Well. I should say a bit more about the end of my Peace Corps experience.

As I said before, it was somewhat underwhelming. It seemed totally surreal to think about as it approached because I knew that after the end, I'd be doing the exact same thing. And so it was easy to ignore. But at the same time, as that finish line loomed into view, I was struck with a moment of clarity. I realized that my service as a volunteer had been a series of highs and lows (I'm pretty sure I've made that observation before), and that where I was emotionally at the close of my service would probably have a strong impact on how I viewed my service for the rest of my life.

So I sat down and had a good long talk with myself about what it would take for me to end things on a high note. I looked at the reasons for my good feelings in the past, and the reasons for my low feelings. It wasn't too difficult. I got positive feelings from being involved with projects and activities at school, from spending time in my community, basically by doing the things that I felt like I should be doing as a volunteer. Low feelings came about with frustration about school, from feelings of isolation and dissatisfaction with how I spent my time. Not too shocking, not too complex, and not too difficult to plan accordingly.

I talked to one teacher and we set up a sex education unit I had been kicking around in my head. That ended up being one of the most fulfilling parts of my Peace Corps service. Whoop! I accepted a bunch of requests to do activities at other schools, which, while of questionable value to students learning to speak English, do have value in students getting an opportunity to interact with a foreigner (and have fun doing so). I started going to Mae's school once a week. I started trying to exercise more (figuring that an increased level of fitness would improve my emotional state too).

And it worked. I was able to finish my end of service reports and feel good about (most of) what I had to say.

My new challenge is to find ways to feel personally fulfilled without Peace Corps service. I've made lists of ideas for activities for myself and things to do (learning to play guitar, gardening, helping Pa with English stuff, yadda yadda yadda, and for a few days so far (since I made this decision), it's been going pretty well.

Oh yeah, Gam and I got back last week from 2 weeks in Chiang Mai where we took a Thai massage class. It was pretty cool, and now I have souvenirs for EVERYone (in the form of free massages)! So look forward to it, punk.

Oh yeah! I still have a blog!

Whoa.

I have successfully completed my term as a Peace Corps volunteer. So that's cool. And at the same time, completely underwhelming. As my COS (completion of service) date drew close, it was hard for me to feel much of anything, since I knew that I wouldn't be going anywhere right away, and that, in general, nothing would be changing for me as I remain in the village waiting for Gam's visa to be approved (which will be who knows when). And my feelings haven't really changed.

Looking back on my Peace Corps service DOES elicit a variety of feelings. Regrettably, the majority regard what I DIDN'T do as a Peace Corps volunteer, but I manage that by pointing out to myself that that's probably pretty natural, and it's easy to fixate on one's short-comings rather than one's accomplishments. I am happy to report, however, that the overwhelming feeling is one of confidence that my service in the Peace Corps has been a positive one and that I have NO regrets about spending the past 27 months serving as a volunteer.

Hm. I know for a fact that I have a lot more to say than this, but this is really all I've got for the moment. I'll have to try again after the whiskey has worked its way out of my system. I just felt the need to say something that might be heard, so hopefully I have accomplished that.

Cheeers!
E-rock

That's ill!

So when the doctor said the word "meningitis," the first thing that went through my head was the Ween song, "Spinal Meningitis Got Me Down," and I worried that I might die. Then he told me that I would be getting a CT scan and Lumbar Puncture (yes, big needle in spine). I can't say I'd recommend either, but my headaches improved considerably after the doctor drained some of my spinal fluid. I'm sure you're asking yourself, "What the hell is an LP like? Does it hurt?" No, it didn't really hurt, I got anesthetized first, but it did feel extremely weird. Unpleasant, and wrong, and mostly just weird. In all, I spent 5 days in the hospital, about 4 days and 23 hours longer than I've ever spent in a hospital since birth. Thanks, Peace Corps for footing the bill!

So yeah, that was my most recent illness, prior to that I spent about a month with one or more stomach ailments. I had pretty much every symptom of gastro-intestinal distress there is, and I visited 3 doctors.

All in all, I've been sick for almost 2 months. And I'll tell ya, I'm SICK of being SICK!

Now, I don't mean this to be a call for pity, though that may be what it sounds like. I don't need your damn pity. I'm feeling better now, and planning on taking it easy for a little while to make sure that I'm really all better. What I would like from everyone out there is more of a "get your rear in gear" mental push to get me back into the swing of things. I've been out of everything for a while, and I'm a little concerned about jumping back in. It seems like jumping rope, where the toughest part is catching the rhythm and starting, and that's where I am right now. The rope definitely hasn't stopped spinning.

On the positive side, I'm probably definitely the skinniest I've ever been, so that's cool. Granted, I'm pretty weak, since I haven't really been able to exercise for a long time, but still...

Ok, I'm gonna do some push ups.
Eli

Speaking of exercise, the Hula Hoop is the current exercise craze here (in my village for sure, and I've seen 'em elsewhere, I'm wondering if it's nation-wide or not). I think it's great fun to see EVERYONE hula-hooping.

Peace.

Whassup?

So the school year has begun (it's been almost a month already!).

Already, I feel a lot better about my situation at one of my schools.
Last year I had issues with my co-teacher (we never figured out how to co-teach, and I ended up not really doing anything). I've rearranged my schedule so that when I'm at that school I'm working with other teachers, too (though it's only occurred a couple times that those other teachers actually stayed in the room while I taught, but I didn't mind). When I'm teaching my co-teacher's students, I teach my own lesson (focusing on speaking), and she stays in the room. I think she's a lot happier with this setup, too, and I feel a lot more useful. The other day, she took some notes on her own accord while I was teaching, which was way cool, and it occurred to me today that we could and should start coordinating our lessons (I've been prepping my stuff independently, probably a result of my frustration from last year).

Things are going smoothly at Pa's school, and I'm hoping to do some projects with the scout group this year. I should see about getting that ball rolling soon.

The insurgence in Bangkok and the rest of the country seems to be all over (but not before a bunch of fires were set in BKK in a big commercial district. Here are some pictures and a song.
Between living at the temple, restrictions on travel and other stuff, I haven't seen any other volunteers in, yow, over 2 months. I'm going a little Colonel Kurtz here. Social gatherings are on the horizon though, and it will be nice to speak English with other native speakers.

It's starting to rain more frequently, though it still gets plenty hot. Things are turning green, and I need to check when Kru Nuun is going to plant rice.

Um, Peace?

Monk'd!

On April 29th, I went over to Pa and Mae’s house bright and early. Pa was getting ready for his usual weekend group of students who come over to study English, and the house was full of relatives (she’s the youngest of 12, and with cousins and nephews and nieces, her family tree is rather impressive). They were making food and ornaments for my ordination celebration [gnaan bpuat].

I took a seat with a group of women on the living room floor and began wrapping slices of banana, uncooked sticky rice and peanuts in banana leaves to be cooked later (this is apparently an important treat for ordinations). Eventually I was called away to help Pa teach while he coordinated something else outside.

When I got outside, men were setting up canopies and tables under them, as well as Pa’s karaoke setup. A couple men were splitting poles of bamboo and making a big ornamental bed, and another group was splitting and scooping out a huge pile of coconuts. I entertained kids for a little while. Then kids went home and the back of the house got taken over with out-sized cooking equipment.

By this time (as I may have implied) quite a few more relatives had shown up and preparations really got under way. A whole pig had been acquired for the occasion (and I mean whole) and about a dozen people went to work separating the different cuts of meat, slicing intestines and skin (to be fried for laab), saving blood, and I don’t even know what else. I got to see the kidneys, and a whole liver, and the pig’s face and watch while they cut the flesh off the tail. If you’re curious, a whole pig is 5,500 Thai baht, a bit over $150. It was my job to distribute whiskey to the people working.

Then we had lunch.

They day continued about that way. I continued to make social rounds, sitting with Pa at a table with a group of men talking and drinking. Pause. While sitting at this table, a number of people selling things came by (I guess when they see celebrations when they ride by on their motorcycles, they stop to check things out), like lottery tickets and peanuts. One guy pulled up and showed us a huge mass of honeycomb in a plastic bag full of honey that he had inside a bucket. Negotiations were made and a price of 100 baht a bottle (that’s 3-ish dollars) was decided upon. He started pulling empty whiskey bottles out of a shoulder bag and pouring the honey from a corner of the bag that was cut off, then rubber-banding a piece of plastic over the top. He said he could get about 10 bottles out of the piece of honeycomb he had, and he sold 5 or 6 bottles while he was there. I think the best part was watching people hand him shots of local whiskey (sticky rice moonshine) as he poured the honey. I think he had 3 shots and a cigarette. Then he hoped on his motorcycle and took off. And now I have one of the bottles in my cupboard.

Later in the afternoon I did a bit of prep stuff (studied some of the Pali I would be saying a bit more, that’s the language all the monk chanting stuff is in, so it felt a lot like studying Hebrew for a Bar Mitzvah). We also made epic quantities of Kanom Baat, another traditional ordination treat. We boiled rice in a huge pan until it was very well done, then added all the coconut that had been shredded in the morning and several kilos of raw cane and palm sugar, all the while stirring the concoction with the stems from palm fronds (it was a two-person stirring job, and went in shifts). It comes out like a really thick, sticky pudding. Tasty. We made like 40 trays of it and gave some to everyone who visited the next day.

Then in the evening I took advantage of my last chance to drink whiskey and sing and dance for a while (though I did so in moderation, jing jing).

