Barbie’s Dream House

Before...

Returning home on Sunday afternoon after a sweaty walk to the market, I was surprised to find four students painting my house (two painting, one “supervising”, and one singing and running to the dumpling cart to get snacks for everyone). The supervising senior student was one of the more enthusiastic English learners, so we made small talk about the upcoming Sports Day, his aspirations to speak English, and my hair, before finally acknowledging the fact that he was painting my house, which I was obviously hoping to enter to finish my steamed buns on the privacy of my own floor mat.

“When will you finish?” I asked.

“Please to waiting,” he said with a big smile.

“How long?” I prompted.

He paused and gave their progress a very serious look. The two younger students, who were squatting on my porch painting a blue stripe along the bottom of the wall, peered timidly over their shoulders at me with wide eyes. He looked at his wrist, which did not have a watch. He solemnly examined the house again, of which only the bottom quarter had been painted so far. With some confidence and a nod he said, “about five minutes.”

... After!

Five Thai minutes later (that’s about an hour), the front of my house was in fact finished, and looks much less like a Soviet interrogation room than before. So, now seems as good a time as any to finally show you my home, affectionately referred to by everyone as “the A-frame”. It’s basically a square made of cement blocks and a tin roof, luxuriously furnished with a bed, desk, wardrobe, and fridge, and with one corner inside partially walled off as a bathroom. The lack of kitchen combined with side effects from malaria tablets have caused me to have weekly dreams in which I bake mountains of magnificent desserts for a cast of characters ranging from my family to celebrities to former elementary school classmates.

 

Like many of the teachers, I live on the school campus. My house is across from the student dormitories, sandwiched between a row of three other identical A-frames on one side and an onion garden on the other, which three or four students cheerfully water every day after school.

My “neighborhood” is noisy. Outside my house I hear the sounds from the boys dormitory: morning wake-up bells (starting around 5:30am) and other scheduled bells throughout the day, rowdy “study halls”, TV cartoons, Korean pop music, and winsome guitar and singing floating down from the upper balcony of the dorm into my house multiple times a day. This is in addition to the regular buzz of motorbikes and trucks puttering past, gongs and chanting from the temple, melodic class bells (to the tune of “It’s A Small World”) and rattle of announcements from the school, dog fights, cock fights, band practice, drunken karaoke parties, the tinking bells of the dumpling and ice cream carts, throaty rooster calls piercing every hour of the day and night, and a percussive harmony of other birds, lizards, and many, many insects. Inside my house I hear the sounds of more lizards chirping and scampering around, the whir of the fan, the hums and clangs of the old refrigerator, leaves landing on the roof with a crash and sliding down the steep incline (surprisingly loud when your roof is tin and the leaves are two feet wide), and, when there’s laundry hanging from my roof beams to dry, the occasional wet splat of water dripping to the floor.

Seriously, hearing these land on my roof from inside the house, you'd think you were under rocket attack. I will be the first person on record to suffer PTSD from falling leaves.

Luckily I trained the biggest, loudest lizards (Thais describe their sound as “tu-kay, tu-kay” while Westerners think it’s “geck-o, geck-o”) to stop making noise by banging my metal roof beams with the handle of a mop every time I heard them, like a cranky old lady from a TV sitcom.

Unpredictable days and the tight community here mean there’s always some kind of commotion going on. One Saturday while taking a bath I heard a loud roaring and walked outside to see a helicopter circling above campus. All of the dorm students ran outside to watch, and it eventually landed on the athletic field with a great cloud of dust and a crowd of curious onlookers aged two to seventy. Another time I was taking an after school nap when I noticed a sharp smell and a crackling noise distinctly different from the usual ruckus. I opened my door to see five-foot flames, as a few students were calmly burning a huge pile of leaves and other debris, tending it with brooms made of straw and twigs.

Thais describe these as "not dangerous" and "very delicious"

When I first came to Mae La Noi, I used to lay in bed at night trying to fall asleep and jumping at every rustle and bump in the night, convinced each one was a giant spider, a rat, or something worse. I’d finally fall into an uneasy sleep only to be dragged back into wakefulness by the f*cking roosters a few hours later. Now the cacophony of natural, mechanical, animal, and human sounds tells me I’m home. See how many sounds you can hear in the above video clip! And if you want the killer tunes you hear bumping in my house, download Kap Slap’s Spring Break Mix for free.

