can't help you if you can't help yourself

I have been in Saigon for about 2 weeks now, and beside the purpose of seeing my old friends from elementary school and checking out my old stomping yard, I had intended to spent the most of my time here volunteering with some NGO's that I have found. I guess it's the after effect of being an Alternative Breaker, that I no longer feels that it's okay to enter a country and blatantly be a tourists without noticing the less glamorous sides of life in a developing country.

So anyway, I have mentioned the volunteer group(s) before, Helping Hand Saigon and Smile Group. These are the two groups that I have been sort of involving with along with the bi-weekly English Club set up by Helping Hand Saigon, and they have been great, the people and the involvement, but the work I have been doing have been way less than satisfying. In fact, if anything, I don't think I have been doing anything at all productive during my two weeks here, and it's bumming me out. I guess you could say that my timing is bad, that I arrived during the two weeks after HHS has done some big projects and now I am about to leave during the time they are about to start on their next big one(s). The one single project I was about to plan for this weekend got shut down from the start because the orphans and orphanages I was going to be working with aren't going to be available, and when they are, I won't be here anymore. So I spent most of my "volunteer" time space contemplating on what I should be doing. I did get to spend a few hours with the Smile group, and the children are way chill and I was going to come back the next day to hang with them at the zoo but I woke up with a fever instead. Thus, I've been sick for the most part of this week so beside dying from this heat, I am dying from a crappy throat.

I had really looking forward to this part of my Vietnam trip. I have always had a good time volunteering as a part of AB and wanted to look for the same experience on my own minus the massive program fee, but now I sort of feel that the program fee is worth it. Don't quote me on it though.

Another hard thing along with this is that it has been a bit difficult to reach people who should be available for volunteer inquiries. HHS has been great at corresponding, but Smile Group was/is harder to reach and the number I have for them didn't work and no one is responding to my email. Blargh. I really want to do more work with this group because it is a similar group to the CASAA orphanage in Salvador de Bahia that I worked with this past June. I think I would feel a lot of request not being more involved with this group, but as of right now, I don't know how else I could work more with them.