At 9 the next morning, we went to the temple by Pa and Mae’s house and I had my head and eyebrows shaved. The hair was all collected in a big lotus leaf (though I’m not sure what they did with it). It was pretty cool. All the people who came all took a turn cutting my hair, and then pouring water over me. Then I was dressed all in white and we gave some respect to Buddha.

Then I got loaded in the back of a pickup truck (I sat in a big wooden chair, and Pa and another guy held umbrellas over me) while another pickup truck with big speakers in the back played loud Thai music. All the people who had come with us got in front of the trucks and we proceeded on a tour around the village, with everyone in front dancing and drinking and picking flowers. I think we did that for the better part of two hours. And don’t worry, people brought whiskey to my umbrella bearers, and at some point they traded places with other people so they could dance, too.

When we got back to the house, I took up residence in what became my corner of the living room. The bamboo bed (it was purely ornamental) was covered with all the things that I would be using as a monk (my robes, my baat [the bowl monks use when collecting alms], etc.) and some banana tree-based sculptures were there, too, though I still don’t understand the symbolism behind them (no one I’ve asked has actually known either). I was given lunch (I had to eat alone, that is, not from communal dishes). After everyone ate, we did one of the banana leaf sculpture chanting things and I gave a blessing (the one I’d been practicing) over the microphone.

The party continued outside, but I spent the rest of the day in my corner of the living room, accepting gifts (people give money to help cover the expenses of the celebration) and bestowing blessings. The party continued outside, and people came and went. Mae sat with me for most of the day, and explained to me that staying in my little space was meant to acknowledge the discomfort and suffering and hard work I have inflicted upon my parents. And not that I have been a terrible child or anything, but in having children, parents sacrifice some of their freedom and take on more responsibility. Not being able to go do stuff was to help me practice patience.

So I sat in my corner, and I slept in my corner.

Interesting note, Mae invited 60 or 80 people (mostly family and teachers), but in the ledger Mae kept (tracking expenses and donations and people, she’s all organized like that), there were I think just over 170 donations, and presumably most people who gave something didn’t come alone. So that’s pretty cool. It felt really good to see so many people coming out to support me for whatever reason, whether they just wanted to see a farang with a shaved head giving blessings or because they know me personally and wanted to share the event. I liked it.

The next day (that’s May 1st) around 1 in the afternoon I got loaded into a pickup (I wasn’t supposed to walk) and was taken 50 meters to the temple. I did some “repeat after me” stuff and answered some questions and traded my white clothes for orange robes, and I was a monk! We took a bunch of pictures, then people started leaving, and eventually it was just me and the fam and Jay (he was my kanyom, the kid who hangs out with me and runs errands for me, like buying ice; he volunteered). And then eventually the fam left.

For five days I stayed inside the temple. For the same reasoning as the staying in the corner of the room. I got up at about 5:30 and took a bath, then swept the building I was staying in (the main building with the big Buddha statue). Then I meditated for a while (usually 40-50 minutes) and waited until Gam brought me breakfast. I’d eat and we’d talk for a while. It was interesting, because the interactions had to be “proper,” which meant no touching (avoid my robes brushing against her or something, we kept our distance) and our conversations were reserved. But it was still nice.

Then she’d go home and I’d wash my spare set of robes, then hang out with the Nen for a while. Nen are the boys who live at the temple for whatever reason and act as novice monks. All the Nen at that temple were there to be taken care of and attend the monk school. They were an interesting group. On the one hand, they were perfectly typical 11-13 year olds with all that that implies, but at the same time they observed a set of rules and way of life (to at least some degree).

At around 11:30, Gam brought me lunch and we’d hang out a bit more, then she’d go home and I’d meditate again. After noon, monks aren’t supposed to chew anything (though that wasn’t observed at that temple and they ate dinner together, though I followed the rule, figuring since I was only a monk for 15 days, I could do everything all “riap roi”), so I drank a lot of water and soy milk. I wrote in my journal a bit, and sat and thought a lot. I started getting bored on about my third day and started reading my book (I took Les Miserables, which I’d already started). In the evening I bathed again and meditated one more time. Members of the extended family came to sit in the evenings, and Pa slept in the temple with me.

On the morning of the 6th, my initial confinement was lifted and there was a short ceremony and special breakfast at the wat with all the monks (counting me and the Nen, 9 of us) present. Then my day was exactly the same as the previous days, except that I went for a short walk with the Nen in the afternoon to get some drinks for the monks.

The morning of the 7th I collected alms [bin ta-baat] for the first time. We took off our shoes and walked around the village while one of the Nen went ahead banging a little gong (to let people know we were coming). Then when people came out to the side of the road (or yelled for us to stop if they weren’t quite ready, we’re pretty laid back up here in the North) we’d stop, they’d put the food in our big bowls or in the cart Jay pushed along behind us, and we’d give a blessing. Then we’d keep walking. It was way cool. When we got back to the temple, we ate breakfast, and the rest of the day went pretty much the same as before, though I ate lunch from the leftovers.

On the 8th, I bin ta-baat-ed one more time, then Pa took me to my own village (I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that he lives in a village about 1km from my own) where I moved into MY local wat. And continued doing about the same thing I had been for the past week. The only real difference was that every evening around 7 and every morning around 5:30 we would “Tam Wat.” All the Nen and the monks who were around (I don’t know where the ones who didn’t come were) would get together and do some group chanting. There was a book, and I tried to follow along, and in the slow parts I did alright (it felt like good reading practice), and when I inevitably got lost when they got into the fast chanting towards the end, I’d just close the book and put my hands together. In the evenings, after Tam Wat-ing, Pra Kruu (that’s how the head monk is referred to) showed me new methods of meditating. It was way cool. I especially liked the walking meditations.

Bin ta-baat-ing in my village was cool. I am a more generally recognized face there, and I saw a lot more people I knew. I feel like it was a good means of further integrating myself into the community, and I was proud that I was able to do the two blessings I learned.

One morning we went to a gathering (as I understand it was a general, making merit ceremony) where we were fed (feeding monks is a big deal). At the end, Pra Kruu grabbed the microphone and told everyone that I would teach English to their kids at the temple on Sundays. Whups! Kinda wished he’d run that by me beforehand. But no biggie. It’s pretty clear that no one is super serious about anything here, and I’d like to give it a shot and see if any kids actually show up (and if not, I’m sure Pra Kruu will play English lesson with me). But it was funny.

Then one day (the 15th), I was done. At 1 in the afternoon there was a brief ceremony where I did some more “repeat after me” chanting and reviewed some of the stuff I had learned at the wat (mostly just the meditations) and changed back into regular clothes, then was ferried back home.

Having written this all, this is definitely mostly just a journal entry of what happened. And that’s all I’m going to give you. All the quiet time I spent sitting and thinking without all the distractions I typically impose upon myself, that was for me. But it was nice, and if you get a chance, I’d highly recommend taking a break from everything that you usually do and find a spot and sit quietly and just let your mind wander for a while. Speaking of which, have I told you the difference between meditation and sitting quietly? Meditation (to me) is when you try to unfocus your mind and disassociate from yourself and everything. You actively try not to think. Sitting quietly looks pretty much the same from the outside, except you impose no restrictions on yourself. You give your mind free reign to go where it may, and sometimes you come to a revelation, or solve something that’s been bothering you (or identify what has been bothering you) or come up with an idea for a lesson plan (or what have you), or get side-tracked and think about that movie you watched last week. They’re both awesome.

And now people call me Nan Eli (Nan being the northern way of referring to someone who has been a monk). I’ll post pictures soon. Gam managed to take something like 1,100 photos, though, which is a little intimidating.

SU SU!

Oh, and while I was spending all that peaceful, quiet, introspective time at a Buddhist temple or two, Thailand continued to embroil itself in insurrection. Hm. At least it looks like it MIGHT be wrapping up now…

PEACE (that’s an order, not a request)
Nan Eli

Surreality

So I understand that the situation in Bangkok has gained more international attention now as violence has escalated, and I thought I'd share a bit about what it's like to be in a nation where there is such civil unrest.

But before I go into my perceptions, I'll give you all the best, un-biased run down of what's up that I can. Feel free to check facts for yourself, I'm no news/politics junkie.

So a few years ago, Prime Minister Thaksin was in charge. He gained the support and love of most of rural Thailand by providing funding for projects in the countryside and (as far as I understand) NOT simply ignoring the country-folk. At the same time, however, he was involved in some shady dealings in the city and got into trouble for something financial. At that point half (I think) of his assets (which are in the billions, USD) were frozen and he fled the country to avoid a jail sentence. He is now living abroad under self-imposed exile, though it sounds like he's found plenty to keep him busy.

As I understand, Thaksin's successor, PM Abhisit was appointed, not elected, and his apparent failure to attend to the needs of the people in the country-side (and that IS the majority of the Thai population) has generated a lot of discontentment and calls for the re-instatement of Thaksin (which I'm pretty darn sure won't be happening) or to have a legit election. Thus we have two factions, the Red Shirts (who support Thaksin) and the Yellow Shirts (who like how things are now). The Red Shirts are basically the common people from the country, and the Yellow Shirts are the city-folk and more affluent.

