WORDS Fatima Measham

An immersion experience in Vietnam changed the way a group of students sees the world.

It was only a 12-day journey, but Frances Lynch remembers coming home and finding everything familiar had changed somehow.

‘My room had never seemed so big’, she says.

Along with Emily O’Mahoney, Olivia Farrar, Courtney Lynch, and twenty-one other Year 10 students from Star of the Sea College in Victoria, she spent four of those days helping to build houses in the southern Vietnamese province of Ben Tre. They were for three displaced, elderly women who were living in structures that were ‘not really houses’ but a mix of materials held together by a prayer.

The trip was conducted last year as part of the social justice program at the all-girls school. It was an inaugural tour, with the focus on mission, rather than language or culture. The students not only raised and sent funds for the building project; they contributed a fair amount of labour.

Their experience of working under tropical conditions in the Mekong Delta, far from home in more than one sense, has led them to an understanding of the word ‘solidarity.’ While their friends in Melbourne were finishing the school term and starting their holiday break, they were immersed in an impoverished community that was well off the tourist track.

Accompanied by four staff, including their principal, the girls shovelled and levelled dirt, mixed cement with sticks, painted walls with rudimentary brushes, and turned leaves into thatched roof.

Clearly, the expedition was never envisioned as a sight-seeing jaunt through exotic Vietnam, yet for some of the participants, it was the opportunity that they had been waiting for.

For Emily, the Social Justice Captain, the image of shanty towns in South Africa had haunted her since a family holiday there in 2007. ‘How is it fair,’ she wondered, ‘that I get to have a holiday while these people don’t even have enough money for proper housing?’ Vietnam represented an opportunity to begin answering this question.

It is the same for Olivia, who had been looking for a way to be involved in social justice work, but had until then been unsure about where to start. Seeing poverty in Vietnam has given her an orientation. She now draws connections between her experience and what she sees on the news. ‘It’s not just news anymore,’ she says. ‘It’s personal.’

The encounter with abject disadvantage was certainly confronting for the students. Subsequent visits to an outreach centre for handicapped children in Hoi An, as well as a learning centre based at the Agent Orange Hospital, reinforced the students’ sense of privilege but also deepened their unease.

This was especially true for Courtney when she saw a Western man being escorted by two young Vietnamese girls at a fast-food restaurant in Hanoi. She thought, ‘The only difference between me and those girls was that they were born in one country, and I was born in another.’ She feels the imbalance very keenly, which has compelled her to continue working for social justice.

Emily is similarly motivated. ‘It would have been so easy to go to Vietnam then come back and say, “I’m so lucky,” without doing anything with that knowledge. It’s really important to keep doing things, to not just do one thing and claim to have “done” social justice. It is also getting others to do it with you.’

Mary Harmes, the Social Justice Convenor, and one of the teachers who travelled with the girls, refers to this as ‘reciprocity’. ‘They have been changed by the experience, too. The interaction in solidarity becomes empowering for both sides.’

Since their immersion in Vietnam, the students have initiated or participated in a number of activities that promote social justice. These include running a letter-writing campaign for Nestlé to source Fair Trade chocolate for its products; organising a fair at Christmas that provides market space and custom for small groups such as the Good Shepherd Trading Circle and Abbotsford Biscuits; and helping in the kitchen at Sacred Heart Mission as well as collecting donated goods for it.

For Courtney, all these activities illustrate what solidarity means. ‘It’s about not removing yourself from what you’re doing. You’re working with people instead of just giving money.’

The girls’ sense of mission can also be summed up in Emily’s words: ‘We’re in a position to be able to help people, so we should.’

Comment  on this article