29th to 33rd Days

Hello, it's been almost a week since I wrote last and I'm sorry about that. As I presume you already figured, I was very busy this week. On Sunday I had my very first workshop (the other girls had already their first one when I was in Cambodia) at KTDC (the place where we had our presentation skills training), in front of about 20 people so it was very relaxed and it went very well, I was proud of my presentation! And in general, the whole presentation was very good! In the evening we had a dinner with the AIESEC intern supporting team, and I finally met Yusuke, our new intern from Japan, who was very nice. I also met Jesse, an exchange member from the USA, who wasn't part of any project but had his own internship in Ho Chi Minh City. It was a very warm evening, I met a lot of AIESECers that I had never seen before!

Monday was even better, because we had the biggest workshop ever for this project, in front of a whole school!! There were about 1'200 students listening to us!! A great experience!! I had to wake up at 4am to be in front of FTU at 5am so that we could all travel together to the school which was quite outside of the city, and it started at 7am. First there was a huge ceremony (which occurs every Monday morning in every high school of the city - if not of the country), with saluting and singing the national hymn and every thing, it was very impressive how disciplined the students where!! After that we could start our workshop (version 3, designed extra for that school), and I must say our translators made it very fun for the students, and I think it was a success. After the workshop we went to talk with the principal for a while and then they showed us the school and as it was the break for the students, some of them were courageous enough to come talk to us and ask us for our email addresses etc.

After that day we were all pretty exhausted so every one just went home and slept until the next morning, where we had a big meeting with all the team members, but in the end we didn't do a lot of things, we just rehearsed some parts of the workshops and talked about new tasks and about the "Lead the Change Contest", that was all for Tuesday.

On Wednesday we had an other workshop, in an Australian international school, and we could see right at the entrance that it was a very wealthy private school, it looked more like a hotel to me ... But the director was very friendly and showed us the conference room where we would have the workshop (it was very big and made us feel professional!), and so we presented our workshop in front of around 80 to 90 students who were eleven to thirteen years old. It was very lively and the students participated very well, it was also Yusuke's first workshop so pretty exciting for him I think! In the afternoon we gathered in a supermarket near my home (and near the airport), to shop for the HIV-infected children of the shelter home we would be visiting on Saturday, with the money we had collected from our friends and families in Europe. We bought a lot of toys and books for them, but also a lot of useful things such as pens, pencils, paper, glue, scissors, english books, etc. and we'll see how they like all that!! We still have a lot of money left so we will buy the same things for an other shelter home, and if there's still something left, we will give the spare money to the directors of the shelter homes so that they can maybe take a day trip with the children, I think they will be very happy about that!! On that same evening, after the shopping, we all went to the airport where there were some other AIESEC members (the members of the intern supporting team), to pick up Jan (from Belgium), an other member of our "Living with HIV/AIDS" team.

Thursday was an other workshop day, in the International Highschool HCMC, but only in front of twenty to twenty-five students this time. The atmosphere was nicer this time, because we could feel closer to the students as they were a little older and there were fewer of them than the last couple of times. Myself, I couldn't present because I had lost my voice, I think it's because of the air-condition at night which makes a huge contrast with the heat during the day. So I was only in charge of the slides and I watched Khoa take my part. Now I'm already better as Xuan Minh's mother gave me a lot of things to drink and pills to swallow...