Destarte

Its been nearly a year since I have posted a blog entry.  The year was incredibly challenging, irrespective of my Peace Corps Service, but there are officially three months to go, and I want to attempt to share with my devoted friends and family some of the highlights of the past year and a little bit of the process of closing out my service.

I will start with one of the most rewarding experiences of the year. The biggest thing I worked on this year and perhaps the one solid, tangible monument to my Peace Corps Service is the SALC.  Pi Pop and I worked frantically on this project for two solid months and we both agree, the results are encouraging.

Self-Access Learning Centers are a common fixture in universities and language learning institutes.  During one of our many trainings a university professor came to speak to my group about how to create one and the elements that make up a good one.  The idea is for there to be a public space where motivated individuals have access to free materials so that control of their learning is in their hands.  This woman’s presentation made me think of Pi Pop immediately and all of the students over her thirty years of teaching that she has inspired to become scholars of the language.

When funding for small projects became available last August I quickly wrote a grant for a budget full of books, games and equipment and Pi Pop zealously translated it into Thai.  My new co-teacher, Pi Big, fresh out of university and possessing all the talents of the young, somewhat less zealously typed it all in Thai and we sent it off for approval.

While we were waiting for approval for our project we had to get all the details straight with our school principal.  He donated a classroom and a good portion of materials and money to the budget. Part of proposing projects and seeing them through is what is called, “community buy-in.”  Our principal showed his enthusiasm for the project and his desire to see it succeed by contributing the classroom, the paint, a new floor and the teacher’s desk that would go into the room.  Without such a stake in the project from the school itself, the project would have failed, or worse.  It could have become a monument to me– a truly lovely room with lots of high-quality educational materials that no one would ever use. Luckily, our going rate of 25 student visitors a day is assuring us that that is not the case.

The fact that we live in a rapidly-developing area played a key role in the kind of materials we had access to.  They recently installed a Toys ‘R’ Us in Hua Hin and money-in-hand once we were approved, Pi Pop and I set off for the game isle at this well-stocked establishment.

I think as children we all dream of walking into Toys ‘R’ Us with handfuls of money and walking out with bags and bags.  In this instance the feeling of satisfaction was magnified knowing how much our students stood to benefit from access to a few good toys.  Walking out of Toys ‘R’ Us and heading for the bookstore we could barely carry said bags, filled with Guess Who, Scrabble Jr., Boggle Jr., Mastermind, alphabet puzzles and all manner of word games.   At the bookstore we stocked up on six levels of readers, all with Thai glossaries and comprehension activities in the back.   This is particularly important because officially a library is not a self-access material, since there is no way to measure whether someone has improved or not.  Knowing this though, Pi Pop, who loves literature, and I were not willing to forgo a library.
In fact the library is a a favorite place for many of our students.  Borrowing from an old pre-literacy/beginning- literacy technique I learned during my time working in preschools, we set up the library to be as inviting as possible.  We selected a large bookshelf of warm-colored wood, and placed it catty-corner to a wall of windows.  We sectioned off another side with two low metal shelves so that only one side is open and the space is quiet and set apart from the rest of the room.  We layed down a carpet and purchased some nice fluffy pillows for getting cozy and then arranged the books by level.  One of my senior girls has spent hours cuddled up with a stack of books, slowly working her way through them one at a time, dictionary at her side.  Watching this I realized how cultural curling-up with a good book is, as most Thais will opt to spend time talking with other people when they are free. I also realized how we all stand to benefit from a little more of one or the other.

Arranging the rest of the room was simple. We loaded all the games onto a shelf, along with some phonics games we have made by hand over the past two years and set up another corner for a listening center.  We open the room up three times a day, and I can officially say that no other Peace Corps Volunteer in the history of the organization has taught so many kids to say, “Does your person have a mustache?”

While working on the SALC I learned so much and made so many observations, that it is difficult to remember them all.  Grant-writing and project management are invaluable professional skills and I am still in the process of mastering them, though I am running out of time to practice them in Thailand.

We received about eight-hundred dollars for our project in Thai government funds and while justifying money for games was a little tricky, I almost cannot articulate the value of these materials.  I realized one afternoon as Pi Pop and I were training the English teachers in how to play the games,  that high-quality, creative-thinking based toys are not something my teachers had seen before.  They were so cut throat at Scrabble Jr. I feared for my safety at times and the bright pictures on the board, the sturdy letter tiles and game board and the specific rules for each game intrigued them.

This same concept goes for the students as well only moreso, beacuase they are still children.  My class of eighteen-year- olds shows up en masse every time we open the door.  Most head straight for the shelves of games, having never played with such toys before.

Critical thinking skills are deeply imbeded in the games we are all so familiar with from childhood and the importance of play is acknowledged by most families and certainly in all pre-school classrooms in the United States.  Games like Guess Who, Scrabble Jr. and Mastermind ask students to employ higher-level thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, comparison and experimentation and I honestly think it is the mental exercise over the desire to practice English that keeps the students coming back.

I admit that I am sometimes afraid to try to explain Mastermind to new students that come in because my language skills are limited and at first it is tricky to understand.  The students surprise me every time though.  Just when I think they are too frustrated and want to quit I will find them meticulously looking through each row of pegs and explaining out loud exactly what their previous thinking was, in order to work out what the next best move will be.

For me watching the learning process as it is happening has always been the most exciting thing about teaching.  Seeing students walk away with new knowledge and experience, knowing it will always be with them, motivates me to keep teaching new kids to play Mastermind.  There is more to the SALC than just this though. Selfishly, I find the space relaxing.  I unlock the door to the SALC and immediately release a long exhale.  Inside the room we are not limited to what a textbook or a class period can do for us, we can let go of the reigns and let the students take over.  We can allow them to be driven by what is inside them; the voice that keeps pushing them to try again, that entices them with the idea that there is always more to know.

Pi Pop and I prepared for our Christmas extravaganza with the flourish that some schools might put into preparing for things like Sport’s Day or landing on the moon.  She continually iterated to me that this year was going to “extra-special.”  I think she wanted to do it up right because there was real American around for guidance, but I also suspect she wanted to make a big deal out of Christmas for my sake.  Hence the afternoon we left school in the school van and went driving all over our town and Hua Hin looking for the biggest fake Christmas tree on the penninsula and all the proper trimmings.

We planned a morning of informative speeches, singing and really silly games.  At first I was unsure about this, I had never planned a morning’s worth of activities for six classes of kids before and had certainly never stood up in front of a thousand kids to explain why we celebrate Christmas.  But when a Thai person wants you to get up and speak English in front of the entire school, there is simply no getting out of it.  So I put together something about being with your family, eating a big meal and giving gifts as a sign of appreciation for the people you love. We asked our eleventh graders to sing a Christmas song for every one at this same morning ceremony and in spite of there being several pop-pier options to choose from they picked The Little Drummer Boy.  And so then I had to write another speech explaining the story of the little drummer boy, though I don’t think anyone understood this either.  Pi Pop was thrilled however when I presented her with the cd of 24 Christmas classics, not a one of them Jingle Bells.  She told me excitedly, “No one in Thailand has ever heard any of these songs!!”  And so they were piped through the halls at school for several weeks before Christmas.

While I believe cross-cultural experiences are rich and rewarding for the most part, there was simply no way to translate my own feelings and traditions surrounding Christmas to a thousand Thai students.  So, as I said, we set up our Christmas Tree in the gym and planned to play a lot of really silly games all morning.  We had two games of “Pin the Nose on Rudolf,” going (just try and explain that cultural icon…) and our students were able to draw and paint some excellent Rudolfs based on a picture I printed offline. One of the teacher’s had her mother sew us up five Christmas stockings for “Fill the Stocking Relay,” where teams of students had to race to fill the stockings up with little balls. (Direct quote from the teacher who manned that activity, “You put the ball in the shoes.  Who is first, winner.”)

We had “Pass the Present” a form of Musical Chairs/Hot Potato, that I thought was going to be boring, but was the most popular game of the day and there was a long table full of coloring pages, word finds and crosswords that was busy all morning.  The crowning activity, though we couldn’t get everyone to play, was by far “Santa Costume Relay.”  We had two Santa costumes and two stacks of boxes wrapped up like presents. Two teams of students would line up, the first person in each line would don the costume, race across the room to grab a present and race back.  They would then have to take the entire costume off and the second person would have to put it on and repeat the race to grab a present.  The first team to grab ten presents was the winner.  You had to be there, but this game was HILARIOUS.

We gave away probably twenty pounds of candy at all the activities, which seems like a logical substitute for giving out presents but really just added a Halloween-y sort of feeling to the festivities.  By noon all the kids had headed off to lunch and Pi Pop treated the Foriegn Language Department to a delicious lunch at a nearby restaurant and sealed the deal with a Christmas cake.  All in all an exhausting and sugar-filled morning.

At the county school things were a little more slapped together, what with Sports Day the week before and all the frenzy that had surrounded it.  The day before we planned to have Christmas Activities I printed out most of the coloring pages and worksheets myself and spent the whole day in a coma of craftiness trying to make five Christmas Stockings out of red and green cardboard, cotton balls and string.  The results were probably the craftiest things I have ever done and I discovered, a little too late, that Thailand does indeed have hole punchers.

We had “Fill the Stocking Relay,” with candy canes this time, “Pin the Nose on Rudolf,” the drawings similarly excellent thanks to Thai kids’ incredible drawing skills, coloring pages and worksheets and the distribution of another several tons of candy.  We had set aside the afternoon for these silly games and after the allotted two hours I was completely exhausted, but satisfied.  All the teachers had pitched in to help and seemed to have a lot of fun doing so.  Thais love silly games, this much you can be sure of.

There was a long period of sitting around eating junk food after school that day, but I was in no mood to dawdle.  I got home as soon as I could, packed up the last bits of what I would need and secured a ride to the bus station from my landlord. My preparedness was a bit over-done of course, since my eight o’clock bus showed up at nine-thirty, but I was just as excited to get on it when it did show up and begin my Christmas Holiday down south.

The bus driver dropped me off, as I have come to expect, on the side of the highway at about 5am and my friends Kelly and Renee came out to help me carry my bags full of food and presents to the house.  Kelly, one of my two closest friends here and I put our heads together for a half an hour or so and went over all the details of the next few days and then I fell asleep.  I woke up at ten and hit Kelly’s beach with two of the girls that were already there.  We were just finishing our lunch back at Kelly’s when all the other guests arrived all at the same time.  In all we had seventeen people for our Christmas Eve dinner of linguine primavera. The evening’s event was a White Elephant gift exchange, and you had to contribute something that a Thai person had given you that you wanted to share with someone else.  I was happy to extend my own joy to my friends by giving away such treasures as a set of Russian nestling dolls made in Thailand, two cans of aloe syrup– to be poured over kidney beans for a sweet treat, and a purse that it turns out everyone else actually really wanted.  Hilarious gifts were exposed, including a mug shaped like the head of a Native America Chief and a set of yellow and orange wind chimes made up of little porclain bears.

