Brighten the Corner

Work with me young people: it's not always about you.

2011-07-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

Young English person explains how she has observed that in France they like to dip their bread in their coffee, then performs same, with play-by-play. Young person says she used to be a dancer, sorry, a dahhn-suh, and requests confirmation that she is not getting flabby. Young person displays array of bracelets commemorating every country she has blessed with her presence. Young person complains at great length that fancy hotel won't let her use their pool for free because she is a volunteer, and thus saving the wuhhld, and a student, which she isn't. Young person encounters Sriracha for the first time and pronounces it much better than all the chilis in China, which she says are all "numbing chilis."

Memo to self: In order to preserve last shreds of human kindness for afternoon teaching, avoid having lunch with food-refusing, non-stop talking young person.

Pens down, mouths shut: now learn some English

2011-07-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

The students’ favorite game at the school at Sapa O’Chau is called “guns.” My initial horror at this spectacle has cooled a bit since my first day, so I’m glad I waited to write about it. I still really hate it, but I’m trying to think about it in the larger context of pedagogy. Trying, I said, trying. Here’s how the game works: Students form a circle and make two-finger guns; the teacher stands in the center and fires at a single student. Either he says one word and is seeking the antonym, or he says a letter of the alphabet and is asking for the sound it makes. Up, down, P, puh, and so on (and on and on). The student who is fired upon has to duck and the two on either side of her fire their guns on each other as they answer. You can be dead either for not ducking fast enough or by getting shot by the other student if you are too slow to answer or answer incorrectly (teacher makes head exploding gesture and sound). My fellow volunteer teachers are in their twenties and thirties, and the oldest student in the room is probably twenty-eight, so none of them have any recollection of war in this country. But, I do, and I am damn sure not about to aim finger guns at any Vietnamese person, even if it has pedagogical value. The peace I am trying to get to with this game is that I won’t say anything about it, but I refuse to play. But I’m not sure whether it’s just the game I object to or the way the lead teacher, P, did it.

If I know one thing from 30 years of teaching – and today I’m not at all sure I even know one thing – is that you teach the way you teach; you can watch another teacher at her best and say to yourself, I need to be that good, but you can’t say, I need to be like her. P is a cult of personality teacher; he is the center of attention, the great white male god of literacy, and demands absolute obedience and compliance with his rules. I don’t want to be this kind of teacher, and I worry that it may be what’s required here. I get more worried about what’s driving P’s cargo cult pedagogy when I learn that he has a local H’mong girlfriend who barely speaks English. Maybe I just am a crazy judgmental old woman, but I do not understand this. Was she a student? How are other students supposed to regard her now? How can he not only maintain, but flaunt his authority under those circumstances. How can he look into a room full of students and see potential lovers? What do they talk about? Does he teach her everything?

I also wonder how he can sustain the level of energy that his version of teaching requires. It’s not that I’m jealous of it, exactly, but I am suspicious of it. This may be something like the way it feels for career teachers to have an impossible perky Teach-for-America volunteer come into their school for a limited time, utterly convinced of her ability to change the world one child and one elite liberal arts degree at a time. It may be that I’m lazy and old, but I think of real teaching as a sustained and mutually respectful engagement. But, to be fair, this kind of teaching is different, and he’s been at it much longer than I have. They love him, and it seems to work. Su loves him too with his great white Dead Poets’ Society standing-on-a-chair routines, but it’s not me. When I was a new teacher, I also wanted to be loved and worshiped, but I never cared – and do not care about – obedience like that. I also used to think I would just naturally be loved and worshiped; I never thought I had to inspire or cultivate those things. I was wrong of course. Both because being loved and worshiped has nothing to do with good teaching and because they did not naturally love me.

There’s a lot less shouting with P gone this week, on holiday in Bangkok with his girlfriend, but that doesn’t mean that other peoples’ pedagogies aren’t something to be negotiated, which I am definitely not used to. Where I work, I teach my way and my colleagues teach their ways, and there is almost never and meeting of the twains. This experience at Sapa O’Chau gives me a glimpse of how complex a personal and professional interaction collaborative teaching is. Today I got scolded by J, who has taken over the lead teaching role in P’s absence. She is every inch the school-teacher, and also probably much better at her job than I am, but, man, as we used to say in 6^th grade, she is strict. And, apparently missing the human gene for humor. And possibly, also, good sense. When class convenes in the mornings and afternoons, there is a song and an interminable calling of the roll. She, like P. insists on absolute silence and demand that students put pens down. She wants me to take the pens away from students who are writing when they should be listening to the roll, but I won’t do it. Is this not a literacy project? I will never take a pen out of the hand of a young person denied formal schooling straining after the magic of writing. When she allows them to pick-up their pens again, it is to write down all the words to Old MacDonald or the Hokey-Pokey, because, really, it’s very important to know how to spell ee-i-ee-i-o, apparently, and to be absolutely silent when you do so. I’m probably wrong again, and there is a pedagogical purpose to this, but I can’t see it.

The afternoon session today began a little raggedy because it had just started to rain and people were straggling in and contending with raincoats and umbrellas. The room is impossibly crowded and stuffy and hot, and – oh, dear god, no, are those coals in the fireplace that I have to stand in front of to teach? Is it possible to drown in your own sweat? Will I actually make a puddle on the floor? I’m a little prickly about all of this, and try to have a quick chat with my two assistant teachers, one of whom is on her first day, about the afternoon’s lesson plan, when I suddenly realize that J is standing there with the roster in her hand, giving me that unmistakable fake-smile teacher-glare that says, “when you’re finished talking with your neighbor, the rest of us can resume this very important business of roll-calling and transcribing Old MacDonald lyrics.” “Oh, sorry,” I blurt, and she actually says, “we’ll wait.” Part of me wanted to take her at her word and just keep talking, but instead I swore under my breath and went outside in the rain, fuming like a 6^th grader. I regrouped, and the lesson went well, but the students are clearly both tired and fidgety, and by the day’s closing convocation, Miss J has met her match with students shrieking and poking at each other and running around like crazy. It’s the end of the day, and I would have just told them “good job” and sent them home. But, no: She insists they form the circle the exact way she wants it and demands complete silence for that silly game of guns. She doesn’t get it, however, and an ominous rumble persists, like the temblors that portend an earthquake. Sure enough, all hell breaks loose, and children are running for the door. Then she calls on me to go “watch” the door. In all seriousness, I ask her what does she mean by that? Make sure no one gets hurt in the crush? No, she means bar the door and prevent students from leaving, this despite the fact that the punishment for talking is always having to go outside, via the door. Maybe I should challenge them to a recitation of Old Macdonald before they can leave. Seriously, we all have to wait while she stands in the middle of the room with her hands in the air until everyone shuts up, which takes about 30 seconds short of head-exploding intolerable. Then all she says is “see you tomorrow.” For real? I don’t have children of my own, and I don’t usually work with children, but even I could catch the vibe in the room, and knew that imposing that kind of order without compromise was an exercise in control and not pedagogy. But, again, I’m probably wrong. I’m sure she’s pissed at me. Having written this and vented, I pledge just to keep my mouth shut tomorrow and do my job the best way I know how.

And, if I know a second thing about teaching after all these years, it’s that literacy learning at any level is messy and noisy and non-linear and, at its best, always deeply social. It needs talk.

Was that "tasty," "testes," or "intestine"?

2011-07-19T16:18:00.001-07:00

After the visit to the school, 0ur little party of visiting dignitaries prepares to leave Son Hai and repair to Pho Lu for lunch, and the children walk back down the hill to their home, from which Tuyen had fetched them up, picking her way through the mud and dung in her tight skirt and heels. We’ve left the huge bag of candy at the village center, but I remember I have my stash of Kind Bars, so we hand one to each child, and the oldest one asks if she can get one for her younger brother who is one month old. Good try. I don’t know if I like myself for doing this, but I do it anyway. It wasn’t my idea, and at least they’re nutritious.

I am so hungry at this point that my eyes are crossing and I forget that on these kinds of occasions I will have almost no control over what food is put in front of me. Food in these small villages can range from homey and very good, to weird, to downright septic in my experience. I know this will be a high-stakes lunch, but still I am unprepared for what is to come. The obligatory meeting in the village center earlier that morning is a preview. I’ve screwed this part up before, first by disappointing with my female-ness and then by failing utterly to charm the grumpy and resentful local chairman. I need and want things to go better this time, and I know Le will be a better and more sympathetic diplomat and translator. And I will need all her help. We convene in the village center, with its U-shaped tables covered with blue acetate cloth that sticks to sweaty arms like napalm, under the watchful eyes not just the ubiquitous Uncle Ho, but Uncles Karl and Vladimir as well. Awkward conversation made much more awkward by this arrangement, it’s just minutes before the awkward foods arrive. First, huge and beautiful grapes with a pronounced pesticide flavor to the skin and enormous pits that I don’t know how to get out of my mouth. I swallow them. Next, very appealing warm peanuts. Great, I know how to eat these. But, no, the shells resist all my ballgame and barroom skills and refuse to give up their nuts. Tuyen eagerly cracks them for me and delivers a little pile of pale, larval, unsalted, and I guess, raw nuts that taste awful. The warmth is from the sun of the road on which they were probably drying. I eat. Next, bowls of the legendary Bac Ha plums, little round ones in Impressionist shades of green and magenta. They are trying to trick me, I know, but I have to bite and praise. The first note is chemical again, followed by astringency so powerful that makes your tongue feel like it’s been dry-cleaned and your face draw up in a cartoonish pucker. The finish is sweet and lovely and welcome, but by now you have a slippery magenta pit in your fingers and juice on your chin and nothing but a sad little Kleenex to help you. Thank god you don’t have to swallow the pit. Later, I discover purple dots far down on my arm, and I say aside to Le, “how did I get this all the way there,” and she says, “I think that’s from me; I squirted juice onto you,” and I feel better. I tell her I will always remember her and this day every time I put on this shirt and see the stain. The final course is watermelon, which is delicious, but comes with yet another pit problem. I swallow some more before I notice everyone else is extracting the seeds with toothpicks before they eat the fruit. Still, the meeting goes well, and there are warm handshakes and photographs of me presenting notebooks and pens.

