In many ways, I have followed in my cousin Erin’s footsteps. She went to Cornell and I went to Cornell. She studied abroad and I studied abroad. She got a nose ring and I got a nose ring. Erin is eight years older than me, and as a kid, eight years seems like a generation. While I was still playing with Barbies and learning to write cursive, Erin was going to parties and learning to drive. Erin is the oldest of our cousins, followed by four boys-the children of my mom’s two older brothers. I am the sixth in line, followed by my sister and my Aunt Sharyn’s kids. There has always been a slight “generational” gap between the younger four and the older five. With the memory of me (and Sarah and Ali and Drew) as toddlers, it can be bizarre for my older cousins to see me as grown up. I remember the ruckus caused when, as an eighteen year old high school graduate, I cracked open a beer at a family event, and how my Uncle Steve covered my ears at a vaguely vulgar comedy show...when I was in college. I’ve always looked forward to spending time with that part of my family. We are a fun bunch, between our legendary annual crab feast and whiffle ball game, complete with official Guttenplan family tee-shirts, and our dance floor domination at family weddings. But family events usually involve all of us out in force, with at least 20 relatives milling about, and Erin and I never spent a significant period of time together one on one.
After college, Erin took a job with EF, a company that facilitates student travel, from study abroad programs to au pairships. She was extremely successful and at 30 had one of the top positions in the company. Being the adventurous and brave woman she is, Erin decided to leave her job and begin her own company-Edge of Seven. Basically, Edge of Seven is for people who are interested in Peace Corps-like work, but cannot commit to two and a half years. Outside of Peace Corps, the options for international volunteer and development work are slim. The choices mainly consist of NGOs, which are not interested in short term workers and require years of experience; or fluffy, expensive, “gap-year” organizations that may provide valuable experiences for the volunteers, but few benefits to the local people. Erin’s company attempts to bridge that gap. She is partnering with multiple, grass-roots organizations across Nepal, India, Cambodia and Thailand, with projects including teaching English, school construction, and HIV/AIDS education. The organizations are mostly small and community based. Volunteers can serve for anywhere from few weeks to a few months.
In September, Erin left America and embarked on a five month groundwork-laying trip across Asia. She has visited dozens of project-sites, volunteering, living with families, and building relationships with native staff. On December 28th, she arrived in Thailand, and had her first week off since she left. Our plan was to spend a few days at my site and then head to Chiang Mai for New Years weekend. I met her at the bus station and we spent the evening wandering around Phitlok, drinking beers on the river and eating authentic Thai food. We could not stop talking. I wanted to hear everything about her travels, and she wanted to know everything about my life here. We also had hours worth of family-related topics to discuss, from our grandfather’s funeral to her brother’s wedding in August. Aside from our family connection, we are bonded by the mutual experience of living on our own in Asia. We talked about what we’ve learned being here, and how our existence as outsiders in a foreign world has engendered a deeper appreciation for our family. We are both independent, free-spirited women. We love travel, we love adventure, and we cannot allow someone else to dictate our paths for us. That said, our families are part of who we are, and many of our opportunities and choices would not have been possible without them. I love it here, but I cannot wait to be reunited with my family, and to be home for weddings and holidays, of course, the crab feast.
Back to site, Erin arrived on the day of my “hygiene Olympics”, the culminating day of round 1 of my soap project. I may have mentioned this before, but here is a re-cap. Proper hand-washing is a rarity here. There is rarely soap, and if there is, it is in a bar form which attracts more germs than it eradicates. My students are young and many of them live in their grandparents, who are old and prone to illness. Diseases are easily transferred and kids regularly miss school for being sick. My initial idea was to find money to buy liquid hand soap for the school and then teach the kids how to use it properly, but hand soap is quite expensive and not locally available. Then at our counterpart conference in July, I met a Thai teacher who knew how to make hand soap, cheaply and easily from scratch. Pii Orasa and I used our time at the conference to design a soap and hygiene awareness project, where we make soap at school using the students help, teach them about proper hand washing technique and why it is important, and then sell the soap to help sustain the project.
