See You Laters (and Tokyo!)

   We got to school Sunday morning to be greeted by the usual storm, which meant that our kids were later than usual. By 7:30 we had almost all of them, so we stopped playing games with our kids in our own classrooms and started the awards ceremony on the basketball court. At this point, several kids were already crying and it was spreading through them as they were standing in lines like a disease but for the most part the tears stopped during the presentation of certificates. We did not do too hot in the standings, but according to staff we actually might’ve won at least 6^th grade had we had our 3 best kids but unfortunately there’s a huge overlap between our athletic kids and the ones that get benched for misbehaving, so whatcha gonna do. Anyhow, it was a blast getting to cheer for all of them, take our pictures, watch one of the American coaches present pens to her teams like Vanna White, and just get to focus on how much our kids have achieved in only 3 weeks and how hard they’ve worked. It was also nice to focus on something other than the drama from the night before and to have something that made everyone move through any tension because when it came down to it, I stand by the fact that I was incredibly lucky to have a group of coaches that were all there for the same reason, and that was the kids. After all of the awards were presented, we went back into our classroom. The kids got little notes and gave us some as well, so emotions were already running high, but after a few minutes of milling around, I looked at my watch and realized we had only a few before we were supposed to be loading the bus. Elly was grabbing something from another room, so I started talking to them about how proud we were of them, how we believed in them and weren’t just telling them what we’d talked about in life skills or about their goals and dreams because the textbook told them to, how we’re always going to be their biggest fans cheering them on from across the world, etc., and they lost it, as did the coaches. Toán, our quieter troublemaker, had written Elly and me notes the other day when we did gratitude letters to the people that had helped us, which had already melted our hearts, but watching him cry was not something I thought I would be doing at camp. There’s something surreal about looking around at a classroom, and then downstairs where some classes had already been released, and seeing 140 people ranging from 11-22 all crying. Our director started telling us it was time to get on the bus, but no one made a move to do anything other than continue hugging our kids and she didn’t stop us for probably 10 minutes even though she kept giving us apologetic reminders. We’d heard about how tough it’s been for camps to leave in the past, but I think at least I underestimated the emotional attachment that we developed for these kids in only a month. It’s pretty hard to leave a child, heaving with sobs, after they told you they didn’t know how they would be able to say goodbye to a dear sister and wished you a happy life and asked for you to go back to them. And that wasn’t the anomaly, that was the normal sentiment across the camp. So despite all of the frustration we encountered at the camp and how excited we are in some ways to get back to the land of toilet paper, dairy products, and cockroach-free-living, there’s pretty undeniable proof that the program achieves what it’s supposed to, because it’s tough not to be overcome with pride, humility, and a mashup of all emotions when you go from 2 7^th graders having goals to all of them having a concrete dream and promising us in letters to apply what they’ve learned to furthering their education and overcoming their obstacles. 

     Anyhow, off to begin our 40+ hour journey with a pitstop in Tokyo and visit to the world’s biggest statue – a bronze Buddha! Until the next adventure :)

- Alex

Final Testing

The last two days filled with competitions and tests were complete and utter chaos. As we got off the bus Friday morning, our director warned us because the kids seemed particularly hyped up (they get to school at least a half hour early and just wait for us, either staring down from the top floor to wave or waiting around the bus to run up to us and say good morning). We nicknamed one of our boys “crackhead” because he literally did not sit still once the last 72 hours and adopted this raspy voice – it was bizarre but hysterical because he seemed to be having the time of his life.

   Friday came and went without much to report. It was absolutely exhausting because although we had 5 hours total of proctoring exams between the two grades, competitions for volleyball and soccer were 55 minutes each and between trying to coral them, which is like herding cats, and keep them cheering while doing subs and making sure they aren’t hitting each other, they run us ragged. Friday night we crashed after a wonderful but tiring day and got up nice and early on Saturday to do it all again sans tests.

   If we thought that Friday was tiring, Saturday crushed us and was probably the best and worst day of the trip, alternating by a matter of hours. The morning started with baseball due to the nice weather that we don’t always have, and 6^th grade played baseball while 7^th grade played jeopardy with the questions we’ve been submitting all month and then they switched. We have three kids in 6^th grade that are particularly rowdy, one of whom is harmless just hyper and actually wasn’t there (which hurt us because he’s an unbelievable athlete at about 4 feet tall). The second, Toán, is trouble but mostly because he follows the kids that are disruptive and doesn’t ever pay attention, gazing out the window when we’re talking and is just a bit slow to rally for whenever we go anywhere or try to do an activity. Tháng, the third, is funny but an absolute terror when we’re attempting to have any order in the classroom and is always yelling and laughing hysterically (at what we have NO idea) but to say his sportsmanship could use a little work would be an understatement. Elly and I have no problem pulling any of them (or any of the others who decide to be disrespectful) out of sports or moving them in class or whatever, but they generally are fine with a little extra monitoring. And during competition day, we have a rule throughout the coaches that if any kid yells at a teammate, is pouting, or shows bad sportsmanship then either the coach or the coaches running the sport can bench him/her because they know the rule and know it isn’t acceptable. However, yesterday Tháng decided he wouldn’t have any of our warnings and just wanted to do his thing. So he sat down in the outfield, at which point he got his warning to get out or be removed, but then proceeded to sit down laughing in front of 3^rd base during the next inning and almost tripped a kid. At this point I benched him, so he sat on the ledge on the baseline away from our team and began pouting. I took one of our translators and told him that he could essentially either get up and cheer for our team or he was out for the day, but it was his choice because he’s a big kid blah blah blah (we’re pretty sure he’s lying and is younger though, they found 17 in the last few days). Continues pouting, etc., sits out. The issue is that the Vietnamese coaches don’t really respect the tough love aspect of sports and aren’t exactly receptive to the lessons we’re supposed to be teaching them through sports and thus end up coddling them and I’m 99% sugarcoating literally everything they say. So we left him and he went to jeopardy and it was fine.

