VACEP 3

Volunteering | Story-telling | Creative | Empathy | Scents


VACEP 3 (Vietnam Adverse Childhood Experience Program 3) was a project led by SCDI Vietnam, with the participation of Professors and Students from VinUniversity and Cornell University.

#Click here to check out our work
DATE
July - August 2023
TYPE
Volunteering
RoLE
Volunteer
Interviewer
Translator
DELIVERABLEs
Exhibitions & Stories to raise awareness
on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Skills
Interview
Story-telling
Creativity

I am responsible for interviewing the story-teller and write the Vietnamese version of the story. I also bring out the idea of telling the story through scents base on the story-teller name, and our team created four scent bottles for the exhibition to help the audience to listen to our story on a deeper level.

THE PROCESS
I. pre-interview phase:
As someone who always questions humanity, this was a great opportunity for me to learn more about people and their development journey. The program was split into 2 phases. The first phase was to prepare the participants with necessary knowledge to conduct interviews with the story-tellers and was conducted via Zoom. During this phase, I learned about ACEs, examining previous works and learn basic interviewing skills.

Based on the previous works, this program is the third and final phase of the VACEP series by SCDI. The goal of this program was to spread awareness of Adverse Childhood Experience through the untold stories from people around Hanoi (whom we call as story-tellers).
II. interview:
The second phase is to conduct the interview and write a story for the story-teller. In this offline phase, I had a chance to team up with 2 lovely Cornell students and another VinUni student. Together, we interviewed and wrote a story of our story-teller development.

Our story-teller was a middle-aged woman in Hai Ba Trung District with the history of being a drug addict and a drug seller. She also got into prison twice. Because this is a sensitive topic, being sensitive & ethical was important and always have to be prioritize. By the time we conduct our interviews, our story-teller has moved on from addiction for a while, and is currently working on other aspects of life. After four interviews, we were able to understand about her childhood and current life: from her childhood, family, education, social situations, to her current life and dream.

With that resource in hand, our team helped her write a biography about her character development, and created an exhibition booth for VinUni students and faculties. I am responsible for creating the Vietnamese version, and also help with the English version by translating or explaining Vietnamese history & culture so that the foreign students have a clearer idea of the story-teller journey.
III. Exhibition:
Our story-teller's name means "scents" in Vietnamese. Based on her name and her story, I thought of a white flow of scent that absorbed every odors from the environment surrounding it. This scent can travel everywhere, and it contain the characteristics of the environment it's in. This thought led me to came up with the idea of using scent bottles to help with story-telling. These bottles were used to "capture" the scents representing different stages in our story-teller difficult journey.
Takeaways
More or less, I believe that our work has raised awareness for people about the consequences of drugs and childhood experiences on a person's life.

For a short period of time, I believe that our team created a safe and comfortable environment for her to share about her life and talk about all the emotions and struggles she has. The details of our work can be found on SCDI website.
Key Learnings
Adverse Childhood Experience
Understand how environment, family, education affects one's thinking & behavior.
Multi-cultural experience
Experience in working with foreigners, translating and exchanging culture with people from different countries.
Interview Skills
Understand the interviewing process: Making the questions list, creating a safe & comfortable environment for interviewees, ethics toward marginalized individuals, observing the interviewees reactions & emotions to properly adjust the tempo and the sensitiveness of the topic.
Story-telling skills
Creating a biography that captures the essences of the interviews. Think about using scents bottle to help with story-telling.