Inertia.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Yesterday my alarm went off around 5:20. I’ve been in the habit of setting it for around 7:05 to get up around 8:20 and then head get to the office around 8:40. That gets me in at least 10 minutes after the office opens, but I’m still only about the third or fourth out of a dozen people to show up. I’m still stuck in the rut of going to the office every day – something I’ve been trying to break for a while to no avail. I spent the better part of a month buried in a community assessment report, which I eventually turned in unfinished because I realized and then argued successfully that it was keeping me from being productive at site rather than helping me. Working on the report kept me pretty confined to either the office or my house, because I’d already done a vast majority of the in-community research but had yet to put anything into writing. At this point I officially haven’t worked on it in two weeks and it feels like a weight has been lifted. I’ll finish it at some point in the future, partially because I’ve already committed so much time that I can’t just leave it unfinished, but I’m taking some time off. Hopefully removing this from my docket will help me break the fruitless cycle of coming to the office.

But yesterday was a Sunday, and my alarm went off around 5:20 and I got up around 5:40 and started getting ready. I got a call from Duey just before I jumped in the shower (just realized how I still enjoy using figures of speech that don’t necessarily apply to me – you don’t really jump into a bucket shower) and he invited me to go to the province capital to buy some kind of lamp that he was planning on selling because this was the day that Buddhist Lent ended, and everyone was set to celebrate. Apparently these lamps are lots of fun. He’d told me he might be going, but last I’d heard he’d decided not to, so I’d already made plans to go to the wat that morning. Why the hell else would I already be up that early on a Sunday? So I finished getting dressed – white shirt and black slacks, standard for Buddhist holy days – grabbed the flowers that I’d got the day before to make merit, and then marched next door to the neighbor’s house so that I would have help navigating the wat when I got there. We ended up walking over around 6:15, with my favorite dog, Panda, following us ¾ of the way and us trying to shoe (sp?) her back because this patch of road is decently paved, so cars fly through it and don’t slow for crossing dogs. When we got there the main building of the wat was about half full. A “wat” is a plot of land that usually includes a large building for regular ceremonies and chanting, a boarding area for the monks, a sanctuary building that holds a Buddha image and is only used on the most important holidays, and a last structure that is essentially a set of stairs leading up to a furnace that is used for cremation ceremonies.

So, when I say the wat was half full, I mean the biggest building was full (called the sala), so there were probably around 120 folks. The wat closest to me is supposedly the nicest and biggest in my sub-district, which makes sense because it serves two of the largest villages. The sanctuary (called a bot) is pretty large and recently painted, so the colors are bright and vivid. It looks pretty awesome, and a large portion of it is inlaid with colored glass, so it reflects light and actually shines when you look at it. It has the kind intricate carving work that you didn’t think people did any more on a large scale, but that is common in wats around here. The bot is made of an inner sanctuary that holds the Buddha image, and then an equally elaborate wall that encloses a roughly 10’ walkway around the building itself. Just outside the wall on the east side is a dilapidating white building with a few small windows on each side that houses a different Buddha image. This is the 200-year-old predecessor to the large ornate building next door. The sala is a huge building, with two large stories, each just shorter and a little wider than a basketball court. Construction began on it about 9 years ago and still isn’t finished because there just isn’t enough money yet. The roof and upper portions are intricately carved and brightly painted in the same fashion as the bot, along with a pair of golden, three-headed Naga snakes that run the length of the stairwells with heads guarding the entrances, but most of the rest of the building is exposed cinderblock. The upper floor is rarely used, as far as I’ve been able to tell, but the bottom floor is the place where the older community members gather to make merit and spend the night every holy day during Buddhist lent, and where most of the chanting and ceremonies take place. This is where I’ve been going to meditate while the older folks chant every holy day, and this is where everyone was gathered when I arrived.

At this point people were making merit by giving rice and food to the giant collection and then kneeling and bowing to the collection of larger Buddha figurines in the opposite corner of the room. I’ve heard that the food amassed during these ceremonies in central Thailand amounts to a veritable feast of different curries, soups, and other special dishes. Wat Bahn Chat Yai – the local wat – featured a two foot diameter metal bowl that people were filling with fists full of sticky rice, and then other baskets that ended up full of dried and deep fried whole fish or some assortment of boiled rice snacks, which are filled with rice and any number of ingredients, and then are cooked inside of a banana leaf. They stay in the banana leaf until you eat them, which keeps them fresher, but it also serves to give you absolutely no idea what’s inside of them. Sometimes you get lucky and it’s a brown sugar and egg concoction in the middle, and other times it’s beans, corn, or dried and shredded meat. There were several baskets full, and I don’t know what happened to it, but it was a rather astonishing amount of food. So we went and deposited some sticky rice and dumped off two fish in this corner, then went and bowed to the Buddha statues and put some flowers on the 3 foot plank of wood that ran between two tall yellow candles and served as an alter. After that we put more sticky rice in a series of metal bowls lined up on a table in the middle of the room and then went and sat down on straw mats that covered a majority of the cement floor. I usually go with the elderly woman next door or her daughter, which is who I went with this time. When it’s time to start chanting, the men all move to the first few rows in the room and the women, who are far more numerous, take over the middle and back of the room. Since it’s a religious ceremony I don’t fight this and I end up kneeling near the front of the room with anywhere from 60 to 200 old women staring at the oversized white kid in the front of the room until the chanting actually starts. By now the regulars are used to me, but because yesterday was a big holiday nearly the entire village came to the wat. Even these people are used to seeing me around, but they aren’t used to seeing me at the wat, so they stare away. and I just get that warm fuzzy feeling.

So the chanting goes on for a while and when it’s finished the younger folks go home. Everyone over 60-years-old in Thailand is officially retired, so a lot of them will get to the wat at 4am on holy days and spend the night, going back home at 5am the next morning. They wear white and skip dinner but drink a big vat of warm ovaltine just before dark and spend the day chanting and talking before they sleep on their straw mats rolled out over the concrete floor. Anyone spending the night also cannot have any contact with the opposite sex, which I somehow didn’t realize for a few months until yesterday when I tried to help the old lady from next door poor some water out and got chastised. So… after chanting everyone goes home except for the plus-60 dressed-in-white crowd and me. They told me there was a picture taking session at 9:30, I was getting sleepy and it was about 8am, so I went home to nap.

I went home and sewed up a pair of white pants that I brought when I first came here, but tore a whole in the butt around six months ago. Then I took a quick nap, grabbed my camera and headed back. When I got to the wat everyone organized and we used my nice camera to take a few pictures of everyone standing in front of the bot before we did breakfast – usually people would eat the food that’s been offered that morning, but instead it was large amounts of the same 3 awful Isan soups, sticky rice and bananas. There was a dish with some combination of vegetable and meat, one with just leaves, and one that was a hot pepper paste. Somehow they all managed to have the same flavor, which I’ve come to think of as “isan,” and which is not pleasant but is common enough now that I can eat it with a straight face. I’m not sure what happened to all the fish. After lunch there was an impromptu ceremony where all the old women tied strings around wrists to help take away any bad energy and restore the good spirits that I’ve lost along my journeys (a good example of the blend of Buddhism and animism). I probably ended up with over 30 little white strings around my wrists, and it looked pretty cool even though the hanging ends get getting in my way. I’ve gotten a few of these before, but never in such large quantities and I was excited to look like a Tibetan mountain guide for a few weeks, but grandma next door made me cut off all but five of them this morning. Still, I like the idea of the good spirits following me around, so whenever I’ve gotten these strings (quan) I’ve untied them before they could fall or get too gross and then retied them on the back of my backpack. I’m about to triple my collection.

After the quan ceremony I chatted with people for about an hour, promised I’d come back around 5, then went home for the afternoon. I laid out in my hammock and read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for a while and it was so splendid I just fell asleep. When the sun began to peer under my overhang I got hot and woke up and decided to go inside to finish my nap. Sure enough, I woke up about 20 minutes before I was due at the wat. I’d had plans to do some work, but that was past considering at this point, so I got dressed again and walked back to the wat. When I arrived I was about 10 minutes late and people had already started chanting. Usually they tell me 6 and start at 6:30, so I was surprised that they told me 5 and started at 5, but I slanked my way up to an open spot in the front and kneeled down and got my chant on. Previous chanting sessions lasted around 2 hours but this was only an hour, which I was alright with. Afterwards everyone went and got two candles and either some incense or flowers and then we walked over to the bot. We took our shoes off outside the wall, walked through one of the gates and then kneeled for a while and waited for a monk to come open the sanctuary. Not because we were going in there or needed something, but because the light switch for the area around the bot was inside the sanctuary – this was kind of a let down. I peaked inside through the open doors though, and it was absolutely gorgeous.

Once we had a little light, we all lit our candles and proceeded to walk three slow laps around the sanctuary before bowing to the Buddha that we could barely see through the cracked door, then gathering our shoes and shuffling off. Even with a few lights on, most of the light we had came from the candles. With everyone dressed in white, candle light reflecting off the colored glass on the sanctuary and walls, and the dim light thick with incense smoke that made you cough when the wind started blowing your own offering into your face, I felt like I suddenly woke up in either an ancient pagan ritual around stone henge, or some kind of skulls initiation ceremony, except with more dragons. Despite the weird images conjured by my western upbringing, the whole thing was extremely peaceful and calming. When we walked out everyone put their candles, incense, flowers on a piece of sheet metal that was suspended at about 5 feet by some bamboo poles, then walked back to the wat. There was the standard ovaltine, which I took gratefully after realizing I’d skipped dinner, then I was escorted most of the way home by a half-dozen elderly women in white.

When I got home I read for a little bit, then started an episode of some show to leave on while I washed (long overdue) dishes, but Duey called before I could even get started. He said he’d got the lamps and he was lighting them outside the office, which is across the street from my house, so I walked over. It turns out the lamps are like mini hot air balloons, made of paper. You light a coil that’s suspended by wires in the middle of a big paper balloon, then let the thing float away. They go really far and are fun to get started, so it was pretty good amusement for a while. I sat up for a while and chatted with Duey, and we could hear kids setting off oversized cherry bombs in every direction. Apparently the candle ceremony I went to was the old folks version and after I left and they were safely inside the sala, anyone under 50 arrived and they did the same thing but constantly set off extremely loud firecrackers. I wished I was there, but I don’t think my ears would be working right today. It legitimately sounded like a war zone, complete with children screaming (with glee) every few minutes. When I got home some kids had exploded a few of little bombs right outside my front door while I was gone – must be fun to play tricks on the foreigner. Glad I wasn’t there. So I cleaned up a little, had a short phone convo, then hit the sack a little early so that I could get up painfully early again today to do another morning at the wat.


