Motorbikes and Musings

03/02/12, 8:06 p.m.

                My two-day orientation is now over, so after the weekend I’ll dive right into work. Or trip and fall off the diving board, which seems more likely given that anything can happen on the first day at a care center for children and even some adults with disabilities. My roommate, Karly, who has been here for a month already warned me about the boy who takes awhile to warm up to new volunteers, and bit her on her first day. But he’s a sweetheart after that! Come what may, I am giddy with anticipation. On Monday I’ll finally obtain what I’ve been seeking for quite some time now: a purpose. Through all the preparation up to today, I have been stamping my hooves at the starting gate, and I’m ready to give myself to this project and this experience. Countless travel stories from my grandparents tickling my imagination and goading my curiosity, four years of Circle of Friends participation (the club at my high school that makes an effort to include students with disabilities through various social activities), three months in South Africa working with children, and two supersaturated days of orientation have prepared me as much as one can be prepared, and the rest will reveal itself shortly.

                Yesterday, we had to get through the “signing papers and watching PowerPoints” part that makes every orientation so thrilling in the morning. In the afternoon, local VPV volunteers arrived to give us our basic Vietnamese lesson. Over two hours of wondering why sometimes I say a word correctly and sometimes I don’t when it sounded the same to me ensued. By the end, though, I was able to recognize enough to answer simple questions in Vietnamese. If all else fails, I still have my handy-dandy “Vietnam is a beautiful country” in case I ever get in trouble. After the lesson, one of the staff members, named Max, offered to take me to a local cell phone shop to get a Vietnamese SIM card for the phone I brought. On the walk there through the maze of alleys surrounding Peace House #3, I found out that 19-year-old Max had been a normal volunteer not too long ago when the last international volunteer coordinator left. The staff apparently acknowledged his people skills, offered him the job, and he hasn’t been back to England since. The lucky little so-and-so. After buying the SIM card and bringing it home, I realized to my dismay it would not work with the phone. To avoid another long walk in the heat, he asked if I would want to ride on the motorbike—the motorcycle’s runty cousin and Vietnam’s most popular mode of transportation. Obviously, this was like asking me if I would like a piggyback ride from Gustavo Dudamel, world peace, and a basket of kittens. Riding on the back with the wind in my face as it zipped through the throngs of bikes, it was all I could do to hold in shrieks of glee and I settled for a big, dopey grin the whole time. Being from the land of Harleys and leather jackets, it seems almost comical to see businessmen or mothers with babies, all with helmets and many with surgical masks, getting around this way, but I was glad (exultant!) to be a part of it. I acquired a phone, brought it home, and let out a sigh of defeat when it had no battery power and I couldn’t put the charger all the way in to remedy this. Back on the scooter we went. Upon our third arrival of the day to this tiny store, the shopkeeper’s eyebrows betrayed a “Really?” expression as it dawned on me that I had pulled a Classic Taylor Move. He simply flipped the battery over, plugged the phone in (even if still only halfway), and the phone revived in perky defiance. Max shook his head and chuckled as I felt the dunce cap appear over my head as in the Looney Tunes. There was no time for dopey grins between the profuse, embarrassed apologies on the way home. Luckily he didn’t seem to mind, and after all, maybe subconsciously I just wanted another excuse for a motorbike excursion.

                Today was the all-day tour of Ho Chi Minh City, where I melted the rubber off the soles of my Converse walking all around the city in the humid, 97-degree heat. First on the agenda was the War Remnants Museum, which houses artifacts and photos of American war crimes. Needless to say, it was quite eye-opening to be an American in this museum built around the other side’s point of view. There were disturbing pictures of the effects of napalm and Agent Orange, accounts of atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, reconstruction of the cramped, barbed wire “tiger cages” into which the South Vietnamese army, under the auspices of the US, forced many of their prisoners, and real bomber jets and unexploded ordnances. The images and stories of brutal and grotesquely creative violence stung my eyes and brought a lump into my throat. Disemboweling a 6-year-old and driving nails into prisoners’ skulls has never been, and shall never be, a valid strategy for encouraging democracy. Even coming from progressive Santa Monica, where history teachers tell you the truth about Christopher Columbus and the Taino massacre, our founding fathers and their slaves, and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I was shocked at how much objective information about the Vietnam War was missing from those fairly narcissistic lesson plans. Woodstock is mentioned far more often in terms of protest than the active, international efforts of the youth and elders of countries all around the world. GIs shooting at cowering children in the street simply because they are there rarely is acknowledged. The somber statue made out of bomb and grenade remnants, entitled “Mother,” and I grimaced at each other. It was indeed interesting, though, to talk to the local VPV volunteer who was guiding us about the aftermath on both sides. She had no idea that American Vietnam veterans suffer from immense trauma and are often homeless and forgotten, and I was surprised to find out that the war isn’t discussed much at all in Vietnamese schools outside of the dry dates of battles. We both bemoaned the fact that the nightmares of that war were not exclusive to that one conflict and have continued in variations all over the world up until the present. I was still brooding when we left for the Reunification Palace, the home of the South Vietnamese president during the Vietnam War and the site of the end of the war when a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates. Somewhat anticlimactically, it now serves as a government building. After a lunch of the noodle soup bún bò Huế, we paid a visit to the other popular tourist traps of downtown HCMC: the Ben Thanh market, the Notre Dame cathedral (literally all its materials were imported from France), and the original post office from the late 19^th century. It was my first day outside the neighborhood of the Peace House, and my fanny pack sighting quota was definitely fulfilled for quite some time.  

                Now properly oriented, I get to look forward to my first weekend here, and with it the chance to explore. Two other volunteers and I are going on an all-day boat tour of the Mekong Delta tomorrow, and I hope to check out the North Vietnamese Cu Chi tunnel system on Sunday. Given that all that goes well, and the mosquitoes that have decided to devour my flesh, and only mine, don’t succeed too quickly, I’ll be off to work on Monday to hopefully make a difference. After everything I experienced today, I feel that Americans need a fresh reputation in this country—a compassionate one, rather than one of aggressive politicians and naïve, hedonistic tourists. And apparently a fresh wardrobe is required, too, as I’m pretty confident that fanny packs are a war crime.