Week two: Relationship

             I must confess I’m not sure quite what to write for this blog. So far I have only worked with two people within the DP Hanoi organization, and only for one day each so I have not had much time to establish any meaningful relationships. The day I worked with the vice president DP Hanoi I didn’t have much of a chance to establish a strong relationship for two reasons: the first was the business atmosphere of the organization and the second was the strong language barrier between the two of us. The first two hours I worked with the VP were spent editing translations (see my last post) and very little was said other then what was necessary for the extremely difficult work we were doing. After we finished the editing we did get to talk a little but because of my inability to speak Vietnamese and the VP’s limited English skills we had a hard time getting past basic questions like what I studied and where I came from. However Tina and Vi later told me that she didn’t even quite understand what I studied because her Vietnamese translation of my major to her colleagues had more to do with economics (which I don’t study) then political science. Perhaps the strongest indicator of a lack of a real relationship between the two of us is that I don’t even remember her name.  I did get to learn that she got into the field of disabled rights through working with the government agency concerning construction. It was there that she learned about bout making physical spaces more accessible. She even went on a trip to Washington D.C. to study accessibility right in the US.

            The second day I worked with the head of the Teng Sung association learning how to make mosaics. Bac Ky, the head of the Teng Sung association seemed like a really nice guy. He spent the first part of our visit telling us about his involvement in the war and how he became disabled by a landmine. I found his relationship to his country to be quite interesting. While he seemed to quite proud of his participation in the war (he made a point of telling us why the Vietnamese won against the Americans), he seemed critical of the lack of disability compensation for veterans like himself. He told a story of how he met an American soldier after the war with similar disabilities to him and explained how the American soldier received a monthly salary form the government while he did not. One interesting aspect of my relationship with Bac Ky was the way he viewed my ethnicity. After he went around asking the ethnicities of all the other UC students in the room he turned to me and made some comment, which Anh Thai translated as “Oh, a true American”. This disconcerted me somewhat as all the other UC students were born in the US as well, and while they may have lived in other countries before are as much American as I am.  He also spent most of the time he was talking looking directly at me rather then at Vi or Tina who could actually understand what he was saying. This was particularly pronounced every time he said the word Mỹ. As Mỹ was one of the only words he said that I could understand this was particularly noticeable to me.

As weird as this experience made me feel it didn’t stop me from really enjoying learning how to make mosaics. Bac Ky showed us how he lined up the tiles and coordinated colors to make a frame. We then arranged and glued down the tiles on two pictures. Later he showed us how to cut tiles in half—a difficult process done entirely by hand. He was extremely friendly and helpful the whole time. It was clear he was passionate about his artwork and that he really enjoyed showing us how to do things. I was quite surprised that he let us each cut a tile seeing as we each wrecked a tile and they cost 1000 dong a piece. I do wonder where he gets the money to buy his supplies and what percent of the money he earns from them go back to the organization. I tried to ask him how long it took him to do a mosaic but he said that he mainly just does them in his free time between DP Hanoi meetings so he didn’t really know.

Bac Ky

Making the Moasics