   I was proctoring the surveys that 7^th grade had to take while our 6^th graders were playing basketball, but he was giving Elly attitude so instead of going in for subs in the 2^nd wave he got moved to 3^rd and threw a fit and so he was sitting out when I came down halfway through the game. At that point, Elly was watching our team and I walked over again with a translator and told her/him that it wasn’t acceptable, it wasn’t about him, etc. and that he did not have the choice to sit out and cry because he wasn’t playing and act like a 5 year old. My Vietnamese coach was helping about -50%, so my director came over and basically repeated what I’d said with more authority (because she’s above both of us whereas we’re on the same level and I have no way of actually talking to the child which gives them pretty much as much sway in the matter as they want unless they care if we yell at them). He still wouldn’t move and was crying still, so she picked him up and he started throwing a royal temper tantrum and she held him standing while we did our team cheer and then told him to go upstairs. At this point, our other Vietnamese coach, who is even less help, went and followed him to go coddle him as we had a coach meeting and our director basically yelled at everyone that there was too much coddling and comforting kids for bad sportsmanship. So our coach is now crying because she’s upset by what happened, then leaves to go hang out and is not helping our team, so a staff member comes with our team and my director and I gave her our opinions on what was happening until they went and retrieved our other coach. As we found out later that night, this was a huge deal to them. Yeah, we were pretty frustrated beyond belief, but competition days are the most fun days of the week, we had literally 48 hours left in the country, and we moved on like we had other times we’d been frustrated by cultural differences or the language barrier or whatever normally accompanies a cross-cultural experience. Without going into the details for later that night, all of the tension between the Vietnamese and American coaches surfaced as a result of this incident and revealed a lot of the issues we’d been having throughout the entire camp. Unimportant at this point as we’re heading home, but definitely wasn’t a fun experience.

   However, in between the chaos caused by language barriers, emotions running wild, and spending 24/7 with people in an overwhelming environment for a month, we had probably the most fun experience of the trip (which is saying something, because it’s hard to beat being brought to tears by singing a terrible rendition of Beyoncé’s Listen in karaoke). Since I’m posting this outside of the country I’m hoping the government doesn’t show up at our door, but what can ya do. Our visas had certain restrictions accompanying them, such as having to be home at midnight and not being able to go to kids houses (a few years ago some Americans were playing with kids on a bridge over the river that runs along the road to school and it broke and the woman who lived near it called the government, so we’re not really allowed on locals’ property). However, some of our kids live along the rice fields near school and some of them live on the ride home, locations in which we could feasibly be exploring or running home, get tired, and decide to walk. So we finished early on Saturday, before lunch, and went home to get changed out of our CFC shirts and take a little nap before embarking on our adventure.

     We met a bunch of our kids at the school, and there ended up being a huge group of us leaving the school gates on bicycles that were less than safe, none of which had working brakes. They ride on the back of each other’s bikes because they have little platform things above the back wheels for a backpack or bag or whatever, so we ended up biking kids around (or letting them bike us if they wanted) and took our group of probably 40 people minimum on an hour-long excursion, after which we were hot, sweaty, exhausted, and so, so happy just riding along the rice fields through the most beautiful jungle area.

   We stopped for a few minutes to rest at one of the boys’ house because he had an open shop area in front of his house, but after about 10 short minutes we were deemed to be being too obvious and needed to move. So we walked about 15 more minutes down the rice field, jumped on some haystacks with the kids, had a fake marriage ceremony between two of the Vietnamese coaches (there’s been a running joke that the kids love after one of the coaches drew them as a couple when explaining acceleration in physics), and finally began the journey back.

    Everything was going relatively uneventfully, with only one casualty into haystacks on the side of the road, but then the unexpected happened – we encountered a water buffalo. We’d seen one by the rice fields by the kid’s house, but we went close enough to take a picture and then he got very angry and jumped up out of the water so we thought that was probably a good time to remove ourselves. But this one was quite docile, and we named him Shaniqua and became instant friends. I’d been begging the Vietnamese coaches and our directors and staff to let me ride one from day 1, and they told me that it was against CFC rules but after I could if I found a wild one but that would never happen. Voila, found a wild one. Well not really wild but not in a zoo. The man riding it let us pet him and then as we were walking away, our Vietnamese director asked if we could ride it and he said yes, at which point one of the other coaches yelled at me to come back and I literally sprinted through a line of kids as everyone flocked back. Getting on the buffalo and staying on without holding the random local around the waist was questionable, but it was absolutely worth it (pics of our adventure on Facebook). 3 of us took a little ride on the buffalo and then, on cloud nine, we embarked on our journey. At which point we heard thunder and saw grey clouds coming in, and we rode for about 10 minutes before it started completely and utterly downpouring, with huge gusts of wind and leaves and dirt flying at us. So at this point we were riding through a minor monsoon, with small children on our bikes, with no breaks, not looking at the road because we were looking down to not be blinded by the storm. I think likely the only way we could’ve made that situation less safe would’ve been to stop suddenly, so we all rolled with it and somehow did not get anyone injured. After about 20 minutes of pedaling as fast as we could, we got back to school, said goodbye to the kids, and a few of the American coaches walked back because we didn’t want to wait 40 minutes for the bus. So by the time we’d gotten back to the hotel, we were very, very happy but also wiped. But we had a wonderful dinner and fueled up for our karaoke party that the place we were staying let us have! We rocked some great classics and had a great moment where all of the Americans were up at the front singing along to “Wagon Wheel,” an America country classic, and we had a bit of peace before the chaos of the night resumed before we packed up, wrapped presents for the kids, and went to bed for a few before getting up for goodbyes. Hopefully tomorrow will go smoothly!

