i'm a bad blogger

sorry that i haven't written anything in a very long time, it is a combination of having absolutely no free time and accomplishing and seeing nothing interesting. the last big event was that we all went out for thanksgiving dinner on the program's tab. it was amazing, even though the only thing that you could stretch to say it was thanksgiving was turkey. we went to the sofitel hotel and it had this absolutely ridiculous buffet that had everything from sushi to turkey to salmon and lobster. i basically ate enough for three days in less than an hour. it was great.

the regular structure of the program is over at this point: we aren't going on any homestays or doing units. this is the part that used to be called "independent study" (and was advertised that way) and is now "group project time." my project is creating a website (basically a wiki) that is for socially active study abroad students. it could be really cool but we probably will only have time to set it up, not to get it running, which kind of sucks. we are also doing a magazine and a discussion forum to sort of go with it. I am also doing a project where we are going around to different communities we have worked with and giving 3 or 4 kids a camera and asking them to take pictures of anything that they would want the world to know about where they live. then we are going to go back and get them to explain why they chose the pictures they did. i don't know yet how we are going to put them all together, what form the display will take, but we have gotten one camera back already and the pictures are really cool and i'm really excited. that's pretty much my life right now, i only take breaks to sleep and we are still falling way behind in the schedule, oh well.

i have to figure out where to go for the week after the program while i'm still here. if you have any ideas let me know.

steph

asoke continued

ok hey everyone,
sorry about that little whiny bit there, i'll try to control that. I just have a few more points to make about my experience in this buddhist community. the thing is, and please anyone who knows anything about buddhism correct me if i'm wrong, it doesn't seem to match up in general principle and practice. for example, i have a hard time accepting a religion that tells me that the reason i was born a woman is because i was probably a rapist or some other kind of sexual deviant in my previous life and so was born as a lesser, more sexually loose being. however, the general ideas of buddhism make a lot of sense to me. it's a little disheartening and a little freeing because i have absolutely no compulsion to commit to another religion, i just have some good ideas about how i want to approach the world. maybe. at least for this month.

i did have some really good times there though. i got to jump into this huge mud puddle and mix clay with rice husks with my feet for a few hours (think i love lucy) to make a cobb house. we made bricks out of it and felt very useful and sustainable and stuff for a while at least. i also got to play this game called takraw. it's similar to volleyball in a way: the point is to keep the ball from hitting the ground on your side by getting it back over the net. but, you use a small wicker ball and you can only use the parts of your body to play the ball that you would be able to use in soccer. it is really fun and the people who are good at it are just amazing to watch. we were not good at it but we got to play with a few kids from Asoke and with my favorite driver (we have the same 4 drivers wherever we go, they each have their own van and they are all really cool). i also got to spend the afternoon one on one with one of the kids teaching him english. i have to say, i'm a pretty bomb teacher, but that was a lot of fun.

i think that's it for Asoke, i don't think i'll vacation there, but it was a pretty cool experience overall.

listen to "spirit in the night", somehow it has become a part of my consciousness; i haven't been able to get it out of my head for weeks.

steph

you know Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day? That was me today. I've decided this program sucks and I'm pretty much ready to go home.
good night, fon dee

in the biggest transition ever

after the shock to the system that was the red light district, we went totally the other way these last few days. we spent three days in the Asoke Buddhism compound. Asoke is this sort of controversial form of buddhism where they all live together, do all their work together and share all of their wealth. they practice at least the 5 precepts and they only eat at 9am and 5 pm, and then only vegetarian meals. they start with Dharma discussions with the monks at 4am, then follow a strict schedule until 9pm which is official bedtime. no one wears shoes. while we were there we had to observe all of their rules and live as they did. generally i didn't get it and i came away feeling like they were more of a cult than a religion. another strike against that setting in general, aside from the waking up at 3am thing and the no meat thing, was that the entire place was covered in gravel. that hurts. a lot. especially when my spoiled little feet haven't been outdoors without shoes since i was 10.

to be continued when i have some more time.

