Reflective Journal Entry: 09.12.08
It was the final video training for the elder council today. They took this project very seriously. The research base questionairs were provided by Dr. Giang Nguyen from University of Pennsylvania, Family Medicine & Community Health. Two topics are being focused on: hyperstension and doctor-patient communication issues.
Today practice, the elder council had their first interviewee come to 7th & Wolf, SEAMAAC settle office and practice the interview. Because the interviewee situation was unique, one of the elder council, Mr. Coung Nguyen, previously did his preluminary interview with the client, and found the client got into a car accident resulting from the high blood pressure. Mr. Cuong structured his own way of asking questions for the interviewee.
This is certainly another step of the leadership – the elder council took. When they practice on the questionairs were provided by Dr. Nguyen, they had difficulty to follow through the questions because the interviewee sometimes already spoke about the topic, or sometimes the interviewee situation is just doesn’t apply with the next question to be ask. Consequently, the elder council needs to grap the moment to generate follow up questions, and perhaps, know what questions to skip on the interviewing guide. This is called leadership. It’s very challenging, but they know how to get it done.
Reflective Journal Entry: 09.02.08
SEAMAAC – Intergeneration Program, another Jook’s Breakfast morning, like usual, the Breakfast doesn’t start until 10 a.m. but most elders already arrived between 9 – 10 o’clock. They spend one hour socializing with each other, I got the pleasure to build friendly relationship with not only the elder council members whom I worked with for the New Route Video training, I now got connect with other Vietnamese elders at the Jook’s breakfast, too.
This week during Jooks’, I had such a deep thoughts conversation with one of the elders, David Ngo, about the intergenerational conflicts of the Vietnamese-American families. It wasn’t that easy to get them to talk about serious issue, I have observed for the past two months at SEAMAAC. I always knew these elders were highly educated – my judgement simply just base on their signature on my sign in sheet every Tuesday morning. My feeling about this particular group of Vietnamese elders who sit at the same table that they were either high official ranking in Vietnam or professors.
SEAMAAC has had our Elder Council group established over a year ago, yet they refused to joined. Until last week, by my invitation, one of the member in the group, Mr. Ly Nguyen, agreed that he would like to join the Elder Council meeting to learn more about it. Mr. Ly liked what he learned, he suggested to his friends to join as well, one of his good friends also decided to join, but another elder said, “no, let’s the knows do things do it, I am the ignorance, so let me just take the back seat and listen”.
I can’t helped it at the moment, I took a seat next to him and gently smiled and replied, “you can say that I am young, I am ignorance, but pardon me, I am not stupid, I know you are highly educated”. The elder responded, “No, not like in Vietnam, young people here are our teachers, they know more than we do, old people like us have a lot to learn from them!”
I responded, “well, that just the language maybe that you have to learn from young people, but the rich experience and the knowledge that you have about your heritage, your country, young people like us have a lot to learn from you”. And I went on to explain “ it might be still a new phenomenon that in college these days, the young people are being taught to think creatively how to create an age intergrated society, and that’s why SEAMAAC has Temple University student (Project SHINE) and myself to come to the Jook’s breakfast, so that we can learn from people like you”.
The elder, Mr. David Ngo, was very happy to hear the comments I just made. And he continued, “if this is the case, I am so greatful and wish that there are many more people think it this way”. Mr. David expressed his disappointments about this family how his children and gradchildren are now being lost their culture and they are not being respectful him as an elder –who supposely to have an authority figure if he was in Vietnam.
Mr. David concern is not just his, I believe the intergenerational conflict one like his is a representative voice for many immigrant’s families across the board.
