Visit to a Fish Processing Factory

Today as part of my work, really it was more of a learning experience for me, I had a tour of a fish processing factory. This factory takes catfish raised in captivity in the Mekong Delta and processes them into frozen fillets for mainly the American market but also for South America and Europe. It was extremely interesting and also stomach turning, as I got to walk through the whole factory and see every stage of production.

 1. Conveyor belts move buckets of fish from boats into the factory.

 2. Fish enter the filleting room.

 3. Workers "fillet" the fish, cutting away the head, tail and spine. They are paid based on how many fish they fillet and were working with amazing speed. My supervisor told me that a worker in a factory like this will earn from 2,450,000 VND ($115) to 5,000,000 VND ($236) a month based on how much fish they process and how much fish is exported. This is within the average range of a salary in Vietnam.

 4. Workers further trim the fillets, removing skin, fat etc. They are also paid based on how much fish they clean.

 5. Fillets are checked for quality and imperfections are removed.

 6. Fillets are sorted into "yellow" and "white" as white fillets are more expensive.

 7. Fillets are frozen in a flash freezer within twenty minutes.

8. The final product! Fillets are packaged directly for supermarkets or packed bulk for restaurants. Our guide told us that it takes 80 kgs of fresh fish to produce 40 kgs of frozen fillets but that the other parts of the fish will be used by other factories to make other products.

The experience was extremely eye opening because even though I had an idea of how food processing and factories functioned it was very different to walk through the whole process. I think one of my biggest reflections after this trip was how strange our world food system really is - it is crazy to think of all that fish that is frozen and shipped across the ocean to American supermarkets.

It's not beginning to feel much like Christmas...

A Christmas tree - Vietnamese style!

Being a Tourist vs Living Abroad

Having now been in Tra Vinh for about a month and a half, I have settled in a routine, we have become regulars at some food places, I can buy things from the marker with relative ease, navigate traffic and so on. So this weekend it was an interesting experience to travel to Can Tho, the Mekong Delta's biggest city overnight.

After checking into the hotel and stuffing ourselves with Indian food (oh the advantages of big cities) we went to a pretty typical tourist market to do a bit of shopping and browsing. As in most tourist destinations, the sellers' focus was on the sale. Never mind what you actually wanted to buy, if you showed even the slightest bit of interest in something, bam there was someone going "sister, many pattern, many colour!" Having been to many touristy destinations before, these sellers weren't really aggressive but it led me to reflect on the judgements that tourists can, and do, draw from these limited interactions with "locals". I do not claim to understand Vietnamese culture, not in the slightest, but I have met so many warm and friendly people here who aren't just trying to hawk their goods.

Tourism is a catch-22 in this way. Often people travel in the search for "authentic" experiences of far off cultures and all they find is a bunch of people that want to sell them goods made in China. At the same time, it is Western influence and tourism that enable these types of markets to exist. There is undeniably elements of Tra Vinh that are Westernized, or globalized, but in decidedly Vietnamese ways.

As I wandered around the market I also reflected how much amusement my three best phrases in Vietnamese ("bao nhieu" - how much?, "mac qua" - too expensive!, and "com tut" - something along the lines of 'bad' or 'i don't like', also spelled incorrectly.) generated. I wondered if the laughs were due more to my butchering of a very complex tonal language or the surprise of this apparent tourist who could ask "how much" and haggle in Vietnamese.

Rock Star Status

While I have become more accustomed to being stared at in the street and people of all ages shouting "hello" just because I am foreign, I don't think I will every be comfortable being a guest of honour. I have had the opportunity to be a guest of honour on many occasions but yesterday I had an experience that I found both troubling and humbling.
As part of my work here I am working to start a small scale project (though it keeps growing and appears to be rather complex) to have university students volunteering regularly at a local orphanage. This project has obvious two-fold benefits. The orphans have a chance to interact with and learn from students outside of the orphanage as well as learn some new skills such as sports or arts and the TVU (Tra Vinh University) students will be able to build skills like leadership and self-confidence. Part of this project has been to visit orphanages and yesterday a pre-school. I visited the pre-school with my supervisor and around 8 TVU students. This is a pre-school that is run by a volunteer teacher for around 40 children whose parents cannot send them to a government pre-school - fees at this school are 30,000 VND ($1.50) a week which includes daily lunch. This sounds very cheap but is a lot for these parents. However, it also means that the school does not have much money to work with.