The plan for Christmas was to hit the beach, but the monsoon season was lingering when we woke up and so all energy went into preparing a fat breakfast and a short time later we started cooking dinner.  We had a huge Mexican Christmas complete with homemade tortillas, stuffed with homemade guacamole and salsa, refried beans, cheddar cheese and vegetables.  There was plenty of our late afternoon feast to around for all twenty of us (more folks showed up that day,) and after a lot of napping we did make it out to the beach for swimming and more laying around and talking.

That evening we russelled up a ton of Thai food from town and stuffed ourselves again, then opened presents late-night, Secret Santa style.  I was told by my friend Peter that he was my Secret Santa and that my really nice present that I am going to like a lot had been left on a bus in a northern city nearly at the opposite end of the country.  Another friend was able to rescue it and I look forward to finding out what it is this coming week, but in the meantime I was really happy to receive a sheet of Imodium from his Peace Corps medical kit and two unused double A batteries.

On the twenty-sixth Kelly arranged for a truck to pick us up and drive us out to a local waterfall.  The spot was beautiful and we were cheerfully climbing around on the rocks when we got hit by another rain storm.  The eleven or so of us that were left huddled under a covered picnic table and ate the snacks Kelly’s brought until the rain stopped and we went to town for hot bowls of noodles.  I left Kelly’s the following morning and headed home, knowing I would need a Sunday to prepare for the upcoming two days of school and five days of New Year’s.

The days leading up to Christmas saw me through a range of sad emotions.  For twenty-four years I have eaten the same things and been with the same people every single year, but when Christmas Eve and Christmas Day came I found that I was alright for the most part.  I missed being home and seeing the people that I love, but I think I can best express it in what I said to my brother on Christmas Day, “All in all, if I was a different person, with a different family, this would have been one of the most fun Christmases of my life.” But of course, when it comes to my family, no tropical beach or  most lovable group of Peace Corps Volunteers can ever compare.

You can check out all the pictures of silly games and beaches on my photo site by clicking on the collection titled, Three Christmases.

Sport’s Day is a rite of passage for every Peace Corps Thailand volunteer, whether or not you are a teaching volunteer.  There will always be a school nearby and you will always be asked to participate in, oversee, coach a team or present awards at a Sport’s Day.  You will most likely asked to do these things at more than one Sport’s Day.  Most likely, whatever projects, teaching units, telephone calls, bathroom breaks you were engaged in at the moment will be paused, in order to prepare for Sport’s Day.  I am no exception and you can check out the photos on my flickr site.

At Pi Pop’s school there are a thousand kids and they play against each other, so six weeks of preparation for a day of competition is unnecessary, at least I haven’t seen any such preparation in the last few weeks.  My country school however has about two hundred kids and is situated in close proximity to about five other little country schools with similar populations.  Each year one of these schools sponsors Sport’s Day activities on the fields of the local municipal office, and, is it any wonder, this year, my first year, it was our school who sponsored this auspicious day of games.

About six weeks ago the practicing began.  We stopped holding our adult class after school, on hold until January, so that each teacher could coach a group of kids.  Things looked bleak for our school in the beginning, and they never really seemed to look any better.  About three weeks ago the focus of the preparations changed from actually practicing sports to putting together the opening ceremony.   Our students had recently won an aerobic dance competition as part of one of a project called, “To Be Number 1,” sponsored by one of the princesses.  The winning routine was sure to find its way into the ceremony. But first there were instruments and drum majors to be dug out and dusted off, trophies, medals and uniforms for the teachers to be bought (it took me several days to convince my teachers that I would indeed fit into a medium sized shirt and pants, in spite of all their vague gesturing in the area of my heart, I managed to convince them and only had to model the Size M for every single teacher before they were satisfied that I actually do know my own size,) and little girls to dressed in princess and angel outfits.

I showed up to school two weeks ago as the flag salute was ending and about sixty kids scrambled out the field and started “aerobic dancing,” marching and twirling pretend batons.  I asked no less than three teachers, “Will we be studying English today?” and got three distinctly different answers.  The first teacher I asked, the hefting overall master of everything, Pi L. gave me a definitive, “Yeah, yeah, yes.”  The second teacher told me that for these two weeks we didn’t have to study anything and the third teacher looked at me blankly and then rushed off to inspect the lines of dancers.  We did study some English last week, in my infinite wisdom I threw together a short unit about sports.

All the preparation culminated in an Olympic-like event this Tuesday. I am not kidding, a kid ran around the perimeter of the field with a torch to get things started.  Field day in America is easy for Americans to understand.  We are going to play games– some sportsbut mostly games and eat barbaque at school on a nice warm spring day and not have any homework.  I expect Thais understand Sports Day, but for foreigners it is one of those mysteries that begs questions like, “If you are so concerned about me forgetting to wear my sport’s outfit, why not come over and help me get dressed?”and “Why did you call me repeatedly to remind me to get up at five am when you were never going to show up earlier than seven thirty?” And of course, “If this is Sport’s Day, why are so many ninth grade girls wearing fish net stockings?” I climbed in next to a huge pot of green beans and green eggplants in the back of Pi L.’s car and whirred off to find the answers.

The teachers made a big todo of me in my properly fitted polo and sport’s pants as we showed up at the field in time for the parade.  Pi L. was so late picking me up because by 7:30 am she had already chopped a million vegetables, cooked a vat of rice, driven around picking up tables, chairs, trophies and medals, donned her own polo and sport’s pants and shouted to Pi Bert to zoom over to get me.

The fishnets are still a mystery.  Each school had a marching band and majorettes and little kids carrying signs in a long parade from the parking lot to the playing fields.  Why our majorettes were dressed up like hookers is hard to explain.  Thais like a lot of make-up, they love flashy dance outfits (counter to everything we understand about conservative Thai dress,) and I guess fish nets and high heeled boots on a 13 year-old-girl just truly does not convey the same stigma here as it might in the west.  Our majorettes led the band and the athletes proudly out to the field all the same, and then hopped out of sight so the aerobic dance team could break into an energetic rendition of, “To Be Number 1.”  Our principal made a speech, gifts were offered to the local officials present and the games began.

Or should I say that after three hours of parades and dance routines and speeches, some preschoolers hit the field and started kicking around a soccer ball.  At first I thought this was utterly ridiculous, and then I realized that they were not running back and forth aimlessly, not stopping mid-field to wave to their moms or make daisy chains, but that these four and five-year-olds knew exactly what they were doing.   And I am proud to say that our preschoolers, my students for fifteen minutes every Monday morning, beat the training pants off those other kids.

Then everything stopped for lunch.  Pi L., Pi Bert and the other teachers from our school kicked into high gear serving up hot, homemade food to all the local officials and serving them fresh fruit and cold water.  We handed out eight hundred styrofoam box lunches to the kids and I enjoyed a plate of rice, hard boiled eggs and a chili sauce made with shallots.  When we arrived in the morning the teachers kept asking me if I wanted breakfast, over and over and over again, as the morning wore on, they kept asking with more urgency.  It wasn’t until the rush to accomodate the “Big Potatoes” at lunch that I realized they wanted me to eat early so they wouldn’t have to feed me while all this was going on.  Its been ten months and my teachers are still not sure how I manage to feed myself every night.

Finally at about one pm, races, degraw and volley ball started up.  The races were exciting and I noted it was always the kid pulling from the back that made it through the red ribbon first.  Later in the afternoon I witnessed our high school boys serve up two other schools at volley ball, but far more exciting was when our sixth grade girls stuffed thier opponents at the very same game, even though by the time it was their turn to play the crowd had largely moved on to football.  I stayed with the two teachers who had coached them and a few others to witness their exciting victory, cheering wildly with every bump or set, all the while wondering, who were these students who seemed to somehow have learned how to play volleyball well while sleeping last night?

I should mention here that the first time I saw one of the boys kick the volleyball over the net and score a point for his team, I busted out laughing and turned incredulously to my teachers.  Apparently, in Thailand you can use your feet in volleyball.  The explanation they gave me was, “Its because they play degraw.”  Which is interesting because degraw is like volleyball, only you use your feet to kick a smaller ball over a net and presumably it is illegal to use your hands.  As I said, mysteries abound.

The day rounded out with two high stakes football matches, out of which our school emerged as the overall victors. I was paraded out at the end to help the Big Potatoes give out medals and trophies.  There was one of those platforms with three stumps and everything.  Our school walked away with three or four trophies and scores of medals and our teachers were victorious and exhausted at the end of the day.

I marveled at the phenomenon to Pi Pop this morning at her school.  I told her I watched those kids play sports every day for six weeks and I was certain they were terrible.  Then I said I thought everyone else was greng jai-ing our school.  Meaning, the other schools let us win so we wouldn’t loose face because we were the sponsors this year.  She laughed heartily at me and said, “Can’t be.  On Sport’s Day no one will greng jai anyone because everyoe wants that trophy.  Just think, if your students are really that bad, it just means those other schools are terrible!”

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I think of Bangkok as one of the most exciting cities in the world. Attempting to cross the street at any hour on any day means a rush of adrenaline comparable to what you might experience on the Superman ride at Great Adventure. I have lived in a few cities since leaving home to go to college– Providence is a quiet town, Aix-en-Provence gives the distinct air of leisure, Burlington, it can be said, excites people who love hypothermia and in Philadelphia there is constant excitement. But Bangkok is a city so full of people, of contradiction, of transience and transition that every time I step out of the van that lets me out under Victory Monument, climb the steps to the overhead walkway that overlooks the treacherous circle around Victory Monument and breath in the stank of exhaust and sewage, I can’t help but feel excited. It doesn’t matter how many times in the last ten months I have done just that. I still get excited.

