live, love, laugh. (:

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Back from a truly amazing ten days in Vietnam! :))))) Haha it's really been an insanely awesome experience, I think it's replaced the Xian immersion programme in Sec 2 as my favourite school trip so far :DDD I want to blog about everything and I have ten pages worth of written reflections in my cultural booklet to refer to but...too lazy to transfer here >< Haha ok I'll just attempt to consolidate everything into something shorter c:

So for 6 days we got to teach (or attempted to, in my case ><) the kids at the Nam Thanh and Dalat Love schools basic English! :D Haha I was put in charge of teaching the P3-4 kids, and all eight of them are really really sweet and responsive and cute and just the best kids anyone could ask for ^^ <3 It was hard at first having to get out of my comfort zone and teach the class English words and nursery rhymes without knowing a single word of Vietnamese but after we warmed up to the kids and learned a bit of basic Vietnamese everything got a lot easier! :) Haha and of course the kids' dispositions helped a lot, all of them have different personalities that I got to know over the 6 days with them but they're all generally really open and warm towards us which was part of what made me get so attached to them >< Still remember how at the end of the first day of teaching when I still barely knew any of their names Trang (one of the kids) randomly hugged me really tight and gave me a bunch of straw roses ;_; Haha anyway yeah that's for Nam Thanh school, the local school in Dalat for the kids from underprivileged families ^^ The other school we served in was Dalat Love school, which was set up for street kids! The kids there are pretty different from those in the local school in that they're a lot less attentive and maybe significantly naughtier, but I really enjoyed teaching them nonetheless! ccc: Kind of doubt they learned much from us considering that most threw away their notes after class but sigh hope we at least made school more fun for them? >< And as awkward and hard as it was trying to capture the attention of either completely unresponsive or completely hyper kids I guess it was really one of the things that forced me to get out of my comfort zone the most for this trip ^^ Haha oh and the lady who set up the Love school can speak French so I got to practise my super rusty French on her heheh :D She could only speak French and Vietnamese so I ended up being the only volunteer she could talk to, and so I got hugged by her...a lot xD Haha aw I'll really miss her, hope we can stay pen pals! c:

Damn that's only one component of this post >< Heh anyway moving on, the second part of our service was to concretise the Nam Thanh courtyard!We didn't do any of the actual concretising though, our work consisted of clearing the bushes, untiling, moving rocks and sand and basically all the sai kang that goes into concretising xD It was still pretty tough for me since the tools are a lot heavier than they look and er I'm not a very fit person OTL Haha but luckily I got assigned to do more teaching than construction so I didn't get the 腰酸背痛 that those who did more construction than teaching suffered from >< So yeah construction was tough but pretty fun when done with friends! :))) And cliched as it may sound it really made me respect construction workers a lot more, there's actually a lot of skill needed for such so-called 'low-skilled' jobs :o

Between the morning and afternoon work shifts every day we have about two to three hours of free time when we can play with the kids who stay in school for lunch! :DDD Haha I really look forward to this part of the day, the kids are just so lively and happy playing such simple games like Follow the Leader and chapteh and the hand-slapping thing and their enthusiasm and highness was really infectious ^^ ^^ Haha and on the second day Wei Yang offered to piggy-back one of the kids, which just sparked off this huge demand for piggy-backing and swinging services from the kids for the rest of the days xD Heheh it was pretty amusing watching the guys getting approached by the kids with all their puppy-eyed persistence and being unable to say no to them even when they're already all aching and sweaty xD Man times like those I'm really glad I'm not a guy :p

Another pretty big component of the trip was all the facilitation sessions, which surprisingly ended up as one of the parts of the trip that left the biggest impact on me! I think it was mostly thanks to the teachers' extensive experience in guiding OCIPs, such that the questions that they posed to us to discuss/reflect upon were really questions that we want and ought to think about! Facilitations ended up lasting for about 1-2 hours every night, haha longest reflection sessions ever but they were also the most thought-provoking so ^^

Oh and I had a really really awesome time with the OCIP team even beyond our service sessions! :))) They're a truly amazing bunch of people and I'm really glad I got the chance to get to know them during this trip :DDD Haha I think one of the most fun parts of the trip was spending the night in front of the huts with the team after facilitation, lying down on the mats looking up at the stars (THE NIGHT SKY IN DALAT OMG I've never seen anything like it before gahhhh gonna miss the stars so so much TTT.TTT) jamming to songs and talking about anything and everything xD Haha and the night time dance pracs (sigh this is what happens when you have a really enthusiastic dance partner... ><) that ended up being pretty fun! ^^ Can't believe I'm saying this but I think I'll miss dancing the batch dance, especially after all our practices >< Sharing a room with five other girls was really fun too hehe ^^ Still quite surprised how 6 girls managed to share one bathroom, or even worse how the 12 guys managed to share one too O.O Ahhh and oh yeah the Dalat scenery in the morning is really something! c: Dalat's a small village in the mountains, so the weather in the morning is super cooling and it's really quiet, so I liked to wake up earlier and go for a walk every morning heh ^^ The peacefulness and quietness of everything made it easy for me to just clear my head or reflect on whatever's on my mind, and I think it's the first time in a really really long time that I've felt so calm and at ease about everything ^^ Sigh wonder if it's possible to find someplace in Singapore like that... ><

Hmm yeah that should be the main parts of the trip :) Sigh really so many other incidents and memories that's made this trip so awesome but this post is getting way too long and I'm getting way too sleepy >< Haha ok the gist of it's that I've really had fun and learned a lot these past 10 days, and I hope the team won't lose touch after this!! c:

Sigh back to reality tomorrow....... T.T