School Trip to Hanoi 26/05

As some of you already know, Sapa O'Chau is trying to raise $500 to take the residential students of the school on a trip of a lifetime to Hanoi, to:

1. Raise the students’ awareness of human trafficking

(a big problem in Sapa) 

2. Go to the MTV Exit’s Anti-Trafficking concert

3. Visit important Vietnamese cultural sites 

4. Give them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience Hanoi

Most of our students have never even been out of the Sapa, or Lao Cai district so going to Hanoi is something they've only ever dreamed of!

 Please visit our website if you'd like to donatewww.sapaochau.org.

In Hanoi we will take the students to the MTV Anti-Human Trafficking concert http://mtvexit.org/vietnam/ where there will be bands from Canada, Korea, Australia and Vietnam performing. 

Visit Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum and Ethnology Museum  http://www.vme.org.vn/aboutus_history.asp

I am teaching them the lyrics of some of Simple Plan's (Pop group from Canada) songs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSxmPoe_fCM, which they have all now downloaded onto their phones and play incessantly. 

For the Hmong and Vietnamese (especially the Hmong) singing and dancing is a bit part of their culture, so it feels good to be teaching them English through a medium which they enjoy and can easily relate to. 

It's amazing to see how quickly they learn new words through song, and I don't know why we don't do more singing in secondary schools back home. Probably because the teenagers there wouldn't be seen dead joining in the community spirit of a group sing-song!

So, I'm excited about Hanoi, but also looking forward to the day where I don't wake up with Simple Plan's Summer Paradise running round and round in my head like a mouse on an exercise wheel! It reminds me a little Joe Simpson's description in Touching the Void with the tune Brown Girl in the Ring stuck in his head. Obviously I am not on the brink of death, struggling to find base camp in the Andes mountain range, but I certainly would not want to die with a cheesy pop ballard about love and summer paradise as an ear worm. Perhaps I am now in a good position to climb Fansipan (4100m), and should do so before Summer Paradise is replaced with something else!