On the Way Home

April 1/2:

We left HCMC at 11:50pm 4/1 and are now in Korea waiting for our flight to Chicago. If all goes well we will be in Philadelphia by 5:30pm. We are looking forward to having American food, good drinking water, flushing toilets, and sleeping in our own beds. We are also anxious to see our family and friends.

Time to Relax

March 31:

We traveled 1 hour by bus this morning to Binh Chau Hot Springs Resort. We had all afternoon to relax before our farewell dinner. Zach and I went to the pool and playground. Then Zach wanted to try crocodile angling. They tied a fish head onto a string attached to a pole. Zach dangled it over the wall into the crocodile pit. The crocodiles would snap at the fish and Zach would yank it away. Their jaws would make a loud snapping noise when they missed. The idea was to see how long you could keep the fish. He had a lot of fun with that activity.

In the evening we had our farewell dinner. There was an art auction of drawings done by Vietnamese children in the Catalyst program. The money raised will go to new school scholarships. Catalyst will be sponsoring boys in school for the 1st time since statistics are now showing a rise in boys being trafficked more than girls to Cambodia. The auction raised over $5000. They also auctioned off 2 bowls of mashed potatoes which was a big hit with some kids who were starting to want American food!

Tomorrow we head back to HCMC to catch our plane back to the US.

Camp

March 30:

Camp started @ 8am on the beach. There were many activity stations - arts and crafts, games, nail painting, tattoes, soccer, tug of war, sand castle building, etc., for the Catalyst children to enjoy. The expedition volunteers each signed up to help at a station. Zach selected the sand castle building station for us so we were down by the water. The kid's faces just lit up when they saw the ocean and the beach toys. When you think about what their daily life is like, you realize how much in our lives we take for granted. This day was a real treat and positive experience for them.

After a few hours the camp kids wanted to go back to their rooms to take a shower and enjoy the air conditioning. Those are just 2 things they have never experienced before. We also heard that they were fascinated by the flushing toilets at the hotel and stayed up late into the night flushing them over and over and over again.

After the rest we took them into the ocean. The volunteers formed a human chain to keep them in the designated area. They all had a blast splashing each other and us!

Another unique experience for the camp kids was having plenty of food to eat. Some kids ate so much that they felt sick afterwards. Catalyst gave each child 50,000 dong (approximately $3 in US $) and most of them used it to buy additional food to take back to their families. We also noticed many of them doing trash picking and placing recyclables in a bag to take home to sell and make money for their families.

We had a short break before dinner to go back to the hotel and freshen up. After dinner was the talent show. The camp participants as well as the volunteers performed. The home team sang a song one of our volunteers wrote to the tune of "If I Had a Hammer". The kids volunteers did a dance. Everyone enjoyed the evening.

March 29

Zach's team visited another school today and played soccer, basketball, frisbee, and jump rope. They passed out gift bags to all of the children as well as bikes and food.

The housing team had off and they took us to a market where there were a lot of vendors to shop from. It was like a giant flea market but I was looking for Vietnamese handicraft items and did not find any at the market. Hopefully we will have a few hours on Tuesday to do some souvenir shopping before we catch our midnight flight home.

After lunch we traveled by bus for 2.5 hours to Vung Tau province to the Thuy Duong Resort. The children from the Kien Giang garbage dump, Dong Thap, and HCMC arrived late tonight. The buses will pick us up for camp at 7:15am tomorrow morning.

Dong Thap - Day 3

March 28:

Today we travelled an hour to our work site. We spent the morning nailing tin siding on the frame of a house. It was the easiest job of the week. The family brought out fresh fruit for us to eat before leaving. Again we were amazed by the generosity of those who have so little. We finished at noon, had lunch, and departed for Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) around 2pm. We stopped at a beautifl rest area in the Mekong Delta where we ate dinner before continuing on to HCMC.

Zach's team visited another school today and finished their work before us. The distribution team left for HCMC earlier than us and had already arrived at the hotel as we were leaving the rest stop. That has been one of the hardest parts of the trip for me. We are separated for much of the day and it seems like everyone else gets the best part of his day. By the time we get to spend time together he is overly tired and on the verge of a melt down. It made me very nervous to have him traveling on a bus for 4.5 hours separately from me but he did not mind at all since he was with all of his new friends.

Tomorrow the housing team has off and they have arranged a shopping trip for us. Zach has 1 more school to visit. Then we will again travel on separate buses by team to our next destination, a beach resort where we will hold a camp for 300+ underprivileged children who will be bused there to enjoy a day of fun activities with all of the teams.

The hard work part of the trip is now over and we will have a few days to relax before heading back to the US.

Dong Thap - Day 2

March 27:

Today's construction project was very similar to yesterday's only in a more rural area of the Mekong Delta. We took a bus part way, then a motor bike/cart followed by a short walk. The family who will be getting the house currentlylives along the river under a metal roof supported by poles. It is not protected from the weather other than the roof. They have none of the amenities we take for granted. There is no running water - they use the river to bathe, drink from, do laundry and wash dishes. They cook outside on a fire. I'm not sure what they use for a bathroom. (We were able to use a squatting toilet at a house down the road and let me tell you how far out of my comfort zone that was. We had to take our shoes off before entering the house and the bathroom floor was wet. So the choice was to get my socks wet or take my socks off. I'll let you guess what I did.)

At lunch, the Catalyst staff brought us our lunch. The family whose house we were building also made food for us. Here is a family that has nothing and yet they wanted to share what they had with us. Fortunatley some of the people in our group were brave and willing to try the food. I couldn't bring myself to do it because I had seen them washing the dishes and vegetables in the dirty river water.

Zach visited another school. They passed out stickers to the children and distributed beans and rice. After lunch they played inside for a while and then went to the park again.

Dong Thap

March 26:

The construction team split into 3 groups today. Two of the groups did home renovations and the other worked on constructing a brick house. I was in the group that worked on the brick house.

We took our bus part way to the site and then had to take a smaller vehicle called a Tuk Tuk the rest of the way. This is because the roads were too narrow for the bus and because some of the bridges could not support the weight of the bus.

Part of our group, including myself, spent the day laying bricks and mortar. It was hard work for me especially since I had never done it before and there was no shade to be found. There was also another latrine to dig - a 4 ft square that was 4.5 feet deep.

We were schedule to work until 5pm but they let us stop at 3pm because we were all starting to feel the effects of the heat and we had run out of bottled water.

Zach spent his day visiting a school. They played games with the children there (soccer and duck, duck, goose) and did crafts witht hem. They passed out beanie babies as gifts and distributed the food. After lunch they had the afternoon off. They played inside in the a/c for a while and then went to a park.