Over the past few months, we’ve been working towards our final goal. We were granted a small amount of the school’s funds and then found out where to a buy a natural glycerin soap base at a cooperative in Phitlok. From there, we experimented with the recipe, trying different herbs and recipe permutations (is it better to steam the soap before or after adding the milk?; how many times should the lime juice or tamarind be strained?). The students helped us every step of the way, from squeezing scores of limes to helping us stir the soap mixture. We had the kids bringing recycled plastic bottles from home, and the completed soap was put into these bottles to teach about recycling and cut down on costs. Finally, we designed labels for the bottles, negotiated pricing, and planned the Hygiene Olympics.
Pii Orasa was responsible for the presentation, about how to properly watch hands (a 7-step process), and using an informational poster from the local health station, went through each step and when to wash hands. Then I divided the students into 6 teams, with soap related names, like the Bubbles and Team Foam, and we did a series of fun and educational activities, like a hand-washing-step relay and a fireman bucket race. We taught about germ transmission by putting the students in lines and covering the first students’ hands in baby powder. They then shook the hands of the student behind them and so on, to show that what is on our hands can easily spread to others. This was, logically, followed by a rousing game of Germ Tag, where the “it” people were germs and tried to capture the healthy students. Next, Pii Orasa led a question and answer game, where she read statements about hygiene and the kids held up a yellow card if they thought it was true and a red card it they thought it was false. All in all, it was a memorable afternoon, and I like to think the kids learned something amidst all the bubbles.
The next evening, Erin, Beau and I head up to Chiang Mai after a day of New Year’s activities at school, eating mugata with my neighbors, and vegging at my house. The bus station was a mob scene, and our 7:1 pm bus had standing room only. We arrived in Chiang Mai at 1:30 am, and met a few volunteers at an outdoor bar where they had little fires burning to keep people warm, it was actually chilly and I was able to wear a scarf. The weekend was busy and filled with obscene amounts of foreign food (hamburgers, tacos, breakfast bowls, spaghetti, cheese, waffles, chocolate). We saw Avatar, visited the zoo, got haircuts and massages, and relaxed at outdoor tables with Bloody Mary’s and imported beer. We brought in New Year’s on a rooftop bar, standing on straw mats and watching the fireworks explore in the air above the graceful white lanterns sent up with wishes.
Next week is the mid-service conference in Bangkok, where we have three days of routine medical check-ups, followed by informal training sessions where we discuss our service so far. Soon, the new batch of volunteers, group 122, will arrive, and it is hard to imagine that I will be one of the “senior” volunteers. I remember meeting the senior volunteers last year during training, and thinking how brave and wise they seemed. They had lived in Thai villages on their own for about a year, and while I knew that was my fate, it still seemed daunting and far off. Now, with it being almost a year since I left America, everything seems normal. There are still challenges and a perpetual series of ups and downs, but little is surprising anymore. I would never want to go through pre-service training again, it is confusing, exhausting and stressful. Still, there is something magical about the initial shock of finding yourself in a completely new world, and finding yourself lost amidst all the things you thought you knew but do not, or were unaware you knew at all. Good luck to all the 122ers, enjoy your last weeks at home, because 27 months is a long time and you may not recognize yourself after it is over.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Post 26: Deck the Halls with Banana Leaves
In a country where over 95% of the population is Buddhist, I was not expecting much out of the holiday season. Temperatures are in the 70s and someone asked me if Santa Claus was Jesus’ father. My attempts to teach a lesson about Hanukkah garnered blank stares, as to understand about Hanukkah, one must first understand about Jews. Or at least know what a Jew is. I realized that just because there is a Thai word for “Jew” (Yiew) does not mean the Thais are acquainted with it. It is like when I first arrived and my host sister persisted in holding up oblong pink fruit covered in green hair and exclaiming “rambutan”, because that was allegedly the English word for it. These things aside, it just didn’t feel like the holidays. Thousands of miles away from my family, cold weather, and lights, there was nothing holidayish to put me in the spirit. No latke parties where I try to break the world latke eating record (48); no distressing Sarah by picking out the most rotund Christmas tree available; no rushing through the menorah lighting and obligatory Jewish songs in order to feel like we’ve earned our gifts; no Christmas herbroy’s and cheesecake (it’s a Grant thing); no watching White Christmas until the TV shuts off in protest.
