Of gates and pots

A gated community?
Well, not exactly. But a couple weeks ago I got up early to go running – well, it was mostly because I woke up early and was not able to get back to sleep. So I walked out the hotel entrance and started down the short tunnel-like structure leading up to the hotel, and I noticed that there were gates on the entrance to the drive and they were closed. With that I returned to my room and went out later, when they were open.

Then I started thinking about gates here, and noticed they were all over. Last week, Lap invited me to his house and there was a gate on his entrance. I told him that I had been noticing gates all over the community, including the one that we passed through each day to get into the university. Most residences have gates – and fences around their properties; most businesses, schools, government buildings – even the Catholic Church down the street has a gate and fence to its entrance. Often, these fences are rimmed with barbed wire or spikes, sometimes two in the shape of a V.

Lap said these fences and gates are designed to discourage intruders. Apparently, in some areas people worry about others breaking into the homes and walking off with valuables. Because so many of the residences here, as well as businesses and other establishments have large sections open to the air, they use a variety of devices to prevent break-ins.

Potables for Portability
As I walk and jog around the city, I couldn’t help noticing all the plants, bushes, and small trees that are large, earthen pots. As I became aware of this, they seemed to be all over, in courtyards, along the street, in front of homes, fancy and not so fancy. Our friend, Lap, has fruit trees in his yard that are growing in pots.

So I asked him about all these plants in all these pots. He gave two reasons. First, in many areas, the government may take possession of the land for development purposes. The residents are at least able to take their plants, bushes and small trees with them. The second reason is flooding, especially in the lower areas. So when the floods come, they can move the plants to higher ground, at least that is how I understand it.

And it provides a small business for others. Down the street from the hotel is a shop that makes pots, literally on the sidewalk. At first, I thought he just painted pots. But then I noticed today he was actually making pots. It is a sprawling yard full of different sizes and shapes of pots.

Cross-cultural ruminations

It has been several days since I posted to the blog, so I have some catching up to do. On Wednesday I completed a five-day workshop on curriculum and teaching for postsecondary education teachers. Each day the experience left me exhilarated but exhausted, and too brain-dead to write much. I had all I could do to keep up with the preparations for each day.

Will start here, though with some reflections on the cross-cultural nature of my experience here. Just a glimpse of what is becoming a major focus for me.

Today in the hotel, there were large groups for both breakfast and dinner. Perhaps the same group but I am not sure. The hotel also seems like it is full of people. Noisy and raucous like. A bunch of them were sort of standing around and waiting for a while after lunch in the hotel lobby. I noticed, after coming out of the restaurant at lunch, that the wait staff was sweeping up the floor. The floor of the lobby was littered with dozens of toothpicks and other trash. I also noticed several toothpicks on the way up the stairs.

Then I wondered more about this behavior. Many people I have seen on the street seem to throw or drop trash onto the sidewalks where they stand, or into the street. But then I see women (and some men, but far fewer) sweeping large sections of the sidewalk, even sections that are dirt, in preparation for the day. And every morning the gutters in the street seem relatively clear and free of trash. I would know because that is where I run!

This morning, on my way back from my run, I heard and then noticed drums and cymbals coming from one of the small street cafes already open (Many of them are open at 5:00 or even earlier!). I thought, what is with that guy making all that racket at this time of the morning? It was perhaps 5:45 or so. Then I was reading in my new book by Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, and he was talking about Shamans and the music they hear. I wondered about Shamans and Vietnamese cultures. Perhaps this is a tradition that is meaningful and important to Vietnamese culture. To me it sounded like a lot of noise, especially for that hour of the morning, and even above the normal din of traffic. Another example of how little I really know or understand of what surrounds me on a daily basis here.

