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Friday October 31st, Day 2 Vietnam
Today was our first full day in Vietnam. Lacey and I had both signed up for an SAS sponsored trip to a school for handicapped children. The trip left from the ship at 8am so we got up early and ate breakfast before meeting on the pier for the trip. There was only 15 students or so on this trip compared to the 70+ on the orphanage visit in Malaysia. We took a 20 minute drive to a different more residential part of town. It actually reminded me of a cleaner India but had the same feel with little shops along the side of the road and a lot of wagons, bikes, and motor cycles on the road. The handicap school was behind another I guess "normal" school and we walked through the courtyar of the normal school to get to the handicap school. The building and playground of the normal school was a bright mix of colors in murals and paintings.
The handicap school was 3 stories high and was an open air building along with most all of the buildings in Vietnam and southeast Asia for that matter. There were bars on the windows rather than glass to help with air flow. It reminded me of a huge house. We sat down in the lobby and were briefed by the headmaster. She had bought this land from her family to build the school. She runs another business and uses the profits from that to fund the school. There are 40+ kids in the school and the tuition is free for them. They have lunch provided for them made from fresh foods everyday from a local market. The kids are of all disabilities from mental to physically handicapped. A lot of these disabilities are the results of their parents being exposed to chemicals like agent orange during the war. These innocent kids are paying the price for our chemical weapons from the war. That was difficult to take in that we are still affecting the lives of so many here.
We got a tour of the school and stopped into all of the classrooms which just had bars for windows. All of the classes did dances and cheers for us. We got to see the kitchen as well and they were teaching the kids how to cook. The ages of the kids were 3-15. After our tour of the school and seeing all of the smiling faces on the kids, we all gathered in the lobby, or first floor area and we got time to spend with them. SAS provided us with toys that we later donated. The kids loved the bubbles and coloring books. The kids were of all different abilities and some of them were somewhat normal mentally but were deaf so they had to rely on signing to communicate. We spent about an hour with the kids and they started to set up for lunch. The kids ate lunch and we stood by on the side and after they were finished the staff of the school brought out this elaborate Vietnamese lunch for us. I don't know what the names of the different foods were but we had things like, Vietnamese salad which was just different veggies, chicken fried rice with cabage, spring rolls which are made with seafood, also a curry dish which reminded me of India, lastly there were green globs of rubbery stuff which were mad eof green beans. It was all very good, the green bean roll things were a little funky but overall I loved the lunch. We found out later in the day that the ship served pizza for lunch on the ship but we were very grateful for the effort the school put into making such a nice lunch for us.
We got back to the ship around 1 and we just grabbed some bags and money and headed out to shop all afternoon.
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