Youth Union Festival

Every year in March, there is a big celebration all over Vietnam. This is the celebration for the Youth Union, and at colleges and universities everywhere in the country, students have a lot of fun. The Youth Union festival usually happens on a weekend. This is necessary because students are very busy preparing for the festival. They don’t just get ready to have fun. They also get ready to build and make things. For the Youth Union Festival, students form groups (usually with students from their major and their class) and then make plans to build a place for their group to have fun. Here we see the photo of a very happy student who's majoring in English. He was good at cutting bamboo and also at explaining in English many things about the Youth Union Festival.

So what do students build? Sometimes these places are tents (a house made out of cloth), but sometimes they are more like small houses. Here is a picture after they have finished buidling it. You can see that this place is big enough for twenty or thirty students to stand, sit, sing, eat, dance, and have fun.

Here at Tra Vinh University, many students are very good at building things. They are farmers and have a lot of experience building things for their own farms, and they also understand how to use materials and tools. They know how to use materials like bamboo and palm leaves and also tools like hammers, saws, and nails.

They get many materials—most of them natural—and bring them to Campus One. They all come to the football field and build their tents there. Students with experience in building things will be the leaders, and they will help their classmates. They will give advice on how long to cut the bamboo, on how deep to dig the holes, on how many nails to use to hold the pieces of bamboo and wood together.

When I saw students making these structures (buildings, houses, tents), I did not think they knew what they were doing. The students were all young and looked happy and excited, but the wind was so strong that I was sure the structures would not stand. But I was wrong! The students had very good ideas about how to build these structures, and they made them strong and stable (not moving). And, of course, it’s very important that these tents be strong and stable: they are used for all the classmates to meet, sing, eat, and have fun. They must be strong and safe.

But it is not enough to be strong and safe. They must also be attractive. Who wants to sit and celebrate in an ugly building, especially for a big festival? No one! So students paid attention to at least two things: the strength of the tents but also to the decoration (the little things that make something beautiful). And most of the decorations yesterday were natural, just like the materials used to make the structures. In this photo we see two students taking a plam leaf and putting in near the door of their tent. Students brought many kinds of flowers and leaves and used them to make their tents more beautiful. Coconuts, palm leaves, and banana plants and flowers were some of the most common things used to beautify (make beautiful) their temporary (short time) homes. Sometimes students used these things in their natural state, but often they changed them a little bit. They took leaves and cut them or folded them to make them more attractive. Or they added color to different kinds of green plants. Some students were very creative. One group (which was engineers and tailors together) took many bikes and put them together to make an arch over the entrance (the place where you go inside something) to their tent. I love to ride my bike, so I found it interesting that they were able to take bicycles and make something beautiful (and fun) from them.

After the students have built their tents and decorated them, they are ready for fun! It’s hard work making these tents. It takes work of both the hands and the brain to create these temporary structures. So, naturally, students are a little tired after they finish. Most groups of students yesterday had lunch together inside their new tent and admired (looked at with happiness and pride) what they had built. Then they started various activities. Some people wore funny hats. And lots of students immediately started to sing with karaoke machines. It was loud, but a good kind of loud. This was the sound of friends happy to be with each other, and everyone was excited.

Other students went outside to build kites (toys made of paper or plastic that can fly in the wind) to fly. Also, at this time, judges from the Youth Union came to every tent to look at it. There was a contest for the best tent, and the judges had to see each tent to give it points. Here we see a photo of someone with large kite that just a few minutes later was flying high in the sky.

In the afternoon, there were many kinds of games. Some students played in small groups with their classmates, but others gathered in the center of the football field and played with hundreds of other students. It was very noisy and exciting. I could hear the voices of the students hundreds of meters away.

In the evening, everything looked very different. It was now dark, but students had already fixed lights to their tents and they then turned these on. Normally the football field at night is empty, black, and quiet, but last night it was filled with people and life. There were lights everywhere. Many students had put lights in the signs above their doors to their tents. Some had also put different colored lights inside their tents. There were so many bright lights that it looked a little bit like Nguyen Hue Street in Ho Chi Minh City on Tet! And everywhere you went there were students walking, running, singing, dancing, and having fun.

My apartment is very close to the football field. In fact, I live just about 20 meters from where the celebration was taking place. In my living room, it was very noisy. It was so noisy that I had trouble hearing the television, but that wasn’t a problem since most of the time I was outside with students and friends celebrating. I don’t know when the party ended. I was tired and went to bed about midnight. The bedroom of my apartment is not next to the football field but is on the other side of the building, next to the Agriculture and Fisheries Building, and there it was quiet. So although thousands of students were having a noisy good time, I was able to sleep easily.

This morning, when I woke up, it was all quiet. My plan was to get my camera and go take some pictures of the students as they took down their tents. I looked out my window and was shocked. Every tent was already gone! I had heard that there would be a big fire, but I had assumed that people would build a fire, watch it burn, then go to sleep and in the morning take down all their tents. But that isn’t what happened. I now think that the bonfire (a big fire for a celebration) they had last night was made with all the materials from their tents. I guess that they took the bamboo, palm leaves, and other natural materials and threw them on the fire. This did two things. It saved them a lot of work, since now they wouldn’t have to take all these things out of Campus One. And, maybe more importantly, it let them have a lot of fun. It made the fire bigger, brighter, stronger.

But this morning, as I look at the field, I find it hard to believe that just six hours ago, there was a small city in front of my apartment, a special kind of city filled mostly with young college people having a great time. And now, it’s gone. It’s all a little bit beautiful, but also a little bit sad. It reminds me that the things we love in life don’t last forever. They are here for a short time, bright and noisy, beautiful and filled with happiness. But then soon—much sooner than we want—they are gone. We think that we can go back to them, but just as I learned this morning when I saw the tents were gone, when we try to return, we find that everyone has left.

Probably the happiest times of my life were from my college years, so I enjoyed watching students today having fun, making friends and memories. When you’re in college, you think that it will last forever. You imagine that it will always be easy to meet your friends, talk with them, be silly, have fun. But in just a few years, years that are far too short and fast, it’s over. And maybe because we know this inside—we know that our youth won’t last forever—we enjoy these moments a little bit more. So, I want to say thank you to everyone I met yesterday. You let me take photos of you and to make videos of you setting up your tents and of you singing and having fun. Many of you invited me to join with you—for a short time—and share some of the happiness that you were feeling. I’m glad that I accepted your invitations of friendship. Even though I will l be in Tra Vinh three-and-a-half more months, and even though I hope to return many times in the future, I will never be here again for the 2011 Youth Union celebration. That is over and done with, and I want to let you know that I feel very honored to have been a part of your special day.