GARFIELD EDUCATOR TO TEACH ART IN VIETNAM
By Dan Pompili | Staff Writer Published:
A James A. Garfield art teacher knew she wanted to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship to teach abroad.
She just didn't know where she wanted to go.
Libby Frato-Sweeney was awarded the prestigious scholarship late last year. That she'll be going to Vietnam seemed to be a foregone conclusion, even a matter of destiny.
The Fulbright Scholarship's Distinguished Teachers Awards program, through the United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs gives her the opportunity to apply her craft in a foreign country while learning some of what that culture has to teach her about art, and then bring it back to teach children here at home.
When the participating countries were announced early last August, she was on vacation with her family in Oregon, and the options seemed to limit her choices to begin with.
"I remember looking at them and thinking I didn't feel very safe about many of the choices, like Israel and the Palestinian Territories, or Botswana which has the highest AIDS rates in the world, and others you had to be fluent in the language," she said. "So I crossed all those off and what was left were a lot of southeast Asian countries."
At breakfast that morning, her GPS guided the family to a nearby bakery, which was run by a Vietnamese family out of a tofu factory.
"These people were the nicest people I had met on the whole trip, pulling things out of the display case for us to sample and giving us a tour of the factory," she said. "And they told me 'if you go to Vietnam, you'll be treated almost like a god there, because teachers and learning are so revered'."
As if that wasn't enough of a nudge, an hour later they parked at a tourist site -- at the Bonneville Dam -- and a Buddhist nun exited the car parked next to them.
"We start talking, and again she was just the nicest person, and then we're taking selfies, and my kids have her conical hat on and she's wearing their baseball caps," Frato-Sweeney said. "And she told me she teaches peacefulness and mindfulness to kids in public schools in Vietnam. So on the very morning I'm trying to decide where to go, these Vietnamese people walk into my life."
On Aug. 23, Frato-Sweeney, her husband and four children will depart for the country most Americans remember as the site of our nation's most controversial war.
Frato-Sweeney though sees it differently.
"With it being the first year Vietnam was participating, I thought we have this history and it would be great to do something to help move past that," she said. "I'm not a diplomat but I can make art with kids and I thought it would be so wonderful to do that in Vietnam. I really like that we'll be immersed in a culture that from what I've read is 85 percent Buddhist. What I read says that people there are past the war and don't want to talk about it, and I have to believe that comes from their Buddhist faith, and living in the present."
Frato-Sweeney, who started at Garfield in 2000, will spend five months at the Hanoi National University of Education, a teaching college of about 23,000 students in a city of about 7 million people.
"We live in Hiram with 700 people, so I think if you just had the Frato-Sweeney family move to an American city of 7 million, that alone would be a culture shock," she said.
While immersing her family in Vietnamese culture, Frato-Sweeney said she will teach American and European art forms to the students in the elementary, middle and high schools located on the campus of the college, while learning Asian art forms like silk painting and lacquer-ware.
"I have a real lack of Asian art exposure," she said.
She plans to work on a big project while there, perhaps a large mural of a dragon -- a symbol that is ubiquitous in Vietnam.
While she teaches, her husband Ed will work out the logistics of the children's education.
The four kids will work on a blog they plan to post about the differences between the two countries, such as comparing American pizza to Vietnamese pies.
Frato-Sweeney admitted that the food is also something she's looking forward to trying.
"All of us are adventurous eaters, and they have a totally different way of cooking, where everything is all fresh," she said. "It's not a culture of keeping food, it's going to the market and buying food fresh, and cooking what you bought that day."
For the past several months, she's also been trying to learn the language, or at least enough to get by.
The country of 90.5 million people speaks the 13th most commonly spoken language in the world, behind French, which is also spoken along with Vietnamese and even some English.
"People tell me I won't have too much trouble communicating, they speak enough English there," she said. "But we have Vietnamese vocabulary flashcards hanging up all over the kitchen and it looks like some kind of crazy preschool."
She said the learning experience will be just as important for her kids as it is for her.
"I'm just excited about having my kids experience first hand what I always try to teach them, and that is that the way we do things here is not the way things are all over the world," she said.
She said she plans to keep her friends and family abreast of her experience via social media while she's there. The family will return in late January.
