Shallow Trenches

Does anybody remember the “song” Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) that filmmaker Baz Luhrmann unleashed on the world in 1999? A litany of advice to young people originally written by Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich, read by voice actor Lee Perry over a remix of Quindon Tarver’s “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)”, it was undoubtedly the strangest thing to hit the radio that year.

In our end-of-term report to MCC, we are asked what advice we would give to a new volunteer coming to our assignment location. I had plenty. If you feel so inclined, put on your Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and read the list below aloud.

Don’t be afraid to say no to people who want free English lessons (there will be plenty), but don’t assume that everyone who wants to speak English with you is looking for free tutoring. Make friends. Buy a cheap cloth mask to protect your lungs in traffic.

Wear a helmet.

Respect their ancestors. Play sports. Learn enough Vietnamese to understand the logic behind illogical English. Don’t leave home without a raincoat.

In traffic, don’t look back, and stay away from buses. Forget what you were taught about how to cross the street: that doesn’t apply here.

Drink the coffee, it’s wonderful.

Don’t worry too much about food safety or hygiene. Don’t worry too much about anything. Use Skype to call family and friends. Try ruou can at least once. Sing. Learn one or two slang phrases in Vietnamese and use them judiciously.

Always give the benefit of the doubt to someone who is rude to you; what they are doing might not be rude to them. Don’t queue politely unless you have all day. Be generous with your personal space. Read good books. Drink lots of water. (Boil it first.)

Host visitors halfway through the year to rediscover the strangeness and excitement of your new home. Take pictures of motorbikes laden with live animals. Take videos of the traffic. Don’t show them to your parents until you’re back home.

Share your anger and frustration with other foreigners; help each other realize you’re being too harsh. Buy pirated DVDs. Scan your USB drive for viruses. If none are found, use better antivirus software.

Collect stories.

Consider your worst experiences to be your best stories and start laughing about them. Don’t assume your stories are interesting to others; tell them to your most critically honest friends first. Keep a blog. Write more often than I did, but don’t put off having fun out of an obligation to write. Bring a good pair of headphones.

Some of this advice might be useful, some might not. Some is obvious, some might not make sense until you’ve been here a while, and some you may decide is dead wrong. Take what you can use, ignore the rest, and enjoy the year.

Chuc may man!

I will leave Vietnam in five weeks’ time. Between now and then I have only one weekend without commitments. My parents will be here for two hectic weeks at the beginning of July. The end is barreling down on me.

MCC has provided reading material to help us prepare for the process of reentry. We’ve been warned that returning home can be as difficult as moving away. We are encouraged to prepare for a different sort of culture shock.

So I’ve been taking stock of old memories, recounting the surprises I faced in my early days here. It seems probable that those same things, no longer surprising, will be shocking in their reverse forms. So what do I expect to surprise me?

I expect my most difficult task will be readjusting to relative solitude. Quiet streets — low in both senses of the word volume — with drivers insulated from each other by metal and glass, and startlingly devoid of families and young couples on motorbikes, will disorient me. Malls and box stores playing light rock radio will strike me as unpleasantly sterile replacements for markets and sidewalk stalls blaring Asian pop music. Assuming I’ll spend at least a short while living with my parents, the number of people with whom I share a house will drop from eight to two. Life will grow quiet. Perhaps too quiet.

That that house will be insulated both from the weather and from external noise will probably come as another subtle and depressing shock. It’s not that the noise of Hanoi is particularly enjoyable, or that I haven’t often felt like escaping it. But my tolerance for background noise and activity has been raised to such a point that a quiet Canadian town like St. Catharines may seem altogether eerily silent.

One other observation that constantly registered during my first month in Vietnam was how slender the Vietnamese are, both women and men. It no longer surprises me. A related surprise was how casually Vietnamese apply the term ‘fat’ to people who experience difficulty managing their weight (is the latter phrase oblique enough to be fashionable?). I will have to exercise discretion in comparing the height and weight of North Americans to southeast Asians.

And, of course, I’ll have to come to terms with being short again myself. On top of everything else, that may just send me fleeing back to Vietnam.

Someone known by the rather inscrutable handle “v!Nc3sl4s” has posted a pretty decent video of Hanoi traffic to the video sharing site Vimeo.

The time-lapse video of an intersection near Hoan Kiem Lake adds considerable excitement to an already dramatic experience by speeding everything up.

The video really gets good around the one-minute mark when you get an overhead view. Enjoy!

Hanoi crazy night traffic from v!Nc3sl4s on Vimeo.

