Manners?

The longer I am in Vietnam the more I notice more and more societal habits that are very different to Canada and the West in general. Seeing the totally different daily habits around me reminds me of the phrase "taken for granted assumptions" which came up frequently during one of my international development classes. Basically my upbringing in Canada has led me to take for granted a certain type of manners, which is minimally to non-existent in Vietnam. The following is a list of some of the more extreme habits (from my perspective) I've observed.

1. Never waiting in line. I am continually reminded of this each time I patiently wait for a bathroom, the cashier in the supermarket, to order food etc. I subconsciously wait only to realize that my turn is never going to come unless I jostle to the front and make it physically impossible for someone to pass me.

2. Picking one's nose in public. Does this need any elaboration? People just stick their finger up their nose whenever and where ever it suits them.

3. Men and children can pee anywhere. When your kid has to pee sometimes you have very little time to find a bathroom. The solution here? Just pull their pants down and find a grass patch, the edge of the road, where ever and let them squat. Same goes for men.

4. Playing music out loud on public transport. If its a trip of any significant amount of time the bus is guaranteed to be playing some time of music video or at least the radio, yet so many people are compelled to add their own soundtrack by way of an mp3 player or phone. Naturally everyone on the bus MUST be dying to hear your musical selections, especially if they include Gangam Style!

This isn't meant to sound snarky - I can see where some of these habits come from, many families still live communally in small houses so the sense of "private" and "public" isn't defined in the same way it is in the West. Except the lines thing, that drives me crazy.

Travels

Buddha on Marble Mountain, Da Nang, Vietnam

Beautiful tourist trap - Hoi An, Vietnam

Touristy photo with giant wooden fish

Chinese assembly hall in Hoi An

3D mosaic on Marble Mountain

Just moving a buffalo along the beach - Koh Rong, Cambodia

Breathtaking Long Beach, Koh Rong, Cambodia

Long Beach, Koh Rong Cambodia

The Lunar New Year holidays gave me a chance to do some more exploring as well as witness the madness that is Vietnam during Tet. I've been very poor at taking photos, more and more often choosing to simply take the scenery in myself but here are some bits and pieces of my most recent travels.

You know you've been in Asia a while when blasting techno music outside your office at 3pm is only a mild surprise...

Life Pro Tips for Vietnam

Some of my observations after 2.5 months of living in Vietnam, enjoy!

1. It's not important whether or not there's insects in your house (there always is), it's only important whether they will bite you or not!
2. In traffic, size is the most important factor determining in right of way. Therefore: bus, truck and car passes motorbike, motorbike passes bicycle, bicycle passes... people walking, people pushing/pulling large carts, cows...
3. If you have unusual body modifications (such as facial piercings and tattoos) you will be pointed at and possibly touched on a daily basis.
4. Most events start late but if someone's coming to meet you, they will start calling you repeatedly the minute they arrive.
5. The description "same, same" means the two things being discussed are not even remotely the same.
6. People in Vietnam are significantly smaller than your average North American and size of everything (chairs, clothes, ceilings etc) reflect this fact.
7. Restaurant service that would be considered non-existent in North America is the norm, shouting at the waiter is expected and no one leaves tips.
8. The sun is an evil enemy to be feared. Therefore one should cover all exposed bits of skin, typically with face masks, jeans and sweaters in 30 degree heat. If you wear a t-shirt it will be concluded that you are strangely fearless of this evil enemy.
9. Vietnamese people can sleep anywhere, at anytime. It is not considered lazy to nap on the job. Some people, such as guards, have beds at their posts for this exact purpose.

...more to come as I think of them!

Obssessions with Excess

I recently read another article about how much food is wasted world wide: this one stating almost half of all food produced! The article brings up many good points but one that stuck with me is the common cultural practice of serving guests more food than they can possibly eat. This is a practice that can be observed the world over, from Thanksgiving dinners in North America to every dinner party I've attended here in Vietnam, everyone wants you to overeat - and then some!

But where does this custom come from? In North America obesity is already a huge health concern, as it is becoming in many other parts of the world as well but more interestingly to me is the fact that when you state "I'm not hungry" (especially in Vietnam, but I'm sure you, dear reader, have observed this throughout your travels) suddenly your judgement is no good and your word holds no value.

Everyone's been put in those uncomfortable social situations where they have to eat when they really don't want to and are not hungry so why does this practice continue? Why can't we, the advanced people we are, accept that sometimes someone just isn't hungry and it isn't because there's anything wrong with the food or the person offering it but they just don't feel like eating at at moment? I understand that in many cases people do not have much to give other than food and it is a common ground that all humans share - we all must eat, but we have the biological ability to become full as well!

Northern Vietnam

  Some highlights from my two week trip to Hanoi, Sapa and Cat Ba Island.

Christmas decorations in Hanoi

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum

Visiting a village outside Hanoi

Village outside Hanoi

Trekking in Sapa - terraced rice paddies

Sapa

Cat Cat village outside Sapa

Market in Sapa

Two day trek in rubber boots!

Kayaking in Cat Ba

Our boat in Cat Ba

View from Cat Ba

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)