Birdy and Luke Look Both Ways Before Crossing the Street

Waiting for Rain to Stop at Ho Chi Minh Airport

The Mekong River Delta
(flying out of Ho Chi Minh)

     The seasons in Vietnam vary quite a bit from north to south. As far as I've gathered, the north experiences a recognizable four seasons, with late fall through spring bringing the rains. In the south you can expect a rainy season and a dry season. The central regions of Vietnam have their own patterns altogether. Everywhere you go, humidity rains supreme. We fall somewhere in the central/south. Ho Chi Minh City was experiencing its rains when we arrived, but Tuy Hoa was a different story altogether.

     At the moment we're experiencing some light rains and cloudy skies, but when we arrived in early July we were attacked by the heat. The locals deal with this by getting up every morning

Our First, Fuzzy View of Tuy Hoa

around 4 or 5 am and walking down to the beach. The entire city sits right along the coast of the South China Sea, making a walk to the beach a five to ten minute ordeal at the most. People do their exercise, swim, rinse their bodies and cool off before heading to work around 6 or 7. The temperature steadily rises until about midday; people deal with this by having lunch around 11 am and then napping until about 2 pm. They return to work for a couple more hours and then head back to the beach at 5. It may seem like an easy day, but the rest and breaks are required to keep your body functioning in this climate.
   

The Sky Here is Always Gorgeous

     We were waking up at ridiculously early hours when we first arrived and decided to join the morning routine. It was bizarre to see thousands of people up just before dawn, walking, bicycling, running, playing soccer and exercising in the streets. Our sleep pattern caught up with us within the week and we've only been out in the morning once since then. Still, we keep telling ourselves that we're going to make it a part of our routine. It's a nice idea, anyway.

     My family is renting a very large house in one of the newest neighborhoods in town. There are only a couple neighborhoods where foreigners are allowed to live, which feels strange. Lucky for us, they're nice and new. I don't think we're ready to live in the run-down shanties many Vietnamese call their homes. Often times a single, average-bedroom-sized space will house a family of four, their kitchen, bathroom, pets and vehicles.

Landing in Tuy Hoa

     Our house is three-stories with six bedrooms, an enormous kitchen, five bathrooms, three large living spaces, a large terrace and an accessible roof. It's bigger than the quasi-mansion Birdy's family is currently living in back in Oregon. We may share the house with my family and occasional guests, but we have our own room (complete with bathroom) that gives us all the privacy we could ask for. Aside from the construction taking place, it's a quiet neighborhood.
   

This Guy Delivers the Building Supplies Next Door
(Birdy and I want one)

     We are a couple of minutes away from downtown, which is convenient, and just as near to the beach. Everyone gets around by motorbike or bicycle here, and I've learned how to drive one already. Birdy wants to learn, too. I'm not sure which one of us is more nervous with the idea, but it'll have to happen soon.

     We're slowly getting to know the city, a process which is helping me feel more in control and more at home. It's really a very small city with not much to see- or so the Vietnamese say. With everything being so new to us, it seems like there are a million things to see everywhere we go. The biggest challenge will be learning to speak and read the language- a task we haven't started yet. Most of the words I've learned are related to numbers or food, since its actually cheaper to eat out than to cook at home. The food is delicious but with few variations. We need to find some new ways to cook rice, since it's used for lunch and dinner. Every day. Always. Birdy's thrilled.

At a Cafe Around the Corner
(Birdy isn't actually this color)

     While the food is reliably homogeneous, the traffic is reliably unpredictable. You see a lot of strange things as you drive: large potholes, piles of sand used in construction, people, animals, swerving motorbikes and bicycles, unrelenting trucks and buses and an occasional herd of cattle.

Off to Work

An Empty Street in the
Middle of the Day

     It's always interesting to realize that something as surprising as a bull pulling a cart down the street no longer shocks you. People carry entire families on their motorbikes, and while I still find it impressive, I no longer look twice. Birdy's even begun riding side-saddle when she has a skirt on! I always figured she was missing a few marbles. Now I have proof!