Lunch will be like this, except I will have to be even more alert to secret codes and, ha, pitfalls. Be the open-minded and grateful eater you say you want to be, I counsel myself in the car. Not “adventurous,” because other peoples’ food isn’t a theme park or an test of strength; it’s food, and it is meant to be shared – and appreciated. We pull into the restaurant in dusty Pho Lu to find that behind the usual craptacular façade is a stunning old beamed Chinese-style house. Promising. Let the impenetrable tea rituals begin. And they do. Somewhere among the pouring and the rinsing and more pouring, Le says to me, “you don’t mind dog, do you?” I’m mortified to report that my actual, thoughtful response was, “Well, I don’t much care for it, but I don’t mind if other people eat it.” Much to her infinite credit she does not say, “You don’t ‘mind’? What kind of fucking answer is that, and who the fuck do you think you are?” Just gives me the Vietnamese smile and nod.

We move to a semi-air-conditioned chamber for lunch and the plates start arriving, the first a plate of sliced roast something. “Is that duck?” I ask Le, and we get so confused with the similarities between the words that I ask “quack quack or ruff ruff?” “Yes, ruff ruff,” she confirms. Nothing to do but have the smallest bite possible and hope other foods come soon so I can distract attention by eating them instead of the dog, which is, in fact, not vile, And what a spread it is: another dog dish, and three goat dishes. The curried goat is pretty good, but since no rice has arrived yet, it’s not very easy to eat. One of the other goats is okay, so I decide to try the third, and my luck runs out. Halfway through a chewing marathon, which was, regrettably, beginning to yield up some flavor, Le says, “it’s tasty.” No, it most certainly is not. Oh, no, I realize, she didn’t say “tasty,” it was either “testes,” or “intestines.” It hardly matters which at this point, and dear reader, I had swallowed the fruit pits, the sour plum, several shots of grain alcohol, and the slice of dog, but I did not swallow that bite of goat unmentionable. I really tried, but I knew if I did it would come up with everything else in a rainbow of plum and curry and watermelon and pumpkin vine. I almost pulled a Seinfeld and put the Kleenex of goat-whatever in my bag, but, alas, I just dropped on the floor behind me, and raised another toast in my half-assed Vietnamese, downed it in a single shot, and charmed the living shit out of the robustly drinking female teachers and male local leaders. You gotta play to your strengths.

Two Schools & and the Hunger for Literacy

2011-07-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

I would say Sunday was a long day, but it’s hard to say when one day ended and another began. I’m sure meth-heads and emergency surgeons and bipolar people on the ragged edge of a manic binge know the feeling of going days without sleep. I know I used to dabble in it when I was younger for schoolwork and partying, and more usually my inability to balance the two. But when you add the elements of physical travel through space, language barriers, and encounters with unfamiliar and troubling food, you find yourself in a strange psychological state, one that’s not entirely unpleasant. Clumsy, unable to keep track of my belongings (I lost and found my sunglasses three times, and my readers and my camera once each, in the space of twenty-four hours), I crawl into my bed at 8:30 on Sunday night, the first bed I’d slept in since Wednesday in Austin, Texas. Woke up at 1:00, took a Lunesta and slept until 5:30.

So, it is with a marginally clearer head that I start the real work of this trip this morning: teaching English classes at Sapa O’Chau to H’Mong girls who have had to drop out of school to make money for their families in the villages by coming to town and selling handicrafts to tourists on the street. It turns out that about a third of the students are boys and young men, some well into their twenties. Those who learn to speak English and Vietnamese move up to jobs as tour guides, which is better than street-selling, but since many of those cannot read and write in H’Mong, English, or Vietnamese, the next rung on the career ladder, slippery and rickety at best, is just too far a reach. According to Tan Shi Su, Sapa O’Chau’s indomitable 25-yr old 4’6” creator and director, there are 88 students currently enrolled, with ages ranging from 10-30. Thirty of the girls sleep at the Center, some as many as 10 to a room so that they can continue to study, and work on the street, without having to walk miles a day through the mountains to their home villages each day. I suspect those who work as tour guides and walk as much as 30-40k a day are especially grateful. On the drizzly Sunday afternoon when Le and I visited to center, Su led us to the top floor classroom, and we sat and talked about curriculum and logistics (me, quietly panicking) while three small girls with waist-length silken hair wearing a motley mix of modern and traditional H’mong clothing tended a huge pot of rice they were cooking for their dinner in the open fireplace in the corner. They talked and giggled and occasionally poked at another girl curled up asleep on the sofa. On the front steps when we came in, we had passed another three girls, at work on exquisite pieces of traditional embroidery. I’ll write more details about Su and Sapa O’Chau, H’mong, Sa Pa, tourism, education, and the complex nexus of them all in future posts. For now, I just want to add that I’ve never felt more humbled by what people – children, mostly -- will do to get an education. I’ll be teaching from 8:30-11:00 and 2-4 Monday through Friday.

Earlier on that longest of Sundays we visited another classroom, empty of students for the summer save for the three little emissaries summoned from their home down the road. This is the school that Phil Deering and I raised the money to build, and I’ve come to see if everything is as it should be and to meet with the local officials and teachers. We crouched in the classroom on the kindergarten in Son Hai, its wall decorated with a combination of the universal semiotics of early childhood education (talking animals, letters, numbers, etc) and communist dogma (picture of Ho, pledges of obedience), tiny chairs with imprints of cat faces on the backs lined up along the walls, heat and humidity kicking the ass of the ceiling fan, talking to three tiny local girls. In my case, talking is a huge exaggeration because both they and I can barely speak Vietnamese, and share few if any vocabulary words. They were barefoot, small even for their ages, bright-eyed and curious, but deeply skeptical of me. And they were filthy. Dirty faces, visible boogers, matted hair, torn and mud-crusted clothing. Does that matter, I wonder? Is cleanliness an indicator of quality of life? If one of your jobs in your family is tending water buffalo, then I reckon you’re going to be pretty dirty, and you’re going to stay that way in a house without running water. In our world, we would read these children’s appearance as an indicator of neglect, if not abuse, but I don’t know if that’s true. Of course, I think the runny noses and bare feet and skin conditions are signs of health issues that should be addressed, but there’s no way to say they aren’t loved and cherished even if their childhood contains much more hard work and much more primitive conditions than we would find acceptable. I don’t know. Shoes, though, I’m drawing the line on shoes. I’m sending a box of those cheap, ugly Chinese sandals.

I hate everyone, and other sensitive cultural observations.

2010-05-29T01:14:00.000-07:00

This appeared earlier on Dog Canyon (dogcanyon.org), but I'm reposting here.

Travel broadens the mind, but it also narrows it, especially when you are traveling alone as an invisible person, otherwise known as a middle-aged woman. In truth, it’s not really my mind that’s narrowing; it’s my patience and tolerance, and those two strands of my character are winnowing into a frayed spitty end of a short rope. Not my patience with and tolerance for the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, and even the frightening, necessarily. I’ve been studying and trying to use a new and difficult language, weathering regular power outages, rats and roaches, and have even survived being hit by a motorcycle while riding my bike. What I can’t stand is the other travelers. Not every single one of them of course; far be it for me to make such broad and unfair generalizations.

I hate the fake raggedyness of the backpacker crowd, wearing their collection of tattered bracelets and “I went tubing in Laos,” t-shirts, but who never leave the safety of their movable cliques. I hate those stupid Hammer-Harem hybrid pants the women wear, imagining they’re dressing like some lost tribe (I’ve never seen a local person anywhere in Vietnam or Cambodia where those things), the gesture of conspicuous authenticity illuminating their western privilege like white phosphorus. I hate the shirtless men with their dumb-ass tattoos and stupid hats and sunglasses (yes -- precisely the kind of folks who should be given cheap beer and motorcycles!). I hate how rude they are to the Vietnamese people in cafes and hotels. I hate also their callowness and ignorance. The rudest of a pack of insufferable English women in Sapa, sat reading a Judy Blume novel in the lobby of the hotel while her friend occupied every other square inch of the place with her gear and yelled loudly into her cell phone to some hapless Vietnamese driver. If you’re old enough to travel in Southeast Asia, you are too old for Judy Blume: go home. And I hate myself because I can’t help but envy their youth and beauty and unfettered fucking fun and their easy ignorance of the responsibility to think more deeply and complexly about the world and their places in it.

You know who else I hate? The older richer tourists in search of some Asian Resortiana, some unholy spawn of Orlando-Vegas-Waikiki-Cancun, Canlandowaicun, if you will, with “such cheap prices” and “nice people.” A very angry woman from California with whom I shared a cab from the train station to the airport in Hanoi, yelled at a Vietnamese man (who was actually trying to rip us off, but not by much) to fuck off. Then she launched into her critique of the whole country: “Vietnam is too scammy. We’re going back to Thailand!” Because the combination of low-wage service workers, tourism, and wealthy business interests appears to be going quite well there, doesn’t it?.Here in Hoi An, the men have their suits made for them and while the women get spa treatments, then they eat steaks and sea bass with knives and forks in fancy restaurants. Soon the central coast will be lousy with these people, although the actual residents of Hoi An town need hardly worry that they’ll spend more than a few hours here in its hot dusty streets filled with actual Vietnamese people. The road from Danang that runs south along the coast, past the beach now named for an American television show, past the beach where decades ago American helicopter pilots sometimes dipped the bellies of their machines low enough in the shallow waves to wash out the blood and mud and body parts, that road now blocks the view of the beach and is lined on both sides by enormous walled golf resorts where people can experience the exotic world of Vietnam without getting any of it on them. When these places are all open, beautiful Vietnamese women will wear ao dai and serve tea and cocktails, and small, wiry men will carry huge bags of clubs over what used to be sand dunes, descendents of the men who carried artillery piece by piece up and down mountain paths more than 35 years ago. On the day I came in from the airport, I saw an old woman in a conical hat stooped over with a short handled broom sweeping the sand and dust from a small patch of St. Augustine grass outside the wall.

And finally, I hate that the Vietnamese government – or someone – can’t or won’t do anything about this kind of crap. I shouldn’t blame them: They simply need the money. But these are the people who expelled the Chinese, the Portuguese (very briefly), French, Japanese, French again, and then the Americans. They fought off the Mongols, for crying out loud. I wouldn’t think bad-back Greg Norman and that little ill-tempered turd Colin Montgomerie could put up much of a fight. But of course, they’ve probably never been here.

The land is sliding

2009-07-28T02:40:00.000-07:00

My time in Bac Ha has rushed to an end as quickly as the beginning seemed to crawl. I had the company of a friend the last two days, a fellow English professor also traveling solo through Vietnam. We have a former student and friend in common, who put us in touch, and I am profoundly grateful for the chance to talk about our experiences for hours over coffee and other beverages that were not coffee. On Monday morning he leaves early to return the rented motorcycle and get the train to Hanoi. I have a few hours to make my goodbyes to the people I've come to know here, though there's a part of me that just wants to slip away without a word. I'm not sure I know how to do this.