Holiday Wishes

Busses, Buddhas, and 7-11 — Road Tripping, Thai Style

The four pillars of travel with Thais are snacks, shopping, temples, and taking photos. Luckily, in Thailand it is not hard to find a cluster of food stands, a market, a place of worship, and innumerable photo ops within a one-block area. If you’re lucky you can combine them—photogenic markets full of Buddha paraphernelia. We covered all four during our recent field trip to eastern Thailand and Laos. The stated purpose of the trip was to attend a botanical garden expo with exhibits from schools all over Thailand, including ours. The Thais are experts not only at indirect communication, but also indirect travel—we made it to the expo and back with many, many stops along the way.

Most of the trip was spent cozied on the bus with a good chunk of the MoDo extended family: about thirty staff members, including the school “housekeeper”, the housekeeper’s little daughter, the director’s girlfriend, and the director’s girlfriend’s mom. We drove straight east across Thailand and popped over the border to Vientiane (the capital of Laos) for a whirlwind four-hour tour, the majority of which was spent shopping for an equal mix of traditional crafts and fabric, knockoff purses, and duty-free whiskey and luxury snacks at the border market, with a few temples thrown in for good measure.

European influence in Vientiane

Enlightenment and cold beverages

Then we trucked to Khorat for the botanical garden exhibition. It, too, had an extensive food and clothing market, where we spent most of our time—when we weren’t taking photos of ourselves. One of my favorite images from the trip is of an unlucky student tasked with taking a group photo, shuffling ten or twelve cameras that dangled from his skinny arms like Christmas ornaments.

Then was the journey home to northwest Thailand. On the way we passed through some areas that had been hit hard by the recent flooding. Rows of tents had been set up along the side of the road, and water buffalo and cattle crowded in makeshift roadside corrals. Inside the tents families continued their daily routines of cooking dinner, sipping cans of beer, and reading the newspaper, surrounded by neat stacks of their rescued belongings and lit by the glow of a TV. Behind them, entire neighborhoods were flooded, the top floors of houses peeking out above stagnant water. Rows of streetlights marked where there once was a street but now was only navigable by raft or boat.

Despite this, the atmosphere on the bus was always upbeat. We played cards, sang songs, teased each other, and shared countless snacks. Periodically someone walked down the center aisle handing out cans of beer. In the back of the bus, the men grew progressively louder as their whiskey bottles grew lighter.

Of course, we also made many stops at temples. When on a road trip, in between buying shrimp chips at 7-11 and bargaining for imported Korean dresses and cell phone charms at the market, the Thais are sure to pay respect to every giant gold Buddha within a 10km radius (just follow the sound of pre-recorded monks chanting).

Luckily every temple has a market too!

A favorite moment was at one of these Buddha pit stops. The shrine was set in a town square, surrounded on all sides by busy traffic, shops, advertisements, food carts, and all the bustle of everday life. In the middle of this, people crowded around the shrine to light incense, bow, and say prayers. All around the shrine were people hanging out, taking a break from errands to stop at the coffee stand, teenagers practicing breakdancing, grimy dreadlocked bums, umbrella sellers, little boys flying kites and feeding pigeons, a stage and sound system being assembled for sime kind of performance, old ladies selling offerings of incense, bananas, and fresh coconuts, and everyone from high-heeled preetens to swanky businessmen posing to snap photos of themselves. I loved how spirituality happened in the midst of this everday chaos.

Back at school, all photos from the trip appeared on Facebook within 24 hours. Throughout the week, special snacks purchased on the trip were passed around the office and new clothes were excitedly modeled (and photographed). By the time the buzz wore off (and the men slept off their hangovers), plans for the next trip were already in the works.

Bananas and Borders

Photo by Dang, age 13

Walking back to my house after class one day, I hear shouts and look to my left to see a student bolting at an alarming speed down the hill towards me yelling, “Teacher! GOOD AFTERNOON, TEACHER!!” I stop and respond, “Good afternoon,” as he skids to a halt next to me. Panting and wiping sweat from his brow with his shirt, he says, “How are you?” Using the dialogue we practice daily in class, I respond, “I’m fine, thank you. And you?” He immediately replies, “I’m fine, thank you,” then stares at me for several seconds, still breathing heavily from his sprint, before saying, “Okay, bye,” and shuffling away bashfully. I had to laugh, along with the nearby students, at his eagerness, but I was also delighted at his excitement to meet me and dedication to practicing English. After almost three months in Thailand and a month teaching at Mae La Noi Daroonsik school, the students and teachers here continue to surprise, amaze, and inspire me with their kindness, openness, and genuine interest in learning about me and making me feel at home. Once, when practicing talking about ourselves in class, I used the example, “I like to eat bananas.” The next day, three students brought me a giant bunch of bananas grown in their village. Weeks later, I continue to periodically receive gifts of bananas from students, teachers, and the school’s director.

