Here and Now - Saigon at last...

This blog entry is named after the fact that for the past few weeks I've been attempting to catch up with all I didn't write about over the past months. Twas an admirable effort, but one which I'm abandoning as of HERE AND NOW , BABY! Cause it's time to put the presence back in the present, dig?

SO... for the past two weeks I've been learning to like Saigon after a rough start here, arriving half heartbroke and... well, broke, actually. Totally void of any 'real' money, a fact which I have been lucky enough to fix straight away with a job offer that came flying in at exactly the right time. Anyway, it was hot, the pollution gave me asthma, I knew absolutely nobody here... and coming as I did from the summer of my life, I didn't take to it too well...

But enough of that! I am here NOW and started teaching in local schools today, employed through a well paying company who taxis me to my classes and gives everyone free lunch (admittedly of varying quality...). After three days of induction and loads of time to plan I walked into my first classroom of smiling bespectacled Vietnamese faces (about a third of the kids in my class wear glasses, and another third need to - I've been told it's the lack of Vitamin A in the diet because eyesight is pretty bad in general... correct me if I'm wrong here!) and taught a two and half hour session on Frankenstein. Such a cool and gory tale, particularly the graphic novel the kids have been doing...

Surprisingly enough, it IS actually 'real teaching' that I'm doing. I had imagined myself teaching 5 years olds how to sing the alphabet, but I've been put with kids aged about 11-13, most of whom have a pretty good grasp of the English language. SO I'm teaching what I would teach to a normal intermediate age. Horror, folk tales, non fiction, autobiography... exciting stuff, particularly as I've now tested my brain function and am happy to say that after a ten month break from teaching, my brain does still work! And I'm so glad now that I'm back in the classroom. It wasn't until I got back here that I realised how much I missed it.

Because, to be honest, I've hardly given it a second thought these past few months, completely on holiday on all levels and loving it. And although I adored my last school and my three years there, I did suffer from stress quite a lot. It's my personality - intense and somewhat highly strung, brain going 100 miles a minute and stopping me sleeping at night with thoughts about how I could modify lessons for my five classes, what I could do, some behavioral issue that was going on and how I could fix it... All of this stuff has been coming back for me this week, all of the waking up in the middle of the night too unfortunately.. but thankfully the work I am doing here is so stress-free that I am gradually learning that there's nothing to wake up for.

I've also realised that I really love teaching - I love it! But seriously, I don't know if I would go back to full-time teaching in New Zealand or any other Westernised nation again. I'd do it part time of course... but I don't know if I could 'fulltime myself' again. Some things are just not suited to some people, and I just feel like I compromised my own enjoyment of life too much when I was working 60 hours a week. Honestly, I've still been having the same old anxiety dreams of not being able to control students and missing classes for the past ten months of holidaying! It's unbelievable...

So here I am in this nice air-conditioned office, planning my lessons before I am chaffeured across town to teach. I never teach more than one class at a time, which means that even though I often teach 2 1/2 hour sessions, at least I have time after each class to go back and debrief with myself. I teach 8 long sessions a week to four different classes in two different schools, always with a Vietnamese assistant in the class which I don't use cause the kids are all well behaved, if a little noisy. And they WANT TO LEARN!! It's so wonderful... even though they have difficulty thinking for themselves, they are total sweethearts and call me 'Miss Sharon' or 'Teeecher!'

So, even though this city is disgustingly smoggy from the thousands of motorbikes that crowd the roads... I think I can learn to like it more and more. Exhausted after work every day, I catch a 'xe om' (motorbike taxi) home each day and am whizzed through the rush hour traffic, getting an adrenalin rush through my face mask (you need one here, believe me...). And when the monsoon hits, I love it...

The Vietnamese staff in our office are so cute, all curling up and going to sleep on their lunchbreaks despite the airconditioning (old habits die hard...) and they seem so happy with their lives. Outside perspective of course, but I see it in the kids I teach too - there is none of the surliness I was used to, or the refusal to work... there are many many reasons for this of course, and they're not all good - I bet some of them are threatened if their marks aren't good enough... but my point is, in a nation that has been so screwed over in the past, people still seem happy with what they've got, which is much less than what we Westernites have come to expect and whine about when we don't receive. None of my students complain about being given homework, or having 2 1/2 hour classes, or about going to school from 7- 4.30, six days a week! It's just an accepted part of 'the way things are' here, one which I think everyone could learn from - not that quantity equals quality by any means, I'm more getting at the ability to just get on with things whilst still keeping a smile on ones face...

Anyway, it's the end of my first week of full time work and I'm exhausted so am going to sign off. I've been in bed before 9pm every night this week and, besides waking up in the early hours of the morning (old habits die hard...) am having no problems falling asleep even with the traffic noise coming through the toilet paper stuffed into my ears (note to self: buy proper ear plugs this weekend). I'm yawning as I write this, so I know it's time to get back to my cute little top-floor $8 a night hotel room.

xxxx