And so this morning was a lot like the early portion of yesterday at the wat, except I left a little early so that I wouldn’t feel guilty about showing up too late to the office that I don’t actually have to go to. I had a few good meetings in Bangkok last weekend and had a good talk with Ben and with my Dad, and I can be productive in so many other side tasks, but I cannot seem to get a project to develop at site. It’s frustrating the hell out of me. If I had to pick a reason why I haven’t been writing, or why I haven’t been posting what I write, it’s because I’m in a rut and I’m pissed about it and I don’t feel like writing and telling people about it. I average one or two weekends a month out of town with volunteers, and those are good for morale, but I don’t want to write about those – they’re not why I’m here and they’re a tiny fraction of my time, even though they manage to make up a majority of my facebook pictures. When I get around other volunteers in a committee or something, I can finally function like I want to, but at site I’m dead in the water. I’m not depressed, mostly, but most of what I feel like writing about seems like bitching. Since I don’t have a lot of positive things to say I’ve been opting not to say. Other volunteers would probably understand, but I don’t want people back home to read a bunch of rants and think I’m whining. In order to keep track I’ve been keeping a journal that I haven’t been posting, and it’s therapeutic without feeling like a pity party.

The old nayok lost, and Chaiwat is probably on his way back and we are currently leaderless so people mostly just sit around all day and once again I can’t drag my counterpart away from her card games long enough to form a plan or even talk about any potential projects. I’m kind of excited that Chaiwat’s coming back because I can deal with anything else if he’ll actually help get some work done, which I feel like he will. This Friday marks 6 months at site with very little to show. My life is inertia. I need something to give. And yet I’ve had enough time to reflect on it and people to commiserate with that I’m in an alright mental place. Some people already have a lot to show for their time, but I’ve realized that some sites are just easier than others and mine is not one of those sites. I need to stop coming to this office and to find someone who is willing to work with me, and then hopefully things will start happening. Instead I keep getting things started with my counterpart just in time for her to disappear or get disinterested. Maybe I’ll have a new counterpart by my next post, whenever that will be. I just finally set aside some time and felt compelled to put up an entry with a little bit of life and maybe an excuse for why I haven’t written in so long. My other good excuse is that because writing became sort of an outlet for me, it also became overly personal. I realized how many people were reading my blog – especially other volunteers – and I wasn’t sure how to react so I just stopped. If anyone’s still reading this after such a long hiatus, then I apologize. I haven’t quit, but I’ve definitely slowed down and I’m okay with that. Maybe check in every month or so and I’ll try to have something to show. Sorry this isn't better written. It's kind of like a rough draft that I'm just going with, so there's probably a few mistakes and the ideas might not be clear, but I feel like it's good enough. Take care all, and ตามไจคุณ (dtam jai kuhn). The song of the day is “Do It Again” by Nada Surf because I like the line at the end about “maybe this weight was a gift; like I had to see what I could lift.” Also check out Nate Ruess’s new band, Fun. Hope all’s well over there.

Chaiwat

I've been sitting on this for a little bit. I keep meaning to write more because this entry is a very one-dimensional view of what I've been up to, but every time I sit down to write I can't stay focused or motivated long enough to get out a full entry. I wind up with several half paragraphs that span a few days, then I read over it and realize that, not only is it crap, it's not even cohesive. And so I don't want to post those, but this entry has been the one that I've somehow managed to knock out in its entirety over the last month or so. I also found an old entry about a storm that I wrote close to when I first moved in, but somehow lost and never posted. So upcoming is a lot about my old counterpart, but it also goes through a lot of different aspects of life at site. I've been trying to get out an entry on the "work" I'm doing next, which is the half-dozen half paragraphs that I described earlier. Today I was going to go visit community groups, but when I showed up there were a few hundred elderly villagers here picking up monthly government allowances (500 baht, or just under $15), and the entire staff, including my counterpart, is busy giving out the money. So i'm helping guard the main money box right now, and I'm writing when people aren't talking to me. The folks that aren't literate put a thumbprint next to their name, and we just got some other money back because the recipient died. A lot going on.

I'm not sure if the entries confirm it, but I feel pretty good right now. The ball is starting to roll on a few potential projects, and I'm happy in the village. I've got good friends at site and nearby that I can visit on off weekends, and I'm rarely bored. I'd always heard that boredom was one of the biggest things you'd have to face in the Peace Corps, but I'm faced more with a feeling that there just aren't enough hours in the day. We had a two-week training in the beginning of July, and after that it took me a week to get resettled and motivated and shake off a light round of homesickness, but it's gone and I've found a good pace again and it's nice. I've realized homesickness is just the crap that pops into my head when things aren't going ideally here, but the more I think about it the more I realize what's going on and can just get over it.

I've also realized that I post updates on facebook a lot, because it's just easier, and because soundbites seem more reasonable there than in the form of a blog entry. For me at least. So I've decided to put the last bunch up here for those that aren't on facebook:

Yesterday at 2:00am ·to the day, 6 months in country. 21 to go.
Sun at 11:00pm - Officially sure that my neighbors dig through my trash before they burn it for me, when they were using a milk carton I threw out to hold water this morning. good camp in sisaket, better weekend in ubon, now trying to plan my week and doing a last round of research before starting my compost bin.
July 21 at 1:42am - About to go teach 40 first graders that "A" sounds like "alligator," and alligators go like this: "chomp!" how could that not keep them amused for a full hour? those intimidating little cute little 6 year old punks.
July 20 at 12:07am - Tomorrow night's goal is to write people back and hopefully update my blog. tonight's goal is to finish applications, prepare a session on hygiene for a camp on friday, and to get ready for my first day of teaching tomorrow.
July 18 at 10:44am - friday through sunday will be over 100 k on my bike. I saw a 60 m tall buddha and got to use high speed internet (posted a facebook album for the first time since junior year of college). horrah posh corps.
July 17 at 2:23am - biking from wapi to roi et this weekend. something's gotta break the post-pst2 funk.
July 12 at 11:16pm - after 6 and a half hours on a bus, we pulled through a small town and the hills had disappeared. Only rice fields and trees growing in the rows between them and the rainstorms brewing overhead. And we were in Isaan, and I was almost home.
June 27 at 7:39am - Training for two weeks in Kurat. Less than prepared. Not really worried.
June 12 at 2:21am - plans for the weekend: Do laundry and plant rice. This might mean I've officially assimilated.
June 11 at 12:10am - uses so much nonverbal communication he's on the verge of becoming an involuntary mime.


Kind of crap, but more consistent. And I did just officially hit the six month mark, which is kind of cool. Also, keep in mind that my laptop time is still set to America, so all the ams and pms should be switched. So the old folks have their money and are clearing out, and I'm going to go ahead and post. The other night I had the good fortune of a friend introducing me to a poem that Bob Dylan wrote, called "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie." I'm not sure how rare it is, so I'm going to try to post it (no go, but I think you can listen to it here, http://www.imeem.com/tag/last thoughts on woody guthrie mp3/music. If that doesn't work, you can always try youtube.). Anyways, it's awesome and is definitely the song of the day. Hope all is well and happy reading.



22/7

I think of a dozen things I want to write through out each day, but I usually don’t write, and before I know it everything’s lost on me. I always think “wow, this would be a great story to start a blog entry,” and then I think that about something else later that day, and then again the next day, but I never get around writing it down, and soon most of it’s lost. I still remember the better stories, so maybe it’s a good filter to make sure I’m not just writing a bunch of crap. But I’ll probably still just write a bunch of crap, I’ll just stick to the more current crap. But first, I just read through my last post and it feels like forever ago, so I’m going to try to catch up. God knows I’ll miss a lot, but here it goes, in very little particular order.

Starting about 2 minutes ago and then working backwards. My old counterpart just stopped by for about 30 seconds to give me some shirts that his cousin bought for me at a beach resort, and in return I gave him a bottle of honey I bought during a training. Wow, I have a lot to tell…

So my old counterpart is named Chaiwat, and he’s never actually been my counterpart, but I call him that because he was the person that was listed as my counterpart when I was given my site assignment. Judging from the initiative at my office, he is most definitely the person that filled out the Peace Corps paperwork, and is therefore the main reason why I am where I am. Over the last while I’ve come to find out that even though he no longer works in my community, he is still extremely involved in the politics here. In fact, I’m relatively certain that the reason that he no longer works here is because he and the current chief administrator are at odds. The current chief administrator (the position is called Nayoke) is currently up for election and has strong competition that is heavily supported by Chaiwat. If the current nayoke loses, then Chaiwat will return to my area to work as the community development officer in my office. I don’t necessarily want this to happen, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

The current nayoke is not favored to win, according to the few people that I’ve asked (Real Clear Politics for some reason forgot to post the latest poll results). My current counterpart at first explained to me that my counterpart doesn’t have many supporters because he didn’t buy booze and meals for the local village representatives after meetings, but the other guy did. I told her that that seemed like “corruption” (a fun English word that we overuse because she understands it mostly and because the Thai word is so similar to the words for “beautiful” and “bad luck” that I confuse myself when I try to use it). She then told me that people don’t really mind corruption here as long as the person is a good worker. So I obviously then asked if the current nayoke is a good worker. The answer, which I already knew, was a resounding “no,” or “baw mehn” (Isaan for no, which was confusing when I first moved here because it’s sounds a whole lot like “plaa mehn,” which has a slightly different tone, but means “stinky fish” in Central Thai. Anyways..). Haha… So, the nayoke is the elected chief administrator, but there is a second head of my office, who is called a balaat, and who is appointed after taking a series of tests. The balaat is actually the direct boss of all of the non-elected employees in an SAO (a Sub-district Administrative Office; the office where I work). If an SAO has a bad balaat, then there is really no oversight of the office and the employees tend to do whatever they want, which in my office is bet money on card games. Now, the only way to get rid of a bad balaat (appointed head of the office) is if the nayoke (elected chief administrator) stands up and goes to the province office and directly says that the balaat sucks and that his area needs a new person in the office. It turns out that my balaat is actually famous for being bad at his job, which I learned when I went to visit the governor and provincial head of local administration, and they were making jokes about how awful he is. Hell, I went to a province-wide meeting of chief administrators and they were joking about him on the microphone to the whole province, and everyone seemed to recognize who he was and that he sucks. But my balaat stays on because my nayoke doesn’t have the initiative or the balls or whatever to get rid of him. So that’s another strike against my nayoke. Lastly, the only project that is currently actually happening at my SAO is an effort to fix the cracked and cratered collections of asphalt that serve as roads here. This seems to only have happened because there was such a huge push for it from village representatives, but now that it is happening, my office’s nayoke, balaat, treasurer, head of finances, and head of engineering have skimmed a combined total of 30% off the budget and into their pockets, according to my counterpart. I know that that was all pretty dense, but in the end it seems like my nayoke’s two biggest activities are campaigning (badly) and taking government money. Still, the real reason he’s probably going is because he doesn’t do anything, which includes that he hasn’t gotten rid of our current balaat, who also loves doing nothing, but does it with less teeth.

Sorry this is all coming out so dense, but it seems my life is being defined by these densities, and in order to communicate it fully I need to bore you all to death. At this point we’re already through the worst of it though, if that’s any relief.

