Destarte

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.

After two weeks I am still cobbling together an initial impression of my town. It is not a sleepy place, so far as I can tell. The party was fierce yesterday all over the streets and the celebration mixed with alcohol and a lot of hip-swiveling young girls dancing in the backs of pick-up trucks. This was not the scene the day before when I was visiting my supervisor’s family with her for the holiday in her quiet little home town.

 Let me explain. For the last week Thais all over the country have been celebrating Song Krahn, which people keep telling me is Thai New Year, though as far as I can tell they also celebrate Chinese New Year and December 31^st just as heartily. What makes it more confusing is that they follow the Buddhist calendar, so I don’t know if it’s a new Buddhist year or just some kind of metaphorical clean slate for Thailand only. Anyway, it’s a wonderful holiday, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Part of the actual religious ceremony involves going to the temple and pouring water over the hands of the monks, said to bring you good luck (people seem to be really invested in luck for some reason.) You can then also pour water over the hands of older people you respect, who will also say a prayer for you to be lucky in the coming year as you pour. For example, my supervisor poured water over the hands of her old teachers, and while I was visiting the temple in my town with my co-teacher, who has been at the high school here for almost thirty years, many ex-students approached her to pour water over her hands.This is, I think a lovely tradition, but the real fun begins when people take to the streets, fill their garbage cans up with water, arm themselves with massive super-soakers, and buckets and just start pouring water all over each other. Its all out war as people load up their pick up trucks with these garbage cans and a bunch of feisty kids, and drive up and down the streets furiously dumping water between other trucks and the people who have lined the streets, armed and ready.

Whenever Thai people want to explain something inexplicable about Thai food, Thai dress or Thai culture to you in limited English whatever it is gets the very descriptive, “it’s Thai style.”  Last night I was Thai style and if all goes well you can all feast on the pictures.

This is our last weekend in our training city and last night our tambon, (village), threw a party fit for four farongs.  One of the volunteers that is my neighbor’s dad was recently elected Pu Yi Ban, village leader, since my host dad’s term was up, and last night the relatives from Bangkok came down and threw the third party in seven days to celebrate his election and the imminent parting of our villages beloved Peace Corps Volunteers.  Let me say this party was Thai style.  There was karaoke, dancing, speeches (made in poor Thai by some unsuspecting Americans), traditional Thai dance and lots of photo ops.  The crowning moment of the evening being, not when speeches were made and wreaths of flowers given in honor of our new village leader, but when I was wisked inside a house, spun into traditional Thai dress and marched onto the stage with the other volunteers.  At the sight of me my host mom was near tears, my host dad did cry and get on the mike to make sure everyone knew I was his daughter, (there is some confusion among Thai host families as to whether or not our families are real or made up,) and the new Pu Yi Ban invited me to dance about a million times.  Let me say here that this is not like inviting a woman to dance in the US.  In Thailand you can invite anyone to dance at any moment and you do not in anyway dance with each other.  Traditional Thai dance as performed by Fook and Fawn, one of the volunteer’s younger host sisters, is absolutely beautiful.  It is an act of grace, poise and endurance.  Thai party dancing, however, is at best hilarious and fun, and happening in some time signature that does not exist on this plane of reality.

It was a particularly difficult week here after having gone to site visit, seen my schools, met my teachers and supervisor, and found a house(!), to come back to the grind of training and being hovered over all the time.  But last night I felt truly loved by the community and appreciated and I will truly miss them all very much.  Luckily my site is about a half a day’s trip away so I think I’ll be coming back to visit my host family atleast a few times in the next two years.

