I reached my month's anniversary of being here the other day. Can't say I've fallen in love with the city yet, and don't know if I ever will, but I am starting to live with certain aspects of Saigon life a wee bit better.. like the noise, for example...
Whether it be a whole class of Vietnamese 11 year olds performing an ear-splitting dance routine in their breaks, or another teacher making himself heard over the tug-of-war by shouting into a microphone, or the incessant hooting, tooting, throttling, pulsating cacophony of motorbikes 24 hours of the day and night, there is rarely a peaceful moment in this city, it seems...
Except during lunchbreak. Here, the city stops sometime between 11.30 and 2, eats their main meal of the day, and SLEEPS... Shops close... shop keepers ignore you.. even the men selling sunglasses on the street (8 of them approached me as I ate breakfast this morning! EIGHT!!!) take a break. Even our air conditioned office is eerily quiet after we pick through the dubious yellow lunch trays (tofu for the vegetarians every bloody day of the week - I've gone off it for good now) and settle in for a rest. My Vietnamese co-workers all pull their soft toys out, use them as pillows on their desks or just slump down into their seats, put their heads back and open their mouths for a sleep they're used to having since birth.
My afternoon classes begin at 1.50 pm, right after nap time is over. It takes a while to get the classrooms back to normal - for all the sleeping mats to be folded away into the cupboard, the desks to be put back, the heavy teacher's desk to be dragged back into the room... and while the children are rubbing sleep from their eyes and devouring their leftover lunch, some are frantically memorising their spelling words so they'll get ten out of ten, even if they have no idea what the words mean... I'm struggling with this cultural love of memorising and rote learning. When I ask for volunteers to read aloud something we're studying, I get a seas of hands and a show of reading as quickly as they can to prove their cleverness. When I stop the kids after every paragraph and ask them what has just happened in the story, the sea of eager faces suddenly turns blank. It seems they know their letters and how to read, but have no idea what the words mean.
I have to hand it to them though. At school 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, and learning in a language foreign to them. Keeping all this in mind, they're doing amazingly! And yet, I wonder how they'll cope with the Cabridge English exams they'll eventually sit. Even at the gifted school where I teach every afternoon, regurgitating knowledge has been given paramount importance. Frustrating to say the least, but we'll get there...
I teach at one other school three mornings a week, with kids at a much lower level. They greet me every morning with a "GOOD MORNING MISS SHARON" spoken very mindlessly and in unison, to which I reply "Good morning class, how are you?" before a very collective "WE ARE FINE THANK YOU, AND YOU?" comes back at me. This class doesn't understand much of what I'm saying, but there are small victories - like the kid who has been named 'Harry Potter' being able to string a few letters together on his own. As I congratulate him he looks up at me with big hopeful eyes and asks 'Stick-er?' , a most important word for these kids who work so hard and get little acknowledgement from their Vietnamese teachers who control with the cane alone(in general, I'm sure there are some exceptions...). At first I wondered why the kids were sitting stock still and listening while their other teachers wrote in perfect cursive letters on the blackboard with their backs turned, and where I was going wrong, until someone told me about the quality of the punishments.
I've taken to teaching through a microphone myself sometimes when my voice is tired and I love it, no longer competing with the noise from the ceiling fans or drills going off in various parts of the school, OR the monsoon - it hit the other day halfway through an afternoon class and the noise was deafening as sheets of rain pounded the open air school, past the three floors and down onto the stone courtyard where teachers conduct activities (through microphones) in breaktimes.
It hit last night too as I ate, the gunfire of the thunder no longer making me jump. After waiting for half an hour and failing to hail down a taxi, I decided to leg it and had my clothes clinging to me within seconds. I eventually found a roadside stall who sold me a flimsy polkadotted plastic raincover for 7000 dong (about 40 US cents). No raincoat could prepare me for crossing the streets though - the water was halfway up my calves and I tried not to think about cockroaches (one ran up my arm the other day!!!) or the rats whose sewer homes had been flushed out once again.
Anyway, being here is still a valid experience even if I'm not having the time of my life. Career wise it's fantastic, I'm still loving the job and the teaching - but lifestyle-wise, gimme clean green New Zealand any day. I'm hungering for some BEAUTY and REAL greenery, not the skinny parks filled with exercise machines and statues. Someone told me that every foreigner here is here for a reason and I'm certainly not here to enjoy the aroma of pollution, or risk my life crossing the road every day or fight off the cockroaches. I'm going to stick it out until May, learn as much as I can about teaching English as a foreign language, enjoy simple pleasures such as fresh coconuts and origami cranes from students, and practise being content...
No comments:
Post a Comment