The hardest parting will be with Hoa, the young woman who works at the Cong Fu with whom I've spent many hours working through English and Vietnamese words and sentences, she so much better at her new language than I am. I come by the hotel around 9:00, and we sit at the oversized table in the lobby, awkward and formal. She busies herself by working on the tea, and I rummage around in my bag for the ceramic Texas-themed shot glasses I’ve brought, trying to decide if they would appreciate that corny addition to the tea service at the hotel. I've already given her a personal gift of a small writing notebook. I plunge ahead and present the cheesy souvenirs from home, and everyone is kind of taken with the strange offering. I like that I leave a little bit of Texas there on the table. Hoa and I dance around the farewells a few more times, struggling to understand the platitudes we are each uttering, prolonging and complicating an already awkward situation. Making small talk, she asks if I get carsick, but it takes forever for me to figure what word she’s saying because I can’t see that one coming. She means airsick, but carsick is as close as she could. get Why is she asking me if I have cussing, because, hell yes, I do. Or maybe she wants to know if I have cashews. Or cousins. I don’t know, but I’m grateful for the distraction. Other employees and the manager come by for some solemn handshaking and promises that I stay at the Cong Fu next time I come to Bac Ha, and when am I coming back. Maybe one year. More bowing and nodding. Finally, Hoa and I have to make a final goodbye, and the semi-jerky manager breaks the ice a bit by making crying noises and laughing at us. It’s his final victory in the battle of wills we’ve waged these past weeks. You win -- I’ll cry. And Hoa and I both do, stepping outside for a little privacy. We clasp hands the Vietnamese way and then draw each other into a glancing hug -- very much not the Vietnamese way. I shove my sunglasses on my face even though it's raining and try not to let all the people on the curb and the stoops see that I'm crying, and make the same little circuit of town I’ve done every day when I was sure that no one knew or cared how I was feeling. This time my emotions are hanging out like a shirt-tail sticking out of my fly.

After a few more stops, I pack-up all my stuff and check-out. All I have to do is sit in this hot, dark, empty lobby at the Sao Mai for a half an hour for Thanh and his driver to arrive. I'm grateful that no one is around because it's midday on Monday, the slowest day of the week, and all the Vietnamese people are at home for lunch and naps.

Now I’m done; I’ve already departed emotionally, and just have to make it through the half-hour lag time between my mind and my body. But turns into an hour and a half because my ride is late. I’m sorry, Thanh says, we’re late because the land is sliding. He means that there was a landslide on the road and they were delayed, but I feel the same. The land is sliding, tilting me toward home.

If it was easy, everyone would do it

2009-07-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

This is a story about both the power and the limits of good intentions. I thought a lot about whether I should post it, but I’ve decided to do it anyway, with identifying information and real names omitted. I want to share because the questions it raises are complex and difficult, because it makes me try to puzzle through the hidden assumptions and partly submerged desires that animate the good intentions which brought me back to northwestern Vietnam this summer. Also, some of it's pretty funny.

I'm going with a small group of Americans affiliated with a US-based NGO to the village of Na Hoi, where they will teach a class to women on basic health and hygiene and work on a sand water filtration system they are installing. When we arrive in Na Hoi, a 10-minute drive from the hotel, the women take over the village meeting room and the men go off down the path to work on the filter. There’s the typical milling about and unpacking and setting up the laptop (oh, god, transnational, bilingual powerpoint hell?) before getting started at nine. We're early, and after a teacherly confab, it’s decided that we need to play a game to fill the extra 20 minutes. Ugh, my least favorite thing, but I’ll have to participate and be nice. The game goes like this, but takes several long minutes to explain and translation: we all stand in a circle with our legs apart and the person who is “it” pivots in the center and tries to throw a pink squiggly ball between someone’s legs; if it gets through, that person is "it." Grasping immediately the sexual innuendo of the game, the women are laughing and teasing each other. If N, K, and J get it, they betray not one wit of that, thus making the whole thing infinitely more hilarious, as the capri-panted women bounce up and down on the balls of their feet and wiggle their butts from side to side.

My hunch is that this game comes from a prepackaged development curriculum and that it’s supposed to be about sexually transmitted disease, but even then, the analogy breaks down, because once you fail to close your legs chastely, you become infected and then aggressively use force and deception to infect someone else -- for fun. Lesson, exactly? For the American women leading this exercise, it might as well be duck-duck-goose; they want to make sure everyone is included and has a turn at being “it.”

We all take our seats, all women now, the few curious men who were here before nine have gone, and the lesson begins. It will have three parts: hygiene, nutrition, and dental health. It is a five-paragraph theme. Part one is based on what I have to admit is an ingenious piece of curriculum, a richly illustrated, step-by-step overview of germ theory of contagion, graphically mapping the various vectors by which wee beasties travel from poop to mouth, with a little aside about sneezing (into your arm, not your hands! No one addressed the local snot-rocket epidemic.). Visual aids include a laminated drawing of a man taking a dump (cross-culturally hilarious), a plate of fake poop, and a giant plastic fly almost the size of the poop itself. N and K go at it with a verve of aggressiveness, to borrow the felicitous language the Sao Mai Hotel uses to describe its staff in its brochure. N is every inch the retired schoolteacher, urging, repeating, demanding response and participation. K is all Office of Human Resources, insisting that T translate the rules verbatim, stern, minatory. By the time we wrap up this topic by doing a group fist-pump cheer and chanting “No to germs,” (no translation -- English only), I’m worn out; it’s taken more than 30 minutes, and still two more paragraphs to go. If you gave me a quiz, I’d have to say the main take-away is about hand-washing. I’m all for it. In particular, however, it’s about the need to construct field hand-washing stations called Tippy-Taps, which hang on trees, of which there are few to none on the high slopes where they when tend their crops. It’s a great idea, to be sure, but it seems to me that any initiative that begins by asking these women to carry one more damn thing on their backs up the mountains is unlikely to gain much traction.

I can’t help thinking that the women in the audience must have thought it was a diverting and unusually theatrical discussion of poop.

Adventure comes in small packages

2009-07-20T04:15:00.000-07:00

This trip isn’t supposed to be about big adventure, though I keep finding myself writing about that. It’s supposed to be about small adventure: finding a place, staying here through good days and bad, though my mood whipsaws back and forth in intervals much shorter than a day. It’s about trying to live here instead of visit here. The exceptional moments become not the high mountain passes and motorcycle rides, but when people greet me on the street, when I’m invited to sit with their family for a meal.

Sunday market day comes around for the third time, and although I don’t have much desire to go back down into the bowels of it anymore, the pull is hard to resist: a flood of women in their best elaborate dresses, some sporting little high heels underneath, surly buffalo, ponies, men eagerly awaiting the day’s drinking and card-playing. I’m headed that way when I get pulled aside by a large-ish woman in a conical hat. I recognize her; she’s the woman who worked in the kitchen at the Cong Fu, older and more stubbornly more “country” than the other employees, she rarely said a word to me, only shaking her head at what I did or did not eat. Now she wants me to sit down at a table outside what I now realize is the Cong Fu Restaurant, around the corner from the hotel. So I do, and order a coffee. She wants to know if I’m alright, if it’s ok at the Sao Mai. I reassure her I’m fine and that the Sao Mai isn’t as nice as the Cong Fu but that I needed the internet in order to work. I don’t know how much of that went through, but it seemed to be the first step in healing from the slightly less than amicable divorce between the Cong Fu and me. When I ask her for extra hot water to lengthen my powerful Vietnamese black coffee, she just plunks the battered metal thermos on the table, as if to say, you know how to do this, you’re one of us, not some exotic bird who just arrived in town. Soon, on foot, motorcycle, and bicycle several other employees from the hotel come by to shyly say hello, even the manager, who’s brought the magical shield of his adorable daughter with him. Now I know I can stop by the hotel for tea and there will be no hard feelings. I smile and nod a lot like an idiot from a Flannery O‘Connor story, but it works.

Realizing I can get all the pleasures of the market from this perch without having to walk through the mud and smoke and smell and umbrellas poking me in the eyes (because I'm so tall!), I think I’ll just have another coffee, and when it arrives, two scruffy looking guys from the UK turn up and take seats opposite me at the long table. I’m so happy for the English-speaking company that I babble on and on, but soon we settle into a normal rhythm, and I learn that they are both doing year-long trips around the world, just seeing where it takes them. Ian, who’s older, close to my age, I guess, and more serious, has worked for years for NGOs in Africa, has so many interesting things to say about western interventions -- tourism or other forms -- in the developing world. I feel very much the country mouse in this situation; it’s almost unimaginable to leave my life behind and just go for a year. I know so little. Still, Ian is interested in how I’ve weathered my puny one-month experience. When he asks if I would do it again, I surprise myself by saying, yes, but if you had asked me three days ago I would have said definitely not. What’s changed?

I appear to have made friends, is what’s changed. At this café I help the seasoned travelers order their coffee and tea in Vietnamese, and when the hotel manager’s daughter comes up to me and smacks her hands on my legs, the guys say, wow, she’s very friendly. No, it’s that I know her, I say.

As hot afternoon turns to evening, I sit on my balcony and try to work a little, but there’s too much to look at: the tide of people from this morning reverses, having traded one load for another, families walk back up the hills toward home; tourists wander back to the hotel and wonder what to do for their remaining 12 hours in town. I can see into the Hoang Yen from where I’m sitting, and watch to see when they’ll put their family dinner on the table. If I go over now, I know they’ll invite me to join them, and I’ve already done that twice and don’t want to take advantage. I wish I knew which was more impolite: to just show up and be fed, or to be implicitly expected and not show up. What I’m doing -- sort of alternating -- is probably the worst strategy, but I don’t know what else to do.

I can see they’ve cleared the big round rice cooker and most people have gotten up from the table, so I head down the 4 flights of stairs and across the street. There’s an awkward moment when I walk in, and I realize that they could see me the whole time and must have been wondering what I was thinking. Did I not want to eat their food? It’s the opposite: I’m too embarrassed to accept more of their generosity.

By the end of the evening, an quiet equilibrium is reached. I’ve worked for an hour with Bon revising the draft of a list of their trekking services that he has amazingly produced, considering he has taught himself English from television and sheer necessity. I put a copy on my flash drive and tell them I’ll take it home and work on it. Nghe won’t let me pay for dinner, but he takes money for the beer. I promise to come tomorrow night to talk about it. They’re expecting me.

