Entering October, it’s now been over a year since I've been home, and exactly a year since I've started my Fulbright grant. Though the grant is only a year long and it’s expected that the ETAs head home after a year, I’m following in my predecessor’s footsteps and ignoring that expectation. I’m staying an extra term at my school, employed as just another foreign teacher, and I’m so stoked about it. I think I've been working my students hard this past term, and while I’m still learning how to be a teacher, they’re learning how to be my students, and they've gotten pretty freaking good at it. I feel like I have a lot of momentum with them, and I’m so excited to have them another term to experiment with what their capable of.
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| farang friends! |
On Saturday, we headed into the jungles to go on a crazy awesome rafting trip. Usually these kinds of tourist packages are cheesy, expensive and make me feel like a stupid tourist, but this was an absolute gem. It was only 700 bhat, just over 20 dollars for over two hours of rafting on the Nan River. The resort that puts together this package is hidden on the side of a highway in the middle of Phitlok jungle. Besides being adorable, serene and the epitome of zen, there was also a Thai talking parrot! He was kind of annoying, but he said “sawasdi kap” and “khop kun kap” like a pro while “hello” was not in his vocabulary.
The rafting trip itself was spectacular. I had gone on a rafting trip in New Zealand, which was about an hour of training and maybe 30 minutes in the water. But in total Thai style, there was no training, and over two hours of good quality rafting. Well, there was no waterfall like there was in New Zealand, which made the training there kind of necessary, but there were a lot of rapids. Our boat was 4 Thais and 4 of us, and an adorable guide who didn’t know any English. We were kind of the lazy boat, and we kind of didn’t paddle at all. He kept politely reminding us, “paai, kap”, but his commands to paddle resulted in all of us dipping our oars in the water once, maybe making a paddle motion, then putting it back in the boat and relaxing some more. Tough work! But the current was strong enough that we really didn’t need to paddle. And any time it was too calm that we probably should paddle, we jumped out and went swimming instead, and waited for the boat to float to us. Sound perfect? Then as we were passing through some rapids, we passed a monk who was meditating on a rock in the river under the cover of a large tree, not flinching or hinting to have heard the rowdy tourists barreling down the rapids. I think only in Thailand can these worlds coexist like that.
After the rafting trip, I did what I typically do and left the farang party early to head back to Sawankhalok. The end of the rainy season has resulted in some problems with flooding which has particularly affected Sukhothai province after a levee broke and the new and old city were under three meters of water, but that’s not why I was heading home early. I had been invited to go on an 80 km bikeride with P’Bew, the owner of my favorite coffee shop in ‘wanlok. He had put a together this trip with all the bicycle clubs in Sukhothai province to bike to an orphanage in the hills of Thung Salium, and there were over 100 people planning on going. On Sunday morning, we were supposed to meet at P’Bew’s coffee shop and get an early start. Unfortunately, the Sukhothai gang never made it because their homes were still flooded, and the Sri Samrong group had shown up, but as soon as they got to P’Bew’s, they turned around and went back to Sri Samrong to patch up their homes to prepare for the flood. But the rest of us went for it anyway, and started the journey. It was a cute crowd of mostly older men in their professional bike suits, helmets, and fancy bikes. Then there were the teenage boys, in their blue jeans, black tee-shirts and baseball caps, riding their super trendy fix-gear bikes. Then there was the farang, not really fitting in with anyone as usual. But P’Bew lent me his bicycle suit, and P’Buddy lent me his helmet and fancy bike, so I blended in with the professional riders a little bit minus my silly sunglasses. The first 30 km weren’t very interesting because they were just on the main road to Thung Salium which looks like any other main road in Thailand- rice paddies, rice paddies and more rice paddies reaching all the way to the mountains in the background. Then all of a sudden, we reached the mountain in the background, and spent the last 10 km up in the hills. That was the best part. The air was slightly cooler, the scenery changed to forests, and the cars on the road disappeared. The whole trip went surprisingly quickly, and we made it to the orphanage before 10AM. P’Bew and some other had driven their trucks filled with donations while we were biking, and we unloaded pounds of rice, preserved foods, clothing and teddy bears to give to Bahn Nok orphanage. It was an incredibly gratifying feeling, to be part of this trip.