-Alex

Water

 in so many ways was absolutely the theme of today. We started the morning off by loading the bus with 5 water jugs, which seemed weird because we normally only do 2 max, but we asked our American director Oyuki and she just said to roll with it so we listened. We got off the bus and it was already scorching at school by 7 AM, so we figured it wasn’t a bad idea to have extra water for the kids and went about our business. I was also greeted by two of my favorite 6th grade girls (one cutie below, and the duo rocking their stellar outfits) yelling my name and running into my arms to get lifted up and spun around, so not a bad way to start the day.

 It was our last day teaching, so we had a lot of fun with the 6^th graders and pretty much didn’t do life skills in exchange for playing with them and extending team bonding. Whoops. 

Sports were pretty routine, just another day herding cats. 

 Luckily, we're about the same size. She's probably my tallest, and she's 12.

But health was incredible, we had an open Q&A at the end that began with a kid asking how we knew if cuts were infected (we were teaching them about bacteria) and turned into questions about why penguins can’t fly, how trees reproduce, why our breath smells bad, and how mosquitoes can bite us if they are so soft and our skin is so tough. And they just kept going. It was actually hilarious and so cool to see them curious and engaged without us having to play a game or competition to get them invested.

    Lunch was fabulous, we got our favorites AGAIN (we’ve started calling the woman who makes the food an angel on Earth regularly and I think she’s freaked out that she gets hit on by the Americans whenever she feeds us…standard, but she’s started giving us peanut butter at breakfast so it’s absolutely deserved) and then grabbed some coffee to head out to finish up 7^th grade. 7^th grade had some drama, which is to be expected, especially with these kids who are, as the Vietnamese coaches called it, “emotionally unstable” for a variety of reasons, but also because they’re honestly babied by the Vietnamese coaches. And it’s difficult for us to correct this or try to change it because by the time we’re involved after translation, it’s automatically become a bigger deal than it needs to be and the kid has been cradled for 5 minutes already. Not a day has gone by, at least recently, where we haven’t sent a kid to get ice or had a kid cry. Sometimes the ice and bandages are justified because oh yeah, they’re running barefoot on concrete, so split or torn off toenail happen and stubbed toes and scraped toes are pretty standard. But for the most part, the bullying and harsh language that goes on probably doesn’t deserve the reaction it gets. But today we had a kid get pulled out of health because he was crying out of fear he was going to get told on by his friends because he’s really going into 5^th grade but lied to get into the program (we’ve had this issue before but it was with an older kid, because 8^th and 9^th grade in this province is the week before and overlaps by a week so they’ll drop out of their camp for the last week and try to re-enroll using kids’ names that go to the school who are younger). Frustratingly, he’s literally been a terror for the yellow team coaches and the camp in general and has gotten their team into trouble an absurd number of times. But it seemed like as soon as that was resolved, we had a few girls start to cry because they were sad that we were leaving and camp was ending on Sunday (today was the last day of classes but we have two days of tests/competitions/jeopardy and then goodbyes on Sunday) and red had a huge debacle that took them almost 20 minutes to figure out and left most of their team in tears. After this, our director was yelling at everyone to form a heart to take a picture for the CFC Facebook page and was getting very frustrated, so we tried to coral our crying kids onto an outline of a heart. They then asked us to take 5 steps to the right, which kinda confused us because then we weren’t on the outline and didn’t think the picture would be preserved, but as soon as our directors started flinging water balloons at all of us from the second story of the school it made more sense (also cleared up why our director had told one of the girls to grab her GoPro for the pictures). So then we had a massive water balloon fight, complete with an extra box of water balloons, jugs of water that coaches threw on the ground to break and then poured over everyone, and a massive breakdown of multiple campers as the chaos broke down the emotional walls they’d been trying to keep up. We hopefully have some footage of the whole situation, but it was essentially 20 coaches, about 30 kids that were left, and some randos watching and we were just chasing and attacking each other with water balloons, drawers filled with water ,and broken water jugs as the remaining coaches tried to comfort (or find a translator to help us comfort) upset children. Pretty comical, and the guys watching were staring like we were, well, doing something absurd, which we were. The water fight calmed down after about 15 minutes once the toilet water was about to be used, and I walked down the path towards the gate to give the kids on my team that were watching from their bikes high fives but only got to one because when I looked at the first boy in line, his eyes were red and as I walked towards him he started crying. Literally heartbreaking. I got a translator to help me tell him that we had 3 super fun days left and that we’d already figured out how to write them letters, but he just cried harder until we sent him home to get rest.

