Bizarre Food of this Week

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, which has described my encounters with everything from boiled pig's blood and fermented bean paste to chicken feet and crickets, this week's featured cuisine is:

McDonald's hamburger and fries.

Yes, I caved. Only because it was convenient; it was not intentionally sought out, I promise. But oh, did it taste good.

I'm so ashamed.

English in the Hills

Today is a cooler day in Chiang Mai, and I’ve spent the afternoon napping and sitting at one of the picnic tables on the Payap campus, smelling the bougainvillea and plumeria trees. We counted today and realized that we only have about 9 days left in Thailand. But whatever profound thoughts or realizations I might have gained from the summer will probably come more in retrospect—maybe on, say, a 17-hour plane ride home. So for now, here’s just more of what we’ve been up to and why we probably won’t feel ready in 9 days to get on an airplane.

On Friday we woke up at the ungodly hour of 5:00 so that we could be well-caffeined and in the cars by 6:00 to head up into the mountains to a village called Bakaew, where we spent the day teaching an English Day Camp for some of the students at the school. The drive to Bakaew was beautiful, even if it was along some unbelievably winding, steep, and half-paved roads while we sat scrunched together in the back of the car. But some of the sights along the way were fantastic--I think we happened to spend the summer in the most beautiful parts of Thailand, by the way (see above).

For nearly all of the 500 some students at the school, ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade, English will be their third language; Thai is their second already, since they all come from a variety of hill tribes surrounding Bakaew, including the Hmong. Several of the students were even dressed in their more traditional outfits.

We started the day with some big group activities, then headed to various stations for the groups of students to rotate through. Our students were mostly middle-school-aged, and all acted like middle-schoolers do when they meet adults: shy. Couple that with the fact that we were a big, loud group of farongs speaking English, and I think we all understood why they were hesitant to even look at us.

The station I taught at was with Greg and Taylor, and we’d decided to teach body parts. We went well-equipped with Simon Says, the Hokey Pokey, Mad Libs, and a pin-the-different-pieces-of-the-face-on-the-face game. The Hokey Pokey produced some good laughs—mostly at us and not with us—and Simon Says proved incredibly easy for them because, not speaking any English, all they had to listen for was whether or not we’d said “Simon Says.” So never play a non-English speaker at that game and expect to win.

Another suggestion: if you’re ever going through parts of the body, and you’re a female, and without thinking you try to teach the word “chest” to a group of middle school boys, and see them giggling, you realize just how much you can understand even without a common linguistic base. But the real success, at least in most groups, seemed to be the face game, which produced some hilarious and very “naa kleeat” (ugly) Picasso-looking faces.

The main reason for us being there was just to get them excited about and interested in learning English. Evidently, our groups have been going up every year for almost 10 years, and this school has always scored higher on tests than others in the area. Maybe it’s the day camp—likely it’s just good teachers.

Either way, it’s a day for everyone to have fun and to meet people who, at the surface, have nothing in common. But neither language nor culture stopped us from being invited to games of tag and duck-duck-goose with the children, and by the end of the day we’d made several friends who waied us and waved at us as we were leaving. The day, as far as we could tell, was a success.

Oh, and in a gesture procuring the awed applause of his friends, one little boy even blew me a kiss as we were leaving.

We Teach English Many Time Last Weeks

Well, a favorite phrase in Thailand is “sabai sabai,” which means “just take it easy and relax.” I’m afraid I’ve been a bit sabai sabai with my blog lately. Hence, another long post to compensate.

Actually, it’s more that we’ve been a lot busier than in the beginning of the summer, and the blog has sort of been subsumed in the daily life of Chiang Mai. So here is a bit of an update of what’s been going on here lately.

I would venture to say that everything is going infinitely better even than when we first arrived because we’ve really adjusted to life here and have been able to make it more like home—at least for a little while, of course. The language is still a daunting challenge for all of us, but then again English is quite the struggle for most Thais. So we’ve all figured out how to better communicate with people in a mix of broken English and the occasional Thai phrase, since we’ve picked up quite a few in our last eight weeks of semi-immersion. Also, as a warning to our friends and family back home: we’ve become more accustomed to speaking simplified English even among ourselves, so be prepared for a lack of conjugated verbs and strings of very simple sentences. Expect phrases like this: “Yesterday, I buy some pineapple from the store.” Since there are no conjugations in Thai, saying things like “I bought” or “We taught,” produces in people who are just beginning to learn English those same blank stares we give when people ask us anything in Thai.

