I had my internship in the city of
Ho-Chi-Minh in Vietnam. I worked on a project called SELF which focused on
improving leadership skills of Vietnamese university students.
This experience was a great new challenge
for me. I had many experiences in travelling but this was the first time I
traveled alone. I experienced so many diverse cultures from people from
various parts of the world and learnt how to work with them. The “cultural
shock” I got and how I adapted to it was one of the greatest learning
challenges in my life.
The working attitudes of each of these
interns and the Vietnamese Organizing Committees (OCs) were different.
Sometimes the meetings and discussions became so intense that some OCs
started crying. But it was just because everyone wanted the project to be
successful. First I had some trouble communicating because the interns and OCs
could not understand my accent as well as I could not understand theirs. I had
to speak slowly than usual, but at the end everyone understood each other.
My experience in Vietnam was life changing
as I was helping others in becoming leaders as well as I was learning from them
to become my own leader.
AIESEC is what brought me to here as, if it
wasn’t for AIESEC I wouldn’t be able to meet such amazing people and learn from
their own experiences as well as make new experiences for me as well.
I had to work as a leader to a group of
Vietnamese students and act as a mentor to them as well as help in conducting
leadership workshops and presentations. The experiences I shared with them
during those sessions and the guidance I provided made a huge impact as they
were motivated in activating their leadership skills pursuing their goals at
the end of this project.
There were many differences in the culture rather than similarities. Vietnamese people were very friendly and there was a great attention on foreigners. People would talk with me or say Hello. I had to stay with a Vietnamese family for these 6 weeks. So I was really exposed to their culture. Vietnamese people are ‘foodies’ and everywhere there were food stalls. The food was really different from Sri Lankan food and other interns had trouble eating Vietnamese food (eg: Blood pudding, snails, pig fat, dog meat). The traffic in Vietnam is crazy as the road is only filled with scooters and nobody would give space to cross the road. One of the first challenges for me was crossing the roads in Vietnam.
This internship also helped me to discover
the ‘traveler’ within me. I traveled a lot with the other interns as well as
traveled alone. I went a 900km journey alone in night buses as well as using
an inland flight and couch surfed for the first time in my life. I learned to
ride a motor cycle for the first time. And my first motor cycle journey was a
400km trip with my German friend to a place called Mekong. I met a lot of
different people in this journey and had positive as well as negative
experiences. My bike broke down in the middle of nowhere, got lost and had no
way of contacting because my phone got soaked in rain water, got cheated by a
shop owner who stole my key and forced me to pay a ridiculously high price for
a cheap meal. But the good things about Vietnam and the friendly people surpass
these negative experiences.
I experienced things in 6 weeks that would take years for some people to experience and each experience was a new learning point for me!
Indunil Herath
Department of Civil Engineering
Department of Civil Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
University of Moratuwa
