Viva la exotic menu
Trip Start
Jul 09, 2008
1
7
Trip End
Jul 26, 2008
Thanh Phu Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Its actually starting to feel like the rainy season. Rained for a few hours yesterday, and until 2pm today. I actually had to buy a rainponcho from a street vendor. They are available everwhere for $5,000 dong (about 30 cents). Spent alot of time walking around gathering info for my class assignment, but also stopped in at a optometrist where I got an eye exam and new glasses for $33 total...gotta love it!
Stopped in a Mitsubishi dealership where I learned that I could walk out the door with minivan for $40,900 USD. It was only this cheap because gov't tax on cars produced in VN only have 5-10% tax. If the car is assembled elsewhere and imported, the import tax is 83% or higher, depending on the car. I've been told that a Toyota Camry is about $100,000 USD, a Lexus is $200k. Anyone who owns a car is considered rich.
Turns out construction companies here are corrupt too. Apparently a US company will start a new project (e.g. sewer upgrade) but use VN workers. As soon as the supervising engineers leave, workers stop working, even tear up their work to drag out project. On one street, they didn't remove the old sewer, just put in the new, bigger sewer pipes on top. Somehow they didn't factor in that someone might figure it out when the one side of the street was a couple feet too high....pure genious.
Spent a day earlier this week at the local medical university. All medical majors are taught under one roof and you enter med school, etc directly after HS. Nurses are taught by Doctors, with a resultant subjugation of the profession to "doctor handmaiden" status. The lack of teaching material is appalling. Most nursing textbooks are in English (unreadable to most students), and the Vietnamese ones date back to mid-1990s and are incredibly basic. The nursing professors are currently in process of translating more recent texts during their limited free time. The nursing practice lab is full of equipment that looks decades old, and lack of basic supplies forces nurses here to resort to laborious and time-consuming procedural variations.
Most of the nursing instructors are diploma school graduates, few have a Bachelors degree and only a couple have a Masters. This means that there is no capacity for training advance practice nurses or even getting the Nursing instructors trained adequately. Instructors must go to Thailand, New Zealand, Australia, etc. to earn a Masters (the minimum training for an instructor in most Western countries). Two of the instructors I worked with seemed very young, around maybe 22 years old. Another, a Medical Technologist who teaches microbiology and MT classes is 25 and has been teaching for 4 years. She teaches full time, works in the hospital lab, works in the International Cooperation office, and runs her own mini lab on the side...people here work very hard. The nursing instructors are stretched pretty thin. Our three nursing professors from ASU worked with them for 3 days and will be following up to implement Evidence Based Practice improvements and greater educational quality.
Went out for a drink last night of Che Thai, a Thai drink supposedly. I got the Che My (Che American) which consisted of angel hair noodles, some kind of huge beans, small fruits, and various flavored jello-type bits with yoghurt and crushed ice over the top..yummy sounding right? Actually wasn't too bad, but I won't be putting it on my favorite foods list.
We had our last English class/Bible study tonight and I covered part of Matthew 7, ending with the wise man and foolish man building their houses, then tied in Psalms 18 and Acts 4 where Jesus is my rock, fortress,etc. and "no other name...whereby we must be saved". We gave away most of the rest of the literature too. To liven things up we did the wise man, foolish man song w/motions and some other contemporary songs too with the guitar. It was strange to say good-bye to the friends that I just made...they all said see you next year, but I'm not sure if i'll be here next year. There is so much work to be done here, and not just in the medical arena....I'd love to come next year if God wills.
I know that this is not even the area of greatest need. In the rural areas things are much worse, in other countries conditions are more appalling. This has been a good introduction to the world outside the comparative comforts and insanely rich lifestyles of the US.
