50th Anniversary and Reconnect

I've been away from site for the past 2.5 weeks for Peace Corps events. It all started with the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps Thailand which was 2 days of celebrations. The first night was a "cocktail" party at the US ambassadors house. No actual cocktails were served because a worldwide rule of Peace Corps is that volunteers and staff can't drink together. It was an incredibly beautiful house right next to the embassy with huge gardens, a swimming pool, and a beautiful covered outside area. I got to speak to returned volunteers from group 1, the very first group of volunteers to go to Thailand. Most of them are in there 70's now and some still live in Thailand and have married Thai people. The next day we met HRH the Princess at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 60 volunteers got to take a picture with her (we picked names from a hat and I was one of the 5 or so unlucky ones that didn't get picked). That night there was a party at the Peace Corps office where volunteers from past and present got to share stories and experiences about their time in Peace Corps.

After the 50th celebration was over I went to Sing Buri to visit my host family from training and spent the night there. My host mom had become a nun at a temple for a few weeks so I unfortunately didn't get to see her or enjoy her fabulous cooking. After that it was off to Suphan Buri for 2 weeks of Reconnect or inservice training. We had 16 hours of language training which I spent learning how to speak Lannese. In my region of northern thailand the language is very different from central Thai so I am hoping to be able to study both regular central Thai and Lannese. It's pretty confusing trying to keep track of which language I am speaking. We had lots of technical and cross cultural training as well and one person from each of our sites had to come for 3 days of the conference to work through any issues and explain more about the program. Aside from training these two weeks were full of farang food, air conditioning, stories, hot showers, comfortable beds, western style flush toilets, great friends, and hours upon hours of speaking english.

Now I'm finally back at site and am readjusting to village life again. I came back on Sunday around  7am and was immediately horrified at the smell of my house. It didn't take me long to discover the source was toucay and gecko poop all over my floor, table, toilet, and even bed. There are also spiderwebs everywhere and its a bit "chilly" now that rainy season is in full swing. I started cleaning my house and got very dirty from all the poop and spiders I had to clean up and kill. It wasn't warm enough for my regular cold water shower so I boiled water and poured it into a bucket with cold water to take a luke warm bucket bath. Sunday I was "thainapped" and worked in the fields as free labor all day. We got to the field at 7:30am and immediately started picking fruit to be sold in the market. By 10am I was thinking to myself we have to be done any time now. By 2pm my back felt like it was going to split in half, and by 4 all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Now everyone wants me to go help pick their fruit but fortunately I have had the excuse of needing to work the last 2 days.

Tomorrow I am apparently going to meet a flying monk. Everyone is very excited about me meeting him and want me to ask him how he flies. I'm pretty sure I won't be able to do that without laughing so I'll probably just pretend I don't understand what they are telling me to say. Village life feels a lot less like a vacation after 2 weeks of western amenities but I am still loving every second of it.

Pictures to follow soon! Sorry for the long delay in updates but now that I'm back at site I should have a bit more time.

4th of July Festivities

For some reason this year I was feeling more patriotic for the 4th of July than I ever have in the past. I'm not sure if it was being abroad, serving in the Peace Corps or a combination of the two. On the 3rd I was feeling a bit down and depressed about not being home for the 4th and then started thinking about how many events and holidays I will miss out on over the next two years. So I decided instead of moping around and being a downer I would celebrate the holiday to the best of my abilities and share it with my friends and neighbors here in Thailand. 

Immediately after work on the 3rd I took my roundtrip 20k bike ride to the store to buy all the supplies I would need for my 4th of July feast. Unfortunately it rained the whole ride back. When I got home word had spread around the neighborhood that I was throwing a party the next day and I started to get worried that maybe I hadn't bought enough food. I had to work all day on the fourth but during lunch I got a ride to the store again to buy even more supplies. When I finally got home from work at 5 there were already 4 women waiting to help me start the cooking. We made chicken, pepper, mushroom, and onion skewers, pineapple salsa, spicy tomato salsa, homemade fajitas, and grilled pineapple. Over 15 people showed up all wearing red, white and blue. Some of them came and then found out the dress code and went home to get changed. I even gave a little speech to everyone about what the day means to Americans. The party was a huge success and tons of fun for both me and my neighbors. Plus I got to bring in the 3rd goal of Peace Corps and share my culture with my host country. 

I plan to continue this tradition and celebrate all of the holidays I'll be missing out on at home with my new family here. Hopefully it will keep me from getting all mopey dopey self-pitying around the holidays. Plus I'm sure everyone here appreciates the free food.

Enjoy the pictures!

