Before transferring from Colgate University to Georgetown, Taylor Farmer (COL `09) spent six months volunteering for orphanages in and around Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (formerly known as Saigon). While in Vietnam, she taught English and cared for children who lived without love in a world of filth, disease and hunger. This week, Farmer shared with THE HOYA stories of the children she worked with, the conditions they lived in and her current plans for raising money to send to the Green Bamboo Shelter for Street Boys in Ho Chi Minh City. What did you intend to do while you were in Vietnam? I went there to volunteer. The organization I was working with has affiliations with a bunch of different projects in Saigon, but I discovered . after maybe two weeks, that I didn’t use those contacts anymore, but I would generate my own work. Once you’re involved in the volunteer side, people will come up to you and say `Oh, can you visit? My orphanage, here, we really want you to teach them how to speak English,’ or, `Can you visit my orphanage?’ Could you tell us about the orphanages where you worked? The first one I worked with was called the Green Bamboo Shelter for Street Boys. It’s an orphanage for boys who have lived on the street. And these kids come from really destitute families and they basically beg on the streets. A lot of them are involved with drugs; a lot of them are abused by older people who manipulate them. The Green Bamboo Shelter houses these boys and gives them food and gives them an education. And they set them up for vocational training, so the kids would work in a kitchen and learn the restaurant industry . So I would hang out with the boys and try to teach them English. Another place I worked was Phu My Orphanage which is a state-run orphanage for handicapped kids. These kids were really sick. . They’re bed-ridden and a lot of them die. I worked with the babies – and when I say babies, I mean the bed-ridden kids, and they were from ages two to maybe 15 or 16. Basically you go and you have to feed them and hug them and try to give them some physical contact because they just stare at the ceiling for hours a day and that’s all they do. Then the biggest place I worked at was an orphanage on the outskirts of Saigon. I made this my biggest project because they really, really needed help. They had never had any volunteers before. It was in a really, really poor area. The woman who owned the orphanage, I’m ashamed to say, abused the kids really, really badly. There were over 30 kids [in the orphanage] and five babies who, at the time I started, were four months old. And you cannot imagine the conditions in this orphanage, the squalor, the dirt, the crying, the bleeding, the feces everywhere. … It was absolutely crazy. The babies didn’t have cots, they would sleep on the floor and they didn’t have diapers so they would just defecate themselves and then it was never cleaned up. It was just terrible. And there was no one to take care of them, so the little girls would have to take care of the babies. It was absolutely shocking. What made things worse was that [the woman in charge] was really mean to the kids. I would come in and I would have crayons that I’d brought from home and I’d have the kids draw me pictures and stuff and I’d say `Oh that’s really pretty … Wow! That’s really good.’ And the she would go `Oh, that’s really ugly, that’s terrible’ and she’d rip them up. And I walked in on her more than once beating the kids with a two-by-four plank of wood. I tried to stop her, but as soon as I turned my back, I knew it would happen again. I was in a really tenuous position. But I kept going to try to see the kids because I’d become really attached to the kids at this point and I knew they needed some positive thing in their life. I don’t know if I was positive, but just someone to hug them. It was really simple. It’s a closed orphanage, the kids won’t get adopted out; you can’t believe just how much poverty and sadness there is everywhere. And there’s no one to help. Are you going to go back? I am going to go back when I have the means of actually helping. I’m not saying I didn’t help, but I would really like to bring some more money. I told the priests [who worked at one of the orphanages] that I have a dream that we’ll all be able to open an orphanage some day. But I need to go back when it’s all sunk in and when I have the means to actually do something. I don’t know if that’s going to happen right now. Also, I’m still processing the whole experience and trying to get my head around how I can incorporate all that I saw with being a Georgetown student from a very privileged family living in New York City. It’s a hard kind of double-consciousness to have, and I’m still trying to work through this. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the kids, especially. I have these beautiful pictures of them on my wall at school. I think about them every single day, and I hear from the priests all the time. Do you feel like people at Georgetown, people in America even, are really conscious of what’s going on? No. Everyone gives money to the African orphans and all that stuff and you think you can understand it, but until you’ve actually seen it with your own eyes, there’s nothing that can explain the impact that has. And I think for me, too, being by myself … and I didn’t have many luxuries, believe me, I was sleeping on a straw mat. I wasn’t at the Four Seasons or anything. I got sick every two weeks, I broke my leg, I ate cat, I ate dog, I ate rat. … I lost 25 pounds in the first three weeks. I got to kind of experience a lot of the hardships that they experience. It really is a different ball game. At the same time, I just want to say that the Vietnamese people are the nicest people I’ve ever met. After all the stuff they go through, I’ve never been so welcomed. I thought because of the whole Vietnam [War] that they’d have some resentment towards Americans, not at all. They were so appreciative of what I was doing, they were so generous. I got invited to everyone’s house for dinner. They were full of curiosity; they were always smiling, always laughing. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire life. – Interview by Sarah Mimms