Another Fine Day

(Written by Celine Riendeau)
Today we started off the day three people short. Tess, Angie and Chris were sick with the “thing” (various types of aliments that we all seem to be coming down with). The rest of us ate a wholesome breakfast at the cafe to prepare for our day of work in the heat. Then we saddled up our bikes and traveled through many busy intersections, one of the intersections on which I am guilty of having had a collision with a fellow biker only yesterday. We traveled to the Vocational Training Center for the Disabled to spend the morning placing a second coat of paint over the fence that we painted the day before. This turned out to be a quick job and was finished in about an hour and a half.

We were then taken into a side room, furnished with many intricately done, beautiful chairs carved and created by the carpenter students the center trains. There we talked with the chairman of the center and many kind words were exchanged. He then presented us with gifts of thanks, including bouquets of flowers, fruit (bananas and oranges) and gift plates with various pictures of famous landmarks in Hue on them. We enjoyed the break and then took a tour of the center. We brought the left over fruit to all of the students, who were either learning the trade of carpentry or of sewing.

After our rounds were done, we gathered up our gifts and headed back out into the heat to go back to the hotel for lunch. Waiting there for us was a table spread out with Vietnamese dishes. We ate tofu and shrimp soup, morning glories, rice, and fried pork ribs. Afterwards, we had a little time to digest our food before we got ready to go to our afternoon job of tutoring the children at the Street Children House. At three o’clock we were on our bikes again, headed in the direction of the school. Our task today was challenging, being that three of us were sick and Tess and Chris were in the same tutoring group. Jill was the third member of their tutoring group, and I joined her in case she needed an extra hand with the kids. But as I expected, Jill had it under control the whole time. After an hour and a half of teaching, we pedaled back to the hotel, had a group reflection, and followed by dinner and various wind-down activities before bed.