Nguyen Dinh Chieu 10th-15th July

The project at Nguyen Dinh Chieu school for the blind was probably the most challenging of all the projects we ran in Hanoi. The school is used to foreign visitors who come in to work with the musically gifted children. This fact was actually the thing that made the project so difficult, as the students found it hard to warm up to us. Furthermore, we lacked huge amounts of musical talent and so found it hard to connect with the children whose whole lives were centred around music. To give you some idea of what its like, the school was never silent: there was invariably a melody from a flute or strumming guitar chords eminating from one of the dormitories.

Our program for Nguyen Dinh Chieu was very similar to the one we used at Friendship House, combining some basic English lessons with creative activities and games. The English lessons were hit both by ability problems (like Friendship House, there was a large ability gap) and also problems trying to make what we were teaching relevant. The bottom group seemed to enjoy the animals lesson (preceeding as it did a trip to the zoo). The middle group, composed mostly of teenage boys, seemed completely uninterested in everything, until we decided to teach them 'How to get a girl.' This lesson, a brain child of Nat and Shaz, involved the hilarious spectacle of a class of 10 students diligently chanting question and response style:
"Did it hurt?"
"What?"
"When you fell from heaven."

The creative activities on the whole worked really well, especially the clay modelling, which appealed even to the profoundly blind students as well as the visually impaired. The games however were almost invariably torpedoed by problems arising from having two groups of students, one fully blind and the other visually impaired. The visually impaired students could with little modification take part in most of the games we had planned. The blind students were limited in as much as we were told they would feel uncomfortable doing any game which had a particularly physical element. As such we had constant difficulties (and arguments) arising from trying to find sufficient games which would work with them. Annoyingly, even games we had planned and agreed as beign suitable were later decided to be unsuitable often on the point of delivering them.

As in Friendship house, we took the students on a day trip, more or less mid way through the week. We were able to take them to Thu Le zoo, which they all seemed to enjoy, not only for the chance to go somewhere beyond the confines of Nguyen Dinh Chieu (most of the blind students live in the school), but also because it gave the students a chance to sit down together with a picnic and sing and dance with each other (accompanied by guitar or Binh's unforgivable party mix!!) After the trip, the students began to warm up to us much more than they had initially. In fact on the first day, we had unwittingly been victims of a practical joke by one of the students who managed to dodge having to speak by feigning an impediment and storming out in a mock tantrum.

The other two activities different from Friendship House were a recording session and a careers talk. The former, we had spent time planning, preparing dialogues, exercises and stories for an oral cassette only to arrive the morning of the recording and be told to read from a picture dictionary. The latter involved us doing short presentations on various inspirational blind figures. We hit on a winner with a brief biography of David Blunkett. One of the students had followed his career with great interest and was able to fill in the blanks of our account. I had to say I felt rather sorry for this guy at the somewhat embarassing recent conduct of his chosen role model.

We finished the week's program with a variety show comprising a rather embarassing OCEP performance of We Go Together with some very talented music performances by the school band and some rather more tone-deaf English songs by the students.

I'm sure reading this, I must sound very negative about this project. I have to confess to feeling that we were unsuited to this type of project. The students at Nguyen Dinh Chieu would have benefitted much more from a musically oriented program. I also often felt that we lacked the experience and training to tailor our acitvities to the blind students. I discovered sometime during the project that the YGCP member who had made the initial organisational arrangements and who had worked at Nguyen Dinh Chieu as a volunteer for sometime, had had to leave the project, so we were missing a valuable resource to help us interact with the students. Despite all this, by the end of the project we had managed to bond with the students and had come someway towards getting to know them a bit better.