As I arrived I had 42 small pairs of eyes trained directly on me. This continued as I handed out paper, crayons and pastels and explained they could colour a picture. As the children slowly started to draw more and stare at me less one of the more bold TVU students approached me and introduced himself. After chatting for a bit I asked him "What made you come out to this school today?" and he replied very honestly "to see you". This was not the answer I expected, I had been thinking something along the lines of "to see how I could make a difference for these kids" or simply "to see a school in a particularly needy area". Not to see me. Me? Really? Not knowing how to respond I think I laughed awkwardly.

As the children finished drawing and we handed out some cakes and I asked a lot of questions I thought our visit was coming to an end and we would be leaving soon. Not the case. My supervisor said to me "they have prepared a meal and want us to stay to eat". Having just discussed that many of the children were small probably due to malnourishment and also that I had a celebratory dinner to attend in two hours, what I really wanted was to have them serve the children this food tomorrow for an extra hearty noon meal. After what seemed like a life time of awkward back and forth and waiting around it became apparent that we were not going to be able to leave until we - I - ate. Stuck between a cultural rock and a hard place I gave in and ate - and drank an unpleasant amount of rice wine. Rice wine, and drinking traditions, deserve their own post but basically someone forces you to share a shot of what might as well be rubbing alcohol. And then someone else. And then someone else. And then the first person again. Finally once we had finished we said our good byes and thank yous and went on our way.

As we drove back, I guess I was particularly quiet (not my usual barrage of "what is that" "what are they doing" etc) because my supervisor asked if I was ok. I replied yes I was just thinking about how so many people who don't have much money are so generous while so many people with a lot of money don't want to give anything.

While I think my "rock star" status is troubling because I think that putting foreigners up on pedestals and expecting them to know all the answers and solve all the problems is a very problematic mindset for development, it can be very humbling when someone without a lot of money yet clearly such a big heart offers the simplest signs of human generosity - a meal.

Since coming to Vietnam there has been three planned power all day outages on campus - from 7:30am - 5pm. I have been here now for 5 weeks so this represents a significant amount of time that work is simply not able to be completed. On top of the planned power outages there are also frequent brief outages for 10-15 minutes. Since work is almost entirely done on the computer and relying heavily on the internet this makes continuing work essentially impossible. Further complicating the situation here is that much of the electricity is hydroelectric meaning dams already and continue to change water levels and flows which affects much of the population who rely on waterways for transportation, income and are a way of life. Not to mention the environmental effects on fish populations etc. This has led me to the paradox of needing to rely on technology to keep up with the world while lacking infrastructure to support technology there by preventing the ability to keep up. 

Visiting an Orphange

This evening I had the opportunity to go with two other volunteers to visit an orphanage in Tra Vinh. We only stayed a little over an hour and simply sat on the cement outside helping the kids make bracelets out of string and beads we brought (supplied by Lisa who unfortunately couldn't come). However, this was a very powerful experience for me for two reasons. First of all it reminded me of my time spent in South Africa as well as volunteering I did in Toronto working with kids because it really brought me back to the idea that kids, no matter where, have the same curiosity about life that so many adults lose at some point. And that kids, no matter the circumstances, want to play and laugh, even if you don't speak the same language. It also reminded me of why I was interested in studying international development in the first place, so much of international development is caught up in processes, bureaucracy, fancy meetings and everything else that prevents concrete actions from being taken. So often the very human face of poverty and international development is lost in the the process of "doing development". The fact that those millions of people, are just that, real people with their own stories and individual lives.
While we only got to stay at the orphanage for a short time, I hope to be able to return regularly to do activities with the kids, so if anyone has ideas for simple games or crafts to do with children that don't speak any English (so no explanations needed), post them in the comments.