I was working in the hotel lobby this morning for a couple hours, while they cleaned my room, and to give myself a change of scenery. At that time, I made an entry into my research journal about not really knowing the humanness of the Vietnamese I am surrounded by, like the wait staff in the hotel, the participants in the workshop I had just concluded on Wednesday, or the people I run into on the street each morning on my daily runs. The language seems like a barrier to that. Many of them who don’t speak English seem like people wearing masks or costumes, actors in a play that I am watching from a distance. I can’t seem to be able to relate to very many of them on what feels like a human level. Shortly after I wrote that, one of staff in the hotel brought me three bananas on a dish, then a hot cup of water, took my cup away and cleaned it so I could put fresh coffee in it. Then when I came back with a packet of coffee, they put more water into my cup and wiped up the table. I hadn’t asked for or indicated I wanted anything in particular. Kind of spooky, really. As if, at some level, they had read my mind.

Now I wonder if I am using the language issue as a self-protective mechanism, a kind of excuse for not doing the work I need to do to connect with them. How can you relate with and to others without a common language? This morning I learned that acts of kindness and thoughtfulness are great places to begin. Like the little kids on the backs of bicycles or motorbikes, who always seem to turn and wave as they glide past on their way to school, or wherever it is they are going.

Week three - Odds and ends

I am now well into my third week here in Vietnam, and I thought I would post a few things under this category. Nothing terribly deep but some things which strike me as interesting.

Bicycling in Can Tho. In past posts, Kris and I have referred to the numerous bicycles here that are used by residents of all ages to get around. It is second only to the motorbike, it seems, as the major means of transportation. As you might imagine, the great majority of these bikes are relatively simple affairs, something like I used to ride growing up on the farm. No angst here about whether a person should buy a trail bike, a mountain bike, or a road bike. And not much worry about which of the zillion models within each of these categories from which to choose.

You might imagine, then, my surprise on Sunday morning, out for my early morning run, when out of the dimness of the early dawn hours emerged what could easily have passed for the Bombay Bicycle Club coming at me, with riders dressed in the typical road gear and riding some impressive road bikes, with turn-downed handlebars and the whole bit. Most have been about 25 - 30 of them in a pack riding together. A neat sight.

The Mobile Businessman. We have also talked about the numerous people here who seem to operate their own small businesses, doing what they can to get by with their small carts cluttering the sidewalks and providing welcome access to their own version of "fast food, ready meals for motorbikers and bicyclists on their way to work or school or wherever.

Last Saturday, I went with Chris Wheeler and some of his colleagues from CTU to visit the Research Station about an hour south of Can Tho, where some of their schools and their kids were selling vegetables grown from their school gardens, and where some adults were selling vegetables and fish to learn to raise through the community development project. On the side of the driveway, I noticed this man with a motorbike and food cart all in one. I thought I had seen a lot of variations of what they motorbike can be and is used for here, but this was a first. If business is not so good on this block, you just motor on down a ways to see if it is any better there!

By the way, in the pic the building in the left background is a new dormitory they intend to use for CTU faculty who come out to the station to teach, etc. It is also used for other purposes, such as on this occasion when it is housing a group of students and faculty from a university in Indiana on a three-week study tour! We met several of them and talked briefly with them while we were there. On the far right is a former community school, made mostly of bamboo, in which kids were attending class. The government has now taken over the school and it is used as part of their primary schooling in the area. Yet, another dimensions of a study of contrasts here.

Reflections on my adjustment here. Before this experience, the idea of "culture shock" and the intercultural adaptation processes reflected in the literature were just concepts or ideas. The first week, while Kris was still here and we were busy planning and implementing the workshop, I felt on a pretty even keel. But after she left I was on my own for several days, and I went through a series of emotions and feelings that surprised even me. At times, I felt that if there would have been an easy way to catch a quick ride home, I would have been on it! It is hard to describe this feeling, a kind of deep longing and feeling quite alone.

As time has passed, however, these feelings have subsided and now I feel reasonably comfortable being here. There are moments, however, like yesterday afternoon, when I still sense these feelings hovering around the edges of consciousness. All of this brings home the work some of us have been doing on emotions and cross-cultural experiences. From a Jungian point of view, we ask, "What are these emotions and feelings asking me to pay attention to in myself? What aspects of myself are they, in their own way, revealing to me?"