   As soon as we got home, we had dinner and then watched the movie that Oyuki made for our trip (currently being uploaded to YouTube). There were absolutely tears, partially due to the fact that she used the song “Over When it’s Over” and we were already emotional from comforting kids all day. We also wrote grateful letters in our 6^th grade class during life skills to teach them about how our brain is always growing and we have to keep learning in order to keep it growing but we learn from the people around us as much as we learn from our academic subjects and when we use teamwork and learn from other people it’s important to let them know that we appreciate it. So we tried to promote team bonding but Elly and I ended up getting some adorable notes (all in Vietnamese haha) but the basically “don’t go back to America and thank you” from our biggest trouble maker was heartwarming.

   As for now, we’re just resting up for our big competition day tomorrow after a pep talk in which we were reminded that we are not currently in conference play and therefore cannot yell at the kids or treat them like D1 athletes because they are in fact 11 years old – always a good reminder before going into a competition J

   Here are some pictures from the rain adventures and more, and a great one of Jerry and his pink parasol. Literally one of a kind.

Until tomorrow, Green Dragons - JUST DO IT!

-Alex

Last Week Best Week

    So I was going to blog about the weekend trips, but after these past 36 hours they don’t seem as exciting. Or maybe that’s because they seem like ages ago, but regardless, a quick recap – first weekend we went to Ran Gia, a port town. It was hot (shocking) but super relaxing, and we basically just chilled, journaled looking over the delta, had an incident of water being spit across the table, and refueled after traveling here and going through week 1. Weekend 2, our “city weekend,” was in Can Tho, a college town where the majority of our Vietnamese coaches go to school. It was super fun, albeit more busy, but we got to visit a Vietnamese ancient market, get Western food (huge play), get 90 minute massages for $14 (filled with large amounts of “lost in translation moments” in which we ended up standing in a steam room wiping the door begging them to let us out as they imitated and laughed at us, but luckily we were laughing too), and karaoke. Karaoke was absolutely one of the highlights of my trip, but it has to have been outdone by the past day and a half.

   To kinda put you in our mindset of where we were yesterday morning, we were pretty crushed. The combination of being eternally hot and sticking to chairs, frankly not ever reaching full fuel because we’re not eating the nutrients/protein that we’re used to and eating with chopsticks makes you think you’re eating a whole lot more than you really are (although really, thank goodness for chocolate – which we made homemade this weekend and also found a puppy at the chocolate farm that I pretty much held the entire time despite the fleas we found on him, sorry Mom), and the fact that we’re fighting to get what we say translated and teaching/coaching for 8 hours a day with kids that literally have no idea what we’re saying is absolutely exhausting. Add working out as often as we feel like we can without being completely dysfunctional at camp, and we weren’t the peppiest group on Tuesday morning. So Tuesday came and went, I was particularly frustrated at points because I didn’t have my American co-coach for volleyball (another illness victim), one of my translators does not translate because he pretty much speaks no English (it’s SO unclear how he’s on this program, he’s also 28…), and the other one demos incorrectly and hasn’t ever played volleyball, so to say it’s a struggle. However, things took a major turn when we arrived, hot, bothered, and hungry, back to lunch.  (Also, I’m making us sound like terrible people but I’ve actually been really impressed by the way our whole group rallies for every session and keeps positive attitudes. From what we’ve heard/observed from other groups, this is certainly not always the case so I think I got really lucky with my incredible group of coaches!)

    We had favorite lunch, which is a pork omelete thing?, Vietnamese sweet potato fries, green beans, and pumpkin in soup. So automatically the hangry subsided and we were in much better places to start the afternoon. We also discovered that we could buy iced coffee from the hotel in the afternoon, which is coming in big (their iced coffee is VERY different, and so delicious. It’s also 50 cents so that’s pretty awesome). School was pretty good, we did a bunch of demos in Life Skills to demonstrate how your mood affects other people and actually were using the same analogies (the Traffic Light) that we use on my Dartmouth team because Jeff Janssen, whose books we use for mental skills training, works with UNC athletics and since the curriculum for Life Skills comes from Duke, it made its way over. So that was pretty funny. But after dumping some Purell and Tums in water bottles to prove our points and create weird pink bubbly solution, the rest of the lessons just kinda came and went. I benched a kid during volleyball who then tried to ditch school, so that wasn’t ideal, but he ended up back so it clearly resolved enough. But then, we got to our last sport, which is right before team bonding in the afternoons, and it started downpouring. Which meant that we couldn’t really have sport because the baseball field (an uneven, slippery slab of concrete) was flooded so they had to combine so we basically just decided to play in the rain with all of the kids for an hour instead. We started with volleyball (so like 30 on 30) and then split off, so a few people went and played basketball and a large contingent went to play mud soccer. Obviously volleyball was a blast, and there’s nothing like playing with small children on your shoulders to make you work on balance while you’re blocking (fun fact – learned today that our average kids are about 26 kilos. That is less than 60 pounds, and they’re in 6^th grade. Additional fun fact from our books today – 1.8 of those kilos are just from the bacteria on them. Yay health class!). But soccer was one of the funniest experiences of my life. Not only is it pretty great to watch a bunch of small children just go at each other in the mud and pouring rain while running around, trying not to trample them, and getting tired of running into them so adopting my strategy of just picking up the good ones so they couldn’t get by, but Jerry showed up. I cannot even begin to describe how absurd this guy is. But he has to resemble some cross of a spider monkey, 11 year old boy, character in the Big Bang Theory, Urkel, and some other things I can’t even think of. (Side note two bugs just flew into my computer screen because they’re attracted to the light. Awesome.) But he first showed up toting a pink umbrella and hiding under it. Like what? So we mocked him, laughed, moved on, but then he joined us playing. In the goalie. Within moments, his glasses had fallen off and he had fallen, so he stumbled to put them away but then stayed in the goal. He is legally blind at this point (his prescription is a 6.5…this is not a joke). So he’s squinting, tip-toeing around in a way I can’t describe other than to say maybe imagine an awkward praying mantis running away from something? And we’re trying to mess with him, telling him to throw the ball to us (we’re on the other team) and he’s just going “no no no” and shaking his finger at us, although he gives it to us occasionally, and then he chucks the ball yelling “GABBY” to a girl he coaches with but instead of going to her, it goes into the tree, over our bus, and off towards the baseball field, at which point he squeals “OHHH!” and covers his mouth with his hand flexed all the way backwards. I’m going to try to figure out a better way to describe him, but I’ll upload a video of him dancing when I can figure out how if it helps at all.

