learned 'em good

This morning's lecture was about harm reduction policies and implementation in Vietnam. This lecture was specific to HIV/AIDS prevention. I don't know if I've talked about this before, so I'll keep it brief. Harm reduction is anything that takes a risky behavior and makes it less dangerous. Pretty self-explanatory, right? This could be getting motorbike drivers to wear helmets or providing clean needles to intravenous drug users or using methadone to replace the demand for intravenous drugs. It's very important to reiterate that studies have shown that providing clean needles does not lead to higher rates of drug use. The same is true of condom distribution and methadone clinics, each in their own turn. Something else we talked about is pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). One example of PrEP is shown in the use of antiretrovirals (ARVs) to prevent transmission in sero-discordant couples. A sero-discordant couple is one in which one partner is HIV positive and the other is HIV negative. If you get them both on ARVs, transmission is much less likely to occur. PrEP is also used for pregnant women who are HIV positive to prevent transmission to their babies. Fascinating stuff. Feel free to e-mail me if you have questions or want some more info.

I got back from class this morning, ate an egg and cucumber sandwich with chili sauce (a deliciously fantastic staple here), and promptly fell asleep. Usually, when I nap, I come in and out of sleep and how long I end up in bed is completely dependent on how stubborn I am in refusing to get up. Today, I fell asleep and did not move once in the following three hours. I don't remember being that tired, but I guess I was. It was a wonderful nap.

I went to teach English today with Maeve and Alison. Due to the insanity of rush-hour traffic right around 5:15pm (when we usually leave to teach), what should be a 15 to 20 minute drive takes us at least an hour and we end up late to class (which begins at 6:00pm). Today, we left at 5:00pm to make sure that we would get there because the parents committee promised a pizza dinner. Of course then we got there super early, but today's weather was amazing, so there were no complaints to waiting outside, watching this small park area of parents and children. I will never see anything more beautiful in this world than a parent delighting in his or her child.

As promised, we sat down to a delicious pizza dinner with the kids. It ended in cookies and cake. Could this have been more perfect. I doubt it. We had a fantastic day learning about animals. These were some of the more wilderness animals like snake, lion, chimp, parrot, giraffe and elephant, to name a few. I really went for the gold teaching concepts like amphibian for the frog and marsupial for the kangaroo. The kids are geniuses. When we got to the elephant, I told my kids that Mom had grown up in Africa and seen lots of elephants and that there is an elephant tusk in my house (taken not by poachers but from a sick elephant that needed to be put down). They were blown away and super interested in Mom's story. I explained how Grandpa was a bác sῖ (doctor) and Grandma was an y tá (nurse) in the Congo (they helped me practice my Vietnamese here). It was so great for us to learn and share stories together!