But wait, I said this would be nothing too deep, so I will stop there. And no, I am not going to answer those questions here!

Comparisons between cross-cultural experience and the dreamworld

Many of you know my interests in the image as a form or way of knowing. Of course, the penultimate contexts for the kinds of images in which I am interested is the dream, but also the kind of fantasy states and "waking dreams" that fill our days.

I began reflecting on being here in this culture and society as a kind of dream world. Like the dream, there is little of what I see and hear that I make sense of. My environment is a swirl of images, many of them unusual or strange. The language conveys words and sounds which have as much meaning to me as words spoken in a dream. Images juxtaposed on top of one another, demonstrating a cacophony of form only the dream could create.

Like in a dream, there is the occasional familiar image, an English word on a billboard, or infants playing in the sand, or the movement of traffic on the street. But, like in a dream, these familiar images are often in the context of quite unfamiliar and strange images and contexts.

The English word on a billboard might be part of a larger message written in Vietnamese, or the billboard itself springs out of a complex of buildings that, from the outside eye, look like a maize of loosely coupled structures, hanging together by some unseen force.

The child playing in the sand is against a backdrop of a very busy street and sidewalk on which the pile of sand rests, and workers behind the sand pile moving in and out of a darkened entrance to a building, resembling more of an opening to a cave.

The streams of motorbikes, bicycles, trucks, buses, and pedestrians on the street, coming at each other, moving in and out of one another, as if schools of fish swimming towards and through one another in an ether that feels and sounds surreal.

People’s faces carry with them feelings of images within a dream, from the gleeful and laughing faces of young children seemingly with no care in the world to the weathered, worn, and tired visages of an old woman, sitting on the street with the traditional Vietnamese hat turned upside down, hoping to collect a few dong for her next meal. They could be characters in last night’s unconscious and darkened meanderings of the soul.

There is little here, in the language or in the customs, that I understand. Like with the dream world, we try to make these unfamiliar images familiar. We try to bring them into our day world, where rationality and reason prevail, try to make sense of them somehow within the logic of the day. When we do, like with dream images, we often distort the image, using language and forms of the day world to describe things that seem to have and use their own language and forms. We struggle to make familiar the strange, because that is what in the day world we do. But, in our urge to do so, we often miss or leave behind or overlook things about this other world. We bring away meanings from this world that are incomplete, tinged with the well-known understandings and frames of our waking life.

I am learning to try to honor the images that come to me from this other world that I am in. It is hard. Like our dream images, we so desperately want these images and forms to make sense to us, to conform to familiar structures of meaning. And like our dream images, they are so illusive and so easily slip away.

I don’t want to stretch this metaphor of the dream world too far. I know enough and understand enough of my surroundings and context to get by, to order a meal or to get a taxi to take me to and from the university, to buy supplies at the market. But it does seem to help illuminate the different realities I experience while I am here, as if awake within a lucid dream.

It seems like a helpful way to frame our understanding of the Other.

The adult learner on campus - at CTU

Our early impressions of higher education here was that it is the almost exclusive province of the young learner, what we in the United States might call the “traditional student.” My first impressions were that higher education was a kind of zero-sum game, in which, if you didn’t succeed in entering at the traditional age through entrance exams, etc, you were basically excluded from the game and relegated to other, what is perceived by some here as, lesser forms of education, such as technical or vocational schools or community colleges.

This early impression, however, seems not quite accurate and I am gradually learning more about their “system” of higher and adult education. My recent conversations with Tho, a young part-time teacher of English at CTU who is applying to our HALE masters program, revealed another thread in my evolving picture of postsecondary education here.

Tho teaches a class at night which is, she told me, made up of mostly “inservice” students. These are adult learners who are usually working and attend class at night to pursue a degree or even a second degree. They are also referred to as “irregular” students (I think I prefer nontraditional myself). These are students who are enrolled in a degree program, just like the regular students but who have been admitted as inservice students. They may or may not be required to take the same entrance exam as the regular students, depending on the major area of study.

