By Thi-Anh Tran, November 2005

Almost six weeks after our Mobile Care trip to Vietnam, I can still hum to the tune of our driver’s cell phone ring as we traveled to each of our locations. I can remember the feeling of anxiousness and excitement as our vans drove through the single one-way dirt roads to each of the four villages we worked in. All the village people would emerge from their man-made huts and watch as our unfamiliar vans passed by. I compared their stares to the way I would gaze at a long stretch Hummer limousine in the streets of Los Angeles, wondering who was in there and why they were in there. I would only hope that they knew we were there to help them. I personally knew that everyone I was traveling with were on a mission and had a common goal: to assist and give hope to the people who were most in need. I left my comfortable, predictable, and routine lifestyle in the United States to pursue a one week mission that was at times uncomfortable, unpredictable, and very unroutine.  I was on a journey of a lifetime, and I wanted to make it a successful one.

By Jean Lieu, DPM

I didn’t know what to expect on this trip, but I was prepared for the worst. Armed with antibiotics, mosquito repellant, anti-diarrheamedicines, anti-itch medicines, cortisone creams, avian flu medicines, sleeping pills to prevent jet lag and a score of medicines to combat anything that I might even have a remote chance of catching, I was prepared to wage and win the war to stay healthy and productive on my trip. No diarrheal bouts or jet lag was going to set me back. I was a woman with a mission, and nothing was going to prevent me from getting it done--be it mud, rain, monsoons or mosquitoes. 

The 4 am trip from Saigon to Long Xuyen was pleasant enough. The road was bumpy, making me motion-sick most of the time but it was no match for my anti-nausea and anti-motion sickness medicines. After an hour into the trip, I was out like a light. Much of the trip passed like a blur. The next thing I remembered was that we were in Cao Lanh. It had begun to drizzle a bit, but no major rain. I stepped out of the van a bit groggy, but the sight of the welcoming committee instantly filled me with adrenaline. There was a roomful of people staring at us as we slowly filed into the auditorium. There was a banner proclaiming our arrival as well as a podium with a microphone and a table with six or seven chairs in the front of the room.

The first thing people warned me about when I decided to go back to Vietnam was the heatand poverty. It would be my first trip to the country since my family left in 1978. There is always someone who has been back to Vietnam recently ready to provide more information, but it could never be the same as going home yourself. Walking out of the airport into the humidity was expected, seeing the dichotomy of run down buildings and modern hotels adjacent was expected. It was the language spoken everywhere that first triggered a chord.

Vietnamese spoken in Little Saigon and in the home is a muted humming in the background interspersed with English words. In Vietnam,the accents and persistent usage of the language is a physical presence. It is a reminder of a culture that is, for myself, not thought muchabout. However, listening and attempting to speak to the patients at each site was a reminder that the language I barely know now was the first language I learned to speak. It was with profound luck, sign language and the patients’ laughing patience that communication with them was able to progress. With each day, traveling to each site on a narrow dirt roadare images of a country that became more real than any stories told by parents and friends.