The end of my site visit was a considerable improvement over the beginning.  I recovered from my food poisoning in time to go house hunting and I found a lovely place with two bedrooms and two bathrooms (one squat toilet and one western!), a kitchen, two living room type rooms, refrigerator, bed, and washing machine, well within the means of our housing allowance.  I also got to spend more time at my schools, meeting the English teachers at my high school and I think all the teachers at my tiny elementary school.  The director there is a jolly woman and the teachers came into the meeting one dressed flashier than the next.  They chattered away rapidly in Thai about me and then turned and said, “We hope you like to talk and eat.”  Well, I like to talk and eat and so I can tell this school is going to be the biggest challenge, as it will hard to convince the teachers to think differently about their teaching methods and get them interested in trying new things.

This past week back at training we prepared to give our first English teacher training to the teachers of this city that failed the English exam that teachers have to take every year.  Let me say this is no reflection on these people as teachers or on their ability to speak English, in fact a lot of them were really good.  The test is a very poorly crafted example of some of the worst English out there and I think most people who don’t pass, fail because there are no correct answers to choose from.  It is rather not how good your English is, but how well you play the game.  To make things more difficult for these people, most of them are not trained English teachers, but were told that they had to be the English teacher when the initiative to start teaching English in grade one started in 2000.  (Incidently our program coincides with that initiative.)  So some, like the teacher that I did my practice teaching with, have been teaching Thai or History for twenty years and were suddenly told that they had to teach English. 
That’s the state of things and for our Teacher Training we were told to keep it pretty basic and fun.  And  man did we have fun.  The teachers, in spite of 100 degree temperatures, were so kind and receptive.  We taught them strictly games and songs and tried to include a lot of repetition so they would in fact remember and be able to bring them back to their classrooms.  It was really a pleasure to work with people who were so motivated to learn some new tricks.  Our technical coordinator was a volunteer in group 117 and she told me that she signed on for as many teacher trainings as possible during her service and I can see  I will likely do the same.

This week we have our last language classes and a huge Thank-you party for all the families and teachers and local officials that have allowed us to practice on them and then next week it is off to Bangkok for the last five days of training!  By the way, today marks group 120’s two month anniversary in Thailand!  Things are just heating up, literally.  Think of me in April, I will be delirious with heat stroke, so enjoy every minute of spring.

Some of you may know, but most of you probably don’t know that I have had to mourn the passing of a great companion this last week and I am now left with how to move on without my precious computer!  I also face an existential dilemna, now that I live in a Buddhist country I am confused about whether my laptop is going to computer heaven or if it is going to be reborn?  If its going to be reborn maybe it will come back into my life in the form of some zippy little number with all the latest tricks for a ticket price of less that three hundred dollars.  Any comments on where computers go when they die are welcome, but be sensitive it is a sad day when one has to close their notebook for the very last time.

My computer was the first in a line of mishaps, some hilarious, some will be hilarious in a few years.  On Friday we left for Bangkok where we had the time of times exploring the Peace Corps Office, having some sessions, and then going out on the town.  We took it to the famed tourist spot Khao San road just to see it just once.  There were farongs everywhere and we soon realized what a difference it makes in terms of getting ripped off if you speak a little Thai.

The next day we went off to visit volunteers all over the country. About four people came with me to meet their volunteers at my volunteer’s site and we were treated to the best of pizza in Thailand (it was okay) and a Thai rock concert by the famed, “Big Ass.”  Apparently, this has some different meaning here.  Well, the band was great and the next few days I spend at my volunteer’s site were wonderful.  Her Thai was inspiring and I got to meet her students and teachers and see how she lives. 

The misadventures began when I left her site and headed down south to visit my own.  There are two types of buses in Thailand, the Rot Bo-Kau-Sau and the Rot Tua. The latter has direct routes and air conditioning while the former is like an extended city bus with no air conditioning and stops every fifteen minutes, mostly on the side of the road.  Five hours into a three hour trip I realized I was on the wrong bus.  It was literally like riding in a sauna with wheels.  The bus attendents’ looks of confusion when I said I was getting of at the bus station was another tip off that I was on the wrong bus, and finally they let me off on the side of the road and one of them got on the phone with my supervisor and told her where to come get me.