The orange star marks the location of Mae La Noi

The village of Mae La Noi is in northwest Thailand (Mae Hong Son Province) near the Thai-Burmese border, surrounded by mountains and bisected by a river. About nine thousand people live here. Mae La Noi Daroonsik school sits on a hill above the village and is somewhat self-contained, much like a tiny college campus. It is affectionately called MoDo, which I like because, said with a Thai accent, it sounds a bit like “Mordor,” the dark kingdom from Lord of the Rings. This makes statements like “meet me at the gates of MoDo” a lot more interesting when I imagine them in the voice of Gandalf. Modo has about a thousand students and fifty teachers. Some of the students and most of the teachers live at school because their homes are too far away to commute (certainly true for me). Throughout the day and night students and teachers can be seen and heard hanging around the classrooms and dormitories studying, playing football and volleyball, sharing snacks, gossiping, singing songs, and playing guitar. Everyone helps out with tasks around the school like cleaning, cooking, maintaining the school’s botanical garden exhibits, and generally keeping campus looking nice.

Students doing landscaping work at school. Photo by Canon, age 13

Most of the students are members of the “hill tribes”, or ethnic minority groups of the mountains, some of whom are migrants from Burma, southern China, and Laos. In this area are many Karen, Shan, and Lawa people. Each group has its own language, dress, food, beliefs, and usually many subgroups. For some students, Thai is not their first language nor the language they speak at home. Interestingly, many of the hill tribes are Christian as a result of missionaries who came here in the past. But the fun-loving Thais don’t let religious differences get in the way of a good time—Christians and Buddhists frequently participate in each other’s holiday celebrations and parties!

Lawa woman in tradtional dress. Photo by Tasanee, age 17

Mae La Noi doesn’t see many foreign tourists, although foreigners do pass through as volunteers and NGO workers. Still, people were understandably a bit shy around me at first, but once they realized I was friendly and would be sticking around for awhile, they came alive with questions.

“Do Americans eat rice?”

“How much do you weigh?”

“Are you happy here?”

“Have you ever seen a sheep?”

“Do you have a nose implant?”

“Do you like our school?”

“Do you know how to make a sandwich? Can you make me one?”

“Do you know any black people? What are they like?”

“Why did you come here?”

The questions people choose to ask reveal just as much as the information given in response. Aside from questions about my personal life (read: my marital status) and appearance, most common are questions about my experiences here, along the lines of, “Do you like Thailand/Thai food/Thai movies/our school/our new classroom building/the weather here/Thai men?” People don’t just want to know about me, they want to know how I see them, their culture, and their country. A foreign perspective provides new eyes with which to look at themselves and their lives, and in the same way, in relating to this foreign place and people, I see myself and my culture in a new light too.  Some of the images captured by these new eyes can be seen in Global Playground’s Moment of the Week project, in which students use digital cameras to photograph their daily lives. All of the photos in this blog entry were taken by MoDo students! In doing this, they start to think about questions like, what do I want to show a foreign person about my life and culture? What might they want to see? What images can I choose to represent my world?

Photo by Benyawun, age 13

A student sits by a shrine to the King. Photo by Dang, age 13

“International Lonely Guy” Harland Miller describes it this way: “You spend a lot of time talking about where you come from. You’re almost giving yourself a crash course in who you are. You get more of a sense of yourself, somehow, than you had when you were back home, surrounded by people who are similar to you.” When people from different cultures come together and interact, they learn about each other, discover common ground, and develop a sense of common humanity. But they also learn about themselves and their own culture, and learn to think about things in a new way. The result is creativity, innovation, and collaborative solutions to interconnected problems—thinking outside borders and thinking outside the box. I see countless examples of this process occurring every day here in Thailand, whether it’s students comparing photographs they took of their families or playing traditional Thai instruments while singing Stevie Wonder. I can’t wait for the start of the new term and to work with GP Fellows Adam and Ryan, in Honduras and the US respectively, and with teachers elsewhere in the world to bring our students together!

