Last Day of Summer Classes

This morning was our final class; we handed back exams and handed out awards for best score and most improved. We went through a couple of of the exam questions together, took lots of photos, and then we all went out to lunch. 

Awards for the most improved students over the class.
(left to right): Sao, Sang, Tam, Chat

Thus starts summer vacation for both our students and us. They will have three weeks to go home and see their families before classes resume again in the fall. The resident fathers are also taking their home leave: Fr. Pat is back to Ireland for the month, and Fr. Trinh will head south to his home town of Can Tho. We are also taking the time to travel. On Wednesday we will be hopping on a bus (for 12 hours!) to Siem Reap in Cambodia where we will be visiting Angkor Wat. We also have plans to visit Australia.

We will return to teaching in the fall, just as this group of students will return to English classes, but we will not be together. Instead these seminarians will be staying in Saigon and we will be off to Nha Trang to teach a different group of seminarians. We will remain in Nha Trang for the year while we teach. We have been told the seminary is quite close to the beach ;p

Nha Trang

In the mean time here is a video of the students reciting a prayer. Can you understand them?

We very much appreciate you following along - please feel free to comment, or to email us with questions.  

-Kim and Chris

P.S. We would like to note that all of our touristing activities are funded our of our own pockets, and not from any of the fundraising we did. Fundraised money is used only for costs related directly to our mission work (Vietnamese visas, vaccinations, flights to Vietnam and flights home at the end of our trip, etc.)

Churches and Masses

As is to be expected when living with a religious community, much of our community time is focused around mass and prayer. We pray at the beginning and end of every class (which has the added benefit of helping our students practice their impromptu speaking and prayer skills), at the beginning and end of every meal, and the seminarians do evening prayer together every day at 6p. We attended evening prayer once, but its all in Vietnamese, so we had trouble following along. It is pretty to listen to however, because the Spiritans chant the psalms instead of saying them, and Vietnamese is tonal, so it lends itself well to chant. We often listen from downstairs as they do evening prayer in the chapel.

The students (and many Catholic Vietnamese) attend mass every weekday at 5am. We have not yet braved the early morning to experience that, but we have attended mass in Vietnamese. The priests that live in our house additionally say mass together at 7:30 on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. On Saturdays we often attend mass at the pastoral center, which is run by the archdiocese and is located on the grounds of the rectory where the bishop lives. They host a 5:30 vigil mass in English that is well attended by the international community in Saigon. The seminarians also often attend this mass as a way to practice their English. If we are unable to attend mass on Saturday evening we go to the Dominican church nearby which has a 10am Sunday mass in English. It's not as well attended as some of the other English mass, drawing only about 100 people.

The regular Vietnamese masses on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings and evenings draw huge crowds, we guesstimate at least 500 people, as the whole church is full, the entirety of the courtyards are full, and many people have to stand in the street outside the gates of the church. The churches have loudspeakers and screens outside of the church building to allow for better participation.

The highlight of our community's week, mass wise, however is on Friday night. One of the father's says mass in the chapel at the top of the house where the seminarians live, and afterwards we have a dinner cooked by our local benefactors. The whole of the community attends, from the various locations across Saigon, and dinner is a fancier affair - last week we had spaghetti! Its a time for the whole community to gather and to welcome new and old members of the community as they pass through Saigon. 

Dinner Time!

Chapel at the Aspirant House

Thanks so much for following along! If you have any questions feel free to drop up a line!

Mekong River Cruise

**All photos can be clicked for larger size**

This past weekend we treated ourselves to a little river cruise. Originally we were supposed to move to Can Tho to teach English to seminarians for the school year. But, because that plan fell through, we decided to make a weekend trip to see the Mekong Delta region while it was still close at hand. We will be moving 8 hours north in the fall and visiting the "rice bowl of Vietnam" will become more inconvenient. The cruise we took ran from Cai Be, overnight, to Can Tho. On the journey we visited a small riverside village, the iconic floating market of Can Tho, and a rice noodle "factory". We had a lovely time and met some very interesting people along the way.

The cruise operator we used, Mekong Eyes, picked us and several other guest up in Saigon and drove us to Cai Be, where we boarded the boat. We left at 8:30 in the morning on Saturday. Most of the other guests were staying at centrally located hotels, so they were picked up form their accommodations, but we met the group at the Opera House. As we waited for our van we were chatted up by a friendly motorbike tour guide who claimed to have toured someone from the Obama administration around. He showed us pictures, but we had no idea who he was...

