*Some details are intentionally left out in order to protect our contacts in Vietnam. Please keep this in mind when sharing or commenting.*
I could tell that something was off the second we landed in Vietnam, and it wasn’t the humidity, our three-hour wait to get through customs or the fact that I had slept for literally the entire flight from Abu Dhabi to Ho Chi Minh City. No, it was a little more complicated than any of those, or all of them. It was what I can best describe as a sort of dark heaviness, with a solid grip on my heart. It weighed me down.
We had a few days in Ho Chi Minh before heading off to Da Nang with five other teams, and this feeling escalated. I was restless, yet perpetually exhausted – the only thing getting me out of our hotel room was the fact that it didn’t have air conditioning and the Starbucks across the street did. On Thanksgiving the whole squad was together, something that usually gave me life and energy. This time it drained me, a feeling I wasn’t used to in a setting like this.
But I kept quiet about it. After all, month six of the Race is when you typically hit a slump – it’s the halfway point, and the fact that said halfway point collided with the holiday season back home didn’t help much. So I soldiered on until we arrived in Da Nang, when is when my inner monologue turned on me.
“Screw it, I’m out of here.”
That night I looked up the price of plane tickets home. I talked myself into thinking it was a good idea, that I had been wrong and I wasn’t strong enough to continue the Race.
The next morning, overwhelmed by the magnitude of this almost-plan, I cracked in front of my teammates. I didn’t leave the apartment that day – the second I got to the door I would experience a crippling feeling of impending doom that came out of nowhere.
Obviously I didn’t go home. Eventually I did leave the apartment, but every day was a challenge. The bright lights and constant motion of Da Nang overwhelmed me, and my old enemies depression and anxiety were back for another fight.
So why talk about all of this? Because context is important. The World Race isn’t all amazing adventures and cool places to explore. Sometimes it gets real, and it gets real fast.
On a lighter note, the funny thing about Vietnam was that it was surprisingly the most “ordinary” month we had, from a logistics perspective. We helped teach English and volunteer at a cafe five days a week, with weekends off (that’s rarely a thing on the Race). We could explore the city on our own, go to cafes, try every Saigon iced coffee I could find, and I even went to church. Church. English-speaking church. In a closed communist country. (Although to be fair, it was a government-sanctioned church strictly for foreigners – you needed a passport to go.)
I spent a lot of time by myself, but the highlight of my month was the time I spent in a classroom. Thankfully I didn’t have to come up with any curriculum on my own – I was assisting Olivia, one of the American teachers at the school. It got a little crazy at times – those kids had a ton of energy and one of them was so wild that his pants almost fell down while dancing to “Shake it off” (100% true story) but I really loved it. In addition, I got to check off a bucket list item when my teammate Lyndi and I performed at the cafe’s music night.
That’s the thing – even in my hardest month, little flashes of light always came through. Whether it was teaching, exploring by myself, or playing cards with the cafe staff at our host’s apartment, there was something to look forward to. I have to look back on those times, because otherwise it’s easy to cast aside Vietnam as a pointless month. It wasn’t.
But the heaviness and darkness stayed with me, and later on in the month, though a few heart-to-hearts with one of my squad leaders (thanks Amy), I began to figure it out. There were external factors as well as internal, and it doesn’t surprise me that this happened in a country that tries its hardest to keep God out. Every shop and restaurant smelled like incense, coming from the Buddhist shrines and altars, and every day I walked past the visually jarring neon signs that said “Massage.”
I knew exactly what was going on behind those doors, and it sure wasn’t massages. As our host told us, “if it says ‘spa,’ it’s probably legitimate, but if it just says ‘massage’, it’s a brothel.” Now the horrors of human trafficking and prostitution were hardly new pieces of information to me, but now it was literally two doors down from me. It was enough to make anyone sick.
There was one night when Lyndi came back to the apartment in a rage. In all my time knowing her, I had never seen her angry. I sat there with my team as she described what had happened: at the cafe that night she had encountered a man who openly admitted to paying for sex, didn’t see anything wrong with it, and, most shockingly at all, claimed he was doing so to get back at God who had “cursed him with singleness.”
My immediate instinct was a desire to find this guy and kick his ass – I realized that I had seen Lyndi and Racquel talking to him earlier that night but didn’t know what was going on at the time. (Also, if you’re offended by the fact that I just said “ass,” please go back and read the paragraph before this one.) Once the adrenaline faded, all I felt was pity. What had happened to him that he was now searching for fulfillment in purchased time with foreign women?
We’re all slaves to something, whether it’s temptations, emotions, relationships… the list goes on- it’s human nature to be influenced, to be led by something stronger. There’s a reason why Jesus calls human beings “sheep” on more than one occasion – sheep are dumb, but they don’t know it. All they know is how to follow whoever’s leading them, and that whoever/whatever makes all the difference. If there was one takeaway from Vietnam, that was it. That’s why we need a savior in the first place.
Oh, by the way, the heaviness and darkness that plagued me the whole month left me the instant we crossed the border from Vietnam into Cambodia. I don’t think that was a coincidence, and I was happy to leave it behind.