Rainy Season Checklist

• moldy Birkenstocks – check
• afro – check
• brown water in the plumbing (Thais call it “chocolate water” and “iced tea”) – check
• times leaving umbrella at home because the sky looked blue – 6
• times getting caught in the rain without umbrella – 6
• sunny days – 3.5
• ever-present smell of wet stray dogs – check
• times getting caught in the rain while wearing a white shirt – 1
• Thais scandalized by above incident – 27
• “thumbs up” given for above incident – 2
• mosquito bites on soles of feet – 3
• ceremonies interrupted by rain – 3
• ceremonies that went on despite rain – 5
• classes cancelled due to rain – 4
• campfires lit inside the auditorium to avoid rain outside – 2
• foreign teachers complaining about heat – 1
• Thais complaining about cold – 5
• puddles stepped in on accident – 9
• puddles splashed in on purpose – 14
• “That’s what she said” comments made by foreign teacher in response to, “It’s very wet” – 18
• Thais who found said comments funny – 0

Bus Ride Photos

On the bus from Mae La Noi to Mae Hong Son (the provincial capital), I let the little boy in the seat in front of me play with my camera. He turned out to be a pretty good photographer!

My pisao (big sister) packed me a lunch for the bus ride: sweet pork balls, strawberry drinking yogurt, coconut kanom (sweets), and pork buns!

Slowing Down at Huay Pung Mai, or, How I Became Bucket Bath Barbie

As my co-worker, Ryan, trained me in the ways of village life, I learned the key is not to loiter in one place for too long, and always look like you’re doing something important, or at least waiting for something important. My first day in Huay Pung Mai, a mountain village of about 800 people where Ryan has been teaching for the last year, all classes were cancelled for a ceremony welcoming the new director. I’ve since learned that in Thailand, ceremonies take precedence over pretty much everything. This one involved, like most, speeches, food, dances performed by female students wearing traditional Hmong and Karen clothing, taking photos, karaoke, and a lot of hanging around. First, we’d sit in the meeting room and watch teachers and students sing karaoke. Then we’d wander outside and stare at the mountains, make small talk, and give the students a chance to giggle at us. Next we’re summoned inside to eat and add some glamour to the event with our white faces. Then we go lean on the railing by the classroom building for awhile. Of course, the students, although not invited to the festivities unless it is to entertain or serve food, are required to stick around until the end of the school day. Otherwise we couldn’t do the daily closing ceremony!

Students lined up for the morning ceremony. There is always a stray dog on the pavement somewhere.

This is how we pass most of the time in the village, even when classes are in session. Wandering from place to place, sitting and standing, enjoying the scenery, joking with the students, making conversation with teachers, and watching the day go by. Time is punctuated by various routines and ceremonies, like meals and daily announcements. Saying hello to friends, enjoying food, and looking good are high priorities; punctuality and efficiency are not. It’s a pace of life that takes some getting used to after life in America and in the big city. But those who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I’m adjusting to it happily.

Because Huay Pung Mai is so small, it is a constant and close-knit community, especially on the school grounds. Most of the students and teachers live at the school because their homes are too far away to commute each day. I like the feeling of it being part school, part summer camp. When classes end, you can see students and teachers playing football (soccer), singing karaoke, gossiping, sharing snacks, and staring at the new foreign teacher. Most of the students at Huay Pung Mai are members of Thailand’s ethnic minority groups, or “hill tribes”. Huay Pung Mai is a Hmong village but the area is mostly Karen, so the student body is an even mix of both groups.

Girls in handmade traditional Hmong clothing

The students and teachers alike were a little enamored of me. They have had some foreign volunteers come through the area before (like Ryan), but never any young women, as far as I know. They were infatuated with my appearance, asking about my boyfriend and telling me I looked like a Barbie. As I walked around school, frequent shouts of “beautiful!” made me blush. One teacher even insisted (jokingly, I think) that I must have had a lot of plastic surgery, including a silicon nose implant, in order to look so lovely. Seb, another volunteer, joked that it must be difficult to be Barbie while taking a morning cold-water bucket bath. So, he coined the term “Bucket Bath Barbie“.

