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  Kim Trinh is currently a junior at Whitman College. She is majoring in English (American Literature) and is a bilingual speaker of English and Vietnamese. Kim was born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City and immigrated to the United States along with her family in 2001. She joined the Prosthetics Outreach Foundation as a volunteer reporter and was in Vietnam interviewing amputee patients from December 20th, 2006 to January 9th, 2007.
It was a sunny and humid winter afternoon when I arrived at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi, Vietnam. Being a daughter of the South, I had never been beyond the green hills of Da Lat, never visited Hanoi, never seen Ho Guom except on pretty postcards or in colorful art books. I was excited and anxious to spend my Winter Break in Vietnam.
 For the following three weeks, I spent most of my time traveling to the Prosthetics Outreach Foundation's patients' houses, making trips back and forth between Hanoi and the surrounding areas, then made an extended visit to Yen Bai, Lao Cai, and Ba Vi. Spending an entire week in the mountains gave me a sense of admiration for the strength and persistence of the amputees I interviewed. Picturesque mountains proved to be a great challenge to travel around, and green hills that appeared so peaceful were obstacles to be conquered every day.  It was in these patients that the value of a prosthetic limb became clear to me. It helps them get back to their routine: it enables them to walk up the hill to tend their rice field in the morning and go back to their family in the afternoon.
Having the opportunity to meet and talk to these patients was a very humbling experience. Some of them cried as they told me their stories. Some smiled a quiet smile. Many simply gazed off into space as their mind took them back to that exact moment when the tree fell, when the train passed, when the car pulled away… If it was difficult for me to fight back tears while the details of their accidents were unfolded, it was a lot harder to stop smiling upon hearing the inspiring accounts of their learning to walk again. Hieu Tran, one of the patients I interviewed, was much better at describing such feeling than I was. "Falling down hurts a lot more when you are no longer a kid… But you learn to walk again, and this time, you really notice how hard it is." Those words echoed through my mind as I made my way back to Noi Bai Airport, and back to the United States, on a sunny and humid winter afternoon.
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