Goodbye Subaru

Well, it finally happened...I had to say goodbye to the ol' Subaru. It wasn't a happy goodbye, either...that is, it wasn't because I got a nice new car to replace it with. It was because of an incident involving a snowy day, icy roads, and a school bus (without children in it) that left my car looking like this:



So, I finally had to say goodbye. (I think the Kidney Foundation is pretty happy though.) This car and I have been through a lot together...I've been driving it for 7 years, and my family had it for 8 before that. Its 254,000 miles have taken me to Canada, California (several times), Las Vegas, St. George, Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, and more...if I hadn't killed it, I don't know if it ever would have died. And sadly, it hasn't been replaced by anything new yet...

Vietnam - Week 3

I had to take a break after posting about the first two weeks. Ha! Anyway, the last week in Vietnam was great. We spent the first few days of it in Hoi An, a little coastal city that is famous for its textiles...you can buy amazing silk (and other fabrics)and have them turned into clothing in 24 hours! Needless to say, I did a little shopping while I was there. Here's a picture of one of my dresses...



That's one of our Vietnamese dentists with me in the photo. She was my age, and a dentist, which I thought was kinda crazy.

We also had the chance to go to the beach again while we were there - for a few hours anyway. I was glad to be able to go and relax and read on the beach. We did a couple of clinics in that area. It was really hot and humid there, and most of the places we went to didn't have electricity, or glass in the windows, or much protection from the heat at all. (Or plumbing, but that's a different story...) Those clinics were long days, but well worth it. Especially seeing all the cute little kids.



Our last clinic was at a youth shelter in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). It was a place where kids ages 5 through 17 or 18 are placed when they are in trouble with the law or their families have kicked them out or abandoned them. Some kids are abandoned by their families for what seems like no reason at all, such as they have a big birthmark that is seen by the family as a curse. One little girl I saw had been kidnapped by her own uncle and held for ransom. Another little boy's medical card read that he was there because "his parents didn't want him at home anymore". It was very sad, but what struck me was how happy many of the kids seemed. They have a terrible lot in life, but still manage to stay happy and do things for others. I was helping out in the pharmacy that day, and near the end of the day, a bunch of the teenage girls came out of a class where they had been making hand-embroidered greeting cards. They set up a little stand later where they sold the cards and other things to us, but first one of the girls came up to me and presented me with her card, in which she had hand-written and little message. Her teacher told me, "She wants to give this to you." I had one of our Vietnamese interpreters translate it for me, and then I got a picture with the girl, whose name was Lan Anh.



She wrote me a very sweet note, thanking us for coming to her school, and wishing me well in her health and travels. The card was beautiful too, with hand-embroidered birds on a silk background. It was moments like that that made the heat and the long days worth it!

Right after that we visited an orphanage across the street. This was only two days before we left, but it ended up being the turning point for me on the trip. It really made me realize how much these kids in Vietnam go though, and how much they need someone there to love them. Going to the orphanage that day was a pretty tough experience, and I left there in tears. After holding the sweet little babies in the baby room, and then seeing the suffering babies in the handicapped room, I broke down crying and wished I could take every one of them home with me, because it was so hard knowing that most of them didn't have a chance in life. Even the ones with totally treatable medical conditions would probably never get the treatment they need, because most doctors won't touch an orphan child.




It broke my heart, but I managed to get up the courage to visit another orphanage the next day. That one happened to be the orphanage where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopted their son Pax. I only know because there was this bulletin board that was practically a shrine to them outside the front doors of the orphanage (which I thought was a little silly). Anyway, we went into the toddler room first at that one, and as soon as the children saw us coming, the doors burst open and before I could even look twice a little boy had jumped into my arms and was squeezing me so tight, I couldn't believe a three-year-old had a grip that strong! He laid his head on my shoulder and probably would have stayed there forever if I hadn't had to put him down because another child was clamoring for his turn to be held. These children were so desperate for love and affection. They didn't want to let us go when it was time to move on to the next room and see other children. It was really hard letting them go, and knowing that they might not ever have a family of their own. I think these last two orphanages were a turning point for me because it made me really start to consider international adoption.



Oh, also, we visited a preschool class while we were there. The kids were incredibly well-behaved, and sat there practicing writing their letters. Then suddenly one little boy, who couldn't have been more than five, asked us if we wanted to see him do a hip-hop dance. This was the most hilarious, adorable thing that I have ever seen. I wish I had it on video, but here's a picture:


We also got to visit another sort-of orphanage, it's a place that's run by nuns and gives free day care to children and babies while their mothers work. The nuns there are doing so much to help the orphans and the people in need, but there is so much more that needs to be done.



