Sunday, July 9
After a steaming bowl of pho for breakfast (what heaven!) the Global Volunteers team rumbles off in a van for Cao Lanh, where the program is based. Cao Lanh is the newly designated capital of Dong Thap province. An up-and-coming town, it's located about 4 hours west of Saigon. It's also the city where my grandparents (on my mother's side) lived until their death.
I still marvel at the sheer coincidence of Global Volunteers' program being based in a city so near where I was born. Tram Chim (now renamed Tam Nong, as so many towns and streets were renamed after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975) is where I was born, and it is only an hour and a half's drive from Cao Lanh. I vacillate between whether or not to go visit this town.
On the one hand, I tell myself, of course I must go! This is an unprecedented opportunity. To be in Vietnam, within a couple hours of where I was born…it would be foolish not to go. But part of me does not feel ready. I don't know if I'm emotionally not ready to see Tram Chim, or if I am just being superstitious. You see, I've been thinking up to now that this journey back to Vietnam is like having my life come full circle.
Many emotions run through me as scenes of everyday Vietnam speed past me on the ride from Saigon to Cao Lanh. Children playing in the streets. Young women dressed in the traditional ao dai. Old women selling fruit. The buildings and homes built up one right next to the other. It's all everyday life to them, but so different to me. And yet it could easily be me sitting in the streets, selling fruit.
Another wave of emotion is felt for my parents. This all seems so strange to me. I feel a kind of relief that this is only a three-week program, and afterwards, I will be able to return to the comforts of home and my family. Yet 25 years ago, when my parents arrived with four small children in tow, they faced the same sheer unfamiliarity of a different country and culture, and knew they had to stay and live in that country forever. I grieve for my mom, especially. Most of my dad's side of the family accompanied us, but my mother's parents, brothers, sisters, and homeland were all torn away from her and replaced by a land so foreign in language, climate, food, and people. I cannot even begin to imagine her shock and sadness. My mom never saw her parents again.
And what saddens me the most is that her story is not uncommon around this world. Not then, and not today.
