The Year in Review...

Exactly one year ago today, a plane out of Hong Kong touched down at Noi Bai airport outside of Hanoi and disgorged two very tired, rather disheveled and discombobulated Americans. These travelers' names were Joelle and Steven and they weren't coming to Vietnam to take pictures, buy a few silk scarves and leave. Like a stubborn case of athlete's foot, they were going to be around for a while.


In the twelve months since then, we've seen a fair bit of this here country. We've tasted its food (even some of the stuff that looked gross), swam in its seas, hiked its mountains. We've made friends, embarrased ourselves on numerous occasions, had close calls with pickpockets and purse snatchers, been hit by a speeding motorbike, and somehow gotten a newly-purchased wardrobe stuck in a tight spiral staircase. We've ridden on planes, trains, basket boats, xe oms and elephants. We've watched mold grow on every single piece of clothing and furniture we own, battled hordes of giant cockroaches, sweated more than we ever imagined possible, and witnesed our bus driver getting punched in the eye by a rival bus driver. More than that we've laughed till we cried with our Vietnamese friends, had deep conversations in broken English over strong iced coffee and wondered how on earth a place so different from our home could still be so dang beautiful and sometimes feel so much like...home.


It hasn't all been easy. There have been broken bones (two of them), miserable nights spent in the bathroom, and tears (lots of those) over loved ones so far away. There have been birthdays that we've couldn't make it to (including several literal days of birth, with babies back home popping out like to make Orville Redenbacher throw a fit). There have been hikes we could have gone on, massive snowstorms we missed, foods we have longed for, and people on the other side of the ocean that we really wish we could have just sat down and had a burrito with once or twice.

Has it been worth it? Yes. Absolutely.

Are we excited about coming home for the summer in a few months? Yes. Absolutely. As wonderful as they are, Skype and Facebook are no replacement for a real chat, and we're so looking forward to being able to see many of you this summer. We're also incredibly thankful for the support, encouragement, emails and blog comments y'all have given us over this past year. We miss you guys.

As a parting gift for our one year anniversary, we now present to you the Shetterly timeline--a few key pictures from the past year in Vietnam:

Spring 2008: Encountering the joys of learning a tonal language, our first six months in Hanoi were focused largely on language study. Here we are with one of our tutors.

April 13, 2008: Approximately 8 seconds into his first basketball game in Vietnam, Steven blocks a bullet pass with his right thumb, which promptly breaks. Here he is awaiting medical care at the clinic in Hanoi.

May 2008: The weather grew warm. Uncomfortably so. The logical course of action was to stick a big fan up the back of one's shirt and look like a body builder for a while.

May 2008: 90 degrees in the shade with 70% humidity and somehow she still manages to look good.

June 2008: Ninh Binh, our first escape from Hanoi without the aid of someone who speaks Vietnamese. We survived, and saw a rice harvest in full swing to boot.

Summer 2008: East meets West. The pervasive influence of punk culture extends even to this young, impressionable Vietnamese caterpillar.

July 2008: A scenic shot of the historic battle site of Dien Bien Phu...and Joelle's forehead.

September 2008: A bird's eye view of Quy Nhon, our new home, confirms that yes--this is indeed a dang beautiful place.


October 2008: A class of Vietnamese students goes to the beach for a picnic and invites some foreign teachers along. A good time is had by all.

November 2008: Steven makes a fool out of himself by singing "Stand By Me" with his teammate Jason in front of 500+ students. Joelle continues to look really good. Both receive flowers.

December 2008: Christmas parties and excited students. Fun.

Christmas 2008: Visitors from distant lands arrive to celebrate the day with us. We are blessed.

January 2009: Three Iblings siblings and Steven make their way through southern Vietnam on the way to Thailand for classes, a conference and elephant riding.

Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.

He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.

-Ps. 126

Anyone still reading this thing...?

Wow. I wouldn't blame you at all if you had stopped checking our blog. As it stands it's been well over a month since we last updated.

To employ a much-overused phrase: It has been the perfect storm of busyness, travel, computer problems and laziness that has kept us from updating you all on our lives in a timely manner. Sorry 'bout that.

As I write this, I sit overlooking a city street from a cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand with a brand new HP laptop at my fingers. How did we get here? Where did the new computer come from? What on earth has been happening the last month and a half? I'll try to give you the quick-and-dirty (or not so dirty) explanation below:

• December flew by in a blur of activities, visitors, celebrations and extra classes. As a team, we wanted to make the most of the season with students, so we had several things planned each week. From cookie making parties to Christmas movies to a big party with around 120 students AND Santa Claus himself, we did our best to communicate the meaning of Christmas to anyone and everyone who would listen.
• Partway through December, Joelle's brother Will and our friend Carissa arrived in Vietnam to celebrate Christmas with us. We had a great time showing them around Quy Nhon, traveling with them, introducing them to students and enjoying the season.
• After Christmas, Carissa headed back to the states and Joelle's younger sister Bethany arrived from Egypt where she's been living for the past several months. After a few days in Quy Nhon we picked up and traveled to Saigon via the scenic route (hitting up the coastal city of Nha Trang and the highlands city of Da Lat on the way).
  