They receive the same degree but their certificate indicates that they are inservice students, to distinguish them from the regular students. Tho said that many employers regard the inservice certificate as somewhat lower quality that the certificate for regular students. I asked her about this but I am not clear why they regard the quality as lower or if there is any empirical evidence to support this perception.

In the U.S., of course, the term inservice means something completely different. While it does imply adult learning (for example, inservice education or staff development for practicing teachers), it is not related to higher education or the pursuit of a degree.

More later on continuing education in Vietnam and their forms of adult education.

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.

A study in contrasts

This afternoon, after a lunch of noodle soup, bread, and a glass of incredibly good orange juice, I went for a walk, down an alley Lap told me about yesterday, in search of the island he described (I was surprised to learn of an island so close!). The density of living in this area is so amazing. The main streets themselves seem jammed with humanity coming and going in all sorts of ways and engaged in all sorts of activities. The sidewalks are a constant buzz of making and dismantling, of washing and cooking, of eating, drinking, and cleaning up. Yet, off these incredibly busy avenues are numerous alleys, each of them by themselves extensions of the mass of humanity one glimpses along the major streets.

My afternoon walk took me down one of these alleys. In contrast to the street, where there is semblance of distance between the casual observer and the inhabitants, the alleys brought me up close to the living conditions of those who live and work along these narrow urban corridors. They are right there and one can readily see into their living quarters, the conditions of which vary as much as any in the city proper. My walk took my across a narrow, metal bridge, framed in the immediate distance by a larger, more modern-looking concrete bridge that remained unfinished at both ends, as if that was all that was called for. In contrast to the city street and even the alley, few motorbikes, bicycles, or pedestrians were using the bridge when I crossed. I felt like I was engaged in a quiet, casual stroll into the country. As I crossed over the river onto the island that Lap had described, the quiet continued. “What a study in contrasts,” I thought. “This is actually contemplative back here.”

As I left the bridge, the road took right angles left and right. I looked down the more narrow, concrete path on the right and decided to first explore the broader, more expansive road to the left. Again, the quiet and contemplative mood continued. Things definitely seemed slower back here, more quiet and subdued, almost a vacation-like spa. All around me the feel of the tropics crowded the road in a lush, green display of foliage. As I continued down the road, the quiet punctuated now and again by a passing motorbike or two, another study of contrasts began to emerge. Along the road, down the bank I noticed buildings that resembled hutches barely hanging together, with an assortment of materials assembled together in a patchwork like manner to provide shelter from the sun and rain. In front of some of these, stands were erected for selling a variety of produce and other goods. The entrepreneurial spirit of the Vietnamese people expressing itself. Despite these rather squalid living conditions, this road appeared to be the route to prosperity, because I soon came upon houses erected and being built that might make some of the homes in Spring Lake look modest. These homes were magnificent structures and stunning in their attractiveness and aesthetic appeal. A sign down a gravel road where men were working on a house in progress, a sign that closely resembled one we might find in a housing development around the Lansing area, suggested more such structures to come within the vase array of emptiness that stretched beyond the sign.

What struck me, however, was the location of some of these gorgeous structures, almost directly across the street from structures that resembled shanties more than homes. The street was wide, smooth and modern, and hardly traveled. I could see why folks would want to live here.

After heading down this street for a while, I turned back and headed down the other, more narrow road. To call this a road might be an overstatement. We have bike paths that are wider than this road. Still, it was a route for motorbikes and bicycles, paved and in good shape, although I can’t imagine four-wheel vehicles using it. But along it was where obviously the less fortunate lived. Here there were no splendid structures rising mightily into the air. Here the structures hugged the earth, sometimes receding into it. Outside one of these structures a woman was washing her clothes in the fork that run off from the main tributary of the river, a river that is known to be highly polluted with a variety of toxic and infectious substances.

