recent teaching team writeup
The following post is based on an email I sent around to the teaching team I’m working with here in a neighbourhood of Ottawa; my main path of service so far has been teaching a children’s class open to the whole neighbourhood.
I arrived at the Vietnamese Centre around 10:30am, and they were still waiting for chairs to fill up (apparently the customs of punctuality I observed while in Vietnam carry over to the overseas Vietnamese as well). The morning crowd was full of older Vietnamese gentlemen and ladies, and perhaps through a bit of shyness—and a desire not to greet elders incorrectly, with my broken Vietnamese—I didn’t break out into greetings and conversation with them all. Instead I listened with bemusement, being able to pick out about 15% of what people were saying. The morning presentation was given in English by a Registered Nurse on Pandemic H1N1, and included lots of great flu-prevention tips. The Centre’s director translated everything into Vietnamese. At the end, the speaker was given a certificate of appreciation on behalf of the Centre and its community—such a nice gesture—and a photo was taken with all present.
By the end of the H1N1 talk, it was clear that the crowd had swelled to about twice its original size, including a few younger folks, and still almost 100% Vietnamese. The next speaker followed after a short break: ethnically Vietnamese, but raised in France and married to an Israeli gentlemen, she came to talk about the Vietnamese community in Israel (of all places). In fact, it gave me an interesting insight into Ottawa’s own Vietnamese community, and the difference between “mainland” and “overseas” Vietnamese—a mainly political difference, brought on by the after-effects of the Vietnam War. This presentation continued until about 1:00pm, at which point we stopped for lunch. This is when it got really interesting—with four of us present from our Chinatown teaching team, we had a lot of conversations with many different people and covered a lot of ground.
I spoke to a really nice Vietnamese lady who asked about my recent trip to Vietnam and the sort of activities I took part in while I was over there. I explained to her about the core activities, and linked my time spent serving in Vietnam to our efforts here at the Centre. She asked me directly whether I was interested in offering English classes to members of the community, specifically newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants who had been living in the Philippines. I told her about the English Corner initiative put on by members of the Baha’i community and she seemed very interested; I told her I would follow up with my contacts to see if we could offer something similar for this community. Maybe it’s time for me (or one of us, at any rate) to learn how to be an English Corner facilitator?
In short, lunch was awesome. I felt like we accomplished more in that hour than we had since the beginning of the project, in terms of making contacts and solidifying our foothold within the community.
For the story of what happened during the children’s class, visit my children’s class blog.
11.30.09 
baha'i, canada, children's classes, core activities, ottawa 
No Comments »