   So after volleyball, soccer, a mud fight/mud wrestling, and finally cleaning up and saying goodbye to the kids, we went home for another unreal meal. It’s also unclear if the food is getting better or if we’re getting hungrier, because we’ve been stocking up on the snacks they give us at school (which combine to 130 calories – you cannot find a single set of snacks in America for that) but regardless, it was delicious. We then crashed early – read: 8:00 lights out – and woke up this morning for a short circuit and school.

    This morning started out disastrously with sports, because we had two teams together because the baseball area was flooded, I was again essentially solo, and they did not understand Queen of the Court (it wasn’t being translated so how could they…) so we played 17 on 15. It shockingly went unbelievably well, and gave us a plan for the rest of the sports sessions so that was great! Health in the morning was fine, to be honest I can’t remember what we taught but I’m sure it was just brilliant, but during Life Skills we had some inner-team drama. We had one girl crying because she hurt her knees (we made them climb up the stairs with no hands on their knees to do a demo about short-term/long-term goals and how it isn’t easy to achieve them), and then one of our boys, who’s ditched recently and is constantly causing us trouble, just showed up 3 hours late. So we asked where he was, and our translators told us that he had been playing videogames. So he got yelled at until he cried, stood at the back of the classroom with his arms in the air, and then someone talked to him and he told them he’d overslept, so we were confused but turns out the girls had lied and said they knew he’d been playing videogames and our coaches had listened. So then the girls were in trouble for lying (although weird that he slept until 10:30 but who knows), until we found out that he had said something I will not repeat to them the day before and refused to apologize. So back to him in trouble. Meanwhile, my other color coach and I are looking at each other like what in the world are we supposed to do because we can’t understand any of the conversations that are happening (one of the coaches is translating back to us but it’s delayed and fragmented), but we ended up just having them apologize, moving on, and working on trust during team bonding. We had a short meditation session which was pretty funny and was led by one little dude who took it upon himself to try to restore order even before we brought up the meditation idea.

    We had a great nap sesh after a wonderful lunch and then went back to school with the plan to cut our 5 minute passing/prep periods in order to get us to finish a half hour early to play volleyball. So class and sport went as normal (I got to teach a great lesson on rats and muscle mass and they thought I was hysterical so that’s always fun, plus I got to practice my drawings of rats on the board) and then we had coach bonding and played volleyball with the 8 Americans and 8 Vietnamese. It was hilarious. I’m the only one who’s ever played before (my “translator” who doesn’t speak English may have but it’s unclear), but since at least all of the Americans are D1 athletes somewhere it was really successful and we had SO much fun smack talking. (On the smack talking front, it’s been maybe one of the funniest things I’ve seen when we realized that our kids literally can’t understand a single thing we say aka we can talk about them or say whatever we want/great them however we want directly next to them. Which sounds messed up, but it’s oddly convenient and incredibly stress-relieving when you can actually quickly vent how you feel and then get over it without anyone, even generally the Vietnamese coaches, realizing it.). It was really nice to blow off some steam from the afternoon and allowed us to get moving without having to run home because it was pretty rainy and that just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

   And THEN, as if the day could get any better, we arrived home to pasta. Lots and lots of pasta. And fried rice and French fries (always) and some green veggie that was delicious and their lemon juice and MANGO, our favorite fruit, after we got dragon fruit at lunch. I think we almost cried we were so excited. Our director told the woman who runs the hotel that she was an angel on Earth and that we all loved her, and I think she appreciated it but was also a little weirded out. With our newfound energy from eating, we began wreaking havoc when the Vietnamese coaches from the other coach came to visit and hung out and danced for a bit before realizing that while we were pumped about what has been happening, we’re still exhausted. However, not too exhausted for Jerry to rock the dance floor, alone and with Annie, another coach.

Anyhow, time for bed but hopefully some pictures soon and more later!

