LT teacher brings back lessons from Vietnam

A Lyons Township High School teacher vacationed half a world away in Vietnam this summer, but her thoughts often turned to the classroom.

Amy McNamara said she wanted to venture off the beaten path in mapping out a month-long tour of Vietnam and Cambodia.

Though the humanities teacher read a lot of books, she found, "there wasn't a lot of people to talk to. No one goes there."

Even her father, who served in Vietnam, was puzzled by her travel destination.

But McNamara found plenty to write home about and took hundreds of digital photos to share with her students concerning the region's history, culture, people and the ravages of war.

The trip's highlights included picnicking at a remote island waterfall, sleeping on a junk floating in Halong Bay, cooking in an open air kitchen and touring the Angkor Wat temples, Saigon, underground guerilla tunnels, Hanoi and Cambodia's infamous Killing Fields.

Traveling by boat up the Mekong Delta to the Cambodian border, McNamara said she thought long and hard about what American soldiers endured.

"It was excruciatingly hot at about 100 degrees with 95 percent humidity. I took two or three showers a day," she recalled. "The soldiers were in full gear with 80-pound packs in the jungle with no breeze. That would have been really intense."

By far, the most moving experience was touring the Killing Fields, where it's believed nearly one third of Cambodia's people were murdered by the Kmher Rouge regime of Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979.

"Every person we met had lost a family member, including our guide who lost his father and sisters," McNamara recalled.

The memorial stupa building at Choeung Ek, which is full of human skulls, was disconcerting, but far more chilling was a walk through one of the fields where bones and bits of clothing were still sticking out of the ground from an unmarked mass grave.

McNamara, a reading specialist, is eager to relate many of her experiences to the units she will be team-teaching in LT's freshman humanities program, a three-hour block of world history, reading and English.

One of the books freshmen will read for the unit on genocide is First They Killed My Father, Cambodian native Loung Ung's account of survival while losing most of her family.

"It was so sad but at the same time the spirit of the Cambodian people is amazing. They are the kindest, warmest people," McNamara observed. "Their poverty is incredible. Their economy has not even remotely recovered."

One aspect McNamara said she will find difficult to convey to her students is the lifestyle differences that travel illuminates.

"All the luxuries my students and I have and the privileges we take as rights, we have no idea how easy we have it," she said. "Street vendors would lie down next to the stands at night, pull a mosquito net over themselves and go to sleep on the sidewalk.

"The $12 I would spend on a manicure could feed a lot of people in a country like that. It just changes the way you think."