Day One of our workshop seems to have gone as well as we could have expected. There weren’t too many surprises in terms of who was in attendance or the perspectives they might bring. Our participants are faculty and administrators from Can Tho University as well as community colleges in the Mekong Delta, and someone who works in what might be similar to agricultural extension, except that his organization is an agricultural (mostly rice) research and development group separate from the university. Other than those working in the English Department or Center for Foreign Languages, most participants speak no or limited English. We have a team of three very talented and considerate interpreters (one of whom got her master’s in English from Boston College – Go Eagles!). We’re all still adjusting to one another – with good humor and patience.

It is interesting to try to keep up with work and life back home while teaching here. The time difference continues to boggle my thinking – being a half-day “ahead” feels very strange; I’m used to thinking of my time zone as a half-day behind, if anything. So our Wednesday noon in Can Tho is Tuesday midnight in Michigan. John is keeping up with his online course as best he can with our more limited internet access (when did we get so dependent on high-speed access, and how do our students who are not on high-speed keep up?). I’m grateful to HALE doc student Jen Hodges and colleague Pat Enos for taking my classes on Thursday.

We talk in our department about how supporting international work is a group effort – one or two people may be overseas, but everyone has to chip in to get our collective work done and our students have to be patient while we’re communicating from a great distance. It’s an interesting organizational question about commitment to international work, who picks up the pieces, and how it fits into faculty (and hopefully also student) work. In the next month, HALE has us in Vietnam, Jim in Finland, Reitu in Egypt for two different reasons (Fulbright and then an MSU project), and Marylee in Egypt as well. As we become a more internationally involved program, we will have to deal with important issues of roles, rewards, equity, and student access across the entire faculty group. Balancing benefits and costs fairly will be an important challenge.