Over the past few years, there have been clashes (the Red Shirts shut down the international airport in Bangkok for a while shortly before I came here, and there were demonstrations in Bangkok last spring), which have apparently culminated in the current events. What is going on now started out peacefully enough about a month ago(Red Shirt party tried to get enough people in BKK to block traffic in some key areas, peaceful, light rallies). It escalated a bit when a bunch of protesters donated blood to be thrown on the residence of the current PM and some grenades were fired into an army base. At first, the protesters were tolerated, and peaceful dissolution was attempted. Now the Thai government has declared a state of emergency and called for the end of the protesting, granting the police and military permission to use force as needed. Also members of the Yellow Shirt group have joined in, and the violence has increased, from shooting marbles with slingshots to increasing use of explosives. People have died, people have been injured, and the Peace Corps has (quite appropriately) banned all non-essential travel into BKK, and the US State Department has issued a travel advisory to American travellers.

So what's it like for me to be here now? Surreal is an excellent word.

In my village, things are quiet. A fair number of people have their red flags out, red-supporting shirts, and sometimes when I go to the market, people will have their radios on listening to people making speeches and they (the people at the market) will cheer every now and then. And maybe that's because my community is fairly homogenous. I did have an interesting talk with a local Yellow Shirt supporter who criticized the Red Shirts for being too reactionary and not using critical thinking, but I also feel like he keeps his views to himself for the most part, so as to avoid conflict. I've heard several false reports from community members that, "The Red Shirts won! Abhisit is resigining!" but this does not appear to be the case from the news sources I've checked out.

So it's interesting. There are definitely a LOT of layers to everything that is going on, as I feel would be the case in such circumstances anywhere, but because this is Thailand and things can be very subtle and indirect (not that blowing shit up is very subtle and indirect, but the underlying-underlying motives might be), those layers can be tough to perceive (especially for me, with less than perfect Thai and an imperfect understanding of the political situation). I think that within the Red Shirt party, there are a lot of conflicting interests (the people who had only wanted a peaceful demonstration, and the agitators who were hoping and waiting for things to escalate). And then there are all the Red Shirt supporters who stayed at home, some of whom support things openly (with their flags and shirts and loud radios), and some of whom do so quietly, and those who maintain their indifference.

So my plan is to be like my neighbors. I keep my political opinions to myself (though every now and then I get a chance to discuss things with people in private settings and it's interesting to hear their views), and I'll keep checking headlines. There really isn't much more I can do besides hope that things don't get too much more out of hand. I do have a meeting in BKK coming up in about 4 weeks, so if this could all get cleared up before then I'd really appreciate it, OK guys?

So if you see headlines about violence in Thailand, you don't need to say, "Oh my goodness! Eli is in Thailand! I wonder if he's OK?!"
OK?

*heart*
Eli

Did you know?

Did you know that the Thai word for "orgasm" is the same as (one of) the word(s) for "awesome?" Now I understand why my girlfriend used to say "Orgasm!" when something cool happened. And really, it makes perfect sense. Can you name something more awesome than an orgasm?

Anyhow, that seemed like a better opening than another stupid apology for tardiness in blog posts. Without re-reading all of my blogging to this point in time, I feel like my entries have evolved from descriptions of what I'm doing (though those are still included when cool things go down), and shifted more towards my thoughts, impressions and epiphanies. And I just had me one of them epipha-thingies.

The thing that is so cool and bad-ass about the Peace Corps, at least for this volunteer, is the two year commitment. It would be very difficult to put myself into the circumstances I find myself in any other way, with a reasonable amount of language and cultural instruction, followed by a work placement in a cool rural community. And I get to do this for two years. After about 6 months, I was feeling like, "yeah, I've seen it all." Nothing was making me say, "Oh my goodness! I can't believe things like this are happening!" And that feeling has simply continued to grow. I think that realization became most apparent to me after my family's recent visit (Hey family! Thanks for coming! It was great to see you!). I kept thinking, "Yeah, this is probably cool for them, but it all seems so typical to me," which led to me always wondering if I was doing my part as a host (I'm sure the fam will say "Of course you did, Eli!" but I still have to wonder).

And anyway, my new epiphanimity is that this sense of jaded-ness is actually an amazing thing. If I were only here for 6 months, I never would have got past that, "Holy crap! I'm in Thailand! Everything is so amazing!" state of mind, and yeah, I would have had an awesome time and gone home and told everyone about how cool it was to be a volunteer in Thailand for 6 months, but...

Here I am now at a little over a year in, with about another year (of Peace Corps service, already thinking about possibly staying beyond that) to go, and I'm well past that, "Holy crap!" phase. I feel like I can view things from a fairly Thai point of view, my communication skills continue to improve, I have established myself as some sort of member of the community, and I get to do all of this for a substantial amount of time still.

And that's why Peace Corps is cool.

And now I'll wish everyone a happy Songkran (remember that crazy water-fight New Year's party I talked about last year?) and let you all know that I will be shaving my head an eyebrows and donning orange robes for a few weeks shortly as I become a monk (something pretty much all young men do for a brief period sometime in their 20s). It'll be like that Bar Mitzvah I never had. I'm even learning to chant in a dead language!

PEACE!

What the heck have I been up to?

The school year has been winding down here, and this is the last week for students, just wrapping up testing and doing celebration stuff now, my 4-6 graders will be taking a trip to the beach near Bangkok next week (though I shan't be going, as I will be busy greeting my family at the airport! Whoop!), and everything school is pretty much over until mid-May.

I have had a conversation with the folks at the Aw-Baw-Daw and explained my conflicting feelings and reached a resolution. That is, the Nayoke (head honcho) had twisted my desire to teach an English class once a week to interested adults in the community once a week into my coming to the Aw-Baw-Daw to teach the staff there three times a week. At first this was OK, but as time went on, I grew frustrated as it became apparent the staff had no real interest in practicing English, and though I enjoyed hanging out with them, my three afternoons a week there were preventing my participation in other activities, and the farang in me made it difficult for me to not do what I had agreed to do. Anyways, I pretty much laid this all out, trying hard to emphasize that I wasn't angry about this, but that it was a situation for me, and ended up with a happy arrangement to come hang out when I'm free, but not to sweat the teaching stuff and the schedule.
Then I went to the sports day with the Aw-Baw-Daw staff and about 50 people from all over the tambon (as well as the other 7 tambons) and had a blast playing relay games and winning more medals than some countries got in the olympics (I'm assuming there were some that got zero, right?).

I have found an outlet for my Dance Dance Revolution prowess in the local aerobic dance group (a group of mostly mee-baans [housewives, though I'm sure most of them do work outside the house, too]). This is similar to the aerobic Issan dance group I stumbled across a while back, but it's even closer to my house, and involves loud techno remixes of techno songs (only in Thailand, eh?) instead of traditional-er music. And they meet every evening. So I'd like to make a more regular appearance there.

I also found out that one of my matayom 1 students (that's equivalent to 7th grade, I was told she is 15 years old) is getting married (well, she actually got married the other day), which threw me for a loop. I got laughed at by some other teachers for being surprised, and at first I thought this meant that they weren't surprised and were totally cool with it, but it just occured to me that laughing at an uncomfortable situation is a very Thai thing to do, so perhaps it's more like that instead of Eli being the silly farang.
Anyhow, the rumor was that her husband is a 24 year old soldier (her being 15 sits slightly better with me than my original thinking that she was 13, though I'm not exactly sure of her [or his] age). When I first mentioned this to some of you folks in the states, it was questioned if this was an arranged marriage (because why else would a kid get married?!), but I'm 99% sure this wasn't the case. I haven't heard anything about arranged marriages here, though men do pay a dowry to the family of the girl. What I do know is that this particular girl had numerous boyfriends (my counterpart was pointing out all the broken-hearted boys at school) and it is my (completely unfounded) assumption that she managed to get pregnant (I couldn't come up with a tactful way to inquire about this), and that marriage was the best way to save face.

So, "Wow."

My frustration with my counterpart at the matayom school kinda peaked, as I realized that this year at that school has essentially been a complete waste of my time, and I have vowed to myself to do things differently.
I have heard other volunteers express complaints about their counterparts expecting the volunteer to do all of the teaching on their own and frequently leaving the room while the volunteer teaches, effectively eliminating the sustainability aspect of the arrangement. I have experienced the opposite, with her expressing no desire for me to teach and more or less ignoring or twisting my advice and suggestions into something very nearly worthless. I feel like there is a lot of greng-jai between us, and maybe this is not really the way she wants things to be, but we have established such a routine of me doing nothing that I really feel bound by it. My decision for next year is that, in my most face-saving way, I am simply going to tell her that I will teach 2 days each week I am there and perpare for those lessons independently, and supply her with copies of my planning. Any additional time I am there, I would like to work with other teachers in the school and prove to them that I am not the incompetent, worthless lump that I feel they perceive me to be.

Hoo. That's a bit of a rant, ain't it? I'm serious about teachers thinking I'm incompetent, though. I think that they think I cannot speak a lick of Thai and hardly attempt to communicate with me, either addressing me with the most basic questions and statements ("It's hot, isn't it?" "Are you hungry?") or not even attempting to speak to a non-native speaker and going along in Thai that I have no hope of following, addressing my counterpart to translate to me instead. And the shock another teacher expressed when she saw me practicing reading and writing Thai and her confusion when I asked how to spell a word (she started trying to explain what it meant, then instead of telling me how to spell it, she wrote it down for me to copy). I dunno. Maybe it's not so much that they have a low opinion of me, but that I have a low opinion of my role at that school and I'm imposing that low opinion on other people. Next year WILL be better.