A weekend in Bangkok holds the promise of, obviously, much cavorting among volunteers, along with the promise of American food or Japanese food or Indian food or sea food from across the world or most exciting, some of the best Middle Eastern food in the world. (Outside of the Middle East, I am assuming.) The pursuit of the best Middle Eastern food in Thailand can sometimes lead to awkward situations. In short- sleeved shirts and shorts my friend Kelly and I located one of the most authentic places on Soi 3/1 off of the longest road in Bangkok, which also names the area, Sukhumwit. She had been there before with her boyfriend, so it took us a minute to realize as we debated hummus over grape leaves or heck, why not get the big platter which has two kinds of hummus and grapes leaves and tabbouleh besides?!, to realize that we were surrounded by stern looking men and female servers covered from head to toe. No one said anything, we devoured our food, absolutely the best hummus I have ever had, and the proprietor even cheerfully bid us farewell and come again. Some of the boys told us later that there is a dining room for women on the second floor, which I am certain we will look for the next time.

Food and company being the biggest draws to Bangkok it is easy, especially after nearly a year, to forget that all the strange sights and smells (in this case mostly unpleasant) are easily forgotten as anything but typical. So I decided to take a few photos while we were all in town for Thanksgiving and you can check them out on my flickr site to get a taste of things yourselves. It is common in Thailand, in Bangkok or at home to walk down streets lined with carts full of food. Street vendors sizzle up Pad Thai, roast processed meat on mini grills, deep fry bananas and even mix up something called Rotee, which I heard was an Indian dessert that Thais love, basically a crepe, usually stuffed with bananas. Trays full of lottery tickets are also a common site, along with street musicians, kids begging for money or trying to sell flowers or souvenirs and in Bangkok of course hundreds and hundreds of people.

These hundreds of thousands of people drive lots and lots of cars, so that traveling in Bangkok by bus or by taxi is a laborious process. Bangkok isn’t much of a walking city, what with narrow sidewalks, open grates along the way, people selling things on either side of you and the sheer volume of bodies, so you weigh your options and either push through all the people and hoof it or grab a taxi and watch the meter tick up, up, up as your taxi driver sits immobile in a sea of cars, buses and motorcycles. The sky train in Bangkok is by far the most efficient way to travel, but it covers perhaps a third of the city, while the metro is equally efficient and even quieter, but covers only a quarter of the city at best.

When taking a taxi you not only risk being stuck in traffic for much longer than in it would take you if you lived in some other country with a different perspective on urban planning; Bangkok is the only city I’ve been in where cab drivers consistently turn down your money because they don’t want to deal with you. Sometimes they will say that where you want to go is too far, sometimes they will say they don’t know where you are going and sometimes they will pick you up anyway and then yell at you for not knowing where you are going when they get lost. And of course oftentimes they will drive you far out of your way in order to squeeze a couple extra bucks out of your foreign face.

At this point I have stayed in quite a few hotels in Bangkok, a few in the Sukhumwit area that are popular with volunteers, one near the Khao San road area—which is the dirty backpacker capitol of the world—and recently one around the corner from Thanon (road) Rama I, which is where the four huge foreign-store-filled malls are and where MBK, a huge Thai style mall and Pantip Plaza, the technology shopping mecca of Southeast Asia are located. The malls in the Siam area attract tons of tourists and are immaculately clean, boast something like four movie theatres, English book stores, huge food courts and stores upon stores of expensive Western stuff. This area I think highlights Bangkok’s complexity well. Rich people and middle-class tourists flock to this area for shopping, while just outside the malls people are on the street all day trying to sell hair bands for 10 baht a pack. If Sukhumwit is interesting for its cultural diversity, than this area makes you think about the enormous socio-economic gaps still present in Thailand. People on either side of the gap inhabit the same blocks daily, but then when you compare this with the status of most volunteers’ communities, it seems like if you’ve made it to Bangkok you have somehow made it. Which is precisely why so many people desert their villages, small towns and cities and move to Bangkok, either seasonally or permanently, in order to find “steady” or “better” work and in general to crowd the sidewalk.

Lately it has been taking only about 2 hours and 45 minutes for me to get to Bangkok and so I go just often enough to blow all of my living allowance for the month and then return home . I then have to ration off my cereal and water for another three weeks. I always have the best intentions, but every month it’s the same. This weekend I will be staying home, but on Wednesday I head south to Kelly’s house for our Christmas celebration! Let’s hope I have enough cash to get home afterwards!

I have been neglecting my blog and while I am often in contact with friends and family through email and phone calls I haven’t been able to give the sort of overview type statement about things in Thailand that the blog allows for.  I have been meaning to write about my brother’s visit, talk about some of the other real characters that are part of my life here and comment on my day to day, but either there is too much, life is too full and busy or as now with school out for the next three weeks, too little.

I got back a few days ago from a weekend with some darling PCVs in Krabi, on the Andaman Coast.  Living as I do on the Gulf of Thailand side and spending an unconscionable amount of time in Hua Hin keeping my tan glowing ever-just-so-much, I really wanted to check out the west coast where the water is said to be a certain shade of teal and of course so clear you can see straight through to enormous translucent jelly fish, just as they make to stun you.  

I attempted to secure a seat on a bus bound for Krabi by riding my bike up to the ”bus stop” in my town the day before.  My aspirations towards western-style preparedness became a two-day afffair involving several trips to said bus stop where the woman who mans a desk with handwritten list of bus times and destinations and a cell phone told me more than once that “there is no bus going to Krabi.”  To which I responded more than once, “But we live on the highway that goes there??  And I have seen these buses.”  To which she responded, “No, no, if you want to go to Krabi you have to go stand in front of the municipal office, you know, near the new Tesco Lotus.”
I fell into a state of exasperation.  I knew there are buses that pass right by this bus stop, have seen them many times and could not understand why the traditional Thai-style waiting for a bus method did not seem to apply in this instance.  Why couldn’t I, as I had so many other times before, stand at the bus stop till the bus to Krabi came by and then jump into the street, wave my arms frantically and  jump into the bus as it slowed down?

It all seemed so impossible, I needed a bus ticket for a bus that would clearly drive by my stop, but the woman wouldn’t sell me one; I mused it all over as I rode towards home and then at home I kept on musing, why are logistical things so difficult in Thailand?  I sat in the house pondering when a long, “Hellloooo!” broke my thoughts and I realized it was Pi Pop at the gate with a big package from America.  I let her and Pi O, her constant companion, inside and we three together marveled over all the lovely end-of-summer sale items my mom had managed to squish into a relatively small box for me.  After the fashion show I mentioned my Krabi predicament and Pi Pop of course offered to go to the bus station with me, to which I said, “No, no, I don’t want to take up any more of your time,” to which she responded with classic Pi Pop logic, “But, Angie, don’t you think it will be easier if we help you?”

I couldn’t argue with this and Pi Pop indeed did get her hands on a more in-the-know bus stop attendant who sold me a ticket for a very lush overnight bus to tropical paradise and between the two of them and the bus jockey who called me every hour on the hour before the bus left they got me to Krabi.

In Krabi I met up with my two best girlfriends and a range of other volunteers, some who live nearby and some who were also vacationing like us.  We stayed at a beach called Ao Nang and got up in the mornings and took a long tail motor boat for 100 baht out to an isthmus called Ralaiy, where I sun-bathed on the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen.

The water is indeed a spectacularly clear aquamarine, the jelly fish, though we didn’t see many, the biggest and most bizarre I have seen and the soft sand and company were simply priceless.  Enormous rock formations jut out of the water, while the beaches are rimmed with sheer, mountains and rocky cliffs.  I cannot confirm or deny that some cliff jumping, of a very mild, not very high sort did or did not happen.

Back in Ao Nang we took part in a half day of rock climbing for about 800 baht and the low low price of having your Thai guide smoke a ciggarette and flirt with your friends while you hung suspended by your finger tips just high enough to scare you.  As my friend pointed out before we embarked, its not like you sign any waivers or anything.

I’ll direct you now to the small sampling of pics from the weekend, I posted them on my flickr site, mostly for those of you living vicariously through me.

The summer, and I use the term in the western sense, I so anticipated has passed and it has taken me a few weeks to feel settled again and ready to sort things out and post them.  I have posted new photos that go as far back as the beginning of July when I had a wonderful visit with two Returned Peace Corps Volunteers from Honduras who just happened to be riding their bicycles right through my neighborhood. The most recent photos are from this past weekend when I headed south south south to help my friend Kelly out with a teacher training she put together about Critical Thinking and Project Based Learning.  My brother’s visit is in between along with some “I want to be …” drawing from my  fourth graders.

I thought the rainy season was going to start in July and it certainly did rain most afternoons promptly at four for about a half and hour, but this week in mid-September has made the rainy season real to me.  I planned all day to spend a few hours at this the most efficient internet connection in town and couldn’t be put off by the down pour that came as soon as I put my shoes on this afternoon.  I also have no food and really couldn’t stretch it one more night without going to the market.  I have been here for about and hour and I am finally drying out, but as soon as I leave its going to be the same story, thanks Dad and Les for my rain coat, it makes me think I’m untouchable and that pneumonia is for people without rain coats.

Next week is final exam week at both of my schools and the following week is a week of scouting activities, everyone in Thailand is a scout for life, and then magically there is three weeks of vacation right smack in the middle of the school year.  I will be out of school from the second week of October all the way until November begins and it feels like being handed a platinum credit card that you don’t have to pay the bill for.  What to do with all this time?  Where to go, who to see?  Pi Pop and I are planning a lot of reworking of our work this semester and of course a lot of bike rides.  My friends all have different plans and since we’ve done the Hua Hin thing, (doing it again this weekend!) I will probably take advantage of a weekend or two to see something new.  After all these absurdly long vacations come but twice a year!

I have to say I can’t believe that the first Haskell Day at Monmouth Park Racetrack that I miss in seven years gets dubbed “The Year of the 10 Cent Supafecta.” Peace Corps life is full of sacrifices that you never even anticipate. Maybe the reason Jeanette won big at the track this year is because I wasn’t there to convince her we should pool our funds.

I spent the morning scrubbing every last corner of my house today, partly in the spirit of reassimilation– all told I have been away for about three weeks– and partly in preparation for the arrival of my very best big brother. I anticipate an estatic reunion next week when I meet, barrring any unforseen hang-ups, Dan at the arrivals gate next week and we take to the streets of Thailand with typical Wychean exuberance and style. Just have to keep him from getting food poisoning or some tropical parasite for ten days . . .

Our pre-service training pre-gaming in Hua Hin was forty-eight hours of volunteer madness, including everything from hours on the beach, burning our outer layers, dipping into the great green gulf and eating what is, to date, the best pizza I have had so far in Thailand. (Pizza Corner!) My dad reminded me of one of the ways I am lucky to be here by saying, “Enjoy it, you can’t have fun like that anywhere anymore.” And its true that a two-thirty am swim goes over way bigger here than it does on Long Beach Island. Random, but charming French boy in tow, my friends and I combed the streets of that great farong haven until the wee hours and were shocked to find check out time long passed when some of us stirred the next morning.

