The Nuts and Bolts and the Nitty Gritty: Boring but Very Good

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Working with these kids provides many a great photo op and endearing, wonderful tale of small but life-altering inspiration. It also requires a lot of mundane, perhaps boring work. From sharing our successful classroom experiences to rethinking failed lesson plans to finding the kinds of games that both instruct and entertain, we’re always trying to do the little things that will hopefully, over the long-run, really make a difference in these kids’ lives.

The biggest challenge thus far has been meshing the schedules of our busy volunteers and their busy students at Hoi Tu Thien and Chua Buu Tri. To steal a line from Julie Ginsberg’s article about Dan, a lot of our project operates as “semi-organized havoc.” We’ve spent a decent amount of time and effort organizing our schedule and planning the activities, doing planning meetings at Can Tho University’s Learning Resources Center, and running around getting the materials we need (for a city of more than a million, it’s really hard to find cardboard boxes in Can Tho) for various activities, but the key is to always be ready to adapt. Schedules that were set months ago often have to be re-adjusted on the fly; activities that seemed good at the planning meeting have to get thrown out the window when the pressures of organizing or coercing kids into following your instructions get to be too overwhelming. This all works thanks to the commitment of our student-workers and student-volunteers. That and text messaging. I send out lots and lots of group text messages to coordinate and alert our troops.

To go ahead with the goal of having the USP student-volunteers and our year-round student-workers plan and organize most of the summer project’s activities, we’ve also set up an activity planning process. The vols and workers were at first not too excited to hear that they’d have to do something that looks and smells a lot like homework, but I think they’re starting to see the light. Organizing activities as best you can before hand lets others give input. It also makes you really be prepared so that you can adjust on the fly when necessary. We’ve also built in an activity reflection assignment that lets our vols and workers re-evaluate what went well and what didn’t go well in their activities. The goal is just to make sure we keep doing a better job each time we head into Chua Buu Tri or Hoi Tu Thien.

So, that’s all to say that there’s a lot of boring work that we and our student vols and workers are doing. Lots of folks can come and play fun games with kids. I really respect the people we’re working with because their compassion for the kids at Chua Buu Tri and Hoi Tu Thien motivates them to do the boring stuff, too. That’s a characteristic that Dan really embodied that still motivates our project. It's humble and it's real compassion. I’m usually the one who just plays with the kids then gets to go back to Rach Gia; our workers are the ones who show up everyday to do the nitty-gritty that really makes a difference.

My favorite thing about our project is being able to see how the kids at Chua Buu Tri and Hoi Tu Thien look at our student-workers. (My second favorite is playing indoor soccer with hordes of children hanging off me.) These kids crave routine and dependability and that’s what Minh, Nhat, Thao, Phung, Loan, and Hue give them. They’re great role-models and I just really love seeing how the kids respect them. And it's also been great this past week to see the USP students stepping up into that role, too. Of all the things the project gives the kids, I think these dependable role models are the best.

So that's a kind of preachy, mushy take on the project. Stay tuned for more updates and pictures about what we've been doing. Yay!