no pithy title (a little explicit so hohmanns and other small children skip this one please)

hey hey hey
so we are in the middle of a unit called 'movements and trends' basically it is the unit for all the cool stuff that didn't fit in anywhere else. we had Sulak Sivaraksa come in to talk to us about Engaged Buddhism (basically that being a good buddhist doesn't mean meditating until you are detached from the world, but that instead you should use your enlightenment for positive social change) If it hadn't been for my basic distrust of organized religion because it corrupts the ideas that it is founded upon and makes them into often meaningless practices, a lot more of his speech would have made sense to me.

on an entirely different note we also went to visit SWING (Service Workers in Groups) in the Patpong, red light, district. The group provides support, meals, sexual practice education, and english lessons to male sex workers in that district and in Pattaya (basically prostitute island). we had a really great exchange with them, everyone who works there is a former sex worker, and hearing how they got there was often surprising. most of them had college degrees and just couldn't find work or were discriminated against and fired for being gay or transgendered. They all were extremely open and had a really great sense of humor, not in a sad, oh look how well they're coping way, in the simply funny outgoing way. they gave us a rundown of the practices there, how many sex bars there were, how the owners treated the workers, and how much they made. basically they make nothing, it all goes to the house, so most of them stay way below the poverty line. this leads to a lot of risky behaviors since clients know that they can just pay more for the workers to risk their health. we didn't talk to any street workers, but we were told that, if caught by the police, they are fined 500 baht per condom they have on them. surprisingly, they are not willing to carry them and therefore dont use them regularly.

after their presentation we split up into groups of six and went with one of the SWING workers to see a few sex shows. I am not going to describe what i saw here because i don't know who is reading it, but i have never seen, and i think never will, anything like that. we started at a male gay bar, though the majority of the performers are straight. it was extremely graphic, honestly it sounds silly to even call it graphic, it was out of control. most of the people on stage seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor about it, we were ringside so we could hear them talking and see their faces really well. this was not so good when liquids were flying or when they had obvious pain on their faces. luckily for me i was sitting right next to the SWING guy who spoke pretty good english and answered every question i had. i certainly won't forget it anytime soon, and a few very popular songs may forever remind me of some events that i would rather never picture again. although, as i said, they seemed like they were having a good time, and the act included a lot of slapstick and jokes which was a little hard to get used to, the SWING guy was telling me that when he was working he cried every day for the first 3 months.

after an hour or so there we moved on to a women's show. this one was MUCH more tame, it was mostly just strippers, but there were some special acts. there was the pingpong show that thailand is unfortunately so famous for, and also some tricks involving razor blades and beer bottles. the girls that were performing here just looked really disinterested, clearly checked-out most of the time, so that was more depressing. our last stop was a transgender bar and all i have to say about that is that most of the girls there were a heck of a lot hotter than me, it was crazy.

ok i think that's it, don't be surprised if this post keeps getting edited to have more or less content. i can't figure out how to convey what it was like to see this stuff without having seen it. also there were some funny moments that i really can't describe here without being way overly graphic but shoot me an email or something if you want to hear 'em.

think that's it, im sure there will be more soon, tomorrow we have an exchange with the Secretary General of ASEAN and then go to an engaged buddhism wat for a few days, then do a mini HIV/AIDS unit. im sure ill have something to say about most of that.

talk to you soon.

vacay

hey all you kids out there, i decided to suck it up and do another post. this one is not going to be very exciting because all i have done since the last is go on vacation! which was just ridiculously gorgeous. myself and 7 others went to Koh Chang (elephant island), in the gulf of thailand, for a week. not to knock those classy new jersey beaches, but this water was Blue! i couldn't handle it, ocean water is brown, greenish if you are lucky, but surely not blue. not only was it blue but it was a different shade of blue depending where you were, crazy. we went on a 5 island snorkeling trip one day, and though the snorkeling part wasn't so good under the water, the surface of the water was just breathtaking. and where we were was pretty untouched and so some of the islands looked like something king kong or a dinosaur or something would bust out of, i'm really sorry that i am just not talented enough to explain them, but it was the prettiest place i have ever been. i got pretty badly sunburned that day, go figure, and i swear i bruised my tailbone on the the way back to our island because we had a psycho captain and it was about to storm. our boat spent more time in the air then on the water i think.

