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.