This weekend I will travel to my friend's site in Issan to celebrate with him as he becomes a monk for a little while (something that all young Thai men do and many volunteers decide to do). I am planning on doing this myself, as well, in October. This will be my first "bpuat pra" (monking) since training, and my first one for a volunteer ever, so I'm looking forward to it.

Anyhow, I'm at school right now (I played some game with kids already and there's no teaching happening today), and I think someone else is waiting for the computer, so I'm gonna wrap this up.

Hey family! C'mon already! Though I'm sorry that the timing is corresponding with the air being really bad (I hope it rains in the next week! Though it hasn't really rained for months now), and it's too bad you're leaving before Song Kran, but it's all good, na? I'm really looking forward to seeing you!

*heart*
Eli

a death in the family

So I've been to a few funerals since being here, but yesterday my neighbor (a teacher at one of my schools and a house I've eaten dinner at more than a few times) 's mother died. This didn't come as a huge shock as she was 92 and her health had been failing for some time. Anyhow, I am now in the process of developing a better understanding of the Thai funeral and Thai attitudes towards death in general. (People have asked me quite a few times how the Thai funeral compares to an American one, I respond by saying that I've never been to an American funeral, but because America is a melting pot of cultures, religions and whatnot, there isn't exactly a standard)

Anyhow, the first and most striking difference is that at Thai funerals, people don't "grieve." I think I've mentioned before (but I'll do so again) that in Thai, the word "serious" is a bad thing, and if people do their best to be "no serious." This applies to death as well. I'm sure the advanced age of the deceased and that it wasn't terribly shocking helps put people at ease, but even at funerals for relatively young people I've been to, I haven't really seen any great outpouring of bereavement.

I don't, however, want to imply that this funeral was a wild party with karaoke and dancing girls.

When I arrived yesterday evening there were only a handful of people there (yesterday was the first of four days). I greeted my neighbor and was taken into the house to wai the buddha figure and the deceased (there was a photo of her and incense and flowers to "offer" to her, I think the body was in a casket buried under flowers, but I'm not sure). Then I sat outside with some other people who had showed up. And things were pretty mellow. People asked me about what kinds of Thai food I can eat, my girlfriend, my age (pretty typical stuff) and other conversations seemed pretty comparable. The only way to tell that this event was different than others was that (most) people were dressed in black and white (though dark jeans and t-shirts were pretty common). More people arrived, snacks were had, and eventually a group of monks showed up. The monks did a series of chanting prayers, people wai-ing while they chanted, though many conversations continued through it, and nobody shushed the kids who were playing and trying to get me to talk to them. Then people sat and talked for a while, then started going home. When I walked back to my house there was a group of men drinking and gambling.

This morning I went over before school and ate rice soup with a group of people.

Anyway, as far as belief-y type stuff, it's important for the family of the deceased to give lots of things away (make donations) in response to a death. The belief being that everything that they give away, the deceased will have in the afterlife (so the make donations and gifts of food, clothes, refrigerators, gazebo-type things called "sala"s. I'm under the impression that the next few days will be similar, and I've heard that food, drinking and gambling will be more prominent (or maybe that depends on what time I arrive).

All in all, it's pretty interesting stuff, and I really like the choice to essentially honor the deceased's life and try to make them comfortable in the afterlife rather than mourning their death.

PEACE

P.S. Completely unrelated, but I meant to mention it a while ago in a random blog post I never made, but my family here is genuinely afraid that if they close the windows and turn off the air conditioning in the car, they will die of suffocation. I tried explaining that this was not the case, as when it is cold in America and we don't open the windows or have the fan on, we don't die. They said that's because American cars are different from Thai cars. That was while we were driving in their Isuzu. I just thought it was amusing, and slightly annoying on the mornings when it's actually kinda cold here.

My most awesome experience?

Today I headed to the Aw Baw Daw at 3:30 for what has now become my regular, thrice-weekly English lesson. When I arrived, people were saying something using the word "fei" (I think it was fei mai). This word has many uses, and refers to everything involving fire, light and electricity. At first, from the pantomimes, I thought they were talking about a fireworks display, but it quickly became apparent that they meant something was on fire that wasn't supposed to be. I had been wondering about the presence of the big red tanker truck that was always parked at the ABD, and I became illuminated as three office guys threw on their flip flops and headed out the door, asking if I wanted to come as they went.

So, we hopped in the cab and roared off. And they were probably the most laid back fire crew in the world. As we went, one of the guys kept playing with siren, honking it at girls and pretty much anyone else, and the other two cracked jokes back and forth and asked me how to say some fireman terminology in English.

At first I had been under the impression that a house was on fire, and my head filled with visions of running into a burning building and manning a big hose and I was excited and nervous, since I really wanted to help, but had no idea of what to do or how to do it.

But that didn't really matter. We shortly arrived at the site of the fire about 10 km away. Or rather, we arrived near it. It turned out that it was actually a field that was burning, explaining why there wasn't a great sense of urgency. Fields are regularly burned here (it was fallow), and the only thing that made this special was that apparently it wasn't intentionally set ablaze, and presumably steps to control the fire had not been prepared.

Anyhow, we got to the end of the little side road and started out onto the rice fields, but the guy driving decided the truck wasn't really the right vehicle to navigate the humps between rice paddies (typically gone over by motorcycles, pickups and tractors). So we sat for about 10 or 20 minutes looking at the smoke a few hundred meters away contemplating what to do. They made a few calls and talked to some onlookers to try to figure out if there was another way. They even had a guy scout ahead on his motorcycle to see if the way got better or worse (it got worse). Then we turned around and kept on going down the road to a house that had a private road out to the fields, closer to the fire. They scouted that road, decided it was too narrow, made the decision that a tractor was better equipped to deal with this fire (it could push dirt around and whatnot, and actually get to the fire), then we headed back to the ABD. Honking at pretty girls and joking all the way.

The only disappointing thing about the experience was that they wouldn't let me get up on the back of the truck to wave at my students playing volleyball when we went past my school. Actually, one guy was all for it, but the other two said it was dangerous. They did tell me they'd call me for the next fire, though.

We got back to the office about the time we usually wrap up the English session. I hung out for a few minutes (to see if the whiskey they'd been joking about would turn up) then headed home to tell everyone about my awesome experience.

So yeah. My status update is that things are going really well for me. I'm still doing more outside of my house and spending more time in my community, and I'm feeling really good about it. I wouldn't have gotten to ride in a fire truck if I hadn't started doing this, and I'd probably still feel frustrated and question my presence here.

Whoop whoop! (That's my fire truck whoop.)

One year in and feeling...

Today is the day that marks the completion of my first year of Peace Corps service in Thailand. That’s twelve months in the Land of Smiles. Fifty-two weeks of volunteer work. Three-hundred-sixty-five days surrounded by a foreign language and culture. Eight-thousand-seven-hundred-sixty hours trying to understand my role here. Five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred minutes of shifting moods and feelings. Thirty-one-million-five-hundred-thirty-six-thousand of the most challenging, rewarding, confusing, boring and exciting seconds of my life.

And I suppose that any of what I’ve done and experienced here alone might not be that monumental in terms of my life experience, but taken as a whole, this has probably been the most extraordinary period of my life to date. And I really like that word, “extraordinary.” Because it doesn’t really FEEL extraordinary anymore. I know I’ve talked before about how nothing here really fazes me anymore, but that’s because being here has changed me, not anything about the things around me changing. And I wouldn’t say that any of the changes have been particularly drastic. I’m a little more patient (though I thought I was pretty patient before), a little more “go-with-the-flow,” and I move a bit slower (though I think that has as much to do with adjusting to the weather and traveling with people with shorter legs than any internal change).

I feel incredibly fortunate that my personality seemed to fit into Thai society really well. I may not always know what’s going on, but I’m comfortable and like the people around me, and I feel like I fit in pretty well. I definitely know that isn’t the case for every volunteer, there are many still trying to adjust to “Thai people,” and I’m glad my experience seems easier than theirs.

I think I’ve been hung-over here as many times as I had in the rest of my life, and I’ve sung lots more karaoke than I ever had before. I’ve taken far more cold showers and pooped without sitting down more than ever before, too. I talk to my neighbors more than I ever did in the states, with minimal communication skills to boot.

But that’s all about my year in summation. I bet you want to hear more about my current state after my first year here. And I guess the best way to tell about that is to recap my time at site since returning from Bangkok.

I arrived back in my town before it was light out. I actually had a pretty comfortable trip back and managed to sleep a bit, so I wasn’t too disoriented, but I was still getting off a bus at quarter to six. I wandered around the market for a little while until my co-teacher/father arrived and took me back to the village. I spent a few hours at his house before I headed back to my own, stopping at my market to get some oranges. I got back to my house, and then… I kinda hit a low spot.

For a few weeks before I had left, there was water from a mystery source pooling on my kitchen floor, and my internet had been down for a long time. I had gotten used to both of these things and hadn’t been terribly concerned about either, but having just come home from a pleasant week in a pretty comfortable setting, they were pretty frustrating. I spent a few hours in my house, trying to adjust to being back at home, but the longer I was there, the more frustrated I felt. Finally, I realized that being in my house was the source of my frustration, so I decided to go for a walk.