So, my old counterpart, Chaiwat, comes to town rather frequently from his new home about 45 minutes away, in order to campaign for the current nayoke’s opponent. He usually calls when he’s around, like he did tonight, and will come and visit for a bit or take me to visit someone or do something, which is nice. Or was nice initially. About a week or two after my last entry, he came and got me on a Friday after work and we went to another rocket festival near where he lives. This rocket fest was huge compared with the other ones that I’ve been to, with dozens of dragon floats and hundreds of overly made-up girls, and even a beauty pageant. The real highlight of the whole experience was meeting Chaiwat’s cousin, who married a soldier from Mississippi 40 years ago and is here on vacation after selling the restaurant that she owned in Tampa, called “Lemongrass.” She’s a feisty woman that’s short for a Thai person, but carries herself like an American, laughs like an American, calls her husband “papa,” and loves using her American resources to take care of her family here in Thailand. She’s put at least two of her extended family through college, and has helped the others buy land and other things that just make their lives easier. Looking at her story I could maybe see why Thai women seem to be obsessed with white men – they love taking care of each other and helping family and friends, and American resources would open up so many doors to be a provider; ideally, they’d like to be able to be like this woman. I’m not honestly sure what I think about it when I see it like that, but when I walk through a bigger city here and see it manifested with gorgeous younger Thai women holding hands with the kind of older white men that Darwin would have categorized with the dodo bird, it still sends creepy shivers down my spine. I’ve digressed.

So she was great and she showed me how to make fried chicken in a Thai kitchen and we sat at the beauty pageant and made fun of how none of the girls could walk in heals and it was good times. I haven’t seen her since, but I’ve seen Chaiwat a few times and tonight he brought three t-shirts that she bought as gifts for me, which I really appreciate. Anyways, the Friday after I went to the rocket fest with them, Chaiwat came to visit me again and he took me trolling for tadpoles with a few of the villagers, and afterwards we went to a Korean barbeque restaurant in town, which is pretty nice. About half way through the conversation he asks me why I’m not afraid of him. Initially I thought he was just fishing for compliments, like for me to say that it’s because he’s a good person or something, but I hate it when people fish for compliments, so I just said I didn’t know why I should be scared. He said that he would be scared if he were me. I said I wasn’t and tried to drop it, which worked for a while, but he kept bringing it up. Literally, this guy is not big. And he’s a little socially awkward, but he’s no Dexter. But he kept bringing it up and then he started giving me examples about why I should be scared and by the end of the night I was freaked out a good bit and couldn’t wait to get away from him. Maybe it was his awkward way of telling me I need to be careful or something, but it really only makes me worried about him. Right now I actually have a pocketknife tucked in the waste band of my shorts from when he came by earlier. I just don’t trust him after that.

But it gets better. That all happened on a Friday night, and the next Tuesday was one of my favorite days at site to date. I had a slow morning, then spent the afternoon talking with one of the local women’s weaving groups and with members of the Thai government’s cooperative support office. It felt like a very productive day, and I stopped by the SAO on my way home to pick up my backpack before it closed. A group of the folks I work with were playing cards inside and they told me to stop by where the cars were parked on my way out. So I stopped by and there were some people drinking beer so I set my bag down and hung out for a bit and shared a few beers (drinking Thai style, which is pouring a single small glass of beer with ice in it, giving it to one person to down relatively quickly, and then refilling for the next person). As we stood around under the carport drinking, we could see menacing, pitch-black clouds rolling out of the south, like from the gates of Mordor itself. When they were finally overhead, we loaded our bags and phones into the trucks and just stood under the carport as the rain started. It came down hard. We stopped leaning against the trucks and the motorcycles and instead leaned into the wind to take the rain full on as it was blown against us as if the carport weren’t even there. A few times I thought that the wind was going to catch the tin roof and take it off, but it stayed and we stayed under it and waited for the rain to stop and watched a couple of trashcan lids blow by. When it slowed down to a light shower, everyone went inside and I went with the building manager to buy two cases of beer. When we made it back everyone was inside and they had set up karaoke on one of the computers (a Thai party standard). At this point we all had our own glasses, and we sat around drinking and singing karaoke and eventually ate through five bags of uncooked ramen noodles (new favorite drunk food. Try it, I’m serious). It was quality bonding time with two of my favorite Thai people (the building manager, Duey, and the assistant accountant, Woon, who are both close to my age and my speed) and a few others, and we all had a great time and eventually called it a night around 10:30 (what you get when you start early). I walked home and was getting everything together to go to bed when someone started knocking on my door. It was Duey, the building manager, and he had a bag full of frogs. The real translation for his title is janitor, but it doesn’t really describe his job, which is more along the lines of catchall maintenance. I also don’t like the connotations of “janitor,” because he’s a cool guy in his late 20’s with a wife and a kid and a rice field, just like everyone else around here, which isn’t what I think we usually picture as a “janitor” (of course, with no disrespect to janitors). So it’s raining outside and Duey is standing on my front porch with a helmet flashlight strapped around his head and a bag of frogs in one hand and he wants to know if I want to go catch frogs with him… Of course I want to go.

So I go throw on some shorts because I’m only wearing a Thai towel (which is a relatively thin piece of plaid cloth that is perfectly acceptable to wear around your house or really anytime you’re in a small village and aren’t in an office or meeting someone important. If I’m at home, it’s probably the only thing I’m wearing. It’s great for the hot weather, and it’s just generally pretty great), then I throw my flashlight in a ziplock bag and off we go into the wet night. My flashlight was complete crap compared to his, so as we walked down the street he would generally spotlight a frog somewhere down the road and then I would run off and grab it. After I got the hang of it, it was surprisingly easy. We went down the main road a ways and then off onto a muddy side road and through a few rice fields that hadn’t been planted yet. On the main road I was surprised at the night crawlers. The entire pavement was covered with hundreds of giant earthworms, most of which were easily over a foot long. When I stepped on them they would start squirming like crazy and the first few minutes they had me jumping constantly. Only twice did I look down and see that it was actually a snake, but no bites, so no worries.

After our bag was full of frogs we started walking back to my house. Duey and Woon had both been asking me earlier that night what I thought of Chaiwat, and on the way back Duey asked again. This time there wasn’t anyone singing in the background, so I had a chance to say that I used to think he was a pretty good guy, but that the last time I was around him he kept asking me why I wasn’t afraid of him and saying that I should be. Duey agreed that that was weird and said that if I ever had any trouble with Chaiwat that I should call him. He then told me that they were asking what I thought of Chaiwat because I’d been spending a lot of time with him and that he’s gay and has been asking them about me. Definitely did not see that one coming. Sexuality and gender are a lot different here, and most boys that show signs of any femininity or homosexuality essentially switch genders at a young age. They dress and act and are socially and culturally female, and are accepted as such. There are generally very few masculine homosexual males due to this custom. So I just did not expect that at all, and I was left trying to decide if this guy wants to kill me or date me or both. My response is just to be scarce, which has been easy because I’ve been legitimately pretty busy for a while now, and I’ve avoided one on one time with him with the exception of one night where he came over for me to help him work on a visa application so that he can visit his cousin in Tampa. He stayed til midnight that night, even though I was yawning like crazy and telling him how tired I was (an example of greng jai, or the Thai idea of being considerate by doing something even if you don’t want to, or by saying you’ll do something to make someone happy, but then not actually doing it, or of not directly saying you don’t want to do something, but dropping more subtle hints so the person will hopefully realize it, like this). Anyways, tonight was the first time I’ve seen him for a while, and it’s been nice not seeing him, and if he ends up moving back and becoming the community development officer in my area again, it’s just going to be a pain in my ass.

And that’s the Chaiwat chain of events. In the morning I need to pack for a camp I’m going to go help with in Sisaket, then leave my house by 7:15ish in order to bike to the highway, lock up my bike, and catch a bus to a nearby city in order to catch another bus to a far away city in order to catch another bus into a friend’s town. It’s a little after 1 in the am now, so I’m going to call it a night. I’ve been listening to a ton of older Ben Folds Five since my last post, and so my songs of the day (I guess month, since it’s been that long) are Philosophy, Emaline, and then Time, from the Ben’s newer Songs for Silverman. It felt good to write, and I think I might be on a roll, so there should be more to come soon. Dtam Jai Khun, all.

25/4

The power’s been out for a few hours now, and the darkness and a long day are lulling me to sleep. But as I lay in bed listening to the frogs call through the thunder and lightly falling rain, I felt like writing a bit before bed. It was late morning when I finally got out of the house today, and you could feel the rain coming. It hung over us the entire day, dark clouds muting the sun’s rays and gusts laying strong through the leaves and against the houses. But the rain held off until dark. I was washing dishes when I first heard it falling outside my kitchen, and it was falling hard before I had a chance to turn around and shut the window. The lights went out within minutes.

The day that I moved in, the rain started to fall soon after I’d walked over after work in the afternoon. There was a hammock that someone had given me still sitting on my front porch, so before I ever went inside I put my bag down and set about tying the hammock up. I tied it to two of the columns that are holding the overhang up on the side of my house. I tested my weight on it and it held, so I lay across it and was stretching out as the rope slid down the smooth column and dropped me hard on the concrete, knocking the wind half out of me. I laid for a minute, then got back up and found some extra rope and tied it around the column a few times so that it would hold. I tested my weight again, and as I was climbing back in for my second go, a few raindrops hit the ground next to me. When I was sure I wasn’t on my way back down, I lay there and watched the drops fall harder until there was a steady downpour. I tried to imagine all the stress of the day washing off me into the water and through the ditch into muddy fields. After about half an hour I was ready to go back in and face the building that would be my house for the next two years.

When the power went out tonight I went and found my bicycle headlight and used it to finish the dishes, and then I went out and tried to sit in my hammock again to watch the rain falling. There’s a small gap between the front porch and the side porch that isn’t sheltered from the rain, and it was raining so hard that I was legitimately soaked before I even got to the hammock. The rain was blowing the wind in towards the hammock too, but I figured if I was already wet I might as well go ahead and lay there, so I did. The rain fell hard and the wind blew it in to me as even more splashed up from the puddles below, and the swaying hammock made me feel like I was riding a small boat through an angry squall. Looking out I saw flashes of rain and swaying trees when the lightning struck, and nothing when it didn’t. I realized the lightning was falling all around me, and the thunderclaps that shook through me were loud and instant. My heart started racing and I started calculating whether lightning would be attracted to the antenna on the other side of my house or the metal garbage can lid right next to me. I wondered what it would be like to be struck by lightning and whether I would live and if I did would I be able to get help afterwards because my phone was nestled under my arm and would get fried. I was dripping wet, heart pounding, and the sky lit up every few seconds and I thought about just laying there, leaving it up to fate or chaos and betting I would come out on top. How cool would that be? But my heart kept speeding up until it was pounding inside my chest and it was hard to breath. I finally gave in to my body's self-preservation instinct, and got out of the hammock and went back inside to dry off.

