i'll shut up for today, here are some pictures instead.

This time last year, I was enjoyed being fed a ridiculous amount of good food because of Lunar New Year, and navigating the unnecessarily confusing Houston high way systems --was still pretty fun.

Now I'm pretty sure I won't get that food anytime soon, and Houston is really, really far away. Instead I'm reminiscing about the last 11 months of my life remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad, while considering raw ramen as a great mid night snack.

A friend of mine mentioned that my blog posts have been quite depressing, and she was worried. I want to clarify that my babbling on this reflects the 35 or 40 percents of my experience. I keep good days in my heart, and I write about bad days to get them out of my system.

As me and the twenty something people in my group are reaching our one year mark, we are also reaching on mid way point. For some of us, this is the high/low emotional point -- happy that we made it this far and sad that expectations didn't reach. For some, it's the realization of our self and the work's limit, and the fear that we are running out of time.

I am one of them. Within the last month, I have experienced hope, frustration, disappointment, satisfaction, bitterness, and happiness. One followed the other, not seamlessly but somehow still fittingly. Things didn't go well, but somehow it worked out in the end. Something seemingly so easy to accomplish somehow turned out to be impossible.  My ego is bruised and failed plans hurt me tremendously, but somehow, I also recover more quickly. I can't stay angry for long, and it's easier now to admit faults or make apologies. Don't dwell on no shit is going to be my new motto.

Anyhow, I could spend the rest of this post talking about why I experienced those feelings this recent month, or I could let you see the better outcomes for yourself and make your day. I'm even going to dash (Ghanian's term for give a little extra somein' somein') you 3 more months (so that's from September, in case you couldn't do math) in pictures of my work since I've been a Peace Corps volunteer.

Hope you have good internet to load all this shits!

JHS students signing up for several different youth clubs 

the first of many Neem Cream demonstration 

steaming hot fufu and groundnut (peanut) soup for lunch -- periodically.

a little spiel about proper nutrition and more neem cream demo for some mothers, and nosy children.

women and children.
this picture is bigger because you have to find the photobomb in it. 

goats on a bench! come on, there are some GOATS, on a BENCH!

more neem cream demo at a baby weigh-in, so many crying babies that days, lawd...

net hanging demonstration at the school, and this boy showed us how he sleeps in it.
 oh , youth. 

waiting for our soaps to cool down.

one of the many community mapping that we did, "tell us where you shit!"

little gremlins who are actually my minions.

little girls with chairs on their heads. it's exactly what it looks like. 

our first ever spelling bee,
 and me.

talking about "don't be a fool, wrap your tool" in the house of God.

the dance team that represented our entire region to go to Accra and show off their skillz.
something like Ghana's best JHS dance crew, but everyone wins.

this old man practically dug this pit entirely by himself. it's 8 feet deep.

hanging posters about latrines.

hanging posters about latrines inspections.

one day, Simba, all this will be yours.

last minute strategy meeting before our football match.

drawing AIDS ribbon on people who were tested (108 tested!)

wearing it proudly!

showing it proudly!

So there you have it, my last 4 months-ish of work related things. I hope this makes up for all the downer posts I've been throwing at you this entire last year. Check my facebook if you want more!

talk is cheap. 2 months to go.

My uterus is having a rave inside me, and I'm not invited. All I get is the messy after math. 

Sorry for the absence since the last angry post about small penis trucks. Nothing much went on ever since. I got my yellow fever shot in last month, not only it was 175 bucks (but PC reimbursed me so yay), it also hurt like a bitch. I thought the chicken pot booster sucked but this stuff burned like hot liquid fire.

Exactly two months from today, I will be on a plane leaving. First for Philadelphia, and then Ghana. Despite my initial excitement of preparing for the trip, I've really slowed down and haven't done much as of late. It's like running a marathon, and I spent all my energy way too early in the race so now I'm worn out and just slow grazing as oppose to my other PC mates who are now just starting to get excited about preparing. Right now, I just want to hurry up and quit my job and have one last hurrah with my friends before having to think about the all the heavy burdens of life in the third world.

I've been getting emails from the the PC Ghana Google group  these past couple days of people talking/sharing about their past experiences and their excitement for the next 2 years, and for some reason, I don't even want to be a part of it at all. I think that it's because I've been preparing for this for so long, that talking anymore about it would make it a broken record.

I don't want to talk. I just want to do. I just want to buy my shits, pack them, and then go. I don't want to spend so much time talking about how I hope to change the world and what I have to offer because the one thing I have learned about international volunteering is that volunteers are only as helpful/useful as the locals need them to be, and any one coming in with a savior complex are just setting themselves up for disappointment.

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.

how foreigners make themselves look bad to locals

Today was my second night at the Engish Cafe/Club. My friend and I was actually on time this time, and we even had a good group of people instead of sitting my ourselves because we were late like last time.

How the meeting operates is that people are divided by groups, and each is set to discuss a sub-topic of a bigger topic for the night. Then all the groups would hear what the other talk about and furtherly discuss the topic with each other. It's a way to get everyone talking and learning to use category specific vocabulary.

Tonight's topic was "Co-habbiting without a marriage liscence and Marriage." What I got out of what young people like me are saying is that, they prefer to marry a person before living together because the Vietnamese society values the virginal status of the bride and if there will be a lot of pressure on the couple if they are just living together and not married.

I was a bit shocked to hear these idea because I had expected a more modernized answer, but I wasn't that shocked because after seeing that my friends here are still heavily attached to their family and all the social traditions. I guess that means that I will never brings honor to my family as a blushing bride. Oh well.