Later that day we had some time to go shopping and see a little bit of Saigon. It's a pretty crazy city, very crowded, with tons going on at every second. There are motorbikes and scooters everywhere (you have to watch closely so you don't get hit!) and street vendors hounding you every couple of feet, practically begging you with the few English words they know to buy whatever they're selling. I didn't get many pictures of Saigon, because I didn't have a lot of time there, but maybe this one will show just a little bit of how crazy/crowded it was...even the electrical and phone lines were a jumbled mess overhead, strung back and forth between the buildings.

Our hotel was pretty nice too. I wish I could remember what it was called...but anyway, apparently it's pretty famous because the rooftop restaurant (where I ate dinner one night while listening to a terrible Filipino cover band sing the Pina Colada Song and Hotel California) is where the government officials and diplomats sat watching the city burn during the fall of Saigon. It's got a great view of the city still.


The last night the whole group went for a farewell dinner at a restaurant, Blue Ginger. We all had a great time dressing up in our newly made clothes and celebrating our trip. Here is a picture of most of the medical team.



The trip truly was a great experience, and I loved working with this team. It also solidified my desire and love for humanitarian work, and I hope there are many more trips like this to come!

Vietnam - Week 2, continued...

Okay, are you ready? We're halfway done! So, after Hanoi, we flew to another city called Hue (pronounced Hway). Luckily after Sapa, where it was FREEZING cold, the weather just got hotter and hotter. Hue was really nice. It used to be the capital, and it's a really fun city with lots to do. Our hotel was like a resort here, with a swimming pool, salon, etc. It was on the Perfume River, where we took a little boat cruise. We also visited the Citadel, which was the home of past emperors and royal families. Some of it is in ruins now, but some of it is well preserved and it was cool to see some historical things that are actually old, as opposed to our "history" here which is never really more than 200 or so years old, usually.






Darn! It's that sideways problem again...can anyone tell me how to fix that? Oh, and that last picture is the result of my friends paying a few thousand Vietnam Dong to put on the "Emperor's Robes" and sit on his throne. Anyway, it was delightfully warm in Hue, which is more than I can say for the weather since I've been back in Utah...here are a few more pictures.


My roommate Hailey and I...yeah, I guess we were too cheap to pay to wear the disgusting robes that thousands of other people have worn...we opted for a ride in the emperor's carriage instead...




We took a little boat cruise down the Perfume River that evening. That was a pretty crazy experience - I can't believe how many people actually live on their boats in the river! I mean, these things are just thrown together with pieces of wood and tarps, and there are, like, 4-year-old kids jumping from boat to boat, and people are building fires on their wooden boats for heat, and their dogs are hanging out on the boats too. It's like a whole neighborhood of boats along the river! I couldn't believe some of the living conditions I saw there.





A fishing boat out on the river (although I can't imagine you'de want to eat ANYTHING out of that river...EVER) and our hotel in the background

We did a clinic the next day just outside of Hue, at Kim Doi compassionate home. This is a place run by some sweet little nuns, and basically the whole village showed up to be checked out by us.




The sweet little nuns, who cooked for us, gave us presents, and treated us like royalty even though we probably got them in big trouble with the government for hosting us.

It was a really long, hot day, but fun too. It was also a bit scary, as some communist government representatives showed up and tried to make us leave halfway through the day. Our director, Binh, (the found of COPI, from Vietnam) spoke to them and told them we would be happy to leave if they would apologize to the 200 people that were still waiting to be seen. Of course they wouldn't so we stayed...but they were not happy. We had even gotten permission from the governor of the province to be there, so he sent undercover police to stand by and watch, and help us in case anything happened. We made it through the day (another 12 hour), but the poor nuns will probably be the ones that get the punishment for us being there. Then, when we got to our hotel that night, in another town an hour away, there were government representatives there waiting for us. It was pretty scary...they escorted our director and her son out to the parking lot, and it was so late at night that none of us heard what happened until the next morning when our trip leaders announced that we were leaving the province immediately. This was very sad, since our accommodations there were at a lovely little beach resort, which I had been waiting for the whole trip! I have some pictures of the few hours I got to spend there though. Anyway, it turned out that the woman who is in charge of Foreign Affairs for the province didn't want Americans coming in and delivering health care to her people - apparently it makes the government look bad when they're not doing their job, and it's being done by foreigners. So we skipped out of there VonTrapp-style to avoid anyone getting arrested, and we had to cancel our next two clinics. Here's the pictures of the beach:

