Embassy Experience

Today the team here were invited to the Irish embassy in Hanoi. I had never been to any embassy let alone an Irish one so it was another day of firsts for me. We met with the ambassador and the head of development to discuss our individual projects and the VIBE program as a whole. The Vietnam Ireland Bilateral Education Exchange program (VIBE) was developed as a catalyst to encourage and deepen third-level education linkages between Vietnamese and Irish institutes which will contribute to Vietnam’s socio-economic development. Ireland has been supporting Vietnam’s socio-economic development plans since 2005 and has also supported education and research here so the VIBE program is essentially a collaboration of the two. We discussed the VIBE program in the embassy, the research we will be conduction during our time here and the importance of these projects for rural Vietnam. We also talked about potentially having another meeting when we are finished our research to discuss further the relevance and importance of the VIBE program and what we have observed whilst conducting our research.