A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
All is well with the world -- the ladies at my sidewalk noodle soup place returned from their Tet holiday yesterday. I am now writing with a warm chicken-noodley feeling in my stomach.

However, my week (apart from meeting the alarmingly intense Lebanese man who "really really likes" me) has been incredibly boring, so I'm going to share a story from the Lost Month of Lefthandedness.

This is another Mr. Lanh-related story -- for those who don't religiously read this website, Mr. Lanh is the HCMC Department of Education official who ropes me into various English-teaching related activities, usually for the low-income students taught at his evening schools.

During the first week of January, I got one of those cryptic calls from Mr. Lanh. As I may have expressed earlier, all of his calls are basically cryptic due to the combination of his appalling accent and the vagaries of the mobile phone system here. Plus he inevitably calls when I'm walking down a busy street or in a crowded restaurant. Come to think of it, there just aren't very many quiet places in Saigon, so maybe it's not his fault. Anyway, suffice it to say that all Mr. Lanh's calls require a dangerous mix of guesswork and blind agreement.

His request this time seemed simple -- he appeared to be asking me to go somewhere on January 9th. That much I got. What I didn't get, despite repeated inquiries, was where we were going and with whom. However, I decided that getting out of the city was its own reward, regardless of any pesky details that might crop up later.

Although by this time I shouldn't be surprised by any Mr. Lanh situation, I admit I was a bit taken aback when I was picked up at 6 a.m. by a full-sized bus loaded with Vietnamese women. And ours was actually one of three buses, carrying most of the English teachers in the Ho Chi Minh City school system.

The purported objective of this jaunt was a sort of environmental ed bonding experience for the English teacher corps to Can Gio, a mangrove forest/monkey refuge on the coast not far from Saigon. But after mere minutes on this bus I could say with no false modesty that I was clearly the featured attraction on this field trip. Can Gio was just an excuse for the organizing officials to hold the teachers and me captive for ten hours of English practice.

And it worked pretty well for the most part. Apart from feeling like an exotic zoo animal, I enjoyed talking to the teachers. At Can Gio I chatted casually with whoever was bold enough to approcah me, and at the beach lunch that followed I gave a 15 minute impromptu speech followed by 40 minutes of Q and A.

A couple of questions were a bit frightening. Giving them my advice on how to engage teenagers in learning English was laughable considering the problems I've had with those wretched 10-year-olds and the fact that I had only been a teacher for three measly months. But the question that truly struck fear in my heart was "Will you sing a song for us?" Yikes. Those who have heard me sing in the car are aware that I have the musical talent of a bowl of rice. My range is about one octave, and often I think I'm singing one note when actually another is emerging screechily from my throat. I wasn't in a position to refuse, however, so using a megaphone in front of 150 Vietnamese teachers and education department officials in beach chairs, I sang "Sing ... sing a song...sing out loud ... etc". It's very tough to find a song in my pea-sized range, but I managed to make it through without causing any permanent environmental damage on the area. Of course, the nappers of the group were pretty much screwed, but hey, they should have been listening to my fabulous speech!


© 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 7:13 PM