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.