How humid is it in Vietnam these days?

Shoes stored for a month on an otherwise dry tile floor end up looking like this (I cleaned the shoe on the right for comparison):

Mold grows on clothes, books, shoes. Anything, really.

That’s how humid it is in Vietnam these days.

How hot is it in Vietnam these days?

At a red light, motorbike drivers now jostle for a spot next to a truck or bus to enjoy its shade.

That’s how hot it is in Vietnam these days.

I’ve shown up in a few places around the web lately.  These links are mainly for friends and family who like to keep tabs on me.

• Rachel and Anna blog regularly about our shared experience in Hanoi with MCC’s SALT program.
• Erin, a SALTer in Cambodia, posted pictures of our exploits in Laos.
• Tim Nafziger, a young Anabaptist activist and writer, and Dale Suderman, a Vietnam war veteran, stopped by Hanoi on a recent tour through Vietnam.  Tim posted a blog entry about us. You can read about Dale’s reasons for visiting Vietnam here, and Tim’s here.
• Michal Garcia is a freelance photographer and friend of mine here in Hanoi.  He has let me use his big, expensive camera gear on a few occasions.  By a bizarre coincidence, we happened to meet each other in Luang Prabang, Laos on our respective vacations. Michal has posted pictures I took of him in Laos and at Minh’s Jazz Club on his blog.
• Just Massage, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry, has a website featuring a picture of me receiving a Shiatsu massage.  You’ll just have to take my word that the back being massaged in the second picture on this page is mine.
• My friend, Lutheran vicar J.P. Cima has created a website for Hanoi International Church. I show up in a few of the photo albums, and many of the photographs in which I do not appear (only the good ones, mind you!) come from my camera.
• Anna, mentioned in point #1 above, is a communications officer with a small NGO in Hanoi.  As such, she occasionally uses her friends to promote various causes — like Just Massage in point #5.  Most recently she used the three Vietnam SALT volunteers as exemplary bicycle riders in a green transport campaign.
• After Tet I wrote a short letter to Charleswood Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, which was printed in The Grapevine, the church newsletter.  You can see a PDF of that letter here.
  

If you don’t know much about Laos, fear not: you’re probably in good company.

Before we begin today’s brief geography lesson about one of Asia’s more obscure countries, a word on the country name. Laos is pronounced as one syllable, not two, with a diphthong resembling the pained expression ‘ow’. Enunciation of the ‘s’ is optional, as it is silent both in Lao (the official language of Laos) and French (the language of their former colonizers).

Laos is a land-locked (or, in the positive parlance of politicians, land-linked) country bounded by Thailand to the west, China to the north, Vietnam to the east, and Cambodia to the south. Like Vietnam, it has been a one-party communist state since the end of the “American War” in 1975. Also like Vietnam, the Communist Party of Laos has opened up considerably through a series of market-oriented reforms in recent years.

Per capita, Laos is the world’s most heavily bombed nation. As part of their efforts to disrupt the flow of supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the United States dropped more than two million tonnes of ammunition on Laos during their escapades in the region. Unexploded ordinance – bombs that didn’t go off upon impact and remain volatile – poses a major danger to the country’s six million inhabitants.

None of that background information, however, is immediately relevant to the long bus ride between the current capital, Vientiane, and the ancient seat of the monarchy, Luang Prabang. I just threw it in for free.

Crossing the mountain range that separates the two cities, the bus ride from Vientiane to Luang Prabang is at once spectacular and nauseating.

If you buy your tickets too late, as we did, you’ll end up seated at the back of the bus, unable to see the mist-covered mountains as the tail of the bus wags in exaggerated arcs around vicious curves. If you happen to be on the KING OF BUS, you will also discover that the bolts securing the rearmost seats to their frames are missing, and that reclining causes the cushion beneath you to slide forward and fall to the floor.

For ten long, headaching hours, I was unable to sleep, unable to enjoy the scenery streaking past, and unable to converse with civility, thanks to the nausea.

The most enjoyable moments of the journey occurred when the bus driver pulled to the side of the road to relieve himself, allowing passengers to briefly enjoy a view of what, at that precise moment, might well have been the world’s most beautiful mass urinal.

Those of us with antsy shutter fingers snapped off frame after frame, reminding ourselves that digital photography is cheap, and forgetting that our hard drives are already full of pictures we’re too lazy to delete.

We finally arrived in Luang Prabang around dinner time, having lost the best hours of the day to the road, and caught a tuk tuk – a modified pickup truck with benches and a roof serving as a taxi – into town to find a guesthouse.