my other major activity was an elephant ride. my friend and i went out for two hours on an elephants back. it was definitely an experience, it was kind of weird and our elephant was having none of the whole thing. did you know that elephants growl? no, not growl, roar? not that trumpety thing you hear but a sound not much different than a lion. so that is a scary sound. and when you are sitting on the back of a elephant repeatedly making that sound, and you can feel his chest vibrating with it through your feet, it's a pretty terrifying experience. but we survived it, we even got to go bareback on the elephant and swim with it in the river: another slightly scary experience because you never feel like it would be that hard for him to just trample you to death and have less weight to carry on the way back. overall it was a great time and though the whole idea may be questionable from an animal rights standpoint or some crap like that it was fun and no elephants were harmed. at least in front of us. also, an added bonus was that they had 3 baby baby elephants there too and i got to play with one. and by play with i mean feed a banana and have him wrap his little trunk around my arm. it was the cutest thing i've ever seen. mom i want one for christmas.

the rest of the time i just sat around by the pool or on the beach, which was less than 10 steps from our little bungalow and read and got burned. i also scored some minor injuries in a skinny dipping incident that i won't go into, but suffice to say that you should be sure that if you are somewhere where tides change that a) your clothing is nowhere near the water, it may get swept away, and b) be sure that there is water deep enough to swim in that is not mostly coral and/or rocks. just some suggestions that my friend told me.

i feel like there was something else i wanted to say, but i forget it now and it must not have been important anyway.
ps they celebrate halloween in thailand!

have fun with the time change, they don't do that crazy stuff here.

read The Master and Margarita it's some good stuff.

lata gatas

supporting The Man

this last unit was entitled "Land." as with all the units previously (urban=slums, food=organic, water=dams) what it really meant was something much more specific:mining. what made this one so interesting, however, was that the issues hadn't actually begun. we stayed in a community where a potash mine was planned but had not yet been given a mining liscence by the government.

basically here is what happened that caused one half of the group to hate the other for being cold-hearted and the other half to hate them for being irrational. guess which side i was on. we started our unit by doing an exchange (meeting) with the mining company. the man who gave the presentation was this canadian geologist who seemed to really know his stuff but was not so good with the speakin good and promoting good PR. he basically said that potash mining is already way cleaner than most other mines, and that the company is going out of its way with this mine to come up with new, extreme, measures to make sure that there are almost no environmental consequences. from a scientific perspective, from what i could tell never having studied mines, they seemed to have all the bases covered as completely as possible. he, being a scientist, had numerical proof for everything he said. then we went to see the villagers. EVERYTHING that is sort of rebellion based in thailand is run by NGOs so we met with this one NGO (one person) a few times. she just kept saying the same thing over and over. these issues that she had were legitimate in terms of the fact that, as a farmer, she should be worried about salt run-off ruining her fields. the problem, however, was that she just kept saying that there was nothing the company could do, no way they could prevent that. that there was no way to take the salt out of water once it was there, that there would be huge smokestacks everywhere.

someone was lying. no not lying, they were just not accurately portraying what would happen. and these two sides have been fighting for 13 years. they have never actually talked to each other. the NGO said there was no reason for anyone to go to listen to the company because they would just lie anyway, and the company just kept saying the villagers were under educated and just would never understand. in the end it came down to us as a group having to decide whether the gut instinct of a farmer or the proof of a scientist was more believable. i decided to listen to the facts, and spend a lot of my time judging this NGO for not getting herself educated and still thinking she could lead a few thousand villagers. i just felt that even if the company was lying, it is just basic debate skills to know your opponents argument so you can combat it.

then we talked to this "youth group conservation club" which was a complete lie in and of itself but the kids (a 19 and 23 year old) talked about how they could care less about how much potash they use in their own life, or to think about the world's dependency on mined materials. all they cared about was that it wasn't built near their homes, it could be their neighboring village for all they cared, just "not in my backyard." this is a completely legit feeling, i would probably feel that way, but it was just a little bit of a shock to hear them just be like, i don't care, why are you asking this, when they were calling themselves the youth's answer to conservation issues.

it was rough. i felt like a bad person. end of story.

but not really the end of story because now i am basically dwelling a lot on the issue of what value facts hold for me, and our society. and how easily they are manipulate. we all know this. but i still think they mean more than someone who just says that they know it because they know it, even if they can't prove it.

who would you believe?

peace yo
ps all yinz are dirty too so don't judge me.

