2/13/2001 - In Training

Welcome to our second update from Thailand! We are beginning to get acclimatized, and life is developing a bit of a routine by now. We survived our first experience as teachers, we had our first experience at our village’s Wat (Buddhist temple), and Denny survived his first bout with diarrhea!

This week began on a sour note – Denny, who had been perpetually sick with a cold since arriving, came down with a bacteria that produced a high fever and diarrhea. Fortunately antibiotics along with a bread and water diet soon cured the problem, and Denny has now felt healthy for 4 days in a row. It is amazing how much better one can learn when one feels healthy! Today we received our 7th and 8th shots since arriving (we will receive more than 20 shots total, with vaccinations against 8 diseases), and we were warned that one of today’s shots may produce a fever – we hope we are healthy enough to avoid that.

We are beginning to develop more of a routine with our Homestay family. Our room is only large enough to accommodate our bedmats and our luggage, so we have to rearrange our room every morning and every night (not to mention setting up a mosquito net over the bed every night). Our Peace Corps issued bedmats resemble beds in that they are quilted and flowery, resemble mats in that they are rectangular, and they resemble a concrete floor when it comes to the padding that they provide (coincidentally, our pads are ON a concrete floor adding to the enjoyment). Lisa has taken to sleeping on her pillow for padding (as soon as our language develops further we will find our own mats that actually offer a somewhat soft surface). But we digress. . . Our routine is generally to wake and take apart our bed before 8:00, to eat breakfast (rice with miscellaneous cooked food, often last nights left-overs), and depart for school on our bicycles (taking the 5 year old with us riding on the back of Lisa’s bike). We have language classes in the morning, and in the afternoon we discuss the possibility that one day we may be trained in teaching. We arrive home around 5 or 6 (if we are home much later than 6:00, the sun will set and people in our village will be concerned about us being out after dark). Our family often leaves about the same time that we do, and they come home after 7:00 PM – they spend a long day with those cows. We did not go with them this last Sunday – we were invited to spend the day at a neighbor’s house. We’re not sure if we went to the right neighbor’s house, but the people where we went were friendly, and the kids learned to play UNO very quickly.

Our purpose here in the Peace Corps is primarily to help facilitate training teachers to adopt a more student centered approach in their classrooms. We have not yet been given any concrete information about what that means, however, we have been given the opportunity to act as teachers in a Thai grade school classroom already. We were told to plan a half hour activity and teach the kids in a given classroom a song or a game. Lisa was planning to sing a song with her 5th graders, and Denny was panicking with no ideas about what to do with his 6th graders. Fate came through for Denny, and school was canceled in the next village down the road, so the Peace Corps Trainees there came to our school, and we got to teach with another trainee – that worked remarkably well. Lisa taught her class a couple of songs and Denny helped teach his class to play kickball. It is amazing how complex kickball can be to teach to a group of kids who have never seen baseball, and who speak virtually no English. Bases, outs, strikes, running from 1st to 2nd base when someone else kicks – these were all totally new concepts, but we laughed and had fun!

Our Thai language skills are growing, but slowly. We have learned numbers, times of day, and the names of some basic foods and buildings (bathroom, Wat, school) and we are just beginning to learn to put these all into sentences to tell our family that we will be gone until 5:30 at school! Telling time is a bit of a kick – they divide their day into 4 sections instead of two (am and pm). The new sections start at 6 and 12. So for 7:00 pm they say 1:00 in the evening, 8:00pm is 2:00 in the evening, etc.

On Thursday last week some form of holiday was celebrated. We still are clueless about what it meant. The locus of activity was the Wat, which is split into two buildings – one is very decorative and stands out as the center of the community, and the other is more of a simple meeting hall. In the morning people gathered in the meeting hall and brought food. Everyone placed spoons full of rice into 7 bowls in the back of the room, and then placed other food items in miscellaneous bowls in the front of the room. Eventually 7 monks showed up and were served the 7 bowls of rice and the rest of the food. There was some interactive chanting between a community leader and the head monk, and then the monks ate. After the monks were through, the community had a potluck with the leftovers – and still had enough left over for lunch and dinner! In the evening the people from the community gathered at the back of the decorative Wat while the monks chanted inside, and then everyone lit a candle and, carrying 3 lotus blossoms and 3 incense sticks, everyone followed the monks around the Wat 3 times. I’m sure there was some Buddhist significance to the whole event, but it was lost on us. It mostly seemed that it was a good time for the mothers in the community to get together and gossip (perhaps a little too close to home?).

Saturday was our first intentionally fun group activity – we went to a nearby provincial park. The picture is our busload of trainees heading home from the park. On the far left is Scott (Sa-cott as he is called by his family here). Scott is from New York and he lives just down the road from us in our village and he generally stops by in the morning to ride his bike to school with us. Behind him is our teacher (Ajan) Saowaros (pronounced Sow-a-lo, go figure) – she is being very patient teaching us Thai. Lisa is half way back on the right side of the bus, and to her left are Anne and Gillian (Gilliam to her family here) who are also in our village. Lennie is on the far right – she is our technical trainer for teaching. She has been here for two years and is a great inspiration! If she can survive with a very limited knowledge of the Thai language, then so can we.

As for the park – it was nice, but not a natural beauty that you might expect in the U.S. Every plant, tree, and rock had been intentionally placed. It is still hard to see the beauty in that. There were a couple of miles of forest with trees all planted in rows, there was a man made pond with a man made shoreline. However, there was plenty of opportunity for fun! We played ultimate Frisbee, badminton, hearts, pinochle, and had ice cream. We had friends who went swimming, golfing, and who played snooker and American football. All in all it was a good day. After getting back, several of us got together for sodas and beer in a nearby village, and spent the rest of the day getting to know eachother. Those of us who got home before dark, and without too many beers were asked about the location of our colleagues who were still out. There were 4 who stayed for an hour or so after dark, and they were the talk of 2 villages the next morning! Rumors about fiancés and coming home drunk fly fast in our little village. We are all adults, but our families are still very protective. Just try to explaining to someone who speaks no English that your friend (their temporary daughter) is drinking beer with 3 other friends at some village who’s name you cannot remember down the road. The only words you are allowed to use are names, the word “home” and the word “at”. These were our conversations on Saturday night! This made teaching kickball seem easy.

Stay healthy and count your blessings.

Denny & Lisa