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.