An “Omar-Gooding-Wild-And-Crazy-Kids” Kind Of Summer.

The contest/competition club had the fewest club members, but definitely the most participation from everyone.  The idea for this club was just to activate every kids’ competitive/playful side (which isn’t exactly hard to do…), and make it a consistently active summer full of memorable contests/competitions.

Huong's first water balloon of the day.

The Contest/Competition Club spent all morning making water balloons.

The most chaotic water balloon free-for-all I've ever seen.

The student leader, Huong, did an amazing job at collaborating with the American volunteers, considering how passive/shy she tends to be.  It was easy to see how proud the club members were too, when they saw everyone else laughing and enjoying the games.  I suppose I’m also that way, I’m always the D.J. or facilitator for dance parties or games because I like seeing others enjoying themselves.  Is that nice? …or kinda creepy?  Or is just creepy now because I offered that suggestion?  Darn.

Watermelon eating contest!

The war's aftermath.

And now, a series of rice sack relay race photos of children… hopping.

Rice sack relay races!

You can't even see his tiny, tiny body.

(That's not one of our children. That's Alban, one of the French scouts.)

This is the best.

The club spent the budget on prizes, water balloons, birthday cakes, watermelons, prizes, and more prizes.

Edible prizes?! No way!

Thank you to my two Teach-In-Hue volunteers, Ngan and Will, for always encouraging and assisting this club’s young leaders, and therefore helping them grow in confidence.

PAIN! SWEAT! RED MEAT! Sports Club.

For the more athletic kids and/or for the kids who had no artistic/musical ability whatsoever, I started a Sports/Exercise Club.  For this club, I thought it would be useful for the kids to work with the volunteers (there were 4 volunteers in this club) to set up weekly scrimmages/games/tournaments, since it was always difficult for the kids to organize games with good participation.  So, because the shelter had new basketball/soccer equipment and the volunteers were also there to play on teams with the kids, there were several basketball games and an organized soccer tournament during the course of our “summer camp.”

Some shots of the Sports Club playing Knock-Out, Pig, scrimmaging, and other basketball games.

I love this one.

Billy's not taking it well.

Many of the volunteers participated in the soccer tournament, so the sports club student leaders were able to organize a mini “World Cup,” with an American team, a French team, and a Vietnamese team.

I saw a lot of dedication and leadership skills develop in the student leader of this club (Hau), and I think it was probably because it was the first time he was able to be in a leadership role for… anything.  He was always in my room writing down team break-downs of participants, or deciding on what kind of rules he wanted for tournaments.

Chalking the soccer field lines.

Vietnam vs. France.

Umm... is there such thing as an action shot being too full of action?

The spectators.

The club mostly spent the small sports club budget on a refreshment shopping spree of “prizes” for after the mini World Cup tournament.

Team Vietnam!

Team U.S.A.!

Team France!

Oh, and the French team won.

To: Tyler, Billy, Will, Franck, Molly, Katherine, Benjamin, Nathan, and Alban… I could never thank you all enough for spending as much time as you did being active with my kids.  Sorry you guys had to sweat/change clothes so often.

Xuan Phu’s Best (and only…) Dance Crew.

The dance club’s goal was to perform two dances for the showcase night.  The club was given a budget of about 500,000 dong, or ~$30 USD, to buy outfits and refreshments for every dance practice (trust me, having dance practice with 10 kids without food is a disaster waiting to happen.)  I helped teach and choreograph a lot for this club, and the kids were surprisingly enthusiastic about practicing.  The last week before the big show, we practiced for about 3-5 hours every day/night, and they even gave up watching their favorite Korean soap-opera that week for the club’s sake.

We taught some of the teenage girls a dance... until they dropped out. haha.

My kid Truong and I joint-choreographed a dance to Mario’s Crazy Kind Of Love, and some of the volunteers and I taught them the whole Thriller dance [R.I.P.].  Truong, who has taken dance classes for half a year now, used to only use routines from his dance group to teach the kids.  But, this time he made up some of the choreography on his own, and I was lucky enough to be there and witness his creativity blossom.

Thriller practice.

Dancing helped the younger kids work on their listening skills and made them practice following directions.  But, there was also one section in the Mario song, where I decided to break the kids up into small groups of 2-3, and have them choreograph eight counts of their own.  At first, they were dumbfounded by my difficult-sounding request, but when they actually got down to doing group-work, I was surprised at how well it went.  The more and more we practiced, the better it looked, and the more confident and proud they grew.

We took time on each step until everyone could do it.  At first, there was a lot of scolding and criticism towards the slower people. But, I pushed them to be supportive of one another and reiterated over and over to them that we were a team and that we wouldn’t succeed unless everyone was on the same page.  The kids got continually better at patting each other on the back (or that might have just been “killing mosquitoes on each other’s backs…”)

One-on-one practice session with Dao

On the final night, we messed up a little bit on both songs (barely noticeable…RIGHT?), but the kids were so full of adrenaline, excitement, and genuine pride after each dance, you could tell it was a moment they’d never forget.

