By Christina Verderosa

What better way to spend a vacation then to leave behind winter and travel 10,000 miles to a tropical paradise? Then when you arrive, how about spending your time painting buildings?

Recently, Peggy Bullock, my neighbor in Crocketts Bluff, and I discovered that it’s a great way to spend a vacation when we participated in Peacework’s work camp at the Khanh Hoa Sanitarium and Rehabilitation Hospital in Nha Trang Vietnam. Along with five other American volunteers, volunteers and staff of the YMCA (Youth Movement for Cooperative Activities) of Vietnam and the hospital staff, we put the finishing touches on two projects at the hospital complex.

We began our work on the morning of January 3. The hospital director Dr. Huong Kung Chuong welcomed us. He told us about the hospital, which has 90 beds, 90 staff members and 18 doctors and combines traditional and modern medicine. “We don’t have enough investment in technology,” Dr. Choung said, “but we have much to contribute to health care.” He added that we would be working on the hospital’s original building, built in 1960 and that patients would occupy the building as soon as the renovations were complete.

Donald Voth, professor of rural sociology at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville, and our group leader told us that his association with the hospital went back to its original construction. “I remember bringing in wood from the jungle to use in construction,” he said. “This is part of a long mission of peace and helping people in need.” Don said he first met Dr. Chuong in 1997 when the collaboration between Peacework, the YMCA of Vietnam and the hospital began.

After the speeches, Don and Jean Hershey, a nurse practitioner from Lawrence KS, presented a gift to a n elderly patient. Jean had served in Nha Trang as a volunteer nurse from 1971-1973. The entire delegation then went around to the patients’ rooms and presented each one with a gift of sweetened, condensed milk.

Now that the formalities were over it was time to get to work. There was already plenty of activity going on at the work site. Workers were laying tile, and building steps and ramps. Our job was to paint the trim on the windows and doors. We were issued gloves, masks, sandpaper, rags, and paintbrushes. The foreman poured out gray paint into the cut-off bottoms of plastic water bottles. I was amused to notice that the paint was “ Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” brand.

Jean and I claimed a window and got to work. We wiped down the surfaces with our rags, and went to work with the sandpaper. There was no such thing as a power sander; we just scraped away with the paper in our hands until it fell apart and we went and got some more. We worked alongside our Vietnamese hosts from the YMCA and hospital staff members. At first we tried to be careful and not drip paint all over the place, but once we were told that it would all be cleaned up, we reverted to our natural messiness. Peggy and I especially competed to see who could spill the most paint. I think it ended up a tie. One of the YMCA volunteers, Ho Thi My Ngon, went around looking at our work and was quickly dubbed,” the Inspector.”

The hospital in Nha Trang is located along a beautiful beach on the South China Sea. Although other parts of Nha Trang have become a popular resort area, the section in front of the hospital still has not been fully developed and the big wide road along the beach doesn’t lead anywhere yet. A new bridge is under construction, which will probably lead to more hotels and tourists in the area, but during our stay the street was usually full of children playing soccer. Some mornings fishermen spread out their nets on the beach and the sidewalk, where the whole family would work on them. Vendors set up their stalls and children rode by on their bicycles on their way to school calling, “hello, hello,” to the Americans. The weather was comfortably warm with a constant sea breeze.

By Friday morning, we had painted every window and door we could find, with two or three coats, so as I was wandering about paintbrush in hand, Nguyen Duong Dinh Thai recruited me for another job. Thai is a staff member at the YMCA, who Peggy had met on her previous trip to Vietnam. We swapped our gray paint for black and got to work painting the cement strips between the bricks around the flowerbeds.

Thai and I talked about rock and roll music for a while. Later Peggy joined us and Thai went off to do something else. We were complaining about what a mess we were both making, when I heard someone calling, “Hello” to us from the roof.

I looked up and saw a young workman grinning at us from the roof. Most of the people we met knew at least some English and our new friend seems to have decided that he would try his out. He asked me my name. “Christina,” I said.

“Christina, Christina!” he repeated. He seemed to like the sound of it.

“What’s your name?” I asked. He told me something that sounded like Juan or Wong. I later found out it was Quon (I’m not sure that’s right, but it’s closer than my other guesses).

“Where are you from?” he asked, running through the usual questions. “Arkansas,” I replied.

“Arkansas!” he repeated. He seemed to find it amusing.

“Are you married?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I left my husband home!”

I’m not sure he understood that part, but Peggy’s reaction was, ““Uh oh!”

