Orienting in the Orient

I have been here for three weeks. Still, I am figuring out what “here” means and what to say about this country where sweat and rain are inevitable, most people are shorter than me, and I can walk down the street a farang eating a farang (“foreigner” takes its name from the white innards of the guava).

The program that I’m doing doesn’t mess around with free time. We usually go from 9 to 5 or 6, with a day off every couple of weeks or so. I’m very excited to be doing what I’m doing, though, and I think I’m going to learn a lot about the process of social change and issues around food, water, slums and mining in Northeast Thailand.

Bangkok

Grand Palace

We arrived in Bangkok and spent just one day in the city. We were staying one block over from the biggest backpacker street in Thailand and my experience was definitely superficial. We went to the National Museum, a maze of rooms with a jumble of artifacts—clothing, carved ivory, instruments, weapons and enormous gilded procession chariots along with a lot of dioramas depicting battle by elephant. We also went to the stunning Grand Palace and two temples. Wat Pho was filled by the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand. As we rounded his feet, which were inlaid with scenes of dragons and fish, we saw that the ring in the background was of people walking down a long row of metal pots, dropping in coins. We joined the line. Being part of the sound and doing this repetitive action was incredibly satisfying. We ferried across the river to Wat Arun, whose surfaces were covered with pieces of pottery, and climbed up the steep steps to look out over the sprawling city.

Other highlights:

• Stands of people sewing small white and pink flower buds into garlands.

• Giant raindrops monsooned down one evening and flooded the streets up to hubcaps. We ate outside and felt the waves wash over our feet when cars plowed through.

There is something about all cities that is familiar, especially non-Western cities, and this one had that feel, of quickness and cheap plastic things for sale and thick dirty air. I left before I had time to experience the “real” Bangkok, but I was glad to leave nonetheless.

Oriented

There are 27 students here: 11 men and 16 women. The program also has four program facilitators, recent grads who help the group work together on our projects and Ajaan Mike, who oversees them. There is the program director, who is very funny and very nearsighted, and several staff members who teach Thai, translate in our exchanges with villages, and run various other things that make the program work. I have been amazed by the dedication of these people. The facilitators often stay up working until 1:30 or 2, and everything we do with them they have done themselves or practiced presenting several times.

Orientation started seriously when we left Bangkok on a double-decker bus with massaging chairs for a resort in the mountains. They weren’t jagged peak mountains but quieter jungle mountains, covered in thick vegetation. A brown river flowed behind the resort, and the owners had kindly guided it into some little waterfalls. Some of us climbed across the river and my friend pointed out a banana tree.

We started Thai class, learned how easy it is to be impolite—pointing the bottom of your foot at anyone, stepping over bodies or food—how to shower outside—hold the tube of cloth up with your mouth, and did group building activities.

Activity 1: everyone stands on a cloth and without anyone stepping on the ground, flips the cloth over. Activity 2: everyone goes gets from one side of a net to the other, going through the spaces in the web without touching the lines that make it up. Activity 1 took 5 hours, Activity 2 took 7 hours. Both things seemed impossible, and were incredibly frustrating at times, but succeeding was exhilarating. These activities have continued, although in slightly less grueling form. We all touched a ball while keeping it in the air, we did a short meditation with a contemplative education teacher. I learned that I am a Wind, and an “Abstract Conceptualizer.” We wrote down our goals, the steps we need to achieve them and how we plan to measure our progress, and I realized that most goals can and should be made concrete.

It has been interesting to spend so much time with the same people, and to know that there are months ahead of us. I like everyone. Many of us are very different, but there has been a general respect and inclusiveness that has made me feel connected in some way to each person. We are still being oriented, but I am oriented enough to know that being here is going to be a process, with a lot of ups and downs.

Thai language

Thai is hard. Really really hard. It is a tonal language, so you can be trying to say, “It looks like a mustache” but come out with “a man standing in a rice field.” Mother, dog and doctor are all deceptively similar (sorry mom) and the word for rice (“cow”) sounds a lot like “white” and my roommate’s name (she wrote it Kaew but said it Gao). There are also about twice as many looping letters as in English, a deadly “ng” sound, and nine vowels each with a short form (“ah”) and a long form (“aaahh”). Needless to say, my foray into the language has been exciting.

Two or three days after we arrived, Thai class began. We did four hours each morning for about a week, and have been doing three most mornings since then. Divided into small groups, we are not allowed to speak English or write anything except during breaks. We listen as the teacher shows a picture and repeats a word or phrase and then we repeat it back. The system seems to work really well, and although the words often fall out of my brain as soon as we start the next word, enough stick for me to be as functional as I need to be. Staying with a family by myself for four nights also helped so much—using words in context and being forced to puzzle things out is where I have actually learned the Thai that I know. I will never forget how to say “I don’t have it” after playing five rounds of dominoes with my host brother, sister and mom.

Nong John



Nong John is a small community of thirty houses inside what the Thai state decided in the 1970’s should be a national park. Because of this, they are technically squatters, and no one new is allowed to move to the village. Nong John is probably the most beautiful place I have ever been. Here, the lush forested hills were punctuated by stone-faced mountains and the sky reflected off small rice plots.

