Becoming Miss Saigon

03/12/12, 8:13 p.m.

                I’m long overdue for another blog update, but with this past week being my first week of work and my glorious weekend at the beach of Mui Ne, I guess I have been more concerned with accumulating new experiences rather than documenting them. And that’s not so bad, right?

The learning curve is steep but I’m steadily becoming more and more acclimated here. The fishbowl effect of being white in the non-touristy parts of town (essentially where I spend all my time) will never stop being unsettling, as hundreds of heads on motorbikes rotate to ogle the creature with the funny blue eyes waiting at the bus stop. I wake up early with the rest of the city, sometimes participate in the Vietnamese siesta from 12-2 p.m., and go to bed early. I have mastered the rudimentary shower situation, but have at the same time become accustomed to the ever-present sweaty veneer which turns my cheeks rosy and curls my hair into what I’ve dubbed the “Nam Fro.” Watch for it on the runways this spring. I have mastered the apologetic smile, which can be poetically translated to, “Do you seriously think I speak Vietnamese?” and how to jump on and off a moving bus, but I’m most proud of my new street-crossing prowess. This seems inane, but it’s actually quite a feat. The traffic of motorbikes, taxis, and buses never subsides because of the lack of stop signs or lights in most places, so if you wait at the “crosswalk” (a chimera of sorts) you will never cross. You have to quell all self-preservation instincts and step out into the street, making eye contact with the motorbike riders and walking slowly and predictably. While cars and buses do always have the right of way, you simply have to trust that the motorbikes will go around you, despite all the honking they might do. After only two weeks on the opposite end of the map, I’m quite proud of all I’ve absorbed—and that doesn’t even include everything I’m learning on the job.

I spend my  weekdays alternating between working at LTK, a physiotherapy clinic for children with disabilities, and the Ky Quang Pagoda, which serves as an orphanage to over 200 children—most of whom are disabled. I occupy the daycare center of both of these places, playing with and feeding children who mostly have cerebral palsy, Down’s Syndrome, or are blind. 1 in 40 children in Vietnam are born with CP, a staggering statistic, so the majority of my charges have some form of it and it has been both enlightening and humbling. The most important, and rather heart-breaking, part of CP is that you can never judge a proverbial book by its cover. At LTK last week, I sidled up to a boy who looked about 7 years old and kind of vague, and started to draw pictures for him with a crayon stub on a scrap of paper. After a few minutes, he motioned for the crayon and, to my dumbstruck amazement, scrawled out, “Name,” in English. I wrote “Taylor,” and in response he gestured at himself and wrote, “Tre.”His next written query was simply, “Age,” which is actually very common here so people know how to address each other, next to which I wrote 18 and he 15! Before I had to go, he scribbled, “Origami,” and grinned. I had just had a pleasant introductory conversation with a boy I thought wasn’t even there, let alone a fan of Japanese paper art. From that moment on I knew never to assume, and since then I have had all sorts of verbal and nonverbal interactions with these children who are dying for someone to give them a chance. At the beautiful Buddhist temple setting of the pagoda, you can tell the difference between the kids there and the perky, sometimes spoiled little ones at LTK who go home to families every afternoon. They often smell a little worse and are a bit tougher. However, as soon as we volunteers shut the gate, the ones who can walk are pulling you in every direction to play with toys, or trash, or even right out the gate again to walk laps around the pagoda, an activity in which you can get stuck for hours if you aren’t firm. I was once out for a long stroll when the kid of indeterminate gender at this point (most of them wear the same clothes and have shaved heads) I was accompanying wanted to go inside the central temple. This kid has a fixation on collecting stick-like objects (used incense sticks, straws, plant material) and usually doesn’t show interest in anything else, but while in the temple something special happened. I lifted them up and over an uneven part of the tiling, and upon landing they looked up at me and actually cracked a smile. While heading back out, I suddenly received a baby kiss on my upper arm and then a head nuzzling underneath my chin. I hugged back as a wave of tenderness passed over me. I may never know this child’s story, and I’m not in their life for very long, but judging by their subsequent friendly interactions with other volunteers and me, I like to think that some sort of pilot light was turned up. It is times like those that make the bites, scratches, spit-up rice or flat-out refusals to eat, endless pagoda laps, ball retrievals, and helping the heavy kid with male and female genitalia put on his shorts all worth it.

However, all the tribulations definitely made this past weekend in Mui Ne even more of a reward. From sunning outside our hostel (beach view for $8 a night) to traipsing through the muddy Fairy Springs to quad biking in the nearby expansive sand dunes to fabulous fresh seafood enjoyed with my volunteer friends and new ones made almost immediately upon arrival, it was well worth the sleep deprivation I’m feeling now. Becky, Karly, and I took the 1 a.m. bus for the 5-hour trip back to Ho Chi Minh City and went to work today, so I’ll be dragging myself into bed tonight without continuing with my rereading of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The unnecessary and wildly destructive American bombing of Dresden during WWII, the focus of the novel, was almost a foreshadowing of what would come a generation later in this country. The neatly planted rubber tree groves we passed on the way to Mui Ne betray the fact that the original foliage and country itself was obliterated in the war, but the bustle of the modern motorbike traffic and the genuine smile on a disabled child’s face portends well for the future of Vietnam.

So it goes.