Day 5
Today is our fifth day in Vietnam for humanity. Everyone has slowly started to become frustrated and tired after several taxing days of housebuilding. Mr. Glover had a really serious but motivational talk with us before we left to work. He commended the group for the work we've been doing so far and said that the rest days would present the real challenge for us because we almost run out the energy to stand straight after having worked with determination for the past three days. He encouraged us to be ready and put our heart and soul into the work, to be reminded of why we signed up to come to Vietnam.
After arriving at the build site, we scurried away like mice to get going with our pre-set routine. While couple of us had to shovel in and wheelbarrow sand from the main road, all the way through the alleyways and the twists and turns of the area to reach the build site, some of us mixed cement and layed brick while others had to scrub off dirt from the corrugated tin rooftops so hard, that we squeezed out the living daylights of those poor pieces of metal. To be honest, this job was the worst one we have done so far. We had to stoop down and use scrubbing brushes to scrape the dirt off the house roof, which were extremely dirty with an unbelievably HUGE amount of mud. In fact, what started out as a place sheet of metal, was polished and scrubbed so hard, that there wasn't a single spot on those new metallic white roofs. While we were scrubbing it, however, the wet mud stuck on our shoes and clothes – the ground latched on to our shoes so hard, that we could barely move! After we cleaned one roof, some guys took more roofs for us to clean, it seemed like never-ending for this job.... I felt dead tired after cleaning ten pieces of roofs, just that morning, so I started to look around and hoped that we could swap over for a less exhausting task. I saw other people were working hard, putting all their energy into what they had to do. They were sweating and become extremely exhausted, some even injured! At that moment, I realized that everyone had to do their best and put as much effort as they can. So do I!!! I forced myself to concentrate, because someone had to do it. It was a part of job that we need to handle, so we all need to play as team members...
In the afternoon,we had our first rainy day. Because of the rain, we had to stop work early, which was, such a shame (can you sense the sarcasm?). Jokes aside, it was not as much of a disappointment as it was a bittersweet moment. The rain let us take a break from our work but, that means that we did not work as much as we could have. Our supervisor, however, said that since we had worked so hard and so efficiently, that they just couldn't find any more work for us to do, we were given more breaks, which was great, but we wanted to do more for the homeowners... We had some comfortable rests with some local fruits like rambutan, green mango, pomelo, mangosteen etc. After a while, we took the bus and came back to the hotel for shower, to get ready for the culture exchange with local high school!
Cultural exchange night
Days of anticipation and weeks of preparation and many bus rides of practices have passed... But today, it all came down to the moment we were waiting for with our secret weapon - Garett and his guitar, and of course our beautifully coarse voices. And how did it go? It was a GREAT lot of fun and we all had a wonderful time. We performed the songs, “I'm Yours” by Jason Mraz and “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles. It was a night filled with a few games, and dancing, especially from Connie and the dance king, Elliot. There was a great amount of with the song, “Nobody But You” by the Wonder Girls. Though it quite a queer song, we still had a lot of fun dancing to the music.
There were also other games such as fruit tasting. The players were blind folded and tasted fruit to try to identify which fruits they were. It was quite surprising as to how Elliot managed to guess that the banana as a jackfruit, but nevertheless it served to bring out a couple of laughs amongst the audience. After the games were played, we sang “We Are the World” by Michael Jackson. From there, we all had time to meet the local high-schoolers. It is interesting to learn all about their life and how different it is to ours in Singapore. It made me feel a little more appreciative of how lucky I am to be able to be out here. They asked about how life was in Singapore and how hard the work was that we were doing. Though they were quite simple questions, it was hard to answer as we had to remain culturally sensitive and be very diplomatic with our answers. The cultural exchange night however, cannot be explained through an account alone, so how about checking out these videos below?
Yanli Wang and Mitchell Ho