So I came in and took a quick bucket shower and read Grapes of Wrath with my bike light until the batteries died, then read a few old emails and now here I am. Other things have happened today and since my last post, but I don’t feel like writing about them right now. The rain here comes in waves, and another good shower just started up. There have been a few waves so far tonight, but none as driving as the first. I don’t remember ever being afraid of a storm back home, and I don’t know if it’s the type of storm or the comparable weakness of the buildings nearby, but something about the weather here just feels more powerful than I ever remember it being. The song of the day is Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm.” Dtam jai kun.

Better?

6 / 2-3 /09

So I’m sitting at home waiting to be picked up to go to another rocket festival. There are two lizards mating behind a picture of one of the old kings and about a dozen cows grazing through my yard. I started getting mosquitoes from the standing water in my bathroom – I have two big plastic trashcans to hold water for bathing and a 3-gallon-ish bucket of water for using the toilet – so I’ve cut down to just using one of the trashcans, because it has a lid, and then refilling the bucket when I need it. So I just got done refilling a trashcan and taking a bucket shower, which has become old hat by now. Spent the morning going to markets with the nayoke and his family, so going to the rocket festival will mean a day away from the office. Right now I have less than a month to complete my community assessment, so the days off aren’t necessarily good, but I like not being in the office. My last two full days in the office I hit a point around mid afternoon, when the heat hits it’s peak and the fans just won’t turn fast enough and I’ve been staring at a computer screen or a Thai community plan for too long and I just need out. But I’m almost done with a few of them, and even if I don’t finish I’m going to start going into the communities, ready or not, and start working out there. That’s the real way to get to know these villages anyways, and I’ve been reading up on the Peace Corps’ Participatory Analysis for Community Action book and am about ready to go talk to people without wasting their or my time. Peace Corps also just sent me a book about learning Isaan, (I only found out this book existed from other volunteers, they didn’t tell us) so I’ve started a regimen of sorts to learn this dialect.

When I got off of work yesterday I took a two-hour nap and then went to bed early because I was still just exhausted from my weekend in Phisanolok. There was a big meeting there last week and so a lot of people stayed for the weekend and we probably had over 30 people.. [and I was picked up to go to the rocket fest]

…So my friend was telling me about textsfromlastnight.com and at the end of work today I found the site and opened about 10 pages worth and just kept them minimized on my desktop to read after work this afternoon. It’s just a collection of hilarious and embarrassing text messages that people have submitted, but it’s freaking amazing. Part of why I didn’t read them at work (besides the fact that I was at work) was that when I looked at the first few of them I almost started crying I was laughing so hard.. And then after work this afternoon I was looking through them on my front porch and laughing when my landlord/grandma comes across the yard with a notebook and a pen to teach me to read Thai. She asks what I’m doing and I just told her I was reading emails from friends, so she sits down next to me and starts writing things on her notebook to see if I can read them. I can read it all, but there were a few phrases I didn’t recognize, so I switched the language on my computer to Thai and I started to type them on a text doc to keep for later. She sees this and somehow the fact that I’m typing in Thai without a Thai keyboard doesn’t alert her to the fact that I can read. But what’s more is that just below the document, the bottom of the textsfromlastnight page is still open, and I can only see the phrase “Thank God for loud music. There is a circus in my butt right now.” I mean, how do you not laugh at that? And I know she can’t read it, but she’s looking right at it and I’m holding my breath trying not to burst out laughing and then I suddenly needed to go to the bathroom. Some mixture of the butt circus comment and the little fish-meat balls that I had for lunch. Anyways, I’m gonna go run for a bit while there’s light, and then maybe write some more.

So I ended up biking instead of running. I just wanted to cover ground faster and it was starting to get dark. Almost hit a four-foot snake and saw some areas I hadn’t seen before. Got home and did some pushups to try to fight the skinny, and then took a shower. I got my first Thai haircut in Phisanolok this past weekend and a friend had to spend a few minutes evening it out with my leatherman before I wanted to leave my room again. I just spent the last ten minutes in the shower finishing the job and I finally feel satisfied with it. I hadn’t had a haircut in nearly 6 months and my hair was as long as it’s been in my adult life. When I got off the bus Friday night I suddenly decided I hated it, so when I finally made it outside on Saturday, the first thing I did was go to a barbershop. I had a relaxing day mapped out of haircuts and shaving and Thai massages, and I just knew in the back of my mind that at the end of it I’d feel clean and like myself again. Well, all those things happened, but I didn’t get that clean, relaxing feeling I was hoping for, and I think it was because of the damn haircut. The guy didn’t even touch a pair of scissors; he just had a trimmer and used a comb to adjust the length. Not sure what I was thinking… But it was a good afternoon nonetheless and a few of us went and got massages on a barge on a river and there were wind chimes and they were boiling herbs, so it smelled great. The full sensory experience, except for food, but the smell of the herbs made me hungry, so that might count?

Speaking of food, tonight I made my first homemade spaghetti sauce. It was good, but I wasn’t prepared for how many tomatoes I need to make a single bowl’s worth of sauce. About twice what I expected. I also decided I’d try to make tortillas tonight for fajitas tomorrow. Someone told me how to do it quickly over the weekend and I thought I remembered enough of it to feel it out, but I didn’t, and I ended up making pancakes instead of tortillas. Not the worst mistake ever, but a little surprising and definitely not what I wanted. I tried adding eggs too, and I just ended up with egg flavored pancakes… weee! Between that and French toast, I’m definitely buying a ton of syrup the next time I see it. Although I don’t think I’ve seen any yet. I don’t think you can just make syrup, can you? Anyways, I’ve been focusing on making American food so much because I want to perfect something so that I can invite my co-workers over for lunch or dinner one day and serve them something they couldn’t do better themselves. Soon. Side note, after she turned me on to textsfromlastnight.com, I challenged the closest volunteer to a ridiculous text message contest and this is already one of my new favorite things.

Speaking of good times, remember when the light in my bedroom exploded? I was talking with a (Thai) friend today and he told me that last year a single storm ended up electrocuting both him and another villager in our area through their TVs somehow. He ended up spending a month in the hospital, and the other person died. It’s one of those weird parts of development where people have decent tvs and appliances, but their power isn’t even grounded.. If anyone has any experience in this area, I’d sure love some advice on how to ground housing, wires, etc. It sure didn’t make me feel better about the constant huge storms, and it actually caused me to jump off the toilet earlier tonight, just before a storm rolled through, just to make sure my computer wasn’t plugged in. Better safe than hospitalized. Or even worse, computer-less! If you think I’d actually start writing letters, you’re probably right.

I talked to a friend from the campaign really briefly the other day and it’s stuck with me a little bit. She just mentioned that her and a friend were working for the administration in some cool positions and it made me wonder if I’d have made it in and what I could be doing… I feel like I’m constantly busy, but life just isn’t the same pace as it was on the campaign and I miss it a lot when I think about it. It feels like things here move so slow and all those folks are passing me by. I have been doing a good bit of traveling lately, which helps, but it’s not the same. I need to try to take that energy and make sure I keep it focused on my work here. Hopefully I can walk away from here in two years having accomplished a fair amount as well.

Yesterday’s rocket festival had very few rockets, but they had some for sale and I bought them to save for the 4th of July, which will be during PST2, so I’ll have other Americans nearby to celebrate with. The festival was huge though. Apparently they were saving the big rockets for today and I didn’t go, so I didn’t see them, but there were a ton of parades all celebrating Isaan culture, and some of it was pretty cool and some of it was pretty weird, and a lot of it was just pretty. It was in the next big district to the East, and there was a huge wat and about 5 giant golden dragon parade floats, each with about 10 overly made-up pre-teens dressed in traditional outfits and nestled in little shrines built into the sides of the dragon. There were a lot of women dressed in the traditional garb, with a ton of makeup on, I think it’s reminiscent of the fashion of old kings and queens. Everyone kept asking me if they were pretty, and they were, but more in a porcelain doll kind of way. Most of them looked angry most of the time, which was probably just discomfort at the ridiculous shoes they were marching around in, amplified by the makeup, but still. It was weird. I didn’t find it attractive, I found it surreal. I got some good pictures though, especially of a monk watching the whole spectacle from a rooftop, wearing sunglasses and trying to take advantage of the little shade a satellite dish gave off. I thought it was a bit representative of all the contradictions that make up this place, and I like the pictures, but I didn’t get that perfect one.

I don’t know if I have anything else, so I’m going to call it a night. I feel like I’m going to actually complete reading the first entire community plan (I’ve read parts of about 8 or 9 of them) tomorrow, and if I do I’m going to find a way to go buy myself a beer and celebrate. I’ve been listening to a mix of Ben Kweller, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Tom Petty, and Peter Bjorn and John. It all feels about my speed right now, except the Petty is hit or miss, but the Kweller is especially good. I never think about his music much but always love listening when he comes on. So tonight the song is “Different but the same,” by Ben Kweller. Alright folks, take care and dtam jai khun. I’ll try to keep you updated.

This strange existence i've chosen

20 - 27/5

Starting off with a side note, this entry isn’t up to par either, but at this point I just needed to get something out. I’m hoping once I get the ball rolling again it will be easier to start writing frequently again. So I don’t like this post, but at this point I just feel like I need to post something… Apologies for the long break.

So it rains a lot. The land is used to it, so the whole world doesn’t turn to mud like it might elsewhere, and when it rains the temperature drops and you usually get a good breeze if you’re near a window, which feels great. But geeze, it rains a lot. It woke me up twice this week (haven’t been sleeping much anyways) and it knocks my power out about once or twice a week. Power’s never gone for very long though. This week we lost power for about an hour in the middle of the afternoon at work, which was actually kind of fun. Last Saturday morning a storm woke me up early and I laid and listened to it for a while and finally got up to take a shower. I was about halfway through when the lightning struck so hard and so close to my house that the place shook. I about jumped through the roof, and the power was gone instantly. So I splashed the soap off and dried off quickly and went to put on some clothes when I realized that the light fixture in my bedroom had essentially exploded when the lightning struck. Part of the fixture was missing, and the bulb was in pieces on my bedroom floor. Apparently it’s not all that uncommon, which is an exciting prospect. They replaced the fixture in the room for the second time (once earlier when the original just stopped working), and there are now two separate lights in my bedroom ceiling, only one of which works – a testament to idea that “if it functions, don’t bother cleaning it,” a slight, but important variation on “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I’ve noticed it’s a commonly held belief here.

So I live in Thailand now. I’ve been here for a while, and I have a house and a job and some friends and it’s actually a life, not some trip or vacation or project. I think because it feels like a regular life it seems less worth writing about, which is why I haven’t been writing much. But then when I did sit down to start writing, I had so much to write about that it was daunting, so I just kept putting it off. I tried to break everything into categories to organize it in my head, but it ruins the flow of my telling, so I think I’m just going to string a bunch of anecdotes together like I’ve been doing all along. They’re easier and more fun to tell, and I think the same applies to reading them.