Maybe kilometer has several meanings

2009-07-17T03:35:00.000-07:00

Thao -- my guide for Saturday's fate-tossed hike -- is driving the motorcyle I'm clinging to the back of on an ass-rattling ascent up a dirt track to the starting point of today's hike. On a particularly steep patch, he asks, over the whine of the over-burdened engine, “how you way,” or something like that. I was still trying to figure it out in kilos when I felt the bike slow and waver and heard him clutching madly down through one gear and then another to wind up enough torque to haul my fat American ass up the mountain.

The motorcycles leave Ban, a guide with five years experience, and me in a high green valley, the hills corrugated with rice fields and dotted with a few small homes and villages. We’re high up the ridge, but not high enough, so we start up on what's supposed to be a 15k hike. No chance to ease into it and alert the legs, all bowed and stove-up from the ride, of the work to come. We just start up. It’s only a little after nine, but full sun and getting hot. I’ll not make the same mistake I made last time of getting into deficit so early, so it’s slow and steady, keeping the rhythm by shortening and lengthening the steps as the trail steepens and levels a little. Place each foot, get full extension, breathe, back off when you feel the lactic acid coming on, try not to anticipate. It’s more than an hour up, but on a path that mixes steep with gradual. On a narrow trail skirting the edge of the hillside, I’m surprised to see a small black dog come up and overtake us, followed soon after by a Hmong family with two ponies in tow, walking up to the their fields on the high slopes. They have reed baskets on their backs and carry heavy hoes on their shoulders. They must have already been walking for hours, and will work all day in the sun before walking all the way back down to wherever home is. Before long they disappear around a curve, moving faster than us. I’ll be taking advil and writing about this tomorrow, and they’ll be doing it again.

There are more shades and textures of green than I knew existed, even a few stands of tall pine trees that used to forest these hills before they were taken over by agriculture, and thus became dangerously prone to tumbling down onto each other and everything in their paths. I don’t know how policy-makers are supposed to solve this problem: it’s hard to convince people that they need trees to look at more than they need food to eat. The sinuous beauty of the rice fields makes you almost forget how labor-intensive this crop is. I tried to ask both guides, is there any time of the year when rice doesn’t need hands-on care? Both of them just shook their heads: maybe they didn’t understand the question, or maybe it was just patently absurd.

For lunch we sit in the child-size chairs at the tiny table inside a small Hmong house, enjoying the shade and the breeze that blows now and then across the valley and through the reed wall of the house. I notice a small red plastic mirror nailed to a post. Oh, yes, to keep out evil spirits; I’ve read about that. Then I see the comb. Nope, just a mirror. Reminds of my first stay in Sapa when I heard from my hotel balcony a tinny and mournful song coming from the distance and was moved by the thought of the local people mourning a death or or summoning the ancestors. It was probably someone warbling Stairway to Heaven at a karaoke bar.

After lunch, Ban says it’s two or two and a half hours more to go, mostly downhill, which sounds just about perfect to me. So, off we go. But, no, there’s been a discussion with the local man about a shortcut, which would supposedly take an hour off the trip. Uh, ok, but this has not gone well recently. First, the backtracking, and then the turning down a narrow muddy track, and I’m getting a sinking déjà vu feeling. But Ban is a very experienced guide, so surely this won’t turn out badly. Wearing just well-used running shoes, I’m finding the steep, muddy, rocky descent very uncomfortable. It’s hard on the feet, but it also calls for a measure of agility that I don’t seem to be able to muster. Maybe this is an age thing, but I’m afraid of falling and hurting myself. Some scrapes and bruises are not problem, but a badly sprained ankle, a blown-out knee, snapped fibula, or a head banged on a rock would be beyond my field medicine limits. I don’t want to have to solve a problem of that magnitude and urgency. So I go very slowly, and, I’ll admit, start to complain when the trail heads toward the rice fields and begins to pick its way along dikes and down spill-offs. Coming to yet another place where muddy track braids into another equally unpromising one, we meet an old woman who has harvested her corn and spread it on a tarp; she’ll then load it up and carry it on her back up the hill we’ve just come down. She says, pointing out the small house across the valley, that it’ll take us an hour and a half to walk there. She’s so wrong; we make in in 89 minutes.

Now we have to walk the rocky, sunny (why, oh why, is there not one measly cloud today?) road all the way back up this side to where we can at least get cell phone service, call the office and find out how far away it is to Ban Voi, where we’re supposed to be picked up. Finally stumbling into the shade of the porch of a school, I lie back on the cool-ish cement and Ban calls. To his surprise -- not to mention mine -- it’s another 10k to Ban Voi. We have already been walking for 6 hours on this supposedly 15k hike. This time I don’t have to be the one to call for 2-wheel rescue; Ban’s already on it.

Shortly into the ride down the rutted and rocky descent, however, I’m wishing I had walked that 10k. We got ourselves sandwiched between one hulking, belching, dirt-throwing truck over-laden with projectiles-in-waiting covered by a half-assed tarp, and its evil twin menacing us from behind, sometimes less than 10 yards away. Thao is my driver again, and he somehow manages to bounce and fish-tail and downshift and skid and flat-out will us down the hill, peering through a dense cloud of dust and fumes, when one slip would send us to certain death under the wheels of the truck. I almost forgot to worry about brake failure on the part of our pursuer.

At long last at Ban Voi we stop for a cold drink and to let the bikes cool off before heading up the pass to Bac Ha. The woman who runs what amounts to the convenience store there at the fork in the road is pouring gasoline from one worn jerry can to another, sloshing it down the side and on to the cement. Then she siphons it into green glass 1-liter beer bottles and expertly upends them into the gas tank of the motorcycles. The air is hazy with fumes, and an old man comes over to the table looking for the ubiquitous bong, which as it happens is right between my legs. Having just escaped death by motor vehicle, I’ll be damned if I’m going to die in a bong-related explosion. I pretend I don’t notice him and refuse to move. Sometimes being the giant, rude, clueless foreigner pays off.

Thank you for visiting. Now please go away.

2009-07-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

Hospitality conventions in this part of Vietnam are built more for one-night stands than long term relationships. We’ll all do just fine so long as we have a lot of fun and we don't have time to get on each others' nerves. I may give you an awkward cup of coffee in the morning, but then please gather up your crap and go. And, no, there will not be clean sheets and towels and declarations of affection.

Yesterday began and ended well, but there was one bad episode in the middle when I got into an argument with the hotel manager (over internet access -- again), which, though I think I prevailed, left me feeling ashamed and unwelcome at the place where I plan to stay another 12 days (not that I’m counting). And because I have no one to confide in, or even talk to I second-guessed not only my reaction to the situation, but reading of it in the first place. Did I think he was saying table when he was really saying cable? Was I the giant jerk in this drama? I realized then that I’m working from the assumption, which has a lot to do with unexamined white privilege, I ashamed to say, that people will basically be nice to me in whatever transactions we manage to cobble together, that they will be grateful for my presence and will forgive my transgressions as if I were a poorly socialized child or a doughty old person. In truth, I don’t just expect people to be nice to me, I assume they’ll like me. But why would they? The people I interact with every day must have the same kinds of gnawing annoyed reactions to my habits and practices -- the way I move in space, and eat, and drink -- that I guiltily admit I have to theirs. Dealing with these things once or twice is fine, but difference can be abrasive, and the points of contact get raw and exposed over time like blisters.

Here’s what gets on my nerves: the insanely loud slurping noises while eating soup; crew socks with dress loafers; looking over my shoulder at my computer screen if I happen to be using it downstairs; how the men sit around and drink all the tea but always expect the woman to get up and replenish the supplies; the littering and spitting; and the shouting, dear god, the shouting. I'm just bracketing out the horn-honking.

I’ll guess what they hate about me: that I won’t go away, won’t leave the hotel all day on outings and look at stuff so they can sit around the lobby and nap and play computer games and smoke that stinky bong that sits in the bucket; that I drink beer and water straight out of the bottle; that I want fresh towels every few days; that I don’t speak their language; that I’m so physically large and white and sweaty. Mostly, they probably just wish I would go away because my presence makes things so much more difficult. I’m sure it’s not just the Cong Fu or this particular manager (who is arguably the worst hotel manager ever), it’s that my overstaying the duration of a conventional visit has exposed the fault lines in a much larger system: east meets west, privilege meets the developing world. The fledgling tourism industry in Vietnam is the laboratory where they forces collide.

The manager isn't very easy to deal with. He seems lazy and surly and unhelpful and sometimes downright deceitful in his attempts to maintain his strict standards of laziness and unhelpfulness. His staff is cheerful, eager, and very hard-working. And bewildered most of the time. His bilious temperament notwithstanding, the breakdown in hospitality conventions isn’t really his fault. Vietnam has watched Thailand, Cambodia, and even Lao capture big hunks of the Southeast Asia tourism market, and they want their share. Yes, there are models of how it can be done: fancy resorts at the beaches and luxury hotels in HCMC and Hanoi with multilingual staff and ice cubes in the drinks, but the people who work here have never been there.

They’ve never been anywhere. I can’t yet determine if they don’t have any desire to travel -- can’t understand why anyone would do it -- or if they just shelved the ambition long ago because they know they won’t able to, because it requires leisure time and cash, which they do not have. I’ve never heard a young Vietnamese person say, “I’d like to go there,” even in response to my telling them about another place in their own country. So, you have drivers who barely know how to drive, or only know how to drive, and waiters who may have never eaten in a restaurant, guides who never been beyond their local and learned routes, and hotel managers who have never stayed at a hotel. As you can imagine, this leads to problems. Every request from a hotel guest probably sounds idiosyncratic and bitchy. When they hear, do you have a newspaper? Can you recommend a restaurant? May I move to a room where the toilet doesn’t leak? Must they chisel the tiles off the wall right outside my window at 6:00 am? They must think, who the hell do you think you are? We put a copy of the rules on a faded, misspelled photocopy in a sad page protector in your room, gave you a sliver of Camay and a little ration of toilet paper, and turn the electricity on for you most of the time, what more do you expect?

We're all in unknown territory here, but if we're stuck together like a snowbound one-night stand, we might as well work on it. I was helping Hoa with her English this morning and wrote out a list of questions that I thought guests may ask and others that she might ask guests. She was stumped by “may I have a wake-up call,” but admired the novel concept once she got it. Borrowing from the Lonely Planet Phrasebook, I also included, “do you have an adaptor plug,” but made no headway in explaining what is was until I went upstairs and got mine and showed her how it worked. I also had to explain that people from different parts of the world would need differently configured ones. Why anyone would need one at all was a revelation to her. Moving to the other list, she was very pleased to pronounce “are you happy with your room” perfectly, and glad to know “is there anything else I can get for you?” for waitressing.