I have lice

there are bugs making their home in my hair.
do you have any idea what this does to your sanity?

wet and wild

so this last unit was the Water unit. i don't remember if i have been explaining the whole unit thing or not but in case i have i will not do it here. we went to two different communities that were affected by dams. the first one is a semi famous dam apparently, called Pak Mun, and we only stayed there for 3 days 2 nights. for the first time i didn't stay with a whole family, it was just us and Pa. he was pretty much the coolest guy i've met here so far, he was like 70 or something and was a medicine man guy. he took us out into the forest to find herbs and trees and mushrooms and whatever else to use in his medicines. he tried to explain it to us but, you know, we don't speak thai, so it was mostly in gestures and most of them indicated a release of constipation. anyway he gave us this little spiel about the government not allowing him to use the forest anymore and how he thought the government was dumb and could shove it because he was using it anyway. i have developed an ability to respond correctly even when i don't actually have any idea what is being said, basically i can read what their general point is i.e. "this sucks" or "can you believe this" or whatever and respond with the proper head shake or chuckle. this makes them feel like we are communicating, which is good, but also gives them the false impression that i can understand thai which comes back and bites me in the butt later when they expect an actual verbal answer and i can never provide one. i'm not going to lie, i was Pa's favorite, he just loved me.

we had a lot of fun there; i drank freshly collected wild honey, and chewed some kwai (water buffalo) jerky that i had seen rotting on a shelf along with all the bones the day before. we also got to len footbon (play soccer) with the neighborhood kids and scored some injuries doing so,, those kids don't mess around with football. but we had to move on to a different community with a different dam. we went to rasi sali village next and i stayed with my meh, nung sow, and pa. Meh thought we were a riot and had never seen a foreigner before, my little sister was 17 and also thought we were just ridiculously entertaining, pa was scared of us and wouldn't come into the house until we were asleep. if i were them i would feel gypped that i got defective farangs because both me and the girl i was staying with were sick. i was just developing a really good cough and she got pharengitis while we were there and had a 103 fever the whole night. the family raised cattle and had 2 that lived in the yard. the baby decided that it hated me and charged me everytime i walked outside, it even stuck its head through the window whenever i was inside the house near its pen. that cow was the devil in my opinion. unfortunately everytime it charged at me they would beat it with a stick so i had to pretend it wasn't doing so while still running for my life. it was tricky. thats about it for that trip for me, we didn't really do much and the family didn't want to take us out with them when they were working so we didn't see much local stuff, mostly we went shopping at the markets with the teenager. my friend who was living across the street got bit by a poisonous millipede and had to go to the hospital, her hand swelled up to mickey mouse proportions. all in all it was a pretty eventful trip, though i really didn't learn anything more about how these people are being screwed over by the dams. they just are.

have fun at home everybody, drink some orange juice for me, i am craving it like crazy.

bai teow to the hospital

ok so i know i haven't posted anything in a long time; there was nothing to post and then i was on a homestay. but i will start with the most recent adventure: a trip to the thai hospital. being a farang (foreigner) we got seen pretty quickly. we being myself and two other girls who have what is lovingly referred to as "the black lung" in our group, and is currently affecting at least 15 to some degree. the three of us had decided to finally suck it up and go to the hospital. so we had some doctor type guy check us out in a little office type thing, surprisingly he didn't even look in our throats or anything, something i would have done had someone come in with problems with their throats, instead he just asked us a few questions and sent us to get x-rays of our lungs. we were taken to the next room by one of the nurses whose uniforms are just the most ridiculous looking things ever, they have a short white skirt with a little white collared shirt, stockings, high heels, and one of those little nurses caps that i haven't seen anyone wear since the 50's. all in all it was a pretty successful trip, it turns out i have pneumonia in my right lung, so i got these horse pills of antibiotics and was sent on my way. the other two girls had bronchitis. so yeah that was my latest adventure, i'm bringing back my x-ray as a souvenir ( i think, unless it gets erased when it goes when the x-ray machine at the airport, i don't know how science works) so that's good. by the way pneumonia is so not as intense as i thought it would be, i just have this weird pain in my lungs and this very very strange buzzing/vibrating in my lungs when i breathe.

