A Ticket To 'Anything Can Happen'

by Jan deFreitas (Jamaica)

A leap into the unknown Vietnam

All I knew was that I needed to get away. My soul needed to breathe. I was trapped, not only in a pond too small for this fish but also in my mind. I needed to experience something vastly different from what I had always known. I was yearning for freedom, for healing. Living in the capital city on an island of 3 million people with peaking crime numbers, we watched it daily on the news. We knew people who were affected - friends of friends with less than 6 degrees of separation - it came close, but we never fathomed that it would happen to us. Until it did. Murder. My parents lost their first born of two children, my older brother. Even if we had wanted to, we couldn't pack up and move, our roots were there. We couldn't run, he had already had two sons and another baby was on the way. The little bundle of joy who made grieving her father more bearable, was born the day before his funeral. It was now five years after his death and I had been helping to raise kids and support my family as best I knew how but the shock to my reality became too much, I needed to escape, so I quit my job, sold my car and bought a ticket to ‘Anything Can Happen’. My ticket to Malaysia was booked for a month but three weeks before my departure I received a job offer to teach English in Vietnam. I boarded the plane with much anticipation and a few black and blues on my legs as I’d been taking blood thinners in preparation for the 16-hour flight. After three days in Putrajaya, I was glad that my time there was divinely intercepted. I was a free spirit, wild in mind and the air there felt too conservative. However, after enjoying seven days of decompressing in a luxury hotel, eating frog, shark and snails at the famous Jalan Alor food street, it was time to bid Malaysia adieu. "Book a plane ticket from Malaysia to Hanoi and then from Hanoi to Vinh City, someone will meet you there and bring you to the school" were the instructions from my new employer. At 5 a.m I made my way by taxi to the airport to board my flight to Vietnam, which would be home for another five months. My friends and family kept saying I was “brave” to travel across the world to a country where I knew absolutely no one, where I didn't speak the language much less know how to find my town on a map. But, I didn’t see it that way. I saw adventure, freedom, escape. It was late and I was exhausted from spending the day exploring Hanoi with my non-English speaking chauffeur who wore a black suit and tie in what felt like 95-degree weather before my flight to Vinh. After a 15-hour day of travel, exploring and non-verbal communication, I was relieved to be met by Vietnamese English-speaking teachers when I arrived. After polite exchanges, we got into the car that I would become quite familiar with during my days teaching as we were transported from school to school. Naively I asked how long a drive to our destination, my fatigued body hoping to hear something different to what I had researched but no such luck. The drive time remained the same, just over an hour. It was 8 p.m, I didn’t have WiFi and I hadn’t been in contact with my family since leaving Malaysia. At that moment it occurred to me that these strangers could be taking me anywhere, that no one would know what had happened, that if I happened to “escape” I’d have to follow the breadcrumbs I didn’t leave behind. My survival instincts and panic began to take over. I took a deep breath. I had already taken a leap of faith from a small island in the Caribbean and was now en route to a rural city in North Central Vietnam. This was the adventure. So I adjusted my travel pillow, closed my eyes and decided to enjoy the drive into the unknown.