(Version française plus bas)

It’s hard to find a French teaching job in Ho Chi Minh City. I know English is THE popular language at the moment. But I really thought that there would be more opportunities for French-speaking people. Viet Nam was a French colony for a hundred years, for crying out loud! Despite that, the young generations have totally given up on the French language. So far, I have only met one 30-year old man who is fluent in French, and two other people who know a few words.

View of Ho Chi Minh City area from a plane.

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Episode 2 shows and suggests how challenging it was to find jobs after we landed.  I wanted to clarify one of the crucial reasons why the process was so difficult and why it pummeled our morale.

Usually, getting jobs is supposed to be fairly simple – show up to a school, make a year-long commitment, and bam! you’re in the classroom dishing out some English and raking in some money.  Most ESL markets are afflicted with some teacher-school antagonism.  Schools change schedules, pay late (or not at all), and can just generally puppet teachers around.  Teachers have an unfortunate habit of disappearing before their contract is up, often without warning, and mysteriously just after payday.  Needless to say, it’s a bit of an unstable environment, and generally, it’s the students who lose.

The job search could have been much easier if we had just folded ourselves into this vicious cycle, taught for 3 months, and split for the next country.  However, I think that would have been disrespectful and dishonest, and this isn’t the message we want to give about traveling.  So it was agonizing to explain that we are only here for 3 months – in almost every interview, that prompted an “Ok, great, well we might have some classes opening soon, and if we do, I’ll give you a call…”

The job search was frustrating for many reasons, but this was one of the biggest.  It’s a principle we chose to stick to, and it didn’t come without cost.  At the end of the day, however, it’s more accurate to the story we’re trying to create and the message we’re trying to tell.

So the search for jobs in Vietnam left the internet and hit streets of Saigon today.  It was a much more trying experience than we anticipated, although I’m quite willing to admit that our strategy was misfounded.

Basically, I finalized my cover letter and resume, meticulously emphasizing my experiences and credentials that might make up for the fact that I don’t have a TEFL certification.  I hopped down to a nearby internet cafe to print all the documents I might need, then walked to a pharmacy that mysteriously doubled as a copy place.  The copier was ancient, stained yellow, and spat out ink-speckled copies on thin cheap paper.  All in all, the slow machinery made this trip far more of an endeavor than I anticipated, although everyone I met was extremely nice and polite.  Given all the smiles and their obvious patience with the language barrier, it was hard to stay frustrated.

I also printed out a list of school addresses, pulled from a handful of internet sites of varying reputations.  Turns out that we couldn’t find a searchable map of Saigon, so the addresses were relatively useless without knowing nearby cross streets or drawing on local knowledge.  We opted for the latter, renting a Vinasun taxi at an hourly rate to drive us around to all the addresses.  Well, by “renting a taxi” I mean consulting the ad hoc council of taxi drivers that assembled to understand our request and provide us a price quote.  Again, I’m astounded at the patience of so many people in the face of a language barrier.  My Vietnamese vocabulary consists of basic basic words, and my fumbling attempts to use them are met with either besumed but benign laughter or genuine applause.

At any rate, the taxi drove us from address to address, with our camera crew following along to document the adventure, or as it turned out, the misadventure.  The first 3 addresses no longer belonged (or never once belonged) to schools, and the stares I got as I wandered around in my slacks and white dress shirt were thicker than the sweltering humidity.  It felt as if all the gazes clung to me like the moisture that constantly collects on my skin.

We finally navigated our way to a couple schools, where I filled out some applications, dropped off the cover letters and resumes, and had a couple brief interviews/conversations.  Despite all my efforts into crafting this resume, I think I basically boiled down to 2 primary characteristics: I didn’t have a TEFL degree and I was only staying for 3 months.  Little else on my resume seemed to matter, though obviously the search is just beginning and these impressions could prove short-lived.

So the first day of physical visits was disappointing, and I returned to Pham Ngu Lao heavy hearted…and also exhausted.  Jet lag woke me up at 4am and my own concentration had kept me from eating.  Hopefully tomorrow will bring some better results, and I will shift my approach.  I’ll update as the process unfolds.