Vietnam - Week 2

Our second week in Vietnam was quite an adventure! On Sunday night, after being at Thanh Ba all day, we all piled in a bus (one of our main modes of transportation while we there) and drove to the train station, where we took an overnight train to Sapa. This was another new experience for me - I've never riddern in a sleeper train car before! Really, they shouldn't call them that, because I don't think I slept much. The train lurched around and stopped and started all night long. We left around 9 PM and when we got there it was about 5 AM. Then we took another bus to the town of Sapa. Sapa is in the very northern end of Vietnam, about 30 miles from China. I was told that you can usually see China from there, because Sapa is way up in the mountains. But it was unseasonably cold there this year, and it was so incredibly foggy the whole time we were there that you couldn't really see more than several yards in front of you. The city of Sapa was very tourist-oriented, and the look of it seemed almost Europen to me.





Sapa, and the mountains of northern Vietnam, are where the indigenous people live - a lot of them migrated from China, Mongolia, etc. hundreds of years ago. They are the Hmong and other tribes, and they are now the ethnic minority in Vietnam, and they are very discriminated against. Again, these children are normally not allowed to go to school, so COPI gives them scholarships and help set up a school for them to attend. It's very interesting there. The indigenous people live in very primitive conditions in small villages outside Sapa, but they come into the city or wait for the tourists to come to their villages so they can sell their handiwork. Besides farming, that is how they make their living. There was a whole group of little girls waiting for us when we got to our hotel. They followed us around the city for hours, trying to get us to buy the things that they had made. And they make everything - jewelry, handbags, blankets, wall hangings, scarves, etc. A lot of it is hand embroidered and hand-dyed with dye from the indigo plant. It's all very pretty.





The market in Sapa. They had lots of crazy things (can you see the dead chickens?) like chopped up cow and pig parts, and bottles of "healing" wine with snakes, scorpions, and lizards in them. They also had lots of cool stuff, like Pashmina scarves and handmade blankets and pillowcaes.

We went on a trek to two of the native villages. The government had paved sidewalks put in the villages a couple of years ago so that tourists could go on these treks and the villagers could have a little industry. They surrounded our bus the minute we pulled up, and walked with us all over the villages for a couple of hours, in hopes that we would buy things from them at the end of the trip. It was all women in the group of villagers that were walking with us, and one of them would latch on to one of us and walk with us the whole time, speakingin perfect English that they have learned from all the tourists coming through. What I didn't realize was that that person then felt that you were obligated to buy something from them at the end. Well, I didn't end up buying anything from my little friend, because the lady next to her had stuff that I liked more. I felt bad, especially after she followed me around and yelled at me for about 10 minutes after that! Here she is:




And a picture of what their housing looks like. It's basically just some wooden boards/planks thrown together with a tin roof and a dirt floor. They build a fire in a fire pit inside the house to keep warm, while pigs and chickens are running in and out all the time. Most of them are rice farmers as well. Here is a picture of what their rice fields look like. The hills are all terraced for their rice paddies.



The next day we did a clinic in Sapa, at a boarding school for the indigenous children that COPI supports. They were lined up and waiting for us at the gate to their school, and all along the entrance. They clapped for us as we walked in, all the way through the last person that made it in. They were so grateful to have us there. We probably saw over 300 children that day, and we were there for about 12 hours.





The next day we had another clinic, at another school in Sapa. It was in a pretty remote little village, which we actually had to trek into on foot after quite a long and nauseating drive in a van. I was actually shocked when we made it back to our hotel in one piece. The combination of the lunatic Vietnam drivers, plus the extremely narrow mountain roads with cliffs plunging down the sides, and the incredibly thick fog made it pretty much the scariest ride of my life. Way scarier than any amusement park ride, because at least on those you know you can't actually get hurt. Anyway, we had to trek over this rickety little bridge, up this hill on a muddy, swampy, unpaved road to the school and back. I was pretty much covered with mud when we got back. Oh, I'm also attaching a picture here of what our dental clinic looked like that day. Pretty scary.




Anyway, once we survived the van ride back and cleaned all the mud off ourselves as best we could, we drove back to the train station and took another all night train, this time to Hanoi. Hanoi is the capital, and it was a fun place to spend a day. I did a lot of shopping there. COPI supports a store there were we all bought a lot of stuff. They give women in the small villages micro loans to have some start up capital to make more of their handiwork, and then they can sell it in the store for fair trade prices. It was a little more expensive than most of the stuff you could buy there, but definitely worth it for the cause. Most things in Vietnam were ridiculously cheap.