I already mentioned our night in Bangkok and bidding farewell to my good friend, I will note here that she is thriving after just two weeks at home and never more certain of her decision.

Hua Hin weekend was a mere taste of the insanity that would ensue when everyone got back together and I feel certain the hotel staff, and particularly the karaoke bar staff at the hotel was happy to see the last of us.

Training was two weeks long and it literally took a full seven days for people to calm down after the release of being with other volunteers. Perhaps this is one of the most rewarding things about Peace Corps, or maybe I should say necessary things about Peace Corps, the enormous network of people you can reach out to at any time. The spider web of people who are all going through similar emotional swings, albiet often times in many different ways.

I certainly learned from being with everyone that I have no right to complain about anything, with a fluent English speaker as my best friend at site, plenty of access to technology, a huge resort with all the foreign food I could hope for and most amazingly water that comes out of the faucet, every time I turn it on.

We reviewed development tools, participated in a four-day project development workshop and studied Thai for six hours a day during the second week. In our program specific sessions we teachers got advice from 119 volunteers who are rounding on their last six months of service and we exchanged ideas from our first four months in our Thai classrooms. We got more shots, were updated on the political situations in Bangkok and specifically on the Thai-Cambodian border, and reviewed Peace Corps policy in intricate detail.

Hours were spent at a nearby pool, swimming laps and being lazy, while each evening the town’s night market was invaded by hungry white people looking for papaya salad and barbequed chicken. A final weekend in Bangkok after the training gave closure to the two weeks of togetherness and we parted ways until our Mid-Service Conference, coming up in January.

Events didn’t end there though, that Sunday a few of us 120 and several 119 checked into a ridiculously nice hotel in Bangkok to attend the annual Gender and Development Conference sponsorded by our very own Gender and Development Global Initiative Group. Lasting friendships between 120 and 119 were forged and I will go into the details of the conference itself at another time.

A supafecta of my own of sorts, and a three weeks I will remember for years to come, but would I have traded it all for that after-Haskell feast of linguine and Uncle Ben’s own pesto??? Perhaps I should just be grateful I don’t actually have to answer that question.

I was last writing about my dad’s visit and how we were treated like royalty by the teachers I work with during his stay. Its unfortunate because the royal treatment continually steered us clear of the things I wanted my dad to experience, the rich moments of my day where I am most connected to my my teachers and students.

On the day in question we gummed an awkward lunch of Thai delicacies in the school library with the school director and one other teacher. We perservered however because I had been telling my dad all week about the fourth graders, how they fill my life with joy, how much they love English and their lightening quick language skills. I built the fourth graders up to be perhaps the most adorable students in the history of the TCCO project and after a tough morning of being ditched by the third-grade teacher, my dad was psyched to see some real co-teaching action. In the free period before I teach fourth grade we chatted with the fourth grade teacher and my dad helped us work on some materials for the next week and my excitement grew, an opportunity to share with my dad something so authentically satisfying about my Peace Corps service was near at hand.

It was literally seconds before English hour for the fourth grade when another teacher came running at me, enormous grin glinting, arms flailing. “Angie!” she called to me breathlessly.

“I have great news! My director says we can leave school early today, we can take your father to see the summer palace of our beloved king Rama the VI!!”

I’ll just say that we made a point of saying “Hello,” to the fourth-graders, who had waited, just to the point of bursting, for weeks, to meet my father, before we spent another entire afternoon driving around in the car.

Tuesday was the brass ring we were reaching for all along, a day set aside for just me, my pops and the ever-gracious double H. We grabbed the bus early in the morning up to what I consider my resort town now and spent the whole day exploring the tiny back streets of farong heaven and of course laying on the beach sipping cocktails.

That night my school director took us out to a wonderful meal at the talay (sea) side and we stuffed ourselves on sea food to the point of immobility. On Wednesday my dad got to see my high school and on Thursday morning we headed into Bangkok with Pi Pop and Pi Nit, my neighbor, in the school van (official school business, obviously) and I showed my dad around the Peace Corps Office. He hit it off with our Peace Corps Medical Officer, and I had to cut the PCMO off from talking about the job too much, lest my stepmom should trace the blame back to me when my dad runs away to work for Peace Corps.

That night we went to Rajodoemen Stadium to spectate some Muay Thai, and were we both not so exhausted we would have been climbing the fences around the cheap seats to get a better look like everyone else.

I sent the man off at about four the next morning and took a van home, only to feel, just being honest here, the crushing emptiness that follows when your dad comes to visit and then goes home. I am lucky to have such a great dad, lucky that our relationship is so strong and I am lucky to have the gift of his perspective. He was able to point out moments when I needed to be more gracious to my community members, talked over saftey issues with me, reminded me of course, to keep my wits about me, and bless his heart, gave me all his left-over baht.

We are at Pre-Service Training Part II a few hours north of Bangkok, in a sleepy little town getting educated up on project development, learning more Thai and of course catching up on everyone’s business over the last few months. (Not that news doesn’t travel faster here than a bullet train full of sinners heading straight for heck . . .)

The number one most rewarding thing about coming together of course is seeing the group and getting the dish on people’s work, their sites, their love lives, etc. A few of my friends and I got started in Hua Hin about four days early thanks to Buddhist lent and I am still peeling from the sunburn and recovering from the late nights swimming in the gulf of Thailand and eating farong food. After Hua Hin the nine of us hit up Bangkok where most of our group was already taking advantage of the holiday. It was in Bangkok that I straightened my hair for the first time since setting foot in Thailand, met my best Peace Corps friend’s boyfriend and had to say good-bye to my best Peace Corps friend and wish her luck as she heads back stateside to see what life in America will bring.

Teary embraces were given and then the rest of us headed to the Peace Corps office to catch the bus to training. More on all this at a later date.

I am sitting in the internet cafe in town, the quiet one, where the least kids come, and I am not leaving until I am good and ready.  I am aiming now to put down my first thoughts about my dad’s visit, the thousands of singular moments we experienced, the broad range of things we talked about and how seeing my life here and my site through the particular lense of my dad’s perceptions has changed my own perceptions, or at least made me consider things differently than I had before.

We had a great time.  I nearly bowled him over as he came striding down arrivals lane at Suwinobuhm Airport in Bangkok last Friday.  His flight was delayed about an hour, so I couldn’t contain my excitement when I finally saw him, after leaning on the gates like a lost puppy for an hour and a half, thinking about what my dad would look like.  I realized that everything that I perhaps expected to see could be different, and indeed somethings were.  I looked for a bullet of dark brown hairk, but when I found him his hair was a handsome salt and pepper.  I thought maybe he would have gained weight, but he was fitter than ever, and of course when I got to hug him and we started talking I found the fundamentals unchanged.

We ran a sort of Thai-hospitality gauntlet this week and I cannot say it was all wonderful or that I was always grateful.  I had asked Pi L. to take me to the airport to pick him up and she was of course overly willing to help.  As with almost everything in Thailand though, things manifest differently than they are planned.  Instead of Pi L. and me and her son as our driver in a fairly new Toyota, we showed up at the airport in a van and had to quickly drive off after we got my dad, back into Bangkok to pick up about ten other teachers from our school who had been enjoying dinner and dancing on the Chao Prayha River.  My dad of course was met with choruses of, “Oh, handsome!” and “When we saw you we thought you were Angie’s brother!” and  “You look so young!”  These exclamations continued all week, absolutely everywhere we went with everyone we met.

The van ride could have taken three hours, but there is no point A to point B in Thailand and there were bathroom breaks and other stops every half hour or so.  We reached my house at almost 3 am, and tried to get as much sleep as possible.

The next day we woke up at six and picked up at seven to attend an English competition in nearby-seaside-resort- town.  My dad was a champ and helped to read some trivia questions for one part of the competition,  and dealing with hot weather in the extreme.  By noon the competition was over and we were completely exhausted, but my supervisor had offered to take us around that day and so off we went for some drive-by sightseeing until we were able to convince her to find a beach.  We got real lucky stumbling upon a pretty secluded, pretty clean little alcove in front of a resort where beach chairs were free.  We both fell asleep for long stretches of time that afternoon and in the intervals sipped pina coladas and caught up on all the news.  We got sea food for dinner and checked out the famous night market in said seaside resort town and were so grateful to get home and get in bed at a reasonable hour.

Sunday was another early day, but it was worth a little bit of grogginess, because at about seven we headed out with Pi Pop for a bike ride to the Peacock Mountain.  My dad was the first person I thought of when I did the ride with Pi Pop and her neighbor Pi Jeed a few months ago and as I suspected would happen, he really enjoyed getting the bicycle’s eye view of my town.  We pedaled past field after field of pineapples, caught a peacock with its feathers fanned as we road past the Peacock Mountain and rode to the very top of the Goddess Mountain, took in the view of the whole town below us and then let go of the breaks for the wild coast down.

After our ride we showered up at home and then Pi Pop and the delightful Pi O picked us up and took us out for fish noodles for breakfast.  I wasn’t sure my dad would enjoy a lot of the heavy sauces and deep fried food that abounds in Thailand, but I knew he would love the clean taste and simplicity of a hot bowl of noodles with some good pieces of fish.  We stuffed ourselves on noodles and fruit at breakfast and then Pi Pop and Pi O took us on a long explore all over the province.  We walked on a wooden path through an enormous lotus field, drove down to the capitol city and walked the beautiful beach there, fed monkeys, (I didn’t feed monkeys,) and then came back to my town for a long walk through a magnificent mangrove forest.

Pi Pop treated us all to an enormous meal on the beach at one of the resort restaurants and we stuffed ourselves on crab, fish, shrimp, and the sweetest pineapples in the world.

Monday we went to teach at the little school, where my dad was asked to introduce himself during the morning ceremonies and where his baby face was once again a smash hit among the teachers.  I should have put it all together, but until lunch time I didn’t realize that Pi L., instead of teaching all morning, had been hard at work in the outdoor cafeteria space making us an enormous lunch.  I had only cursorily wondered what she could be doing with a mortar and pestel the size of my head, but it wasn’t hard to figure out when they sat us in the library all by ourselves around a table piled high with dishes that she had just put her heart and soul into this lunch.

