April 1, 2005
Hi all:
Our "honeymoon" trip to Singapore was interesting.
Singapore is an anomaly in South East Asia. It is a country /city with 3,000,000 people, mostly of Chinese heritage but every other culture is to be found among the minority. The official language is English but most speak it badly, if at all. It is unbelievably
clean and modern to an extreme. It is a "democracy" which rarely holds elections and the Chief Executive office was passed from father to son. The airport sports many signs that say drug offences are punishable by death.
The official symbol of the country is the Merlion, a lion’s head with the tail of a fish It is found everywhere in all sizes from giant fountains to key-ring souvenirs. It looks like an ancient symbol but it was created by the tourism board in the 1970's. It adds to the Disney World flavor of the place. It is very expensive, with prices on a par with or
even greater than the U.S. We pay about fifteen cents for a fresh coconut (to drink) in Nha Trang. At the zoo in Singapore they were S$8.50, about $6. The zoo is a wonderful space if an animal is going to live
a captive life. The enclosures are completely unobtrusive. Elsewhere there is some amazing architecture and public monuments. They have a state of the art subway system and a cable car connection to
their largest island, Santosa, which is one huge amusement park and tourist attraction. It is worth visiting once but I have no desire to ever go back.
When we got back to Nha Trang, we found there had been several birthdays at school so Dung arranged a party the second day we were in town. It was a huge success as usual. With so much to catch up on and things to do to try to get the new house started, we haven't seen as much of the schoolchildren as we would like. There are a lot of new children and there seems to be a
greater number of foreign visitors lately, which the children enjoy. The new room that Kim built as a classroom was not well thought out. There is no air circulation and the roof is like a greenhouse and it is already too hot. Summer is months away, so I don't know how that it is going to work out.
My Danish friend, Annette, and I started Vietnamese lessons but we are not optimistic. When we use a phrase we have been taught with our Vietnamese friends, they find it unrecognizable. I am learning
some of the rules and idiosyncrasies of the language and am improving a little on my pronunciation but my terrible memory constantly plagues me.
One Saturday, a group of my expatriate acquaintances from U.S., Canada and Scotland invited Dung and me to join them and their wives and girl friends for a
cruise and swim and picnic to some of the islands in the bay. One of the fellows is a chef from Scotland and he brought some beautiful fish to prepare according to a recipe he wanted to try but the women
simply wouldn't let him. They just persistently edged him away from the food until they had taken over and were doing it their way (which was delicious).
We had a wonderful, much needed rain the other day. Southeast Asia is experiencing one of the worst droughts ever and fresh water is scarce although we aren't experiencing any problems in this part of
Vietnam. The tragedy is that poor farmers aren't able to get water for their crops and livestock.
I had an interesting experience with health care in the "People's Paradise" the other day. As I was leaving the house I saw a woman staggering along using the wall as support. Just past my house she fell in a
heap on the ground. My neighbor was just leaving and I gestured to her to check on the woman but she just shook her head and drove off. There were several other people at the end of the street and I asked them
if any of them spoke English. One young man said that he did and I asked him to help me find out what was wrong with her. He spoke to her and she pulled up the
front of her blouse to reveal a badly scarred, very inflamed abdomen. She obviously needed attention. There is a military hospital directly behind our house and I asked him to help me get her there. He said
they wouldn't look at her because she had no money. I asked him if we got her to the Provincial Hospital if they would take care of her but he said "No".
I had gone to the same hospital the day after I hit my head in the motorcycle accident and an examination and an X-ray was only $10 so I said I'd pay for her.
Another man helped and we got her to the first building where no one was in any hurry to see what was needed but they finally put her in an examining room. Then the young man told me they wanted 2,000,000 D or
the equivalent of $120 before they would do
anything. This was a good deal more than I had bargained on and I had no idea what the money was going to pay for. I called Dung and fortunately she was just arriving at our house so she came right to the hospital.
She talked with the nurses who were handling the situation and told me they wouldn't do anything without the payment but that it would cover the examination and hospitalization and the surgery she
appeared to require, a lot for $120. We discussed it and our commitment to helping poor people and the fact that I had volunteered to help so we agreed to
the payment.