We also had the opportunity in Hanoi to visit a leper colony. Contrary to popular belief, leprosy is actually very hard to catch from other people. However, the government forces these people to live in isolation, and not only the lepers, but their children and grandchildren, who are completely disease free. Only the elderly in this colony have leprosy, but their descendents are completely ostracized as well. The children are not allowed to attend school, and the are hardly even allowed to leave the colony. The government "provides" them with food and medication, but once you visit there you can see that these are completely inadequate. Also, the government is mostly corrupt, so all the food, medications, etc. that we brought the people had to be handed out one by one directly from us to them. The government representative who just happened to show up on the day that we were there would have liked to take them and "distribute" them to the people, but past experience has shown that the people never end up getting anything that way. The government or who ever happens to be in charge will take and sell whatever they can get. This was another hard thing to see - these adorable children who are completely normal in every way having to live in isolation, and the older people suffering from leprosy, losing limbs and extremities because they aren't getting their medication often enough.







We were able to donate some money while we were there to give the children scholarships to go to school. Here I am with the little boy I gave a scholarship to, and his sister (I think?)



This is getting to be quite a long post...I think I'll split it up some more to give all you readers a break. (All 4 of you...)

Vietnam - Week 1

Well, I'm finally getting around to reporting on my adventures in Vietnam! I've been back for 2 weeks now and it's been crazy catching up. So I went there with an organization called COPI - Children of Peace International. It was founded a by a Vietnamese woman whose family fled to the US right after the war. She ended up in Colorado and became a Lutheran. Then when she unexpectedly went back 12 or so years later to find a lost sibling, she realized what a need there was there. There were so many orphaned children from the war, and so many others not receivng adequate medical care, etc. under the new government. So her Lutheran church began donating money and she founded her organization. Then a pastor at the church there who is now a pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran church in Sandy enlisted people here to help. One of the nursing instructors at my school goes to church there and began taking nursing students there with COPI on study abroad trips a few years ago.

My first week there was really only half a week, and half of that was spent flying. It was my first trip crossing the International Date Line, and it was a weird experience! We left on Wednesday evening, March 5 and got there Friday morning, March 7 - but Thursday the 6th got lost somehow...it is a strange feeling missing an entire day. The way back was even more strange...like living the same day twice. Have you ever seen that movie Groundhog Day? :)

Anyway, we flew into Hanoi, which is in northern Vietnam, and stayed our first few days in a city called Viet Tri. It was not my favorite place. It was a smaller city, not too touristy, so I don't think that the people were too used to seeing Americans. We got stared at a lot, me in particular...I don't think they have seen red curly hair too often. Our first full day there happened to be International Women's Day, so we all got roses! That was something I've never heard of in the US...



That's my hotel room in the background...

Anyway, after unpacking and sorting all our supplies that day, we went to a place called "The Temple of the Seven Kings". It had all of these different shrines to this former king, and they were all built further and further up on this hill so that you had to climb a ton of stairs to get to each one. The scenery there was like nothing I have seen before, so it was pretty cool. Like I said though, it wasn't my favorite city. It was pretty polluted, and the city itself wasn't really that pretty (which is why I don't have any pictures of the actual city). Here are some pictures of King's Temple...






The next day we had our first clinic. We set it up at a little school in a village outside of Viet Tri, called Thanh Ba (pronounced tang-ba). All of the people get so excited that we are there to provide medical care...for some of them it is the only time they ever get to see a doctor or a dentist. They line up before we even get there and wait for hours in line for us to see them. We mostly saw kids at the first clinic, and they were super cute.



Some of the kids being entertained by our clown while waiting in line


One of the nursing students doing an assessment on a child

There was also an orphanage at Thanh Ba. I spent a little time in there after our clinic was over. I had never been to an orphanage before that. I've hear a lot of horror stories about foreign orphanages and the terrible conditions and everything. This wasn't nearly as bad as some of the ones I've heard about in Romania or the Ukraine or something, but it was still pretty sad. A lot of parents in Vietnam will abandon their baby if they think something is wrong with it, or if they get pregnant without being married, because of the stigma in their culture. And when a child is an orphan there, they are a complete outcast in society. No doctors will touch them, they are not usually allowed in school, and they will probably never get married since they have no social standing. It was really sad to see those tiny babies lying alone in metal cribs or on hard wooden "beds" and know that they won't really have a chance in life. Also, that particular orphanage recently closed adoptions to the US. Hopefully there are some people in Europe or Australia that want to adopt some cute little Vietnamese children!