Service Learning: First week at Hoa Binh

Last Monday, Peter, Mai, Miki, and I started our Service Learning class at Hoa Binh (Peace) Thanh Xuan Village. It’s a nonprofit organization that works with young students who have been affected by Agent Orange or who have been diagnosed with Down Syndrome. Whether Agent Orange and their condition are connected, we cannot tell. After hearing stories of children who get extremely attached or who would randomly lash out on you, I was pretty scared the first day. I didn’t know what to expect.

However, when we got there it wasn’t too bad. For the first day, they just wanted us to play with the most “normal” students, meaning the ones that could still speak and maintain a normal conversation, But I could feel my linguistic incompetency coming in. After the usual questions that I could bust out in Vietnamese, I started getting shy and shutting up. I realized that I fail at making jokes with the students in Vietnamese. So I freaked out, got shy, and stopped talking.

It wasn’t till later when they let the students play outside that things became a little easier. I realized that we didn’t really have to talk to the students 24/7. We just kinda had to be in their presence and play with them. For many of them, that was exciting enough. For instance, one girl just really wanted to kick a ball back and forth for a whole hour. Soccer? I’m cool with that. Haha.

It wasn’t until the 2nd day of work did I realized how much communication was an issue. When we first got there, Peter and I had no clue where we were supposed to go or what we were supposed to do. So we decided to go to the main office. When we got there, we watched this scary fiasco unfold. The boss got angry at one of the teachers for not showing us how to do things on the first day. Then we watch the boss get angry and call her repeatedly on the phone. Then, when the teacher comes, she gets scolded. Peter and I just sat there quietly, kinda freaked out by it all.

After hanging out with the students for 3 hours in the exercise room, we tried helping by volunteering to wash dishes. When we got there, we didn’t realize that we would suck so much at doing it. Instead of teaching us how to do it, the people cooking just watched us do our thang. We tried asking if they could explain it to us but they brushed us off. Finally, Peter and I found a system for washing the dishes. After the older students came though, they looked at us and said that we didn’t clean it well enough. They proceeded to take all of our dishes and rewash them. Wow, it felt really demoralizing. We tried to suck it up and just left. :(

I think it was a reality check in terms of where we were coming from. Did they even want us to help wash dishes? Did they not teach us because we weren’t fluent in Vietnamese? Who knows. I think communicating to the staff and the children is going to be really difficult. Hopefully, the 2nd week will be better.