Shut up and walk

2009-07-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

Let me shut up. All the stuff I wrote before about the abstract joys of walking? I couldn’t be more full of shit if I were a port-o-john at a curry cook-off. The walk I did on Saturday not only kicked my ass; it took it prisoner and sent it to re-education camp. In retrospect it had all the elements of a classic clusterfuck: incomplete information, hasty prepration, inexperienced guide, and some very bad weather luck. Add to that a major language barrier and the poor infrastructure of a very undeveloped part of a developing nation. At least it only cost $24, plus the soaked and limp $5 bill I tipped the hapless guide, who almost wept with apology at several points along the way.

He wasn’t the only one near tears. I knew it would be a demanding hike in the first place. The woman at the restaurant who booked it, who herself admitted she hated to walk, said it was about 20k and there was a mountain. I should be able to do that without too many problems, other than I hadn’t eaten very much in the past several days. Just less of me to haul up and down, I figure. I should have known it wasn’t going to turn out well when the first hour was a blisteringly hot climb up the mountain we had come down on by motorcycle to Can Cau market. On that climb I remembered I had forgotten sunscreen. Uh oh. I can also tell, but shove the thought to the back of my mind, that this first hour has been very costly metabolically speaking, and that I’m already dehydrated and don’t have enough water. Surely he’s brought more, or there will be someone selling bottles at one of the scenic and charming villages we will surely walk through. Because if I know one thing about Vietnam it’s that there’s always someone there to sell you something. I’m always amazed how you come up the top of a high pass on an unpaved road in some remote part of some remote province, and right there on the shoulder of the road in the mist are women under blue tarps selling plums and tea and Fanta and sticky rice stuffed inside bamboo, and some unmentionable bits charring on hibachis. So, surely, we will be able to restock water.

At the top of the mountain we turn off onto a dirt path, winding down and along the ridge, more pleasant than the hot road with its blaring, belching trucks and minibuses. But this is just the beginning of a series of increasing narrow, muddy, and often dead-end paths we will follow ever deeper into hiking purgatory. There’s so much doubling-back and gaining and losing and gaining back precious feet of elevation that I have no way to know how long we ultimately walked. I do know that it took the better part of eight hours, which, to be fair includes the break we took when we had to plummet down a muddy hill to the Hmong house to take shelter from the pounding rain. Of course by then I’d already slipped and fallen on my butt in the mud (and probably some species of ubiquitous dung) and my shoes and socks are soaked and caked. But here’s where things take a turn for the worse.

Tao and I have a “conversation” about what to do now. I say that it’s time to bail out, though not in those words, to call the office and the other guys on the motorcycles and have them meet us. We’ve walked a long way already and are too wet and muddy and the paths are too treacherous. And we’re out of water. With all the nodding and smiling and agonized apologizing I have no doubt that he agrees with me. But he doesn’t; he doesn’t have any idea what I said. So when we start back up the mountain we have just come down in search of a path he will not find, I think we’re on the way to the road and a ride, and I’ve calibrated my mood and my energy expenditures accordingly. He’s talking and texting away; evacuation plans must be in motion. After another hour or so, I’m frustrated and confused. Why, oh, why is this taking so long? But, finally --mirabile visu -- up ahead at the top of this long climb is a village where surely there is water and a road and waiting motorcycles. How long, I ask. Ten minutes. I swear he said ten minutes, but I guess it could have been an aural hallucination. Thirty minutes later we get to the village, which is certainly some failed socialist experiment in rural living because it’s dominated by a large building with a locked gate and there are no people to be seen. There is also no water and no road to speak of. And there are no waiting motorcycles.

Three hours to Bac Ha, he says. My turn to almost cry. I takes me a very long time to communicate that I will not be able to walk for 3 hours with no water: I have to have some soon, or I’ll be sick. I sit on the steps of the locked-up building until Tao returns with water, probably from someone’s house: please let it be boiled or filtered. A liter later and I’m ready to go. It is 5k to Bac Ha, he says, all flat and downhill. Great, we’ll be there in a little over an hour. He says it’s three hours. Two and a half hours later when I can finally see Bac Ha far below, I have to concede he was right, but that was a LOT farther than 5k. Now, I’m really tired, and this rock-strewn path is killing my feet.
I’m not sure my I was aware that my lizard brain had been plotting my revolt, but apparently it had been at work at it for some time. When we come down the hill into Ban Pho village -- where I’ve walked several times and know that it’s 2k to town -- and he says it is less than 1 kilometer to go, I just pull up and stop. I’m done; call the motorcycle.

As usual, it takes a while to make my point, but when he finally understands he‘s shocked by the novelty of the idea. Call for the motorcycles? I never heard of such a thing! What a radical thought!

More about walking and knowing

2009-07-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

[Tried to post this on Friday, then was out all day Saturday, so here it is, the belated story from Thursday]

Yesterday’s walk was all about the comforts of reiteration, the knowledge that comes from re-inscribing. I wanted to walk the same path I knew, so I could say to myself: there’s where the men were loading the corn onto the pony that the women had gathered; there’s where the the skirts of the Flower Hmong were drying on the wall, semi-circles of brilliance against mud and dust; there’s where the children ran out of the house to say hello. For a few moments I want to not learn something new; I want to already know something. This got me thinking about my relationship with learning and knowledge.

In academia we say we like to learn, to experience a new field or an unread book as an open prairie. An epistemelogical song of the lark moment. But, really, it’s temporary, or, rather, artificial, contrived. It’s like a carnival ride that simulates tumbling and falling and not knowing up from down, but we never genuinely lose our bearings. In a sense we come to know new things because we already know them, never truly losing our place on the map of the known and knowing world. We have access to powerful uses of language, unlimited resources, and people around us who know why we ask the questions we do. This, on the other hand, is real not knowing, and I am not used to it.

I did not know; I have not known; I shall not have know; I will not know. That’s my condition in all its conjugational permutations. I did not know, for example, when I got back from my walk yesterday, hot, and red as a tomato, how long the power had been off and when it would come back on. I deduced it was off in the whole town because the squawking loud speaker was silent. I tried to ask someone in the hotel, but couldn’t formulate the right question or understand the responses. So I just hosed myself off with cool water, closed my windows and curtains against the afternoon sun, and lay down on the bed to wait. As it got closer to sundown, panic crept in. What would happen when there was no more light even to read? How would food be cooked for dinner? Can I just go to bed in this stifling room at 7:30 and hope to be awakened in the middle of the night with the lights and the a/c coming back on? It’s not the heat, or even the palpable humidity, it’s the close darkness of aloneness and not-knowing. So, the sun went behind the mountain, and dusk came to the town, and the streets filled with families. The sun off my balcony, I pulled out my chair, got a Bia Ha Noi from the now sweating cooler downstairs and watched everyone adjust. Dinner came later tonight, the ladies who walk the circuit around town in their plastic sandals doing those wacky floppy Vietnamese exercise arm movements came out a little later. Everyone adjusts to what is there and what is not. It’s possible to be and to not know, but it feels like somersaulting through space.

The walk that was supposed to be about reiteration turned out not to be. A dog that didn’t chase me the first time, did this time; they are about to kill a pig up ahead and I have to turn back

Walking with myself

2009-07-08T22:02:00.000-07:00

Today is the 4th day (is that all??!) that I've been on my own here, figuring out where and what to eat, eating alone, dong managing (that's the currency, but, oh, I never tire of the puerile jokes), filling the hours of the day, and holding back tides of anxiety that make me feel like I should always be doing something more or other than I am. One voice in my head says, you should be out there, in there, EXPERIENCING stuff all the time. But the other voice says, no, that's the tourist impulse, to collect and fetishize experience, to skim across and sail around the daily rhythms of life in a place that is, after all, to the people who live here, ordinary, home. There's no avoiding the sensation and the fact of being strange, of course, and I can't make myself at home here, but I can try, well, to live deliberately, to be both self-reliant and alert to the moments of connection that come unbidden and pass so quickly. But unlike Thoreau, I want right now less to get away and more to come back, to be a little less in my head: I want to be a swinger of birches, not a hoer of beans.

And so I have been taking walks. The first day, down the hill, through the outskirts of town and into one small village after another, then back up into town the other way, men staring and some glaring, women smiling and waving, children waving and shouting "hello goodbye." See, that wasn't so bad? The next day, a little more courage is required to take the major road going the other way, following as it narrows and begins to climb into the hills. I pass a Hmong family and their pony: stares all around, and one shy smile. Where am I going so purposelessly and why am I not carrying anything? Why am I so sweaty?

The third day, a little more courage still. I stop at a cafe that says they have tourist information, but all they really have is a hand-drawn, 4th-generation xerox of a map, with three things in the legend: Bac Ha, the Hoang Yen Cafe, and The Road. Not helpful, but I take it anyway. I decide I can do the Ban Pho village loop, the walk that I did with Thanh last week and that all tourists do when they come here for their one day because I think I remember the way. But there will be no one else here this early in the week. When I get to Ban Pho I pass the turn that makes the loop and just decide to keep going a little bit, following the road as it begins to switchback up the mountain, opening views of terraced rice fields and small stands of corn on the high slopes. At the top of the pass where the road turns to mud there is a village of a few Hmong houses and a scary dog, so I turn back: about time anyway, as it's taken me over and hour to get here and I don't have much water. I keep thinking, I've always wanted to be the kind of person who can do this, but mostly I feel like I'm pretending -- or practicing? -- to be her.

A view from the Cong Fu

2009-07-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

They are constructing a building next door to my hotel, almost right outside my room, and I am watching it from my balcony. Like all VN buildings it is narrow and extends far to the back. Because it is also built into the hilly terrain of Bac Ha, there are two stories in the back below the one that will be street level in the front. You can see the storeys are supported by unmilled poles from one of the many deforested hillsides surrounding town. Today they are pouring concrete despite intermittent light rain and saturated humidity. Here’s how they’re doing it.

An ancient cement mixer throttles away at a small makeshift ramp at the front. From time to time it sputters to a stop, coughs, and gives up. A guy comes over with a big crank and winds it up like a Model T. Then the hive of workers also cranks back into motion. On one side of the mixer is a big pile of rough gravel, on the other a mountain of sand. A man shovels gravel into beautiful shallow woven bowl-shaped baskets, then he and the carrier together lift it high enough for carrier to swing underneath it, rest it on his head, walk the few steps to the mixer, tip it in and come back for another. The same process is repeated on the sand side. A man carries 10-gallon buckets of water filled from a hose across the street from which buckets are dipped and added to the mix in whatever proportions someone deems appropriate. One of them must be in in charge of the mix, but who knows according to what engineering principles: more master baker than science.