Still don’t know how to say goodbye, but can now write “stride” (as in stride length and stride frequency), so I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

-Alex

Smoke, Sweat, and Tears

To begin with the obvious, sweat. I think I’ve already mentioned how frickin hot it is here (and I can’t even complain because we haven’t lost electricity for a few days AND we’re the site that has AC most of the time – the other one doesn’t have AC or Wifi, so even though ours is intermittent we are VERY lucky. We also have showerheads rather than buckets AND at our new last week site, we have toilets AND they flush instead of us using buckets!! #blessed). Anyhow, I’m currently sitting on my elbows and knees so that I don’t get my bed any sweatier than it already is and I’m also on the bed rather than my sheet, which is a pretty big deal for me because there are bug guts from the bugs I had to scrape off of it this afternoon. Although we had to get a cockroach out of our room last night and one night in the old site we walked into our room and it was covered in THOUSANDS of gnat bug things, and I proceeded to get locked in there because when I pulled the doorknob it broke. I also had a fever and strep and had not eaten in almost 48 hours so to say I’m proud that I kept it together would be an understatement. ANYHOW, the rain has stopped other than a few 15 minute downpours, which is great because we’re not being drenched while trying to teach, but not ideal because it’s really, really hot. And while luckily part of the volleyball court is in the shade so we’re not getting cases of heat stroke to add to the illnesses that are plaguing us, I’m still slightly concerned about the wellbeing of the kids because they wear sweatshirts and long pants to protect their skin from the sun and stay pale (yeah, that’s what I generally go for too…). But hey, they’ll look great when they’re 50. I will be wrinkled, both from sunburns (hey Irish!) and the fact that I sweat enough on a daily basis here to literally turn into a raisin from dehydration.

As for smoke, apparently it’s a good idea to burn plastic next to schools here. Because obviously we should basically hotbox the basketball court and surrounding field and cement courts, because that’s good for kids. So we live in a haze when it isn’t raining. I’m sure it’s helping our lungs that are already struggling from fumes when we walk outside.

Tears. Have begun. Starting last Wednesday, which is pretty aggressive if you ask me, but hey. Our camp is all girls. A girl on the red team had been crying in class at the end of the day, so the American and Vietnamese coaches in her color took her aside because they thought she was being bullied. Luckily, she wasn’t, but she started telling them about how she was so upset because they were leaving soon. So obviously the coaches started crying, and the Vietnamese coach was pretty upset the entire bus ride home. So that was hard to see, especially because we’ve all gotten unbelievably attached in 2 short weeks. Something about playing sports with them and doing life skills, rather than just teaching, changes the way our relationships have developed, kinda in the same way that in preseason after 3 weeks you feel like you’re already a family. Definitely not looking forward to our goodbyes on Sunday, but we still have a full week left! (On the tears note, we just watched The Fault in Our Stars. If anyone has not watched it…there’s a reason it’s in this section of the blog. Just be warned.)

Originally I changed the phrase from “blood, sweat, and tears” to smoke, because 1. there has yet to be blood and 2. I thought I was being clever. There has still not been any blood other than the occasional skinned knee or stubbed toe, but there’s a possibility that I’m going to punch one of our translators (aka Vietnamese coaches, or less likely but still possibly one of the men who drive by in their motorbike as we run home and mock us. Like I’m hot, I’m exhausted, I want to puke because your fumes are in my face – don’t make fun of me right now, especially not in a language I do not understand) in the near future. Just as a heads up for anyone in the US who would have access to an embassy in the event of an arrest. Since they know how to work the internet better than I do here given that, oh yeah, the ENTIRE thing is in Vietnamese if not blocked (again, cheers for government censorship), I think the explanation should end there on this but let’s just say that 21 in the US means a VERY different thing than 21 in Vietnam, where their curfews are still 9 PM and they’re more matched for our kids than us. Which is saying something coming from me given that Frozen is up there with my favorite movies. They also just blatantly don’t translate for us, making us rudely just follow statements with “translate please,” or they change what we say which we can easily figure out when we mention names or places and they’re just not included. They also don’t really believe in praise here/it’s not a cultural thing, so 99% of the encouragement we give our kids is not translated. Which is sad and very, very frustrating. (Side note about our kids – apparently their small stature is unique to the rural south jungle where we are, because they don’t have the money for dairy products so they don’t get enough calcium. They’re also apparently a lot brattier here, but who knows where that comes from. With the exception of a few of them, they’re still great!)

Anyhow, more to come later! With pictures, as soon as I can download them. Facebook may have to suffice on the picture front for this if I don’t get my act together within the next few days though.

Adios (still have no idea what “bye” is)!

- Alex

Hump DAY!

Happy hump day! Today marked our halfway point in the camp, which absolutely crazy, but it also gave us an opportunity to explain to hump day to our Vietnamese coaches using the commercial. They were confused to say the least, but the laughs were much appreciated given that we had two Vietnamese coaches down for the count at camp today. One of them is also now limping with a dislocated foot(?), one got pooped on by a bird and has an infected ant bite, and a third today almost passed out from drinking no water and it was maybe the hottest day yet (but she was fine after I literally forced her to chug my entire water bottle during one of her classes).

Today was a bit of a whirlwind, starting with one of our lift coach’s fun circuits that included 160 squats. Not appreciated given that we spent the next 8 hours in shockingly hot weather running around with little minions. That being said, school was anything but boring. As a run-down, we started the morning with sport, and to say today failed would be an understatement. To back track a little bit, Vietnamese 6^th and 7^th graders are much cuter than their American counterparts for several reasons.

1. They look like they’re 2^nd graders and have not hit that awkward train wreck phase yet.

1a. Like, most of them don’t go up to my ribcage. And today, I measured my wrist against some of the kids’ arms. They’re bigger than their biceps, and for reference I have the hands of the average 6 year old so I was not setting the bar high.

2. While apparently our kids are way worse than the ones further north, they seem to be less entitled and bratty than some middle schoolers at home (no offense). Granted, we can’t hear 90% of what they say, but after threatening them with push-ups and following through on it a couple of times, they’re generally very well-behaved.