Three other girls and I stayed on the lofted second story of a wooden house. Our host mother looked like a grandmother. She spoke to us almost as if it didn’t matter that we couldn’t understand, like she was talking to herself, and pulled out a batch of papers which seemed to be from when she had gone to school. One had pictures of Shakespeare, Einstein and some European philosophers; another was a carefully labeled drawing of the male and female reproductive system. She and her husband cared for two young boys who play kicked and chopped at each other, hopped gymnastically around the floor on the back of a large stuffed dog, and laughed as we chased them or carried them on our backs. We also encountered an even smaller boy who was always playing with the ribbon of a cassette and a girl who played with my playdoh and listened patiently as we read our Thai class notes to her. We had an exchange with the village and got the chance to ask them about their experiences being forced out of the forest by the government. The headman told us they were not afraid of being expelled again: they had nowhere else to go.

In the middle of the night when I woke up sick, I climbed up the ladder to our mattresses to see our host mom waiting for me with pills. She stayed there, lying on the floor, for a long time.

The next morning, we went with most of the women of the village up the hill to bring food to the wat. Then we watched as the monks chanted and filled their bowls with enormous quantities of sticky rice, fish, sauces, fruit and bamboo passed to them by a village man. I was surprised to see that many of the monks had tattoos and struck by the generosity and community of this ritual. The leftovers were brought to a pavilion, where we ate, and I threw up.

Our host mother in her house, dog in background

School Homestay

After a couple of nights in the Khon Kaen University dorms which will be our base, we packed our bags and were carted to homestays with fourth graders at three schools in poorer areas of the city. I was very nervous to spend four nights alone with a family whose language I didn’t speak, but the days slipped by and the homestay was a wonderful experience.

Things started off well: my little sister Ai was a head taller than the other girls in her class, with a smile that made two vertical lines in the bridge of her nose. The concrete house was next to a large green field, and the neighbor’s chickens and Asian-humped cows wandered through the trash-strewn yard. Three houses across the street were also part of the extended family, and every once in a while produced things like badminton rackets and an extremely cute baby.

Inside, the living room was actually where most of the living was done: it held a shrine, a large bed where the grandfather and smallest children slept, three plastic armchairs and two tvs. The walls were crayoned with toothed eels and stars. In addition, there was a small kitchen, two other bedrooms, each with a tv, and a back room crammed with a jumble of clothes and other things. Last but not least was the hong nam. Hong nams, or bathrooms, here are generally equipped with squat toilets and built-in concrete basins that are kept full of water. I learned early that showering is something you are supposed to do often—at least twice a day, and that if you do not immediately agree to partake, you will be pressed until you do. One evening I came back to school with my family wearing the same clothes as earlier and another little girl whispered righteously that I had not showered.

The other members of the family were nice and provided interesting subjects for observation. Leo, 6, was rarely separated from his nearly toothless female cousin, and loved when I ran after him and gave him scary looks. Jen, who was maybe 4, was rarely separated from her backpack and totally uninterested in me, although I could tell she had her eye on me when Grandpa gave me a cloth of hers to wipe my mouth and she screamed and grabbed for it. I mostly saw the older sister, who worked at a bar, asleep in the mornings with her purple eyeshadow still on. I watched the grandfather eat soup with whole eels, repair a fan, tinker with a motorcycle, and wade through a pond behind the house stabbing the ground with a net. Both parents worked at a printing shop, but I saw little of the father and a lot of the mother, who I realized was technically closer to my age than her daughter Ai.

Although I was worried about having enough to do, it was never a problem. In the mornings, I went to school with Ai and watched their assemblies, where they sat in very straight lines and sang the national anthem and said other things. After, we had our own classes with the program until evening. We threw my Frisbee around, tried out the badminton rackets. We sang “This is the way we wash our cloths”, practiced a hand slapping game, and visited 7-11. They tried to teach me Thai words and letters. We watched some soap operas and played some fast-paced dominoes. One afternoon, the mother gestured for me to get on her motorcycle. I hopped on and we got off at an amphitheater full of people doing aerobics. I joined in and the mom just watched, which was kind of weird, but after punching and hopping and being goofy I couldn’t stop smiling. The next day I petitioned for Ai to come, and we all went to aerobics, but ended up walking around the entire lake instead. The sun was setting and Ai and I raced when the path forked. We passed several more aerobics groups, a bunch of ping-pong tables, and lots of runners. It was lovely. When I left, the mom handed me a note she had written by going through my Thai-English dictionary. It said, “Liz- kind, nice, Liz – skillful, good at” down to “Liz- cutegirlsandkidsonly” and “O.K. I loeu you How about you”.

With Ai, outside of her school

Jen and Leo drink coke with spoons

KKU

The University is huge, and Khon Kaen is the fourth largest city in Thailand, a center of the Northeast. They love uniforms here, and KKU is no exception. I still haven’t been far on campus beyond the couple of blocks that surround our very nice dorm rooms and the office where our classes are held.

My roommate Kaew is very nice. She’s an English major and studies a lot, especially because her finals are coming up, but I’ve had some meals with her and a couple of her friends. We’re going to play badminton this afternoon…

I hear there is cheese somewhere in this city, but I have yet to see it. 7-11, or “7”, seems to be the store of choice and it is always packed with people getting things like prepackaged crab “pizza” they definitely don’t sell in US 7-11’s. But American things can be found. Last night some of us (Bowling names: Appleseed, Bud, Connie, Dee, and Eunice) went bowling. Against a background of American pop songs I haven’t heard in five years and Thai hits, I bowled a 23 my first game as “Connie” and a miraculous 122 to win my second game. We walked to the night market, ate some delicious fried dough and headed to a bar that was jam-packed with students going wild over the band that was playing. Between sets they played hip hop and we busted some moves, some of them inspired by my fanny pack, that weren’t happening anywhere else in U-Bar.