Green Fruit, Buddha Bellies, and My Asian Face

This is a blog I wrote two weeks ago, a few days after arriving in Thailand. At the time I was taking Thai language lessons in Chiang Mai, a big city that is called the capital of the north. I didn’t get a chance to post it until now.

The British writer Rudyard Kipling said, “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” The dominant smells here in Chiang Mai are spices, incense, and diesel fumes. Every part of the city I’ve been to smells distinctly like one or more of these things, depending on my proximity to a food stall, temple, or line of motorbikes and tuk-tuks.

I’ve been immersing myself in all of these things in different ways. Mostly the food, which is spicy enough that I no longer have to ask for hot sauce with every meal, like I do in the States. One of my favorite snacks so far is som tam, or spicy papaya salad, made with green (unripe) papayas. Here they eat fruit in every stage of ripeness throughout the season. Green mangoes seem to be even more popular than orange ones! I also love khao soi, a special northern dish with egg noodles and crispy noodles in a spicy pork curry broth. Yum!

My favorite fruit stand in Chiang Mai. See the feet sticking out at the bottom? There's a tiny old lady sitting back there.

The smell of incense is ever-present due to the temples (wat) scattered all around the city. Most are gold and flashy with giant Buddha statues. I have visited a few, but am always nervous around the monks because they have so many rules regarding their interactions with women. I can talk to them but cannot touch them or hand anything to them directly. For example, if I wanted to give one some rice or another offering I would have to set it down on a table where he could pick it up. When they pass me on the street I am supposed to cede the sidewalk to them to avoid an accidental brush. So, I am always a bit tense around them because I don’t want to accidentally make a cultural faux pas. Anyway, I still enjoy seeing the temples around. Spirituality is so much more a part of daily life here. There are so many temples in Chiang Mai, I think it’s easier to pay merits to Buddha than to buy toilet paper. After four years at Loyola and working at the Archdiocese, my view of spirituality and its role in daily life is definitely changing. When I go to the mountains it will be interesting to see the religious practices of the hill tribes, who practice forms of Christianity and Buddhism mixed with animism. I know the Hmong people place great emphasis on animal sacrifice!

And of course, the fumes of motorbikes and tuk-tuks are inescapable. I dodge the motorbikes on my way to language class and avoid the tuk-tuk driver’s shouts of “hello!” “where you go?” and “tuk tuk tuk tuk!” I prefer the drivers who are busy sleeping with their shirts rolled up to expose their round bellies. I have enjoyed exploring the city on motorbike with my co-worker, Ryan. Drivers here are crazy, but motorbike is still one of my favorite ways to travel.

All of these things are exotic and distinctly Asian in their own ways. Yet one of the most striking feelings I’ve had within the first few days of being here is the feeling of coming home. In some ways I seem to slip right back into the pace of life here, sleeping in a guesthouse with the constant whir of a ceiling fan, deciphering the swirly writing of unfamiliar street signs, communicating with charades and smiles, and exchanging knowing looks with foreigners who look as out of place as I do. The feeling of being a perpetual outsider in a foreign land has a familiar ring to it. And come to think of it, the last two years of my life have been divided equally between two continents. It’s hard to say which has been my “home base” during that time. Especially since my time in the US was scattered between two apartments in Chicago and three houses in Michigan, including my dad moving out of the house where I grew up, all while trying to decide what to do with my life!

In some ways I am between two worlds, and perhaps it’s starting to show. On my first day of language lessons, my Thai teacher asked if it is my first time in Asia. I told her I had spent a year in China and a few weeks in Laos. With an understanding look she gestured to my face and said, “Oooh, that is why you already look so Asian.”

Sawadee kha everyone!!

It’s officially been one week since I arrived! For those who don’t know, I’m here in Thailand working as a Teaching Fellow for an NGO called Global Playground. I’ll be teaching at a secondary school in Mae La Noi, Mae Hong Son Province in northwest Thailand (near Burma), working with students from the “hill tribes,” or ethnic minority groups in the mountains. In addition to teaching English, my job is to develop cross-cultural learning programs between students in Thailand and our partner classrooms in Honduras, the US, and elsewhere. Right now I’m in Chiang Mai, the unofficial capital of the north, for two weeks of Thai language lessons and orientation before I head west to Mae La Noi. Here’s to getting the blog up and running—and to more (and better) posts to come!