Front to Back: My Mother, Birdy, Our Friend/Translator

Luke Time Travels While Watching The Hunger Games

Waiting in PDX, Setting up This Blog

     The actual decision to move to Vietnam was easy, especially for me. I just waited for Birdy's verdict. She said yes and now we're here. Easy! Unfortunately, the decision-making process was significantly more complicated. We had just moved to Lebanon, Oregon, 10 months before. Birdy was just finishing up her first year of college. I needed to start paying back my student loans. We had a house (rental) we loved and a load of pets we'd picked up over the year. Neither of us had any savings. There was the future to prepare for- school, wedding, house, career, family- and we knew that moving to Vietnam would mean putting everything on hold while trying not to slide backward.

In Ho Chi Minh City we ate at a restaurant
President Clinton had eaten at- their claim to fame

     At the same time, there were plenty of valid and valuable reasons to risk the move. My family was there and my mother needed our help and support. We both want to travel and experience life abroad. We're still getting started as a couple, so a move like this now would be easier than it would be down the line. It would be a big test of our ability to compromise Birdy's love of Oregon and the familiar with my love of travel and the unfamiliar. It would look fabulous on our resumes. Also, Vietnam has coconuts. Tons of them. Fresh, local, cheap and delicious.

     Once we'd decided to move, we had to find a place for all our animals. That was our main priority. We had to go through all the preparations of re-homing pets, moving out, storing our things, preparing documentations, paying pharmacists to stick needles in our arms, all the while continuing to work. May and June were impressively busy and hectic. By the time the end of school rolled around, Birdy was no longer working and we were able to move to Happy Valley to stay with her parents until we left. That brought stresses of its own.

     The closer we got to leaving, the more it seemed that a million things remained undone. I ran errands and tried to stay busy while Birdy grew gradually more stressed and frantic about all the people she absolutely needed to spend time with and the things she absolutely needed to do. This is what she looked like the night before we left:

Birdy Shows Excitement Over Tomorrow's Adventure

Thankfully, we left Oregon on a good note. We enjoyed a plethora of good-bye parties and get-togethers and resolved stresses that had come between us and her parents. There were tears at the airport, but not nearly as many as I had anticipated. I'm sure the sixteen packets of tissue I had stashed in my pockets had something to do with the looks I received when we passed through security.

On the Plane, Waiting to Leave PDX,
Birdy Still Under the Impression Flying is Fun

     We had short layovers, flying from Portland to San Francisco to Tokyo to Ho Chi Minh. An extended delay in the Portland airport  resulted in almost immediate connections. Twenty-one hours after leaving Portland we landed in Vietnam. We'd crossed the International Dateline and jumped a day into the future without doing anything more than watching The Hunger Games on a tiny screen. It was a relatively easy and quick trip, considering how far we'd gone. Halfway into our nine hour flight to Tokyo, however, Birdy was thoroughly done with traveling. So, naturally, I did the helpful thing and napped.

     It was evening when we arrived, and the son of one of our school's board members picked us up and took us to our hotel. We arrived on a Saturday and had to stay two nights in order to visit the U.S. Embassy on Monday. I needed to get affidavits for certain documents in order to request a work visa. As it was, we entered on 90-day tourist visas.

Intersection in Ho Chi Minh

Smiling on the Outside, Totally Freaked on the Inside
(she's resilient, I have to say)

     Sunday was a difficult day for Birdy. Despite having enjoyed Vietnamese food in Oregon, we couldn't seem to find any food she liked. The traffic and heat and humidity and noise and strangeness of the city worked its way into her. I'm sure she was much more panicked than she let on and I was worried. I knew Tuy Hoa was much different and that she'd be better once we got there, but words can only help so much. We stayed in our hotel room the whole day and watched Animal Planet on the TV. Strangely enough we saw a teacher I had worked with, Cliff Barackman, chasing Bigfoot in New York State. It looked like he was living the dream, too!

Electric Cables (typical wiring in Vietnam) 

     Monday morning I visited the embassy and took care of documentation. We headed to the airport that afternoon to catch our flight to Tuy Hoa, but were delayed by torrential downpour that materialized out of thin air. Thick, humid air, really. It was a relief to finally board the plane and take-off for Tuy Hoa. We were glad to arrive and settle in and it was nice to see my family. The town is much smaller, calmer, cleaner and quieter than Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi. Little by little it feels more like home, although Birdy still struggles off and on. It's a beautiful place and I'm excited to be involved in this project, especially since we get to go barefoot in the classroom. It's the little things that count.

