Photo: How adorable right?? This is a little boy and girl that live at the research center. They run around during all the meals and love saying HELLO to all of the American coaches. Their dog just had puppies so they play with them alot.
Photo: They are really goofy and funny. Their grandmother is the one that always helps me with coffee.
Photo: This is at the tennis courts. The kids here are doing a running relay. They go crazyyyy during the relays and cheer a lot. "GO GO GO"/cheering in Vietnamese sounds like "DOLAN DOLAN DOLAN."
Photo: Afternoon red team comes to tennis station! Love them. (One of the girl team members if missing from the photo.)
Photo: Told you they love Barbie in Vietnam! HAAA. This little girl is not a camper--she is too young to be in camp. But she comes to Hoa An every day and plays in the hallways and around the sport courts. She is always begging to help or join in on class activities, her name is pronounced Goo.
Photo: This is inside a classroom at Hoa An. All of the hallways are outside and the classroom windows open to the outside. In the middle of the school is a huge sports court with the volleyball and basketball courts.
Helllllooo!
Internet randomly started working at the research center tonight, yayyyy! We were in the middle of planning our lessons with the other coaches for tomorrow and all of a sudden we saw the coaches from camp 3 running around w/their laptops!!
Today was another great day at camp! Mon-Tues, Wed-Thurs are the same lesson plans. (Friday is competition day) So the past two days we have been teaching/coaching the same things to different groups of kids. But we meet each day twice of a day with our team (red team)--it's kind of the same idea as homeroom. When we meet with red team in the morning we focus on leadership/team building and when we meet with them in the afternoon we focus on "higher education" which is goals/future etc.
My favorite moment from school today was probably from the higher education portion of class that we did with our red team. The focus today was on important leaders and what being a leader means to them. It was really special to hear about the people that they look up to in their lives and why. I also enjoyed having red team come play tennis today!! They were awesome, I was so proud of them. (All of the color groups rotate through different sports/academics and my team didn't come to the tennis station until today.) Thai (my favorite camper) only comes to camp in the afternoon. But often times kids from town or other campers will come to hang out at the school during other sessions, simply because they enjoy being there. Today Thai came to the morning session and helped with my Tennis class. When I was doing drills with the kids, Thai would run all around the court and grab the tennis balls and place them next to me so that I wouldn't have to go gather them myself. Another highlight from class today was when Christie and I were teaching English to the kids. (She played lacrosse at Duke.) It was the last class of the day and we were attempting to practice a dialogue to the class demonstrating how you answer the question "How are you?" with different feelings. However, after both of us said "Hello" to each other, we simply stopped and stared for probably ten seconds because somehow we completely blanked on what we were doing or what we were supposed to say, so all we said to each other was "HI!" We couldn't stop laughing for SOO long and the other Vietnamese coaches plus the students were realllly confused as to what was so funny. Also the director's of the camp ambushed everyone with water balloons as we headed back to the buses today.
I did my first load of laundry today. And by that I mean swished my clothes around in some buckets and then hung them up outside. This process took up my entire nap/lunch break. I'm a little worried that it might be pointless for us to hang our wet clothes up outside considering it is SOOOO humid but oh well. I am also discovering miscellaneous scratches all over my body...I think that this is because when I run around in the morning I am usually running into branches all of the time. Or they are self inflicted scratches from touching my mosquito bites haha.
The meals at the research center are family style. But each meal pretty much consists of white rice with some fruits, veggies and meat. I can easily say I will not be eating white rice for a long time after this trip. We got fresh mango this morning and then more chum chum's tonight at dinner, it was great. But, today at lunch there was the usual pork skewers and then a bowl of.....cooked MICE!!! Ew ew ewwwww. Some people tried it but it was NOTTT happening for me. As many of you know I loooove sweets, and there are NO sweets in Vietnam. I think that that is why I have coffee w/sweetened condensed milk after every meal haha, because it pretty much tastes like chocolate milk :) I know I shouldn't be missing American food already but I do. Kelly, I thought of you today when one of the coaches whipped out a box of graham crackers. Ah, I couldn't have been happier!!
I have to go--more to come soon!! Miss everyoneeee!! xoxo
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