She couldn’t have imagined either how much I had been looking forward to sitting with the teachers at lunch and introducing my dad to them, talking casually and just hanging out.  Thai culture dictates the very best for guests and shooting the breeze is strictly out the question.  I was disappointed because lunch is the time of day when I feel like I make meaningful connections with the teachers and when everyone is most relaxed.

I will pause here and pick this thread up another day, but be assured that many happy adventures came after this.

I am working on posting the last of my photo backlog so you can head to my photo site to see my pictures from Song Krahn, the Thai new year celebration that happened in April.  My community is abuzz with spectualtion about what is actually going to happen when my dad comes.  Perhaps there will be no one, perhaps he is just someone I made up so that people would stop talking about me like I was some kind of orphan.  Perhaps they are on to my games.  For my own part I can hardly wait for Friday and imagine over and over again the moment when I can give my dad some free punches, it has been so very long.

I should note that when I say my “community,” I mean the group of thirty or so people I see on a regular basis.  For some volunteers their community is their actual village, but my town is too large, my schools too far apart from each other and my house too fenced in for their to be a community in the immediate sense.  Still I am starting to feel quite at ease with a lot of the folks, Pi Pop, Pi L., Pi Little, my supervisor, and a few of the other teachers in particular.  I also, to my relief and am starting to feel like all these people are getting some return on their investment.  All those meals, all that fruit, its starting to pay off and I think people are starting to see I can actually be of use to them.

Pi Pop was thrilled to have me from the first, based simply on the pervading belief that Thai kids need to talk to native speakers and because she is the intrepid-type herself and we liked each other from the start.  But it feels good to think that our students are starting to improve their listening skills a lot and their speaking skills a little.  At the little school Pi Oo and I had a really rich conversation about teaching last week, where she told me she used to hate teaching English until I showed her how to practice letter sounds with kids.  I was really happy to hear her say this, since she is an excellent teacher without me, and more glad that she is able to see that there is a well thought out (not by me, I didn’t invent phonics) method to what we are doing.  It seems Thai students are taught to read Thai using Thai phonics, and I all did was point that out and say it works for English too. 
This led to perhaps one of the most rewarding, genuinely exciting days I have ever had working in schools or with kids.  After our conversation I was able to download some free phonics books, short little cut-them-up yourself stories focusing on short vowel sounds from a site called Starfall Books and we had reading groups with our fourth-graders the next day.  All our ‘ a a a’-ing finally paid off and I listened in amazement as our kids read the story.  I watched their little eyes dart back and forth over the words and saw the gears of decoding turning and turning.  I am novice teacher myself and so I find it is double exciting when you work hard at something and it works, when kids actually learn something from you, having no long-tested tricks in my new bag.

In other little ways I give back to my community, my empty water jugs, some fruit here and there, some editing or word processing or some bit of pronunciation.  It feels good that people are comfortable enough with me now that they will actually accept a gift or bit of help I might be offering or that they will come to me if they think I can help with something, when for so long I was the high-pedastalled farong, not to be inconvenienced in anyway.

To be honest I think it happened when I started asking people for help with things more.  When I made myself less of a stranger, people stopped treating me so much like one. 

The standards for jokes around here, I’m sorry to say are altogether pretty low.  On the other hand you can say something really not funny but use the structure of a joke and your Thai counterparts are going to laugh their heads off.  Today one of the assistant director’s of the Education office took me out for fish noodles (oh god, they are sooo good,) after my adult class and on the way back he made a point of showing me some really exquisite bird’s nests.  “Nest birds,” he said, gesturing out the car window.  “Its engineering.” 
“Ah,” I said, “Yes, bird engineering.”

Whoo-man that guy laughed so hard I thought he was going to go off the road and I was going to have to haul myself from the wreckage of his truck and hoof it back to the office in the noonday sun.  The best part is, I could say that joke again next week and it would go over just the same, like funnel cake on the board walk- nobody can get enough.  Till they puke off the ferris wheel.

Anway, carnival analogies aside, my life has been, utterly insane the last few weeks.  I wrote last time about feeling like things were settling down, routine taking shape, finding my place to a degree.  Well, it was as though the moment I set down those words things went crazy again.

On Monday the third-grade teacher took the time to sit and talk to me about Tuesday’s lesson.  I was excited, this was the second or third time we have actually discussed a lesson and I was feeling really hopeful that it would become like a pattern.  Yeah, not a chance.  She didn’t show up for school the next day.  Didn’t tell me she wasn’t coming while we were planning, just let me going on talking about numbers, ten to twenty, and body parts and songs. 

Tuesday was actually an amazing day, a really good example of what a day in Thailand can be like.  In the morning one of the teachers came to pick me up, only I didn’t know that he hadn’t told the teacher who normally picks me up that he was going to pick me up.  So I guess she was sitting outside my house for twenty minutes and calling my phone– which I didn’t pick up because I was at school, you know?  Well, at school I settled down at a computer and worked on uploading some photos and making a number chart for us to use.  I thought my hour with the fourth grade was the second period on Tuesday, but its the first.  When I showed up the second hour to teach, my co-teacher cheerfully remarked that she already taught our lesson and no need to worry about having screwed around of Facebook for an hour when I should have been teaching.  (Okay, so fine, but why am I here then?)

I was a little hurt that she didn’t try to find me, though I take full responsiblity for not knowing the schedule.  I was literally two rooms away from our classroom and a tiny peak around would have had me located and in class in a hot second.   And then of course I had to go and teach the third grade by myself.  (Actually I secretly love having them to myself, but I am not supposed to teach without her, so I am conflicted about it.) 

So I spent the morning out of sorts and frustrated.  Then at lunch the most amazing thing happened.  Everyone sat down to eat, the eating happened and we were chatting at the table digesting, watching kids play when another lady, Pi L., a favorite of mine, asked me if in America we teach kids about “the sex.”  I said that we do learn about “the sex” in school and asked if Thai kids learn “reproductive health” in school. 
She said people in Thailand are afraid to talk about it, and that for a long time no one would teach kids anything. “Now,” she explained, “now, civilised.”  Though as far as I can tell its the very beginning of the sex ed movement in Thailand.

I tried to explain that in America we teach sex ed so that students will understand their bodies and make healthy choices based on the education they have. “We think,” I said, “that if we don’t teach kids about it, they won’t know what is healthy and what isn’t.”  Understand that with my language skills and Pi L.’s hilarious but limited English it is impossible to address the complexities of sex ed and sexuality in America.  I really was just trying to make it sound like a great thing to teach and make everyone want to teach about it.

This led to one of the richest discussions I have had so far in Thailand about American dating culture (my Thai co-teachers now think I have had a million boyfriends), Thai relationships and how sexual education plays a role in the choices kids make and in the way issues are addressed by society.  I was in awe that the conversation was even happening, to be honest, for how much we were told that Thai people do not discuss certain things with strangers, and I had to control my excitement so as not to make anyone clam up.

When the bell rang (its a real bell by the way, that someone has to ring,) to signal the end of lunch I felt high from the conversation.  Maybe, just maybe there is a project here somewhere, that deals with life skills and empowering women and being honest with kids about life and maybe these teachers would be on board for womething like that.  I hope hope hope.

The other thing I was struck by is what an amazing character Pi L. is in her own right.  She brought this up with me, in broken English, with no shame or embarrassment.  She is a formidable woman, hulking, huge.  The kind of fat that is less chub and more stuffed into the tightest of sausage casings.  She walks a little sideways because of a knee injury, which her niece summed up for me in one succint word, “Ooin.”  Which means, in case you couldn’t guess, “Fat.”

Pi L.’s character has been unfolding slowly before me since my first meeting with the teachers at the little school. She carries herself with so much authority I thought she was the school director when I first met her. Indeed because of her age and seniority she is responsible for a lot of the goings on at our school.  You can see what a cornerstone, pillar, I don’t know, foundation she is for the small community she has worked in for thirty years.

At school functions or community events she is quick to hobble over to a microphone determinedly and call everyone to attention.  Ususally after she has everyone’s attention she breaks into song (this is common at events in Thailand) and her shrieking warble is so earnest it brings swells of pride to my chest.  I am, after all, the only one in the community who gets invited to the Tesco Lotus every Sunday to eat fast food and buy jugs of water, baby toilet seats, fifty bottles of oyster sauce and the like.  No one else can claim such status.

She is the kind of woman who gets things done.  And whenever I hear the whirring, squealing squeaking of her near destroyed chariot whizzing down my lane (actually its a 1980 Mercury Pacer literally held together with electric tape) I know its going to be a hell of a day.  For awhile I really thought the little man who puts his head down, day after day, drives her around and does her bidding was a driver or cousin or something, but now I realize it makes sense that Uncle Bert, as he is known, could be no one but her husband.  Girth notwithstanding, it is easy  to imagine Pi L. as the liveliest, most fun, interesting girl in their school, and her lovely face is evidence that no boy could resist her.  Its no wonder, then, bully that she is, she picked the smallest most gutless of them all to be her husband.

I imagine their courtship thirty years ago being something like a wrestling match, where she pinned him in like three seconds, told him to get in the car and drive and here we are today.  She is the overbearing type who will tell the driver what kind of gas to get and how much and the illusion of him as the “husband,” is repeatedly shattered each time she reaches into her wallet and waves money around in his face.  (for gas, for food, for the newspapers he so loves, etc.) 

For awhile I thought he was a little off; whenver we are driving somewhere and Pi L. gets out of the car to stretch her bum knee he often starts muttering to himself in rapid Thai. Now I understand it is his only release, those few moments when she is out of the car, because invariably she will get back in and light into the little guy about something that most likely has nothing to do with him.  She will break into a shrieking, hot pink-lip-sticked litany about the state of the world, huffing and puffing as she goes, and render him utterly silent.  Nothing to do but touch foot to gas pedal and unnecessarily grind the gears of his poor sad maroon steed.

At first Pi L. drove me nuts, always coming to pick me up to early or too late, leaving her thirteen year-old niece with me for five days while she went away so I could “have a friend,” and constantly ( and I mean constantly) giving me food I neither wanted, could eat or wanted to eat.  (Some examples: can after can of jasmine rice, bottles of oyster sauce, value packs of Mama noodles– pork flavored, and more fruit than frankly, than I could poop out.)

But once school began and the third-grade teacher started her perpetual disappearing act and hauled me off to lipstick cult training camp for the weekend, I came to see Pi L. as an ally and a friend.  It was an uphill struggle for us because of the culture, but I think now she enjoys all her secret knowledge about what makes me tick.

