Monday made for an exciting day. Following a week full of discovery and relaxation, I was at excited to finally get to work again. Sleeping a sound seven hours the night before, I woke rather easily, freshening up in the bathroom, and then prepping my lesson for the morning. I don't know what it was but, I had a bright outlook during the whole day. Though starving for breakfast, I decided instead to stay in and work, looking to stuff myself during lunch time, which for this week, was in a new house. This week I would being joining the Ngoc Lanh house down near the entrance of the center, where the younger children and a few of the older sisters live. They were all excited to have me eat with them for lunch and dinner, as they asked me throughout the weekend of who's house I was going to eat at. The first class of the week was the morning class for primary students. With that in mind, I packed up my things and went over to open the library.
"Where are all of them?" I asked myself, though already knowing the answer to it. Five minutes past the start of the class, I decided to walk down to their houses to ask them to come up, knowing that they might have been busy with other chores. Upon walking down the tiles to the two houses near the entrance the center, I see Chinh, who is about to enter sixth grade, digging in the dirt, asking me to tell his mother, Ms. Tao (who is soon to be Mrs. as she is marrying this week!), to allow him to keep playing. When I asked him what he was doing he said "I don't know, playing I guess?" I smiled and walked on over to the Phung Vi house, the other house near the front of the entrance, facing the Ngoc Lanh house that I was to be eating at this week. Upon walking near the steps up to the entrance of the house I found many of the children preparing vegetables for lunch, stripping leaves from stems and talking amongst themselves. Among them was Ni, a soon to be second grader. "Wait a little bit Brother Ben, I am a little busy at the moment" Ni said to me, in her quiet voice. I nodded and walked up the steps, looking for Man, the last of the children in the first class. He already had his notebook and pen ready, but was just waiting for Ni and Chinh to walk up with him. After about ten minutes and hanging around, I walked them up to the library to begin class, us being more than fifteen minutes late on schedule.
Teaching the primary school students was a bit more difficult than the others, being that I was exposing them to English lessons that they would either not learn or learn much later on in their schooling. After allowing them to organize the furniture in the library to their liking, we began first with review of the vocabulary I gave them in the last class. They happily remembered most of it, also singing the "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" song every time I pointed to one of the body parts for them to remember. Ni, being so young, has a more difficult time following with the lessons, but does try to pronounce everything I tell her to. She definitely knows what a knee is, as everyone reminded her that it was the pronounced the same as her name. "See look, Ni is here, right here, this is knee" she said, giggling. Chinh and Man, being rising sixth graders, had gone over a lot of vocabulary already, but just needed to work on their pronunciation. Sister Hieu, one of the younger sisters about to enter seventh grade, joined the class, looking for something to do with her morning. She sat with Ni, writing down notes for her, while participating with the class. Shortly after reviewing some other basic lessons, I decided to teach the students a page of vocabulary from one of my books, feeling that it was the right time to expand their vocabulary and eventually work our way to conversation. I decided to let them finish the first Harry Potter movie, due to the fact that I promised them the other day that I would let them finish it. The mere act of hearing English being spoken I know is helping them, and I worked me way through the rest of the movie with them in Vietnamese, helping them understand the story. When the movie finally ended, which was thirty minutes past the regular ending of the class, I headed back to my room, dropping off my things and walked on down to the Ngoc Lanh house to have lunch.
Oh I was starving! On my way down, Loi, one of my brothers from my first home at the center, told me that today we were going to have new orphans on the site. "My goodness! I must see them!" I thought, rushing down to the entrance. Right as I finished that thought, two motorcycles full of what looked to be relatives of the orphans, and two of them, both girls, arrived, asking me where the director's office was. I asked them to follow me, and so I ran up, showing them the way to Mrs. Hong's house. Eva, the french volunteer, met me along the way, letting me know about how the orphans found the site. "They probably found it through the television, and they called in yesterday, asking to join the center" she told me. How interesting! I didn't know very much about the process of being accepted into the center, so I followed Eva and the group into Mrs. Hong's house. Mrs. Hong decided to give them a tour, me following along and listening to the conversations between the relatives and the director. My brothers from the Thanh Truc house looked at us, while eating lunch, talking amongst themselves about the new children. We took them first to where they would be staying, the Anh Dao house, the house of the older girls. The two girls were in high school, and whose names I forget (I know shame on me!). Not all the girls from that house had returned yet, as many of them were going to come back the following day, along with many of the older brothers from my old house. We eventually took them down to the houses of the younger children, to get them acquainted. At last, lunch time!
One of the sisters ate at the house I ate at, and the other at the other house, along with Mrs. Hong. All the older sisters, Phuong, Hac, Hien, and Thuy, told me I had to eat fast to keep up with the boys of the house. And I ate fast, really fast. Seven bowls later, surprising everyone in the household, and a dessert later, I decided to hang around, getting to know some of the children in these houses, walking back and forth, and chatting to them. I joked with them that I wasn't full (and yes I was!) and that I could never be full, not even after eating one hundred bowls of rice. Eventually the third new orphan joined the site, whose name I do remember, Phuc. He was a middle school student, very bright, but a little shy. With time, I know these new students will open themselves up to their new family (to which they already are, after two days at the center!). With my stomach swelling due to all the food, I thanked my fellow brothers and sisters for the meal and walked back to my room, deciding to take a nap.
Despite being rather exhausted from all the food and fun, I could not seem to fall asleep, and so I instead got up after thirty minutes of lying around to surf the web and work on my lesson plan for my class for the below-average scoring students or Duy Kem. Out of all my classes that I teach, I feel that this particular class is getting the most out of my lessons, perhaps the size, being only three students at the moment, helping in this regard. From grammar to speaking, the students in this class are doing well, being inquisitive of every little rule they don't understand in my lessons. I made it clear to them that I would be focusing more on speaking from now on, which I had been wanting to do, but have been finding some trouble with deciding what balance I wanted to have with it. After a successful class, I walked outside the library, noticing that Ly, one of the older sisters, who also had just finished testing for universities, had returned. She told me that she would not know if she got in until a month from now, to which I replied "best of luck!" Sister Yen also returned, one of the brightest students in the whole area, scoring third on the baccalaureate exams at the end of the final year of high school and having an equivalent of an A+ average at school. She was one of the three students, her, sister Anh, and brother Van, who went to the high school known as Quoc Hoc, the most competitive high school in the whole country of Vietnam, producing alumni such as Ho Chi Minh himself. I read that it had about a ten percent admittance rate, accepting the best of the best in Hue and nearby provinces. I was very impressed by these students, providing great examples for their peers, and future public servants to their country and the world. Yen told me that tomorrow at around the afternoon, the majority of the children would be returning. I couldn't wait to see the center fill up again!
The remainder of this day composed of playing with the younger children near the entrance of the center, helping around with some chores in the garden, and getting to know some of the older children that I had not had the chance to get to know. Tomorrow (today) was to be a swim day, so I decided to head back to my room at around ten, working and reading until I fell asleep. That was a rough night... (more to follow in my next entry)
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