Arrival in Rach Gia

This morning our team headed to Rach Gia...the central location for our Habitat for Humanity build.  It is much smaller than HCMC with about 200,000 people. We were picked up at our hotel at 4:30am and taken to the airport for our 45 minute flight south of Ho Chi Minh City.  When we arrived it was very humid and over cast and we were pleasantly greeted by our Global Village Coodinator, Ngan, at the airport. From the airport we headed to our hotel, the Henry Hotel, unpacked our things and met for breakfast.  This is a 2 star hotel, close to the waterfront, with standard rooms and situated by many restaurants and amenities.  By 8:30am were we on our way to the HFHV head office where we received our orientation for the next couple weeks.  This is the point were it really hit me that we were finally here.  It's been a long road planning this trip and it was so exciting to be with the team and meeting the HFHV staff who have been working so hard behind the scenes to make this happen.

We learned a bit about HFHV, the project we will be working on and a little bit about the families we will be working with.  We are building in the province of Kien Giang, which is in the south west of Vietnam and boarders Cambodia.  The average annual income here is $1,350 US, lower than the average in more northern provinces and the families we are building for earn approximately $20 a month per person.  We are building for one family the first week and moving to another location the second week, where we will be working with two families there.  The first week we will take an hour long boat ride to the site and the next week we will go by bus.

After our orientation, we spent the next several hours touring around Rach Gia and visiting a few of the temples and pagodas. Along the way we came across an entire block full of herbs and flowers drying in large piles.  How colourful and it apparently was very aromatic as well.  I'm sure the locals thought the white foreigners were a little odd as we were all out with our cameras trying to snap some photos...I love being a tourist!  One of the temples we went to was actually an orphanage for a number of children in the area.  There was a school, a foot massage area, a computer lab and play areas for the children.  When we were there the children were actually resting, however when we were touring around, they started to wake up and were somewhat intrigued by the strange white people who were walking around taking pictures.  The longer we stayed the more inquisitive they became and more wake they appeared...I can only image how noisy it became not long after we left once everyone was awake.  At the end of our tour we noticed what looked like a tree with messages on it.  It turned out it was a wishing tree where people hung their wished each day.  Of course when we found this out, we all decided to hang our wishing on the tree as well.

Following our visit to the temples/pagodas we were taken to the local market for an hour to tour around.  The markets here are much tamer than what I'm used to, as the people are not that aggressive and there is little need to barter prices down at all.  We purchased some local fruit...delicious of course and eventually met the group again.  On the way back to the hotel I was dropped off at the bank with Ngan who was going to help me get some funds out of my bank.  In Vietnam the most you can get out of a bank machine is 4 million VD...sounds like a lot, but that's only about $200 Canadian.  The bank was quite the experience and thankfully Ngan was a great help, as no one at the bank speaks any English.  I successfully withdrew my money and instantly became a millionaire!!!

After our tour of Rach Gia, we were taken back to the hotel for a bit of a rest and met up for dinner at 6:30pm. We were taken to a beautiful hotel about 10 minutes from where we were staying and arrived to a table set up outside along the water amongst the palm trees and beautiful music playing in the back ground.  Can you say gorgeous!!!  We had another fabulous meal together, along with two of the HFHV staff and one of our site coordinators for the build.  We had lots of laughs, I further practiced my chopstick skills and we also got to practice our Vietnamese...I'm sorry to say mine is pretty non existent.  This is definitely a tricky language as every syllable has 6 different intonations that makes the words mean completely different things.  You wouldn't want to make too many mistakes in pronouncing words or lord knows what you would be saying!!

By 8:30pm we were exhausted and headed back to the hotel.  Everyone appears to be very excited about our first day on the build site and eager to get to work.  Tomorrow should be an interesting day to say the least.

Until tomorrow...

Lisa