The ride from Saigon to Cai Be was about three hours, with a break at a rest stop, and the other guests were a Singaporean woman working for a Japanese management company and a couple from South Africa. The ride was pleasant, if bumpy, and we all did a fair bit of chatting once we had communicated to the driver that we would like the AC turned up. We arrived at Cai Be around 11:30 and were ferried out to our vessel. 

Our trip route (marked in yellow).

Once we had boarded, we dropped our stuff in our room and were given a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice (with sugar in it :/) and the chance to explore the boat until lunch time. Our vessel, the Mekong Eyes Classic, was built in the traditional style of a rice barge, but has two levels and is larger to accommodate 14 passenger cabins, a kitchen, dining room, and an observation deck with sun shades and lawn chairs. The rooms were cozy and well appointed making a nice blend of traditional and modern tastes.

Our Ship!

The sundeck on our ship.

The view from inside our room.

Lunch was served at 1pm and consisted of pumpkin-coconut soup, fried pork spring rolls, fried sea bass filets, rice, stir fried green beans, and a fruit parfait for dessert. We were seated at the end of a long table of guests, next to a lovely couple from New Zealand. They were in their sixties and the wife was nurse while the husband was a crayfish fisherman. We enjoyed talking to them about New Zealand, their daughter who works for a Christian aid organization in Scotland, and other places they had traveled. At one point in the 1970s they had rented a convertible Camero and driven across the US on route 66.

After lunch we had some more down time for cruising. Around 3pm we pulled up to a small riverside village for a walk and a visit. The dock was more of a ramp in the water, so we had to switch from our relatively larger boat to a smaller one to get ashore. It was essentially a long canoe powered by an outboard weed-wacker. We walked for about a mile through banana groves and between rice paddies until we reached a Cao Dai temple. (For more on the religion of Cao Dai see our previous post about our trip to their Holy See.) At this point it started to absolutely pour. We holed up in the temple for a while to let the rain pass and the tour guide gave some background on the religion of Cao Dai. Twenty minutes later we braved what had become a light drizzle to visit a local family.

A group of houses along the river (left), a small pagoda nestled along the river (center), another house along the river (right)

Traveling to shore in our small boat to visit a village.

Walking through the jungle to experience a local village (left, center), a bunch of bananas (right). 

A rice field with grave monuments. The deceased family members were buried in the rice fields where they worked as an omen of good luck for future rice crops.

The Cao Dai temple in the small village we visited.

It was about another mile through the mud and drizzle to get to the house of the family, where a lovely tea was spread for us. The family seemed like a pretty typical middle class house, although it wasn't exactly clear what their primary occupation was. They did have a pet king cobra, a pet viper, guava trees, and an adorable baby. The tea was the typical variety of weak green that is widely available. We also had rambutans, jackfruit, sweet potato chips, and rice crackers with sesame seeds. I enjoyed all of the snacks, and it was fun to watch the American children on the trip learn how to eat the rambutans. There were 5 tweenagers between the ages of 12 and 15 belonging to two 30-something American couples who were traveling together. I didn't get their full backstory, but one of the dads I talked to worked for the San Francisco fire department. The kids were a little rambunctious, and not always the most conscientious, but they were pretty good for a pack of tweens.

Rambutans (left), jackfruit (center), toasted rice chips (right).

After tea we trekked back to the boat to clean up before dinner. On the way back we made the acquaintance of a middle aged german couple from Freiberg. Their English wasn't great, so our conversation was short, but they were undoubtedly the best equipped passengers. They had fabulous, ankle length, hiking ponchos that they produced out of nowhere and their footwear was very well suited for the weather.

Back on the boat we all enjoyed a quick shower (hot!) and convened in the lounge (the only part of the boat with wifi) for a drink before dinner. We were given something pink in a martini glass called a "Mekong Martini". It came with a orange for relish and was some combination of fruit syrup, coconut milk, and vodka. Kim thought it was weird, but Chris has a thing for sweet drinks, so he liked it. Dinner was steamed giant prawns, which are a lot of work to eat, catfish fillets, sautéed eggplant, rice, BBQ ribs, and very small piece of chocolate cake for dessert. Over dinner we got to know another Kiwi. She was a widow in her early sixties and owned an avocado orchard. She also had rented a car in America to drive up the west coast in the 80s with her late husband. After our river cruise she was joining a three week biking tour up the coast of Vietnam in which she would cover approximately 50 miles a day.

Dinner, drinks, and discussion only ran until about 10pm. I think we all would have like to stay and talk much later, but breakfast was to start promptly at 6:45 in the morning! We slept well, and it was even a little chilly in our room!