so i guess i actually learn things too...

i realized that it seems like i do nothing but wait around from trip to trip. this is not the case at all. my days are filled with what seems like a whole lot of nothingness but lasts 8 hours. this last unit was the 'food' unit as i may have mentioned. so basically we learned about organic farming. which, you know, is a kind of interesting topic in a very vague sort of way. do i want to eat chemicals? no, thanks for asking. should farmer's have major health problems because they used chemicals? ummm also no. beyond that i didnt really understand how we could have a whole unit on why organic is great. sure we touched on fair trade which is sorta kinda related to organics, and we met some really great organic farmers, but throughout the unit i couldn't help feeling that there were so many more important things to talk about if we were going to talk about food. i couldn't seem to convey to the more crunchy of the bunch that organics didn't matter if people couldn't get food at all. and i don't even mean in the 'there are starving kids in china, finish your carrots' kind of deal. i mean that in our own country there are an overwhelming number of people on welfare and food stamps and other support programs that can't even access nutritional food, let alone special, high priced organic foods. people in the group were all excited about going on the 100 Mile Diet (which is pretty much the opposite of organics these days because the organic market is so mass produced because it is such a fad right now that most organic products come from farther away and have been more processed and messed with than the regular foods so that a Wallmarter can feel like they are in on the trend) but what i was saying is that people were talking about these huge organic movements that they are going to start so that our little farming families in Surin will benefit without even thinking about anything that could perhaps be done to solve larger food issues. i was just extremely disenchanted with this unit which proclaimed itself to be about the problems with distribution of food, solving world hunger, and looking at how food affects us personally.
at the end of the unit we were supposed to write a paper essentially about how to start an organic movement. i was kinda pissed that i was forced to continue thinking about what i felt was a moot point and instead i wrote about how freely the term "poor person" is thrown around to distance the 'real' people from those who dont care enough to get themselves out of debt. i found out that 1.2 million more people are living below the poverty line in the suburbs than in the cities in america. poor people are all around! can you imagine! anyyyyyway yeah the director of the program did not think it was a worthy topic for a paper because it is not about thailand. surprisingly however, there are 'poor people' in thailand too! and they dont get treated like the regular people either! so when i get back i guess i wont know how to solve world hunger (because im sure if they would have tried they could have taught me how) but i could give you a step by step to become an organic farmer.
thanks for sitting through the rant. buy organic, buy fair trade, but be nice to 'poor people.'
love ya

Animal Encounters of the First Kind

Thanks for reminding me mom.
I completely forgot to write about the animal encounters that i wanted so badly from this whole program. those of you who spoke to me before i went may remember that the only clear goal i had was to see an elephant up close. well now i have touched one! i fed it bamboo (i think)! it was sort of amazing and sort of sad and not at all the kind of closeness to an elephant that i desired. it was some man riding an elephant through the streets so he could sell the food to tourists to let them feed it. it was still kind of a baby and the man on it had an ice pick thing that i never saw him use on it but was clearly intended for that purpose. dispite those sad conditions it was still really cool to be able to have an elephant wrap its trunk around your arm. though a little terrifying after seeing a "tame" elephant wreck jeff corwins arm on anderson. anyway it was really cool.
i had an equally touristy encounter with monkeys. thousands of monkeys. the little ones that are known for being extremely volatile. there was this really old wat that had a whole monkey reserve right outside it where you could feed them. they would just stand around you and reach up to take the food from your hands. or growl from behind you, race up, and rip the plastic bag of food from your hands, then tear the ear off of another monkey because it tried to touch the bag. a simulataneously amazing and terrifying experience. yeah that was fun.
i think thats it. catch yall on the flip side.