The mixture flows out to be shoveled by another stooping man into the waiting bucket of one of the two-person carrying teams. They lower their pole, unhook the bucketand if they are lucky the timing is right, someone else shovels it full. If not, then one of them bends over and fills it. Then they pivot, lower themselves to a deep squat and shoulder it, walk up the uneven ramp, tightrope across the naked rebar and deliver it to the men pouring the slab at the rear. Each trip will get incrementally shorter but the load no lighter. One of the teams’ bucket only gets about ¾ of a load because they are very slight people. One of them is a woman, possible a teenager, but I can’t tell because her conical hat is tipped low and she is wearing a cloth over her face in a futile attempt to protect against dust and fumes. Her partner is a whisper-thin teenage boy, possibly more like a child. Most of them are walking across the rebar and steering around heavy equipment in flop-flops; a few have rubber rain boots. No one is wearing a hardhat, though a few have green pith helmets. Most wear baseball caps. There is a choreographed beauty to this, and a egalitarian peasant purity that would make the socialist architects proud, I’m sure, but the ideological virtues are surely lost on those doing this dangerous, loud, filthy, and underpaid work. Is this someone’s house? A new hotel? Will someone make money with this building, whatever it is? Will they ever set foot in it?

A 10-minute break comes at 8:45. The mixer arrived on site at 4:45 -- I know because it woke me up. During the break the woman who runs the little shop next door serves them from a large jug of bottled water. Even local people can’t drink water that comes from the tap, if they are privileged enough to live in a house with plumbing at all. One thin middle-aged man retrieves the 2-ft long bamboo bong to dip in a bucket and have a hit or two of tobacco. A Flower Hmong woman walks up to the shopkeeper, her extravagantly colored clothes a contrast to the dust-coated workers, unloads fresh corn from her reed basket backpack, sells a few ears, loads up, and walks on. The mixer belches back into life and the rough ballet of shoveling, lifting, and toting goes on.

Bac Ha, the beginning

2009-07-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

July 4, 2009, Bac Ha
First morning waking up in the Cong Fu Hotel, where I’ve committed to staying and writing for the month. It’s 5:35 and a couple of hotel employees are having a lively conversation about something and just basically yelling their asses off, the voices bouncing up the marble stairways and rattling around the building. If I understood more than a few words of Vietnamese, I’d be able to understand them as if they were standing in this room. And then, coming in from outside, the propaganda loudspeakers have just started. Is that the VN anthem I hear? And some inspirational words about work? Warnings about social evils -- one of which is apparently sleeping past 6:00. Perhaps some deal could be arranged whereby loudspeaker sponsored the now moribund wifi service. I could take it, I swear.

So, the promised wifi service is “broken,” and “needs a part from Hanoi, we’re told. I had no idea wireless routers had “parts.” What do need here, a flange? Bushing? a timing belt? Sheesh. I’ll be able to plug my netbook into their connection for a few minutes a day, but will have to sit in a corner in the lobby and shove aside one of the two big computers they available for guests (and teenage boys from town). On the bright side, the internet on these two didn’t work at all during the days we were here last year. Progress.

Arrived last night in hour 40 of total elapsed travel time since I left my house in Austin, and had a bit of a struggle getting a suitable room, one that did not have two tiny twin beds, had a/c, and a balcony. I ended up on the front side of the building, which isn’t ideal (see loudspeaker), but I do have the other features, and a bed no softer than the well-padded dinner table. I had remembered the Cong Fu as more luxurious than it is, but it’ll be okay.

Thanh and I had a light dinner at a restaurant we had visited last year, which appears to be something of a gathering place for locals and those working in the tourist industry. You notice ruddy-looking middle aged Dutch couples in specialty trekking pants, and other typical western tourists eating in one room, while their guide shares tea and other kinds of food and swaps stories with owners and other guides in the front room. Last night Thanh and I sat in the front room, but not at that “cool” kids table. But after dinner we did get up and move over there and talked some business about the school. Met Mr Sa, the man who owns the resort just outside of town, which we’ll go look at today, and Mrs [TK], an entrepreneurial sort who owns the restaurant and hotel, and whose brother, they say, is the minister of minority affairs for the government. He could be a big asset in negotiating some of our bureaucratic obstacles, and she, of course, owns a construction company. See how well that works together?

The plan for this raining morning is to have breakfast in the hotel and then take the motorcycle out to a market, then maybe meet with one of the school teachers, see Sa’s place, browbeat the hotel staff about the wireless service, and whatever else we can get into. Thanh is good at making plans, but I never seem to know what they are, so I’ll just dress for riding in the rain and mud and will see what happens next.

Aghhhh….the loudspeaker! You win: your music is most patriotic and inspirational, yes, it is best to work hard for the fatherland, work is happiness. Okay, now please stop. Where is Bart Simpson when you need him?

Returning and Beginning

2009-06-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

I posted below the update on my involvement with a project to build an elementary school in northern Vietnam. It's the same thing I posted on facebook, so many of you will have already seen it.

I'm leaving on Weds, July 1 to spend a month in Bac Ha, where rumor has it the internet access has vastly improved since last year. I'll be using this space to share thoughts and photos, and will also write a brief version of how this school project got started in the first place and what we did and where we went last summer when technological obstacles thwarted my blogging ambitions.

An update about the school building project in Vietnam

2009-06-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
I'm way overdue in sending this update about the project of building the elementary school in northern Vietnam that many of you have so generously contributed to. We have made great progress toward raising the amount needed for basic construction, and hope to have secured all the necessary permissions in order to build in November.

I'm pasting below an excerpt from a letter that Phil (Deering, my Minneapolis-based partner in the project) wrote. But first, an update to the update: I will be in the village of Bac Ha, the market town closest to the school, for the month of July, working with local contacts and writing about the process, the people, and the region. I'll be posting updates on my facebook page (be my friend, if we aren't already) as well as on my (now moribund, but soon to be lively) blog (www.brightenthecorner.blogspot.com).

Here's what Phil wrote:

We want to update you on progress (and some minor setbacks), so that you'll know that your money is being put to good use.

When we returned from Vietnam last June, we had our mission clear: to build a new school in the village of Tong Thoung. Here's what we've accomplished:

1. We've raised over $23,000 dollars – enough to build the two-room school as planned.

2. We have a complete architectural building plan, which has been reviewed and approved our friends at Sunflower Mission.

3. We have strong support from the local community

And here are the setbacks:

1. Phil was laid off from his job this winter. With tight personal finances,he wasn't able to go to Vietnam. As a result, we have to put the actual building off until November, 2009.

2. We've had consistent problems with the bureaucracy in Hanoi, and getting official Vietnamese Non- Governmental Organization (NGO) status for Sunflower Mission (our sponsoring US non-profit). This prevents us from some advantages that we would get from oversight by the federal government, but is really a minor inconvenience, since we are well positioned at the local level.

The plan is for Phil and Elisabeth to go to Vietnam in November of this year and work with a local company to build the school.

The children of Tong Thoung still need your help. Especially, help from young people in the US. Here's some things that would be really great:

1. If you or your school, religious group, or other group like Girl or Boy Scout troop would like to take on Tong Thoung school as a service project, please let us know. We have lots of support material to share and can promise an interesting and rewarding project.

2. If you want to make another donation that we will use to buy school materials or add to the basic plan to further improve the school with electrical generators, better hygiene facilities, etc. please make a check to: Sunflower Mission – BacHa School Project, and send it to Phil or Elisabeth (just ask for mailing address).

And now a final word from me (Elisabeth)...
Thank you for your interest and your support -- financial and otherwise. One of the greatest joys of this project for Bruce and me is witnessing the flowering of generosity from so many extraordinary friends, relatives, and colleagues. For more pictures and some video see www.bachaschool.org.

Yours,
Elisabeth and Bruce (who won't be able to go to Vietnam, but whose love and support make it possible for me to go)

Our friend and translator Thanh talking with a student at the school

Children in class

And then what happened ... eight months later

2008-04-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

After letting my blog lie fallow for months, I'm back, and planning to use this space to write about a number of things, but especially about the amazing events that have transpired after my trip to Vietnam in July 2007. Along the way I hope to fill out and complete the narrative of that trip, while also writing about the one that begins on May 11 of this year.

So, stay tuned. The first tale to tell is about the school in the north near Bac Ha that I am helping to build.

Back to Texas

2007-07-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Got back home to Austin last night shortly after midnight. Will catch up on stories and pictures soon, but for now I need to lie on the couch and watch some golf.

Adventures in train travel

2007-07-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

Took the night train back from Sapa to Hanoi last night and was so grateful to have kept my hotel room here while I was gone. While other people were staggering around tired and grimy waiting to be able to check-in somewhere, I went straight to my room where all my stuff was intact, opened a cold diet coke and drew a bath. Ahhh...

This relief was particularly sweet considering the adventure of the train. In Sapa I got on the train and claimed my expensive reserved sleeper berth, this time one of the lower ones, and waited to see who else would be sharing the compartment, expecting a similar group to the genial Finns and the woman from Singapore. This was not to be. First, a young (Vietnamese, I think) couple comes in and perches on the other lower bunk. They stow some luggage and then leave. Then only he comes back, followed by two grinning men in matching tan shirts and two tarted-up, gum-smacking, giggling apparent prostitutes -- oops, I mean sex workers. I'm completely claiming my space and lying down on my bed, but the men decide to sit on it anyway so they can face the girls and have a chat. I'm having none of this, and make an unmistakable "get off" gesture, which just makes them move to the opposite bunk, so that now four people are staring at me like I'm crashing the party. I'm thinking, yes, I am well aware of the legendary and often heroic patience and forbearance of the Vietnamese people, but y'all ain't winning this one. Eventually the tan-shirt dudes leave, and the girls ratchet-up the gum smacking and cell-phone yacking while I turn my back and pretend to try to sleep. After a while they start playing a game by clapping suddenly and giggling to see if I'm still awake, but I am in no mood to be mean-girled by a couple of seat-scamming sex workers. They're still sitting up and making a racket when it seems the right time to lock the compartment door for the night, which just escalates the battle, of course. I lock. One grabs my arm and shakes her head to say, no lock. I nod, point to my chest, glare, and lock. This happens a few more times. Then there comes a loud knock on the door and one of the girls opens it. Here we go, I think. But, no, it's the conductor. He looks at the two of them in one berth, says something, points, looks at their ticket (?), then just laughs and shuts the door. Thanks a heap. But I lock the door after him and put on the chain so that even he can't get in, flash another dirty look, turn on my side, wrap my arm around my bag, and actually go to sleep. Victorious.