Xuan Phu Art Club

The art club kids spent most of the summer preparing for an art gallery, where all of their art projects during the summer would be showcased the night of the big show.  The art club was given the biggest  budget (about $1 million dong or $62 USD), and the kids were responsible for buying all the materials themselves.  Every week, there were a couple of different art projects for the kids to work on and thanks to our wonderful volunteers, they always had really creative, phresh projects.

One of the Art Club's first projects: hanging magazine clipping fish!

Nina (A Teach-In-Hue volunteer) helping the boys.

Front right: Kathy, one of the volunteer leaders for the Art Club

Leaf prints

Duc didn't really understand how to do leaf prints... but he drew leaves at least.

Stamp Art!

Another Teach-In-Hue volunteer

The finished products. (The kids painted these rocks too.)

On the night of the art gallery, all of our guests had only the best of compliments to say about the kids’ artwork.  I mean, that would be awkward if they didn’t… and kinda mean… or maybe funny, if it was like this guy. (I’ll give you a penny if you remember that.)

I also had the idea of resurrecting the kids’ handicrafts project from last summer and bringing their hand-made lacquer egg-shell necklaces out for the art gallery, which didn’t get the best reaction from the staff at first. [They thought people would steal them.]  Almost immediately after we let people into the gallery, several people asked me if we were selling the necklaces. The kids ended up making a huge profit that night… actually, probably the only profit since the project failed last summer.

Some more last-minute rock painting...

One of the girls, Trang, made a card for Kathy (a Teach-In-Hue volunteer) that I helped translate and it basically said: “Thank you so much, teacher! You’re wonderful and we’re better art students because of you!  Thank you for teaching us amazing, new techniques and art projects- and we’ll never forget them or you!]  Phuong gave her this toothpick sculpture as a goodbye present:

Thank you so much to the V.I.A. Teach-In-Hue Art Club volunteers for sharing your talents, creativity, and also  helping the kids realize how beautiful their artwork really is… thank you Kathy and Nguyen

The Final Vietnam Blog Posts Series. Chapter 1: My Summer Fellowship Project (I mean, the introduction at least.)

Alright, alright.
So I know I’ve been home for almost a month now, and that should have been plenty of time to finish up the Vietnam blog…

But, man, sleeping, relaxing, and constantly hanging out with friends and family is way too time consuming.

Anyway, I know I’ve been leaving everyone hanging by not covering my last few weeks in Vietnam, which was essentially the climax of my community fellowship project – for this, I apologize… or I can just hop over the identity line to my Vietnamese roots and just not apologize and say “Better late than never.”  Yeah, that’s easier.

The 2008-2009 VIA Community Fellows, together on my last night in Vietnam.

So, if you want to do the required reading for this blog class, please see Project Name: Structuring and Spearheading Organized Extracurricular Programs Within The Xuan Phu Shelter. (Real Project Name: Teaching Kids How To Get It Poppin.) God, spearheading is such an amazing word.

In short though, I started the first ever extracurricular summer camp for my kids in the children’s shelter.

One might ask, “But how, Hy?!  How did you manage a summer camp for 30+ kids all by yourself, while simultaneously juggling anvils all summer?!”
Well, fortunately, I was blessed to have so many helping hands… and obviously extremely developed muscles to juggle anvils all summer.  During the course of my fellowship project, I had a group of 10 volunteers from the Teach In Hue, Volunteers In Asia (V.I.A.) Summer program, 5 scouts from France, a long-term volunteer from Australia, and my own brother (Huy) to help me out.  …and it was all because I sent out a twitter S.O.S. that all these random people came to a small children’s shelter in Vietnam to help.  Amazing, right?

So, at the beginning of July, we broke up into five clubs that the children were interested in starting (earlier in the year, I gave a survey out to the kids asking what they wanted to do in the summer.)  So, the 5 clubs were: the art club, the dance club, the sports club, the contest/competition club, and the comedy club.  Some of the kids’ suggestions such as Weight-Lifting Club or Makeup Club just didn’t materialize.

For each club, I had a select number of student leaders, who worked with one or two of the volunteers to plan club activities for the summer.  The volunteers also dispersed themselves amongst the clubs, making sure there was at least one Vietnamese speaker in each.  At least two-three times a week, the volunteers met with the kids to prepare club activities/practices with the ultimate goal of preparing something for a big showcase night in the middle of August.  This would mark “the end of my fellowship project” and “the end of summer.”

Rather than making one huge, annoying, texty blog post that covered all of the clubs, I thought I’d separate them into different posts.  With that said, ART CLUB IS UP FIRST!