**late entries posted from Quang Tri but written on 6/18 because the schedule has been i-n-t-e-n-s-e**
In the whirlwind of the last few days that has been our time in Saigon so far, I realize I haven’t talked about what we will be doing in Quang Tri when we go in a week. Apart from the fact that Saigon has treated us to an overindulgence of all the senses, I did want to devote more time and thought into this post and include all I’ve learned from DukeEngage Academy, from Vu, from Dr. Christophe Robert (CET Vietnam Director and very cool guy), and from past experiences. The Academy offered us a lot in terms of global service learning but to hear about issues in Vietnam today, and how what we are working on is actually so significant in creating lasting impact, from someone who has lived here and researched here for years was great. Dr. Robert is like this classic college professor guy with glasses and plaid shirts and the mild French accent and it’s fantastic. Especially because, as some of you know, I am a huge history/anthropology nerd but the #Prattlife makes it a little more difficult to take these classes at Duke.
So back to our project. We’re teaching ESL with our Vietnamese roommates to students in 8th to 11th grade in Quang Tri, focusing on speaking skills. We’ll also be building bathrooms at two different sites- two different schools in Quang Tri- as the old ones are deteriorating and not super sanitary. These projects are based on community needs, where CET works with leaders in Quang Tri to determine what would be most helpful and have the greatest impact. And I feel like it’s easy to dismiss these projects as having little, or very concentrated rather than broad impact at a first glance. Indeed, that’s the message DukeEngage Academy warned of us so many times: You can’t trick yourself into believing you can change the world- you’re doing a service learning project, and you’re learning about yourself and about the community you are working in. There will be positive impacts, but you can hardly tell yourself you single-handedly are transforming the country you’re in, or believe you’re eradicating all the issues a community faces. But Dr. Robert helped delineate a balance of sorts: yeah, you aren’t changing the world, but you aren’t only building a bathroom, either. With respect to the English classes: in Vietnam like in other countries, being able to speak English fluently is a kind of prized skill- it can do so much for your job opportunities. While English is taught in schools, it rarely involves interaction and speaking. It’s more of the rote memorization model that my parents talk about from their experiences learning English (or anything) in school in India. We’re embarking on a project-based approach to learning English, which is going to be a new experience for our students. One of my questions about this is really just how will our students kind of adjust to the rote learning in their schools when they return in the fall. Particularly for our students in Quang Tri, due to the uneven development and lack of investment in rural areas of Vietnam, it is true that they are at a disadvantage of joining the modernized version of Vietnam the government tends to portray to the world.
Considering the bathrooms: the photos of the old bathrooms at the schools we’ll be working in are really not great. There are so many sanitation problems, beginning with the lack of maintenance. Dr. Robert showed us photos of past DukeEngage projects such as paving the area in front of a school so that students could ride their bikes to school and park them comfortably and safely even in the monsoon season. That simple project helped raise student attendance in those seasons, and it helps me consider the public/global health impacts of our own projects. As in, how does building a bathroom point towards improvement in the larger socioeconomic, educational, etc. needs and issues that have been identified even in just the community we’re working in, even in just Quang Tri?
I’m more able to appreciate the service that we’ll be doing because it’s based strongly on what the community wants. We are not establishing our own agendas here, and this helps ease the sort of dilemmas that seem to appear when discussing service-learning projects, especially global projects. And with the ESL classes it’s even better that we’ll be working with our Vietnamese roommates, really striving for cultural understanding when teaching these classes. I hope to be able to really adjust to the education system in Vietnam and make my students feel comfortable speaking English.
In the whirlwind of the last few days that has been our time in Saigon so far, I realize I haven’t talked about what we will be doing in Quang Tri when we go in a week. Apart from the fact that Saigon has treated us to an overindulgence of all the senses, I did want to devote more time and thought into this post and include all I’ve learned from DukeEngage Academy, from Vu, from Dr. Christophe Robert (CET Vietnam Director and very cool guy), and from past experiences. The Academy offered us a lot in terms of global service learning but to hear about issues in Vietnam today, and how what we are working on is actually so significant in creating lasting impact, from someone who has lived here and researched here for years was great. Dr. Robert is like this classic college professor guy with glasses and plaid shirts and the mild French accent and it’s fantastic. Especially because, as some of you know, I am a huge history/anthropology nerd but the #Prattlife makes it a little more difficult to take these classes at Duke.
So back to our project. We’re teaching ESL with our Vietnamese roommates to students in 8th to 11th grade in Quang Tri, focusing on speaking skills. We’ll also be building bathrooms at two different sites- two different schools in Quang Tri- as the old ones are deteriorating and not super sanitary. These projects are based on community needs, where CET works with leaders in Quang Tri to determine what would be most helpful and have the greatest impact. And I feel like it’s easy to dismiss these projects as having little, or very concentrated rather than broad impact at a first glance. Indeed, that’s the message DukeEngage Academy warned of us so many times: You can’t trick yourself into believing you can change the world- you’re doing a service learning project, and you’re learning about yourself and about the community you are working in. There will be positive impacts, but you can hardly tell yourself you single-handedly are transforming the country you’re in, or believe you’re eradicating all the issues a community faces. But Dr. Robert helped delineate a balance of sorts: yeah, you aren’t changing the world, but you aren’t only building a bathroom, either. With respect to the English classes: in Vietnam like in other countries, being able to speak English fluently is a kind of prized skill- it can do so much for your job opportunities. While English is taught in schools, it rarely involves interaction and speaking. It’s more of the rote memorization model that my parents talk about from their experiences learning English (or anything) in school in India. We’re embarking on a project-based approach to learning English, which is going to be a new experience for our students. One of my questions about this is really just how will our students kind of adjust to the rote learning in their schools when they return in the fall. Particularly for our students in Quang Tri, due to the uneven development and lack of investment in rural areas of Vietnam, it is true that they are at a disadvantage of joining the modernized version of Vietnam the government tends to portray to the world.
Considering the bathrooms: the photos of the old bathrooms at the schools we’ll be working in are really not great. There are so many sanitation problems, beginning with the lack of maintenance. Dr. Robert showed us photos of past DukeEngage projects such as paving the area in front of a school so that students could ride their bikes to school and park them comfortably and safely even in the monsoon season. That simple project helped raise student attendance in those seasons, and it helps me consider the public/global health impacts of our own projects. As in, how does building a bathroom point towards improvement in the larger socioeconomic, educational, etc. needs and issues that have been identified even in just the community we’re working in, even in just Quang Tri?
I’m more able to appreciate the service that we’ll be doing because it’s based strongly on what the community wants. We are not establishing our own agendas here, and this helps ease the sort of dilemmas that seem to appear when discussing service-learning projects, especially global projects. And with the ESL classes it’s even better that we’ll be working with our Vietnamese roommates, really striving for cultural understanding when teaching these classes. I hope to be able to really adjust to the education system in Vietnam and make my students feel comfortable speaking English.