It had always been a dream of mine to go on a mission trip and I'm glad I had realised it before the end of 2011. I sincerely want to contribute to making this world a better place for us to live in. The divide between the rich and poor is ever increasing. Within myself, there is a calling for which I know I want to serve - I want to be an active global citizen and help spread the love to the less privileged.
Supposedly, I and a friend of mine had wanted to join this international service trip together. Due to mum's fear of her child suffering hardship, my friend withdrew, and I was expected to go without a friend. Things didn't turn out too bad just because I knew no one there as there are a few of the rest joined alone too. One said she simply wanted to join in this trip to help and so signed up for it while another wanted to get an experience of OCIP. Perhaps I should have known that the participants of this trip must be kind-hearted people, hence they joined. Duh.. So my initial worries of bring unable to make buddies during the trip since I was alone was redundant. The people are very friendly and I felt at ease with them.
Most of the participants are from business school. I had no idea why. 3 others are from my faculty. 1 from Chemical engineering. I shared a room with 2 others, both from business school, one in year 2 and another in year 3. So, being the youngest, they took good care of me. I am really thankful to them! For the first 10 days, I had no Vietnam dong with me as I had not changed my USD to dong, as such I couldn't buy anything whenever we had a supermarket break. My roomies were fast to let me know that they could lend me money first if I want to buy something, and reminded me not to stand on ceremony on this matter. Even though I was not prepared to accept their loan, I really appreciate their offer. My year 2 roomie even wanted to me to keep a note first in case I want to buy something but I returned to him as, well, I still find it embarrassing to accept his kind offer.
To add on to the list of my year 2 roomie's kindness, he peeled off the shell of a prawn for me because he knew that I was reluctant to dirty my hands peeling off the shell and would rather not eat the prawn. How did he know that? I told him frankly when he asked me why I did not eat the prawns. I did try to reject the peeled prawn when he offered me but I understood that he wouldn't allow me to reject it, so I ate the prawn he peeled for me. He asked me if the prawn tastes nice. I answered him that it tastes nice, of course, especially when it was peeled from a friend whom you spent only a few days with together and was willing to do something for you when he could just choose not to bother about this small matter.
Let me blog about what I did over at Dong Thap province, Cao Lanh city of Vietnam. From the information given to us, the suburban ward in which we lived in during the project period has an area of almost 830 hectares, populated with 11 000 people from 2 500 households. 43.4% of the housholds were considered poor. The people earned their living through agriculture and small business. Indeed, on our way to lunch, we had to walked 10 minutes and passed by households which are selling snacks and toys just outside their houses. I guessed that is how they earned extra penny.
On my first day in the class with the kids aged between 3 and 5, they welcomed us by showering us with generous kisses and passionate hugs! I was truly overwhelmed by their hospitality! One of them even aimed at my lips such that I had to move my face away and stop them from charging towards me with my arm stretched! Nonetheless, I was happy that they accepted us so readily and made us feel welcomed. They did a superb job on that! I had forgotten to mention that while we had learnt to say hello in Vientamese - Xin Chao, the kids were already repeatedly saying 'Hello!' to us before we stepped into the classrooms! We should bear in mind that Vietnamese only starts to learn English at Primary 3 and thus the kids totally had no English background. How enthusiastic they were to our visit!
Most of the time in the classroom, I would sit on the floor with the kids while one of us would teach them alphabets at the front of the classroom. The kids love to lie their heads on my laps or to sit in front of me when I sat cross-legged. I guess they were curious about us foreigners who would be visiting them for 7 school days. I am proud to say that my class is the only class that had successfully learnt all 26 letters and sang the ABC song out of the total 4 classes. Teaching them could be tiring but their enthusiastic response of repeating the letter after me kept me focused on teaching them and achieving our goals of teaching them the English alphabets.
Sadly, language barrier was a big obstacle. The kids were all enthusiastically telling me something but I do not understand at all, only able to patronize them with a nod and a smile when they finshed speaking. Luckily, hand signals are universal and kids do understand what we are trying to convey. So yea, hand signals are our main communication tool. For instance, during the time for the kids to play when class ended and were waiting for their parents to pick them up, some play ball and asked us to play with them. In a game of throwing a ball into a basket, we would use hand signal to ask them to stand further away from the basket before throwing, to increase the challenge and fun. They gladly follow what we asked them to, as they understood us.