3. As mentioned early, for many of them the whole exposure to sports thing leaves a little to be desired.

4. While this is pretty similar to America, it’s really funny to transition from the morning to afternoon because the kids do get noticeably more awkward and self-conscious and refuse to get up in front of the classroom, but they all still think it’s funny when we act things out for them so that’s all that really matters. They also smell significantly worse.

So, today we attempted to start overhand serving. So far we’ve done passing, setting, and underhand serving, so we thought this was the next step. We thought wrong. What started as a simple warmup of throwing the ball over the net to warm up our arms turned into a huge reality check when we realized that probably 60% of our kids cannot throw the ball over the net. From the 10 foot line. And I don’t even think we’re letting them off the hook by saying it’s just a lack of technique, I literally don’t think they have the strength because I could break their arms fairly easily. So that didn’t exactly work, but they seemed to be having a lot of fun! Somehow the translation has gone downhill over the past two weeks, but the girl I coach with (Rainey) and I have started to master the art of sign language. Serving is easier because there’s a lot of body language stuff that we can act out, and we’ve started just establishing symbols for “straight line” and “spread out” and, the one that’s been most helpful, “hands up mouth shut.” So while our hopes of playing a real game by the end of next week have been slightly crushed, we’re still keeping our fingers crossed.

Health today rocked, because Gabby and I figured out that if you split our kids into groups, tell them they have to draw as many _______ (fruits, frigid climate animals, etc.) as they can, they will draw enthusiastically for 20 minutes, no questions asked. With classes of 40 minutes, this is huge. So we drew a lot of fruits in 6^th grade, learned about simple/complex carbohydrates in both grades, and identified frigid, hot, and tropical climate animals in 7^th and their adaptations. Riveting stuff, but we got some fun pictures out of it. And we had to fight our 6^th graders because they screamed at us when we tried to collect one group’s pictures that we later realized they wanted to give to their coach, but now one of our American coaches has a “garden for her home” so that’s pretty cute. Just when you want to throw something at them, they pull through.

Today also started our teamwork section of life skills. Basically, life skills is where we try to tie sports and academics together. I get to do this a little bit already because I teach health which ends every topic in how it relates to athletes, but obviously that’s a little tougher to do for people who are teaching English, math, and physics. Because we have life skills every day, as opposed to subjects which they only have every other day, we get 4 topics and lesson plans a week instead of just 2. Objectively, the lesson plans they give us are pretty boring, so it’s definitely the aspect of the academics that we have to be the most creative with. At the beginning of camp, we talked about our dreams, how our dreams can impact society, and how higher education plays into all of that because the main goal of CFC is to leverage sports to encourage kids to get a higher education. We had some awesome responses from our kids, from a future CEO to a girl who wants to be a doctor to help the victims of Agent Orange (side note – to start our trip, we visited the Vietnam War memorial, obviously not called the Vietnam War here but rather referred to as the War of US Aggression. One of the most obscene things I’ve ever seen, including two full rooms of Agent Orange victim pictures, a letter from a 3^rd generation(?) victim to Obama, and preserved fetuses. Talk about some somber team bonding, interrupted by a lovely bat swarming while we were in the torture section of the museum, but it was definitely a good reminder about our reputation as Americans before living and working here for 3 weeks).

 But anyhow, back to life skills. So after we talked about our dreams and aspirations and overcoming obstacles, for which I drew a pretty stellar visual of the transition from a caterpillar to a butterfly, we’ve moved on to teamwork and trust. While we bash life skills because of some of the examples they give and the stories they tell us to use, it’s actually been a pretty cool experience. Each lesson starts with a quote, two of which this week were from Helen Keller about learning bravery and patience from adversity and working together to achieve much more than the individual can alone, and it’s been a pretty interesting experience having these conversations with middle schoolers, albeit in a different language. I think we’re all realizing how many of the lessons that we’re teaching our kids we take for granted, especially when we explained the Vietnamese education system layout to our class, something that’s rarely necessary to do for anyone coming from the US. Games like the Trust Fall, Minefield (where one person is blindfolded and the other has to lead them through a maze), and other simple examples of teamwork keep revealing to us how many things we’ve learned from being on sports teams that kids from a background of very competitive academics but very rural, farming families haven’t ever had a chance to learn or experience. It’s also pretty fun to hear what 6^th and 7^th graders are worried about, especially when it’s something we can easily dispel like the idea that they shouldn’t go to high school because high school is tiring and they don’t like being tired. But it also sometimes seems like a lot of pressure, because many kids drop out before or right after 7^th grade (and in particular the pretty girls), so we’re working extra hard to both encourage them and help them to understand that obstacles will come, but that’s neither a reason nor an excuse for them to give up.

Characters of the Day –

- Jerry. One of the two Vietnamese guy coaches (we have none), but it’s unclear where his true identity lies. Not only does his dancing literally make us cry laughing, but today he wore a butterfly clip in his hair and got pooped on by a bird and started squealing. His class drew a picture of him as a tall, beautiful woman, which he actively embraced. Hammered and then hungover from 1/3 of a beer.

- Phoenix. Huge crush on one of our American coaches. Has a wife, also known as a gay man girlfriend. Today we told her she should date Jerry, but she said she likes her wives to be strong and Jerry is weak (he weighs 50 kilos, or about 100 lbs, give him a break). Just got her hair cut by one of the American coaches and woke up at 4:30 this morning and just stood there looking at herself in the mirror. Today told us that she lost 40 pounds because she “started smoking right” and went on a diet of smoking, drinking beer, and not eating food. Healthy.