farming continued

i just have a few more updates about my last homestay. not much more interesting happened, but for posterity and my mother's sake i am trying to record most of what i did. one of the most fun things we did is to go swimming in the Mon (sp?) River. we just all jumped in in our clothes during a tour of a community forest. my feet sunk in the nastiest feeling mud ever, and the river had grasses and branches and things one would rather not identify floating all through it, but it was the perfect temperature and had a little pier thing you could jump off of. right before we were all about to get out a herd of kwai came swimming through us to get to the bank. a whole herd of water buffalo sharing our swimming hole! it was terrifying! but fun of course.
thats about it for the homestays, right now we are doing an activity called "follow the food." there are 5 groups who each pick a product and are supposed to follow it to its source. i am in the coca cola group so we are supposed to follow a bottle of coke. ours is not working out the way it was planned, because no one will let us into the coke factories, shaaaady. so today we decided to try to find the coke recipe online, find the ingredients, and make it ourself. what resulted was a very unique drink that sort of tastes like a coke if you try really hard to believe it, but is really tasty. it has a lot more flavor than a coke and we have to mix what we made with soda water to make it carbonated and watered down enough to be drinkable. i prefer this final product to a regular coke, and no union leaders were killed in the process. anyway, if you would like the recipe, let me know, it is quite the adventure to make. tomorrow we go to bangkok to the major coke factory. i had pizza for lunch today and it made me sick, which is just great. not only am i not totally used to thai food, but western food doesnt work either, yay!
peace everyone, wish my bro Jeff a happy (belated) birthday! he's a teenager!

earning my farmer's tan

alrighty i just got back from another homestay! this one was for our "Food" unit about organic farming and the farm bill and fair trade and stuff like that which i was vaguely aware of but really had no idea what it was. I spent 4 days living with a rice farming family in Surin province. They were really really nice people who had a rice farm, raised cattle and sold snacks and fruits and vegetables in a green market. i got to go out with the mom to the rice fields in the morning to weed. i don't know how many of you have ever seen a rice field or maybe pictures but it is all in like a foot or so of water. i took of my shoes and sunk like 4 inches into this thick mud and waded through pulling weed from between the rows. i had a little straw farmer's hat but my head was too big for it so i got crisped. the fields were gorgeous, and went on for as far as you can see with little huts and temples scattered throughout. all around the village there were kwai (water buffalo) roaming around. i thought they looked like a cross between a hippo, a cow, and The Lorax. (They have bushy mustaches and ears.) the family caught their own fish in the area, and the major pests of the fields are little fresh water crabs so they caught them too, and they fried them up for every meal, or used a mortar and pestle to smoosh them into a fish paste that looked and smelled and tasted like chum (i guess because that's what it is). They fried the little fish and you just popped the whole thing in your mouth all at once. I mostly just stuck to the fried eggs.
I also got to see our neighbors, who i think were also family, spin silk out of the silkworms. i never really thought about it, but i would have thought that they sort of spun silk like a spider and you just collected it or something. it turns out they are encased in this silk cocoon and you just throw a whole bunch of them into boiling water and pull the silk off. they have a little spool type thing that the string goes over and twists around so that it spins into a usable thread. i am doing a really poor job explaining it but it was really cool! i'll post pictures or something. by the way the rest of my group who actually have unbroken cameras are posting on flickr. if you go to flickr.com and search for cieethailand07 a bunch should come up. i have to go eat now, i will finish this later.
to be continued......dum dum duuuuuuuuh

