Feb 7th (Week 8 Vietnam)

This is it, we are on our two week countdown to end of outreach. Everything here has ground to a halt as the entire country stops for Tet, Vietnamese Chinese New Year. It’s Sunday and today is Lunar New Year’s Eve. Instead of Christmas trees families by cherry blossom trees or cuttings and orange trees. On these will go ‘lucky money’ envelopes as gifts for all younger family members. Also, like Christmas the next few days are traditionally days of visiting family members and friends and feasting. The loud firecrackers, fireworks and dragon dances symbolize scaring away evil spirits. We need some fire crackers here. Last night Ryan came down with stomach flu and he and Jenny have been up all night.
Lets go back a few days. I have been back to my old self the last couple of days. I had 5 days of Tamiflu and other meds to stop this vile cough. We had a quite, restful week with very few formal visits.
On Friday we drove 2hrs out to a home for disabled people. They have about 365 residents from all ages with physical and mental disabilities. There are about 90 full time staff. We walked from building to building chatting and praying for whoever we met. There was a room full of young kids with physical disabilities. From what I could see most of them had what looked like cerebral palsy. Their legs were like sticks and their hands and feet were pulled into tight knots. It was very hard with the language differences to know if they had mental illnesses too. There is no heating or cooling that we could see and it was quite a cool day. It was very hard to see so many people in such great need of additional care. I forgot to mention that it was Ryan’s birthday. He received some gifts from our team which he opened on the bus on the way out to the disabled home. Ryan is so awesome. His favourite gift is a ‘chicken bag’ a material bag that looks like a chicken and converts into a carrier bag. It was made by the disabled residents at the Donkey Bakery and Ryan took a real liking to it and one of our team members bought it for him. They stuffed the chicken with choco pies (like wagon wheels) and candy. Hmmm, now it's not so surprising that he was ill.
We have another fairly quiet week this week. On Saturday we will go out to Sa Pa in the mountains for a few days. The weather has really improved. We are back up to 20C and the forecast is 30C next week. Hallelujah! It will be cooler in Sa Pa but even 20C will be great.

I like this photo of Jemma. She looks like mum.

I missed this trip to the Cultural Village. Our team with some of the NTU students.

Ryan on the bus on his birthday. The Sponge Bob mitts were a hit. 

Yngve playing tag with some of the ladies at the disabled centre.  The lady with me loved hugs. 

All of these kids had severe disabilities.

Ryan was awesome playing with the younger kids

This kid just fell asleep on Jemma's lap. So cute.