The sun came defiantly through our windows at 5am and was accompanied by the sounds of the staff tromping back and forth over our heads to set up breakfast on the observation deck. We had planned to stay abed until 6:30, and we made it until 6, but the general commotion roused us for some early morning river watching. Once set up, breakfast was fruit, toast, mini muffins, tea, juice, omelets, and chicken noodle soup. One of those things is a traditional Vietnamese breakfast item, I'll let you guess which one ;p

By the time breakfast was over our ship had made it to the outskirts of Can Tho, and we transferred to a slightly smaller vessel to go up the river to the floating market. It took us almost an hour to wind our way past Can Tho's quickly developing waterfront to Cai Rang, the marketplace. Can Tho is the regional capital, and though floating markets are typical of the region, Cai Rang is the largest. Cai Rang is actually a wholesale market: upriver producers come with their barges full of every imaginable produce to gather in Can Tho. Smaller distributer boats dart about the barges buying produce they will then cary through the smaller waterways to local towns. Once the big boats run out of produce they make their way back up the Mekong. The market was slowing down by the time we reached it at 9am.  Most business is done in the cooler early morning hours. It was nice to have a calm atmosphere to wind through the boats and see their typical advertising method; a sample of the produce for sale is hoisted up a bamboo pole like a flag at the bow of the barge. Like many market places there is a secondary economy built upon the primary one. Little speed boats zipped between both the wholesalers and the distributers selling food, drinks, and other supplies necessary for life on a barge.

Two boats in the floating market. A 'convenient store' boat selling soft drinks, beer, and coconut water (left) and a whole sale boat selling goods (right). Notice the bamboo pole at the bow of the boat indicating availability.

From the floating market we wound our way deeper into the streams of Can Tho to visit a rice noodle "factory". Factory is a stronger word than it really necessary here, it's really more of a cottage industry. We witnessed as a family combined rice flour, tapioca flour, and water into a batter which they spread onto large canvas cloths to be steamed. The canvas was stretched tight over a round barrel, much like a drumhead and steam was pushed through the canvas to cook the rice. Once the crepe like disk had been steamed it was set on bamboo trays to dry in the sun. Two to three days later it is collected up and run through a slicing machine to make the Thai style stick noodles we can buy even in American grocery stores. I thought the process was interesting, if muggy work, but the South African man commented that the visit had put him off rice noodles on account of the outdoor work and the fact that many of the workers were shirtless.

Visiting the rice noodle 'factory'. Workers cooking noodle disks (left), another working placing the cooked disks on bamboo racks to dry (center), and the bamboo racks sitting in the open sunshine to dry (right).

A man separates the dried disks (left), our tour guide showing the dried rice paper prior to cutting into noodles (center), and the machine used to cut the paper into noodles (right)

The rice noodle house was our last stop and from there were were ferried back to Can Tho to meet our van back to Saigon. We were on the road by about 11 am, and stopped for lunch at a restaurant along the way. We made it back to downtown Saigon by 3:30 in the afternoon and took advantage of our location to grab a coffee and then go to a bar featuring craft brews. The bar was in the newer expat district located across the river, which is an entirely different world from the older parts of Saigon. The eastern part of the city has only started being developed in the last decade or so and it resembles any modern city with high rise apartments, wide, car-friendly roads, and boutique restaurants and shops. Its very clean, new, and shiny. It took us a bit to find the bar, BiaCraft, but it was worth it. They had local craft beers on tap, as well as bottled beers from America (Rouge, Blu Moon, Sam Adams, etc). We had a bacon wrapped hot dog and smothered cheese fries to complement our coconut porter and jasmine IPA. It was a great end to a great weekend, and I'm glad we splurged on the experience.

You made it to the end!

-Chris and Kim

Stay tuned for more tails from the other side of the world!

Interested in something particular about trip? Drop us a comment or email and we'll post about it! Email

Indians!

The Spiritans are a fairly international bunch, here in Vietnam we have one Irish priest, one Belgian priest, and four Vietnamese-American priests. As seminarians, each Spiritan brother spends two years of his formation on mission in another country.  Currently there are Vietnamese seminarians in England, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Spiritan seminarians from Vietnam spend four years learning Theology in Manila. (Unfortunately they attend Ateneo de Manila, the Jesuit university, and not De La Salle University which I and my Filipino cousins attended.) Despite all of the internationality surrounding us, it was still a treat last week to get to know two aspiring brothers from India.

