Life in Hanoi

It is the week before Tet, the Lunar New Year. Hanoi is abuzz with people going here and there to prepare for the New Year. There is only one way to describe it, crazy. But when the day of Tet is here, there will be very little traffic. The reason, because so many people return to their hometowns to see family at this time and people who remain in the city, are at home with their families.

For the people of Vietnam, and for people like us who are here, Tet is a time to get together with family and friends. Households prepare lots of food as people drop by at different times to visit, eat food and wish each other happiness in the coming year. Here is a link that tells more about Tet and how the people of Vietnam celebrate it: http://www.familyculture.com/holidays/tet.htm

One more week before Tet, and workers are busily trying to finish homes they are building or remodeling, as the families that live in them are anxious to complete the projects before the New year. Picture at right shows a first floor of a house being remodeled, which is next to white house being built - picture below shows the almost finished product - one week before Tet.

It is great to be back in our house! Though the adventure continues. It seems that the work on the drainage system that had begun and not completed before the flood is now being worked on in earnest. This has made leaving our area interesting, with some parts we drive on a few feet wide. Of course that's what makes it fun. It is messy though. Across from our house is a huge pile of rubble. Here is Brittany standing in front of it.

Ann and I did have a somewhat scary Vietnam moment. When there is heavy equipment being used, there is no roping off or fencing in an area. A backhoe had been brought in to dig more of the trench for the drainage and it was taking up the whole alley way. If we wanted to get home, we needed to get past the backhoe. There was a foot or two to spare to go by with the motorcycle. Kind of scary. This is the trench with the new drainage system. They built it up with bricks and then put cement over the bricks. Then capped it with concrete blocks.

After the flood, our landlord came over and agreed that our kitchen cabinets need to be moved out to investigate why water was gushing out from under the cabinets during the storm. I guess we had 17 inches in 18 hours and 25 inches for the weekend. Hopefully this week our landlord will come with the workers to do that. They will dig down to the foundation, where we think there must be a large crack to have let in so much water.

This storm, the largest in 35 years for Hanoi, happened during the dry season. We are thankful everything is back to normal in the city.

House relatively dry

Today, Ann and I went to the house. All the water, except for a few puddles, is out of the house. Our first floor seems more like a pig-sty. But I am glad we can start cleaning. We threw out a lot of garbage today. Tomorrow, we hope to continue cleaning and hope to have electricity checked and maybe switched back on. Lots of mosquitoes have decided to move in. We hope to serve them an eviction notice in the next day or two. We are very blessed by a number of people offering to come and help us clean tomorrow. If you come, bring a bucket, a towel, a bottle of bleach and a pair of gloves. We hope to have pictures of the clean up crew.

Here's a house pumping out water on the way to our house.


On the way to our house...the water gets deeper the further down we went.

Rain, rain, go away, come back some other day (in lesser amounts please). That is how we felt as we began to quickly move our refrigerator and other items out of the water that was starting to spread through our house. Later in the morning, we lifted our refrigerator out of the water, and the washing machine and the whole house stabilizer. The stabilizer was much heavier than I would have thought, weighing more than 300 pounds (I did not have time to weigh it..ha ha).

Hanoi experienced its worst storm in the last 35 years. With some places in Hanoi having more than 4 feet of water. Our house had more than a foot. But as bad as the city was hit, the country side outside of Hanoi was much worse. One friend of ours who helps with aid in disasters took some of the pictures you see here on a survey trip. Some places were 10 to 13 feet high in water.

We are thankful that we are safe and dry at a friends house. A wonderful and blessed provision.


Tonight as I write this there is supposed to be another big storm, we are praying otherwise.

The water is mostly out of our house. Yea! Ann and I went tonight and dumped the dehumidifiers and checked on the water level. The only place with water now is about a third of the kitchen (where it all began). We hope to begin cleanup tomorrow.

