Faculty members have chance rendezvous in Vietnam
When English teacher Matthew Olsen planned for his month-long trip to Vietnam this past summer, he didn’t expect for three other fellow Bellaire employees to be there at the same time as him.
It all started when Olsen wrote a grant for a nonprofit organization called Fund for Teachers.
“I’d written a grant a few years earlier to go learn Spanish in Spain, so I wrote another grant to go to Vietnam to do two things: one, to research the sites of the book that we read [in class], The Things They Carried, and also to visit the Vietnam War sites that some of the students might want to use in their research paper,” Olsen said.
The trip took a turn for the unexpected when Olsen discovered that he wasn’t the only teacher from Bellaire in Vietnam. Pre-AP English teacher Elizabeth Chapman was in Hanoi teaching English. Magnet Office clerk Quan Ngo was in Saigon visiting his family. Olsen and Spanish teacher Anita Page were coincidentally staying in the same hotel. Naturally, Olsen met up with the others, and they all had an awesome time, he said.
“I just happened to be in Hanoi at the same time [as Ms. Chapman], so we went and had dinner and walked around the old quarter of Hanoi,” said Olsen. “Then when I was done in Saigon, Mr. Ngo and Ms. Page just happened to be there, so we hung around for a couple days, went to the Mekong Delta, ate at restaurants and had a really good time.”
Some of Olsen’s favorite aspects of the trip?
“The beaches were amazing, the Vietnam War sites were really powerful and sometimes very emotional,” Olsen said. “The Vietnamese people were very happy and loving. The war was something in the past.”
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