My supervisor works at the local education office and she is the absolute picture of grace.  She got me fed and took me home and didn’t bat an eye the next morning when I said that my stomach was bothering me.  Misadventure three getting sick for the first time in Thailand while staying with someone you have known for exactly twelve hours.  Let me note that I’m not talking about sick meaning a head cold.  Lucky for me my supervisor has a lovely little house with western toilets.

We have a really great Peace Corps Medical Officer and I called him up yesterday morning and he gave me a prescription and I was able to sleep all day yesterday thanks to my very understanding supervisor.  One minor struggle, Thai people eat a lot, a lot, so it was difficult to convince my host that I did not need boiled rice with shimp or warm sweet rolls.  All the food she offered would under normal circumstances been fine, but I guess Thais don’t subscribe to the not eating when you have stomach problems rule.

 Today I am feeling a bit better, though not 100 percent and so she is letting me write emails in her office while she gives a short teacher training.

Later I will finally get to visit my two schools and tomorrow I will open a bank account and look at potential houses. It is all so exciting, and suddenly very real.  In two weeks I will begin my work down here and as they say back in the neighborhood, “then you’ll see the fun.”

Today was site placement day!!!

I can’t say exactly where I’m going, but its in the South!!!! I also have six really great volunteers within six hours of my sight, and their sites are even further south! For those of you wondering what the appeal is, my site is about forty-five minutes from the beach! The other placements include the east, the north, and Issan- the northeast region.

So now begins a sort of snowball of intense activity and preparation. We leave for our site visits from Bangkok on Saturday and there is a lot to take care of while we are away. First we will be visiting current volunteers from group 119 that live near to our sites and then we will meet with our counterparts– in the case of my program co-teachers, at our actual sites and they will introduce us to the community, show us possible housing solutions, and take us to visit our schools! I have an elementary school and a high school, and I am really excited to be having a range of experiences.

This past week we had some intense language session as we prepared for our upcoming trips. We learned about modes of transportation, (from trains to flat beds with benches and roofs,) and buying bus tickets and all the possible ways one could say ,”the bus leaves at 8 am and arrives at 8pm”.

Last week we also planned our first English camp and on Saturday tested our skills by running an official English camp. As TCCO volunteers we will be holding several English Camps, upwards of thirty, over the next two years and it was nice to be able to practice. We ran a Pirate themed camp for about 90 kids, and it was a lot of fun. The kids were divided into five teams and there were five rotations, and a few big group activities. There were all the classic big group games like “People to People,” “Simon Says,” “The West Wind Blows,” some of which the kids were able to understand the directions to and some not. By five o’clock we were hoarse and exhausted, but we think the kids might have learned somethings, maybe.

There will be lots more to tell next week when I get back from site visit.  Keep the comments coming, send me lots of email and think of me as you eat your macaroni and ride around in cars!

Well, I wasn’t stressed out. I woke up this morning, and was able to sleep in. It’s relative, I slept for an extra twenty minutes, but after our late night Friday sleeping over at the hotel, twenty minutes on Sunday morning felt pretty good. I woke up, did my laundry, chatted with the family, ate the same fish cooked two different ways at eight o’clock in the morning. Planned on coming here to the hotel to write this blog and in general was feeling fine.

But, its the little things. I walked out with my bike helmet on and was ready to head out when I saw the dog nestled on the ground under the low drying rack where I hang out my clothes. In Thailand most people keep dogs, but not the same way Americans do. This dog never comes in the house and gets whatever leftovers we don’t eat and don’t save. The dogs around are either jumpy/scary or incredibly lethargic from all the white rice that they eat and often will not move out of the way on an oncoming bicycle. The dogs are filthy, often covered in patches of hairless skin, they walk around with infections from the bites and scratches they get fighting with each other (every morning at 4am). And I think everyone pretty much knows about my aversion to dogs. The sight of this one, scratching away furiously in flea-jumping distance of my clothes tugged at all sorts of issues for me. The thing is, whether my towel is now infested with all manner of microscopic organisms or not is not the point. It’s that I think that it is, and will not have a moment’s peace from the itching real or imagined until next laundry day. My host mom found my mad scramble to move my clothes pretty hilarious.