Speaking of English, we’ve been teaching quite a bit more lately, and as an English major, I think it’s fascinating. I’ve gotten to work with a range of English levels and have probably learned as much about English as my students have. Two of the students, Shell and Nam Fon (“rain”), speak very, very basic English. Let me say that again: very basic English. Similar to my level of Thai. So we’ve conjugated the verb “to be” as a starting point, then gone through things like basic greetings and adjectives, which they can use with "to be" and actually say quite a few things. Feeling accomplished is always a good sense when learning a language. But without a Thai-English dictionary and with only my charade skills at my disposal, it’s actually quite a challenge explaining what words like “embarrassed” or “lonely" mean. Or when I said, "Fantastic job today," they thought I said "Atlantic," and an inside joke was born. We’ve all laughed a lot and been very patient, and become friends who communicate mostly by laughing and smiling.

Then there are those like the three Chinese students who come to study vocabulary for the TOEFL exam. Melody, Celina, and Lohm usually come twice a week, and we go through a workbook that I’ve copied for them (see the previous post about the copy shop for more information about that). Yesterday we studied idioms. Strangely, I found that in defining idioms you often use other idioms, which produces the same blank stares and smiles. For instance: explain "that'll teach you" without using phrases like "serves you right," or "what a drag" without defining it as "that sucks." Other idioms elicited some good laughs; after all, imagine not speaking English and hearing that we say “a little birdy told me” when we know someone’s secret, and “gesundheit” when someone sneezes. And I never did figure out how to explain “knock on wood.”

As much as we're teaching English, we're also of course learning a lot more Thai and learning 1) how it feels to not be in the dominant language group, which is a good perspective; and 2) how to communicate without language. So we can go like we did last Saturday and just spend an afternoon with children at an orphanage, which was fun for everyone I think. A little girl named Nuna held my hand nearly the entire time and became my friend for the day. If I may digress on a tangent for a moment: at one point, she led me into their bedroom area and through where the children eat—the rooms were dark and stuffy, and the beds were so close together you could hardly move. Thankfully they're currently building a new facility, but I can’t imagine even one kid getting sick without all the others being sick, and with one hundred little kids and only about 15 adults, it was no wonder all the kids were just wanting to hold our hands and be close to us.

Anyway, we taught them the hokie pokie, and they (mostly the little girls) showed us some Thai dances and what we’d call “playground rhymes.” Then I pulled out my camera and all they wanted to do was take pictures with us, which was fun. But then it was time to leave, so with all the kids following us we got in the car and left--just like that, probably to never go back again. And we’re not the first to have done that, and I doubt we’ll be the last. So if you’ll allow me on a soapbox for just a minute, I think we all should be careful about how we approach things like missions and volunteering and understand that we’re creating relationships wherever we go—and be very aware and very cautious about how those interactions affect the other person, not just the rich farongs who have gone to have a new experience or whatnot.

With all that being said, everything is going very well and we're looking forward to our last couple weeks here. I want to thank all of you again who have supported our work out here and let you know that it has really been a blessing in many ways for many people. We're looking forward to getting home soon! Miss you all and love you all more.

Bizarre Food of the Week

First it was congealed pig blood. Then it was a chicken foot. Last night:

silkworms and cricket. Mai aroi. Not so delicious.



















before

after

"You're Not Tourists Here"

We’ve known that this whole time—we’re not here to be tourists. That’s what we told all our sponsors while we were fundraising, that’s what we tell our students when they ask why we’ve come to Thailand, and I think that’s what we tell ourselves even as we’re climbing up a mountain to a famous temple, going to movies and eating out with our students, or spending a day riding elephants through the mountains outside of Chiang Rai. By the way, riding an elephant might be one of the most “suhtyaaht” (awesome) experiences in the world. I can’t help throwing in a picture from our weekend of us on an elephant (which even as a two-ton animal you can't see in the photo, which makes the picture sadly anti-climactic):

So we’re here to build relationships, work with the church, teach English, organize events to involve the university students, etc., etc. So we’re told. And for the most part, I think we’ve done that as best we can all summer, though we’re always learning more and finding ways to do things more effectively. Lately, especially, having seen most of the tourist attractions here and become accustomed to life in Chiang Mai and met more and more people, it’s been a lot easier to really focus on things like teaching and encouraging relationships.

