My life as a sea turtle judge

As you’ve probably gathered from Scott’s posts, work trips in Vietnam are not the stuffed-shirt affairs we’re used to back home. The riotous drunkenness to actual work ratio is somewhere between much more likely and guaranteed to be heavily tipped in favor of the former, but I thought an excursion to judge school children’s drawings of sea turtles might be different. I was wrong.

When our marine program manager’s son’s birthday kept her from traveling one weekend, my boss in communications and I were selected to attend some project wrap-up activities in her place. The project was to educate coastal communities about sea turtle conservation through extra-curricular lessons for middle schoolers. To show what they’d learned, students at two schools were holding back to back contests over a weekend where they would put on skits, sing songs, read poems and explain artwork they’d created about sea turtles.

Here’s what I wrote about the weekend for work: http://iucn.org/about/union/secretariat/offices/asia/asia_where_work/vietnam/?2487/Student-Contests-Promote-Sea-Turtle-Conservation Here’s what actually happened:

Our two provincial government escorts woke us painfully early each morning to eat spicy fish noodle soup and then sit in a café for 45 minutes while strong Vietnamese coffee dripped into cups of sweetened condensed milk in front of us before driving through little seaside villages to the schools. On Saturday, it was raining heavily when we arrived so we drank equally strong green tea while waiting for the weather to break.

When it did, the children’s performances were truly adorable. Of course, my level of Vietnamese is so far below a sixth grader’s that I couldn’t legitimately judge their work, but I could run around taking pictures of them waddling around with paper cutouts of turtle shells on their backs and doing unrelated dances that their teachers seems to have thrown into the mix just for cuteness' sake.



After the competition, we walked through a field to a farmhouse – I never fully understood that, but best not to question – for more green tea followed by a seafood feast. With beer and rice wine the only beverage options, I selected beer, figuring it would be the less lethal choice (that would prove to be a mistake). I proceeded to watch two representatives of the local department of aquatic resources, two from the department of education, a school principal and any number of teachers get red-in-the-face drunk and deliver round after round of overly congratulatory speeches to one another. Then I was slipped an envelope with the equivalent of $3.50 in it and sent on my way. That seems to be the standard “thank you for showing up” amount.

At that point, it was still only about two in the afternoon. And how do a 40-some-year-old employee of an international environmental organization, her American intern, and their two government guides spend a free afternoon in rural Vietnam? With three hours in a private karaoke room coercing the American to sing obscure English-language songs over more beer, of course. The mass consumption of caffeine and alcohol left my stomach in dire need of a solid meal by that evening, but instead my boss insisted that we’d eaten too much and should walk to the market to pick up a meal of bananas, oranges and a single sweet potato each to eat alone in our separate hotel rooms. My pitch to add yogurt to the mix was rejected because “citrus and dairy can’t be eaten at the same time.”

I woke up the next morning with traveler’s sickness that would last the next two days – turns out the ice in my beer the day before wasn’t filtered – for a similar contest at a school with enthusiastic young teachers eager to practice English phrases like, “my heart is full from meeting you.” This particular booze-fueled lunch ended with the principal standing as if he was going to give a speech, but instead singing a love song from his province – directly to me. That performance was followed by another song from him, a song from a government official and a ditty about Hanoi from my boss.

We left and drove to Hue, the nearest big city with an airport, with two separate stops to drink tea on the side of the road with people who were never introduced to me. I disappointed Mr. Anh, one of our government friends, by saying I’d rather see some of Hue’s sights than go back into a dark karaoke chamber. He grudgingly took me to a very nice pagoda/monastery and walked me across the city’s famous bridge before dinner. Not surprisingly, the meal was early enough to allow us time for hours four and five of karaoke for the weekend, before I finally got to drag my tired and dehydrated self back onto a plane for Hanoi.