Though I’m always the last to know what’s going on, yet am the center of attention for picture taking, it was still a very real experience, seeing how much P’Bew and his crew of cyclists can do for this orphanage in just one day. Though it’s a small orphanage, they get kids from as far away as Chaing Mai and Bangkok. We didn’t spend much time there, because our whole province was flooding, and as people were starting to get packed up, I was about to hop back on my bike. I guess what I hadn’t noticed is that everyone had loaded their bikes up onto the trucks. I asked P’Bew if I could bike back to Sawankhalok, and he said no, Sawankhalok is flooding, so we’re all driving back. I was a bit bummed, not that Sawankhalok was flooding, but because I really liked the ride up, and the ride down would have been so much fun. I reluctantly got in a truck with a guy I recognized and couldn’t remember why, and some other unfamiliar faces. I sat in the front with the driver, who if you could imagine a cross between a stoic Native American and a wise old Thai man, that was him. He wasn’t really old though. The familiar face that sat in the back, I realized, was the tech helper at a school where I taught a teachers’ seminar earlier in the year. He remembered not only my first and last name, but also every detail about me I never knew that I had shared- that I played rugby in America, that I’m half Thai and from Philadelphia. I thought this was so adorable- he was just the guy that helped us with computer things, but he spoke English more clearly than all of the Thai teachers at the seminar and is probably the only person that remembered what I said in my introduction. After telling the driver all these details about me, he introduced the driver to me: Kun Sanyaa, to which the up until now silent driver quietly stated in English: “you call me Mr. Promise. Sanyaa means promise”. The things that Thai people are capable of saying in English really astound me sometimes. He told me about his home in Issan, the Northeast and slightly looked down upon region of Thailand, and gave me some sticky rice from his home. He assured me sticky rice from Issan is more delicious than in Sawankhalok, which I took as a silly, proud statement. Sticky rice is always delicious. My friend in the backseat handed me a chunk of sticky rice for me to be proven wrong, and indeed I was wrong. It was definitely more delicious than Sawankhalok sticky rice, and was mixed with grains of wild rice that are crunchier and I don’t know how to explain this, but taste more like rice than your average rice. One day I’ll learn the proper words to describe grades of rice, but take my word- it tastes more like rice.
So I was dropped off in Sawankhalok before noon. Still
having adrenaline from the bike ride up, I got back on my bike and explored the
flooded parts of Sawankhalok. I guess the flooding had started in the morning,
and was overflowing from the river onto the riverside streets. It was only back
roads affected at this point, and just a few inches of water in the worst
parts, with a party of Thai men that were probably supposed to be workin on
those sandbag walls but were sitting in lawn chairs drinking whisky in the
flooded road instead. But with no rain insight for the first day in a while, Sawankhalok's flooding didn't get much worse. The river had peaked that morning, and Sukhothai’s broken levy downriver of us
soaked in more of flood water.
I watched the river level slowly back down from the sandbag walls, and
Sawankhalok was safe. I was kind of looking forward to the flood, secretly
crossing my fingers for a day off a school as if it were a snow day, but it
never came and Sawankhalok is safe for this year. 
School finished as scheduled with only one more camp for the
foreigners to tackle before the end of the term. Another school in Sukhothai had lost a Fulbright ETA early in the year that had to
go back to America, so I’ve had to do some of her Fulbright responsibilities
this term, including exhausting English camps. The first one was a typical M4
English camp at her school with lots of lady boys, but this last request to
help with an English camp was very different. The school asked me and my troop
of foreigners to run a prathom camp, which is elementary school students. They
didn’t really tell me anything other than that. So a teacher picked up Bryan
and I (the rest of the F-team kind of bailed) at 7 on a Saturday morning, and
took us 45 minutes into the middle of no man’s land, Sri Satchanalai. Dirt road
after dirt road, we ended up at this tiny little building labeled a school,
with an army of little kids dressed in blue track suits. I jumped out of the
car and right onto their awesome playground with them. They had built their own jungle gym
out of wood, and attached a plastic slide- way better than the plastic jungle
gym sets except that I was way too tall to play. But I did anyway. And they
weren’t scared of me! I am potentially the only white person they’ve had to
interact with in their entire lives, and they were not shy or scared at all. What
little angels.