But there’s a different point I’d like to make about this tourist vs. intern conundrum, and it’s one that a church member articulated over dinner one night during our weekend away in Chiang Rai. A few of our friends from the Pepperdine group were leaving the next day to spend time on the beach in Phuket before going back to the states, and one of them said that he was really going to miss Chiang Mai. To this our friend Oi, one of the church members, said, “That’s because in Phuket you’re just tourists; here, you’re family.”

That sounds cheesy—like a low-budget advertisement for a family-style restaurant or something. But at the moment, over a bowl of traditional Northeastern Thai soup that she’d bought specifically to share with us, it wasn’t.

And it still doesn’t feel trite or cliched or oversimplified or tag-lined. If anything, I think it’s been the most compelling—and surprising—aspect of our summer here. We were given the warmest welcome both by the Thais and the church when we arrived, and since then we’ve been more and more included, more and more a part of things. More loved, even.

What I find most remarkable is that they really have no reason to befriend us: we can’t order our own food except by pointing, we can’t drive anywhere, we can’t speak Thai even to the people who try their hardest to speak English to us, we’re completely oblivious to our swelling noise levels and the positioning of our feet (which should stay on the ground pointed away from people), and I’ve spit out an entire chicken foot while sitting next to a judge at a table with ten government workers.

Part of it, I know, is that many want to learn English and create connections that will get them to America one day. There’s also a fascination with “farong culture,” which we’ve tried to avoid encouraging and inadvertently promoting over Thai culture. And we’ve also experienced a willingness among Thais to bend over backwards for farongs, which I think goes beyond even the friendliest hospitality into a misguided glorification of the “farong visitor.” I don’t, however, want to discount the sincere friendliness and genuine hospitality among the Thais. It’s certainly not just because we’re Americans.

That spirit is even more evident within the church community. They invite us to their homes for dinner, or throw a birthday party for a young Thai man whose family never celebrated with him for the last twenty-four years (the picture above and at right). I could go on and on with examples.

The point: I’ve taught English classes, we’ve tried to include and invite as many people as we can, and we’ve tried to serve in many different ways. But we’ve been served much, much more than we’ve served. We’ve learned more than we’ve taught. We have ended up being neither tourists nor interns, but something else entirely that we never would have expected.

Happy Fifth of July

This morning I started working on another blog post. Then we went to lunch and everything changed. The initial post is still in progress and should be coming shortly, but in the meantime there transpired an event that takes precedence--one that makes the hamburger I ate last night for Fourth of July taste even better in my memory than it already did.

Today, I ate a chicken foot.

It was consumed totally in ignorance, mind you, being the deceptively fried and breaded chicken foot that it was. Actually, it wasn't even consumed.

Because there's nothing to eat on a chicken foot. Because chickens don't have any meat on their feet. Claws aren't made of meat. They're made of, well, claw.

I began to question the true nature of this "piece of meat" when the tip poked at my tongue and the sensation was immediately different than just a sharp bone. Then, with what was I'm sure a face or growing surprise and shock, I followed the claw with my tongue all the way up the two "toes" to the joint.

And then I realized what was happening.

And, disregarding all cultural norms and throwing all cultural sensitivity to the wind, I spit it out because I literally couldn't chew it. Because, let me remind you, it was a freakin' CLAW disguised in breading as decent, edible meat.

Now, imagine my even greater surprise when everyone else's plates did not have any uneaten or spit-out chicken claws. These are people whom I'd watched take pieces from the same plate as I had.

I've taken everything else here really well, I promise. So call me ethnocentric or insensitive or disrespectful or simply influenced by patriotism and love of America from last night. But this time, I'd like to think they're just great at hiding chicken feet in their napkins and under their plates.

Then again, hiding it proved just as much a feat as eating it would be, so I must commend them either way.