Birdy Makes the Call

Lunch in Hanoi- Beef and Noodle Soup (usually reserved for breakfast)

     In December of 2011 (last year) I visited my family in Vietnam. My mother and three of my siblings were living in Hanoi, working with a company that was hoping to start up a bilingual school for Vietnamese nationals. The company had launched an English language center in an attempt to get their feet wet. It soon became apparent that the project was not sustainable, having been waylaid by lack of preparation and a complete lack of direction or coherent vision. My mother arrived in the middle of this and, after nearly a year of tiresome effort to reverse the course of things, was forced to close the language center and move on.

Teaching Exchange Students in Hanoi to Play "Killer Bunnies"

     The company she had been working with, Detech, had reached out to a North American-based organization that sponsored educational programs and sent teachers around the world. It was this organization that had mysteriously found my mother's resume, contacted her, and recruited her to their new partnership in Vietnam. During her time in Hanoi, several other companies, schools and organizations heard about Detech's foreign partnership and submitted requests for similar partnerships.

Giving a Spelling Test to Some Homeschoolers

        Most of these requests yielded nothing, primary interests often being financial. One of them, however, seemed promising. So it was that just before Christmas my mother and I (and a member of Detech's board) flew south to Tuy Hoa to determine the viability of partnering with a school there.
     Foreign (American, Canadian, British, etc) English teachers are common in Vietnam, but most of them lack any real educational background or experience. They usually don't stick around for more than a few months, merely working in order to fund their continued travels through Southeast Asia. Additionally, they tend to stick to the major metropolitan locations such as Hanoi, Danang, and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Therefore, the prospect of an ongoing partnership to bring native English speakers to a Vietnamese school in a small province like Phu Yen- Tuy Hoa being its only city- was a prospect worth nurturing.

Sugarcane (ground to make a drink)

     Several months before she closed Lucas Detech, the language center, my mother created a legally established company under the same name. Thus, Lucas Detech become affiliated with Detech, garnering recognition and support while establishing autonomy. The new company, it was agreed, would represent Detech's educational interests and projects. It answered to its own board of directors, had its own finances and its own bylaws. As an educational company it would provide more than just language services. It would invest resources, personnel and finances into the types of programs and projects my mother had originally been recruited to work on. My mother became Lucas Detech's CEO.

Duy Tan High-school

     We came, then, as representatives of Lucas Detech to meet with the board of directors for Duy Tan, the only private high-school in the province. The board of Duy Tan was made of an alumni association that had banded together a decade ago with the goal of improving education in their province. They were teachers, principals, businessmen, veterans, politicians and childhood friends. Their school had built its reputation on a promise that all students would pass the state exams at the end of 12th grade- a test that determined university eligibility. Duy Tan took in students that other schools rejected or failed to help. It was, for many students and families, their only hope of a continuing education.

Building the New Secondary/Primary School
(Me, Duy Tan board member, Lucas Detech board member)

     The board's long-term goal was to establish a primary school (1st through 5th), a secondary school (6th through 9th), a high-school (10th through 12th), and a teacher-training college. Their high-school was already going strong, with over 1000 enrolled students. A number that continued to grow. We only stayed a few days in Tuy Hoa, but by the time we left we knew there was something about this project that would be nearly impossible to find anywhere else. Our time there had been brief and busy. We sat through meeting after meeting and meal after meal. I even led some spontaneous training sessions of new hires, earning me an offer to stay, teach English, and train their teachers.

What I Look Like Before I am Offered a Job, Apparently

Impromptu Training

     We returned to Hanoi full of questions and ideas. A week later I flew back to Oregon, fully aware that Birdy and I would very likely have a difficult decision to make before the end of school rolled around in June. When the project was confirmed my mother asked us to come to Vietnam to teach, and I side-stepped the decision by giving Birdy the power to choose disguised as a Valentine's Day Gift. It was relieving to watch her squirm as we debated the pros and cons. Financially it didn't seem a viable option, and we turned down my mom's offer at the beginning of March. By the beginning of April, however, she had turned matters around and agreed to find a way to meet our needs. Birdy and I debated it some more, and she made the call.

New Hires, Duy Tan Board Members, Lucas Detech Representatives
(in no specific order)

     Now we live in Vietnam, and I sweat when I walk, or when I sit, or when I see a gecko, or when I think too hard. It's incredible (except for the sweating)!