Quick Thought

Today I went to the supermarket with another volunteer and while we were leaving one part of the store, we turned around to a women holding an iphone up to snap our picture. Being one of very few foreigners in Tra Vinh (when we see white people we also stare) I've adjusted to getting a lot of looks and a lot of "hellos" but this women did neither. She just held up her phone in our faces, didn't make eye contact, didn't smile and didn't say anything, she just snapped a photo. In our shock and also lack of Vietnamese my reaction was something of a mix of a glare and a arm waving of "what the heck" as we walked away but the whole experience felt rather degrading. I am already conscience of not snapping photos of people without their permission but this really made me reflect how people must feel when someone sticks a camera in their face like their in the zoo. 

Adventures

I just got the afternoon off to wait for people to come and clean my air conditioner so I decided to post a  few pictures here. 

This is me outside of a Khmer pagoda, of the Khmer people who are descents of Cambodia, in Tra Vinh, there are many pagodas in the city of a variety of types of Buddhism but the Khmer pagodas are definitely the most elaborate. 

This is the weirdest (and most disgusting) thing I have eaten so far in Vietnam (and I think my life). It's an egg with a partially developed duck fetus inside. I've been eating meat while I'm here in keeping with trying everything. With this egg however I met my match. The taste was ok but the fact that there was clearly a duck in the egg was more than I could handle. I've always had a bit of a fear of those funny bloody bits you sometimes find in eggs so I wasn't too surprised at how gross I found this delicacy. 

Here I am participating in a tug of war competitions that the departments at Tra Vinh University participated in to celebrate Teacher's Day. It was pretty funny and my team won our first time but lost the second. 

This is a decoration in Ba Om pond as a part of the celebrations for Ok Om Bok - a Khmer festival to celebrate the moon and a successful rice harvest. The festival was to me something of a mix between a country fair and something I've never seen before. There was paper lanterns, a parade, a concert, a parade, a ladyboy performance and more. Being the only foreigners there we got interviewed for television twice (supposed to air tomorrow morning) and generally a lot of stares and hellos.

Later on in the evening of Ok Om Bok some of us decided to try and find the pagoda where the paper lanterns were being launched from. We did and when we arrived (quite late in the evening, maybe 11pm) they were almost finished but invited us to help launch the final lanterns. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget. The monks were very welcoming and made for a magical end to an already very cool evening.

This is all of the "volunteers" (we're all here for different reasons but it makes it easier) except for Cherry wearing our ao dais for Teacher's Day. From left to right: Lisa, Alica, me, Vincent, Laura, Tayce and Ashlee. Everyone is from Canada except for Vincent and Laura who are American.

Wearing my "ao dai" for Teacher's Day celebrations, with my supervisor. 

New Fashions. 

Introduction!

For those of you that read my "Summer in South Africa" blog, this is the long awaited sequel! Some of my fans (my mom, aunt and gramma) have expressed particular interest in there being a sequel. So I'm going to try and update semi regularly with pictures, stories etc.

In this post I will try to answer a few of the initial questions that I'm asked when I tell people I'm going to Vietnam for 6 months. Firstly is almost always "what will you be doing in Vietnam?" Well I will be doing an internship as a Food Security Specialist at Tra Vinh University in the Southern Vietnam. This internship is co-ordinated by the Marine Institute at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland and is funded by CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency). While there is a lot to be said of how CIDA runs its international development programs (and the concept of development itself) I feel that this will be a valuable experience and it is hard to be accurately critical of something you have only discussed in classrooms. So here goes my foray into mainstream development!

Now the next question I've been asked a lot is "what is food security?" My favourite guess so far is that I will be standing outside of warehouses of veggies with baseball bats... Well, not really... food security is a complex term and has different definitions depending on whose defining it. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (http://www.fao.org) defines food security as existing when people have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and enable an active and healthy life. So my position, as I've come to understand, but I'm sure it will be somewhat different when I arrive, is a combination of research, fieldwork and organizing workshops on food security in the local context.

I will do my best to update regularly with photos, stories, thoughts etc. Check back soon! (but not before October 30th since I don't fly out till then)