This week was a pretty rough one as far as training goes. On Friday we had mid-term evaluations and mock language interviews and extra language class. Peace Corps does two language interviews during service to chart your progress and evaluate their language training programs. The first will be in April before we swear-in as volunteers and the last is right before you leave. So Friday they gave mock language progress interviews to give us a taste of what to expect. I am amazed at how much we have learned in the last four weeks. I can carry on short conversations with my host family without having to stop and mime something or run for the dictionary now. I am also able to understand a lot of what they are saying even if they are not talking about me and my schedule, while jumping in to those conversations are more difficult.

The mid-term evaluation was a matter of sitting with the TCCO (that’s my program) technical coordinator and the training manager and talking about how things are going. This amounted to laughing over all the ridiculous things that can happen in a week as a result of the language barrier and the cultural confusion. Like last Sunday when I came home from writing last weeks blog and thought I was making small talk with my host dad. He asked if I was hungry and I said yes, and then went to fix myself the food my host mom showed me that I was supposed to eat for lunch while she was a work. As I chomped hungrily on a salty ear of corn my host mom came rushing through the door looking flustered.

The conversation went something like this:
“What are you doing?!” she asks me.

“Eating,” I say, not sure this is the correct response. “Aren’t you working?” I ask.

“Pa said you were hungry!” she replies.

“I am,” I say. Thinking this is obvious because I am eating.

“I brought you eggs and coconuts.” She says gesturing with a bag of eggs and then a bag og coconuts.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, excuse me, excuse me.” I say, trying not to make the situation worse.

She is quiet for a moment, unusually quiet, and then burst out laughing. Upon my saying that I was hungry, my host dad had rushed off to the Wat where my host mom works and told her that I was hungry. She then rushed home to feed me, even though we had talked at length the day before about what I should eat when she went to work. Its a matter of remembering that nothing is small talk when it comes to Thai hospitality.

Trying to get this whole what the farong eats thing straightened out has been tricky. I said that I often eat yogurt in the morning and six containers of yogurt magically appeared next to my enormous regular breakfast last weekend. Then I made the mistake of saying I like to drink soy milk, and several little plastic bags full of soymilk showed up a day or two later. I got so visibly excited every time my host mom served tofu that it took me a week to realize the fish had virtually disappeared from my meals, while the amount of tofu doubled. So now I am trying to eat fish vigorously when it shows up in order to express my equal love of both sources of protein.

So, the more I learn the more confusing things get. I dumped my bike on the way over here and after two hours of laundry this morning the clothes I am wearing are muddy and the ones that aren’t muddy are flea-covered. Maybe. I assure you its all very very very funny.

I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts I have been processing with folks, but you can all tell me if it’s just not interesting.

First, to comment on Ben’s comment, the traffic is completely chaotic, but I wouldn’t venture anarchy exactly. People turn right on red here, but they drive on the left. When there is a red light on a three lane road, it seems like the two lanes furthest to the right heed the red and the lane on the left just keeps going. This can make trying to get to the left-hand side of the road menacing, but I don’t want to say much more because my mother is reading this. Suffice to say, there may be a system, but it is not a linear western system.

Second I want to comment on my stuff. I am using everything. Life here is not disposable and whatever you have, a use can be found for it. I packed a lot of my toiletries in plastic ziplock bags so they wouldn’t leak, and the ziplock bags are invaluable for keeping stuff safe from ants and carrying things to and from the bathroom. Every piece of clothing I have is going to use, though some of it is packed away for when I get to site. My new sandals were well-broken in within two days, travel alarm clock has become my clock, my computer is an amazing way for me to connect with everyone, and do work, etc. you see where this is going. So thanks to everyone who coughed up cash for me to buy supplies, bought me clothes and other special things, every last bit of it is a part of my day. I spent considerable money myself preparing to come here and I have to say that the suitcase, headphones, clothes and shoes I invested in were worth it, because they all get a work out and they have to last a good long time.

