Are We Becoming City People?

We arrived in Hanoi late at night and hopped into a taxi that would take us into town. On the way there Oliver kept saying, “Nother builbing, nother builbing, nother builbing” as we zoomed passed the seemingly endless skyscrapers. “What have we gotten ourselves into?” I asked myself. This city is humongous (It’s a little bigger than NYC). We live in a city of 2-3 million now, but it has a small town feel compared to Hanoi, which boasts something like 8 or 9 million. Ryan and I are both from small towns and never had aspirations to live in the big city. Earlier in life we always kind of thought we would end up serving joyfully in some small town; so far, the Father has had other plans.

                We pulled up in front of a 17-floor building and one of our future teammates was sitting outside on a bench. She greeted us and then took us took us inside to the team’s office, where we would be staying. The same teammate had previously told me most of the team lives in the same neighborhood on the same street. “Neighborhood” to me often conjures up ideas of suburbia where people live in houses near each other. This neighborhood was high rises and apartments with little shops on the bottom that all happen to be on the same street.

Surprisingly, after only 24 hours the city started to feel smaller. We met the team and shared meals with them; we walked around the neighborhood and watched how life unfolds for the locals; we spent time with the one ELI Vietnamese staff person and his family. We ate the local fare and went to visit one of the universities where our teachers are teaching. We joined in a conversational class with students. Slowly a few things began to feel familiar. The students had a different cultural context, but like our students in Cambodia they were excited to meet this little foreign family whom they had never heard of before. They welcomed us with open arms, a couple of them asked for our Facebook names, and before we left one young man exclaimed, “When you come back in the spring we will have lots of parties together.”

It is a great privilege to do what we do, to live and work and be welcomed into others’ lives in another country and another culture. Not that it is always a walk in the park, but overall in the places where we have lived or visited, people have welcomed us into their lives and let us do life with them. We go to these places, massive and dense though they are, because we felt called: called to the city, the neighborhood, and most of all, the people. Even a big city feels smaller once you get to know some of its people, and a place will never hold as much importance as the people you meet there. I’m glad we were able to take this short visit. It helped me see a more past the place we knew we would be moving to by giving me a glimpse of the people with whom we would be joining life. 

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-M