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