The weather has been nice here in Hanoi, though a little warm at times. Brittanywentto a homeschool fun group this past week. It was like a 4 day after school camp. They played basketball, card games, ran, went swimming and other fun activities. Brittany also continues to enjoy her ballet.
Today, Joseph, celebrated his 17th birthday. Can you believe it? With some friends we went to a Japanese restaurant not too far from our house. Joseph had sushi, tempura and all the side dishes that are included in the set menu. He loved it! Ann was going to make "Chocolate Bottom Cupcakes" for his birthday (learned it from a friend on facebook), but we discovered that we no longer had the cupcake pans we had been keeping for a friend (I think we forgot that they had collected them), so we had the recipe in cake form - it was great!
In our neighborhood there has been lots of construction. In the picture is the scaffolding they used to put cement over the bricks. I took this picture when it was at its lowest level. It doesn't look to secure, but it seems to stay up.

Ballet

Brittany loves to dance! For quite sometime she has gone into our family room, played classical music from a CD and danced, moving gracefully around the room. After our return to Hanoi, Brittany went with some of her friends to their ballet lesson. When she went her friends asked her if she would like to dress for ballet as well. Brittany did - and the teacher allowed her to join the class. She loved it. The rest is history. She is now going to her own class time and working on becoming more flexible.

Upon Return

When we returned to Hanoi, we were welcomed, or should I say alarmed by the knowledge that we had a rat in our house. At least we thought it was one. It turned out to be 3. The last one gave away it's presence by gnawing on the top of the kitchen doorway, which we had closed in an attempt to keep the rat out. I set out these new sticky traps (I had tried 5 other trap types and they all failed). What a relief it was for the rats to be caught.

Time in America

Dear Family and Friends,

We landed back in Hanoi late Monday night (11pm,

July 28th). The whole trip went smoothly – from Russell’s parents driving us to O’Hara airport in Chicago, the flight to Seoul, our layover, and our flight to Hanoi. We even ran into someone we met in Malaysia this year while at the Seoul Airport. Everyone traveled comfortably and stayed healthy. All our luggage, including Joseph’s guitar arrived safe and sound. We are truly thankful for all the blessings on this trip.

After arriving back to our house, we were able to get Brittany to bed around 2:15a.m., which she was pretty excited about as she said “the latest I have stayed up is 1a.m.”. Amazingly we have adjusted to the time zone quickly and are just about on Hanoi time.

On Tuesday as we began to settle back in we foundwe had a house guest who had been making himself comfortable while we were gone: a rat. At least I am hoping there is only one - as I caught him today. But the rat trap is set again just in case. We found a whole bunch of candy wrappers in the back of the refrigerator, open and sticky with many pieces of paper stuck together. It had made a cozy nest. Our guest also liked raw pasta, finishing off a whole package and, though there is no evidence of smores being made, a whole bag of marshmallow was also consumed.

As you might guess, it is a little warmer here. We have created rooms of refuge, running the air conditioner on the “Dry” setting and cooling the room down to about 85 degrees. This has certainly helped as we unpack, sweat, and get used to the heat and humidity again. No baking for a while. We are grateful for air conditioning!

This summer went by too quickly: June saw us in 4 states (California, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Colorado). In July, we were in Monee, Lake Villa, Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington, White Heath, Bartlett, Springfield, and Naperville (thankfully all in Illinois.) We had so many great visits with friends and family but still had many more friends and family we wished we could have seen. How rich we are to have friends like all of you! We truly felt your love and support. Thank you!!

We would love to hear how you are doing. Please write us at: rafryer@gmail.com

One last word: Our house is always open for you to visit. Just come on over!

Russell, Ann, Joseph and Brittany

Long Time No Write

I apologize for the long time in between writings. This year has been something of a blur. Right now we are in the States for our organizations Conference. We will be leaving back to Hanoi July 27th.

The kids are enjoying seeing all their friends, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. We are all enjoying the green grass and beautiful weather. Though we have been in areas affected by tornadoes and flooding. Our heart goes out to all those that have been affected by the different disasters.

That is it for tonight. More later.