The Indian brothers, both from Tiruchirappalli, are here to spend their novitiate year with their Vietnamese brothers. As the Indian Spiritan community is fairly small it makes sense for them to join the larger Vietnamese group. The Vietnamese group joins the Filipino group for their years of theology for similar reasons - as well as the availability of theological instruction in English.

Tiruchirappalli, India

The novitiate year is a year of spiritual life free from the more rigorous study found in the years learning English (2 years), philosophy (2 years), or theology (4 years). It involves some pastoral work, but not with the intensity that the two years spent on mission require. The novitiate year is one of spiritual focus and personal development.  It takes place in Cu Chi, a smaller town in the countryside, about 30km outside of Ho Chi Minh City. You may remember the name Cu Chu from our visit to the Cu Chi tunnels, which spread through the jungle in the area.

Brother Michael and Fr. Bonaventure, our Indian guests, arrived last Monday and stayed with us until Saturday morning. Brother Michael is following the more typical path of Spiritan aspirancy, and is not yet ordained. He recently finished his missionary years in Ethiopia. Fr. Bonaventure was a priest in another order and has decided to join the Spartans - he was working previously in Kenya. Both are in Cu Chi now.

It was very nice to be able to speak with some brothers who are not also our students. We only have the first two years worth of students with us in the city. The rest are off studying or working in other cities and countries or are at home for the summer before they take up their studies again. Being able to speak with brother Michael and Fr. Bonaventure about their travels and experiences without the expectation that we would also correct their English was nice. In addition, being from India, and having lived in many countries already, their English was excellent and very easy to understand. They also had a very broad understanding of world politics that was interesting to discuss. Most of our students are from rural areas, and have never left Vietnam, so world politics is not really an available topic of discussion.

Both brothers left Saturday morning to join the rest of the novices in Cu Chi. At some point this year we hope to be able to visit that community, perhaps for a small retreat.

The Indian brothers join the Vietnamese brothers for the novitiate

More On Teaching

A good way to learn English pronunciation is tongue twisters. Perhaps a more fun way of practicing English is singing. We start every class with a hymn and occasionally we give them other fun songs to sing such as "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes". We had a lot of fun with this song and recorded video for you to enjoy!

Thanks for watching!

-Chris and Kim

p.s. Look for photo updates under the "Chris's Photography" link at the top of the page!

Cao Dai and Cu Chi

**please note all pictures are clickable for a larger format**

On Saturday we did some more touristing.  We took a guided tour from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) to the Cao Dai temple and then to the Cu Chi tunnels. It was an all day affair: we left the house around 7:20 in the morning and returned around 8:30 in the evening, after dinner downtown at an Irish Pub.

Cao Dai is a religion founded about a hundred years ago in the Vietnamese city of Tay Ninh.  It has around 2 million followers, or about 2% of the population. It's a bit like the American Unitarian Universalist Association in that it draws from Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Confucianism, and regards a number of people, including Victor Hugo and Jesus, as holy prophets. It does have a Pope, however, and a strict religious hierarchy with closely followed religious rights. Its practitioners wear all white and its symbol is the eye. The main temple, or the Holy See, of Cao Dai is located in Tay Ninh, and is a tourist attraction.

We left our house around 7:20 and caught a cab into the center city to the offices of the travel agent we used for our tour. We waited there from 8:45 to 9:00 to be shuttled to the central bus station. There we waited another 15 or 20 minutes for our tour guide to arrive and take us in our van to Tay Ninh. There were seven other tour participants: two middle aged Israeli men, a Romanian women in her late twenties who is a project manager in a factory for Proctor and Gamble, and four British boys who had recently graduated from university. The Israeli men had matching blue nike sneakers and had a lot of trouble understanding our Vietnamese tour guide's heavily accented English. The British boys were loud, rowdy, and disorganized.

It took about three hours to travel the 55 miles from HCMC to Tay Ninh. It took almost half of that time to get outside the city limits. A city whose streets were paved for bicycles and motorbikes does not easily accommodate passenger vans.  We also stopped for about 15 minutes at a handicrafts store somewhere in the countryside selling all manner of wooden items inlaid with mother of pearl, sea shells, and eggshells.

We reached the temple around 11:30 in the morning; enough time to see a bit of the grounds and the temple before noon prayer began. The grounds have several wooded areas reserved for monkeys, although they seemed mostly to be up in the trees as we only saw three or four. 

