A Vietnam Trip

(from Mary Bohan)

We found a very reasonable flight to Vietnam last week, so we went for a short trip overnight over the weekend. It was really interesting, it definitely made me realize a lot of the things I take for granted in Singapore but the people were all very friendly and happy. I definitely stuck out a lot more there, strangers would come up and say hello or just stare at me all the way down the road, little children would come up and wave, and I even saw the tour guide of a vietnamese tour guide speaking Vietnamese to the group and pointing to me, and they were all giggling, we still have no idea what was going on. We went to some caves that were from the Vietnam War, but what we didn't realize was that they were where the Americans had massacred a village, and the presentation was a bit biased, talking about the "brutal Americans" who murdered their innocent mothers and children, and bragging about the booby traps that killed the soldiers, it was definitely interesting to hear from their perspective. In terms of healthcare, it was clear that they didn't have the same level of care as in Singapore, there were no major modern hospitals that we saw, and even within an hour of the city everything got very rural.

This week I've been working on a powerpoint of all of the different strains of Dengue and Yellow Fever, looking into what enzymes can be used to cut the sequences to study the desired regions, which has been very tedious. My supervisor Azlinda is going to use this next week when she begins to clone the cells and the actual experiments start. Apparently I came at a bad time in terms of actual work in the wet lab, within the next month they will be running real experiments, but I definitely learned a lot from the work that I've been doing, and I've found that I'm much better at analyzing things and researching than I am at performing actual work in the lab.

In terms of my work in Singapore I'm done as of today, I'll be stopping by for a few hours tomorrow before my flight and then hopefully the Friday or Saturday when I return as well, just to say goodbye to everyone, I'm actually sad I'm leaving, everyone has been so great here! In India I'm hoping to work in Shishu Bhavan, which is an orphanage run by the MC, or Prem Dan, a convalescent facility, both of which were recommended by a friend from Duke as well as some family friends who had gone before. I was told to also try to spend a day in each of the facilities, just to get a taste of each, so I'll try to do that if I can. Apparently at the orientation on 3pm on Friday they explain everything to you and you can pretty much work wherever you want, but sometimes they will try to lead you towards working at a certain place that is understaffed that week so we'll see.