Anyway, there was a older American there as a facilator to one of the English speaking group. He stood out a lot because of his age, around middle age, and his attitude, he wasn't that friendly. As the discussion went around, he was very outspoken and opinionated about what the other young speakers have said regarding marriage. His tone was a bit condesending and patronizing commenting on how he has been to about 8 weddings in Vietnam and they all pretty sucked because everyone rushed in and out, and how he doesn't understand why there are so many bridal and wedding studios in the city or why everyone invites people they don't know to weddings and pretty much concluded that Vietnamese marriage is often about money and not love or enjoyment of the couple's reunion.

He is so lucky that the majority of the people in the room didn't have enough English vocabulary to give him a rebutal or just didn't understand completely what he was saying. Honestly, who the hell is this guy coming in here criticizing a country with thousands of years' ceremony and tradition? And if he hates it so much, why didn't he stop at wedding number 4 or number 5 and went to all 8 only to bitch about it now? Being the only non-white person who speaks and understands English fluently, I had to explain to him the flaws in his statements, that we don't just invite anyone, and those who are invited can not refused because lots of thoughts are put into the invitation, and wedding in Vietnam has seen better traditional days but it's not just a business like he thinks now. But he didn't even bother to turn around to look at me as I spoke to him and continued to refuse to see my point by saying that all he knows is that American wedding are way more fun and more sincere.

Wow... really? 250 years old America has better traditions and values than more than 3000 years of Vietnamese traditions. Like I said, he is lucky that no one else in the room knew enough English to tear him a new one, and that the discussion was ended before I finished speaking my piece.

I am told that he is the husband of Helping Hand Saigon's founder, and often expressed his negative attitude toward Vietnamese traditions during English Club time. Then why the fuck are you still here man? Get the fuck out of this place if you hate it so much, because now you're just annoying people with your pessimistic and shallow insutls about their culture. What you know is only the size of my pinky toe's nail and is nothing worth mentioning so don't just assume my entire culture is base on your wikipedia knowledge. Seriously, you are making yourself look bad, and just because no one is saying anything, doesn't mean they're not thinking about how shiteous you are for looking down on their culture. And what makes you think you are better than us to even look down on us, being white and ignorant?

I spent some part of my life making fun of people like you for a good laugh, but to really run into one of you, you should be really glad that there were barriers that kept me from whiping out my dick and slapping you silly.

Honestly, to come to a foreign country and to have stayed here for obviously a long time, he should at least learn to appreciate its good and bad sides as oppose to compare it to your homeland that is a melting pots of cultures. I think he thought that he could talk shit since there was also no one who could call him bullshit on making American culture seems way better than it really is.

Good news is, I made some more local friends and we're going places so more pictures soon.

3rd grade girl called me fat.. twice

... sorry I don't have a more clever title. I'm sure you're tired of hearing me complaining about how many people calling me fat here. I'm just as tired of being called fat by pretty much anyone, old or young, children or adult. So much that I don't really feel like leaving the house to explore the place I am at because people just stare at me way too much and say things that end up ruining my days before I even do anything to them. I've been inside "hidding" for a few days now.

Anywho, I've done quite a bit of moving around since the last time I posted. Two days in the city suburb with some more relatives and now I am in Saigon. However, not much has been going on in the past few days that are blog worthy beside how traffic gets more and more ridiculous and dangerous as I head into the city and all the places from my childhood seems much smaller than I remember.

I finally get to sleep in today and its because my aunt and uncle has some business to do in the morning. So it's almost eleven and I'm awake. In local times it's pretty late but I'm awake only because there is a black out and the fan is off so it's too hot to sleep anymore. Even though I do nothing, people still wake me up at 6 or 7 am and tried to make me eat breakfast while all I want to do is sleep.

As I've said, I haven't really done much exploring but I did contact Helping Hand Saigon, a local NGO that I will be/am joining for some for volunteer project. Their works include visiting orphanages as well as other groups and homes for the under-privilege. It's not at all hard to find under-priviledge people here in Vietnam, but to find organizations that are able to help them, in my opinion, is still pretty rare.

Before the trip, I spent a few months researching on NGOs in Vietnam and didn't find very much, so I was very glad to find Helping Hand Saigon. Anyway, upon contacting them, they invited me to their bi-weekly English club event, where local university and young professional get together to practice their English along with any foreigners who wish to help them.

Learning English in Vietnam is pretty much a priority for young people here. Higher English level could potentially get them better jobs and pays, and they all could use the money. I am told, almost consensusly, that the English learning method here does not really promote great speaking ability. So students are only able to read and write well, but hearing and speaking abilities are minimal. Students don't often get to practice what they learn, and not everyone could afford to study abroad in English speaking country, so all the money and effort they spent in learning English could potentially gone to waste. Which is why the English club is so helpful to English learning students, where they could practice their speaking skills with native or fluent English speakers who help them build up vocabulary and grammar.

Anyway, so I was there, and met some very nice people. One was a Belgium girl who is doing an internship with HHS. She is my age and is working on her Masters. In general, I was just happy to be able to speak English with people who can understand me.

Meeting this girl is sort of pulling me out of the daze I have been in for the past 2 weeks. Beside going into hiding for being to fat, I have only been with family, and I guess you could say I am getting quite comfortable under their wings, so I am not venturing out on my own. She made me realized how much easier I have it than her. She is here by herself, doesn't speak the language, get stared at way more than I do and still manage to do some looking around by herself eating the local food. Maybe I shouldn't be too discouraged at everyone from a 3rd grader to old ass grieving lady calling me fat at every turn and just grow a pairs and wander around town on my own.

Being sad about being fat should only be temporary. Right?