I wanted to ammend that last post with a follow up on the storm. Although in Can Tho we were relatively unaffected. . .I have heard that a couple of trees were toppled, about a hundred miles away nearly a hundred people died and the storm destroyed tens of thousands of houses. Two things occurred to me.

1.) There seems to be no sort of adequate warning system in place to deal with these storms. Nobody had any idea where this thing was going to hit or how strong it was going to be and there was absolutely no call for evacuation. If it had been a little more powerful, there would have been thousands of deaths instead of a hundred.

2.) The people who's lives were affected by this storm are exactly the people who cannot afford to deal with the clean up. A family who loses their tin roof is a family who often must rebuild with banana leaves and the next time a storm comes through they must do it again. The families who can afford a solid house lost nothing. Its the ones who have these little thatch houses who have lost everything. A friend of mine described his trip back to one of the most affected areas: "everything was destroyed, every house was damaged except for the few concrete houses. . .there was a woman sitting in a pile of rubish that used to be her home. Personal belongings were scattered across the yard and her children were running around. Nobody bothered to pick anything up, but it wasn't for lack of pride, laziness, or even depression, but where was she going to put it. What do you do with your belongings when you don't even have a shelf to store them on or a room to put them in?"

And I never would have known that anyone was affected only a hundred miles away.

School was cancelled today out of fear that Typhoon Durian (a storm named after a kind of tropical fruit that smells like rotting flesh) was going to hit Can Tho in the night. Yesterday, the rector of the Univestiy made the call to cancel school and even visited several of the foreign volunteers to tell us to stay in and prepare for a storm. I took him seriously, went out and bought some packages of instant noodles and some candles to prepare for a couple of days of rough weather. Some of us were planning on throwing a storm party and everyone was preparing for the worst.

Nothing happened.

Today is one of the nicest days I remember having in my year and a half in Vietnam. It's a beautiful day and I've got the whole day off. I was almost a little upset that so little happened, but evidently it did hit in VN and only a few dozen kilometers from Can Tho. In the Delta more than 40 people are expected dead and many houses had their roofs blown off. Can Tho, luckily was completely uneffected.

I'm going for a bike ride. I've not been getting any exercise these days. . .too busy. Got to fight the old man belly battle.

Speaking of old men. . .this morning as I was drinking my coffee a seventy year old man sat next to with a bag full of children's toys that he was trying to sell. He individually took the toys out of his bag and tested each one. They were the sort of noisemakers that you usually get at birthday parties or new years parties with the little piece that unrolls at one end and the kazoo-like whistle that makes the noise at the other end. The kind of sight that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

I'm teaching a class for some of the older folks who help with the charity I'm working with in Can Tho. That class is usually a lot of fun. It's a pretty low level english class and it's free to employees of the charity or their friends. We don't have any set curriculum to follow. I'm slowly working through a book with them, but for the most part, I'm just making it up as I go, and they seem to like it. I actually enjoy teaching such a varied group of folks. A couple of my students are university students. . .jsut a couple years younger than me, but the majority are older. There's a guy named Luc who always sits in the back and rarely says anything, and clears his throat before every word he says when he does speak. Then there's Anh. Anh's over 70 and full of energy. She can speak Khmer, French, Vietnamese, a little German and a little English. She's actually from cambodia, and from what I can tell, her family fled the country before things started to look really bad in 75'. She worked for Pan-Am for several years and after retiring with her husband joined a group of retirees who opened a private home for homeless children in Can Tho. The other day for my birthday Anh gave me a tie inside an underwear box. Initially, I thought she had given me the underwear which I thought was a rather bold gift. . .now I just wonder if she put the tie in the underwear box intentionally.

Then there's Mai. Mai's at least 85 years old and she's tiny and frail, but she never misses a class, and when I call on her she always stands up to answer my question even though I can tell that it's difficult for her to do it. It's pretty amazing to see her taking the class. The other day we came across the construction "I can't do something, but I'd like to learn", so I had everyone think of something that they can't do but would like to learn to do, and when I came to her, she stood up and said in a wavering voice, "I can't ride a bike, but I'd like to learn". At the time I had to fight back a little chuckle at the thought of her trying to learn a bike, but in retrospect, I think it's pretty awesome that she would even think that she'd like to learn to ride a bike at her age.

Yesterday I took a friend of mine to a couple of hospitals to get some weird discolorations on her skin checked out. It turned out to be nothing, but I had yet another interesting Vietnamese hospital experience to add to the list. First we went to a hospital near campus and my friend waited in line while I sat outside and worked through some vietnamese reading exercizes. After my friend waited for about 45 minutes, the doctor took a look at her hands, didn't ask any questions and immediately diagnosed her with da xam -- which basically translates to gray skin, but isn't actually a condition. The doctor then wrote a prescription for about 10 different kinds of medicine and sent her packing.

Unsatisfied with the first examination, we went to another hospital on the outskirts of town for a second opinion. This hospital was in a beautiful area near a small canal and the hospital itself was a converted French Villa. Evidently there's been a lot of TB in the area so my friend bought a little blue mask for me to wear which was barely big enough to cover both my nose and my mouth at the same time and which gave me George W Bush like protruding ears. While my friend got examined at this hospital, I sat in the waiting room and talked to an old woman who was amazed that I could speak any vietnamese and used her amazement as a way to ensnare me in a 45 minute conversation (of which I probably spoke a grand total of 5 minutes). As far as I could tell, she was telling me about her younger sister who married an American man but has only come back to America once in the past 5 or 6 years. She asked me a bunch of questions about how much money you could make in America and wanted me to tell her why I thought her sister didn't want to come back to Vietnam. She then told me that she came with her father (who must be quite old) to the hospital because he had benh lao. I misunderstood her and thought she was saying benh lau which sounds almost exactly the same but means sick for a long time. When my friend finished her exam we left. As we were leaving I noticed she was carrying an x-ray with her. I asked her why they x-rayed her because she only went to the hospital to check on a small discolored area on her hand and not for any other reason and she said she didn't know why. Then I asked her what they x-rayed and she said her lungs. Now I don't know why the hell they x-rayed her lungs. Maybe they thought that she had TB, but I do know that you should not get an exray, especially one that will expose the thyroid to x-rays, unless you absolutely need to. Terrible. On the way home I was talking to my friend about this old woman and I told her that her father had been sick for a long time and friend said not Benh Lau, but Benh lao. . .tuberculosis. . .