Sapa and Hill Tribe Villages, Day One

2007-07-15T23:39:00.001-07:00

Arrived here in Sa Pa around 6:30 this morning by night train from Hanoi, and after breakfast I headed out into the steep, mist-covered hills terraced with rice fields in a steady rain with my guide. I am the only one on this particular tour, so it was just the two of us making our way along the muddy track among, meeting the occasional water buffalo and hill-tribe villager along the way. It was magical and wondrous -- and very, very wet, a welcome respite from Hanoi's heat, I might add. In an hour or so I'm going back out with my guide Thanh on his motorbike to go see some off-itinerary sights (we made a little side deal). We walked through villages of both the Black Hmong and Red Dzao people, both of whom dress in elaborately layered and embroidered outfits. I saw women hand dyeing the cloth from the indigo planted in their fields (Thanh thought the dye smelled worse than the water buffalo dung. I disagreed). I also saw two women spinning and weaving the cloth by hand and foot treadle. Will try to get some pictures up soon.

Hue to Hanoi & Hanoi to Sapa

2007-07-15T03:16:00.001-07:00

Flew from Hue to Hanoi early this afternoon, and am resting for an hour or so before I leave on the night train to Sapa for a short trekking trip with Handspan Adventures. Don't think I'll have any access while up there among the hill tribes, but I'll post a note as soon as I get back very early Weds morning, which will be Tues evening in the US.

Hue to Hanoi

2007-07-14T01:23:00.000-07:00

Now that I've left behind the CIEE group (with the exception of Tom Huminski of Portland Community College, who happens to be following a similar itinerary for a few days) I have a little bit of time to reflect and catch-up on the writing. It's about 3:30 on Saturday afternoon in Hue, and I'm taking a break to cool off and rest after walking around the citadel and other sights in this beautiful city.

There's so much to process even with almost a week to go in my trip, from the dusty, frontier feel of Siem Reap, to the seductive and faintly dangerous vibe of Phnom Penh, to HCMC's manic energy and profusion of stuff and people, to Hue's elegance (and heat!). I've been down the Mekong River and into the jungle to visit a former VC special forces camp in the jungle, to the floating villages on the largest lake in SE Asia, the Tonle Sap. I've taken my life in my hands (or found the zen of it, depending on your point of view) and crossed the street in Ho Chi Minh City, and learned to act cool on the back of a motorbike as it weaves through traffic, often by driving on the wrong side of the road or the sidewalk.

It's now Sunday morning in Hue, as I pick up where I left off yesterday. I leave in a few hours for Hanoi. One of the things that's been so striking about this trip is the contrasts between the two countries as well as among the places I've been with them. It was striking, for example, to see how much more wealth there is in the Vietnamese countryside around Hue between the coast and the Lao border than there is outside the cities in Cambodia. And wealth is a relative term here, of course, but I'm talking about houses with doors and windows. They're still one-room structures with a lot of people in them -- Vietnam has a lot of people -- but they are much better off than rural Cambodians. You'll see rows of these simple houses, often with stalls selling a jumble of wares spilling out the front of them, and then suddenly a huge Frenchified plaster monstrosity will hove into view. You don't really need your guide or driver to tell you it's the home of the local Party official. There were a number of houses like this in the town closest to the Lao border, where I suppose business is brisk in border management.

There are also big differences in the national narratives you hear from people, which I'll write more about after I am out of Vietnam, and it's often difficult to figure out how much they believe in the story they tell you or are aware of its contradictions. This interplay of narratives is especially evident at the official sites, though of course these are exactly the kind of places where the dominant discourse is intended to drown out the other voices and erase the contradictions. Here's a relatively benign example: At the Independence Palace, which was formerly known as the Presidential Palace, you are required to tour the place with an official guide, in our case, a polished multilingual young woman dressed in the traditional ao dai. Her explanations of the building were fluent and well-rehearsed, and she used the adjective "puppet" over and over in her characterization of the regime that once governed from the building and its relationship to the US. At the same time, however, she pointed out with apparent pride that luxurious furnishings favored by the puppets. She suggested we take photographs of the preposterous platformed, silk-uphosltered chair framed by six-foot tall elephant tusks in which the puppet would sit to receive official visitors. I accidentally stepped on the edge of a huge and elaborate rug in the atrium, and she reacted as if I'd trampled a holy relic. I suppose visitors would say the same thing about these types of ossified historical sites in the US. They might wonder, for example, why we revere Thomas Jefferson and dutifully haul school children to his home without seriously engaging his troubling and complicated relationship to slavery. They might also wonder about things like the Johnson Ranch and the Nixon Library.

Have to pack up my ever-expanding stuff and get to the airport. I should mention that for some reason I can't open my own blog, so I can see from the inside that someone's left a comment or two, but at least for now, I can't read them. So, I'm posting this anyway, but I can't see if or when it actually appears. Thanks for reading!

Bunker entrance at special forces camp in Sac Forest

2007-07-14T00:27:00.001-07:00

Street in Ho Chi Minh City

2007-07-13T20:24:00.000-07:00

After the rain in Phnom Penh with US Embassy in background

2007-07-13T20:20:00.001-07:00

Festive night in Phnom Penh

2007-07-13T20:17:00.001-07:00

Hue and the DMZ, briefly

2007-07-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

Now in Hue, in central Vietnam, a beautiful former imperial city located between the ocean and the mountains. It is very, very hot , however, and the rains won't begin here for several more weeks. Yesterday we toured sites in the DMZ and saw much of the landscape, both mountain and ocean. We went as far west as we could toward the Lao border and walked around Khe Sanh, where I was stunned and saddened to think of what it would have been like to both be under siege there and to try to attack on that hilltop. We also toured the amazing tunnel complex at Vinh Moc, walking about 2 kilometers of its total of 7. Luckily, we were the only three people in the tunnels so we were able to keep the claustrophobia at bay. Hard to complain about that, however, when you remember that people lived in those things for 20 months, eating cold and dried food, giving birth to and raising their children underground. Unbelievable.

Today, it's the Citadel (also the site of fierce fighting), some pagodas and tombs, and maybe some shopping and drinking of cool local beer, Huda.

Will try to get pictures up soon.

Saigon Update

2007-07-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

Last day in Ho Chi Minh City. Wow, what a place. We have a full schedule today, so I won't get to catch up yet, but will work on it. I leave at 7 am tomorrow on a flight to Hue to begin the independent travel portion on the trip. Yesterday turned out to be a really eventful day that included a monkey attack on one member of the group (no real harm done -- she had a banana in her backpack), another member of the group falling ill (still pretty serious, unfortunately), and a ferocious thunderstorm on the Mekong River while we were returning to the city by boat. Oh, yeah, and later a visit to an after-hours bar in an alley, which isn't as daring as it sounds since all the bars are required to close by midnight. Details forthcoming, I promise.

Quick Notes from Ho Chi Minh City

2007-07-09T23:48:00.000-07:00

We're in Ho Chi Minh City now, and I'm sitting at a Gloria Jean's Coffee shop that could be in Cleveland Heights or Plano. That is, until I look out the glass wall of the shop and watch an old woman shield herself from the rain with her conical straw hat and see a skinny guy scoot past in the fast walk people use when they're carrying something too heavy. He's got a single pole slung across one shoulder with an ice chest hanging from one end balanced with a basket of green coconuts. He'll chop them open with a cleaver and sell the cold juice to tourists.

Walking is pretty hazardous in this city, with or without the heavy load. The sidewalks are jumbled with the merchandise coming from all the make-shift stalls on street level; people sitting or squatting and eating, drinking, smoking, and playing cards; and more motorbikes and even cars parked on than you'd think belong on a sidewalk. I temporarily one of these people this morning when I spent about 45 minutes perched on a tiny yellow plastic chair like the one we'd have in preschool in front of a stall that sold SIM chips for cell phones and a wide selection of pirated video and music. I was sort of like the human security deposit while my friend Tom took both our phones and went off on the back of the motorbike with the son of the woman who ran the stall. We still couldn't get the phones to work, but I loved just sitting there and watching Saigon by a startling variety of conveyances.

The traffic here is legendary, and for very good reasons. There seems to be more consensus on what side of the street to drive on than there is in Cambodia, but the first law of driving any vehicle here must be, "do not stop, ever." As a pedestrian you have to cross the street by playing a real-life game of Froggy, plotting and timing a zizagging course between motorbikes, cars, and buses, often getting stuck between "lanes" until another small opening appears. It's hard to concentrate on the task sometimes because the visual display of the moving traffic is so fascinating. To protect themselves from at least some of the dust and dirt, many of the women here wear face-masks while driving their motorbikes. They also tend to wear hats and sunglasses and these very odd-looking gloves that cover almost the entire arm to protect their skin from the sun. You look down the street and see a fleet of them coming and think the city is under siege from an army of 95-pound train-robbing bandits in high-heeled sandals. But my favorite sight of the morning was the woman driving the moto with her baby on her lap. This isn't unusual in itself, but this woman apparently wanted to protect the baby from the dust as well, so she pretty much just put it in a large orange fine-meshed bag, as far as I could tell. Pretty ingenious.

What we've done so far in Saigon: drinks on the roof of the Rex Hotel, where American officials used to gather during the war, a delicious meal at a restaurant where they throw rice across the room, and this morning a tour of the former Presidential palace, instantly recognizable as the building with the gates through with the north Vietnamese forces drove (and got stuck) in April 1975 when they liberated the city. This afternoon it's the War Remnants Museum.

I'll try to get back to this soon and catch-you up on everything that's happened. Okay, well not everything. This coffee shop is now completely packed with locals and visitors escaping the rain, so I'm going to vacate my table.

Angkor Wat

2007-07-08T18:21:00.001-07:00

If you scroll down past the smiling face of Haley on the rooftop terrace of the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Phnom Penh, you'll find some pictures from Angkor Wat, the granddaddy of them all. The post I wrote about the pictures somehow never made it to this site, but if it does turn up, please forgive the redundancy. As I had a camera mishap on Angkor day (a brain, mishap, really), I'm posting the work of Stacy Kowtko of Spokane Community College. There's no doubt that my pictures would not have been anywhere near this good.

