Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Eight

Institutional Life and Coping Strategies 187 Eight Institutional Life and Children’s Coping Strategies 187 The first times that I visited both the reform school and the orphanage are permanently etched on my mind because on both occasions, as I arrived, the children, dressed in formal pale blue uniform shirts and navy trousers, huddled together for mutual support and peered at me suspiciously . This was not a reaction I was used to, and I found it puzzling. On both days the weather was wet and cold, and I thought the children looked worn out and miserable. But I quickly learned that what I observed on both days was somewhat distorted by the particularly bad weather and the staff having anticipated and thus planned for my visit. On my second visit to both institutions few of the children were in the standard uniform but instead wore their own clothing. They told me that they only wore uniforms reluctantly, when outside visitors were expected. I also discovered that the anxiety I had sensed most sharply in the orphanage was because of the younger children’s fear that I was visiting with the intention of adopting one of them. So my initial impressions of the children had been based on the atmosphere created by having an unfamiliar adult in their midst rather than the institutional setting itself. From this experience I realized how crucial it is to become familiar with people one wishes to learn something about before prematurely coming to any conclusions 188 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World about them. It convinced me of the merit of longitudinal fieldwork such as that adopted by traditional anthropologists, where observations are carried on over a number of years before any conclusions are drawn. The tendency of international development programs is to complete short-term fieldwork and research before finalizing the direction a project takes—such as rapid rural appraisal (Chambers 1992). My experiences in the field highlight the inadequacies of this type of approach. As the days and months unfolded I began to appreciate the level at which children in both places were able to create their own highly effective informal support networks and thus find a way to deal with their experiences within the institutional settings. Most of the children I spent time with during fieldwork were, or had at some time lived, in an institutional setting. The boys who lived at the reform school received sentences of up to two years, while some of the children in the orphanage expected to live there until they were old enough to live independently or return to their families as wage earners. Meanwhile, the children who worked on the streets lived under the continual threat of being placed under arrest and being sent to a detainee or re-education center. I discovered that as groups were thrown together, they had evolved often quite sophisticated strategies for coping with their situation and supporting one another. It is commonly assumed that institutional life offers people an automatically negative experience. Clearly, institutions are not ideal environments for children to grow up in, but individually they can vary enormously in the quality of support for their inmates. In this chapter I discuss some of the ways in which children provided each other with support and discuss some of the coping strategies children developed for themselves. I show that even in environments such as the reform school, which is immediately and visibly restrictive, children were successful at reclaiming some power over their bodies and creating their own informal support structure by establishing their own hierarchies, in this case based on gang support. As a result children were very capable of maintaining their own identities rather than allowing themselves to become submerged within a collective, adultdominated , institutional identity. The children’s methods were often highly effective but largely unrecognized by adults, who would have gained a stronger footing among the children during moments when they tried to help Institutional Life and Coping Strategies 189 them if they had had access to, or been aware of, some of the children’s self-created methods of coping with their circumstances. I do not advocate children being left to their own devices; obviously, they need adult protection and guidance, but if we are to properly understand and respect the children we seek to support, it is important to recognize the value children attach to their own support networks, a factor...