I started walking with the mindset that I would walk until I felt better. I began walking with no particular direction, hoping to interact with some of my neighbors and feel like a part of the community a bit. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really find anyone who wanted to try and have a real conversation, and I ended up looking inward, trying to analyze the source of my frustration. Let’s just say that not being able to find someone to talk to made things worse, as it only made me feel less connected to my community. I began to question many things, but in general it was a, “What am I really doing here?” kind of time. For some time I have been rather dissatisfied with the way I spend my free time. I find that much of it is spent inside my house doing my own thing (playing on the internet or watching a movie or reading or listening to music) or at my co-teacher’s house in the next village. Sure I exchange pleasantries with my neighbors, but how much a part of the community am I really? How much do they know me, and how much do I know them? I had made resolutions to be more engaged in the past, but I had never really effected a real, lasting change in my behavior.

It was about this point when my mood bottomed out. My stomach was in knots, I was short of breath, and on the verge of tears. I stopped for a moment and looked around, found myself on a deserted road with houses on one side and rice fields on the other. I considered going home to sulk, and then remembered my intention to keep walking until I felt better, and I certainly hadn’t achieved that yet. So I took some deep breaths, tried to calm down, faced forward and kept walking. And maybe my mood didn’t lift right away, but I got my feelings under control and was able to think rationally.

I had a lot to think about from the Mid-Service Conference, hearing about everyone else’s successes and difficulties. We had a goal setting session and I declared that I wanted to be more involved with my community, to find a balance in how I spent my free time. A balance between being in my house, my co-teacher’s house and engaging with my community. But I was also faced with a fear that no matter what goal I set for myself, as before with any attempt to change my actions, I would simply regress to my current, dissatisfying ways. And that’s when I had my revelation. It’s never too late. Which maybe doesn’t seem like too great a revelation, but when I really thought about it, about what it really means, and means about my Peace Corps service, and what it could mean in terms of life in general, it really did feel like a revelation. As long as I am here and not packing my bags to go home, I can change (or at least TRY to change) anything. And so I did. I made a mental list of things to accomplish the next day, to talk to my landlord about the mystery puddles in my house and broken internet, to visit the Aw-Baw-Daw (local government office) to discuss my idea of working with adults to practice English I’d been kicking around for a while but had avoided doing because I felt either lazy or shy, and visit my village temple. Then I headed back home.

Before I made it to my door, my neighbor from across the road called me over, and before long I was drinking some local whiskey (moonshine made from sticky rice) and finally having that real conversation I’d been looking for.

The next day, I talked to my landlord, visited the Aw-Baw-Daw, and sat at the temple for half an hour or so. I have gone on a number of walks and had conversations with people I had never really talked to before. I have started trying to learn my students names (something I neglected to do at first since it’s hard for me to remember Thai names and I work with some 200 students, and I had resigned myself to not knowing their names as I was somewhat embarrassed to admit I didn’t know them, though I’m sure they knew I didn’t know), and I am now starting to call a handful of students by name and regularly ask students their names, even if I have already asked before. Eventually people started coming around to fix my plumbing and internet. After a handful of fruitless trips to the Aw-Baw-Daw I have started to practice English with a group of grown-ups. I’ve slept in my own house (as opposed to my co-teacher’s) far more than usual, and I spend less time hiding inside my house. In general I’m feeling much better about myself and my position here.

All that’s left now is to keep it up.

Su su! (That’s like the “fight fight!” cheer at a sporting event)

Haldo!

(Saturday January 16, 2010, Thai Time)

Right now, I mean NOW now, as I am writing this, I am sitting in the Bangkok bus station, waiting to go back to my site. I have a few hours to wait, and I'm pretty due for a post, so I'm going to write this now and type it up when I get back home.

I've been here in Bangkok for almost a week for our Mid-Service Conference. Yeah, that's right. MID-Service. Like middle. In truth, it still hasn't quite been a year (that anniversary won't come for 12 more days), and I have about a year and three months to go after that, so it's not exactly mid, but it's pretty mid. Pretty wild, huh?

As far as official Peace Corps functions have gone, this one was very relaxed. I got in monday morning for our medical appointments (a flu shot and quick chat with the PC medical staff), then a dental exam at the hospital. And that was an experience.

A volunteer from the pervious group (will be going back to the states soon) warned few of us about a female dentist from last year who is very concerned about gingivitis and works quite painfully. When I entered the exam room, I noted that my doctor was a woman, she told me she was going to check me for gingivitis, then began carving up my gums. Not only did she dig painfully, but she carried on a conversation with her assistant, not always watching what she was doing. More than once, she (presumably accidentally) dug her tool into the meat of my gums and dragged it up onto the surface of my teeth. In spite of the pain (my hands remained tightly clenched in my lap for the duration), I had to fight to resist laughing when she explained that the blood whenever I rinsed was "because of gingivitis."

When she was finished with my cleaning and exam (this was the first time I'd ever had the actual dentist do my cleaning), she told me my teeth looked good, then launched into a long lecture on what gingivitis was and what it could do, breaking out big models of teeth to illustrate. She wrapped up by telling me not to eat raw meat at my site, because people eat with their hands where I live and doing so could put me at risk to contract hepatitis. And that was my trip to my Thai dentist, my only real dissappointment being that they did not take x-rays.

On Tuesday I went to the dermatologist and had a mole on my back removed (he showed me the removed chunk when I asked about it, which was way cool), which turned out to be, um, NOT melanoma, but at risk to become bad, so I'm glad it got taken off.
On Wednesday, all of us moved from wherever we had been staying (it was up to us during the medical time) to a hotel to have our meetings. And that was all the official business for the first three days of MSC. It was nice to have some free time (or a lot of free time) to re-connect and relax with other volunteers.

Our actual meetings, when they began, were quite laid back, with lots of opportunities for us to share and discuss our experiences, successes and frustrations from our sites. In the evenings we all continued to get our big city fun (though in more, smaller groups than in the past which I found interesting), and I nerded up and played some of the most enjoyable Dungeons & Dragons I have ever experienced with seven other volunteers.

On the last night, I went with five other volunteers (a pretty small, comfortable group for us) to have Muu Ga Ta, which is an awesome meal. They bring charcoal braziers to your table, with metal things that go on top shaped like a big cake pan with the middle area bulged up into a big dome. You pour broth (or maybe plain water, I'm not entirely sure) in the trough around the edge, and get raw meat and vegetables and noodles and sauce from a big buffet. You put chunks of fat on top of the bulge to flavor the water, grill meat on the rest of the exposed bulge (or boil it) and boil vegetables and noodles and meatballs and tofu in the water, making an awesome soupy meal that can just go on and on and on and on and is fun to eat and prepare. And there was a fat guy in neon green tights on a stage singing happy birthday every five minutes or so. He also sang "Zombie" by the Cranberries (a song I'd never heard before coming to Thailand), replacing all of the lyrics with the words "Happy Birthday." It was amazing.

Then we went back to the hotel and had a couple beverages in our rooms (and rounding up some more volunteers) before going down to the hotel bar and singing karaoke until they closed and asked us to leave. Definitely my best karaoke experience to date, and I've had some pretty good ones.

Then today we wrapped things up and one thing led to another and I found myself here, in the cafeteria at the Bangkok bus station (well, one of the bus stations), waiting for my bus. And I will say that this has been my most enjoyable time in Bangkok. Usually I'm anxious to leave after just a day or two, but this time I don't NEED to leave. Although, I do look forward to getting back to my home and not spending anymore money in Pangkok. Hah. That's my new joke that I just made up, and it's funny because "pang" means expensive.

Hey. It's six o'clock. Being the bus station at six o'clock is awesome. Every day on TV and radio (everywhere in the country, on every station) they play the national anthem (at eight in the morning, too, but it's evening now). Back home that doesn't mean much, but at the bus station, with a large group of people, everyone stands and all activity stops for the duration of the song. It's relatively quiet, and you can hear the song clearly. Then it ends and everything resumes as if there were no interruption. Awesome. Literally. Like awe-inspiring.

Anyhow, this relaxed, low-pressure Peace Corps week has felt like a mandatory mental health break, and I've enjoyed it. I've had some enjoyable new experiences in Bangkok and found a few more places and things I like. I've had a good time re-connecting with other volunteers.
The new Peace Corps group will be arriving here soon and I will be a senior volunteer. And that's a trip. I remember meeting volunteers from group 120 and being really impressed with their language skills and their ability to navigate life in Thailand, and soon that will be me. Yow.
I suppose I could say more on that topic, but I feel like I have more reflecting to do and I think I'll save that for my one year anniversary post.

PEACE!

Hello!

Where to start?

I had a Youth GIG (Global Initiative Group, that's the Peace Corps sub-group that I joined) meeting in Bangkok on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Several other meetings were being held, and all of the group that came the year before me was in Bangkok discussing the near future as they would be preparing to complete their volunteer service. So we had a Thanksgiving dinner, too.

About a month(?) in advance, one very on-the-ball (not me) made contact with the important people in the Sizzlers of Thailand and arranged for all of us to have a dinner at a particular Sizzler restaurant, and got a 10,000 baht group discount (woot!). That was followed by visiting a few drinking establishments, then a 5am bus back up north (that was a rough morning).

Then December started. Classes rolled along, though preparations for Sports Day became more and more apparent (other volunteers talked about whole days of classes being canceled for practices). I started making plans for some Christmas activities to do with my kids, and then Nathan arrived.

"Wait, what? Who's Nathan?" That's what you may be asking yourself. Nathan is one of my number one homies in all the world. And he is my first visitor (of many I'm sure, right?) from my old life. It's pretty awesome. We spent a couple of days in Chiang Mai getting him acclimated, then headed to Issan to visit a few volunteers to give him a flavor of Peace Corps life, and for me to see some more volunteers situations (and check out the "deep south of Thailand"). It was a great experience. It was very "same same but different," and we got to try eating rat. By the time we were ready to head to my village, I was feeling a little homesick.