The temple itself is situated at the head of a large lawn with an obelisk, and no one is allowed to cross between the obelisk and the temple during services. Prayer services are four times a day: 6am, noon, 6pm, and midnight. They involve some singing and music on the part of the choir in the choir loft - which is where tourists are allowed to spectate from, and a lot of sitting and bowing on the part of the participants on the main floor. Services last until the leaders feel their god is satisfied. We stayed for about 15 minutes. Then we went to lunch.

Left: the alter area, Right: devotees during the worship service

Lunch was at a local place and was typical Vietnamese fare: corn soup, rice, ginger chicken, fried spring rolls, pork on a stick, and watermelon for desert. We had pre-paid our lunch, as had the Romanian woman, so we sat with her while the other six were at a different table.  She had been volunteering at a school in Cambodia, and then visiting an elephant refuge in Thailand with a group of other Romanians and had decided to spend a couple extra days in Vietnam on her own.

From lunch we left for Cu Chi, which is 30 miles back towards HCMC and takes about an hour. The country roads are mostly paved, but you have to slow down and pull over to the side of the road when another car or truck is approaching because the road isn't quite wide enough. Generally the scenery is orchards and forests of rubber trees. The roads are very bumpy and the very tall British boys in the back had their heads bounced into the ceiling on more than one occasion. Perhaps it's why they were disorganized.

The Cu Chi tunnels are a spider web of approximately 150 miles of tunnels and underground rooms used by the Viet Cong to combat American military troops in Vietnam. The tunnels generally measure about two feet in diameter and include larger dugouts for eating, meeting, sleeping, weapons storage and manufacture, and hospitals. Varrying in depth from 1 to 6 meters underground the tunnels served as both hiding places during American bombardments and underground thoroughfares through the jungle for Viet Cong guerrilla fighters. Some parts of the tunnels have been turned into a historical park open to visitors which also features American tanks and munitions and life size dioramas of Viet Cong life. Exhibits include weapons manufacture, guerrilla traps, and food manufacture.

Left: a traditional booby trap with bamboo spikes at the bottom. Center: Kim demonstrates the method of camouflaging the tunnel entrances. Right: The entrance to the "tourist" area of the tunnels. 

It was certainly interesting to see the tunnels, and even the ones broadened to three feet in diameter for tourists made me claustrophobic. We only crawled through them for 20 meters - the tourist route stretched a full 120m! However, our reaction in general to the park was similar to our experience at the war remnants museum - doubly unpleasant. Not only because of the heat and mosquitos, but also because it is never pleasant to come face to face with a gruesome period in American military history while the other side is shown through rose tinted glasses. There is almost no mention of the South Vietnamese government anywhere. The conflict is referred to as the "American war". I'm sure it is a conflict we will have to continue to grapple with in our time here - especially if we visit any more museums or historical sights.

After Cu Chi we spent another 90 minutes or so in the van headed back to HCMC. We were dropped off downtown by the central market. Since we were already in the city we decided to go to an Irish Pub we had found online for Chris' early birthday dinner. It was nice to have something other than rice for a meal!

Thanks for reading!

-Chris and Kim

Stay tuned for more tails from the other side of the world!

Interested in something particular about trip? Drop us a comment or email and we'll post about it! Email

On Teaching

Tomorrow wraps up our third full week of teaching - and we have yet to say much about it, so we thought we'd give you a little insight to the activity that fills the bulk of our time. We were both a little apprehensive about teaching going into this, as neither of us are trained teachers, but the curriculum the Spiritan fathers have chosen has proven very flexible.

As of today we have 13 students: six second years and seven first years.  The first year students have just joined the community, and are getting their first introductions life as a brother. The second year students have been living in community for a year, and interacting with the Spiritan fathers largely in English. They have also been taking theology classes and doing pastoral work in the community for a year. All of the students have a basic command of conversational English, though the range of abilities spans from Kindergarten to high school.  All of them studied English in high school, but some of them also studied it in University, and of course some programs are better than others. 

In general we keep all of the students together, and try to make the lesson plan as broad as possible. Right now neither of us have a sufficiency of Vietnamese to separate out the lower level students to teach them on their own: so there is a lot of explaining back and forth between the students.  In general I think this is a good thing, as one of the best ways to learn is to teach. Every third day we split the groups up to do a review day.  This gives the more advanced students time to cover extra material while the beginners catch things they might have missed during the lesson. 

If we have extra time in class we often go through the readings for the day or work on some tongue twisters. The difference between "g", "z", and "j" sounds has proven to be quite troublesome! We thought we'd share some video of the students working through some songs and rhymes.