This being my third trip to Asia, there are certain things I have become desensitized to. I am fairly confident crossing the hectic intersections (and they still can't compare to Dhaka), the heat is somewhat more tolerable and I no longer gasp at the sight of an entire family on one motorcycle carrying a ridiculous load of goods. There are some things that I just can't get a handle on any better than I could that first day in Bangladesh. Working through language barriers is one of those things. It is still incredibly difficult, exhausting, and sometimes frustrating to try to work with and get to know someone through broken English. The Vietnamese students we are working with have no doubt been equally frustrated, but hopefully after 6 weeks together we will have found some common ground and formed friendships through both the language and cultural barriers we face.

Ho Chi Minh City is a fairly metropolitan city with all of the organized chaos and charm of you typical Asian city. Traffic laws are actually somewhat followed and there are many western brands mixed among local shops. We are staying here for about a week for training before heading to Tra Vinh which is a smaller agriculture based city of about 100 000 people. Today we learned some background info about the educational system in Vietnam. It is competitive to get into post-secondary institutes but the univesity programs are very structured and there is not a lot of flexibility within the programs in terms of electives, etc. The relationship between teachers and students is based on confucionism and teachers are the rule with no room for discussion or collaboration. Many students choose majors based on the Bility to get a good paying job, hopefully with a foreign organization. So business and technology related majors along with English are most popular despite the shortage of engineers and nurses. The problem with these jobs is often there is additional training needed out of country which delays the time to a paying job and it is difficult to convince people to return to Vietnam (especially rural) to work for the government. I am excited to continue to learn more and I am developing questions I would like to ask as I am in a group surveying parents of current and past students about job training and entering the labour market.

The communist government here has blocked Facebook and we have been trying to hack in. Today I had some success with a site that scrambles your IP address so it is like you are not in Vietnam but by the evening they were on to me and it was not working anymore. Our local techie is working on it.