Catherine and Peter Craig, Viet Nam
05 December 2011
Returned volunteer Catherine Craig writes about her experience working in Ho Chi Minh from October 2009 until November 2010 as a Special Needs Teacher, with the Loreto Vietnam-Australia Program.
Learning Vietnamese can be tricky, writes Catherine, but her and her husband Peter enjoyed their assignment so much they're returning to Viet Nam in February 2012.
My Vietnamese was very limited in spite of the two-week language training. The language is very musical and if the intonations are not correct it is possible to be very insulting. Although everyone was very forgiving in the early days, I still only tried out my slender vocab on people I knew. The vocab grew as time went on, but not by very much.
My journey to Saigon was slow. I had cut out an ad from the Sydney Morning Herald and stuck it in the wall of my office. Every now and then, I looked at it but it wasn’t until my relieving job at school came to an end that I got onto AVI’s website and checked things out. We had been to Viet Nam on holiday the year before so when I saw this position it seemed as though it had been destined.
The Loreto Vietnam-Australia Program is involved with the education of disabled and disadvantaged children in Ho Chi Minh Province. As a result, although my primary job was teaching English at Nguyen Dinh Chu School for the Blind in HCMC, both my husband (as a non-salaried partner) and I were involved in other LVAP activities.
Nguyen Dinh Chu School was a school that had both day pupils and boarding pupils. The school catered for students from K – Year 10 and it also had early intervention for blind babies and toddlers. As well, there was a massage school for students who wanted to learn this skill. I took advantage of this service and believe me, they were very good! It was luckier that most schools as it had space for the students to play in break time where many schools in HCMC and other cities do not have any space other than corridors.
I was worried about my ability to talk to my students as many of them were beginners with limited English language but I had the assistance of a lovely bilingual teacher aide. When her English faltered I discovered that we had the French language in common so we were able to work things out that way.
My classroom was a very dull, narrow room that catered for a maximum of 20 students. Fortunately, it was air-conditioned (the only one in the school). Sighted students rely heavily on illustrations to gain meaning when they are learning a new language. Because the students were either blind or vision impaired, one of the challenges was to find other ways of demonstrate so I bought brightly coloured posters of food and animals to brighten up the room and to allow partially sighted students to explain to blind students what they could see. It also allowed for informal questioning to assist with language acquisition.
The teaching regime in Viet Nam is similar to that of other Asian schools where the teacher is the authority and the students listen or recite. Mistakes are frowned on and students who do not respond when called on are labelled ‘lazy’.
I found that although my older students were good at reading and writing, they were not so good at talking. I decided to implement a method of teaching that included questions and answers about the work that had been learned and also to improvise games that would facilitate vocab retention. Flash cards were made of common articles using fabric and plastic with words in Braille and Bingo cards with vocab words were also used. The students were fiercely competitive and vocab improved a lot. By the end of the year, all my students were confident of speaking even if they made mistakes, knowing that there would not be any punishment. Several of the senior students were integrated into other Government schools and teachers there reported that our students were far and away more proficient English speakers than their students.
As well as teaching English, my husband Peter and I were also responsible for Swimming with the Blind. This involved getting other volunteers to come and help us teach the children form the School for the Blind to swim. Drowning is a big killer of children in Vietnam and this program was designed to make sure that the kids that came from rural districts knew what to do if they were ever in a situation where they fell into water. By the time we left, all of the regular senior students could swim unaided and most of the junior student were confident in the water and could play and float unaided.
We were also involved with schemes such as Bicycle Day where bikes that were bought from money donated were distributed to the neediest students in one of Ho Chi Minh’s most disadvantaged districts. We went to a World Heritage forest in the middle of the Saigon River where families of students who are sponsored by LVAP live in shacks with dirt floors. We were involved in the distribution of school supplies to students from poor families where they received school stationary and financial assistance twice a year. All this is to make sure that students stay in school.
We have been back in Australia for nearly a year now but we are going back in February 2012. We have been asked to go back to the same school for three months to teach, which I think is a great honour. We are also sponsoring six students through a donation that has allowed them to go to University.
The whole experience for both of us is still clear, the people, the traffic, the food, and we can honestly say that there were no negatives about our placement. Maybe we were lucky – I don’t think so.
One of the best pieces of advice we received on arrival was ‘have no expectations’. Other pieces of advice I would give would be to take an Ipod and an E-book especially if the music of the region is not to your taste. And as a voracious reader, I couldn’t find enough books in English to keep me satisfied.
Although we are back in Australia now, we are counting down the months until we return to Saigon.
Catherine and Peter