Over there, I learnt a few Vietnames that are useful during class. For example, ngoi xuong means to sit down, do len means to speak louder and im lang means to keep quiet. Also, I learnt that in order to signal the kids to respond or to repeat what you had said, you must say "1, 2, 3" before they will respond, in Vietnamse of course. So "1, 2, 3" in Vietnamese is "Mot, hai, ba", and you can be assured of a response after saying that :) Besides, we learnt 2 Vietnamese kids songs and we sang with the kids. They were much better than us when it comes to singing these Vietnamese songs; the easiest line for me is "Mot hai ba, mot hai ba, mot hai ba bon nam sau bai", which means "1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7". It is not true that only we are teaching them, the kids teach us, or rather tried to teach us Vietnamese letters too from their workbook. We tried to joke with them by pointing to a tiger in the book, saying that it is "gong meow", which we know that it means cat in Vietnamese, and the kid would be enthusiastic to tell us it is not gong meow, and tell us the correct words which I could not remember. Haha...
Besides doing teaching, we are also involved in renovating classrooms. We did scraping of the old blue paint off the walls, repainted the walls with pink paint and cemented the gaps between the tiles with white cement. The construction could get boring at times but the kids were my motivation to keep myself going and try to meet our objectives of renovating 2 classrooms and constructing 1 new classroom. Really, what we can teach the kids is very limited due to language barrier. The classrooms are we could really contribute and they serve a greater purpose for the kids will be using them - a better learning environment for them. It is through the construction that we did something concrete for the kids, rather than teaching them ABC. Having said that, that does not mean the teaching is redundant for the kids do come towards me and read for me A - Z and 1 - 10 in English, just to interact with me. This shows that they learnt something from us too.
On the last day, the kids kissed us, again. I guessed this is how the kids show their hospitality and appreciation towards us. I must really thank the locals there for their acceptance of us to share our knowledge with them. What made me happiest is that my favourite kid kissed my forearm thrice when I sat beside him, purposely since he is my favourite, while attending the completion ceremony of the renovation and construction of classrooms. Hee! Kiss in Vietnamese is "hon". Ususally we would point our fingers to our face, asking the asking the kids to "hon" - trying to tell the kids to kiss our cheeks. But my favourite, without my "instigation", kissed my forearm, thrice! That would show that he appreciates me for being there, or maybe he knew that he is my favourite. That could be obvious given that I took pictures with him almost every day. Haha!
But, my favourite cried on our last day of seeing each other because he did not receive the gift from YMCA Vietnam as there are not enough gifts for all the kids. He stood still, not responding to whatever we do to make him smile. Moments later, a tear slid down his smooth cheek. I quickly wipe his tear away with my thumb across his cheek. I only wanted him to be happy and smile since it is the last day and last time that I would see him already. I wanted to buy something for him to make him feel better from not having to receive the gift. The problem was I had no dong then. Fortunately, my year 3 roomie was nearby and he passed me 20 000 dong to me so that I could buy some snacks for my favourite from the shop just outside the kindergarten. So i held his litte hand and led him to the shop, carried him up and tried to ask him to point to which snack he would like to have. I was relieved when he responded by stretching his arm out and pointed to me which snack he want. So eventually, I bought 2 snacks for him. Still, he did not smile but I was glad that he accepted my offer of wanting to cheer him up by signalling to me which snacks he want. I felt that he understood my kind intentions although unsure of whether he could understand the insufficient number of gifts to be distributed. Well, after all, he is still a kid. So it is perfectly normal for him to feel sad and cry over not receiving a gift. While there was one other kid who cried out loud, my favourite, surprisingly, stood there motionlessly and we could only tell that he was sad, too, by being in tears silently. Perhaps he is the kind of personality which would endure silently rather than making a big fuss over something he feels sad about.
I hope that there would be a day to come such that we could fly back and visit the kids again!
So there are people out there waiting for our assistance, in terms of living standards. It is not quality of life I am talking about. I feel that we ought to help whenever we could. It is a sad phenomenon when people are so engrossed in their pursuit of luxurious lifestyle and completely forget about fellow friends in low living standard conditions. Of course, this does not mean that being financially poor don't feel happy. In the same way, neither does having mountains of fortune necessary make one happy. The level of happiness and the figure in the bank account does not correlate. The point is that we all should have basic liveable condition and the rest is bonus.
Give wherever we can. You will find that actually we receive much more. :)
