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.