Since we've gotten back here, we've spent some time with my counterpart, walked around my village, gone for a sweet bike ride through the farmland, run with my students and eaten a lot of really good food. It sounds like tonight a couple of people who work at my local government office are going to come over to practice English (which I started doing recently and is a lot of fun), so that should be fun. I figure since Nathan doesn't speak Thai (though he's picking up stuff really well), it will be a good opportunity for them to practice. It was really cool yesterday watching my students talking to him. It made me really proud to see the students having the courage to try talking to a new farang.

And then I decided to do a little update on here. Soon I will have been here for eleven months, and then we will be getting together in January for our mid-service conference right before the one year mark. Yow. Time seems so strange.

Life is pretty strange and awesome, eh?

Loy Katong

Loy Katong is essentially the Thai Thanksgiving and is celebrated during the full moon in November (if it happens to be a month with two full moons, I guess it happens on the first one). This is when people give thanks to the rivers for the water and way of life they provide.

There are several parts to the celebration, but the big one involves floating lotus-shaped banana leaf constructions with candles and incense on the river, to be done with loved ones ("loy" means float and "katong" is the lotus-craft). Many people make their own katongs, and they range from pretty simple (like the one I made) to ridiculously elaborate.

The other parts of the celebration are the sending off of kom-fei (paper hot air balloons), which looks awesome when everyone does it together and you have a full moon for a back drop; a parade where each village in the area decorates a truck and has a girl (or girls) sit on it who participate in the ensuing beauty contest; and the parade ends at a festival with drinking and singing and dancing and the afore-mentioned beauty contest.

Just thought I'd do a quick little "cultural sharing" post to fulfill that third goal of the Peace Corps mission statement (to share the cultures of other nations with Americans).

E

Laying down the law

And lay it down thick, I did.

So yesterday, a few neighborhood kids came by. They are kindergarten or first grade students at one of my schools, and they come by to see what the heck I am doing and get me to play with them every now and then (more often lately since they've been on bpit term).

It started out typically enough, with a little banter in our mutually hard to understand Thai, then proceeded to a game of checkers (Thai rules are far superior to American). One girl, however (who wasn't as familiar to me) was being a punk though. At first, she kept stepping on my feet. In the beginning, it was funny and I didn't mind. But then she kept doing it. And I told her to stop. So she started pinching me and pulling my hair. I told her to stop and go away. She kept doing it. I tried to distract everyone by getting out my frisbee, figuring if we all played together, she'd leave me alone. But then she started poking me in the butt (which Thai kids apparently like to do). I told her to stop again, and when she ignored me, I grabbed my toys, walked in my house and shut the door.

They stood outside calling my name for a couple minutes, but I just ignored them. Apparently fearing that I had gone deaf, they opened the door and came inside to yell some more. I walked over, told them to leave, then locked the door.

Then I got out my mandolin (which has sat gathering dust for far too long) and started trying to tune it. And the kids started banging on my window and door yelling my name, asking if I could hear them over and over. Now, tuning the mandolin is hard enough for me, but it was next to impossible with all the interfering noise. And when they didn't stop after about ten minutes, I started to get frustrated. My first inclination was to yell at them, but I quickly decided continuing to ignore was better, but I really didn't want to sit in my fish bowl with them staring and banging and yelling, so by a stroke of strategic brilliance, I went upstairs.

I finally gave up trying to tune the instrument (I don't know if I'm just inept or if the strings warped or something from sitting too long, but as soon as I would think I had it OK and tried to strum, it sounded more like the local dog pack than a purty li'l chord) and just hung out in my room. After a total of twenty or thirty minutes, the kids gave up and went away. Score one for patience.

Now I just hope they have made the connection between my initial decision to go inside and the one girl being naughty and not stopping when I asked her to.

Calm like a bomb.
E

Bpai Tiao!

Just gonna point out that today officially marks the completion of my first third of my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand. If I'd had a bun in the oven when I left the states, it'd be about done by now, what what?

Anyhow, "bpai tiao" is when you go somewhere for fun (as opposed to for seriousness). Sometimes I bpai tiao when I wander around my village, sometimes I bpai tiao when a Thai person says a bunch of stuff to me in Thai, I smile and nod, then am ushered into a car (we call that being "Thai-napped"), and sometimes I bpai tiao when I intentionally decide that I want to travel somewhere and then I do.

During bpit term (the month-ish break between semesters), my fan (that's Thai for "sho'ty") and I did some touring, hitting three points of interest: Ayutthya, Sukothai and Pai.

Ayutthya and Sukothai were pretty amazing. Sukothai was the first official capitol of Thailand when Thailand became Thailand (though they didn't call it Thailand at the Thaim, I mean time), like 700-ish years ago (I think, you might want to wikipedia that, I can't be bothered to fact-check all my claims). The king (or I suppose one of the kings) from that era is responsible for developing the written alphabet. Eventually, a king decided to move the capitol to another big city more centrally located (called Ayutthya) and Sukothai just got old, until it got old enough that people wanted to come see some history and they started to charge money to see it.

Ayutthya was cool to visit for many of the same reasons as Sukothai (old stuff is awesome, and the US doesn't really have anything comparable). In the 1700s, Ayutthya was attacked by the Burmese, and so the ruins are in shabbier shape than those in Sukothai. I don't know a lot of details about this conflict (sorry), but apparently the Burmese were repelled (or shortly thereafter booted out), since Thailand is Thai today. The destruction of Ayutthya prompted the relocation of the capitol to Grungtep (or Bangkok for all you farangs out there).

And now I will take this opportunity to rant for a moment. There is a fairly common practice at tourist attractions to have different (higher) prices for foreign tourists than Thai tourists, like anywhere from 3 to 20 times the Thai price. Usually, the signs announce the entrance fee in English with Arabic numerals, and then in Thai, with Thai numerals, it tells the native entrance fee, so probably many foreign tourists don't realize there is a different price. A small part of me understands this practice, but for the most part, I really don't like it. I think it reflects poorly on the Thai character. It brings the assumption across that all foreigners are rich and that Thai people just want their money. Bah. I have more feelings on the matter, but it's difficult to articulate. In any case, upon becoming a PCV and receiving our Thai ID cards, we were told that by showing those cards, we could expect to pay the Thai price for things, and it has worked at the zoo and national parks, but it did NOT work to see the ruins. Just to let any other volunteers who might read this know. And doing the chicken dance did NOT convince the lady that I was sufficiently Thai, though she did laugh.

After the old stuff, we headed to Pai for a couple days. Pai is a beautiful area in the mountains a few hours north of Chiang Mai, and it made me kinda sad. We stayed at a very nice guest house a few kilometers outside of the town of Pai, which I was quite happy about, as the town of Pai is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with tourism. Fortunately we were not there at the high season (as far as tourism goes) when the population of the area is approximately 90% farang, and it was only 60-70%. Heavens know, when I go visit a foreign country I'd hate to see local people doing anything besides selling me stuff and taking me on ATV tours. There were signs advertising "Go where most tourists don't go!" So everyone who wants to go see "real" Thailand will go there, and then someone will build a 7-11 and a pizza place there, and then they will have to find a new place to take people where "most tourists don't go!" Just a series of rapery until Pai is lame and people don't want to go there, and the tour companies go find a new place to exploit, and then the local people who have centered their economy around catering to tourists have an empty town full of guest houses and farang restaurants (because I hate eating local food when I travel). And I couldn't help but think that probably ten or twenty (or five, I dunno) years ago, Pai was just a quiet farming community until some businessman from Bangkok or Chiang Mai (or a farang businessman is just as likely) happened to wander through and say, "Boy! This would make a great tourist destination!" But our guest house was very nice and we had a great view.

*sigh*

Anyhow, traveling was fun, but it was definitely nice to get back to my site where I'm more than just another farang with money that I need to leave in Thailand.

Eli OUT!

Edit: So, I just clicked the publish button, and I felt kinda bad, like this might sound pretty harsh, and I suppose it is supposed to be a little harsh, but don't let it fool you. I still love this place, and y'all should definitely come visit. I just encourage everyone out there to practice responsible tourism.

Conflicted!

So I recently figured out why there is a perpetual stream of red ants run the length of my house, up my kitchen counter, around my sink and off to who-knows-where. The answer presented itself in the form of what I had previously thought to be a snarl of leaves of the viney plant growing up the side of my house next to the kitchen window, but upon closer inspection revealed itself to be a nest serving as the terminus for the endless parade of Hymenoptera.

My first thought was, "Swell! Now I can get rid of these guys!" But then I started thinking a bit more. These guys have been around for a decent while now, and while I don't really like them, they bite me very rarely and aren't causing any real problems. Besides, to get rid of them, I would be committing an act of genocide and would surely be attacked in response.

The conclusion that I've reached for now is to let them be and see if I can find someone who really likes kai mot dang (red ant eggs) to come make a meal out of them. That would sit much better with me than simply exterminating them.

Hm. A nice short post about a single topic that isn't just a running narrative. I kinda dig this.

Cheerio!

If blog entries were library books, I'd own this one by now!

I'd like to say that the reason I haven't posted anything in over a month is because I've been oh so busy. In fact, there have been numerous opportunities, but not much to say until these last couple weeks (and then, opportunities these last couple weeks HAVE been rather scarce). And there came a period where I just didn't feel like writing, and then I started and slowly I dragged this out of myself.

