As scary as the idea of being alone in a foreign country is, for people with social anxiety, the idea of being there with a group of strangers is almost worst. Since I’m a big promoter of the motto “fake it till you make it,” most people have no idea how uncomfortable I am with groups of people I don’t know. I don’t often meet people that I have things in common with, and even when I do I feel extremely self-conscious. I had little hope that this week with Habitat would break my norm. I couldn’t have been more surprised.
My first morning in Vietnam I skipped down for a breakfast of dim-sum, fried rice, and Vietnamese style coffee (a French roast coffee with sweetened condensed milk), having not even slightly made up for the days I had been traveling with no sleep, but shockingly unaffected. Although dinner with the team the night before had gone well, as we got to know each other over starfruit soup, I was still concerned about the three hour drive ahead of us. On the other hand, I was just itching to see the more rural Vietnam.
As soon as our baggage was stored and my team was loaded into the bus, Jim and his wife, who had just been in Thailand, started telling us how they had eaten scorpions, grubs, and other delicacies of the insect variety. As strange as it is, my anxiety melted away. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to eat bugs. Not just for the sake of eating them, I wanted to eat ants on an African plain in the middle of the night, next to a fire, with hyenas yipping in the background. Finally, I had found other people who wanted to eat bugs. My moment of clarity was this: there are other people the same brand of weird as I am. We were all different ages, in different walks of life, and from different geographical locations, yet we were also all the same. We were all explorers and thinkers, driven to experience the world and its cornucopia of cultures, while also being committed to making a positive impact as we went. On our ride people shared about their Habitat experiences, and their other travel experiences. I was the least traveled in the group, and it was thrilling to be with people that had been to so many places, and know that it would be me in a few years. After chatting with one of our team leaders, Haley, for awhile it was obvious that she is everything that I want to be. She’s even lived in Africa, the great goal of my life. She paid me a compliment I won’t forget: she said that I seem like a seasoned traveler. Her being such a seasoned traveler, I believed her. I had put so much work into this trip, but still felt overwhelmed. The fact that it looked like I had it all together, made me feel like my hard work was justified.
The city gave way to small communities and scattered pagodas. We watched dirt roads and palm groves through the window until we finally could see the Mekong. It looked like liquid mud, but later Binh, Habitat Vietnam staff, would tell us that during the dry season the river is “like crystal.” That was a relief to hear, as the water supported so many villages. Ramshackle houses, thrown together out of rusted sheets of corrugated metal were clustered around the river’s edge, and in some cases were so dilapidated that they were actually falling into the river. The fact that people were living in houses that were literally falling into the river, illustrated just how important the work that Habitat does is. We would also learn, that many of the people who lived along the Mekong used it for everything. I saw first hand people bathing, washing fruit, and washing clothes in this dirty water, which I was also told they drank.
The economy of the town we stayed in, Cao Lanh, is based largely on lotus. Because of that, and because it’s Asia, Cao Lanh’s town mascot is an anime baby lotus, which they plaster everywhere. The baby lotus was the source of many laughs, the favored sign being one of the baby lotus dressed as a doctor and warning against tobacco use. Everywhere you looked there was lotus or something related to lotus, even our hotel was named Huong Sen, which means lotus scent.
Our hotel beds were small, not meant for our larger Western body types, and they didn’t use sheets, which I learned was true of many Vietnamese hotels. When you walked into your room, you had to insert your room key into a hole in the wall in order to have electricity, which is true for all Vietnamese hotels. In addition to my stellar roommate Joan, the room was shared with a bright yellow gecko named Lizzy. In fact, Joan and I believed Lizzy was not the only room guest of the gecko variety, but we chose to believe that every lemon colored reptile that scurried up our walls was she.
Our first day in the Dong Thap Province we did orientation, were officially welcomed, and visited our work sites. During our week there we would build two houses, which didn’t even seem like it would be a drop in the bucket of the safe housing problem in this region. The great thing was, our build was a trial build. A few months after our two house build, Habitat was going to send 200 hundred people to build 25 houses. 25 houses! Now that is enough to really start making a difference in this small river community.
After orientation, Habitat Vietnam staff took us to the local government building to be ceremoniously welcomed to the community. The building was big, offered no A/C, and plumbing that only worked 50% of the time. Even given these apparent discomforts, the local leaders still came to work in their button ups, fake velvet hoodies, and knockoff Gucci loafers. They took us to a room with long tables set up in a square with red table cloths facing a statue of Ho Chi Minh surrounded by red draperies. It looked exactly how you would imagine the inside of a Communist government building would look, and made the controversial word “Communism,” seem strangely surreal. Five years ago, who would have guessed I would be sitting in front of a statue of Ho Chi Minh in a red draped room? Okay, other than me.
The local leaders welcomed us warmly in Vietnamese, which was translated by Binh. They were very kind, inviting, and grateful. They were dignified and proud of their little spot in southern Vietnam. They gave us bowls of welcome mango, which they claimed was the most special mango in all the world. They said we would never eat mango like that anywhere else. Evidently it is a kind of mango that only grows in the Dong Thap Province. While I couldn’t tell you how exactly it was different than other mango, I can tell you that the mango eaten at those red tables was the most special mango I’ll ever eat in my life.
Annals of an Adventurer 