Fortunately in the universe’s effort to combat my scrooginess, Katelyn received a holiday package from home. It was filled with comfort food, house decorations, and Christmas movies. Katelyn generously invited a four of us ladies to her house in Loei to share in the festive wealth. After the lengthy journey to her home in Patchom district, in the far ends of Thailand on the mountainous Laos border, we arrived to find it hoodie weather and Christmas carols audible from the street. The weekend started, as all good things should, with mashed potatoes. Katelyn’s mother sent her instant garlic mashed potatoes, as well as canned corn, cranberry sauce, and instant chocolate pudding. We tossed in some locally purchased grilled chicken as a turkey substitute and cleaned our plates in an embarrassingly quick period of time. There was dish-licking to involved, and I am ashamed to say I experimented with dipping cranberry sauce in gravy in order to prolong the meal. I wouldn’t recommend it, by the way. Over the next day, we strung up Christmas lights, read horoscopes, and watched Home Alone. We snuggled all together under blankets and became so absorbed in the movie that it was bizarre and disorienting when it ended and we found ourselves in Thailand. Afterwards we played naughty Pictionary with a holiday theme, and a rousing round of Apples to Apples. The Christmas spirit was slowly creeping its way in.
Christmas Day was still 3 weeks away, but my newly found holiday cheer led me to stop at the big grocery store in the city to purchase flour and baking soda, so I could make rice-cooker cookies for my students. Time moseyed on as it does at site. I was teaching the “time” unit to my older students and got into an argument with Pii Som who insists we use military time in America. I went with Jon and Film to his friend’s house, on a lake in the mountains in my district, where we ate outside overlooking the water, and I read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy while everyone else played the very dull and incomprehensible card game for upwards of 8 hours. We made two more batches of soap at Thangam, experimenting with different recipes, and I received a call from the country director saying he picked me to be this quarters “Volunteer Success Story”. I made peanut butter from scratch in my mortar and pestle and attempted tomato basil soup, which came out more like gazpacho. I planned classroom activities for the week before Christmas, read four books, and worked on a collage to decorate my austere and icky green bedroom walls.
For some reason, Christmas is part of the Thai national curriculum, and thus both my schools wanted me to lead all the students in “Christmas games”. I tried to explain that schools are closed for the holidays in America, and we don’t really play Christmas games, per say. We may make cookies, put up decorations, and sing carols, but that is not the same as having an arsenal of games to keep 850 students occupied for an entire afternoon, as was expected of me. Luckily other volunteers have faced this same problem, and there is a consecrated Peace Corps document filled with just the kind of activities the Thais would go nuts for, like pin the nose on the Rudolph and throwing “snowballs” made from wet tissue paper at a snowman target. I also made two big posters with pictures from Christmas around the world, from Mexico to Russia to India, to show that Christmas is not only celebrated by Anglo-Saxons, and a Hanukkah poster which images of menorahs, dreidels, latkes, and animals wearing kippahs and a talis. At my little school, we spent an enjoyable and goofy hour saying “Merry Christmas” in different languages, based off a list I found online. So Priecgus Ziemassvetkus, Maligayan Pasko, and Hristos se Rodi to you: Merry Christmas in Lettish, Tagalog, and Serbian respectively.
On actual Christmas morning, I told each school I had to go to the other, and spent a leisurely morning making banana nut pancakes from scratch (amazing), drinking coffee, and making Christmas cards. I also opened the presents my dad sent from home, including a set of beautiful Egyptian cotton sheets, which will make sleeping on my floor mattress worlds more comfortable, as well as Christmas CDs and my movie, White Christmas. That afternoon, I went to my big school and facilitated three hours worth of Christmas games. At the end of the activities, I was handed a gift. I was touched and a goofy grin spread over my face. The teacher then looked at me and said in Thai “because today is Santa Claus’ birthday, really truly”. Oooohhh, silly me. The gift was not for me, not to say “Merry Christmas, we know it must be hard being here alone for Christmas, and by the way, thank you for dedicating hours of your free time to constructing a giant reindeer poster and snowman”. No, rather the gift was for the over-sized ninth grader dressed up as Santa, and it was handed to me to thus hand to him, so they could take a picture. I was feeling Scrooge-like again.
