Some of the fondest memories I have from my stay in Vietnam are from Cham Islands. As a part of the group paper all of us write at the end of the study, we get to do our own field work. Our group chose to write about MPAs (Marine Protected Areas), and how this affects local fishermen. The closest MPA to Hoi An is the one on Cham Islands (or Cu Lao Cham in Vietnamese), so that is where we spent 2-3 days doing qualitative fieldwork. All of us in the group had varying degrees of experience with interviewing and writing field notes, but we all got a change to test out and improve our skills. We got help from two local, young women whose English was proficient enough to enable them to be translators. Because they were locals, and because so few people, about 3000, live on Hon Lao (the only inhabited island on Cham Islands) they were able to guide us to the people we wanted to interview. Our list of questions were pre-translated to the best of our abilities, and with the help of our translators’ smart phones (which had google translate), we all understood each other in the end!
Doing fieldwork is challenging enough in and of itself, but doing it in another country, culture and language is a whole other ball game. It is fascinating, a tad frustrating, and so much fun at the same time! It also requires you to not only be good at asking questions, but also to be a great listener and read between the lines.
Besides doing interviews we also had some time to explore the beautiful island. Staying in a local homestay, and staying overnight on the island, is such a different experience from that of the hoards of selfie-stick-picture-taking-and-then-leaving-on-a-speedboat-after-only-30-minutes-on-the-local-beach-people that started coming in from around 11 am. Two friends and I were sitting on one of the beaches on Hon Lao, enjoying the quietness and having the entire beach to ourselves. Then came the people mentioned before and did, well, nothing for about half an hour, before leaving again. It puzzled me why they didn’t venture further in to the island and mingled with some of the locals, along with seeing what else the island has to offer. This experience, along with the interviews and experiences we had had with a few of the local people, made me start to realize just how much is missed by this culture of “doing” and “going” instead of really experiencing.
Before starting this course, I had little idea about the real depth of diversity that exists among the countries in South East Asia, like in any other such “area” in academics. Like some of our professors on the course have noted, it is sort of strange that one can study “South East Asian studies”, when we ourselves would find it quite rude and misguided if someone in SEA decided to start a course called “European studies”. We would say that the countries of Europe, even though we are all a part of the same union, are incredibly diverse in language, landscapes and linguistics, making it impossible to understand all of the countries when painted with such a broad brush.
To put it into perspective: through this course, Development Studies 1, we have learned about Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, along with a few examples from Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, the US and probably some others that I have forgotten. And we have just scratched the surface. The more I’ve learnt, the more I understand, and the more I understand, the more I realize how little I know. It’s a never ending learning curve and I have loved every minute of it!
