Having just recently taken a nap, after a near sleepness night (it must be the hard bed I am sleeping on with no mattress), I feel a bit more refreshed to finish this entry about yesterday's events, following my return to my home village. So... here's that fun filled day went!
Cockadoodledooooooooooooooooooooo! I stirred around on my mattress on the front porch of my grandfather's house. Though I slept soundly, I stilled didn't want to live the safety and comfort of that mattress, encircled by a mosquito, while being bathed the cool air of a fan. It was my palace, inpenetrable of beasts and bugs, at least I thought so. "Get up, you're uncle will be here any moment" my grandfather said as he smoked another one of his morning smokes. The time was about 5:00 AM. Okay. Up.
The night before, my uncle slept over at his girlfriend's house (which was adjacent to my grandfather's house) and said he would come over at 4:30 AM to come drink tea and coffee with me and my grandfather. Well... the tea and coffee were there, but he was absent. Having phoned him a couple times and not receiving a response, my grandfathered ordered me to. I called and he picked up. "... Be over in a bit" my uncle tiringly said. I was told by my grandfather's housemaid that he was really drunk the night before. No worries. After all the steam press had leaked out all the coffee into my mug, I mixed it up with some condensed milk, and then put ice in. Ah... I was starting to really enjoy Vietnamese coffee. I do not recall if I said this before, but the Vietnamese in Hue enjoy coffee in small doses, unlike coffee drinkers in other countries. I do know that in Saigon, some coffee places offer some larger servings of coffee, but the majority of them make it the Vietnamese way. Stirring the ice around in circles and sipping my coffee time and time again, my uncle Duyet finally showed up - dressed up in his business attire and ready to take me back to the center. I shuttled all of my stuff into my laptop bag and put on my helmet. I put on my sun glasses and waved goodbye. And off we rode, taking the same beaten path we had taken a week ago when I entered the village.
The ride back was relaxing, the coolness of the wind making the heat a little more bearable. I thought about my birthday coming up this Friday. I am actually having two days for my birthday, one at the center, and one at my village. The reason for this is that Friday, for my villagers, is a religious holiday, and therefore they are not allowed to eat any meat. For that reason my dad phoned back to my family members in the village to schedule it for the afternoon on Saturday, while my actual birthday was to be spent with the children at the center. "Sounds great to me!" I kept thinking. Now it's up to me to figure out how I am going to do my birthday at the center... Cake, food, games... I have a lot to figure out. My feeling with gifts at the village, as well as that of the employees of the center, is that I should not be spoiling the children by giving them any expensive gifts. Still, I feel the need to give them something other than my teaching and interaction with their weekly life, which I have noticed, has been enough to open many of them up to speaking and asking me to play with them. I guess I'll have to think this through this whole week up 'till the day. Regardless, me and my uncle finally arrived at around 7:00 AM at the center, after having a delicious bowl of noodle soup and a refreshing bottle of iced tea.
The time I rolled in, many of the students had finished their morning chores and thus, were roaming about, playing and relaxing with their free time before having to cook breakfast. Many of the 12th grade students had already left to go take another round of testing for college and many of the college students were either hanging out with their friends outside of the center or relaxing in their beds. I was told by one of my younger brothers that the college students get a lot more freedom with their lives. Below the college level, the children are allowed to play outside of the center, see friends outside of the center, and are ordered to come straight home after completing any business outside of the center (including shopping, schooling, etc.). I unlocked the lock to my room in the orphanage, placed down all my belongings that I brought with me and sat on my rock, hard bed, flipping on the fan to cool me off. Phew... I was back at last. "What to do today?" I thought, "I am not teaching today..." Let's go play with the kids.
After waving and greeting all the brothers that were home in my house, I ran off to one of the houses of the younger children and saw them all gathered up next to their little television watching movies. I decided to join them. "Hey Ben, come watch with us" one of the little girls cried out. So I did. We watched The Medallion, a movie starring Jackie Chan and others. It was dubbed in Vietnamese, which I found pretty amusing as the English being spoken was always quickly covered by a Vietnamese woman speaking the lines in Vietnamese. So there we were a group of about twelve crowded around the T.V. I asked one of the older sisters about the younger kids here and I discovered that many of the children liked to watch television and movies during the mornings after their chores. It was heart warming to me to here them laugh and joke about the movie, as I hadn't been around many Vietnamese children in my life. After a while, I went back up to the older boys' house for lunch. We had a great lunch, chatting about many things, joking about each other, and finally went off to take our noon lunch.
Upon waking up I went back down to see more of the younger children who I found, once again, hundling around the television watching I believe their forth movie in a row or so. They are huge fans of movies, even perhaps more than I am, noticing their rather big collection in the form of CDs loaded with more than six movies per disc. I joined them once again, noticing that even more children came over to watch. Noticing that my brothers were heading down over near the pond, I followed after, grabbing myself a pickaxe that was to be used to gather soil to plant some trees in another part of the center. About eight of my brothers came over to a little soil plot, hands with wheelbarrows and other gardening tools. This is where the day got a little interesting.
"So Ben, how can I, an orphan from this center, go to America?" my younger brother, Manh, asked me. "Hmm..." I said, "well from what I know about immigration to the U.S., you have to have family over in America that can apply for you to come over, get married with someone from the U.S., get in through a scholarship/transfer process from a university, work in America, or, (laughing) you can swim over to America." "Can you marry me?" some of my brothers jokingly blurted out. We all roared with laughter. Amidst our talks of America, the ex-Governator Arnold of California, and other American related topics, we were digging down into a little pit for soil. Rotating turns in the pit, we all worked together for about an hour and a half, hooting and hollering the whole time through. I learned a lot that time. They gossipped about people and things on the site, joking about this and that. This moment is definitely up there in what is going to be the most memorable experiences.
Knowing that the day was getting a little rainy (for a brief mmoment it actually did rain I found out), we all headed back inside after sending more than twenty wheelbarrows full of dirt back in to the rear of the center for planting. We all hungrily rushed back to our house, bathed, and awaited dinner. Following a delicious dinner and talk with my host mother and my brothers, I lended them my laptop for the night to watch movies (and to my knowledge would mostly be horror films), while I did some reading and planning for my classes the next day (today as I righting this). I went to bed late that night. Week two has finally begun!
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