We often hear about how Peace Corps Thailand is “Posh Corps,” or “Peace Corps Light,” and indeed we live in a tropical paradise, but there are reminders everywhere that this is the developing world. Here there is no garbage collection, so what little trash people make (and most of it is plastic) gets burned or tossed on the ground, and I know plenty of folks who are cringing at the thought of either one of those things. Smog is in ready supply from the cars, motorcycles and motor bikes, and clean water is either boiled or bottled. I don’t want to sound in any way preachy, but it’s something to think about. If you don’t have to use plastic bags, or can buy energy efficient appliances or find efficient forms of fuel, do it, because the ability to reverse the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization and other development is a luxury.

That said I did two little things this week that improved the quality of my life immensely and one of them was call the doctor and have him send down some bug spray with deet in it. We get bug spray in our medical kits, but it just wasn’t keeping the mosquitoes at bay and what would be a minor itchiness at home is something akin to itching, burning and pain here. Health risks associated with Deet aside, I am sooo much happier.

The other thing I did was get an extra pair of flip-flops for the bathroom. The bathroom is probably number two on the list of things that are stressful about Peace Corps Thailand. Number one for a lot of people being language. The bathroom situation at my homestay is something like this. There is a sink, but it is not attached to any pipes so no water comes out. Then there is a large basin with a faucet and a bucket. This is for the traditional bucket shower. Next to that is a small basin with a faucet and a bucket, and next to the small basin is a squat toilet. There is not toilet paper, and in my house there is no bidet. So it’s pretty much the you, a bucket full of water, the squatter and your hand. The first time I was faced with this hard reality I definitely cried. But you adjust.

In our bathroom we are lucky enough to also have a hose for showering, which I use instead of the bucket. Needless to say the bathroom is always wet, and with all those basins of water, the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. The fact that I now have a pair of flip flops and my feet never have to touch the wet floor or the ribbed porcelain of the squat toilet has made me just about the happiest Peace Corps trainee there ever was.

I mention flip-flops and bug spray because they directly effect the quality of my life and because I learned something in all this. In a strange environment with a difficult language I am still in control of my own comfort. This is all part of traveling and living abroad and having good coping skills. I am learning to look at every problem as having a definite solution within my grasp. Little adjustments.

We had a really busy week this week practice teaching, writing lesson plans, tweaking them over and over again and meeting four different classes of Thai fifth graders. This job is great, and being in the classroom and working with the teacher is just fuel for getting to site and really getting down to business.

Yesterday we had Sports Day, put together by the cross-cultural coordinator. Basically Field Day for Thailand 120 with Thai sports. We played soccer, Petanque (French Bocce), Badminton, which is played anywhere and everywhere with or without a net, and Degraw which is played with a wicker ball and a volley ball net, only you use your feet. It’s always great when we can all get together and having a day to play was even better. Having never been one for serious team sports I really enjoyed playing soccer with forty people on the field running back and forth like crazy. There was also a traditional Thai relay race with eight stations. The first person had to blow up a balloon till it popped, the second had to thread a needle, the third had to first get a coin out of a bowl of water with their mouth, then had to do the same thing with a bowl of flower, the next person had to eat a block of sugary paste and then drink a bottle of pepsi through a tiny hole in the cap, and the person they tagged had to eat to chilis and then get fed bananas to kill the burning by someone who was blindfolded, the last station had to pick up a ping pong ball with chop sticks and race it back to the beginning. Needless to say it was pretty fun and the Thai people had a good laugh at us. Most community events take place at the the temples, called Wats that are around, and Sports day was held at a Wat about half and hour from the city. Lots of people from the community showed up to make food and help out and it was just another example of endless Thai hospitality.

Thanks for all the comments and keep them coming!!