chaplin in thailand

ok so i had a little interesting moment, at least i thought so, and figured i'd share it with all you fine people. i came into my room last night and my roommate was watching City Lights, a charlie chaplin movie. i love those movies so i was really excited to finally be able to connect with my roommate over something (we don't get along all that well). i sat down and was immediately confused to find that the whole thing was dubbed in thai. it took a good 20 minutes to explain to her that the movie was actually silent, that there was no english in it to translate. i don't think she ever got it; i think she just decided i was really upset that i couldn't understand the thai. anyway i was still excited because i figured what could transcend culture better than a chaplin movie. watching him run back and forth behind the ref is funny no matter where you are from. what i found out, however, is that even something as simple as a silent movie has tons of cultural quirks that are interpreted differently everywhere. (for all you sociocultural anth people think "shakespeare in the bush") here is the best example that i could understand. for those who are not familiar with the film "the tramp" falls in love with a little blind flower girl, very cute. at one point he drops her off at her house and gets down on his knee to kiss her hand and hold it to his face in that cute old movie way. at this point my roomie started laughing hysterically. i was already all thrown off by the really weird thai that was dubbed over everything, so i was like 'what are you laughing at, this is supposed to be a serious romantic part.' she kept laughing and said 'didn't you see him kiss her left hand?' for those of you who have read a few of these posts you will know about the bathroom procedures and how the left hand is reserved for wiping and nothing else, left handed people have to change their eating habits so their left hand never comes near their mouth. so when chaplin makes this big romantic gesture in my eyes, in hers he is once again being stupid and ridiculous. yeah so i just thought that it was funny, it's not even language that separates us, its everything. not in a negative way, it just does.
peace everyone, my next homestay is in a few days so hopefully i will have something more interesting to say.

"things are going to start happening to me now"

so yay! i finally started actually getting involved in this program and found something to do that i am interested in. tomorrow i am going to go with three other people to interview some teachers and administrators at a slum school. we are looking at the kind of relationship the teachers and the school has formed with the kids from the slums, what kind of exceptions they have made in light of their circumstances, and hopefully will find out how these teachers think extreme poverty has affected these kids' education. it should be cool because the school we are going to is known for being really close with the community and pioneering some interesting programs to deal with impoverished families. anyway that should be cool, i have to right the questions tonight and everything because it goes better if our interpreter knows where we are going with our questions in advance. i was getting worried because all the causes people have been getting behind here just don't strike me; i.e. proper disposal of medical waste and locations of dams. but helping kids is something i can get behind. also for dinner today i had fried (? i'm not exactly sure how they prepare them) maggots, silkworms, grasshoppers, crickets, and silver dollar sized crabs for appetizer. anyway i'm feeling pretty good about being here and everything now, so sorry if i gave the impression that i was not before. it rained all day today, which is not exactly out of the ordinary but nonetheless a little annoying. all the teachers say that it is funny how all the students love to go out and play in the rain while all the thais run inside, they think we are insane. i have definitely gotten over the urge to play in the rain. moral of the story: go out and try a fried maggot, they are like extra crunchy popcorn.

FOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!

ok here's one that everyone can enjoy. i thought it would be nice to let you all know what kind of foods i am eating on a day to day basis. i was worried before the homestays about being forced to eat chicken hearts or blood pudding or fried bugs or something equally ridiculous and/or gross. what i have discovered however, is that i far prefer the homestay food to the food on campus. the food is just so much tastier (literally it has more flavor, often SPICY, make you sweat spicy) and more substantial. lots of other people complain because we eat so much rice and it just fills you up then disappears in an hour or so, but i freaking love it. i LOVE sticky rice. i love the way it tastes, i love being encouraged to play with your food, and i love that everyone takes it from the same basket and uses it to eat from the same plate. in case you have never been lucky enough to experience this, sticky rice (phonetically cow neow in thai) is kept in a circular basket thing that everyone then reaches into and takes a big handful of. you use your left hand to roll it into a log, and then rip little balls off with your right hand. then you use the little ball of rice to pick up pieces of meat or soak up some sauce or whatever from the communal plates in the middle. basically i want to eat this way all the time. granted no one really washes their hands, and you may have read earlier about the bathroom procedures, which is what makes a lot of people uncomfortable with this eating style. honestly though, it doesn't really bother me, ppl are germy, everything is dirty, i'm pretty sure we will live. ok i guess this just turned into my ode to cow neow but hey, it had to be said: sticky rice is pretty cool. the food that goes with the rice is usually chicken (gai) variations, or pork (moo). almost everything is flavored with lemongrass which i started out hating and now would just rather there was much less of. there are also a lot of curries, and most things are fried. i love the way they fry eggs, the difference from the ones at home is something i am unsure of, but am a definite fan of, i think it fried in fish sauce or something. sounds good right lol. the food at the university is much more bland, there is a lot of fried rice that is completely non-spicy, and uninspired pad thais. i'm sure that as i learn more thai and am able to actually ask for the things i really want the whole experience will be better. ok outta time, i have to go to a peer tutor for thai who will once again shatter any good feelings i have about my progressing in thai by not understanding one word with my pronunciation.
peace, love, and chocolate for all.

