Solo in Can Tho

It is Tuesday afternoon. Kris left last Wednesday morning and I have been going solo here since she left. On the day she left, I moved to the Guest House on Campus 1 of CTU but, for various reasons, it quickly became apparent that I would not be able to work the way I needed at the Guest House and so, on Thursday afternoon, I requested to move back to the hotel. Once I got here, I knew that I had made the correct decision. I immediately felt more comfortable, as if I were on more familiar territory. The inner struggle evoked by my brief stay on Campus 1 requires further reflection, but that shall remain for a later time.

So I have been here at my hotel since last Thursday afternoon (where they insisted in moving me, after one night in another room, back to “my” room – 207), and I continue to take delight in noticing little things about the staff and space, little things that bridge the gulf a bit. For breakfast, I am asked by the wait staff, “Same-same?” meaning the usual: omelet with mushrooms, hot coffee, bowl for my cereal, rice milk, and bottled water.

Being so far away from home and alone, there is a kind of comfort in that quaint familiarity. As I walk or jog the streets, I have a sense that people are now beginning to take me for granted, at least the “regulars” that I pass on my almost daily excursions. A couple guys have jogged with me for short distances, either in empathic identification or mockery – it is a little hard to tell. I opt for the former. Is this the emergence of intercultural competence? Is this what it looks like? Probably not. More like finding out what I need to get by. I feel far from something like being “intercultural competent.”

After a weekend of “open-space,” something that, given my solo status seemed harder to cope with that I thought it would, and doing some of my own work, I started in again on Monday with work on the ACE project and helping to write the grant proposal for the program, which I will be doing on and off for the next three weeks.

I have also begun planning for a workshop I will conduct for the CTU staff on curriculum and teaching. This morning, on Tuesday, I met with Ms. Trang, the Director of the Learning Resource Center (LRC), who is also responsible for this workshop on curriculum and teaching. Together with Lap, after a tour of the LRC we talked through the nature of the workshop, to be conducted the last week of January and the first part of the next full week in February. Like the workshop that Kris and I did, it will make use of concurrent translation. Because I don’t have my regular resources and support materials with me, I will be making heavy use of the Internet for some of this material and content. The danger to that, of course, is to avoid being overwhelmed by what is there.

By the way, I learned of another form of translation – “cabin translation,” a process in which a translator, sitting in an enclosed booth, translates what is being presented and participants listen over headphones. Kris and I used “face-to-face” translation, with the translator present in the room as a real voice and presence.

The LRC is a beautiful, new building with much of it state of the art. They have over 400 computers in the building and they limit student work to two hours per day, because they are in such high demand. They also have small “cabins” or cubicles for private work, and they have graciously provided me with one for my work here, along with a computer and access to the Internet.

I spent the morning working in the CTU-MSU Center office. The space here is also fine, but without air conditioning on (they do have it), it gets a little warm. I found, after about three hours of work there, that I felt a little drained from the heat. With all the staff having left for lunch, however, I was faced with trying to find someone to call a taxi to return to my hotel. Luckily, I was able to track someone done who could do this for me. Getting a taxi here is not quite like hailing a yellow cab in Manhattan or downtown Chicago. Mostly, it seems you call for one and not knowing a stitch of Vietnamese makes that somewhat problematic.

Now I am again working out of my hotel room, to the almost constant whir of the air conditioning. Last night I bought two loaves of bread from a street vendor, along with some cheese and water from the market, all small baby steps on this solo flight, but steps, nonetheless. This morning I survived a fall on my early morning run on the darkened “sidewalks” of Can Tho, but a body at this age tends to feel such things for a while afterwards. After the fall, I decided I would take my chances on the darkened city streets, where now hitting or being hit by a bicycle (they have no lights or reflectors) seemed less of a threat to my health than unknown and unseen protrusions from the varying nature of the sidewalks here.

As I wrestle with some of the emotions that have welled up within in the short time I have been here, I think of Dan, the American from Princeton, and the fact that he has been here alone for 18 months. I think of Hiep, our first translator who is doing graduate study at MSU and away from his wife and children and who won’t see them until at least this summer, if then.

It is one thing to be in a different culture and society half-way around the world with a colleague. It is quite another when you are by yourself. But it is a great time for self-reflection and finding out about aspects of yourself you didn’t know about or were only dimly perceived.

The adventure continues.