Heart

by James Kang, Country Leader, Vietnam

I wasn't sure how to title this.

Kathie Cowie is one of REI’s longest-serving volunteers to Vietnam. I first met her briefly in 2009 when I served on REI’s business team and again in 2022 in my new role as the REI Country Leader in Vietnam. I thought about titles like "Passion" or "Perseverance," "Love for Vietnam," or, to exaggerate it a bit, "How I Left the Freezing Canadian Tundra and Fell in Love with Humidity." But all the titles I thought of do injustice to the story. So, I simply decided to call it "Heart."

Here is Kathie’s story, as she shared it with me.

I was a Cardiovascular nurse in Canada for seven years before joining a team of three Americans and two other Canadians going to Vietnam. In the Fall of 1997, two years after the normalization of relationships between the US and Vietnam and having been told Vietnam was asking for a nurse with my experience; I arrived in Hanoi with all my belongings packed into ten suitcases with a plan to stay for four years.

I quickly discovered that the field of cardiovascular nursing was in its infancy, and the director of the ICU soon recruited me to work with his nurses and teach conversational English twice a week to newly trained doctors and nurses who had only a rudimentary level of English. I had no background in teaching English, but I decided to persevere, and it was fun most of the time. During those two years, I often felt very lonely and not appreciated by the hospitals and others. Although I knew I had made the right decision to move to Vietnam, I frequently questioned whether my being there had any purpose. Sadly, over the two years, our team of six fell apart, and I was alone in Hanoi.

After the team broke up, I left Vietnam. I returned to Canada to become a trained ICU nurse so that I could return to Vietnam again and offer a higher level of training for ICU nurses who only had fundamental knowledge.

After two years working as an ICU nurse in Canada and a brief trip back to Vietnam in the summer of 2000, in 2001, I excitedly asked a new hospital administrator in Hanoi if I could travel back to Vietnam for a few months each year to pass on current and up-to-date skills from my ICU work in Canada. The hospital administrator quickly denied this dream and said, "We don't want or need you." It was a heartbreaking moment, and I returned to Canada shattered.

Around 2009, a team of nurses was going to Vietnam, and they asked me if I wanted to join them. I initially said no but reluctantly decided to visit Vietnam with the team. I was worried about how the Vietnamese hospitals – those same doctors and nurses from years ago – would receive me, because unlike today, we didn't have a good way of keeping in touch. So, I was extremely nervous to go.

When I got there, I was surprised by how much Vietnam had changed and how welcoming it was to Westerners. But nothing prepared me as I entered the same hospital where I had taught young doctors and nurses English a decade ago. My past students were all in one room to greet me warmly, and with tears, and after over ten years, they still remembered me. Most of my students were now in leadership positions and held key hospital positions.

These doctor and nurse friends understood and knew I could help them, and they said they wanted me back as often as possible because they trusted me. "You always come back, and you don't have "color," meaning that I am transparent. And they said, "We know your life was very difficult the first two years you were here, so you understand us, the Vietnamese people's suffering very well."

Now, my life has come full circle. I was incredibly lonely when I first came here, alone and tolerated by the Vietnamese hospitals. But now, I have close and deep friends who have stuck with me since 1997, and they have persisted in being my friends. Because of that, I can bear fruit as I pass on who I am and my skills to others.

Except during Covid, I have been visiting Vietnam once or twice a year since 2009, training and teaching nurses and doctors, even teaching from home when I am not in Vietnam. Each session sometimes has over a thousand nursing and doctor students listening in when I teach over Zoom.

So, in the end, I asked Kathie, "You were also a part of the REI team that pioneered our work in Nepal and Cuba; why is there such a special draw to Vietnam? Why Vietnam?"

Kathie said, "I feel at home in Vietnam, as if I belong here. I have over 100 friends, many of whom have been with me for almost 30 years, and the relationships are genuinely deep. I truly feel as though I am one of them and belong here, and it is a very special place!"

I realized that even though Kathie doesn't live here and comes once or twice a year, her transparent heart and love for her friends is most impactful. So, it is about one's heart for others that is enduring and powerful.

The next time you're in Vietnam, if you see a Canadian with a motorbike helmet that's slightly small for her with red hair flowing out of it, dodging thousands of other motorbikes and cars like the Vietnamese, loudly telling them in fluent Vietnamese to be careful, there is a great chance that's Kathie.