Last week I had two friends come to visit who speak no Thai. While they were here I was translating all day long and was starting to realize how awesome I am at speaking Thai. Then I made two huge language blunders. Instead of saying "my friend wants to have a picture with you" I said "my friend wants to have children with you." The very next day I called someone else the devil. Apparently I'm not quite as fluent as I like to think. I'm a little worried that soon I won't be fluent in English either. I am literally forgetting how to say things and throw in Thai words in the middle of sentences when I am speaking to my American friends. I think in Thai now too and am just waiting to have my first dream in Thai.

Having friends come to visit was great. I got to hang out with people at night, make american food that someone other than myself would enjoy, talk about how crazy my life here is, and share a little bit of my American side with some of my new Thai friends and family. I've still been very busy at work planning my first big program and networking. This week I'm taking a little vacation in Bangkok to see a friend and I couldn't be more excited. It's going to feel good to be in a place where I can blend in with the crowd for a few days.

All photo credit goes to Andy Carlson! 

The Time I Touched the Prime Minister

I was planning on sharing a lovely little video of my new home, but alas I am horrible with computers and can't figure out how to upload. So instead you'll have to settle for written words yet again even though I am sure you all miss my voice terribly and would be overjoyed to hear it.

Everything is starting to feel so normal here I sometimes think I have nothing to write about. But when I really think about it, crazy things happen to me every single day, I just don't realize how crazy they are anymore.

On Sunday I touched the Prime Minister. Yupp, that's right, I touched her. Can you imagine just being able to walk right up to the President and touch him without anyone, including the secret service, even noticing? A crowd was swarming around me and I was getting pushed from behind by this little elderly woman, so instead of falling I reached out and steadied myself on the Prime Minister. Immediately after I turned to the person next to me and said "I just touched her, I just touched the Prime Minister." Of course in my state of shock I was speaking English not Thai so the person just ignored me and went about their business.

Monday was yet another Thai holiday so I had the day off from work. Instead of lounging about my house I went to the wat with the neighborhood and ate ridiculous amounts of free food. Lots of families made gigantic pots of soups, or fried rice, or Kanom Sen Naam neiow (my new favorite food) and dished out bowl after bow free of charge. There were also various flavors of ice cream, fresh tropical fruit, and assorted kanoms (snacks). Families do this to tamboon, sort of like earning merit. For 4 hours I ate bowls of food, fruit, and snacks and ran around playing with the children who are attached to me by the hip these days.

Yesterday when I got home from work there was a blessing ceremony for me and one of my neighbors. We had to sit on the ground and hold on to string for about an hour while an elder chanted things, sprinkled water on us, lit candles, tied lots and lots of string around our wrists, and dumped seeds into a cup. Everything was going smoothly until the dumping seeds part. He takes a small handful of seeds, dumps them into a cup, and then one of the other elders separates them into pairs. In order for this to be successful and for the ceremony to end there must be an even number of seeds and an even number of pairs. If everything isn't even than they keep chanting and repeating this process over and over. After about ten times when things still weren't working out I heard people mumbling about me not having good luck and something about my "quan" being left back in America. At this point I started to get really nervous and was praying that it would finally work. I could just picture them casting me out and saying I was cursed. Fortunately it eventually worked and I heard no more mutterings about my quan. All of the elders then gave me their blessing wishing me happiness, good luck, a Thai husband, and to never go back to America.

The rest of the week I went to the office and worked on plans for projects. I drafted a 4-day project idea on teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS as well as created plans to teach games and songs at the local daycare. I am training the teachers there in different was to teach English to the kids while making it fun and entertaining. That's starting next week and I'm a bit worried about how it's going to go. 

Now I'm off to enjoy a weekend in Chiang Rai with a few of my coworkers!

Sorry for the delay in updates (if anyone other than my mom is actually reading this). It's been a busy few weeks and I don't even know where to begin. Rainy season has begun which I have really been enjoying so far. When a storm rolls in the temperature noticeably drops several degrees and I might even stop sweating for a minute or two. This also means that I got to buy a pretty awesome looking rain outfit for riding my bicycle around.  All I can think about is how similar I look to the tin man from The Wizard of Oz.

In other news I went to a river blessing to thank the river for everything it does for us. In the  middle of the ceremony a snake came out of the river and someone murdered it. I went to teach english at a camp in another district and got to hang out with a few of my volunteer friends. Went to Chiang Rai and ate pizza. Worked at the health center and am developing programs about teen pregnancy, drugs, and HIV/AIDS to introduce at the schools. Gave a speech in Thai to some very important people about a program I am planning. Working on more dengue mosquito traps. Went to a waterfall and national park and hiked with  some neighbors. Started weekly bike rides with one of the youth groups. Teach english twice a week. Set up my new home. Started a gigantic vegetable garden. Killed a scorpion. Saw a mosquito the size of my fist (I'm still not convinced this was actually a mosquito but the kids kept telling me it was). Fended off many attempts of people to marry me to their brother, father, nephew, uncle etc. etc. 