So many people here seem so poor. As I began my trek back across the old metal bridge framed by the incomplete modern bridge leading nowhere, I reflected on some of this. Then I was passed by two boys on a bicycle, one holding a bamboo pole made into what looked a little like a toy spear. They said and waived “Hello” and I waived back, saying hello to them as well. They were laughing and seeming to have a good time. Part way up the bridge they got off and walked their bike up the slight incline and I passed them. Then, on the downside they passed me, saying “Hello” again, giggling, and waiving as they coasted down the slope of the bridge to the main land, seemingly without a care in the world. Who is really poor, I wondered.

Back Home for Kris

I arrived safely home in Michigan yesterday afternoon and slept 14 hours last night. It'll take a few days to do laundry, unpack, and get ready for school to start (a week behind everyone else). I'm glad to be home, glad to have gone, and eager to continue to make sense of the trip. It feels strange to have left John there - not because he's not a perfectly competent grown up, but because we make a pretty good team there and now he gets to make a go of it solo. I'm looking forward to reading the Further Adventures of John in Vietnam, while also looking forward to getting back into a routine in Michigan - where the Mitten State is about to get serious about winter weather.

Parking Problem? In Can Tho?

Well, not exactly, but it is an interesting aspect of the society on which to reflect. In Can Tho (and I suspect in most other cities in Vietnam), the motorbike and, to a lesser extent, bicycle are the major means of transportation. Where, then, do all these motorbikes park? As indicated by pictures in some of our previous posts, it would seem pretty much anywhere they want, making for navigation of “sidewalks” an iffy proposition.

Turns out, though, there are limits. Parking lots for motorbikes are all over, including campus, and many of these lots are attended. In trips to the market or outside restaurants, our drivers had to park their motorbikes in lots with attendants stationed at the entries and/or exits. From what I can gather, there are a couple reasons for this. Because so many of the motorbikes look alike, you have to have a relatively reliable and quick way to identify your bike. Second, apparently, like many lots in the U.S., some of them charge a fee. So, drivers either have marks written on their handlebars or are given a ticket, which they then use to claim their motorbikes when they leave.

Because there are so many motorbikes, it is not uncommon for space within lots or even on the sidewalks outside of establishments to become a premium. So drivers will frequently get off their motorbikes, move another motorbike or two over or closer together, and then park their bikes. This maneuver always seems to be done with care and respect for the other’s motorbike.

Imagine your next trip to the mall in your car, and some moron in a Hummer 2 has taken up two or perhaps three parking spaces. You patiently stop your car, climb into the Hummer and carefully reposition it so there is room for your car and others. Then you park your vehicle in the space you just created.

So, while parking may not be the problem it often is on the MSU campus (where, as we are so fond of saying, a permit is a license to “hunt” for a space) or downtown Lansing, Detroit, or Grand Rapids, it does sometimes emerge as an interesting aspect of a society so exclusively reliant on the motorbike.

On a more serious note, reliance on the motorbike as a major means of transportation doesn’t make the streets or highways here any safer. In fact, I have been told that over 11,000 deaths a year are attributed to motorbike accidents. In a country with a population of just over 80 million, you must admit that is a pretty high mortality rate. Compare this, for example, to the United States with a population of 300 million, where somewhere between 30,000 – 40,000 deaths occur from motor vehicle accidents each year (not sure of the exact figure here. It has been declining). Do the math – from the back seat of a taxi or the front seat of a car the streets and highways here not only seem dangerous, they are dangerous places. The American from Princeton that I talked with a few days ago said in the 18 months he has been here, he has witnessed over a dozen fatal motorbike accidents.

The World Health Organization has apparently recently issued guidelines to help address the problem. Their suggestion? Mandatory helmets for all drivers. Now, helmets are only required on the highway and not in the city, where speeds are presumably slower (the distinction between highway and city – when a street becomes a highway – is one that Kris and I have yet to figure out. It’s like growing old. You don’t really notice it and all of a sudden you realize you are there).

At any rate, it seems a huge public health problem for which there appears no easy solution, or perhaps no solution at all! Talk about an adult education program! Now there is some potential.