I’ve been happy with my life here for a while now. I’m starting to get settled in and it’s calming. And I’ve managed to stay in good spirits despite a string of health small medical issues. Three weeks ago I broke out in an intense rash. It looked like poison ivy, and I assumed it was from eating too many mangoes, but when I went to the local health clinic they said it was from the ground water that I use to bathe and is fairly common. So I called the Peace Corps medical officer and was told to try sponge bathing for a while, in addition to cutting off the mangoes. It helped, but it was not pleasant. The rash went away after a little over a week of covering about a third of my body. Since then I’ve continued bathing with my ground water, but have kept the mangoes to a minimum and have changed soaps just in case. I’ve also cut myself once and burned myself twice while cooking, and managed to develop an intensely uncomfortable hemorrhoid while in Bangkok that lasted about a week. I was embarrassed as hell when I had it, so I lied and told everyone I had diarrhea and just found ways to avoid riding my bike or sitting for too long during that week. In addition, both weekends that I’ve left town have incurred massive hangovers, but those were self-inflicted, and I actually think that the volunteer group hangover breakfasts are some of the best parts of weekends away.

Gripes. All of the health stuff beats you down after a while. Feeding myself and doing chores takes up a large portion of the time that I’m not at work, so I am usually forced to choose. Hence, I don’t write as often as I should. Or do laundry or dishes or eat decent meals. Rarely do people speak Thai here – they speak Isaan, which is really a dialect of Laos - so rarely do I understand an entire conversation. I’m still sleeping with a beach towel as a blanket, even though I was given a blanket, because it’s the only thing that actually covers my whole body. I haven’t left the office as much as I would like, but I’m still studying the information I have on the villages before I go out, so I don’t feel ready yet. I spend a good bit of time thinking about how much more efficient I’d be if I was in a place where I could actually communicate and understand everything that was happening and being said around me. My rental agreement changed three times since I moved in, and I finally put the Peace Corps staff on the phone with my landlady and things are hopefully finally settled, after a month of headaches. In order to get water into my house, I go outside and plug in a pump that automatically starts pumping water through a garden hose into a hole in the wall of my bathroom. The hose is cut off at the end, so there is no nozzle to control the water or turn it on or off without unplugging the pump again. This is my house’s sole source of water, except that I go buy giant bottles of drinking water. There have been two nights in which, without leaving any doors or windows open, the lights in my house have managed to draw in several hundred small moths, that just float around the room and quickly die, shedding their wings to float around and stick to walls and furniture, etc. There were so many of them that I could literally sweep them out the door, about 50 at a time, both alive and dead, while I waited for the next batch to hit the floor. So life is fine. All my complaints don’t really amount to much, and the biggest things are the language and that it just doesn’t feel like there are enough hours in the day. It’s definitely not the Peace Corps experience I was expecting – living in a legitimate house with power and water and working in an office – but the area is in the midst of development and there seem to be a lot of potential projects, so I’m making the most of it.

Still, the thing that seems most daunting is the idea of not accomplishing much with my time here. Although she hasn’t left yet, another volunteer from my group has decided to go home. She got a case of dengue fever and had to go to Bangkok for medical. When she was starting to get well enough to work again, she apparently realized that the last place that she wanted to be was back at her site, so she didn’t go. Also, I was questioning a guy from the group that came a year ago and he was explaining that he doesn’t go to his office anymore. Instead he just stays with his host family and reads all day, everyday. I thought for sure he was exaggerating, so I kept asking about it, and he’s serious. He eats, he reads, he checks his email. The stuff at my site can be annoying, but the thing that messes with my head the most is worrying that I’ll end up hating it here or not finding a project. I don’t think either will be the case, but I doubt either of them did either. I would definitely rather leave that stay here just to read all day.

Highlights. Talking to other volunteers, I realize that I’ve hit the jackpot by working in an office that is closer to my age group and that isn’t very culturally conservative. They’re all pretty cool folks and they’ll invite me to hang out sometimes and it definitely helps with the feeling of normalcy. Right now I spend most of my time in the office translating data about the different villages, because when I went to talk to one of the village headmen a few weeks back, he just told me that everything I was asking was in their community plan and I felt like me being there was pointless. So I’m getting the info first and then I’ll be headed out to the villages to drill everyone on the details. I have gone and visited the 6 schools in the area, and they all just want me to come teach English, which I’m willing to do on a small scale, but refuse to make my primary project. People that speak English in this country almost automatically flee to Bangkok, so there is no sustained development in the communities, and there aren’t many uses of English for sustained development within the communities. But I might teach a little bit to get to know the kids and eventually start a youth leadership group that could help with projects and maybe do a few on their own. I’ve heard of other volunteers doing this with varied degrees of success and I want to try it. Anyways, The way this program works is to spend the first six months doing community assessment, and then hopefully you know enough about the community to make a few suggestions to people there. They pick the ones they like and you run with it. Hopefully this pans out in reality.

I was picked up early one Saturday morning and taken to a small 20’ x 30’ pond in the middle of a rice field that was about 15 feet deep. I was told I was going to get fish. They didn’t say fishing, they said going to get fish (this is in Thai). I just assumed we were fishing and it was a dialect thing, but when we got to the pond there was a big pump sucking the water out of the pond into a nearby field. When the water was down to under a foot, we climbed down into the mud that was left. I sank about 2 and a half feet deep into the mud, and we trudged through with our arms in the mud to our shoulders, feeling for fish that had buried themselves in the mud to hide. When you touched one it would jump out of the mud and swim frantically through what was left of the water, so we waited until it slowed down a bit and then just reached out and grabbed it and threw it into a basket. Grabbing muddy fish with your bare hands has a bit of a learning curve, but it was pretty fun and grandly filthy.

Another Saturday I spent helping give flowers to the village headmen of all 21 villages before going to town at night and having some Korean barbeque (they give you a bunch of meat and a hot surface and you cook everything yourself in the middle of the table, one of my favorite meals) and hanging out. Then the next morning I was taken to a flooded rice field where we trolled for tadpoles all morning in order to eat them in the afternoon. The crazy thing about eating tadpoles is that you have to gut them first or they’ll make sick. “Gut a tadpole?” you ask. Why yes. And you gut a tadpole by holding them upside down and pushing your thumb against their fat bellies until all of their insides pop out their backside, like you might pop a zit. So it’s gross. I was sitting there gutting dozens of these poor tadpoles when I started wondering whether Dexter or Cormac McCarthy would enjoy the task more. That’s when I realized the morbid vain of my entertainment lately.. I’d borrowed the first season of Dexter, a Showtime series about a sociopathic serial killer, and was watching it in between reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, a book known for it’s violence, and Tuesdays with Morrie, a book about an old professor slowly dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. I wasn’t feeling particularly grim, and I definitely wasn’t doing it on purpose, but I realized the pattern while I was sitting there killing tadpoles, and I decided to lighten up my entertainment after that, so I’ve been sticking to Chapelle’s Show and Eddie Izzard since then. And the tadpoles weren’t even any good.

I’ve hit a decent pattern with meals, kind of similar to back home. I’ll usually make fried rice or chicken or pork fried basil or fried eggs. Notice the pattern of “fried.” I only have a stovetop, so my options are generally either pan fry or deep-fry. Pan-fried is healthier, so I tend to stick to that. I’ve made a few curries, which have turned out really well, but the coconut cream is expensive, so I don’t do it very often. I try to make a point of making an American meal once a week for my mental health. Grilled cheese or spaghetti or fajitas. All fantastic, but all incredibly expensive and hard to do right. Cheese, as it is known in Thailand, only exists in the form of Kraft Singles. You can occasionally find premade spaghetti sauce, but it’s expensive and just bad, so I go to Bangkok where there is one grocery store that actually sells small cans of Hunts Tomato Sauce so that I can start from scratch. This is also the only place to find tortillas in the country. All prohibitively expensive, but worth it. My next mission is to start out with a chunk of meat and chop it down til it’s the consistency of ground beef, then try to pan fry a burger. A friend tried this with positive results, so I’m excited.

We’ve had two big weekends off since we went to site, one in Bangkok and one in Khon Kaen. Both were like small reunions and everyone drinks too much and spends more money than we have and then spend the next morning laying around in someone’s room or a small restaurant, nursing our hangovers together. This weekend there’s a large group heading to Phitsanolok, a decent-sized city in the center of the country, and there’s a big bowling tournament planned. Doesn’t sound that exciting, but that’s kind of the point. We’re all excited as hell. After that I don’t think I’ll leave site again until our second series of training sessions starting in early July. If I do leave it’ll be with folks from my site, who are apparently apt to have a strong night out too. We’ll see how that pans out.

The office janitor has been giving me lessons on the Isaan, and I’m reading Thai pretty well by now, when I already know the words I’m reading. My counterpart saw my computer and decided to start her own facebook account. We aren’t friends yet. The internet is still awful, and facebook chats usually only end in frustration, but I still try anyways. I found a spider the size of my palm in my living room, which added a little excitement to one afternoon. Yesterday I went running with a couple of neighborhood kids and I might start doing that everyday if they’re down. I just decided that, because I’m out of meat for the week, I’m going to try to make French toast for dinner tonight… awesome. This week’s song is “How Many Times,” by The Ryan Montbleau Band. Sorry for the extended absence, and I’ll do my best to get back in the habit of writing. ตำใจคุณ = Dtam Jai Khun. Haha, I've been practicing typing in Thai. Take care all.

A lot to say, but said briefly

23/4

“I don’t know if you can see the changes that have come over me, these last few days I’ve been afraid that I might drift away. So I’ve been telling old stories, singing old songs, that makes me think back to where I came from and that’s the reason why I seem so far away today.”

So I’m doing this in reverse today. The song of the day comes first and is “Caledonia” by Paolo Nutini. I decided this a lot earlier today and have decided to stick with it despite a few mood swings. A ton has happened since the last real post, including me buying all of the things for my house and moving in and having the landlord take the mattress and tv and both fans and put them in the second bedroom that I was planning on using as an office and then lock the door and tell me I can’t use the room or any of the things in it. I asked why and their response was just that I couldn’t use them. At that point I could only scream or shut down, so I shut down. I bought a fan and a mattress and I’ve started work, and I’m cleaning my house and I’m figuring out how to cook thai food for myself. Last night I went out and watched the neighbors hunt these large lizards that make loud calls in the night. The first night the lizards were everywhere and I could hear them calling all night, but having grown up around so many dogs I was used to sleeping through noise and actually found it strangely comforting. They did a good job of catching the lizards though, because tonight I can only hear crickets and an occasional bird.

The house is in good condition, but it hasn’t been lived in for a while. While the owners did a good job of cleaning it, they’re all short and can’t see how disgusting the tops of the furniture are. Yesterday I spent 45 minutes scrubbing the top of kitchen cupboard until the fact that it was in the same room as my food stopped making me sick. Today I took the oven outside and hosed it down for about an hour. I had a brush and a piece of steel wool that ended up so covered in ancient grease that I had to throw them out, and I eventually ended up scraping layers of dirt, rust and grease off with my pocket knife. It’s still not ideal, but I’m okay with it for the time being. The standard of cleanliness that I’m aiming for here is “not completely gross.” Tomorrow I’m hoping to get the wardrobe to a state where I’m willing to put my clothes in it.