That evening our landlady brought her daughter, who is a nurse at the hospital, to fill us in. Apparently, the fact that a foreigner was involved doubled the
price. If a Vietnamese was paying, they would have asked for 1,000,000 D. She said not to give the hospital any more money, that we had paid enough to take care of her.
Several days later, we were talking to Dung's sister Tuyet and mentioned the episode and she said she had seen this same woman in front of her store the day after we had her admitted to the hospital. This suggested several possibilities: that she and the
nurses were running a scam, the nurses had taken the money and then sent her away (in Vietnam nearly all transactions are cash and the money is handled very casually, there are no computerized statements) or she
just decided to leave. Dung decided she would go and ask to speak to the Director of the hospital the next day. When she did she learned that the woman previously had surgery and hadn't kept the incision
clean so she had developed an infection, which they treated before releasing her. The Director said they wanted to thank us for helping her and that they had tried to reach us to tell us the outcome. The
hospital refunded 1,500,000 D. A pleasant surprise.
Dung has a friend, Uyen, 36, divorced, two children, who has been determined to marry her way out of Vietnam. For some reason she focused on France. Since she doesn't speak any other language it probably didn't matter. She recruited Dung to translate emails for her. She had a very bad experience with the first man when he came to visit her in Vietnam but she went to France with him in spite of it. She
managed to get back to Nha Trang where she continued her efforts, communicating with a man she met while visiting France the first time. The second man recently came to visit and she seems to have found a pretty good sort this time. He doesn't speak any
English so I can't converse with him but we went together on a tourist boat trip in Nha Trang Bay and had a fine time although Uyen got seasick
Dung and I are now really married as of March 18, 2005. Although we had a paper from the government saying we would be granted a marriage document before
we had our church wedding, we weren't really married until the government office issued our paper, which they did on the 25th. Patrick Fernandez, the manager
of the Sunrise Resort where we held our wedding party, invited us to have dinner with him at the hotel the day we got the paper so we told him we were celebrating our marriage at his hotel again and this
time he was treating.
As a point of interest, in our conversation at dinner we were talking about Easter and the brunch the hotel was planning and we got around to religion in general. Patrick told us he was a Catholic and that his area
of southern India, Karala, had been Christian since the disciple Thomas visited there in the beginning of Christianity. He told us that his hometown was 30% Christian, 30% Moslem and 40% Hindu. He described in
a most poetic fashion the morning scene in his city, where as a child he could hear the sounds of the people of the three faiths, the Moslem holy men calling to prayer, the church bells and a Hindu morning prayer ritual I can't describe, but the whole thing sounded so peaceful and harmonious. Perhaps the relative "balance of power" contributed to the absence of problems but it would be nice to picture somewhere where people just respected one another and religious differences don't matter. I hope we can get over to India some time next year.
On Easter, Dung got me up for a 5 a.m. service; however, it wasn't held at any place where the sunrise was visible (the beach would have been beautiful but I doubt the government would have given permission).
When she told me after that we would go home and then come back for the regular 8:15 service I told her one Vietnamese language service was enough, particularly
since I'd been there for a Palm Sunday evening service and another on Thursday evening.
Vietnam is in the throes of celebrating a series of 30th Anniversaries of the "Liberation from Foreign Influence" in cities all the way to Saigon. In Nha Trang they organized it around a festival celebrating
the inclusion of the bay among the most beautiful bays of the world which included a huge beach party. We had lighted boats cruising along shore, kites and lanterns flying overhead, a large stage built for a
grand patriotic pageant, a trade fair, a performance by a Beatles-type group from Australia (which was very good), a parade and fireworks. A real wing ding.
We wrapped up the month with the official papers from the government in hand so we can finally start on our house. The first of three packages of medicine Jeannie sent from the U.S. has arrived (I'm keeping my
fingers crossed on the other two) and my idiot accountant in the U.S. has made a thorough mess of my taxes, which I am just now getting straightened out. The weather is warming up and it's time for the
tourist traffic to pick up. I have more young people (all women, the men seem to lack ambition) coming for English than I can comfortably handle but I enjoy it
and last but not least, Annette and I have given up on our Vietnamese lessons. We just can't remember what we learn from one day to the next. CRS disease!
According to the counter that Bob has on the pages of the web site, quite a few of you take the time to check on me. I appreciate it but it would be nice to hear from some of you.
Dick
