A Year In Indochina: An ordinary day turned to something special

It has been such an interesting day for me today. In the morning I accompanied Jessica's friend Yennifer on a visit to a factory in Binh Duong province on the outskirts of the city. Here, bamboo and rattan products are produced by the Ba Nhat Rattan Bamboo Ceramic High Grade Cooperative, established in 1976 to offer employment to poor and disadvantaged workers. Madam Cuc is the President of the cooperative and is a friend of Yennifer's. She is apparently quite allusive and it is difficult to secure an interview with her, so I was very grateful to Yennifer for organising this for me.

I was quite short on time as I had to be at my class at the Anh Linh school at 2pm, and I spend most of the morning worrying about this. Before 10am, Yennifer, her friend Hong and I were collected from near my house by Viet, Madam Cuc's friendly PA and the factory's supervisor. It was an hour and a half's drive to the factory, where we were first shown around the showroom to see the products produced here. The Ba Nhat cooperative has supplied Ikea and Wal-Mart and the products were often very beautiful. Then I saw the empty workshops and the full canteen, where the workers were having their lunch. Next, Viet took us through the seven hectare village that houses the five hundred workers and their families. There is a nursery here for the workers' children and a canal has just been completed. Madam Cuc wants the village to be self-sufficient, Yennifer told me. Yennifer's bags were dropped in a room where she will be staying for the following days and then we took a walk around the complex where Madam Cuc stays. The garden was beautiful, with the canal running through, a little pond for fishing, a well, ducks, dogs and beautiful flowers. There was also the less pleasant sight of an enormous caged python that had been caught nearby and kept locked up. I felt chilled all over the see the six or seven metre-long snake, its head only a foot away from me through the wire mesh. It had just consumed something quite large and the middle part of its body was thicker than my thigh.

Bamboo products in the showroom

Part of the garden below Madam Cuc's quarters

We returned to the house for lunch. By now it was 12.30pm, we were a long way from Ho Chi Minh City, I had not yet met Madam Cuc and I was starting to feel very worried about making it back to my class in time. Viet took Hong and I back to the city. We were to pick up Madam Cuc in Binh Thanh district and talk to her in the car on the way back to our drop-off point in district seven. This all went as plan and we picked up Madam Cuc, a lady in her eighties, and her silent husband. Madam Cuc immediately began talking to Hong in Vietnamese, who had to stop her to translate the information to me: she had been talking about the house where she lives now and how she had to sell her previous house to support her business after the fall of the Soviet Union meant she could not trade any more. I was given some newspaper articles about her life and even a copy of the letter she handed Hilary Clinton from a crowd during the President's visit to Vietnam in 2000, which resulted in Hilary Clinton arranging a meeting with Madam Cuc and facilitating a trade agreement for the cooperative with Wal-Mart. Yennifer had explained to me earlier: 'She is willing to work with the Americans now, despite what they did to her country [Madam Cuc's brother and sister were both killed by American soldiers]. That's the thing about the Vietnamese, they're forgiving, they move on'.

It was approaching the point at which I would part and I hadn't yet been able to ask Madam Cuc the questions I had prepared. Taking me by surprise, she turned to me for the first time and told me in perfect English that I should come again to the factory over the weekend, stay overnight, and have plenty of time to talk to her. I was taken aback by this kind offer, especially as I had heard that she is a very private person. I hope that this will be realised and arrangements will be made soon as nothing was formally decided upon.

I thanked Viet and Madam Cuc and left the car, running to the nearest taxi as it was past two o'clock and I had no way to contact the school. My head ached from the hot day followed by the blast of air-con in the car. I turned up twenty-five minutes late to my class and felt horribly guilty. It was my last class with the children today and I had decided to teach them a skill that I should have taught them at the beginning: to mix paints to create new colours. I realised at Tuesday's class that the children don't know how to do this and felt that I must teach them this simple skill before I left them, particularly for the sake of Bao, who aspires to be an artist. I dished out red, blue, yellow and white paint to the kids and told them that they were to make rainbows out of these colours. To help them, I wrote the simple equations on the board:

Red + Yellow = Orange
Red + Blue = Purple
Blue + Yellow = Green
Red + White = Pink

And then I offered the English words 'light' and 'dark' and explained how adding white to a colour would make it lighter. We had previously painted with boxes of twelve colours of paint so the kids had never needed to work this out before. I thought about how it must feel to discover this for the first time. They took to the task really well and they are all very good at naming the colours now (I remember one week when Ms. Kim Ngoc helped one of the younger boys to name the colour 'brown'. It turned out he didn't know the name for this colour in Vietnamese either).

It was a relaxed class and the kids were all well-behaved. When they had tired of rainbows they kept themselves entertained by drawing other things for a while. Then we began to clear up the paint things ready to go outside to play for the last half hour. At this point I was presented with a bunch of drawings the children had done for me this morning, with messages that had been translated by a teacher. They read, 'Dear Amy, thank you for teaching me to draw with water-colours, pencil and to draw comic story. Wishing you happiness' and 'I wish you would have safe return and be happy with your family' and 'Wish you'll come back to Vietnam soon!' and 'Thank you so much for teaching me English. Love you!'. It was very touching and I felt pained to say goodbye to these lovely children. There is a particular little girl in my class called Linh who always wears a necklace with a tear-drop shaped plastic pendant. She runs up to me whenever I arrive at the school, and today she gave me a matching pendant like hers. I worry it may have been a large gesture from a little girl who may not have very much of her own.

As my own parting gesture I produced the pass-the-parcel I had made yesterday. Kim Ngoc explained the rules to the kids. As the playground was noisy and a teacher was playing the guitar and singing with some children nearby, I didn't use music but instead covered my eyes and shouted 'stop' when the parcel should be stopped. The children were meticulous in making sure I remembered to cover my eyes each round. I don't know whether they saw that I was peeking all the way through to make sure everybody got a prize. When I knew it was the final layer I closed my eyes properly and let the winner fall to chance. I was pleased it went to Nam, a really sweet-natured older boy who is always gentle, well-behaved and helps me to tidy up the classroom. The prize was a box of dominoes and when he didn't react to unwrapping it I was worried he was thinking 'well, that's a crap prize'. In fact, he didn't know how to play with dominoes! But Kim Ngoc assured me that she will teach him how to.

Teaching at the school has been a wonderful experience for me and I have really fallen for the children. The Anh Linh school is great, with wonderful, caring staff, and I hope the kids will all be able to achieve their dreams. I will certainly miss them! I feel incredibly happy to have had this unique insight, something that has been so rewarding for me.