Kelsi, too, was feeing a bit curmudgeonly, and came to hang out at my site for a day. I met her at the bus station, so I could reserve tickets for my New Years trip to Chiang Mai. New Years is an actual Thai holiday, and thus schools are closed and volunteers are allowed to leave site. Chiang Mai is a big New Years destination however, and even five days in advance, all the night bus tickets were sold out, meaning our journey will be rather inconvenient. By we, I mean my cousin Erin who will get here tomorrow for a visit. She is setting up her own volunteer travel company with projects in Nepal, India, Cambodia, and Thailand, and will be in Thailand for about a month scouting sites and making contacts (www.edgeofseven.com, check it out). But she is taking a week off to visit me at site and then celebrate New Years together.
Anyway, Kelsi and I went to the big grocery store and bought materials to make pasta for dinner (in the rice cooker of course). We had both made cookies the previous week, and I had leftover pancake batter. It promised to be a rather carbohydrate heavy event, but what evokes Christmas better than carbs? We also bought apple juice, cinnamon sticks, and the ubiquitous Hong Thong (sweet Thai whiskey that tastes like rum) to make cider. My kitchen’s rather limited options meant that the cooking process took hours, but we did it over our delicious hot rum cider and with Christmas carols in the background. We attempted to watch White Christmas (which I already watched the night before), but promptly fell asleep between the comforting drinks, full stomach, and lovely new sheets. The next morning, I woke up in a New Years cleaning frenzy, and feverishly scrubbed, swept, and organized my entire house. Tomorrow, I go pick up Erin at the bus station, Tuesday is the “hygiene day” at my little school, meant to be the culmination of the soap project: round 1, and Wednesday there is a New Years party at my big school. Then I head up to Chiang Mai, for a weekend I hope will involve cousinly bonding, sunrise adventures, and falafel.
Fortunately in the universe’s effort to combat my scrooginess, Katelyn received a holiday package from home. It was filled with comfort food, house decorations, and Christmas movies. Katelyn generously invited a four of us ladies to her house in Loei to share in the festive wealth. After the lengthy journey to her home in Patchom district, in the far ends of Thailand on the mountainous Laos border, we arrived to find it hoodie weather and Christmas carols audible from the street. The weekend started, as all good things should, with mashed potatoes. Katelyn’s mother sent her instant garlic mashed potatoes, as well as canned corn, cranberry sauce, and instant chocolate pudding. We tossed in some locally purchased grilled chicken as a turkey substitute and cleaned our plates in an embarrassingly quick period of time. There was dish-licking to involved, and I am ashamed to say I experimented with dipping cranberry sauce in gravy in order to prolong the meal. I wouldn’t recommend it, by the way. Over the next day, we strung up Christmas lights, read horoscopes, and watched Home Alone. We snuggled all together under blankets and became so absorbed in the movie that it was bizarre and disorienting when it ended and we found ourselves in Thailand. Afterwards we played naughty Pictionary with a holiday theme, and a rousing round of Apples to Apples. The Christmas spirit was slowly creeping its way in.
Christmas Day was still 3 weeks away, but my newly found holiday cheer led me to stop at the big grocery store in the city to purchase flour and baking soda, so I could make rice-cooker cookies for my students. Time moseyed on as it does at site. I was teaching the “time” unit to my older students and got into an argument with Pii Som who insists we use military time in America. I went with Jon and Film to his friend’s house, on a lake in the mountains in my district, where we ate outside overlooking the water, and I read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy while everyone else played the very dull and incomprehensible card game for upwards of 8 hours. We made two more batches of soap at Thangam, experimenting with different recipes, and I received a call from the country director saying he picked me to be this quarters “Volunteer Success Story”. I made peanut butter from scratch in my mortar and pestle and attempted tomato basil soup, which came out more like gazpacho. I planned classroom activities for the week before Christmas, read four books, and worked on a collage to decorate my austere and icky green bedroom walls.
