Ben Tre, and the Things I Assumed

NP took me abroad for the first time in ten years. The Youth Expedition Project, rural Vietnam, Ben Tre province.

Her

She was sixteen, maybe seventeen. The most approachable, cheerful, kind person you could imagine meeting there.

Then the locals told us she had prior cases of theft.

I did not decide to feel differently. I just did. For the 500 metres back to the bus I felt precarious around her, and I noticed myself feeling it, and I have not fully finished thinking about it since. One sentence from a third party rearranged a person I had spent a day with.

I do not have a clean resolution. What I take from it is a rule of thumb: things are rarely as they appear outwardly, and that cuts both ways. The cheerful version was not the whole truth. Neither was the warning.

Facilitating reflection

Each night I ran the reflection session. I had ups and downs with it and I am still not good at it.

Specifically: giving feedback that is useful rather than nice. Steering a discussion without steering it into my own conclusion. Making enough room that a quiet participant will actually speak, rather than making room and then filling it myself.

I know these are the gaps because I watched them happen on consecutive nights.

What came after

Back in Singapore I went to Mission X, a three-day social hackathon, which was my first real exposure to social impact work with MDAS. That is where I learned to help enhance someone else's idea rather than replacing it with mine — and got to practise pitching and public speaking under a clock.

Then 18 hours of post-trip service with KampungKakis, teaching digital literacy to isolated seniors. My senior and I talked about far more than phones — his world views, his beliefs, what he values. The digital literacy was the pretext for the conversation, and the conversation was the point.

He lives at Woodlands ST32, which is where I want to gather elderly residents' opinions for my PROID project. Convenient. Also the correct order: I met the person first, and the project second.