• From Saigon, we flew to Bangkok and then Chiang Mai where we've been for the past few weeks. Steven took classes for his MA degree in TESOL for two weeks while Joelle, Bethany and Will gallivanted around the area.
• Sadly, our time with Bethany and Will came to an end. Will headed back to the States while Bethany returned to Egypt. We had a couple days of down time, then started our annual conference with our organization.
• For the past several days we've been hanging out with some 600 other teachers from all across Asia taking teaching workshops, fellowshipping, learning a lot from the Word and relaxing. In another few days we'll be returning to Vietnam and a period of relaxation before the next semester begins. Whew!

As for the new computer: If you'll recall, I (Steven) got pegged by a speeding motorbike a couple months back. In addition to a cracked shoulder blade, our poor HP laptop was part of the collateral damage of the whole incident. It had been riding in the bike basket and landed hard on the pavement when I went down. Though it didn't die instantly, it slowly grew less and less usable until it was finally apparent that a new one would be needed.

One of our teammates offered to have her parents bring us one from the States (they were coming to visit her in Thailand). We took her up on the offer and a few days later, lo and behold, we had in our posession a newer, faster, and cheaper laptop than our old one. Sweet.

So we are back up and running with the technology stuff again. If you've tried calling or emailing or checking our blog or pictures lately and haven't seen much, our apologies. We're a bit backlogged now on getting pictures uploaded, but hope to have that done soon. Check our photo album regularly to see if anything new has been added.

Thanks for being patient with us. Really, we're alive and we're glad you guys care about us!

Thanksgiving: Better late than never

If you're more of a picture person, you can click here to see the album from our Thanksgiving weekend adventures.

Our first Thanksgiving in Viet Nam has been a good reminder of all that we are thankful for! Life, health, friends, being loved first, so that we can love others…..

It is a good time to say, even in the midst of a broken scapula, we are doing well and loving the city and new friends we have been placed with. We are very thankful this year that we are finding ourselves in the middle of exactly what we have been challenged to do for this time in our lives. Thankful to a Father who calls us by name and gives purpose in life.

The preparation started off with Jill and me (Joelle) working together to create our first Thanksgiving meal ever! And not just for our families, but for 10 of us in total. Our old teammate, Susan, joined us from Hanoi. And also, we were blessed by the presence of 4 of our long distance teammates for the weekend. These 4 girls are teaching in a city about 7 hours away by bus. They are with our same organization and it was a fun time of reuniting, laughing, sharing and encouraging. I myself was greatly encouraged by getting to see the hearts that our teammates have for their students. One more girl, our neighbor and coworker here at Quy Nhon University, joined us also, making the 10. She is from Belgium and experienced a first also – her first Thanksgiving meal!

Our visitors came a few days before our Thanksgiving celebration, so we had a chance to show them around the city, go bowling with them, take them to class and generally have a lot of fun.

The day of our celebration (which was on Friday due to teaching schedules) was a mixture of the traditional and not-so-traditional. In true Vietnamese style, Steven lashed half of our furniture to his bicycle and pedaled over to Jill and Jason's with it. Since it makes him more visible to (and thus less likely to get pegged by) speeding motorbikes, he's considering carrying around a stack of plastic chairs everywhere he goes now.


Even though the “turkey” (roasted chicken) was served with chopsticks, we managed to put together a very American food experience. You know all those recipes that call for canned this, or pre-prepared that…. we stared from raw veggies sold in an open market and ended up having quite the feast! Many hands make light work. Many hands also take up a lot of the counter space, so some of the prep was done on the kitchen floor. That errs on more of the Vietnamese style than the American, but worked just the same in getting everyone involved in the great afternoon.

And yes, everyone took part. Steven made everyone pumpkin coffee and also made whipping cream from scratch (using a whisk). Vigorous whipping may have reinjured his scapula, but we had really good whipping cream to go on top of our pumpkin pie! Meanwhile, Jason washed all the dishes and we women sat and relaxed after the meal. It was a great time. Like eating Thanksgiving meals at home, there was far too much food and we all did our part in eating it up.

