Vietnam hopes to be an English-speaking nation by 2020. What that country lacks are teachers of English. When Goducate visited Danang, Vietnam’s third-largest city, in May this year, we had a request for a pilot batch of teachers to be sent over in September. In July, our Vietnamese partners visited the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, to meet our trainees and staff, and to observe the kind of training offered at the Center. They reiterated their request for teachers in September.
We have thus been helping the trainees to understand Vietnamese culture, to learn a survival level of the Vietnamese language, and how to get about on motorbikes, which is the main means of transport in Vietnam.
Four teachers from Goducate are now in Danang. After a few days meeting their local co-workers and observing classes at a school, two have started teaching there. One is teaching in a language school, one will probably start at a nursery school, and two are being assigned to teach in hotels.
Our teachers now have been given an apartment, and are grateful for donations of various household items for their use. One family has also given them two bicycles—not motorcycles—which is very handy for getting to and from school and for grocery shopping, at least for three of them. The fourth has yet to learn to ride a bicycle, which is going to be daunting because, unlike the spaciousness and quiet of the Goducate Training Center, the streets in Danang are full of bicycles and motorcycles.
