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!

Mekong Villages

[Tim]


Today is our first full day on the river.  We just stopped a midway point called Pak Beng, where tourists generally overnight as they go downriver from Thailand to Luang Prabang.  Our pilot got his river passbook stamped, Janet, Amanda, and my mom went ashore to get lunch foods and see what the town was like, and the three kids skipped shale-rocks out onto the river.



Last night at dusk we pulled over onto a sandy beach and went up into a village to see what language and people group they were.  Amanda found out that we were still a full day's journey from her people group, and she engaged one old lady in conversation as night fell around us.  It's beautiful listening to the tonal language used here, and the evening was a comfortable cool.  And we saw a firefly.

When we set out again for the boat, night had truly fallen around us.  The village homes along the road were generally lit by a single lightbulb, and many of the people were tending cooking fires outside in the space between houses, or sitting and smoking and watching us pass.  Amanda says that if they had been her people group we would have had many invitations to join the family dinners/campfires.  As it was, we had no expectation of any invitation and had food to eat back at the boat.

Back at the boat, though, our pilot was busy exercising hospitality of a wonderful kind.  He and his brother had kindled a bonfire on the rocks above our boat, and we were delighted to sit on the banks of the Mekong, in who-knows-where-Laos, enjoying the dancing firelight and without a care.

There's more to tell about that campfire ... something about barking jungle deer ... but I want to tell about another village before I sign off.  The evening village where we docked seemed sad (and in fact the conversation that Amanda had with the old lady was about how the government was tearing down their houses to improve the road) and unfriendly, but there was another village yesterday that was really neat.  It was our first stop and our first encounter with rural Lao villagers.






The steps up to the village end at the high water mark.  Since we're in a low rainfall season now, there is a bit of a hike to get up to the stairs that lead into the village.  There is no road to this village--only the river--so the stairway here is essentially the front door.

At the top of the stairs, this is the first set of houses we find:



And this old lady was delighted that I could at least greet her in her language.  She chuckled and repeated the words several times.  She is splitting bamboo canes.




I was confused as to why some of the buildings were poorly constructed (what I would have expected from a subsistence-level village with limited access to the outside world) while others were well-designed and well-executed post-and-beam structures.  It turns out this village had been selected to be a "model village" by the Lao government and that had made it available for some NGOs to help out in years past.  We saw the school that a foundation had constructed in 2008, for example.  So that's what you're seeing in these next photos:

The picture above is the school and its grounds.  The six small houses on the left are dorm rooms for kids from villages too far away, so they stay here.

Our stop on land lasted an hour, and since we hadn't been on the boat for very long before then, there was hardly any sensation of the land moving.  Later, after two days on the boat, and when we arrived in Thailand after three days on the boat, then it was different.  Every time we were standing still on land, the land seemed to pitch and roll.

In our third day on the Mekong, we were finally among the people who are Amanda's people.  We recorded the locations of the villages we saw on both sides of the river, and she is planning to go back downriver from her home to become more acquainted with the area.

On the Mekong

[Tim]

I am in the coolest place, doing the coolest thing, right now.  We are traversing north-central Laos toward its western border with Thailand, and I'm on a chartered riverboat.  And every moment is delicious.

Our friend, Amanda, lives in Thailand and spends much of her time in the villages of Laos as a traveling nurse.  At age 28, she fluently speaks several languages and has training in linguistics to be able to continue learning.  I'm so impressed with her!  When I got the job teaching in Danang, a year ago now, I looked at the map and realized that we could go overland from our place to hers, but through a country I had no experience with and no language for.  So I contacted Amanda and asked her how much arm-twisting it would take to get her to meet us in Vietnam and be our traveling companion back to her home.  Not much!

My first thought was to take bus-transport.  Those sleeper-buses that crisscross this part of southeast Asia can get you there, unless you crash because the driver hasn't slept for 20 hours and is using amphetamines to help him stay alert, but the adjectives applied to the adventure on Trip Adviser and from veteran travelers often include "harrowing" and phrases like "the worst sleeper bus experience I've ever had."

Laos, as you may know, is mountainous.  Landlocked and mountainous and poor.  The Mekong River (the same one that flows out through Saigon way-way-way downstream) cuts through the western part of the country.  Maybe I should say the Mekong cuts OFF the western portion of the country, because there is but one bridge, and it's miles and miles away from Luang Prabang (Lao's second city and our point of entry when we flew in from Hanoi).

And now we are 70 miles or so west of LPB on the Mekong.  Everything to my left (across the river in the piture below) is part of the country of Laos cannot be accessed from Laos except by boat.  Crazy to me.

Dissuaded from going by bus, but still wanting to somehow cross over to Amanda's home turf through Laos, I looked at the map and realized that the river passage might be just the ticket.  My mom is traveling with us, so our 5 plus my mom and Amanda is 7 ... and with 7 people it is comparable in price to buy tickets on a riverboat or to charter our own boat.  Plus, that way we have the luxury of a boat all to ourselves and we get to choose where we stop.  That's important to Amanda, because not all the villages we're passing are of the people group she works with.

Amanda's people-group lives in Lao and the language is similar to Lao, but they are ethnically not Lao.  I say that as if Amanda is of her people, but she's not.  She grew up in China but her family is from Pennsylvania and now she lives in Thailand and spends most of her time in Lao among her people-group.  She's all mixed up, if you ask me.  Write to me I'll give her your contact information and she'll add you to her group for email updates.  As is the situation with many people living and working in this part of the world, when communicating with her you'll have to choose your words carefully to avoid pricking the ears of government monitors looking for political or religious activity.