Just killed a mosquito, which we named Malaria (she’s been around a while), by throwing a book at her, so I’m considering today a success. We also ran home from school, which is like 2.5 miles, and LITERALLY almost died of heat stroke/humidity stroke if that’s a thing but got to run by one of the patches they have here where they just have like 50 ducks in a fenced in area next to the road like every 40 feet but these weren’t fenced off, and a baby on a motor cycle with a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses. And every single person stopped what they were doing to watch the tall American girls run, so that’s always fun. But after about 45 minutes we stopped sweating and tried to replenish the calories and sweat with rice and water, so fingers crossed we don’t collapse tomorrow at school.

Until tomorrow, and more pictures to come!

Alex

"Sports are a universal language"

... is the most incorrect statement I have ever heard. Like ever. First off, it's not that it's impossible to have a universal language. Smiling and tic-tac-toe prove they exist, and while playing 20 minutes straight of tic-tac-toe with a girl who rides the bus back home may sometimes get monotonous, we have proven time and time again that a smile and a grid written up on the board can prevent complete chaos when you are alone with 15 children who can understand absolutely zero of what you’re saying. (also heads up it's entirely possible that the word "furniture" will be inserted at some point in the next few posts because my browser is now trying to translate my writing into English and things some of the things are saying are Vietnamese...? it's unclear.)

But back to sports. So today, in the morning it was blistering hot (thankfully we also lost electricity today because who would want a fan) and then in the afternoon we had a monsoon-like storm that flooded the school ground so we did back-to-back academic classes and then sports a bit later. While it was nice to get our health class out of the way because the 7^th grade lesson was so boring that we didn’t even want to teach it, it meant that we had an hour and a half straight of volleyball. Coming from college practices, this shouldn’t have seemed like a lot, and don’t get me wrong – it’s a blast. That being said, there are some SERIOUS differences coaching outside of the US when compared to doing it in our sheltered gyms in Marin or New Hampshire. I won’t pretend like I have extensive coaching experience in either, but I’m almost positive that there are some fundamental differences.

1. I’ve been told that personally and as a team, I’ve looked at coaches like they’re speaking a different language when they talk to me. I’ve also been on the other end of it while coaching CYO and camps. However, I will say this – it is one thing for the to look at you like you’re speaking a foreign language, but it is quite another for you to ACTUALLY be speaking a foreign language. It takes the phrase “pick your battles” to a whole new level, because I am not about to try to spend 5 minutes getting one of our translators to explain something to a child unless it is actually worth it.

2. Kids in America are exposed to sports. We have some really, really athletic kids on my team, like to the degree that I’m pretty positive that if they came to America they’d be on scholarship somewhere by college. And not to generalize, but that’s mainly the boys. Some of the girls are pretty coordinated as well, and especially when it’s coach-initiated they can pass the ball pretty accurately. However, there is a large portion of my team (and especially the girls) that I am 100% positive has never done a single athletic thing in their life. Which is probably true, and which is why CFC exists. But it makes it much more difficult to explain to someone how to do something like set a ball when making contact with a moving object is a struggle and they’ve literally never touched an athletic ball in their lives because sports just aren’t a thing for most kids here in the rural jungle.

3. We play in basically monsoons, in flip-flops/barefoot, on the concrete floor, with barely enough volleyballs for each set of partners to have one.

4. They don’t speak English.

5. They don’t speak English.

6. Did I mention they don’t speak English? And sometimes, in class or in sports or whatever if we look frustrated because the Vietnamese coaches aren’t translating for us, they just look at us and ask “What is wrong?” to which our response is, “they don’t speak English.”

Side note – just paused to watch a lizard walk across our floor. Hopefully to keep eating the mosquitoes and maybe the cockroach sitting outside?

As a fun story for today/from last week, today we had 4 kids get knocked in the head with a volleyball. While this may not seem unusual given that we have kids running around wreaking havoc all day on the volleyball court, we haven't had that happen at all over camp and had it happen four times within maybe 5 minutes. And as a background on why this made my heart stop literally every time, day 1 we had a kid get knocked unconscious for a good 40 seconds playing Duck Duck Goose, which needless to say has been banned from the camp. But don't worry, he came back to school the next day and has been coming to class and playing sports ever since. Because that's safe and healthy and we don't listen to words like "concussion" or "hospital" over here apparently.

But anyhow, that’s the basic run down on coaching volleyball so far, more on health class, life skills, and team bonding to come! And, I’m sure, more adventures with sports.

Current sick count – we had 5/8 Americans today but got up to 6 by the afternoon. We figured out that (ironically) there must’ve been something wrong with the cheese on pizza we found on Sunday, because 6 of the 8 of us ate it and all 6 (except for me, likely because I’m on double-duty antibiotics that kill literally everything) have been running back and forth sick, as well as the one Vietnamese coach that ate with us. But other than that, Ms. Sinusitis in the room next to me is clearing up, the girl with infected capillaries has not regressed, the heat rash has stagnated for everyone, and I believe the two Vietnamese directors that were hit by trucks (separate incidents) are healing nicely. As for the one Vietnamese coach who's sick, more on her later, but for now her name is Phoenix and she has a pretty serious crush on one of the American coaches. So yes, it’s quite the situation.

Goodnight/good morning! More tomorrow :)

- Alex