Sorry I’m kind of rushing through this all. I have a lot that’s worth saying right now but I promised myself I’d watch a little Eddie Izzard tonight and it’s already getting late. That said, I’ll do my best to hit everything a little bit.

In the office I’ve been getting through all the paperwork that the Peace Corps wants us to do when we first get to site, along with trying to reconnect to the outside world now that I have more internet access. Only a little bit more, however, as the connection is inordinately slow. Actually, slow isn’t really it. It runs at a decent speed when it runs, considering. The thing is that the connection turns off and resets about every 15 seconds. I thought it just didn’t like my mac, but then I saw it happening on the other computers in the office too. Fun. This afternoon I went out and made a map of the road from the highway to my house for part of my paperwork. It’s 7k of paved but potholed road that winds through 5 separate villages and countless rice fields. I also visited a couple village headmen, learned about how silk worms are fed and kept, and saw a huge fishpond. I was traveling around with one of the area’s development officers, who is going to be serving as my counterpart. She’s younger and more communicative than the nayoke, and she also speaks less English, which I prefer because it lets me practice more Thai and because the broken English is starting to get old (and rude: nayoke points and says, “give me,” or “you go kitchen now.”). It’s also nice because she’s not running for office so I’m not worried about intentions or politics, although one of her side conversations definitely became an impassioned discussion about local politics. Unfortunately, she was speaking Issan, so while I could tell the subject matter, I couldn’t figure out which side she’s on.

Food wise, I went shopping yesterday and have a full fridge, but I’d much rather spend my time cleaning than making a meal, so I haven’t really tried much. Today for lunch I made pork fried rice, American style, and had enough left over for dinner, which worked out perfectly. People keep showing up to my house and forcing me to make rice in the rice cooker and then leaving so that I’ll eat alone. It’s incredibly annoying since I don’t always want rice. Like breakfast this morning, for example. The nayoke’s wife was knocking on my door at 7 and when I let her in she walked straight to the damn rice cooker and asked why it wasn’t going yet and started doing it for me. She actually stayed to make sure I ate it too. Last night they left after I made the rice, and I wasn’t hungry yet and never felt like making anything to go with it, so I just warmed it up a few hours later and stirred in one of the 10 precious butter servings (like the ones that go on a single bread roll at a restaurant) that I’d found in the market. Having white rice with just butter was good for three reasons: first it tastes good, second is that it’s how I always ate it growing up so it’s a little sentimental, and last is the fact that if any Thai person saw me doing it they’d freak out. It made me happy and it fed me and it was easy. I’ve already bought curry paste though, so the second I actually have some time I’m gonna try to do some real cooking.

I guess to finish this up, the last few days I also grew pretty homesick. When thing after thing didn’t go the way I wanted or expected it to, I started going back to all the things I left to come here. I even started to regret it. I missed the place and the people and the way I could interact with the people I was closest too back home. I thought that after spending so much intense time during training with the other people in my group that I would be missing them, but when I got to site and was finally alone in my room by myself, my mind went right back to where I was three months ago and I wanted that back. I made the mistake of looking through old pictures too, and that just drove it in harder. Then a few things happened. One of my closest friends from home called at just the right time and I had an outlet and an old familiar voice for a while, which helped calm me down a bit. My old fraternity adviser called me in the middle of the day the next day and we talked for a bit too (and he might have been a little drunk?). Then I found out that the person that I was missing the most was no longer going to be coming to see me this year. In my mess of homesickness I’d started to hold up this visit as the light at the end of a tunnel, and then it was gone. I sat there trying not to cry in the middle of my office and I started reading anything and everything to take my mind off of it. I was mulling it over a few hours later, and I realized there was no light at the end of the tunnel to look forward too, so I had to turn my full attention to the here and now. The folks back home are moving and moving on and the home that I’m missing is hardly there anymore, and I’m here and I have to make the most of it. Have to make the decision worth it. And so the light at the end of the tunnel was gone, but the tunnel itself fell soon thereafter, and I’m feeling a lot less homesick and a little more prepared to face tomorrow than I was for today. I still miss everyone like crazy, and would trade anything to have that visit, but my head’s on a little straighter now and at least I feel good about that.

This is kind of a scatter-brained entry, but that suits how I feel right now, so I’m ok with it. I owe you all one after this entry, and I’ll make sure the next entry is just fantastic. Big thanks to the folks who have called and emailed, it means the world to me right now. Now I’m off to conquer countries with the cunning use of flags. Goodnight, blogfriends, and dtam jai kun.

Love,
me.

and... site.

12/4

So where to begin… Have you ever been in a language class in high school or college and you feel like you just hit the wall and you can’t process anymore so you just shut down for a bit and wait til it’s over so you can go? I’m living in that language class. I’m staying with the nayok in my village right now, who is the head of the local government, and I can’t get a moment alone. Sleeping seems to be my only retreat, so I’m doing it more than I need. Right now they think I’m taking a nap, but I’ll be foiled the second anyone decides to look in my room through the windows on every wall (three sides have windows looking in to the rest of the house, the other side looks out to where everyone eats). Pretty much, I’m getting overwhelmed and need to shut down and escape for a bit, but it’s just not possible. A lot of people don’t have houses yet, so they are staying with host families, but most of the people that I’ve been in contact with over the last few days are busy moving into their houses and a house seems to be the light of privacy at the end of this tunnel. I just keep thinking that if I hold on til I have a house it’ll all be just fine, so I’m trying hard right now not to just take the first house they show me to be able to get out. I’m so unsure of everything I’m saying at all points that when I start to speak or think in English, I feel like I’m doing it wrong. So that’s where I’m starting from. I just needed to get that out, and now I guess I should go back to my last entry and catch you up.

But talk about a rollercoaster… So many things have happened that I started writing them down so that I would remember them when I finally got time on the computer, and now I feel like there’s just way too much to write about in the time I’ll be able to get. I’m not processing most of it yet, but just trying to endure and not misstep. This will probably lead to some obnoxiously long blog entries in a while when I have more time. I’ve also realized that most of my writing so far has been anecdotal about my experiences here and that taking a bit to talk about the culture would go a long way towards helping understand how things are affecting me. So I’ll be sure to do that when I get a chance. But now I’ll go back to the counterpart conference.

So the Nayok and his son both left on the morning of the last day, which, coincidentally, was the most important day. This was the point where we were supposed to work together to form a plan for our first 6 months at site so that we would have similar expectations going in. The person that I was left trying to work with spent most of the conference with the biggest frown in the land of smiles. Don’t worry though; it wasn’t too hard working with him because he decided not to show up to the meeting where we wrote the plan. So I spent a few hours making a collaborative six-month plan by myself, then getting one of the translators to write it in Thai on another sheet of paper so I could take it and show it to someone in my community who gave a damn. I apparently have two weeks to mail in a comprehensive plan in Thai and English or the Royal Thai Government won’t pay for my housing. This exercise was frustrating enough that when it was done I was in too much of a stupor to communicate with anyone in any way for about an hour.

That night at the hotel was the last time group 121 will be together til July. So I took way too many pictures and drank a bit and played guitar and enjoyed everyone’s company while I could. At this point I have over 10 gigs of pictures on my computer that I haven’t even looked at yet. I keep hearing I’ll have a lot of free time at site, so I’ll go through them all whenever that happens. :-P

The next morning was swearing in. I’d like to not use the word surreal, but I can’t think of anything better. I woke up a little late and showered and threw on a shirt and tie and went and sat in the same room where we started training and waited for the ambassador to show up so we could start the ceremony. A few people got up and gave short, unmoving speeches, a few of which were in Thai, then we all got up and swore the oath together (same oath that Obama swore, except ours said PCV at the end instead of president). And, like Obama’s oath, ours was slightly botched because of the way the ambassador read it. So a few folks, including myself, didn’t actually say their name during the oath. He’s probably friends with John Roberts. Anyways, extremely anticlimactic. It felt like a group of kids reciting the national anthem together in an oversized classroom full of Thai spectators. Then two volunteers got up and gave a long speech in Thai and after that I had about half an hour to talk and take pictures and drink coffee and eat the awful little sandwich snacks from the back of the room before I was told to have my bags outside the hotel in 10 minutes. So I said a few quick goodbyes and the next thing I knew I was in the back seat of an extended cab pickup on my way to Issan.

Thankfully, there’s another volunteer posted in the same district that I’m in (about 25k away), so we ended up driving to site together. We spent most of the trip talking about the random hobbies were going to take up to pass the time when we have time to pass. The drive was only about 4 hours and when we got to the district’s center my nayok picked me up and took me the last bit to his house where I’m currently staying and will be for another 10 days or so (until I find a house). It’s about 8k or 9k down the highway from my subdistrict to the district center, which is a decent-sized town for Thailand. But once you turn off the highway into my subdistrict, it’s another 6-7k of bad roads that maze through at least 5 villages and even more rice fields before you get to the government office where I’ll be working.

So the first night was slow and we had dinner and “chatted” for a while and I got to go to bed in a relatively large bed (I fit on it diagonally) and they even gave me a rack in the corner of the room to hang my things. I’m living with the nayok and his wife and two kids, the 28-year-old that came to the conference and a teenage daughter. The nayok and his son both have strong English vocabularies, but never practice so they aren’t comfortable speaking in full sentences very often. But now they’re practicing, constantly. And it’s nice because it’s a two-way street where we are teaching each other the languages. What I don’t like is that it doesn’t end. Literally minutes after waking up I’m getting quizzed on vocab. I took a book out to read and didn’t get a paragraph in before I was getting quizzed, despite the fact that my nose was physically in the f’ing book. I took my computer out to write this blog entry yesterday afternoon and didn’t have time to put a single sentence down, even though I actually had earphones in my ears. It’s nice, and it’s really helpful, but it’s wearing me thin. They don’t understand this because this is a culture that values the community and has no sense of the individual (finally needing a big culture note). Everything here is community and family based. There is little idea of personal property and even less of privacy. They shutter when they hear that my family is just my dad and that he lives by himself in Baton Rouge. They don’t understand why I’ve left my family or why I would want to live alone instead of with a host family or why I’m hiding in my room right now to write (a while has passed) or why I don’t want to continue on in the family business (family business?). I tried to explain to them that in America, dtam jai dtua ang, “you follow your own heart”, but they always give you that puzzled look (and they do understand what I’m saying).

While we’re at it, more fun cultural notes. Whenever I meet someone new I get the same exact questions, whether it’s a monk or a village leader or a punk teenager, and they generally go in this order with about 20 seconds of awkward pause between each: Where are you from? Have you eaten yet? Do you eat sticky rice (a regional favorite)? Can you eat spicy food? Are you married yet? How old are you? Where are you staying? Do you have a girlfriend yet? Do you like Thai girls? Are Thai girls pretty? Why are you here? How many people are in your family? What is their occupation? Do you drink whiskey? Does America have [insert fruit name here]? What’s your name? How long have you been here? …If it’s any sort of conversation I’ll get asked at least 80% of these questions and roughly in this order. Hopefully this gives you a small sense of how life here works. It’s also fun how the Thai wording for most of these questions is incredibly direct. More to say on all this in a later tangent, I’m sure.

