OITP

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Day 3. 10th March 2010. Wednesday.

0730-0900 Lessons in Vietnamese
0930-1100 Interaction with local students (Business/Accounting)
1100-1300 Lunch
1300-1600 Orphanage
1600-1700 Local market
1700-2000 Dinner

Day 3 kicked off with much anticipation for our first Vietnamese lesson. Fueled by the potent local coffee, we were wide awake and attentive from greetings to basic sentence structure. The crash course covered basic words like “I” (minh/tôi) ,”You” (bạn), “Hello” (xin chào), “Goodbye” (tạm biệt), simple sentences like “My name is” (tên tôi là), “How are you?” (bạn khoẻ không) and complimentary praises like “ Handsome” (Đẹp trai), “Pretty” (xinh xắn). Vietnamese language shares similar pronunciation with Mandarin and its dialects, but with a lot more intricate tongue twisting. China is “Zhong Guo” in Mandarin and “Trung quốc” in Vietnamese, also pronounced very similarly.

Vietnamese 101

VIETNAMESE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS!!

Learnin’ it Old Skool….

Even I couldn’t resist… and scrounged up scraps of paper to take notes

Falling behind and needing special attention

You’ll never see this level of attentiveness at SP

These came in very handy when we introduced ourselves during an interaction session with the local students during their English class. Our guys were instant hits with the girls in class as soon as we walked in and we took up their invitations to sit amongst them. Improvised sign language, drawings and a lot of intuition bridged our conversations as we struggled to communicate with our extremely limited vocabulary of the local language (18 different words) and their mastery of the English language. We continued the interaction session with some singing and learnt a short Vietnamese song “Family love”. More exchange was done in the form of singing. The generosity of the Vietnamese people is clearly evident when a couple of the local female students offered to bring some of us around the city for sightseeing, shopping and to explore the local culture during our free days. Having a local will definitely make our travels and exploration much easier, but where is the fun when exploring in ease?

Mr Foo greeting the the local students and introducing SP’s finest

Some of our finest struggling with self introduction in Vietnamese

Shh… we have infiltrated ze enemy!

Singaporeans or Vietnamese… we all love having our pictures taken.

Two local students taking on five of the guys… in Vietnamese. We lost.

Our girls fared much better than the guys.

FRIENDS!

This girl definitely took a liking to this guy.

More student interaction

As you can see.. 90% of the class are females

Vietnamese song “Family Love” we learnt

Singing competition! Team DTU

Singing competition! Team SP

SP’s Finest

Group photo. New friends today, another window opens

I think the essence of a global citizen and eye openers of travelling come from the adventures and personal survival skills in a foreign land. Much more is learnt and understood when there is personal interaction with the local shopkeeper, waiter, student or just any local on the street, even with other travelers. Keeping an optimistic view definitely helps a lot. For example getting lost just means a chance to explore the neighborhood more and perhaps to make a local friend who will show you the way back. Technology also helps when you are unable to write a local address correctly.

Photo of Zuy Tan University address

The afternoon sped by at the orphanage as we taught the kids how to use software we installed on the laptops to be donated. The orphanage is a dilapidated 2 story building and starkly furnished. We would be spending time at different branches of this orphanage over the next 3 days teaching youths ranging from 10-18 years old. Today, we taught about 15 kids from 10-14 years old the basics of Paint and Openoffice – Excel, Powerpoint and Word. These youths are generally bright and intelligent, picking up the software knowledge quickly. Some displayed artistic talent - creating pictures on the computer, whilst others took to Excel like born accountants. Strange thing, they didn’t need any assistance in locating and operating “Counterstrike”. It must be an innate sixth sense all kids possess.