strange and dizzying it’s mind numbing), there’s no theatre, cinemas, or any form of entertainment and I have nobody to share this with who really gets it (i.e. a foreigner). All of this is just churning into a noxious mess and at times I want Vietnam to just melt away.

I am going to schedule more me time, more time to read my kindle and back off on the workload. Perhaps that will help. Or perhaps it’s growing pains? Right now to keep my sanity I have retracted and am focused on my students (who show up as the usual absentee rate is 2/3 of my class) and getting them to talk and have fun. The rest of it, the ESCs, movie nights, and other things are falling down my priority list. I have come to grips that I am allowed to vent, bitch and struggle through this. What I can’t allow to happen is for these knee-jerk reactions to be my final lasting impressions and I won’t let that happen. I just won’t live my next 6 months like this.

The next stage of culture shock is acceptance and I am so tired I might just roll over and give in. Do I have another choice?