Pop Rocks

We had our teammates and some students over for dinner this evening, and after dinner someone pulled out a couple packages of Pop Rocks that Joelle's mom had sent to us from the States. Having nothing even remotely resembling this fabulous candy in Vietnam, the students were (needless to say) flabbergasted, befuddled and beguiled. It was kinda funny.

Scapula schmapula

So, the motorbike incident. Here we go.

I (Steven) was on my way to my favorite coffee shop (which my teammates and I call "The Office" due to the fact that we tend to camp out there with their high-speed wireless and do a lot of lesson planning) when my plans were rather suddenly put on hold.

To get to The Office from the university, you need to pull a U-turn in the middle of a main street and then cut quickly to the right to turn into the driveway. Though it might sound a bit sketchy, it's a maneuver I've pulled off successfully many times since moving to Quy Nhon and is generally really easy due to the lack of traffic in this city. Thursday, I was a bit distracted by the fact that it was starting to rain and I was without a jacket--I wanted to get in under cover as quickly as possible.

As I pulled the U-turn next to the cafe, I noticed one motorbike coming the other direction at a rather high rate of speed. I started to pull to the right to turn into the driveway of the cafe, and then my cautious American brain made me hesitate (the speedy motorbike was in the right lane and I didn't want to try cutting in front of him). Bad choice.

Apparently the motorbike driver had seen me start to move right and thus had cut into the left lane. Things between us quickly became up-close and personal as Mr. Motorbike smacked into the back of my poor old bicycle doing (I would estimate) somewhere around 25-30 mph. As I suddenly found myself launched into midair in a sitting position, I instantly knew what was happening. It was a scene that I had rehearsed in the "worst case scenario" part of my mind many times before--me getting nailed by a speeding motorbike--and in all of those potential scenarios, it never really ended well for me. As I headed rather ungracefully for the pavement (screaming bloody murder the whole way), I was fully prepared for things to go from bad to worse.

I landed--near as I can tell from my memory and injuries--more-or-less on my butt and right shoulderblade in the middle of the road. I kept waiting for something from behind to bash into my head or wrench my arm or leg in the wrong direction. Nothing. Soon enough, I came to the realization that I was sitting in the middle of the road, looking back at a laid-over motorbike tangled with my bicycle, shouting something at the driver that I'm glad he couldn't understand.

The driver and passenger of the motorbike seemed to be okay and I was--to my utter disbelief--mostly okay too. I waddled around on the street long enough to grab my flip-flops from where they'd landed (they're Chacos and I didn't want them to get run over or stolen), then made my way to the curb where I sat down and did my best not to pass out. I think my body had released its full supply of adrenalin for the month in the half second it took for me to go from bike to pavement. I made a quick call to Joelle, who sped over on her bike to help me (and to disperse the crowd that always forms at any accident scene).

In a bit of a funny side note, the motorbike rider had been carrying a big handful of jicama (turnipy things) with them, which had gone sailing every which way when they connected with my bike. They rescued a few of them, and then onlookers grabbed the rest. One man stood looking down at me, white as a sheet on the sidewalk, as he munched the veggie that he'd plucked from the middle of the road. I would have laughed had I not been so close to tears.

The motorbike driver eventually came over to me, bowed his head a bit, and offered the best xin lõi (Sorry) that he could. That was that. I didn't really feel like making a big deal out of anything (lacking the language skills to do so even if I had wanted to), and was frankly just thankful to be alive. People went their own ways, Joelle helped get me into a taxi and we headed back to the university.

An x-ray the following day showed that I have a fracture in my right shouler blade. According to our nurse-friend Kimberly, it's a bone that's almost impossible to break on its own, without some sort of other major trauma or life-threatening injuries being involved. Perhaps it was a bit easier in my case, since my shoulder blades stick out like chicken wings from my 0% body-fat back. All it means is that I need to have my arm in a sling and not go violently moving my shoulder around for the next couple of weeks. Shouldn't be a problem.

There are some good things that have come out of this--like the fact that I don't have to do dishes for at least a couple of weeks, and that we had a string of visitors for a few hours yesterday afternoon coming by to make sure that I was okay and offering their advice. (So far the advice we've heard from students has amounted to: Drink lots of milk and orange juice, avoid eating chicken or sticky rice as those prevent wounds from healing, and don't take a shower every day. Reason for that last one...unknown.)

Anyway, that's the latest and greatest from here. Current broken bone count: 2 in less than 9 months. Yes, I'll be more careful. Yes, I'll wear my helmet whenever I ride my bike from now on. No, it doesn't hurt too bad.

Take care, y'all.

Pizza, Bowling, Dance Competitions and Halloween Parties

Well if that title doesn't sound like the most random assortment of activities, I don't know what does. But that's been our life for the past few weeks. I've been meaning to do something fun like make a video, but haven't found the time to sit down and focus. So instead you'll get a quick blurb on what's been happening and a link to our latest pictures. (If you want to skip right to the pictures, click here.)

