Oi Troi Oi!

the vietnamese for "oh my God!"
we use it a lot!

so my vietnamese is improving slightly, slowly but surely!
if only i could stay for longer!

well i haven't been blogging much coz i'm kinda busy, kinda lazy, kinda not much time to sit in front of the computer.
but life here is going really well. some children from a placement up the road from us called Tam Ky recently had 18 of their children moved to an orphanage in a tourist town a little further up the coast called hoi an. it's the main tailor town and it's where we go for a few weekends coz it's pretty easy to get to and reasonably cheap.
so some volunteers from there are spending every weekend there so they can see their kids who were moved (because they were too old to stay at Tam Ky). i was rooming with one for the weekend and ended up going to the orphanage too.
oh man, it was so much fun and so so sad.
there was one baby girl there who's maybe a year or so old and has hydrocephalus. one of the volunteers this month is a nurse and she measured her head, it's the same as Suzy's waist. which i'm guessing is maybe 25 inches or so. the baby is just tiny.
i honestly wished her death as i left on sunday evening, it was the most horrible sight in the world. they won't do anything to help her and it's just going to keep getting bigger....

but i also made a few lovely little friends and had some fun with them. now if only the women who work there would treat the kids with some respect and dignity it would be great.
i wish...
this country will break my heart. the children are all so beautiful and get shortchanged in life so much for no reason at all.

any other news???? well i have a list of injuries i've sustained over the last few weeks the length of my arm. nothing major but they keep adding up
my left little toe is currently the same colour as my passport!!!
i think i might keep that as a separate blog, stay tuned for updates!

i'm off to Laos on saturday for a week and very excited about it.
one of our volunteers from Quang Ngai has decided not to continue with the program and seeing as she was supposed to stay two months there are now no volunteers to carry forward into August.
so guess what, i'm going to stay for a couple of weeks in august too! there's no obligation on me to stay but it will be a great help to our interpreter here (the wonderful Mr. Tuan) and it means i can skip off to Laos for a week now in clear conscience.
i'm a little angry at the volunteer who has left but at the same time i understand her situation. she seems to be very disappointed by our program here which makes me sad and frustrated. maybe she just didn't think it all through properly, i don't know.
c'est la vie. guess you just never can tell.

oi Troi oi she exclaims in exasperation...