So my first morning at site I went to a Songkran ceremony for the retired folks in the community. Songkran is pretty much the biggest festival here and it’s a big water fight and a everything is closed. It’s like a three day 4th of July with water guns and hoses instead of fireworks. Kids started setting up ambush sites today so that whenever someone drove by on a motorcycle (which seriously outnumber cars) they would all jump out and soak the poor soul. I guess it’s all expected and everyone has important stuff safe in plastic bags, but it’s still kind of intense to see someone driving by on a motorcycle suddenly get smacked with a bucket of water and not even get mad. So my first morning I went to the old folks festival which was definitely the retirement home version of songkran. We took buckets of water and blessed them and then walked around and poured them over the old people’s hands and then they would splash the water on themselves or on you, but in a kind of blessing type way. It’s like in a Catholic church where someone walks around with the canter of holy water and splashes a little bit on everyone, except that you have the option of seeking benevolent revenge. This is also the point where I realized the prominence of this intense red, narcotic chewing tobacco with the old ladies here. At first I saw a lot of the women’s hands were stained red because I was looking at their hands while I was pouring the water. You could see the years written across these people’s hands and I really wished I’d had my camera. But I assumed the red was from some sort of dye or something, then I saw their teeth were the same color and then I saw them with these huge wads of chew in their mouths. It’s just gross. They talk with mouths full of the stuff and it stains all hell out of their teeth and I can barely stand to look at them a lot of the time. I’ve heard the stuff is more than just tobacco and has some kind of drug in it, too. But these women are all retired and the government is giving them money and they’re all very satisfied staying high and turning red and living out their time in the village that’s always been their home. I digress.

So I was soaking wet by the time the ceremony was over, at which point a bunch of the area’s leaders stuck around and had lunch. Naturally, there was beer and whiskey, which I explained that I did drink, but only rarely. But then they brought out a big cooler full of homemade rice wine, and I had to try some of it. Like a lot of things here, it tasted a little like coconut milk and was a little too sweet, but figuring out how to brew this stuff is definitely a goal of mine now. Anyways, after dinner I went back inside the SAO and was going to sit to try to translate a form I was given about the area, but then someone signaled me to come out into the main room and I saw that a bunch of the SAO workers were still hanging around eating and drinking on a straw mat in the middle of the floor of the office. So I sat down with them for a bit and talked and they’re all just a little bit older than me, but fun people, and more willing than most to actually have a two way conversation rather than talk at me. So I ended up just hanging out with them the whole afternoon drinking and snacking and eventually someone brought out a guitar and I played the few songs I could remember. It was great. Even the girls from the office were drinking with us, which is fairly uncommon in this country, but is encouraging about gender rolls here. Also, I slowed down after a bit and have a fairly high tolerance still and probably weigh about 80 lb. more than any of them, so when the nayok called me to go home before dark, I was the only one not completely stinking drunk. This was hilarious at first, then everyone got on their motorcycles and proceeded to drive home. So it looks like maybe designating a driver is an early goal I can try to set as far as awareness.

In the interest of finishing this soon, the next bit will be especially brief. So I went home and had dinner and got more language lessons. The next day I walked a square block and met the village headman and then went to a cremation ceremony and then took a nap. All points before, after, and occasionally during these activities were spent in ongoing language lessons. Sooo much Thai. Today I was taken to the market and to see the volunteer in the next village over, which isn’t as close as I’d hoped, but is still freakin close. She has a gorgeous two-story house with an upstairs porch and a fridge and a sink and I’m infinitely jealous right now. It’ll be a lot to manage eventually, but it’s still nice. And I got to hang out with her and talk for a little over an hour before we had to go. It was good to see we’re both in the same state where we need English to feel competent about ourselves again. I’ve been so exhausted that when I’ve gotten to talk to other volunteers on the phone I’ve barely had enough energy to carry on a conversation, but seeing another person face to face that was going through the same things was infinitely reassuring and we chatted until the nayok’s son, who was nice enough to take me out there, said it was time to go. Afterwards we went to the market which is pretty standard for Thailand, except that a small fridge in the corner of one of the booths had a golden treasure that I never thought I’d have the pleasure of seeing in this country: Boneless chicken breasts. I could barely contain my glee. So I bought them and fulfilled the expectation of cooking farang (foreigner) food for the house tonight, and cooking and eating relatively familiar food tonight was great, even though it compelled the son to explain to me during dinner that Thai people don’t like bland food…

So let’s call it caught up. At this point music is my best link to the English language, and it’s becoming an even more integral part of my life/sanity. That being said, today needs a few songs of the day. The Mountain Goats’ “Quitto” and “Cotton,” Bright Eyes’ “You will,” and Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism.” I wanted to change the Atlantic part of the song to Pacific, but then it looks too much like trans-pacifism. Not sure what that means but it made me laugh. Anyways, folks, dtam jai kun. I’m doing my best and I’ll keep you all updated.

13/4

So I realized after writing yesterday how much better I felt and how much more able I was to get back out there and speak Thai, etc.. I guess sitting and writing everything out was more therapeutic than I realized, so I’m trying to make a point of forcing it into my schedule. Also, so much happened today that I want to write some of it down because I feel like I’ve already forgotten too much.

Woke up at 6:30 this morning and went straight away to the local wat, where we made merit and prayed for upwards of an hour and then there was a portion where the nayok got up and spoke for about ten minutes and he used all the key words that threw up those red flags in my brain telling me he was talking about me. He then made me get up in front of everyone there (prolly 150 folks) and talk about myself in Thai for about 5 minutes. Then he helped run a Q and A which, again, mostly consisted of whether or not I’m married or have a girlfriend. Then we prayed some more and talked to a monk for a bit when the event ended, then we went back home for breakfast. After about a half hour of breakfast we left the house and didn’t make it back again for 10 hours. During this time I went to around 4 ceremonies similar to the one from the morning, and had to speak at all but one, same format. I also saw a beauty pangent, took part in a small parade and two giant, water-slinging, alcoholic, mass parades, and won two beers and a liter of sprite in a bet about what hole a scared mouse would run into when it was released from a basket. During the Songkran festival here, splashing people with water and covering them with baby powder is seen as some munificent act where you say thank you after you’ve gotten soaked. So from around 10 in the morning til around 7 at night, I stayed soaking wet and covered in baby powder. Ridiculous, fun as hell, and outright exhausting. The fact that I’m being ferried around by the biggest local politician means that I literally hit up every event that happened worth going to today in any one of 21 villages. They came home for a bit before dinner and then were headed out for more and gave me the option of staying in, which I definitely took, so here I am.

Oh yeah, the country also exploded today. From what I’ve been able to muster, several tens of thousands of people were protesting in Bangkok today when the police began using violence to break it up. Shots were fired. Four days after swearing in as a volunteer, we’re all put on Emergency Action Plan alert to be ready to consolidate and to restrict travel. I can’t travel for a month anyways, but it’s still intense to be hit with that this early on. What’s maybe more intense is the drastic separation between what’s happening at my site and what’s happening a few hours south. It’s hardly the same country. I asked the nayok’s son and he said that the political parties battling in Bangkok don’t even exist in our area, or anywhere in the surrounding district. Today, as we were driving, I saw that the kids’ ambushes had turned into full on roadblocks where they would stop traffic to make sure everyone got completely drenched before they could go. I saw someone actually pull a bike out in front of a motorcycle so that the motorcycle would have to stop so that the other kids could pull the driver’s helmet off and throw a bucket of water at her. At the same time, the red shirts were conducting roadblocks in Bangkok in an attempt to overthrow the government. People were getting shot at Victory Monument, while the kids here ran around with squirt guns spraying the sides of cars. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine here. I saw a little bit of the news today on Thai TV and it’s such a strange dichotomy, but it’s only one of many here. So, wrap up. I’m wet, but I’m doing fine, and I’m certainly not in any danger. I’m adjusting better now. I’m still waiting on my house and I’m ready for the holiday to end so I can finally really get to work. I’ve just been listening to the Mountain Goats on repeat tonight, so I think the song of the day just needs to revert back to the first two from yesterday. Looking to raise that ice cold glass of water.” Or maybe beer. Or rice wine. Dtam Jai Kun. If anyone’s bored and wants to shoot me an email… well, then please do. Take care all, -Me


17/4

It’s hot out. I spent the morning helping plant a lemon grass looking plant around three quarters of a giant dirt hole about 20 ft deep and the size of two city blocks. We ran out of plants. I think when it rains the hole is supposed to fill up with water and be a pool/reservoir type thing, but right now the water’s only about 4 inches deep in about a third of it. So there was lunch there (ant egg soup) and some other activities and then I came home and showered and tried to take a nap with a giant fan blowing down on me, but it’s just too hot. I’m sitting outside in the shade with a strong warm breeze blowing by me so I’m only sweating a little bit. This is probably the closest I’ve coming to really missing air conditioning. A good bit has happened in the last few days, so I’ll try to get to it before I get Thai napped (What we call it when someone walks up to you telling you you’re going with them, but you never really understand where to or why or for how long).

So starting from my last blog entry… When I was at one of the parades that day I ran into the woman at whose house I stayed when I came to visit site a number of weeks back. I had been under the impression that I was going to be staying with her instead of the nayoke when I came, and apparently she had been too. So I worked out with her that I would go hang out the next day and sleep over there that night, then go back to living with the nayoke. So I woke up a little late the next day and packed a bag and when I was ready I went out to where everyone was eating breakfast. [and I just got thai napped to go to a noodle shop where we ate this noodle soup that’s common in Thailand, except that halfway through it was explained to me that this soup had blood in it. I explained that I didn’t like eating blood, but was asked if I could taste and when I said “no,” they said it was good for me, so I acquiesced and finished the damn bowl. Anyways] So I came outside to eat and something was mentioned about a wat and I was almost immediately handed a phone and I think it was the woman I was supposed to spend the day with. She asked what I was doing today, and I said I didn’t know. Now, speaking a foreign language constantly can be trying, but trying to have a conversation over the phone, without body language or hand signals, is just frustrating as hell. A habit I’ve developed from this is to repeat everything I think they’ve said back to them to make sure it’s correct. A few times this ended up with people thinking I was asking them the questions and the conversation would digress even further until I just say “Sorry, I have to go. Bye” (this, of course, in Thai). But this time, when I repeated the question “what are you doing today,” back at her, the family heard and started feeding me answers about the wat. Relieved at the way out of the conversation, I told her I was going to the wat. She then said something about the next day and I told her I didn’t know and then agreed to something about going to visit her. I honestly don’t know what happened and wasn’t sure who I was talking to til I pieced it together later. So it’s now a few days later and I haven’t seen or heard from her. Then my morning took another fun turn before I ever made it to the wat.

