Friday - 25 March 2005  Ryan Rastegar                                                                                           [Main]

Today we left Ho Chi Minh city for the small beach town of Mui Ne. On the way, we made a stop at our second (and last) orphanage. This was after about a two hour bus ride. The orphanage was part a Buddhist Temple. All of the monks there were female. The students who were in the process of becoming monks (about 20 yrs. old) all had half of their head shaven, and the other half with long hair. Mr. Dang explained this was a step towards becoming a monk, when they will be completely bald. Everyone there was very friendly. After unloading some bags of rice and toys from the bus, we sat down for a delicious vegetable soup that the monks had prepared. There was also a mochi-type snack wrapped in rice paper (and of course, tea).

After eating, we met with the orphans (about ten of them) and passed out stuffed animals and candies. They were very excited and happy as usual. Mr. Dang explained that the chief monk had said she could only have ten kids their because there wasn't enough money to support more (even though there was room). The cost to take care of one child (schooling, food, housing, etc.) is 20 dollars per month. We talked about raising money at Punahou to send to them.

Mr. Dang explained that the Vietnamese government doesn't want Buddhist orphanages to influence the kids into becoming monks. Even though the monks don't eat or handle meat, for example, they must bring in an outside cook to make meat for the kids, to give them a less "religious" experience.

After a few more hours in the bus, we arrived in Mui Ne. It's a very pretty beach town, with palm trees and miles of beach. It was nice to see ocean after so many days of big city life. We are staying in a very cool bungalow style hotel right on the ocean.
There are also amazing sand dunes here, with orange-reddish sand that looks just like desert. We walked up there at night, and were followed by some very cute local kids, offering us plastic slides to slide down the sand hills. We gave them candy as payment. They were very friendly and spoke surprisingly good english.

The presence of a Communist government here is pretty clear. In this town, as in Ho Chi Minh city, there are loudspeakers which blast propaganda and news. Luckily, we couldn't hear any from our hotel.

I think everyone is having a great time. We joked on the bus that we should stay another week, but I think we all would really like to. It has been a great experience and we'll all be sad to leave.