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