I’d noticed that mama nayoke had had red eyes at some point in the morning, and I asked her if she was tired and she said she was and so I figured she’d been out late the night before at the party I didn’t go to (which they had been) and that she just needed to sleep. Then a little while after my phone conversation she started tearing up and explaining to me that the nayoke was up for reelection in four months and that there was someone running strong against him. I guess the other guy has a lot more money and the night before must have held some less than pleasant revelations for them. I don’t really know what happened, but it compelled them to start talking about the election to me a lot and I had a lot of trouble conveying to them that I’m not allowed to have any political affiliation in Thailand, even in a small, local race. I thought she understood it the first time, but then about 20 minutes later I overheard them talking about how I was going to help. At this point I went and got my dictionary and looked up a bunch of words my political background should have compelled me to already know, and I told them that if I helped any candidate in any election and Peace Corps found out, I would be on a plane to America faster than they could eat a bowl full of sticky rice. This whole conversation made me more aware of the fact that the election in four months was already heating up. I think that my original counterpart had kept me away from the nayoke and with the woman from the health center to keep me out of it, and now I’m kind of in it. It definitely put me in a hurry to find a house. At this point I’ve been going with the nayoke and his family to a lot of events, just like most of the other community development volunteers I’ve talked to, but now I need to try and walk the wire of building relationships and meeting people while living with the nayoke, while not appearing to support him politically. It’s obnoxious. Anyways, I’m definitely finding out when the election is and telling them I have a meeting in Bangkok that day.

So I went to the wat and poured more water on old people’s hands and was forced to play musical chairs with a bunch of grandmas. I then went to another wat where there was a big stage and a band and a few hundred drunk people, soaking wet and covered in baby powder (mind you, this about 11am). So I had to go up and speak on the stage during a band break and then was taken down to dance in the crowd and was mobbed with water and people wiping baby powder on my face. We got out after 10 minutes, and went and ate and then went home. At this point they finally asked if I wanted to go look at the house that kept coming up when we talked about a rental house. Of course I wanted to go.

So the house is nicer than I expected. It’s across the street from the office where I’ll be working, which makes for an easy commute, but there’s really only one other house near it, so I won’t be in a community, which is something I really wanted. There are other housing options, but this one is the only one that has any furniture at all. So the house is in about an acre of fenced land along with another, bigger house. It’s one of the few places in the area that actually has grass, which I really like. I’ve been trying to figure out how all the ground in the villages has avoided growing even weeds. It’s just hard, red earth and trees and a few bushes. But this place has grass and a lime tree and a few mango and coconut trees inside the big, concrete fence. Across the street is the office and another medium-sized building with a huge parking lot and a big picture of the king on the front of it. I have no idea what it is, but it’s about 30 feet off the main road and is surprisingly easy to miss. There are rice fields on one side and behind the house, and then the giant hole where we planted the grass this morning is on the other side. Past the giant hole is a wat and then the nearest village starts. The house itself is one story with two small bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The bathroom amounts to a big, tiled room with a squat toilet and two trashcans full of water – one for bathing and one for flushing the toilet. It uses well water instead of “city” water, which I’ve heard can be iffy, but I can’t check because the water isn’t actually hooked up to the house yet. There’s a small pump about 60 feet away from the house with a pvc pipe running over the ground to the house and then through a hole in the wall of the bathroom where I guess the pipe will eventually lead to. Right now it’s just laying on the ground beside the hole, but that’s supposed to change. I am currently under the impression that this will be my sole source of water. But there are a lot of upsides to the house. The house next door has a Thai-style washing machine that I can use when I need, and there is a fridge coming and there’s a gas stove with two heating surfaces. The stove is pretty well rusted through, but it’s supposed to work. There’s a small tv in the living room that gets four Thai channels and is surrounded by Buddha figurines and pictures of the king that I’m not allowed to touch. There’s also a bed with an actual bed frame that’s the same size as the one I’m sleeping on now, which means if I sleep diagonally I’ll be able to fit on it! But here’s the crowning jewel: AC. [at this point I was once again whisked away, and I’ll tell you about it in a bit.] So I settled on a price that was a little too high, but I forgot that everything here is negotiable and didn’t try to bargain from the start, so I started out at too high of a price and then tried getting them to add in the electric bill so that Peace Corps would pay for the whole bit and I wouldn’t have to. All in all, my monthly rent, including everything, is a little under US $90. Or that was the understanding I thought we’d come to at the time. We agreed that I’d move in on the 21st, in 1 week, and I went home and ate dinner and spent the evening in high spirits.

The next day was the last day of songkran, so we went pretty hard. I piled in a pickup with two of the nayoke’s sons and one of their girlfriends, and then about 8 kids loaded in the back of the truck with two giant tubs of water. Remember the roadblocks that were set up to splash the motorcyclists? Well we pulled up like a Panzer tank at a DUI traffic stop and let loose. Once we powered through the villages we got onto the highway and drove to the next decent-sized town and hit all the road blocks there. Those kids were better prepared since there were a number of trucks/water tanks on the road, and everyone in the back got drenched and powdered. We were constantly making hits on other trucks and motorcycles that we passed too, and I couldn’t help but think of all the awful things my friends and I would have done to people in high school if America’d had Songkran. We were just so much more creative and driven and devious (and possibly bored) than anyone here seems to be. I didn’t get to do any of the splashing because the damn Peace Corps won’t let me ride in the back of a truck, but I still think I had the most fun. We stopped at a big temple that I’d visited during site visit and took pictures and burned incense and then went to a small lake where the kids floated in the waves in inner tubes, fully clothed, while the older type folks ate hot papaya salad and what was described to me as “burned fish.”

This breaks me into one of my favorite tangents of the moment, which is broken English. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, or recently, but broken English is hilarious. A lot of the time I don’t take the time to stop and appreciate it because I’m trying to figure out what they’re trying to say. Lately though, I’ve decided to indulge myself. When I misspeak it’s a great joke that everyone gets to enjoy at my expense while I’m left still trying to express myself. So, in the least bitter way I can muster, I’ve started returning the favor. Beyond the fact that people are constantly wearing English shirts that they don’t understand – favorite recents are an older woman with a shirt that had a picture of a mechanical bull and said “ride me,” and one that had the complete lyrics to a Macy Gray song written across the front of it – the pronunciation and usage are also generally pretty bad. Most of the time I take the mispronunciations and use them as quiet solace for difficulties I’m having learning a language myself, but the usage just cracks me up on the spot. Like when I’m told to take a sip of bread (which they think is our version of rice – it’s hard for them to understand not eating the same thing for every meal) or when they call free time “free style.” Best ever though: the Thai words for “wear,” like to wear clothes, and “with,” like coffee with milk, are the same. This made my morning a few days ago when we were eating breakfast and I was asked, “Would you like wear pepper?” I stared for a second and then broke out laughing. Another fantastically therapeutic part of the language, is once you’ve felt out the people around you and realize that they don’t know any English cuss words. I start cussing under my breath when I get frustrated and they don’t know the difference between that and me counting to 12. That definitely came in handy tonight..

Anyways. So yesterday I was given the day off and used it to bike to the local town about 15 k away. I met up with the other volunteer who lives near there and caught her just as she was finishing up at an internet café. When she finished she had a few minutes left, so I hopped on for a while and was going to post my earlier entries, but found out that they didn’t save to my jump drive right. So we walked around and got a feel for the place and looked in every shop and priced things for when I have to buy for my house. Then we ate lunch and I headed home. I found out that the nayoke’s son that speaks the most English will be moving to Vietnam in a month to work as an engineer, so I decided to utilize this resource as much as possible and spent most of the rest of the day talking to him and learning as many words as possible, while I taught him about articles and was surprised how hard it is to remember the actual rules about when to say “the” or when to say “a” or “an.” When my brain couldn’t handle anymore I grabbed a book and told him I needed a break to read. I’ve been reading Grapes of Wrath and it’s really good so far, but I just can’t see it being better than East of Eden. The beginning has been an especially interesting read considering my surroundings. It seems like 1930’s America isn’t a far stretch from Thailand today, except there’s no motorcycles or electricity.

So the big part of today that I’ve left off so far is a small mess that was made about my house. In the morning I started getting questions about how much I was paying for rent, and when it sounded like a lot they made me go back to the house (which was literally 100 ft away) and walk through it again with one of the SAO workers. When it seemed fine, we went back and had lunch. Then, as I was going back home from lunch, a bunch of people said they were going to go and look at the house again. I felt like I didn’t want to be present for bothering the poor folks again and make them hate me, so I went home and showered and tried to take a short nap. When I got up everyone was sitting around in front of the house, and when I went out to see what was going on, the son told me the there was a “little mistake” about my house. So this isn’t pleasant news. I asked what and from what I could gather, either there was someone that lived in the house that didn’t know that their mom was about to rent it to me, or the woman that was about to rent it to me wasn’t solid on our deal, or she wasn’t sure about me yet and wasn’t sure if she wanted to rent to me. Or any or all of the above. Anyways, at that point I just left them to talk and game and started writing this. It’s almost 11 now, though, so I’m going to be brief with the rest of it.

So we went back later and talked to the woman and apparently if I use my air conditioner too much it’ll make for a really expensive electric bill and they told me that if I want to use the AC, I need to pay an extra 1000 baht per month. Well I’m paying 3200 right now, and the Peace Corps gives us a limit of 3700, so that’s just not an option. Plus it’s bullshit, and I told them so. Thankfully, no one had a clue what I was saying through my smile. So instead I told them I couldn’t afford it and then they said ok, I just couldn’t use the ac. But they still wanted me to pay the same amount as before. I told them that not being able to use the ac was the same as not having ac, so I wasn’t going to pay the same price. They either didn’t understand me or pretended not to or were embarrassed because I was being too American and too direct so they just dismissed it. I finally got a pen and paper and figured out exactly how much I was giving them as a flat rate for the electric bill and told them that I might use the air, and if the bill broke the flat rate then I’d pay for it out of pocket. Then I think I cussed some more and asked in Thai if that would be ok and they nodded and I called it a night. Then after dinner tonight my family explained to me that the mattress that was in the house when I walked through, that I was told I would have, isn’t going to be there so I need to buy another one. I can afford it, but it’s a full third of my moving in allowance, and moreover it’s bullshit. But in four days I’ll be in the house and they can’t take anything else out of it cuz I’m changing the lock on the front door. I maybe shouldn’t write when I’m this frustrated, but I don’t get much time and this one isn’t wearing off. So, I’m gonna Jai Yin Yin (settle down) and you’re gonna Dtam Jai Kun (follow your heart) and today’s song is Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” It popped up when I searched for “home” on my iTunes search bar. Once you get past sweet home Alabama and all the songs about being home for Christmas, it makes a pretty decent playlist. Take care all, and I’ll obviously let you know how it all develops.

21/4

So I’ve begun the move in and it has even more surprises and I had to call a friend in the five free minutes I’ve had today just to have an outlet to yell about it. But I’m finally out on my own. Work is a mixed bag and is all a lot of paperwork right now, but I don’t have much time to write and want to get this out, so I’ll update you all more when I get a chance. Once again, Dtam Jai Kun.