Post 27: Guttenplans Take Over Asia

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.