For some reason, Christmas is part of the Thai national curriculum, and thus both my schools wanted me to lead all the students in “Christmas games”. I tried to explain that schools are closed for the holidays in America, and we don’t really play Christmas games, per say. We may make cookies, put up decorations, and sing carols, but that is not the same as having an arsenal of games to keep 850 students occupied for an entire afternoon, as was expected of me. Luckily other volunteers have faced this same problem, and there is a consecrated Peace Corps document filled with just the kind of activities the Thais would go nuts for, like pin the nose on the Rudolph and throwing “snowballs” made from wet tissue paper at a snowman target. I also made two big posters with pictures from Christmas around the world, from Mexico to Russia to India, to show that Christmas is not only celebrated by Anglo-Saxons, and a Hanukkah poster which images of menorahs, dreidels, latkes, and animals wearing kippahs and a talis. At my little school, we spent an enjoyable and goofy hour saying “Merry Christmas” in different languages, based off a list I found online. So Priecgus Ziemassvetkus, Maligayan Pasko, and Hristos se Rodi to you: Merry Christmas in Lettish, Tagalog, and Serbian respectively.
On actual Christmas morning, I told each school I had to go to the other, and spent a leisurely morning making banana nut pancakes from scratch (amazing), drinking coffee, and making Christmas cards. I also opened the presents my dad sent from home, including a set of beautiful Egyptian cotton sheets, which will make sleeping on my floor mattress worlds more comfortable, as well as Christmas CDs and my movie, White Christmas. That afternoon, I went to my big school and facilitated three hours worth of Christmas games. At the end of the activities, I was handed a gift. I was touched and a goofy grin spread over my face. The teacher then looked at me and said in Thai “because today is Santa Claus’ birthday, really truly”. Oooohhh, silly me. The gift was not for me, not to say “Merry Christmas, we know it must be hard being here alone for Christmas, and by the way, thank you for dedicating hours of your free time to constructing a giant reindeer poster and snowman”. No, rather the gift was for the over-sized ninth grader dressed up as Santa, and it was handed to me to thus hand to him, so they could take a picture. I was feeling Scrooge-like again.
Kelsi, too, was feeing a bit curmudgeonly, and came to hang out at my site for a day. I met her at the bus station, so I could reserve tickets for my New Years trip to Chiang Mai. New Years is an actual Thai holiday, and thus schools are closed and volunteers are allowed to leave site. Chiang Mai is a big New Years destination however, and even five days in advance, all the night bus tickets were sold out, meaning our journey will be rather inconvenient. By we, I mean my cousin Erin who will get here tomorrow for a visit. She is setting up her own volunteer travel company with projects in Nepal, India, Cambodia, and Thailand, and will be in Thailand for about a month scouting sites and making contacts (www.edgeofseven.com, check it out). But she is taking a week off to visit me at site and then celebrate New Years together.
Anyway, Kelsi and I went to the big grocery store and bought materials to make pasta for dinner (in the rice cooker of course). We had both made cookies the previous week, and I had leftover pancake batter. It promised to be a rather carbohydrate heavy event, but what evokes Christmas better than carbs? We also bought apple juice, cinnamon sticks, and the ubiquitous Hong Thong (sweet Thai whiskey that tastes like rum) to make cider. My kitchen’s rather limited options meant that the cooking process took hours, but we did it over our delicious hot rum cider and with Christmas carols in the background. We attempted to watch White Christmas (which I already watched the night before), but promptly fell asleep between the comforting drinks, full stomach, and lovely new sheets. The next morning, I woke up in a New Years cleaning frenzy, and feverishly scrubbed, swept, and organized my entire house. Tomorrow, I go pick up Erin at the bus station, Tuesday is the “hygiene day” at my little school, meant to be the culmination of the soap project: round 1, and Wednesday there is a New Years party at my big school. Then I head up to Chiang Mai, for a weekend I hope will involve cousinly bonding, sunrise adventures, and falafel.
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