For the next few hours, as we painted, I kept hearing, “Christina! Christina!” from up on the roof.

Quon eventually brought along some of his buddies and I took their picture. But then one of them asked me the fatal question, “Do you have money?”

“No” I said.

They all left after that. But many times for the next few days, I heard someone calling “Christina, Christina!” and would look up to see Quon grinning at me. I gave him an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission hat when I left.

Friday afternoon we moved on to the new Geriatric Building. A great deal of work was still going on and all of us tall Americans had to duck under a maze of scaffolding to get up to the second floor and begin painting.

The construction work was fascinating to watch. Almost everything was done by hand. Workers, both men and women, hauled up heavy loads with pulleys, dug holes with shovels, painted walls with large brushes. There were no cranes, backhoes, or even paint rollers anywhere. We used rags over and over again to clean spills, since there were no paper towels, and we used old newspapers to pick up dirt, since there were no dustpans. The only sound of machinery was the whirring of a power saw used to cut tiles.

In back of the building, a several workers were digging a large pit with shovels. I asked Thai what it was for and he said it was for a generator platform. The next day, workers raised two large concrete power poles. It was the only time I saw a crane at the construction site.

On Saturday, I actually became a patient of the hospital. I woke up Saturday morning and my ears were stopped up so badly, I could hardly hear a thing. I told Don what the problem was and he and Jean arranged for Tran Thi Nhu Ngoc, a doctor who had been working with us, to take a look at my ears.

Ngoc took me to one of the offices and I sat down at the table surrounded by doctors and nurses busily filling out paperwork. Ngoc began cleaning my ears with a solution, cotton, and tweezers, consulting with another doctor who had been working with our group. He seemed to think I had an ear infection and was ready to prescribe antibiotics for me. Although all the staff members spoke some English, we were having some problems with the technicalities, so Jean and Thai were called in to help.

Jean explained the process of irrigating the ears to clean them out and Thai, whose English is excellent, translated. So the four of us went off to a hospital room, where Jean was given a big syringe and a bottle of water and we went to work. Although a lot of the equipment at the hospital seemed old and outdated by American standards, Jean was impressed when she was given a disposable syringe. She told us that when she was originally in Nha Trang, “we sterilized everything over and over again until the needles had no points on them.” Eventually we got my ears cleared out to where I could at least hear and I went back to work. But I’m now permanently enshrined in their medical records.

I achieved a major milestone on Saturday when I learned how to pronounce Ngon’s name. Peggy had told me that the Vietnamese language was very difficult. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means that if words are not pronounced properly, you are actually saying something totally different. For example, if you pronounce Ngon’s name incorrectly, you are calling her “vomit”. It’s not even possible for me to spell it correctly here, since there is supposed to be a mark over the “o” that looks like a hat. For several days I had avoided even trying to call anyone by name, but I finally decided I had to learn at least that much. They seemed to have a much easier time with Christina, but Peggy sometimes sounded a lot more like, “Beggy.”

On Monday we started our final day of painting. While the Vietnamese workers applied the final coats of paint to the walls and finished installing the plumbing fixtures, the Peacework delegation and the hospital staff applied the last coats to the doors and windows. That afternoon we paid the price of our enthusiastic but messy efforts when we got to work on the cleanup. Once again the work was done manually. We got down on our hands and knees, scraped paint off the tiles, wiped it up with a rag, and swept it all into a pile in the corner until someone would pick it up.

Tuesday morning we held the dedication ceremony. Don unveiled the dedication plaque, representatives from the hospital and Peacework cut the ribbon, and we toured the new building.

Dr. Chuong gave brief report on the project. The new building and the renovations of the old one cost $23,000 and took two months to finish. For the renovation of the old building, which will be used for surgery, old materials were recycled; including the wood Don told us about bringing in from the jungle, back when we started our work.

Dr. Chuong said the new building, which will be used for geriatric service is not big, “but it’s a link between the past and the present.” He called it a symbol of the cooperation between Peacework, the YMCA of Vietnam, and the Khanh Hoa Hospital. Choung said the building would be put into operation immediately.

Jean talked about coming back to the hospital after so many years. “It’s wonderful to return and not see barbed wire and military trucks,” she said. She said she had initially been reluctant to go to Vietnam, but decided it would be good to, “really see what was going on and to challenge my beliefs.”

“It helped me even more to believe in peace.”

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Originally published in the DeWitt Era-Enterprise (DeWitt, Arkansas), January 31, 2002

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