My name is Noah Best and I am a university student about to embark on a 3 month internship to Vietnam for my school. I'd like to take this opportunity in my first post to tell you a bit about myself and to also give you a little bit of information from the small amount I know about what exactly I will be doing for my internship.
First off, about me: I am an undergraduate student here at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and I will be going into my fourth and final year of school this coming September. I grew up in Perth, Ontario throughout my childhood and adolescence but decided to follow almost all of my older siblings out to the Maritimes for university. I am completing an honours degree in International Development Studies and I hope to continue my education beyond undergraduate studies after next year. I am a sometimes quiet but very congenial person (in my own unbiased opinion). I like listening to music and am very eclectic in my preferences (right now I find myself often listening to a bizarre combination of dance electronic and classic rock on my iPod). I also enjoy watching various sports such as hockey and football. I am very passionate and happy to be studying International Development. I always knew from the beginning of university I would choose it as my major and I have had no regrets so far. What I like most about my program is that it is an interdisciplinary study and includes subjects and courses from many fields including economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, geography, history, and the list goes on. It's inclusive to all schools of thought and does not discount their importance in the field of development, acknowledging that problems in the developing world are not so one-dimensional as people often make them out to appear. It is that acknowledgement of the complexity of contemporary development issues that drew me to this internship opportunity of which I will now try to explain.
About my internship: I first read about this opportunity through an email circulated by my IDS undergraduate advisor back in September 2012. I had received many emails from him about other opportunities abroad for the past 2 years, however, not many of them really interested me because I was very skeptical towards packaged trips for students that involve providing some sort of donated service for a week or so. I was, and still am, very skeptical towards those types of opportunities because I have always felt they were designed more to make the students feel good about themselves rather than actually contribute something substantial and allow the students to learn something valuable about themselves and the world of development. This internship opportunity was different I thought. I would be spending 3 months in a culture that was completely foreign to me with only a few colleagues as cultural companions. I would not be going into the field with my own solutions to problems/issues I knew nothing about, I would be attempting to ask questions and gather information by completely immersing myself within the culture in an effort to truly gain an insider's perspective on the issues faced there. I decided to pursue the position and was notified in early December that I had been chosen to go. So for the past 4 months I have been steadily preparing myself for this trip getting all of my required documentation and properly orienting myself for what to expect. So what exactly am I going to be doing in Vietnam? While I am in Ho Chi Minh City for the three months, I will be working with students from the local university to go around various districts of the city and talk to any local people who are willing to sit down for a conversation on their food consumption/production habits. I will have a vague guide of questions to help guide my talks with them, however, their is no strict guideline to the conversation so long as it is constructive and moving in a general direction that I would like it to go. I will also spend a lot of time in the market simply observing the behaviours of various individuals and seeing how food is purchased, handled, etc. I will be reading (through translators) various articles in local newspapers on topics that are relevant to my research so I can gain more of an understanding of the issues. In essence, I will be the prototypical ethnographer and by the end of the trip, I will at least be somewhat saturated within the local culture.
This is just a brief synopsis of what I plan on doing while I am over there. As we move along, I will hopefully have a far greater understanding of my purpose and become more acquainted with the research (and I will pass this knowledge along in this blog). I will be departing in a little over a week and the traveller's anxiety has been conveniently replaced by exam stress so I at least don't have that to worry about. I'm not too worried or nervous about going away for so long. That kind of stuff doesn't really bother me too much as it would for some. I am taking comfort in the fact that I have two great friends that I will be there with the whole time and who worked in Vietnam last summer. I look forward to posting some photos and videos while I am there as well. Until then, I will leave you with the song I have had stuck in my head ever since I learnt that I was shipping out to the 'Nam this summer.
I know, this one's obvious:
Cheers,
Noah
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