Factories: A Few Thoughts

This blog will be short seeing as I'm exhausted and have a ton to do this week. Hopefully if I have time later I will come back to it.

This week we went to two factories, a Yamaha motorbike factory and a textile factory. As I was watching the workers at the textile factories i was sitting there thinking "I wonder what kind of people they are?" I mean the whole environment is very devoid of personality. There were easily 300 workers in the room sitting in rows of sewing machines. Other then the fact that each of these workers sewed a particular seam they could have been mixed up and nobody would notice. I know each of these workers has a story, but with the short amount of time we had I couldn’t really get to know anybody.

Much to my surprise I got to have long conversations with several factory workers the next day. At HAD’s 10 year anniversary I asked about 25 different deaf people what their jobs were. The tally: 1 tra da seller, 1 haircutter, 1 nail salon worker and 22 garment factory workers. I guess it’s an easy job for deaf people to get; it doesn’t require being fluent in Vietnamese and the factory managers all admitted they needed more workers. What was interesting though is that for the deaf it also seemed to be linked to a sense of community. There was a group of 8 deaf people around 50 years old who all worked in the same garment factory and seemed to be really close friends. There was another group of factory workers from outside of Hanoi. All of them were in their mid twenties and worked in the same factory and were part of the same deaf club. At least two of them were married to another factory worker. I guess working in the factories is one of the few places where you can work side by side a number of friends all day. Even if your hands are busy so you can’t talk, being surrounded by other deaf people is probably a comforting feeling.

Anyways I will write more later but for now I need to sleep. Goodnight.