Grand Reopening: English Cafe Danang

The community that we feel most at-home in and invested in here is the English Cafe.  I can't remember how much I've told you about the cafe, and since it relocated and opened fresh this week, I'll tell you again about it.

The Korean couple who opened this cafe last spring become gentle grandparents to all the college students who come to study during the day (not very many of those, yet) and all the students and young professionals who come to the evening English Club programs (between 30-60).  These two worked for years with international students studying in Korea, and now they are here in Vietnam running a cafe, with the same heart for young people.

We love them.  The gentleness and grace that they walk in is nearly palpable.  They were in need of foreign volunteers to come and help with English Club when we first arrived, and our family stepped in to fill the gap.  We have committed two nights a week to the cafe, and we have established relationships with the Vietnamese staff (five 20-somethings who are recent college graduates) in terms of having them over as a group on their day off for American food and games.  Nertz is their favorite!

The students who come to the cafe have formed a clique of regulars that we affectionately refer to as the VFDs.  Although we welcome any newcomers warmly, it's the VFDs that really have our attention.  We try to see them outside of English Club any time we can, including having them over for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas (and soon, Easter).  We love these 10-15 college students and young professionals very much.  We had a guys-night before Tet Holiday and invited just the guys from Vision for a double-feature: Courageous and Borne Identity.

At this table are William (in blue), Steve (in red, holding a card), Dan (next to the fan), two guys I didn't meet, Christine, and Joey (in gray).  Joey is a recent graduate who has a job but is away from home living in Danang.  Christine comes from the north, near Hanoi, and is in her final semester of college.  She was glad to return home for the holidays last month, but then felt like coming back to Danang was also coming home because of the "family" of Vision Cafe.  Steve and William are both students at the private university in town, I think.  Aside from the two guys I don't know, this is a table full of VFD friends playing a game called Mascarade--it's a lot of fun to play with this many people.

I use their English names because I've taught them the phrase "Hello! My name is ____, but please call me ____."  It's a lot different from being Vietnamese and going up to someone and saying "Hi, my name is ____" and giving an English name that nobody actually calls you.  So although I know the Vietnamese names of about half of my Vision friends, I only call them by the English name they've taken, if they have one, and that's how they address each other when speaking English.  If you speak a tonal language you know the difficulty of rolling along in English and suddenly having to break over into tones for a name and then back again to finish the sentence.

The students sit in conversation groups for English Club.  The four westerners in this photo are tourists who are traveling together for a year, volunteering for a month at a time in different places, then moving on.  This particular group started their year in Thailand with some team-building and orientation, then they helped with an orphanage in Cambodia for a month, and we are the third stop on their world tour.  The Vision Cafe contacted the sending agency and asked to be a stop-over place for the tourists to come to, and so this current group of five girls is the fifth group that we've seen come through Danang in our time here.  If you have questions about this year-long tourism project, please write to me at <thechaseplace@gmail.com> and I'll get you pointed in the right direction, but it's not information to put on our blog or Facebook while I'm in Vietnam.

The tourists help enormously with the cafe, and it's great to have more native English speakers there in the evenings for English Club--there was even a night in January where the expats outnumbered the Vietnamese.  That's a real feat!  The teams of one-month tourists are usually 5-7 in number, and there are between 6-10 other expats in the city who are invested in some way with the cafe.  But the five Chases are the most invested over the long-term, and when we go home after this school year, our departure will leave a painful gap in the fabric of Vision relationships.  We are praying that another expat couple or family will come to align themselves with the cafe for the coming school year and beyond.

I'm writing today in hopes that you'll do a couple of things.  Number one is to pray.  We believe God is intensely interested in the hearts and lives of the students in Danang.  We don't want to miss any chance to play a role in the unfolding drama of life-change, but nor do we want to force conversations that aren't ready to happen yet.  So we pray and relate to people and watch and listen.  Especially as Easter is now two weeks away, we want to see what God has in store for the people in our lives.  We have good movies to show to friends wanting to research God's redemptive history.  So please pray!

Number two is that we could use some books at the Vision Cafe.  Books that are 4th grade reading level up to high school reading level would be appropriate.  We have five copies of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to loan out, and it is just about the right level of reading for my college students learning English.  High-interest books for middle schoolers, like Gary Paulson's Hatchet, or any of the Newbery Award books would be perfect.  If you have a book on your shelf that you want to send to central Vietnam for the rest of its days, we'll take it.

Finally, we could use some games for the Cafe.  Not the big, floppy cardboard-box kind, like the Monopoly and Life games that we grew up with, but small games that are easy for English learners to play.  Card games like Skip-bo and Phase 10--perfect.  Or Connect Four is a good two-player game.  If you don't mind parting with it, a non-speaking, tactile game like Blokus would be icing on the cake.  Nertz, the favorite game of the Vision staff, requires each player to have his/her own complete deck of cards, with the back-pattern different for each person.  So you can imagine that after you've seen a couple of blue and red bicycle card-backs, it's a bit of a stretch to find more variety of playing cards.  If you sent a deck of cards with a unique back, we'd know what to do with it.  Thrift-store games are perfect for us.

We have someone (Janet's sister, Karen) coming to Vietnam NEXT WEEKEND for a visit, and she can bring 5-10 books and 5-10 games.  Since I'm just now telling you about the need for books and games, I am only intending that people who live in Bend who can get the materials to her this week as she's packing can do this.  But then we have more people coming later in the spring, so if you who live farther away want to put a little game or book in the mail to us, it will get in their luggage when they come in April.  Our address is 617 NE 10th, Bend, OR 97701.  If anybody is able to slip a book or deck of playing cards to Karen this week, that would be awesome.  More than three books from one family would be generous ... but it wouldn't be awesome.  We are thinking along the lines of one or two things from a family, so as to limit the amount we'll ask our visiting travelers to pack into their luggage.

We are to the point now where we have less than three months of Vietnam left, and each day is valuable.  We fill our schedule with hospitality and we eat good food as often as we can.  We are also looking forward to being back in America with friends and family ... very much.  See you soon!