I know when I am with her I can expect to stop for noodles every twenty-five mintues, know that we have reached a point in our relationship where whatever I don’t finish will get poured in her bowl, along with Pear, her niece’s leftovers, and those of her two grandchildren that stay with her during the week and go to private school in our town.  I also know she’s taking care of me.  She has very much asserted herself in that way, and now I find I appreciate usually, as opposed to resenting it, as I did at first.

I trust her so much that when I found out that getting a van to the airport to pick up my dad was going to be really expensive, I called and asked if she would take me.  She gave an emphatic yes and while I am afraid we won’t ever make it to the airport, I really can’t wait to see how my Dad reacts to this lady.  This real fine lady and her one of a kind shriek.

It is as though the corner is palpable, as though I could run my finger along a bend of plaster and knowingly step around it.  The way things feel lately, so different than a few weeks ago, the way things feel lighter, easier, more clear.  May was a difficult month, a lot of missing people so achingly and school beginning and seeing the reality of what the expectations are for me by the people who asked to have me.  Not to mention all those bugs.

But even the most extreme and unfamiliar circumstances become routine after awhile, like finding ants in your closet, nothing to freakout over, just realize you have in some way been hospitable to them and then make yourself inhospitable.  At school there are any number of unexpecteds in a day.  At first they were jarring, but this week when my co-teacher showed up for neither class we were supposed to teach together at the elementary school I merely went ahead with the lessons I planned.  The lessons I planned by myself, though we are supposed to plan together and technically I am not supposed to be in the classroom alone.  I just couldn’t let three hours of school go by and not do anything.  (Though the kids would have happily played in and out of the classroom as the afternoon wore on.  And when the school bell rang they would have gathered their things, straightened the classroom and lined up to go home.  Eight-year olds, mind you.)

So I taught anyway and it was probably good, because it gave me an opportunity to establish my expectations for the kids and to give them an opportunity to view me as a teacher, which is key when you need them to stop rolling all over the ground.  Some of them, may even have learned a few new vocabulary words.

In spite of the way my third grade co-teacher always manages to surpise me, I love this school.  I love it so very much.  It is a little country school set far back from the busy roads at my very developed site.  The classes are average size, but there is only one class for each grade and I envy the students the way they are at home at the only school they have ever known.  I love the home-spun feeling of these kids and the comraderie between the teachers.  When I asked my ride what time we would go home on the first day, (this school is too far for me to bike to.)  the teachers said they all go home about an hour after the kids, noting that there is just no time during the school day to sit together.  So around three-thirty all the teachers amble over to the lower grades building and sit on the shoe racks outside the classroom, protected from the afternoon rains by the eves.  Its such a wonderful feeling, sitting and talking with the teachers, coming into this community and talking over the day, the kids, what we ate for lunch, often passing around a mango or a bunch of fat bananas. 

The school grounds are surrounded by a cement fence and I often daydream about US schools being like this.  Their own place, where kids get their lunches and sit in under the cafeteria roof or out at one of the tables around the black top or on the playground or in an empty classroom.  I love the way it is really a school for children, really their place.  After lunch they play, really old games.  They jump rope, they play a Jacks-like game with plastic links, they play soccer and hopscotch.  On nice days a breeze blows through the palm trees as some sit in the shade and lick ice creams and chatter endlessly about those pressing matters of childhood. 

It makes me think about how hawkishly we watch children, how afraid we are of kids getting hurt, of law suits , of getting in trouble.  There are a lot of things I would like us to do differently in the classroom at this little school, lots of ways I think the kids could learn more, but I like the way the adults don’t interfere with children, don’t try to maximize every moment.  For one long hour of the day they eat and play and talk and rest with no one telling them not to climb, telling them what to eat or what to think.

During training we visited a little country school near our training site and as the wood of the floor boards creaked beneath my feet I hoped for a breezy, lovely little school like that, and here I am, with one of my very own.

Well, my little family of one got a little bigger today as the post office attendant handed me a delicately wrapped bouncing baby notebook.  I’m just as happy as can be.  Yesterday Pi Pop handed me the receipt from the post office saying that baby computer had arrived and it was like twenty-four hours of labor having to wait until today at lunch when a nice lady with a car offered to take me over to pick it up.  You can imagine my delight, and my anxiousness, I have to wait until I get home today to actually open the box.  (Thanks for taking care of this, Mom!)

On that same note I can never ever allow myself to complain about my life in Thailand, as I will now rattle off a long list of things that make me realize that I have a “sweet deal.”  First of all I taught in a very spacious (we have fifty students in our classes) air conditioned faculty meeting room both yesterday and today.  And, if the kids don’t write on the desks, leave their garbage everywhere and break stuff, its ours for the next two years, every Wednesday and Thursday.  I don’t love air conditioning, and I realize this is going to sound like me trying to validate our luxurious move upstairs, but the truth is, the kids are so much less lethargic and so much more engaged out of the heat.  You think that because people live in a tropical climate every day of their lives they adjust, but the ways that they adapt are not always conducive to productivity in the English classroom. (Napping, for example, anywhere and everywhere.)  The next great thing is the “sweetest,” most teched out projector I’ve ever seen.  Actually, I do not even have the vocabulary to describe this thing, but comparing it to an overhead is like comparing a biplane to a rocket ship.  That’s right, my projector has been to space.

So my classroom is tricked out, but my house is getting there too.  Yesterday at lunch time I finally became the proud owner of the ugliest brown and orange sofa bed in South-East Asia, possibly all of the eastern hemisphere.  I also finally bought some blankets this past weekend and assorted toiletries.  All this preparation is for none other than the other awesome thing that is going to happen in a month.  My dad coming!!! I am getting the house ready so that my aging father can enjoy his vacation (ha ha) in peace and serenity.  (By which I mean, so he can battle the bugs, the diarreah, the traffic and the heat in style.)

The best part is, it gets even better.  My dad is coming in a month, and I thought I wouldn’t know how to handle the heart break when he left.  In fact after that its a short month-long wait until my brother arrives!!!!  Its not summer here actually, but in fact this is going to be one of the best summers in a long time.  New baby computer, new orange couch, Dad, then Dan, and sandwiched in between their visits is two weeks of training where I will be reunited with all the other volunteers in my group.

Now if I could just get June over with and get to the point where my Dad cries his eyes out at the sight of me.  Not because I’m hideous, just because he doesn’t realize how empty his life is since I’ve been gone!

There is so much to say about actually school life, and I plan to get into it as soon as I have given it proper thought.  Until then, we work and work and word.

Finding scorpions in the house is just one of the many things that terrorizes me on a daily basis.  Luckily, with the help of some pretty hefty insecticide that I am convinced is going to cause my brain to start coming out my nose in little pieces, when they do turn up they are usually dead.  I tip toe through my house in filp flops (thanks Mom!), turning on lights as I go with utter care so as not to step on anything that could send me into convulsions.  Unfortunately, its the rainy season now so in direct conflict with keeping the lights on to make sure I don’t step on anything, is the fact that the lights attract swarms of flying ants.  So my life has fallen into a timid rhythm of spraying, leaving the house till the smell goes away, turning on distant lights, like the one in the closet in the back room when I want to go the kitchen and just being really careful and scared.  A few days ago all this came to a head when I looked up to the ceiling of that big back room and found a spider the size of my hand, fangs glinting in the glare of the flourescent lights, just waiting to leap from its perch, land on my head and suck out my brain.  (I will not tolerate a single comment about starving brain suckers, so keep it to yourselves.)

At first I did the only logical thing I could think of, I closed the door to that room and lay paralyzed on my couch for an hour.  But it was creeping near bedtime and the spider stood between me and my toothbrush.  So, timidly, again, I pushed the door open and looked around.  I relaxed with relief when I could not see the spider anymore, and then my muscles cramped up again in terror as I realized it was just somewhere else in the room.  Playing hide and seek with me, if you will.   I found it under a window, even closer to the living room and relatively speaking, even closer to my bedroom.  (Still pretty far from my bedroom actually.)  

This spider was so huge and as it sat there nibbling away at what I imagined was an imaginary me, I resolved I had to kill it.  It all seems quite fated when I think of how I bought this cheap insecticide the other day because it was on sale and I ran out of the really baaad stuff.  Crossing the spider’s path once more, I retrieved the spray and “depressed the nozzle.”  I immediately shrieked and jumped as the spider flashed like lightening from the window to the floor.  We moved in the quickest of tangoes, me spraying and the spider running, closer, to my horror, to the living room.  Panicked I leapt from the room and pulled the door shut behind me.  Near tears I sat on my couch heaving sighs and trembling.  What was I going to do if I had to stay out of that room forever??

I settled it that I would just use the side door of the house to get to the kitchen and the good bathroom and never change my clothes again.  Then I saw it, crawling and scurrying on the screen of the window between the living room and the back room.  On the TV stand stood a near empty bottle of the bad stuff, but when I shook it I heard just enough of a gurgling to aim and spray, at which point the monster curled up and fell from the screen almost immediately. 

I still feel my muscles tense as I write this story.  I was never afraid of spiders before you see, but now I realize that was because there was nothing to be afraid of.

I need to reiterate right away that this blog is an expression of my own thoughts, feelings, and opinions.  It does not in any way express those of the United States Peace Corps, of course, because I think they would put a whole different spin on things.  I am going to be straightforward.  They would like me to put that spin on things too, and to an extent I try to write about things in a way that helps me reflect on all the things I am learning.  That said I cannot dip every experience in self-actualizing sugar, though I think that would make everyone want to join the Peace Corps.  The thing is, Peace Corps, while being the leaping off point for many an excellent career, is intensely personal and personally challenging.   What I mean to say is, I am so embedded in this experience from what bugs I find in my house when I wake up in the morning, to the food that is put in front of me at lunch, to how I still, after four months, won’t brush my teeth with the tap water, that there is no way for me to be objective.  My opinions come from what I experience on a daily basis with the people I interact with, (the people and the bugs,) so they are personal, not scholarly, not researched, but often times validated by my friends who are dealing with similar highs and lows.

Nothing really brought on me addressing this idea of objectivity, I just found there is so much I want to write about and share that is my very own, that there was no way of sterilizing the connection between me and my experiences.

This weekend is a great example.  There is always the language barrier to contend with, so I often end up places or doing things I never anticipated, and I am such a planner I like to anticipate everything.  However, sometimes, “We want you to come on vacation with us for the weekend,” which I understood very clearly, actually means, “Come to a retreat for ‘venture-capitalist-pyramid-scheme-that-shall- not-be-named’ salespeople.” 

