Life goes on

As if to confirm just how miraculous my sleeping in this weekend was, this morning I was awakened first by an insistent rooster, later by a text message from a student, next by screaming students, and lastly by a phone call from Trang. We were supposed to meet for lunch, so you'll forgive me if I dared to forget that I was in Vietnam and wasn't expecting to be summoned at 930 in the morning.

Periodically, Trang will tell me that 'something very horrible happens' and she will go under the radar for several days. She makes it pretty clear that she doesn't want to talk about it, so I never find out what kind of horrible things are happening. I wonder whether they are related incidents. I'll never know. Our morning meal together was significantly quieter than usual. Her mind was presumably on whatever issues she is dealing with, and I was barely awake because I stayed up way too late last night.

In the afternoon I met with Ms. Chau Anh, with whom I'd been leading the English club last month. She had asked me to look over a bunch of elicitation results for her thesis. It is a lot of work, and not work I'm entirely comfortable doing, but from what I've heard from my fellow ETAs, it is a pretty normal request. I meant to get through most of it this weekend, but getting sick got in the way, so I didn't have much to show her today. We chatted about how busy she is, and eventually the topic shifted, implicitly, to reciprocity. She asked me if I needed anything, and I said no. She told me that if I ever did, I should ask her. Then she told me that if I ever needed money, I should feel free to ask her. I was quite taken aback. The last thing that would ever occur to me in my exchange rate position would be to ask a Vietnamese person for money.

A little while later I was summoned to the office, and when I arrived I found that I had been summoned to make and eat spring rolls. Let's just call it a sign of being in Vietnam that no one, despite knowing I'd been sick and am still recuperating, thought it might not be a good idea for me to make food for everyone else, and to double-dip in shared peanut sauce.