Cha Hung returned yesterday evening which means the office has been very excited (especially excited about the Swiss chocolates he brought us). The night before Cha Hung returned, a few of the girls and I stayed at the office until 1 AM watching World Cup with Cha Cuong and anxiously waiting for Cha Hung's arrival. Needless to say he showed up 14 hours later. Cha Hung didn't tell us to pick him up from the airport so we have all been speculating as to how he got back to the office. Some of the staff at the office have interesting theories about Cha Hung having a girlfriend, but for a man with such a busy agenda, I doubt he has the time for that! I don't think anyone is more excited about Cha Hung's arrival than Cha Cuong who will be leaving us for the States in a week. Nonetheless, I was really excited to see Cha Hung again and congratulate him in person about his hero status in the latest Trafficking in Persons report.

Loc Nguyen wrote me an email asking if some of the women at the shelter wouldn't mind leaving a note or so on this VietACT intern blog. Well, that's a tricky question. Before I left for Taiwan, I gathered a few letters that participants wrote at the SoCal Walk Against Trafficking at one of the stations. My goal is to have the women at the shelter write reply letters to all the people who care about them by the time my English classes here come to an end. Today they learned "I like to eat (insert tropical fruit here). And you?" So unless Loc Nguyen and others are ready to respond with a fruit the Vietnamese women here are familiar with (try cherimoya, lychee, rambutan, etc.) a written response by one of the ladies here will have to wait until we master "Do you have a girlfriend/wife?" Are you ready to answer that question, Mr. Nguyen?!

On another note, because of the situation the women here have been placed in, emotions run rampant. I have been working on not letting the emotional outbursts and breakdowns get to me personally but it is hard because we are all human and it is never easy to see another person suffer. The atmosphere at the shelter is very unnatural and women of different ages, temperaments, backgrounds, maturity and varying degrees of abuse are forced to live with each other. Needless to say, some women are really strong and mixed with female tendencies of jealousy, manipulation and viciousness, sometimes I feel as if I am living in my own reality television show or a Vietnamese version of Mean Girls.

Sometimes I get disappointed because I can't stand watching people continue to put others through abuse after they, themselves, had suffered abuse (did that make sense?). But I really can't pass any judgment because I can't say that I wouldn't be the same way or do the same thing in their situation.

Anyway, this post was full of double negatives and I hope it didn't put a negative spin on the work that is being done over here. The important thing to focus on is, as Cha Hung put it after I congratulated him on being a hero, "There is still a lot of work to be done."

So I say, to hell with the drama and cheers to pursuing "superhero" status.