First Post

Okay. Well this is my first post as you may have noticed from the title, but in case you didn't I figured I'd go ahead and say it twice. It's funny how that works here. Saying things twice to make sure that the people you are talking to actually understand the noises coming out of your mouth is standard practice during the first few weeks of a new term. What happens is I'll usually say something once at full speed (using my native English vocabulary) without thinking about it; then as I'm finishing my statement I'll glance at my students, half of whom are looking at me blankly while the other half have eyes rolled back in their head as they google their brains for the definition of dichotomy, and I'll realize that I've done it again. So as soon as I finish I start again, but this time with fewer syllables and a careful and deliberate crafting of each individual word followed by a slow "okay?" accompanied by a nod of the head. Sometimes they nod even when they don't really understand which is another story altogether.
But that's not really what I was thinking about when I sat down to type this "First Post." I was thinking about one of the most important things I've learned since I arrived here in Vietnam. Patience. What reminded me about this virtue was a spontaneous invitation to lunch by one of my colleagues, Thay Hung.

-Quick aside here, for those of you who don't know or speak Vietnamese, thay is like a pronoun for a teacher who is a man and co pronounced go is for a teacher who is a woman. The reason I find this interesting is because there are 8 ways to address people: em, toi, chi, anh, ba, ong, co, and thay. All of them can mean "me" depending on your situation, but toi is the only official "me" with no other meaning. The rest are conditional on age. So younger men and women (20s-50s)) are anh and chi respectively. Old men and women are Ong and Ba. Anyone younger than you is em. And Thay and Co are specifically for teachers. So inherent in the language here is a special way to refer to someone who is your teacher, regardless of age. In every other encounter, age is a determinant for what you call yourself and what you call the person you are talking to, but in this special relationship the thay is always and forever a thay and the same for co. I'll talk more about this in another post maybe, but back to what I was saying -

So Thay Hung invites Jacque (my post mate here in Can Tho) to lunch because it's been a while since we've all sat down and chatted in a while and he decides we should eat right now (it's 10:00am, but Vietnamese people are crazy and get up at like 4:30 every day so they eat really early). We agree and he says he needs to go lock his office and then we'll all leave together.
Well, he walks about 4 meters towards his office and stops at the guard's post to chat with the guard...for 20 minutes. I really didn't see anything wrong with the situation and then it donned on me that in some former life of mine I would be kind of pissed because we were sitting there not 20 feet from him waiting for him to get his stuff to come eat lunch and he was having an idle conversation with the security guard. Not being phased at all by this though, I couldn't help but laugh a little bit at how much my perceptions of time have changed since being here. In the States everything has to be done 10 minutes ago and if you take 20 extra minutes for a lunch break you had better have twisted your ankle getting out of the car on the way back to work.

Here, all the teacher's finish morning classes at 10:00 and start afternoon classes at 13:30. That's 210 minutes of pure relaxation. I remember at first having a really difficult time adjusting to this whopping black hole in the middle of my day; futilely searching for afternoon entertainment and finding all venues closed for afternoon naps, but now it just seems normal and a quick nap has become a familiar spoke on the hamster wheel. One of the greatest things I've learned since being here is when to let go and wait for certain things to happen. And they will happen. Eventually. Like when the house floods (which happens from time to time), theres nothing you can do about it except accept it and get some waterproof boots. The most important thing is to have a good idea for how long things will take and to plan accordingly, this way you don't have to get impatient when there's only one more week til you leave the country and you still don't have your visa extension...