And now I'm off to play with kids at a nursery school, enjoy the pictures!

My neighbor. She stands in her door and yells La to get my attention while I eat breakfast. How could I not be happy waking up to that?

Playing in the sand outside my house. They love to plant weeds and then water them hoping they'll grow. I'm always terrified that they are going to unearth a scorpion, but so far I have only found one massive one and am hoping that I never encounter another.

My beautiful new home! I live in this big house all by myself. It's in a family compound so I always have neighbors over and eat dinner at a neighbors home or someone comes over to eat with me. I'm pretty sure I could get away with never cooking since people bring me plates of food every night.

Living room.

Kitchen.

Laundry room/kitchen sink/bathroom sink. This washing machine is the kind that you have to put the water in drain it, run it, drain it, run it, drain it, run it, and then spin it to get a bit of the water out before hanging the clothes outside. Unfortunately the spin part doesn't work and it's rainy season so the clothes I washed 3 days ago are still not dry. I have to wash a lot of my clothes by hand because my washing machine is a bit violent but I love having it for towels and things.

Bedroom.

More pictures

 The three pictures above are from an earth day program I held with one of the local youth groups. The public health officer came and discussed recycling and waste management in our village, where it all goes, and what they can do to help cut down on the trash. Then I taught the kids how to make picture frames from recycled materials, and toys for kids from plastic bottles. We also made headbands and hair supplies from scraps collected from the local seamstress. Originally we were supposed to spend the morning cleaning up the area and picking up trash before doing the crafts but it had been raining for 48 hours straight and showed no sign of stopping so I had to cancel that part of the project.

Some of the finished products from the youth group. I am going to help them sell the hair clips and headbands they made at the market and around the village to help raise money for their group

.

 Mien hill tribe women in their traditional clothing. They wear these outfits every single day no matter what the weather is. I don't know how they do it.

 Mhong hill tribe women. Their outfits are incredibly intricate and take them months to make. I am going to be working with one of the community groups to help them market their designs to tourists.

 One of my saturday english lessons. I have only been able to teach twice so far and have had around 40 kids each time. Yesterday a woman I didn't know came up to me and told me her kids love learning english with me and wanted to know if she could come to the lessons as well. 

 Island in the Gulf of Thailand. Went here for a 3 day business trip with everyone from the government office.

 Village health volunteers helping me make the dengue mosquito traps. Rainy season is fast approaching and the public health officer is worried about a large increase in Dengue so I am really hoping that these traps work and we can put them out into the communities. We just had the first case of Dengue for the season, and from peoples reactions I am assuming it is much earlier than expected.

 A typical afternoon or saturday/sunday at my house. I gave the kids some paper and colored pencils to keep them entertained for a few minutes. Yesterday before I could even unlock my door I was surrounded by 7 kids asking me to play with them.

 When it rains my house is swarming with bugs. For some reason all of the bugs die during the night and the ants come out and eat or drag away all of the bodies but leave the wings. This is a picture of the wings left behind in just one of the rooms in my house. I have to hide in my room under my mosquito net as soon as it gets dark. I turn no lights on upstairs and bring snacks, water, my book and anything else I might need with me to try to avoid getting attacked. I can't even shower after dark because I will be covered in bugs before I can dry off. 

I'm famous

This afternoon I was walking by someone's desk at the village health clinic and saw that the website they had up on their computer had a big picture of me right in the middle. I stopped and stared for a second before someone came up and said oh you like? I frequently wondered what they did with all the pictures they take of me and now I know. I'll post the link to the site below. If you click on the picture of me on the main page a lot more pictures come up. Underneath the photo it says "Health Innovation, Mosquito Traps." They are all of me teaching people how to make dengue mosquito traps. We only made a few traps and set them up around the health center. In a few weeks I will go back and check the traps to see if they contain a lot of larvae. If we think they are effective than I hope to hold a training for all the health volunteers in my community so they can implement it in each of the neighborhoods. I think I may also be starring in a video on the website soon. Yesterday I dressed up as a doctor and examined someone with TB, then diagnosed him, and gave him medicine. All of this was in Thai and I was really struggling trying to say it so the video should be pretty funny. The video is to raise awareness of TB and encourage people to call a doctor.

This week I went on a trip with the government office to the Gulf of Thailand for 3 days, which involved sitting on a bus for about 40 hours. I also moved into my new home! It is starting to look pretty nice and I love having the freedom to eat cereal for breakfast and go to the bathroom without someone asking me how it was. I have a lot more stories and photos that I promise to post next week but I have no time today or tomorrow (it takes a long time with the slow internet)  and won't have internet again until next Tuesday. But enjoy the website!

http://www.ck203.chors.org/