Current Release: September 11th, 2007 | Vol. XXIV Iss. 10

PHOTOS BY MATT RYAN

Walking a Month in Vietnam

By lauren perry

laperry@vwc.edu

 What is that? asked Julie Maggioncalda, pointing at my plate of food.

A lumpy piece of meat stuck out of the rice and vegetables, with three suspicious claws at the end.

I pushed the plate away and decided vegetarianism suited me just fine.

Finding claws, beaks, eyes and hair on meat is not unusual in the rural counties outside of Hue in central Vietnam. But for seven Americans used to sanitation and A.C., the conditions we found ourselves in halfway across the world were fascinating and strange.

We were a group of five students and two teachers, loaded with cameras and film, pens and sharp eyes. Our goal was to gather as much research information, data, pictures and video to create a documentary focusing on the non-profit organization called the Office of Genetic Counseling for Disabled Children.

Philosophy professor Steven Emmanuel first discovered this organization on his initial trip to Vietnam a year before. He became, and still is, the driving force of our project. He arranged our trip and found funding through ASIANetwork, a company devoted to increasing Asian studies in liberal arts colleges around North America. We applied for a grant for our group, presenting the project with a focus on the efforts of the OGCDC to address health issues, mental and physical, in Hue and its surrounding provinces ASIANetwork gave us enough money to pay for every cost, including airfare, hotel accommodations and food.

When the five students were selected to participate in this experience, we were obviously excited, and for months we imagined what it would be like halfway across the world. Our expectations were petty compared to the month we spent traversing the country, changing and being changed by what we were there to do.

Each student had a different window of perception on our overall project, which was the documentary. Sarah Tytler, a junior studying abroad in Mexico this fall, researched the political aspects of the communist country. Maggioncalda, a junior interested in social work, studied the relationship between Buddhist centers and their help with children. Lan Tran, a sophomore studying biology, researched the dire affects of the chemical dioxin sprayed across Vietnam in the 1970s and its possible connection to current health issues of the country. Matt Ryan, a junior majoring in business, studied the process of loans and grants given to families in poverty as well as helping Dr. Stu Minnis, a communications professor, with filming the documentary. And my focus was on the efforts of the OGCDC to reach outlying provinces surrounding the city of Hue to find children who have health problems and need help.

Each of these facets came together to create the intricacy and significance of the documentary, now in the process of editing. This chance to participate in something so monumental had all five of us undergraduates stepping off the airplane at the end of the experience in a sort of daze, sure that we had changed but not sure how, and staring avidly at the bustling capitalistic society we were once again a part of.

A month of treading barefoot into Buddhist pagodas; sitting cross-legged until our feet went numb; shaking our heads at flies and mosquitoes as we scribbled hastily in notebooks that were balanced precariously in our arms with bags and cameras and water bottles; taking hair-raising motorbike rides; making abundant use of our precious five words of Vietnamese; being surrounded by intricate architecture and breathtaking landscape; and experiencing more beautiful and alien sensations than can be done justice with words.

The importance of our research, the impact of the efforts of the OGCDC on the Vietnamese people and the significance of bringing this organization to light gave us a unique and powerful position in social work at its most essential and effective level. But it was not just our research that changed the way each of us viewed our lives and the world around us.

There was the shock of visiting a country with a system of government opposite to our own. We had studied communism, but none of us had ever experienced or could really understand what it was like to live in a communist country until we were there. There was the atmosphere of an opposite way of thinking and of living with Buddhism and it s influence on interactions between people in Vietnam. And again, many of us had studied Buddhism as well as other religions, but to understand what it meant to practice it - to talk with Buddhist monks and nuns about every aspect of the religion and what it meant to lead a Buddhist lifestyle - gave us a comprehension that we might not have reached by any other means.

It is truly said that traveling expands our knowledge of life as it increases our awareness of the world. None of us knew what to expect. Our lives consisted of comfortable beds, abundant options for food, cars and streetlights and dozens of other things that we took for granted. Stepping into the midst of a communist country with little to no grasp of the language and nothing but enthusiasm driving us, we knew from the beginning that this experience would be a significant milestone of change in the different paths of our lives.

And knowing that, it was more than acceptable to find claws in our food.

In fact, it was wonderful to sit in a little open café in rural Vietnam and pick hairy meat out of my rice.