Month 3 has arrived!!!
The small town village our team is in has a local coffee joint that we frequent to satisfy our love for coffee & the outdoors. It’s located literally across the street from where we live & only costs 10,000 dong ($0.43) for an iced coffee with condensed milk (super delish!).
Along with a new country comes new challenges. We are in a closed country, which means we are very limited in what we can & cannot say in our posts as well as in conversations with locals.
Most of our time is spent teaching English. Their ages range from 9 to 65. Teaching English could look like basic conversations, singing songs (e.g the chicken dance & the hokey Pokey), learning how to treat others as we want to be treated, playing hangman, Jenga or Uno.
At first, we struggled with why we were chosen to be here this month.
Why? Comparison.
We see & hear about our squadmates spending their month on the beach, going on boat rides, playing beach volleyball with locals, going to paper lantern festivals, & building relationships with college students through coffee dates on the reg. We spent our off day pr****g for the electricity to come back on so we could sleep with a fan, fill out our March Madness brackets, finish our now mildewy laundry, & catch up on emails, messages & blogs.
Transitions in general are hard, but especially when you are playing the comparison game.
Once we took a step back & stopped focusing on what could have been, we quickly realized what an opportunity we have. First of all, WE ARE IN VIETNAM!!!!!!!! We get to live in a beautiful home with a sweet couple, a western toilet, laundry machine, healthy home-cooked meals, & a fan in our room. Coffee is available right across the street. Fruit is abundant (dragon fruit, pineapples, watermelon, MANGOS, apples, etc.)!!! There are beautiful flowers in the yard & green rice fields surrounding our coffee hub. 30 hours without power aloud our team to have necessary bonding time (i.e. screaming about gigantic spiders in our house & dance parties via headlamps & candle light).
What we didn’t realize coming into this month is how important English is for these people to thrive, especially followers. Persecution is still present in Vietnam, but more in a socioeconomic sense. Followers here are not allowed to work in government positions, which are the best jobs. So if they can learn English there is a lot better chance for them to get jobs outside of Vietnam.
Please lift up this country. It’s sad to hear how bound these people are. Our host has a friend who wants to be a follower but doesn’t want to lose his job as a policeman.
Life for them & for us comes down to one question: Is it worth the cost? Some have realized it is, but we hope others will as well. This life isn’t about us. That motto is played out in the lives of the followers we encounter here on a daily basis.
