Neasa, Rose and Annmarie in Vietnam!
Neasa, Rose and Annmarie spent 6 weeks in Vietnam and share with us their experience.
We live in Thanh Xuan very close to our project in Peace Village. Nine volunteers live in our dorm which is a 10 minute walk from the project. We volunteer in a centre for children with disabilities. Most of the children live in the centre. We were placed in class rooms for the morning. We help in the class in any way we can, usually playing with the children and helping them with their writing and drawing. We also teach songs to the children and sometimes we read to the children. We also help the teacher clean up after the class.
In the afternoon we are in the therapy room. Here we help the nurses; we teach the children how to brush their teeth and how to dress themselves. We do some art in the afternoon too. We try to think of original art activities and we've bought some supplies for the class.
The experience has been very rewarding but also challenging at times. As we were told during the interview and the predeparture workshop, your role as a volunteer can be quite unclear at first and it may seem that you don't have a role, however, we tried to focus on the children and contribute in any way we could. Some volunteers from other organisations seem to become disheartened at the beginning but we were very lucky that we expected this and were very patient. The children are much more comfortable with us now and we are really enjoying the work.
It is very important to respect the culture and to remain open minded. We found it difficult to deal with the manner in which children are disciplined in the school. The staff also need time to accept your presence and you need to earn their respect but this comes with time and we now feel a big change from the beginning and everybody has been very welcoming and helpful. We would strongly recommend investing in a phrase book to help with communication. The children are very good at communicating because they are willing to act out what they say but a phrase book helps with the staff. Patience is also very important as working along side the local people can be very different from what you are used to at home so it is important to be patient and polite and also to respect the way they work. We are very happy with everything so far and we feel we have learned a lot.
I have enclosed some photographs, I hope this is helpful and don't hesitate to ask for more detail if it is needed. Sorry again about the delay.
Kind regards,
Neasa, Rose and Annmarie