No, this post is not about Jen. Though I’ve seen more of Jen sans pantalons than I’d like to admit.
Chances are, when you visit a traditional Vietnamese village, you will encounter the adorable, dirty, pantless village children on your journey. I used to have a tradition of sending my mom a postcard of such a scene, which I knew always made her inevitably cringe as she gazed upon their dust-smeared smiles. While in Sapa, we were not let down. Perhaps most importantly of all, I was very happy to find that they didn’t once approach us asking for money or candy but simply waved, grinned and yelled “HALLO!”
I’m glad to see the no-pants-dance is still going strong in Asian villages.
My trek to landing a steady job has been well, more difficult than the other Jet Set ladies. I haven’t been able to land anything in an English school here, but tutoring is becoming my preferred occupation. At first, I got a tutoring gig from the website couchsurfers.org, as a replacement for an expat leaving the country. It was only three hours of tutoring a week, but since I couldn’t seem to find anything more than that at the time, I was more than happy to undertake it. All in my first week, that three hours has multiplied to seven and a half, and I now am capable of not only covering my rent of $210/month, I can now eat about $50 of food without going further into the hole. On top of it, one of the mothers of the children I teach is just about the most helpful women in the world. She’s actively helping me look for an English school that will take me in, and has been the only reason for my increased hours.
Thus far, there are two significant reasons why I think tutoring kicks English teachings ass (in a school anyway)
1) Its more personal. You get to know the children better, and its becoming easier and easier for me to understand the culture here through my interactions with these kids. Not to mention, they’re all pretty awesome and well-behaved, which tends to help.
2) The dress code. I hate, and I mean hate, dressing up in any way, form, or fashion. Getting to wear jeans and a t-shirt to my tutoring sessions definitely beats having to wear uncomfortable shoes and a button down blouse. My boss in Los Angeles had a hard enough time asking if I had even ever worn a dress in my life, much less business casual clothing.
If this upward trend continues, maybe I’ll be able to make up some of the money I lost during my first jobless month in Saigon.
The teachers at my school seem to think that the purpose of Arts & Crafts class is to make kids mass produce enough decorations to cover the walls of our classrooms thrice over. They pass out two or sometimes three copies of the same coloring page to each student and prod them along until each one is fully decorated. I’ve never heard kids put up such a fuss about coloring; they’d rather continue doing math work than be sent off to Arts & Crafts.
The other day, one of the teachers came into my classroom and handed me a stack of papers, each bearing the outlines of four flowers. She explained that we needed more decorations for the third floor, and even though the kids had colored at least 8 of these flowers each already, we needed another 8 from each of them. I gave her a funny look and told her that I’d do my best but I couldn’t promise I’d get a page from each kid, much less two.
Our school suffers from a serious flower deficiency
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A peri-urban schoolyard in Saigon's low-income District 7.
After two weeks of working on our hands and knees with (literally) hundreds of Korean 4 year-olds, Brian might actually kill me for saying this, but I love kids. That’s because, when it comes down to it and I’m surrounded by screaming, crying and broken glass, one fact remains: kids are the same wherever you go.
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