Head down, power through.

13/2/09

Trying to post less often and more generally. Today was Friday the 13th, and a black cat came and mewed at me for about five minutes while I was taking my clothes down from drying, but with no immediately recognizable consequences. We wanted to go find the village medium today but couldn’t figure out where he or she was stationed. For a while now I have been and will be in class from 8 am until noon, and then again from 1:30 until 5, with 15 minute breaks at 10 and 3. Mornings are almost always spent in a local government building in a small classroom off the side of the main meeting room, studying language. Afternoons are technical training, at this point focusing on assessing the needs and assets of communities as well as teaching English and using it as a tool to build relationships. After class I bike home and shower, then do some homework and go to dinner, then to bed. Roosters and TVs and voices still wake me up at 4 every morning, but I’m nothing if not a resilient sleeper, so I still hold out until around 6:30 or 7. The last few days we ended our class sessions by teaching 1 and a half hour English lessons to employees at the office where we work. The first lesson was bad because we were trying to teach them how to say “hello” and “my name is..” before we said off hand “I’m cold,” and one of them looked at us and told us to “turn off the air conditioner” in English. So today we made the lesson harder and more worth everyone’s while. My Thai is steadily improving, much to the satisfaction of the folks that feed me and put me up. When I went to the hotel Monday night I realized that I actually missed the food I was getting with my host family. Since then I’ve decided that my host mom is an excellent cook, whatever random thing ends up on the table (frogs again tonight). I’ve also started to realize that food here seems bland unless it’s spicy. I never really loved hot sauce back home, but I’ve found myself putting a ton of homemade pepper sauce on just about every bite, and I love it. I missed American food for the first time two days ago when we were learning the words for hamburger and tacos. I unfortunately started thinking of chicken supreme chalupas at Taco Bell, and had an instant craving. I literally haven’t had a craving for TBell for 6 months, and it was the first thing that thought of and missed about American food. I then moved on to Huey’s and so on, but it all wore off quickly enough, and I like the food here a majority of the time.

Most of my classes at this point are done in a group of four volunteers. Two of them are decent folks, but not really my kind of people. The other one is the one that lives out in the boonies with me, and we’ve bonded a lot by bitching about life and by her putting up with my constant smart-ass comments. I miss the rest of the volunteers now that I see them less, and weekends and Mondays are real highlights because I get to see everyone, even if it’s mostly for class. It’s already become routine for small groups of us to sneak off during lunches or after class and have a few beers together whenever the opportunity presents itself. It’s like having a 45-minute vacation where we can just sit and drink and speak English and gossip about the other volunteers and generally be absurd for a bit before we drop back under the veil of cultural and linguistic solitude.

I’m covered in bug bites. My legs still aren’t used to all my bike riding. Music is reemerging as my favorite past time. I never got a dresser or closet, so my clothes are still sitting in piles next to my bed. My flashlight has already died. It’s hot, but still not comparable to an August in Memphis. Pointing is rude here and I’m trying to stop doing it. I’ve completely quit biting my nails again because the dirt I’m getting under them is a great way to get worms. I pulled a bug out of a bowl of noodles and continued eating unphased until it registered about five seconds later how much different my reaction would have been stateside. At this point I’m hoping for a site in the Northeast, because it has the highest concentration of other volunteers. I’ll find out my site in about a month. I’m not homesick. A group of us are going for our first Thai massages tomorrow, legitimate. Internet is hard to come by and I’d love updates. I’m off to sleep.

15/2

Today I took in my first deep breath of Thai air. I think I’ve been unconsciously avoiding it because I didn’t want to take in all the air pollution, even in the countryside. I was riding by myself just after lunch and it was very green and picturesque and I couldn’t help myself. I was right about the pollution.

I also spent five minutes following a truck full of sugar cane on a gravel road. The road was too narrow to pass, so I stayed far enough back to keep my eyes mostly clean from the dust blown up by the tires but close enough to soak up the smell of the cane mixing with the exhaust fumes. When the cane is burned for harvest, the hazy sky grows thicker with black snow that eventually litters the sidewalks and finds its way into the empty coffee cups set up for our breaks. They weren’t burning today.

Woke up this morning, showered, tried to help pick tamarinds for a few minutes, helped load and unload wood off a trailer on the back of a tractor for a few hours, watched as the seventy-year-old and the sixteen-year-old in my family smoked the bees out of a nest, cut the nest out of a tree, wiped off the bees that were too young to fly, and then put it in a bowl and proceeded to eat the nest. They broke the honey out of part, broke off parts of the hive where the bees were still larva, dipped them in honey and ate them. I’d actually been privy to this meal before, but only after cooking it for a bit. The larva were still alive and a few baby bees even broke free from the comb and walked around the bowl while we picked around them and just kept eating. I didn’t eat a lot of it, but it was good – definitely the freshest honey I’ve ever had.

A little bit later I biked out to see some friends at a restaurant and then we all went to a local waterfall. The last waterfall I was at was in Belize, and this really can’t compare, but the company was good. I also think I put in a little over 40 k on the bike today from the trip. Then I went home, helped cook for a little bit, and played tukraw (updated spelling) for a few hours before dinner. At the end of all this I was too exhausted to eat much, and now I’m lying here too exhausted to sleep and listening to Todd Snyder. Long, eventful day, and I wish the same for all of you.

18/2

Long day today and I found a few minutes to get to a computer and post what I've written lately. I've found a way to use my own computer instead of the crappy one at the internet cafe, so this should run more smoothly from now on, whenever I can find time. We biked around one of the villages in our area today interviewing people to find out more about the lifestyles and important people and places in the community. A little awkward and a lot sweaty, but it's forcing us to use a lot more Thai, which is good. Had a little melancholy for a few days and am starting to need some alone time away from the world but am not getting it. Somehow life goes on, somehow. Now that I'm getting life figured out, I should have pictures in my next post, but God knows when. Best to you all. -Me