Service Learning: Organizational Structure

Even after being at Thanh Xuan Peace Village for about 2 months, I don't really understand the organizational structure here. In my very first blog, I described a moment when Co Phuong started yelling at Chi Hoa for not placing us in our spots. It was at that moment that I realized that there was a strict hierarchical structure that the nurses have to follow. You KNEW that Co Phuong was the boss at that moment. And for her to have an office with a full on dining table and everything was really interesting. You knew that Co Phuong was getting paid well. But it makes me wonder about nonprofit organizations like this. How much money do they receive? How much money do they get for themselves? I remember Gerard speaking about how many NGO workers would have nice cars, which is almost in complete contrast to the NGO workers in other places. Is there any sort of corruption going on here? There's a lot of questions that I still have but have not had the knowledge to help me figure out.

Furthermore, it's really interesting to see what the schedule of the students are like each day. For some, they go to the physical therapy room for one part of the day and then they go to class for the other part. But it makes me wonder how effective this is because it seems like there is quite a lot of dead time. For instance, the students are basically sitting in the physical therapy room for about 3 hours. I mean, most people don't even exercise for that long. As Anh Thai was saying once, maybe its because they do not have enough funding to put on any other programs. Or is it that there's a certain mentality here about the students so that they are not treated like other "normally functioning" kids? Is it because they don't believe that they need to be tended to as any other kids? I'm not too sure. It would be really interesting to see how Vietnamese society understands disabled children and how that plays out in the way these children are treated in everyday life or within organizations such as Thanh Xuan Peace Village.