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- Photos from my daughter’s travels in Vietnam
A hopeful wind blew into my house from Asia this week. It brought back my daughter, who had been traveling there since early last November. She started in Bangkok, then journeyed through Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and finally back to Thailand. Along the way she volunteered at an elephant sanctuary, supported families through homestays in villages, earned her scuba diving certification, climbed rocks, kayaked, and learned.
She told me that in Vietnam, they call the war the “American War.” She toured caves in Laos and Vietnam where citizens survived during the war years. She saw the Killing Fields in Cambodia, where thousands of people were brutally murdered. She went to a visitor center in Cambodia and met “hero rats,” animals that are still being trained today to help clear the country from unexploded landmines (and the rats are not harmed because they don’t weigh enough to trigger the bombs).
With a retired hero rat in Cambodia
That was when she started to realize something. The Costa Rica job paid for her airline flights and also provided room and board. That was all, though. There wasn’t any salary associated with it—and it was hard work. Sea turtles lay their eggs at nighttime, so the job included monitoring long stretches of beach with a partner, often for hours at a time. Sleep was often difficult. I had a chance to visit her and her team, and I walked along with her one night for turtle patrol. It was exhausting.
It was good work, important work, but if most of her teammates held master’s degrees and were still basically only earning room and board, what did that say about her plan, her dream, of continuing her education at the master’s level?
When she got home from Costa Rica, she found a summer, in-between kind of job, working as a zip line operator at Heavenly Valley resort, up in Tahoe. That job included a discounted rate for shared employee housing. Whoever would have guessed that adding “zip line guide” to a resume would be helpful in finding future employment? It worked for her, since last summer she went to Catalina Island and was a zip line guide there.