There is this one teacher I have been having trouble with at my elementary school.  It is the same woman who I naively tried to plan with the week before school started.  It is the woman that my program manager assured me understood the goals of the program very clearly.   After our first day in the classroom last week I was feeling like somebody got snowed, and I felt like it was me.  So when she asked me to go away for the weekend the first thought that came to mind was, frankly, “Hell, no.”

But I thought it over.  She seemed like she really wanted me to go, and this is the kind of stuff you hear about all the time– build up our relationship socially, so that our work relationship might improve etc.. And I thought, hey, its only two days.  I even got excited enough about going away for the weekend with some Thai folks who know the ins and outs of vacation spots and looked up where we were going in my guidebook.  First clue should have been that in 700 pages on the stunning tropical beauty of Thailand, there was no mention of this place.

Still I hauled myself out of bed at 6 am on Saturday morning, took some dramamine, and off we went.  For three hours in the car I allowed myself to think, “Maybe there’s a beach.”  “I guess we could practice English a little bit this weekend, yeah, I don’t mind doing that.” “Great, two days of reading and relaxing, awesome.”  And I got even more a little excited when we pulled up to a pretty nice hotel in a very secluded area with almost no development.  Palm trees stretched on to the horizon where a mountain in the shape of a gnarled fist basked in the glow of noon day sun. 
When we got inside I noticed my co-teacher wearing a t-shirt that said staff on the back and thought it might be from some other event until I noticed about 25 other people in the same shirt, and everyone greeting each other like old friends.

Growing wary and darting my eyes around for the shuffle board court and the fancy drinks, I said, “Pi, what are we going to do here?”

To which she airily responded, “Oh its just a group of friends that get together every two months.”  Which didn’t sit right with me, since by this time we were filing into a meeting room and sitting in rows, someone even brought me a name tag that spelled out my name in Thai.

The truth finally came tumbling out when the slideshows of happy salespeople who had transformed their lives by bugging their friends into buying eye shadow and pig farming tools from them started playing to what can only be called, “inspirational” music.  I may have made a frantic call froma bathroom stall to a friend to say that I had been taken to a cult. 

I don’t think of myself as having the most iron-clad values out of the people I know, but when it comes to whether or not I think corporations should come into the developing world and convince people that happiness comes to the person who sells the most cheap garbage I am pretty much fiercly against this.  I am also against brainwashing and indoctrination, see “emotional slideshow.”

As I said in my last post, smiling is a big deal here, and I did not smile this weekend.  I locked myself in the hotel room and ate cookies and read a book.  Incidently, I read Memoirs of a Geisha and found a lot of cultural points that Golden portarys pretty relevant to my life here.  Namely the indirect communication and the idea of a strict societal hierarchy.

Anyway, as much as I tried to hide, I had to come out for meals and got dragged back into the meeting room a few times to witness, with utter dread, the power of “selling power,” over a lot of people who have very little.  At the end of the retreat I happened to glance in the room to see if it would ever be time for us to go home, and was met with the site of about forty five people swaying and holding hands to loud genreless music full of “hope,” and I am not lying about this, more than a few came out of that room crying.

Indeed my co-teacher’s husband had this to say to me on the way home.  “Everybody sad. Because the meeting over.”

I guess the really difficult part about this, besides what personal values seemed to be compromised by this weekend was that my co-teacher acted like princess of the ball.  She was smiling all the time, laughing, playing all the games, getting people involved, leading chants etc.  She also received quite a few extras and promos for all her good selling and I was baffled at how the warm and energetic person before me could be the same woman who consistently leaves the classroom to talk on her cell phone while teaching.

I learned something from all this too.  This corporation-that-shall-not-be-named has really got her number.  The whole weekend was about celebrating people’s small sales successs, a somewhat western idea.  Its eastern equivalent is to forever downplay anything you have done well and focus on what isn’t good about you as a person.  (Again, not a well-researched fact, just an observation backed up by things Thai people have said themselves.)  So it occured to me that it might take a some uplifting words from me– overly enthusiastic and not entirely sincere- to motivate her to work with me.

The funny thing about this is that it is easy to do for the kids, who indeed never celebrate small successes, but its going to take me being a bigger person than I am right now to be able to offer this to my teacher.

As I write this the rain is pounding down hard, even as I heard all day long that it was too hot to rain, and even as the sky was blue as the bluest songbird.  Its getting to be uncanny how I never have that nice Gore-tex jacket with me when it actually does rain.  In fact sometimes I go out when it is already raining, wearing my jacket, just to make sure it still works.

The real work began last week, sort of.  Thailand is not really the sort of place where the real work ever seems to begin.  For example, Friday was the first day of school, and Monday is a holiday.  So, for my purposes I got out of bed and went to one school or another every day last week, in fact on Friday, I went to four schools.  Though, none of them was my own.

I am supposed to work at the elementary school on Mondays and Tuesdays and at the high school with Pi Pop on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  The thing is, I see Pi Pop everyday, and I hadn’t heard from the teachers at my other school in about three weeks.  So I told Pi Pop if they didn’t call then I would go to school and work with her, and that is indeed what happened.  I have already expressed that she is a hard-working enigma in Thai society and we certainly got right down to planning on Monday.  I worked with her again on Tuesday and again on Thursday and we had hammered out three hours of critical thinking activities, oral assessments, and a grammar and reading comprehension pre-test.  And with our first day of teaching, this coming Wednesday, coming at us fast, we are both still thinking all the time about details.

All this thinking and working and planning surely set me up to freak out about my other teachers, who weren’t really thinking of calling me except I ran into one on Monday night completely by accident at the market.  When I asked when she wanted me to come to school she said, “We go to school everyday, so whenever.”  We made a plan and she said she would pick me up Wednesday morning at 8:30, not so early, you know, plenty of time.  Wednesday morning I was awakened by the phone ringing and it was another teacher from the elementary school, one I have spent a lot of time with, but who is too close to retiring to work with me.  “Angie,” she said excitedly.  “Why you not tell me you want to go to school??” I guess I thought it was obvious that I would want to go to school the week before school started.  And the dominos of my expectations began to fall.  “I come for you at 8 o’clock.  The other teacher, she already working, my school start 8:15, so I come for you, twenty minutes.”  Off I went sputtering about showering and eating.  (I’m a real train wreck without my cereal.) “Angie! Nevermind, eating nevermind.  You eat at school.”

This was a sour way to start the morning, and I admit I got a little accusatory when I got in the car.  I started asking why they never called me, and when we were supposed to plan, and if the teachers go to school everyday, why didn’t they ask me to come.  I got a little more irritated when we got to school and one of the teachers told me that the teacher I came to meet with was busy passing out books to students and couldn’t plan with me today.  (To which I started fuming, then why am I hear, dressed riap roy, with all these books and no chocolate cereal in my belly??)

The teachers could see I was upset, and the one who drove me said, “Angie, Angie, I don’t know what you want??”  to which I responded rather snappily, “I want to plan.”  So she rushed off and found my teacher and explained the situation, or a situation atleast and my teacher rushed off and came back with a stack of falling apart English workbooks, mostly written in Thai and sat me in an empty classroom by myself.  As I write about it now it doesn’t seem like it all warranted such agitaiton on my part, but between what I thought was going to happen, what I wanted to happen, the language barrier and how hungry I was I started thinking I needed some help.

So as one of the really spry teachers went bustling all over to bring me fish curry and a can of tuna for my breakfast, I called my program manager in Bangkok and when she asked what was up I said, “I don’t think they really know what they’re supposed to do with me.”

She helped talk me off the ledge by saying she had interviewed the teachers herself for a good long time to make sure they understood what the co-teaching relationship should look like.  She pointed out that they probably went to their homes in the further south for the vacation knowing that the older teacher was already taking care of me.  And most importantly of all she helped me examine that I was freaking out about planning with people who have been teaching for ten to twenty years and never written a lesson plan in their lives.  Expecations, expectations, expectations.

I got some food in my stomach and realized that this was all about me.  I made a few decisions, one being that I would observe for the first two weeks and two being that I would let go of what I thought would be the ideal outcome, and I went out and pulled a chair up next to my co-teacher.  I started chatting with her about her vacation, smiling and trying to emphasize that I was calm and happy.  I talked to the kids as they came to get their books and remarked to their parents about how cute they were.  Figuratively speaking, I took about ten giant steps back and changed the angle from which I was looking at things.  When the kids had all gone home my teacher turned to me and asked me about planning, and rather than start rapidly talking about phonics (there is no rapid talking, my Thai is slow and her English is very limited,) I said, poising pen over paper, “What do you want your students to learn from us.” 
I don’t mean to present myself as some kind of hero, only to emphasize dramatically how I am readjusting my expectations every single moment.  After that we had a great conversation, and it even included phonics.  I found out that she has been pretty terrified of me because she speaks almost no English and she feels like a pretty inadequate teacher because of that.  We talked about the vast store of games and songs I bring with me from various stages of my muddled career and about how she really wants to be a good English teacher, but doesn’t know how.  The whole day was also a good reminder that this isn’t just about me getting my kicks in before I get a real job.  Real people here really want this to work.

My other teacher at this school is younger, peppier, and knows a good deal more English and so when she joined the conversation I got an even better idea of what they both want.  Every teacher here is quick to warn you that the kids are really bad and don’t listen, and I am chuckling to myself at my progressive education and the idea of students being “internally motivated,” as I scour stores for a good marble jar and think of a good system for handing out stickers.

On Friday my supervisor took me to her hometown and drove me around to a bunch of schools so that the kids could meet me and hear me speak.  I don’t know what I thought she meant when she asked if I wanted to go visiting, but I guess I should have realized it would include me teaching in one way or another.  I was grumpy that morning as well, (and I used to be such a morning person,) but the kids warmed me, and I had a lot of fun and even got to be witness to the first game of telephone ever played in a seventh grade class.  Telephone is a classic, but man there is nothing like the first time.

So my first school year has arrived, and it begins at four am, with a bus trip to Bangkok for the holiday.  I’ll be sure to take my dramamine and sit in the front seat.  Pray for me, my friends, tomorrow has all the markings of a long day of car sickness.