Pizza: A couple weeks ago we invited a few of the students we've gotten to know the best to come to our place and make pizza with us. It ended up being a blast--it was only the first or second time any of them had had pizza. One of them told us the next day that she had been so excited she stayed up until 1:00 in the morning writing in her diary about the pizza-making experience.

This group of students has been pretty great. They're funny, they enjoy each other's company and their English is at a level where we're able to have deeper, more meaningful conversations with them. We felt like this was a "breakthrough" night, in that the students didn't just come over to have a semi-formal English conversation time with us, but felt free to just hang out and be themselves.

Bowling: A few days later we invited some of the same students (and some others) out to the Quy Nhon bowling alley. That's right--the bowling alley. Though it only has 8 lanes, the feel of the place is 100% Americana, right down to the stale cigarette smoke in the air. Well, maybe 95% Americana, due to the lack of chili cheese fries and the fact that Steven had to bowl in his socks (size 13 bowling shoes in Vietnam? Are you kidding me??). Joelle whooped everyone soundly.

Dance competition: Next in the parade of wackiness was the campus-wide dance competition. Each class participates (in VN students stick with the same group of students for every class through all 4 years of college, so they grow pretty tight-knit). We went to the competition just for the foreign language department and there were a good 400 onlookers. They took their dancing seriously. Tomorrow are the finals, in which the best teams from each department go up against each other. Will there be any halftime entertainment, you ask? How about a couple of off-key foreign teachers doing their best to sing "Stand By Me" to several hundred students? Yeah, that sounds about right. We'll let you know how it goes.


Halloween: American holidays are big here. We went to no less than three different Halloween parties, two of which were organized by us. We run an English club with Jill and Jason that meets alternate weeks--one week with 1st and 2nd year students, the next week with 3rd and 4th year students. We threw a Halloween party for both of those groups, and both times it was crazy-go-nuts. With a trivia competition, word search, "see who can make the most ridiculous costume out of common household items" competition, bobbing for apples, and plenty of Vietnamese candy, how can you not have a blast?


Things were made even crazier by the fact that Steven invited his 1st year students to English club for the first time this week (since they started classes a month later than everyone else). All three of his classes showed up almost in their entirety, plus several 2nd year students. We figure we had somewhere around 65 people packed into our one-room apartment. A little tight.

Well, that's been life for us lately. The year is going by fast, and we're looking forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and visitors from home for the holidays (woohoo!). Good times. Good times.

Classes and picnics

So the school year has officially begun for freshmen, which means that I (Steven) have actually started teaching. It's been a kick so far (though a bit exhausting, to tell the truth).

I teach three different classes that each meet twice a week for an hour and a half. One of my two speaking-focused classes is a group of English majors who are also teachers-in-training. The students in this class were required to have the highest English exam scores of everyone, thus they tend to be the most proficient (the word 'proficient' is used rather loosely in this case.) I have another class of 'general studies' English majors, who are studying English and nothing else. I teach them the same speaking lessons as the teachers-in-training, but their overall English level is a little lower. Finally, I teach a mix of reading, writing, speaking and listening to one class of students majoring in Vietnamese Studies. These are students who never chose to study English in the first place, but are required to take two semesters' worth for their major. The majority of these students would be classified as beginners--low, low, low level.


Part of the difficulty that all of my students have with understanding English is due to the fact that they all most likely studied grammar (and little else) in their high school English classes. While they might be able to read a sentence and tell me whether it's in the simple past or the past perfect tense, some of them don't understand when I ask them even simple questions like "What is your name?"

It's kind of a fun challenge teaching students who are starting from very little or no knowledge of the (spoken) language whatsoever. You can ask me in a few months how much progress has been made...

In other news, we were invited to go to a picnic this weekend with one of Jason's classes from last semester. We ended up at a beach a few miles out of town and got to participate in some fun picnic games, which included dividing into two teams and seeing which one could start a fire and cook the meat for lunch the quickest. (Our team won. Though anyone concerned about food safety might question the wisdom of seeing who can cook any meat product 'the fastest.')


Joelle and I also experienced a Vietnamese first: Being asked by a class to sing them a song. We were warned that this is inevitable, and sure enough after the sandwiches were finished, the requests started coming. The four of us foreigners managed to croak our way through a couple different songs, both of which were met with somewhat confused looks and delayed applause from the students. (If we'd really wanted to bring down the house we would have had to have busted out Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On and we simply weren't prepared to do that.)

Though Joelle and I didn't really know any of the students, we were warmly welcomed and had a great time with them all. You can check out our whole photo album of the picnic here.