Angkor Wat is huge, but it's hard to grasp its scale. Notice the towers in the distance in the shot with me, Haley (in red), and Stacy Sewell (yellow) walking up the main causeway to the temple. They appear to be modest in size. But then you see the size of the individual tower in the middle shot, with the tiny people at its base. And that shot is taken from high up in the temple itself, which you have to reach by a truly hair-raising long flight of stone steps about as steep as a ladder. Going up hand and foot was bad enough, but coming down was another thing altogether. I was hugging the side of the stairs so closely that I skinned my knee by grazing it on the stone on each long, blind step down.

Among the fascinating things about Angkor Wat, is that despite its massive scale, it doesn't really dwarf you in the way you'd think it would. It's the largest religious monument in the world, but it contains intimate shrines like the one below. It also has over 600 meters of narrative bas relief which is scaled and paced perfectly for walking and reading. It's still very much a functioning temple and a powerful symbol for the Khmer people. Somehow it seems to take history in stride, outlasting tourists, soldiers, looters both ancient and modern, religious zealots, secularists, kings (including the one who began its construction in the 12th century) and a multinational, century and a half long, co-dependent relationship with human waves of scholars and researchers.

For Helen and Scott -- Here's Haley

2007-07-08T12:09:00.001-07:00

2007-07-08T01:19:00.001-07:00

2007-07-08T01:14:00.001-07:00

2007-07-08T01:06:00.001-07:00

Angkor -- Ta Prohm

2007-07-08T01:03:00.000-07:00

I'm now in Phnom Penh, and have been here a few days, but it's just today that I have time to get caught up in reporting what's been going on. The last day or so in Siem Reap was marked ever-multiplying internet problems, so I lapsed into radio silence for while. I've got reliable (mostly) access here in Phom Penh, but have been too busy.

So... where was I? Ah, yes, Angkor. We spent the entire day of July 3 at the temples at Angkor, departing from our hotel as eager and curious little faculty tourists, bubbling with questions about history and religion, environmental justice, the politics of preservation and restoration, and determined to somehow experience the sights in some way that would distinguish us from the mass of other tourists collecting their photo of Angkor Wat like a merit badge. We returned to the hotel a collection of limp, sweaty, itchy heaps, each of us probably privately thinking that if we could live a long time without trudging through the heat and humidity to another pile of stone in the jungle. After a shower and a beer, however, I was much keener on the whole Angkor experience, though I did not use my free day to go see more of them.

Built from about the 8th to the 14th century, the temples at Angkor all draw from the same lexicon of religious symbols and architectural features. And yet, there is surprising variety among them as well. They are, like Cambodians say, "same-same, different," which means, according to the astonishing 12 year-old girls peddling books we talked to last night, have the same generic features, but differing in details. Two American women, for example, one tall and one short, are same-same, different.

Here's the first temple we visited, Ta Prohm (begun in 1186). The hook on this site is that it's supposed been left to look like it did when the French "discovered" it in the jungle in the 1860s, so it has collapsed galleries and these huge trees with root systems all entwined with the stones (it's the one in the "teaser" picture.) French archeologists called this particular tree the "fromage," supposedly because it looks like a soft cheese melting. At least that's what our very smart Cambodian guide told us. I think they were just hallucinating in the heat.

2007-07-08T00:59:00.001-07:00

2007-07-08T00:56:00.001-07:00

A Teaser from Angkor

2007-07-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

Pictures from Siem Reap Old Market and town

2007-07-05T21:42:00.001-07:00

2007-07-05T21:38:00.001-07:00

2007-07-05T21:35:00.000-07:00

Yum...tasty baskets of insects

2007-07-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

Cambodia 101: Siem Reap

2007-07-05T01:28:00.000-07:00

Finally, a few free minutes to report on what’s been going on for the past few days. When I told people I was going to Cambodia, I often heard about what a great country it is to visit, mostly from people who had never been there. It’s very popular destination on the Lonely Planet-crowd and the wealthy retiree circuits. And Siem Reap is the place everyone has to come to in order to see Angkor, so it’s a town that caters to tourists of both stripes: huge new luxury hotels built with South Korean money and blocks of ramshackle guest houses and backpacker hotels, cheap Indian restaurants and gussied up French cafes. But this Cambodia is apparently a complete mirage. Yes, it is an extraordinary place, but also a much more complicated one. It is great, if by “great” you mean an incredibly cheap, indescribably poor country where tourists can get anything they want – legal or not, but ordinary Cambodians often live without running water, electricity, health care, and higher education. Where the streets fill with water after a rain because the sewers don’t work and, thanks to the Khmer Rouge, there aren’t any trained engineers left who know how to repair them. It’s a county where all social services are provided by NGOs, and where basic ideas of public safety are so retrograde that today, on my fifth day here, I still couldn’t tell you with any degree of certainty what side of the road Cambodians drive on. Still, what is great about Cambodia, is its extraordinary resilience and the progress, incremental though it is, in rebuilding every institution in the country that was absolutely decimated by the Khmer Rouge between 1970-1975, barely 15 years after gaining independence from the colonial occupation. Despite the weight and tragedy of the last 50 years of Cambodian history, however, it’s an amazing place, and I’m barely able to process its wonders and frustrations.

Our hotel is just across the street from the muddy river, and all day long the street hosts a procession of motorbikes with any number of people and piles of goods on them; monks in saffron robes walking to and from the monastery, smoking and shading themselves from the sun with umbrellas; tuk-tuks, the covered motorized rickshaw contraption that takes visitors from one place to another for a dollar or two; school children on bicycles; and a variety of cars, trucks, and buses, some with the steering wheel on the right and some with it on the left. I had been amazed that I hadn’t seen any terrible crashes, and then I found out when we visited the Belgian NGO Handicap International, that as many injuries and dismemberments that landmines and UXOs (unexploded ordnance) cause, as of 2006, road accidents have become the leading cause. I’m not at all surprised. Yesterday, on the road back from the floating villages of Tonle Sap, I saw a whole family moving their straw-stilt house (they move their houses to higher ground during the rainy season) on the back of an ancient pickup, and when I turned to watch them after they passed, I saw a boy no older than 6, barefoot, straddling what looked to be the trailer hitch. But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit.

It’s easy for us to walk or tuk-tuk our way across one of the bridges to town and browse – well, that’s not really the correct word for the sensory overload and cramped jostling – the old market, a covered, dark, hot, smelly, claustrophobic hallucination of a square block souk-like place full of textiles, jewelry, dried eel, lotus pods, pirated books and CDs, sausage, hot bowls of fish amok (the local Khmer dish), with children hectoring you to buy their wares, old women sleeping on their piles of produce, and young men driving their Honda Dream motorbikes straight through the aisles. Today, our last day in this town, was the first time I was able to negotiate the market’s stimuli and seductions well enough to make choices and buy a few things to take home with me. And still, I’m not entirely sure what I bought.

In Siem Reap, Cambodia

2007-06-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

After nearly 40 hours of travel, I've made it to my hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia. No mishaps along the way, I'm pleased to report. And boy, howdy, is it ever hot and humid here.

More later when I can figure out how to connect to the internet in my room.

Lone Star State of Mind

2007-06-28T17:27:00.002-07:00

Here is where I live in Austin, Texas.

Angkor Wat

2007-06-28T17:27:00.001-07:00

I wish I could take credit for these pictures of the temples, but I had a major camera mishap that day. Truthfully, it was a brain mishap, but I'll blame it on the camera. These photographs were takes by Stacy Kowtko (Spokane Community College). She's a much better photographer than I could hope to be, but still, these don't come close to capturing the magnificent scale of the building.

Departure

2007-06-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

Early tomorrow morning I'll get on the plane and start this adventure. After a 12-hour layover in Bangkok, I'll arrive in Siem Reap, Cambodia at 1:00 Sunday afternoon. I'm just about finished packing and worrying about packing so I'll take a few minutes to give you a preview of my itinerary. I think I've got everything: passport, visa, malaria pills, uncharacteristically demure long skirts, insect repellent, money belt, camera, ibuprofen, traveler's checks, and a big stack of crisp American one and five dollar bills because that's apparently the preferred currency in Cambodia.

I'll be meeting the other people in my seminar (13 of them) in Seam Reap, which means, according to the Lonely Planet, "Siamese Defeated," certainly a less than tactful name for a city so close to Thailand. In the northwestern quadrant of Cambodia, it's the nearest city to the temples at Angkor, which we'll spend a couple of days touring. We'll also visit the floating villages on the Tonle Sap. On July 5 we'll fly to Phnom Penh, which is apparently a lovely city with lots of French architecture and very good food. There, however, our activities take a more somber turn as we have lectures and films on the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and then visit the notorious Tuol Sleng prison and the Killing Fields themselves.

On July 9, we leave Cambodia behind and fly to Ho Chi Minh City, where we'll be for the next 5 days. I'm particularly thrilled about cocktails on the roof of the Rex Hotel, where it'll be hard not to succumb to the dreamy idylls of "Indochine" or "Nam-stalgia," as British journalist Robert Templer calls the two most common misperceptions of Vietnam. Other highlights include visits to the former National Liberation Front guerrilla base in Sac Forest and a wildlife preserve.

The last phase of the trip begins when the seminar ends on the morning of July 13. I'll fly to the old imperial capital of Hue and will stay there for a couple of days. I've arranged a guide and driver to take me to military sites in and around the DMZ, and I may also take a trip to the town of Hoi An, which is famous for its textiles and its cooking. On Jul7 15 I'll continue north to Hanoi by plane. Why not take the train? Because despite its glorious name, The Reunification Express, the thing travels at an average speed of 48 mph! I'm all for authenticity and traveling like a local, but that's just too much to ask. I have a side trip planned from Hanoi to the village of Sapa, close to the Chinese border and Vietnam's highest peak, the 10,000 ft. hilariously named Mt. Fan Si Pan(ts). Okay, so I added those last two letters. I'll get to visit small villages of at least three different hill tribes, the peoples that the French lumped into one category and called Montegnards.

My trip wraps up with a day tour of Ha Long Bay, a place we've seen in countless movies, no doubt, with its limestone karsts rising out of the ocean and topped with mist. I wish I had time to do a kayak trip, but I don't think I will. I'll be back in Austin late on 20th of July.

So, that's the outline. I have no idea how closely things will hew to this plan, but that's the whole point of travel, after all. Next post will be from Cambodia.

2007-05-07T14:41:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog. Here's where I'll write about my trip to Cambodia and Vietnam. The first adventure comes next week with a visit to the travel clinic where I suspect I will have to endure some ghastly innoculations.