This middle-of-nowhere school is for grades 1-6, and between
the six grades there are 200 students- in the whole school! So at our camp, we
had almost all of the 4th, 5th and 6th
graders. Their English skills were almost non-existent, so games were the
extent of our language teaching. Duck duck goose, which became duck duck mouse
because I forgot the word for goose in Thai, was our main source of
entertainment…and I played that for HOURS. During our lunch break, one of the
girls asked me to go out to grab snacks. So we hopped on two broken bicycles
with flat tires and biked to the end of the of the school's dirt path and stopped in a little wooden shop on stilts. Inside were shelves of
dusty snacks, an open bottle of whiskey, an old woman fanning herself, and a
monkey! (not sure who opened the whisky..) The little monkey on a chain was
awesome! He didn’t hesitate to start climbing all over me, and hold onto my
hands to do somersaults up my leg. As the little guy was using my body as a
gymnastics bar, a guy came up on his motorcycle and laughed at me and my new
friend. He kept saying to the monkey “go to mother, go to mother”, which I
didn’t even take offense to him calling me a monkey’s mother because I would
adopt my monkey son any day.
One last thing that has started with the end of the semester
is my new found interest in Muay Thai boxing. For something I never really
appreciated, man is it fun to train! P’Be found a Muay Thai training center in
Sawankhalok with the most awesome trainers ever. I went one day after school,
after hearing about these great trainers
from P’Be. We showed up and started warming up in the ring, as the trainer
comes out, wearing nothing but a purple towel wrapped around his waist, yelling
hold on! I just showered, I’ll be out in a minute. Great first impression. This
guy’s two sons, whose nicknames are “Sua”=tiger, and “Singh”=lion (for reals,
their nicknames are Tiger and Lion), and are around our age, are actually the
trainers. So once a week, I meet with P’Sua or Singh to train, and it’s
actually really fun! We went to watch Singh fight in Uttaradit at their longan
festival. We piled into the back of P’Sua’s pick-up truck (thankfully a clear
night, and a blue moon! I miserably failed when I tried to explain what a blue
moon was in Thai to Singh’s dad) and headed through corn and sugar cane fields
to the next province over. The festival was waaayyyyy cooler than the festivals
that Sawankhalok has, mostly because they had bumper cars. We didn’t have time
to play the bumper cars unfortunately, which ended up turning into a dance club
by the end of the night. We watched about 8 fights, mostly kids still in middle
school or early high school, before Singh got to fight. Those kids were feisty!
Singh’s fight was much more controlled, and very structured. We made our way to
the front, just inches away from the ring, where we got a lot of attention from
the announcer for being accompanied by a white girl. I think he was talking
about us throughout the duration of Singh’s fight. They loved Singh’s
entourage. The guy that Singh fought was really calm and slow, and looked like he
was high, whereas Singh was full of energy, always with a little grin on his
face. I guess the high guy knew what he was doing though; they went through
four really good rounds, and on the fifth round he got Singh cornered and
repeatedly kneed him in the stomach, and won on a technical knockout because
Singh couldn’t continue. And after that, I decided I will never enter a Muay
Thai fight even though P’Sua keeps saying I could do it. But what I have kind
of signed myself up for is to be a Muay Thai demo, so I don’t have to actually
fight, just demonstrate how to fight. We’ll see if that happens!
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| By Hanks, in M5/5. We were focusing on new ways to express likes and dislikes. Hanks really enjoyed this lesson. |
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| This is one of the first assignments Pel has handed in, and they're always so funny when he finally does them. |
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| Kao from 4/2, always a crazy imagination |
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| A good demonstration of the difference in science and English education. My students still can't write in the past tense, but they will tell you all about Albert Einstein |
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| Gam, from 4/1 apparently has strong feelings about cucumbers and caves |
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