I think I'll start filling y'all in with the sanook sanaan (I'm going to translate that as "party") I attended at one of my schools in honor of myself and another new teacher. I arrived at school around five in the evening and met one of the head monks from the temple next to the school. He was a big jolly guy and greeted me by shaking my hand (which I later learned is- well, not taboo, but un-traditional). At that point, the paw-aw (principal), a few other teachers and a couple older men were the only ones there. They had the new teacher and myself sit in front of a great big centerpiece type thing made out of rolled up banana leaves and flowers (I'm not sure if I have pictures of one or not, but they're pretty common at any sort of Thai ceremony) and a man (not the monk, I think he was a retired monk) recited the long chant to welcome us and bless us and give us good luck. By the time he finished, some more folks had started to show up and people started tying strings on our wrists. By doing so, each person is drawing bad energy out and putting good energy in, and you end up with a massive torque of string wrapped around your arm.

People continued to arrive, and as I understand, they were various important people from the village, though aside from the elected guy, I have no idea who they were. There were also a lot of mee-baans (housewives) in attendance, and several of them thought to mention to me that they had daughters (one actually said, "I have a daughter your age, but she is not beautiful"). The best part of all of this was definitely when Wandii, my counterpart's wife and my mother told me in English, "You are my son, you are part of my family, I love you, I will take care of you." (That's paraphrased, but that was the general spirit of her words). This was especially touching because prior to this I had only heard her say "My name is Wandii, I speak Thai, I don't like to speak English," and a few random words here and there. It made me feel very good.

After a while we were told to take seats at tables and food and whiskey started to flow. The physical education teacher decided he wanted to drink with me and started pouring whiskey pio pio (straight). And didn't stop. I believe I have noted before that drinking with Thai people is dangerous because it is common practice to refill someone's glass for them whenever it is empty, or less than 2/3 full, making it difficult to gauge how much you actually consume (this is anytime, not just with alcohol). I had an idea of what this evening would entail in advance and had decided to allow myself to consume to the point of intoxication. And so I did. I sat at all of the tables, toasted everyone, and eventually sang the Thai song I've been practicing when the karaoke got going hot and heavy. In the end I walked home and regretted my actions in the morning.

MOVING ON!

Shortly after my sanook sanaan the other school I'm teaching at hosted a science exhibition. This was probably one of the coolest things I've seen here. Seriously.

The day began with a lot of that old time religion (it was a wan prat, and this school takes Buddhism pretty seriously) [right now is the Buddhist Lent and every full moon, half moon and new moon is a wan prat, or "monk day," and involves going to temple and making of merit]. On this wan prat, the temple came to the school. Four monks and most of the community came for a morning of prayer and bestowing food and gifts upon the local temples. Naturally, as soon as I arrived my paw-aw (principal) had me come up in front of everyone to sit with him (I'm getting used to this kind of treatment, though I still feel weird about it, but it's kinda fun sometimes). After the chanting and speeches and whatnot were over, the science extravaganza began. Began with some kids from another school in the area doing a sweet dance with drums and cymbals and play-fighting! And then some grown-ups from the area who are into model remote-controlled airplanes showed off their stuff. It was pretty cool, but what really struck me was how excited people were about this. It also made me realize that in my time here at site, I haven't seen any machines in the sky. Would an airplane flying over be a big deal out here? I am pretty sure the majority of my neighbors have never flown. Anyhow, I really appreciated the purity of the audience's wonderment. Not jaded at all.

When that was over, the students spent the rest of the morning going around and looking at projects they had made. A group of my matayom 3 (that's like 9th grade) boys built a 3-person bicycle that people were riding around (of COURSE I went for a ride!). In the field, students were blasting off water rockets they had built from soda bottles. There were a few other stations with pretty typical experiment things, and a math and science fact contest in the cafeteria. And that was it (aside from the snack and drink vendors who showed up). It was simple, it was mellow, and it was fun. The students got to show off some really impressive work they had done (I'm still amazed by the bicycle, and the water rocket launching contraption was super sweet). But most of all, like with the planes, it was the atmosphere that made the day for me.


My next destination was the Youth Conference. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned that I joined the Youth GIG (I'm pretty sure that stands for Global Initiative Group), and our primary responsibility is to host this conference each year. In addition to us, 12 volunteers from all around the country came, each bringing one Thai counterpart (mostly teachers) and two students ages 13-18. The conference was hosted at a little place in the woods (although the "log" cabins were in fact made of concrete) a couple hours outside of Bangkok. The theme of the conference was "Dream, Believe, Achieve," and for 3 days we ran activities designed to get students thinking about their future, setting goals, and thinking about the things they need to do to reach those goals. Which means they built models out of random household items to represent their dreams, played team-building and problem-solving games, did some journaling and debriefing, talked with a panel of Thai professionals and danced silly dances.

I feel like there's a lot more to say about what we actually did at the conference, but to really understand you would have to have been there.

In any case, I feel it was a lot of fun and pretty durn successful. And it's got me thinking about what we'll do next year. There are definitely a lot of things that I think went well that I would like to emulate, and a few spots that I think we could improve upon. But I don't really wanna think too much about that right now. I'll just say that many of the volunteers who were there (myself included) have made comments to the extent that participating in that conference is/has been one of the most fulfilling parts of being a volunteer. This is because it is specific in whom it is targeting and applies to and works directly with those people, and because the benefit is so obvious and visible. A lot of the things that we do as volunteers are questionable as to whether or not they have any real value, and even if there is value, it may be hard to see, or may not show itself for a long time.


The last stop on this whirlwind blog entry will be Doi Tung, the home of the king's now deceased mother. It is located on a small mountain in the north of the province of Chiang Rai. The location is significant because one of the queen mother's (I THINK that's how you refer to her) big projects was to reduce drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle, and she had a lot of projects working with the hill tribes doing things like introducing alternative crops to grow instead of opium. Anyhow, we drove up this mountain and parked. Around the base of the peak (does that make sense? The house was right on the top of the mountain [and by mountain we mean really big hill], and the area just below that is what I'm talking about) is a pretty nice flower garden. I'd love to say more, but I'm really not that critical and couldn't rate it any more specifically than that. I'll post some pictures and you can see for yourself. Then we headed up to the house.

I had no idea what to expect. Pa had used the word "palace" when describing it, and I was kinda dreading something big and gaudy and western-styled. To get up to it, I had to borrow some pants (shorts weren't kosher), then we walked up a long driveway. And I was tremendously relieved. The palace was a big wooden house. We took a tour (the tour was in Thai, but they gave me a pamphlet in English to read with information about the house). The style was a fusion of Thai and Swedish (sounds odd, but the king went to school in Sweden when he was a boy and ma had a place in the mountains), so the aesthetic style was alpine cabin, but the form was more typical of Thai buildings. And all the pine paneling was from recycled packing crates, and on the ceiling of one room, the lights made a scale model of the solar system with everything positioned at the time of the queen mother's birth (astrology is kinda a big deal here). But we weren't allowed to take pictures inside. Then we got to check out the awesome views that she enjoyed and it was time to head home. I would say it was a really good trip, as it bolstered my opinion of the Thai royal family (not that I have any issues with them), as this "palace" could have been as over-the-top as you could imagine, but was actually incredibly modest (a ridiculous house by common standards, but considering royalty had lived there for 10 years, very humble indeed).


And I'm going to call myself caught up for now. There's ALWAYS more that I could say, but I'd say that's enough. I'd like to do some journaling in my personal journal (which I haven't been doing at all), so I think I'll make a date for some forced introspection, say tomorrow evening on the balcony? Great, see you then!

6 Months in the Peace Corps

As of today, I have been in Thailand for 6 months.

I can definitely say that my experiences are not at all what I expected. Then again, I also tried really hard to come without expectations, so I can't say if that is good or bad.

I don't have anything specific to write about right now, so maybe this is the perfect time to just ramble a bit. It just seems kinda like a momentous occasion, and I really ought to say something.

More than anything, I am impressed by the Thai people. There is a near universal sense of genuinely caring about the well-being of others. Sometimes it can come across as nosy ("Why these fools all up in my business?!"), but it's important to remember that the concern/interest behind the question is legit.
There is also a feeling that everything has value. There is no sense of futility, and nothing is wasted. This means that work is done efficiently and with care. Priorities might get in the way of some projects, like road work but put on hold indefinitely, but others, like planting rice fields and building houses rally the community to roll up their sleeves and help one another.
No cut of meat cannot be turned into dinner (I can't emphasize that enough), and no one is to poor to smile, dance or sing a song.
I'm sure this country has it's share of lazy, ne'er-do-wells, but they just don't stand out here.

On a less positive note, I am becoming more and more disenchanted with the role of English teachers on a continuous basis, especially in the countryside. If one of my students works very hard and learns English well, they can... go to one of the cities and sell crap to tourists? Yes, they could do other, better things, but the likelihood is exceedingly slim. And really, what's wrong with being a farmer? I feel like I'm supposed to think there's something wrong with the way the people in my community live and that I'm here to make everyones' lives better, but I just can't do that. They have been fine for a long, long time without me, and they will continue to be fine after I am gone.
So I have more or less decided to not care if my students learn English or not. Instead, I will spend my required time in the classroom, and try to build my relationships with my co-teachers to develop teacher trainings for non-English teachers. I have posed the idea to my teachers and they sound interested, so now I need to do some brain-storming and planning and keep pushing this. I also have some other ideas, but I think I've talked about these before. And even if I haven't, I want to keep my mind rolling right now.