I think constantly about writing, but it is difficult to string together the endlesss, isolated, ridiculous things that happen to and around me every day.  I try to flip the telescope around as often as possible and think, “If I were a Thai person visiting America and I saw a motorcycle with only one middle-aged man with grey-streaked hair flowing out from under his motorcycle helmet, I would probably think to myself, ‘How absurd! He could easily get two or three more full grown adults and atleast a dozen babies on that moto.’”  I try to imagine how strange the US must seem to Thai folks and it helps me deal with the impossibly knotted rubber bands on all the little plastic bags of food, and all the babies on motorcycles, and all the really really really long hairs that people grow out of their moles.  I think they would take one look at our bellies or one sniff of our lysol and promplty vomit.  As I have wanted to do many many times.  Peace Corps life is challenging, it is challenging to be motivated to meet new people everyday, to accept what is culture and what is not going to change, and it is challenging to keep at the language, especially when everyone wants to speak English.  But, and I predicted this pretty well, one of the most challenging things for me is the assault on the senses.  Sights, smells, tastes, and sensations on my skin (like the mysterious rash I woke up with this week,) often carry me to the brink of melt down, or when I am frustrated by something else, one well-placed snot-rocket can carry me right over.

I am lucky to have Pi Pop who can level with me about most anything.  Today we sat in the ice cream shop near my house and parsed out all this smiling and not smiling business.  As most of you know, I am imfamously easy to read, whatever is on my mind, is immediately on my face.  My friends take great delight in pointing this out to me, my mother never gloats, but always knows.  All the same confrontation, or addressing my feeligns can still be difficult.  I have always struggled with this, and felt a great failure in light of the self-esteem movement that teaches young impressionable westerners not to keep their feelings “bottled up inside.”  In Thailand, and I believe in a lot of Asian cultures it is precisely the opposite.  I was explaining the whole “letting your feelings out,” idea to Pi Pop today and her face became very grave and she said, “Oh no, in Thailand we cannot do that.”

Here children are taught to hold it all in, all the time.  People often endure whatever discomfort may come to themselves in order to avoid confronting or bringing discomfort to a relative, friend, or especially a boss of some kind. (You can imagine this hinders development in a lot of ways.)  We learned all about this in training, about the idea of saving face and not being too expressive of your feelings.  We learned that it is best to smile all the time, no matter what, as most Thais do, knowing that a smile does not always mean everything is alright.  But as I explained to Pi Pop today, this is not something that I can just do now that I know how it works.  It is something I have to think about, all the time, and something that I often find myself rebelling against, in the uncomfortable throes of culture shock.  In fact, with the language barrier, sometimes not smiling is the only way to express to people that pork counts as meat, so no, I’m not going to eat this dish of noodles, or that I actually don’t need everyone in town to know exactly where my house is, who lives on either side and what hours I am usually at home. 

It causes a certain amount of problems, though I think in a few months people will know me better and I will be more at ease and will find it more easy to smile all the time.  This morning Pi Pop and her neighbor invited me to ride to the Peacock Mountain, and I wanted to go very much.  We had a great ride, I was lucky enough to see a peacock with its feathers fanned regaling, strutting around the foothills of the mountain. (Pi Pop says this is only the second time she has seen such a thing in 50 years.)  We rode for about two hours, had a great workout, and I was really happy that we finally got out there.  But when I started talking to Pi Pop about it this evening over ice cream I realized she had been worried all day because I seemed like I wasn’t happy this morning.  We woke up at five-thirty and it was still unbearably hot and the last week of planning all day and pit bulls barking all night has left me exhausted.  So I had to explain that sometimes I just don’t feel happy, and that its not a big deal, and that I was wrestling with myself.

In the US we are used to people working on their own “stuff” internally and being a sounding board for that “stuff,” is often what friends do.  But here if you’re not smiling your brightest at six am, then other people worry all day long that something is wrong or that they have offended you somehow.  This is a lot of pressure to smile, and I tried to explain to Pi Pop, and lucky that I have her because she understands pretty well, that even though I am so happy to be here in the big picture, in the small picture the people I love are very far away, the heat and the humidity make it hard not to feel sick, and the pit bulls bark all damn night.  But Thai people smile through it all, and I am learning slowly, that often it is easier to pull up the smile, after I let go of whatever western expectations I am holding on to.

I’ve been watching Casablanca, over and over again. 

Pi Pop is my greatest ally and probably, despite her being thirty years my junior, my best friend right now.  She is a strong and capable woman, and with her smarts I often wonder what she would have become, in another culture, at another time, under different circumstances.  WIthout all this imagining though, she is a pretty amazing woman, whose accomplishments and reputation in the community are far-reaching.

Today she fed me eggplant, (I’ve turned another corner with eggplant– the Thai kind is so good!), and rice and we talked a long time about what are some of the emerging problems in English speaking that I’m noticing and that she could confirm.  These include crazy use of prepositions, a lack of understanding when it comes to linking verbs, (there are none in Thai), verb tense, (none of these either), and pluralizing things.  In Thai there are no aspirated or pronounced word endings, so adding an ’s’ to something, or pronouncing the ‘d’ or ‘l’ at the end of words like ‘dad’ and ‘little’ is a whole new thing.  The short-term solution for the ‘l’ problem is to add an ‘n’ instead.  I guess it makes people feel better if they make some sound, so ‘little’ often becomes ‘litton,’ and apple is ‘appon.’  The fact that Pi Pop can discuss these details of language with me at length is a testament to her English abilities and her constant desire to examine her own speech and improve and to improve her teaching.

To make an observation, not a judgement, finding hard-working people who want to improve is damn near impossible here.  And I understand.  What the rest of the world considers working hours, 9-5, are so hot here that I don’t know how anyone accomplishes anything.  To that end Thai culture is very relaxed with a lot of eating and relaxing, and the even the Buddhist values influence people not to want too much or worry about trying to make things better, since there is always another life coming.  (Keep in mind these are my armchair observations and not well-researched statements on Thai society.)  Another reminder that what we think of as the truth, or how things or people should be is actually culture and life-experience talking and not in fact “how people should be.”  Pip Pop spent a year as a Language Arts teacher in the US about twenty years ago, (We are fellow former AFSers.) and I think some of the American work-mania rubbed off on her, because she is always at something.  She employs three teachers out of her house to give weekend English lessons, has an expansive garden, is frequently doing teacher trainings, or walking her beloved dog, (who is really beloved and still lives outside– a note to you American pet-lovers, you can still love them outside!) 

It is because of Pi Pop’s diligence that I know so many people in my town already, and after one month know the streets, restaurants, post office, and markets so well.  She is devoted to my having the best possible experience, and with good reason.  As she often says, if something goes wrong she could lose her Peace Corps Volunteer and she desperately wants us to do as much as possible with our students in the next two years.  So she is serious about not breaking any of Peace Corps’ rules, making sure I am well-known and comfortable in the community, and has allowed me round the clock access to her internet connection. 
The funny thing is, I have been a stranger places before, and people are always willing to take you around and show you things, but Pi Pop and I genuinely like each other, laugh about things, and want the same things for our students.  She understands culture shock and Americans, and that people all come with their own “stuff.”  Just today I told her about how another teacher, who I have spent a lot of time with, came over with my mail yesterday and a piping hot bag of sausages, explaining to me that I could eat them because they were made of cheese. Pi Pop had a good laugh over this and then said, “You know, culture is a problem, language is another problem, and then personal likes and dislikes are something else entirely.”  I then explained the idea of quirky to her and how even at home there is a lot of stuff I won’t eat even if it does fit all the standards.

Another of my co-teachers quirks is her dedication to health and fitness.  She sees the dentist twice a year, has regular check-ups, mammograms, etc, and exercised daily.   She rides her bike every morning for an hour or two and again most afternoons or evenings. I am often encouraged to wake up at six-thirty and come to her house, where we saddle up and ride from the center of town to the mountains or temples, or the temple on the mountain, and we stop every fifteen feet so she can introduce me to yet another family that told her they wanted to host me before I came.   

There is no joy quite like knowing that at six-thirty in the morning it will be cool, and for almost three hours you can ride a bicycle, talk to folks, eat fish noodles, etc. without feeling like you want to vomit from the heat.  Pi Pop introduced me to a new noodle shop that serves absolutely the most delicious noodles with fish that I have had so far, and often if I say we should go there for breakfast she says she was already planning on it. 

When the fish noodle place is closed we got to what I consider my own personal gift from some higher power.  A vegan food stand conveniently located in the downtown area.  Sometime I just want noodles so bad I get them in broth with tofu, but this place has the real deal in vegetarian dishes offering such favorites as seitan with fat noodles and vegetables and a charming array of other fake meats made from the finest soy products.  I don’t know if I am properly expressing this, but the food is just amazing, its delicious and its a relief to know that its what I want and what my body is used to.  Though I have to say, I would probably be malnourished by now if it weren’t for the power of eggs.  But more on how eggs muscled their way into my life another time.

I often head home after my rides with Pi Pop, take a shower and pass out on my couch for awhile.  Its worth waking up early and sleeping again in the late morning to be able to see the palm trees and mountains with lush low brush bathed in morning light.  The late morning and afternoon hours I read or watch movies and come over to Pi Pop’s to use the computer. 

Such has been my lazy life for the last month, though this past week I worked at a teacher training that Pi Pop was giving about what she learned last summer when she went to New Zealand for a month-long seminar on teaching English.  (I am dead serious, it is really rare to find a teacher here so devoted to improving and evolving her teaching abilities.)  She didn’t know I was coming, and she didn’t invite me originally because she has no car and its a strict Peace Corps rule that we can’t ride motorcycles. (She is really serious about my not getting sent home for any reason.) My supervisor called in the morning and asked if I wanted to go and was Pi Pop ever thrilled to see me. She happily handed me some information and asked me to present it the next afternoon.  For my own part I was happy to get in and see how it would go, and Ihappy to find that we work pretty well together.

This week the real work begins to trickle in.  We are going to another teacher training on Monday and Tuesday- - Pi Pop, my supervisor and I, and if the past is any judge of how these things go, I will be asked to stand in front of a million English teachers and talk about myself in English and Thai.  The teachers then head back to work, about a week and a half before the students.  We are still in very preliminary stages of planning, but the word for right now, is assessment.

The last week of training was such a whirlwind, as were the following two weeks, that I am just sitting down to write about things now, though inevitably there will be times when the blog is slow. Especially, when some sort of normalcy starts to take shape, though it may never be one of those familiar shapes.We said good-bye to our host families and all the teachers and municipal workers we practiced on during our ten weeks of training at a huge thank-you party with food, performances and dancing. There were two Traditional Thai dances performed by groups of trainees and one American performance, that I may have been a part of and may have learned the Thriller dance and performed it on stage in front of three hundred people, maybe. The last day I was at the house, my host mom was so emotional she kept asking what I was going to eat for the next two years. I think her utter lack of faith in my ability to feed myself was her way of saying she loves me.