Getting My Feet Wet

As I begin my fourth week here in Da Nang, the pace of things has definitely mellowed as I’ve settled in. The bureaucracies of getting the donated equipment shipped here has been a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, and the case load at the hospital has been relatively low recently, so I’ve reached out in a few new directions to help where I can outside the hospital. There is a great organization here called East Meets West that works in a variety of sectors, including health, education and community development, and I am going to be helping them translate a medical catalogue they are distributing. Through one of the members at EMW, we also managed to set up another English class in the evenings for people who can’t attend the one at the hospital. And lastly, I’m helping a friend of a friend find online in-roads into western markets for his tourism business. The first thing I told him was to change the title of their historical tour package on sexuality in religion from “Sex Training Tour” to something slightly less misleading.

And though things have been a bit mellower over all, this past week has still certainly had its exciting moments, usually involving something breaking. For instance we had our first power outage the other day. Though, admittedly, dinner by candle light was relatively benign. Less so, however, was breaking through the sidewalk when I was running the other day. I was jogging down the sidewalk at a good clip and chose the wrong slab of concrete to place my weight on because it literally cracked in half beneath me breaking into the sewer. I can’t say exactly when, but some time ago, around when I was learning to walk and developing the concept of object permanence, I just started taking the ground for granted. No longer…  (And, yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.)

What really takes the cake though has got to be when my water heater broke, sprayed boiling water all over my balcony, and then slowly proceeded to flood my room—around 1 am, no less. This meant spending a few hours on Tuesday relocating all my stuff to the adjacent room, and placing everything that was on the floor out to dry. The silver lining was that my new room had a queen bed and was closer to the internet room. However, as a very wise man once said, every silver lining has a touch of grey, mine in this case being the water slowly seeping through the wall and/or out of my new bathroom’s plumbing causing me to change rooms again. My guess is that the new leak had something to do with the “repairs” they did that tore up three walls, left me showerless for three days and resulted in the new water heater visibly leaking.

It’s hardly been all bad though. When I was driving across town the other night I found myself driving past a field scattered with rows of hanging fluorescent lights. It was incredibly beautiful in an eerie, but still pleasant kind of way, and I’ve seen more on the edges of town as I’ve driven around since. I learned that these are actually fields of paperwhite flowers, grown for the Tet Holiday, i.e. the Vietnamese New Year. The lights are used to influence the lifecycles of the flowers to try to get them to bloom on exactly the right night of the holiday.

I also made it to the beach this week. On the one day it was really sunny this week I bought myself some sunscreen and a 70¢ beach towel, and went bodysurfing in some of the more wonderfully temperate waters I’ve swam in in quite some time.  This week I also broke my record for the most impressive thing I’ve seen hauled on a motorbike (in person anyway). The record was previously held by a Peruvian family of seven, but the new title goes to a guy I saw carrying a 5’ refrigerator strapped vertically to the passenger seat of his bike.

For those of you interested in international politics, I also picked up this cute Vietnamese phrase, “Russia says everything, but does nothing. America speaks, and it is so. China says nothing, but does everything.”

My favorite moment, though, has got to be translating the YouTube sensation, “Charlie Bit Me”, for my English class. I don’t think anything says globalization quite like using someone’s smart phone to bust out one of the world’s most celebrated YouTube videos as a lesson aid for an English class halfway around the world. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hilarious video documenting a young boy’s personal struggle with operant conditioning. I would highly recommend watching it—immediately: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM.)
                Finally, I am quite pleased to say that I managed to find a real Thanksgiving dinner to partake in. Bread of Life, the restaurant staffed by the deaf I mentioned earlier, had a great set menu for the holiday so I decided to bring a handful of people from my English class. We had talked about Thanksgiving that day in class, but that was virtually their only exposure to the holiday, and everyone was excited to try the food. They had never heard of any of the dishes before, but liked most of them, though the size and density of the meal was far beyond the normal Vietnamese diet. 
                We also wound up eating with a modest looking, but deceptively interesting, granite exporter, who was there by himself. He was of Vietnamese descent, but was in fact born in Paris, raised everywhere from Nigeria to Singapore, and attended college at UC Davis. Speaking fluent Vietnamese, English and French, he was a great person to talk to about languages, though he also said such a vagrant childhood left him with few permanent friends. I definitely hope I'll get the chance to see him again.