I am very aware of there being a LOT of things that I WANT to do, and a lot of things that I am NOT doing. But, I need to remember that it's important to take things one step at a time. For example, I have just decided to take a walk around the neighborhood when I'm done writing this. It's something I did a fair amount when I first came here, but I've stopped doing lately. Yes, I've been busy(ish), and after a first meeting, I don't have much to say with my Thai, but, SNAP. It's the effort that counts.

So now I'm antsy to go out for a walk. I will finish with some general thoughts on the Peace Corps.

Does Thailand NEED the Peace Corps? Of course not! Peace Corps is here because Thailand has requested our presence. That is WHY the Peace Corps sends volunteers to countries. Am I going to revolutionize teaching practices and cause a dramatic improvement in student performance in my area? Probably not. It IS possible that I will find one project that will have a positive, lasting effect, and that is my current goal, probably something with a youth group (or maybe agriculturally related). But what I DO know is that when I leave, a few hundred or thousand people will remember a farang who lived with them for a few years. And he didn't come here to find a Thai woman to take care of him, and he made efforts to learn the language, and... I don't know what. That's the part that I think matters. That's the part that I can count on happening. The rest is valid and worthwhile, but whether or not anything actually comes of it is highly questionable.

While I was out of site for the second round of training and everything, we watched the movie "Volunteers" from the 80s, starring John Candy and Tom Hanks who play Peace Corps volunteers in Thailand (though I like to say the ended up in Peace Corps Generic Asia). I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone who wasn't in the Peace Corps (in Thailand, gah-dai), but it did kind of strike a chord. The project they were sent to their village for was to build a bridge over the river. In the end, they have to blow up the bridge to save the day, and when Tom Hanks apologizes to the villagers, he is informed that nobody cares, because they never really wanted the bridge in the first place! This really emphasizes the need to align your goals. I may come up with the most brilliant project idea ever that will revolutionize and improve everything around me, but if nobody wants what I'm selling, it doesn't matter. And again, who am I to say that my "improvement" will actually make anything better?

We also got the line, "Lying, malignant stink-infested yankee Peace Corps! Ptui!" from the communist contingency in the movie, so that was good, too.

OK. Time for that walk.

PEACE CORPS OUT!
E

Big cities.

So I've been out for a while, no joke. About 3 weeks. And now I'm back.

I began by heading over to the neighboring province (up in the mountains) to help out with a fellow volunteer's English camp. On the bus ride over, as the bus wound through the mountains, with the grinding of gears and the brief backwards slides when the driver changed gears, I gained some new insight on the practice of slash 'n' burn farming.

When I first visited my site back in March (jeez, I've almost been here for 6 months!), the air was super hazy, and it was explained to me that this was a result of the hill people burning the mountainsides for some free farmland. My initial reaction was, "Man, that sucks. Look at all this smoke. This is bad for the environment, makes the area less beautiful, and it hurts my lungs. Slash 'n' burn is bad."

When I returned to my site a month later to stay, it appeared that the season's burning was finished, as the air was much clearer. At that point, I stopped thinking about the slashing and the burning, as there really wasn't anything to make me think about it. Out of sight, out of mind, no?

And then I took a bus ride through the mountains and witnessed the results first hand.

As I watched a woman holding onto the slope with one hand, surrounded by neat rows of young green shoots, hacking at a stubborn root with a machete, I decided that I could no longer simply say, "Slash and burn is bad." It's just not that simple. Certainly it is not ideal environmentally, but how can you NOT respect and admire the effort, love and tenacity that it takes to clear, plant and harvest a slope that would be difficult to simply walk on, let alone make a living from?


And then I was through the mountains and my thoughts returned to myself. I became more disillusioned with English camps, but I had some good ice cream, so I figure it all balanced out. I've probably said this before, but it seems to me that there are two values to English camps: as a mini-teacher training (where teachers can see some fun activities to maybe use in their class, or course this is completely undermined when they teachers just use the time to hang out and don't observe, which seems to happen as often as not), and to give kids a chance to have FUN speaking English (because they certainly aren't going to learn and retain much from these). It's just frustrating that so much of the focus seems to be on show and ceremony, and knowing the tens of thousands of baht that are spent on these instead of a new computer or something that could have a more practical and long-term benefit. But I'm not going to be able to change that, so I will have to do my best to find ways to add some value to these camps I find myself involved in.

Oh yeah, apparently Michael Jackson died around here, too. It was a weird feeling. He was definitely an important part of my childhood, and I still admire what he did, it's just really too bad things got as weird as they did those last-- 15 years or so? But yes, America, Thailand noticed.


After the camp, my associates and I headed to Khorat for PST2 (the second round of training, still called pre-service training, though we were sworn in a few months ago...). On the way, myself and a number of other volunteers (about a dozen of us) went to check out a national park, intending to camp there for the evening and hike around before 2 weeks of meetings and whatnot.
We made it to the park, but did not end up camping when we found out that campsites were some 20-ish kilometers inside the park, and it was starting to get dark and rainy. So we hitch-hiked a few kilometers back up the road (hitch-hiking is WAY easier here, and feels way less sketchy) and ended up staying the evening at a resort.
The next day we hitch-hiked into the park, checked out a waterfall, became very glad when we saw the campsites (since there was no place to get food or beer which I guess had been expected) then spent the rest of day traveling back to the site of our training. Oh, and everyone got a tiger t-shirt (a sua sua, if you will, the words for tiger and t-shirt being identical except for a difference in tone), except for me, I had a lion shirt (because I'm a rebel) and we entered our first session of training chanting "sua sua sua!" to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger." Because we are awesome.

And then we had training.

Things started out with a second counterpart conference where we went through essentially the same activities as we did at the end of the first round of training, though with a different counterpart. Of course, my counterpart didn't show up (she'd had some recent drama and decided not to come, and I supported and defended her decision), so I got to do a lot of brain-storming and whatnots by myself, but I came out of it with some good ideas for projects (recycling, AIDS, and trying to find a way to get enough water to produce two crops of rice every year, if you have any ideas [besides damming the river], HOLLAH!), and questions about the actual value of teaching English instead of working on community projects. But I'll work it out. I think as far as my work with the schools go, I want to get involved with more teacher trainings and get a youth group going. Anyhow, yeah.

Then the counterparts went home and we got some more language instruction, which was awesome. We also got to go into Khorat (it's a big city, I heard the second biggest in Thailand [no, Chiang Mai is NOT the second biggest, it's just famous and stuff] though I can't say for sure), which was a pain to get to from the hotel we were staying at (we were kinda in the middle of nowhere), a LOT of people got sick (I had a pretty nasty bout of food poisoning), and we took over a local bar called Hank Over (the 'g' and 'k' final consonants are pretty much the same in Thai, and I'm assuming that's where the name came from, or maybe it's actually something more meaningful). Which was awesome. We went over there on the 4th of July after our No-Talent Show at the hotel and danced to American music for a bunch of hours. The place filled up with Thai people watching us, and I went around putting American flag stickers on them (the Thai people, they got a kick out of it). Then an awesome Thai band came out (there are some really good musicians here, but the consensus is that the music itself isn't very good). They played "Happy Birthday America" for us, took requests for the few Thai songs we knew, then went into their set. We stuck around for a bit longer, but we'd been there for a while already and were pretty tired and headed home.
And there really isn't much more to say about training.

When training was all over, about twenty of us headed back to the site of the FIRST round of training to visit the ol' host families. It felt really good see them again and speak slightly better Thai and show them pictures of my new home. I also felt really guilty as they pointed out that I don't call and I tried to explain that I don't like talking on the phone in general, and it's REALLY hard to try talking on the phone just in Thai, but I think I'll be making an effort to drop a line every now and then, tell them what I've eaten and tell them I miss them. It'd be worth the effort.

Then I spent a few days in Bangkok, as the Peace Corps medical staff decided I should see a doctor about my food poisoning. I still don't really like Bangkok, but this was definitely the most enjoyable visit I've had yet. We stayed at a guest house located right next to a BTS (the sky train) station, so it was really easy to get around, and I just feel like I'm getting a slightly better handle on the city. It was just nice to feel a little more in control. There were also some folks from 120 (the PC group who've been here for a year already), and they're fun to hang out with, and they know fun places to go.
And then the doctor told me I'm fine and I headed home.

Did I mention that right before I left site (at the beginning of all this), my computer crashed and I had to format my hard drive? I got a bunch of music from other volunteers, and I still have most of my favorites loaded on my ipod, but it's a little sad that there is a lot of good music I like that I won't be able to hear again until I get back to the states. Ok, you can stop pitying me now. It really isn't a big deal. But this DID prompt me to get a external hard drive in Khorat to back up stuff. When my computer initially crashed my biggest concern was that I would lose all of my pictures, but I managed to get into safe mode and copy those before it stopped letting me load at all. So that was good.

So now I'm back at site. I just did a load of laundry and now I'm just going to chill out for a while. I definitely am taking today to recover from being gone for so long. Do some reading, maybe nap a bit. This evening I'm going to go help my counterpart coach our two champion speech kiddos (the regional competition is sunday!), and then I guess tomorrow is back to normal.


It's kinda reassuring how life just keeps on going, isn't it?

Eli OUT!

Oh wait, my Prathom 1 (first graders) can't say Eli, so they call me Kruu Arai (basically that means Mr. What?)

Kruu Arai OUT!