It was our last night in Vietnam.  In the morning we would be heading out

to the airport for our return journey to the United States.

It had been a wonderful trip.  The people were so willing to help out and

really seemed to go out of their way for us.  This was possibly because we

were westerners and thus an unusual sight in the closed society of a

communist country.  I had made up my mind by then that that was the only

reason they would be so generous to us (as well as the money we brought).  I

had been overseas before, and the general consensus that I gathered from my

travels is that the people of the world, generally speaking of course, really don't

like us but they LOVE our money.  The Vietnamese were no different.  But

something was about to change my thinking in that area.

The dinner that night had been wonderful (as had all of the other meals

before that), and at the end of the evening we were all expected to give a

presentation of some sort reflecting on the adventure.

Some members of the class read poetry, some did a skit of some sort. I

chose to write a song and sing it.  Knowing that there were singers with

instruments at many restaurants in the Saigon area, I felt confident that I

would be able to find a guitar in time and convince the owner to let me

borrow it temporarily for my performance.

However, by the time the dinner came, I had yet to get a guitar.  I

thought that I would have to sing my song without one, when right in the

middle of dinner two musicians came down to play for us.

By the time dinner was over and the first of the skits began to play, I

looked for the musicians in the restaurant.  The manager, who spoke English

very well, explained that the musicians only worked for the restaurant from

time to time.  Thay made their money by traveling from restaurant to

restaurant playing for the tourists.  It seemed that I would be singing my

song without music after all.

But just before I was about to go on, in walked the manager with a brand

new guitar!  I couldn't believe it.  I was in the middle of one of the

poorest countries in the world, and the manager of the restaurant sent one of

his waiters across town to buy me a brand new guitar for me to play only one

song.  The gesture moved me tremendously.

My prowess with the guitar is rudimentary at best, and I was not able to

tune it properly (so the song sucked, but the fact that they would go

through that for me, someone that they didn't even know, was definitely a

testament to their graciousness as hosts.  I really don't think that that

kind of generosity existsvery often in American business, and if I ever do

decide to go into business for myself or become a manager of a business, I

will definitely take a page from the Vietnamese.