the clarks

i just want to take a minute to pay tribute to the clarks. i have loved them for a while, i have had clarks days, i have annoyed carolyn by only playing them for hours on end then singing them for the next few days, but i learned today that they are really the best thing there is. i spent like 2 hours in a van actively trying not to throw up from car sickness (side note: there are technically lanes on the roads in thailand, there are yellow lines painted on the ground, but they are more suggestions than anything. everyone is constantly weaving through lanes and changing speeds to narrowly avoid head-on collisions or smashing one of the hundreds of motorcycles that literally do whatever they want) anyway i put on the clarks full blast and tried to concentrate as hard as i could on the music to avoid thinking about what was going on on the road and in my stomach. in short i think the answer to anything in the world can be found in a clarks song. know them, love them. they will pick up your mood no matter what is going on, and, yeah, what more can you ask for?

the group process

so you may or may not know that this program was advertised to be student run and heavily dependent on the "group process," now affectionately known by us here in thailand as "the process which shall not be named." it is all we talk about, it is all we do. we hold sessions then have a meeting to discuss what we found out in the last session then a meeting to talk about our feelings about these sessions then lunch, then a session to recap the previous sessions. we do this everyday with a few changes. although everyone who came here had some idea about the extensive reliance on the group, but also thought that because it was "student run" we would have some say in what we focused on. the program also advertised a 4 week independent project at the end, a really cool idea which drew the majority of the participants to the program. we have now found out that neither the student run portion nor the independent project portion is included in the program this semester. we expressed a great deal of dismay at this loss of the independent project and a general feeling of having our lives completely out of our control in small groups of 4 or 5 people in a session entitled "hopes and fears."
when we did this session we were in small groups, encouraged to air out any general discomforts, and then to write them down for posterity. later that day the staff collected them and said they wanted to type them all up for us. the next day we had a meeting with the program director in which he used all of the fears we expressed,in what we thought was a safe and personal space, to accuse us of being extremely negative, untrusting, hostile, and generally just not cool people. he then said if we were not willing to hand ourselves completely over to his program the way it was then we should just quit right that minute and he would design a regular lecture-based classroom program for those who just couldn't handle the genius of this progressive program. it just felt like this ridiculous attack and basically made me feel like the person who is running my life for the next few months is a child who can't have his work criticized. anyway i decided to stick with the program anyway, because a big reason i came here is to put myself in situations i am uncomfortable with, and i am sure as hell uncomfortable with giving my life over completely to a man and a program i do not trust. i'm not sure at this point if i will come back brainwashed, inspired, or just completely beaten down, or if i will even know which i am. so yeah that is where i am at right now.
after all that i had to sit through a 4 hour car ride that 4 out of the 10 people decided to turn into a sing along. thats right, pity me.
hope everyone is doing well, sorry this one sucked.

point of process

ok so this is just to let anyone who may be reading this know that i have now decided what i want the purpose of this blog to be, which is basically a travel journal. i was thinking before it could just be a way to let people know the major events, but i don't feel like keeping a separate journal so i'm just going to do it here. i will skip (most) musings about the color and consistency of my bowel movements for your sake, but much of what i write here may not be very interesting. on the topic of pooping i just want you all to imagine (or maybe recall if you are lucky) the experience of having explosive diarrhea on a squatter toilet with no toilet paper in a bathroom who's walls don't go to the ceiling less than 4 feet from a family who does not speak the same language and is eating dinner. exciting right? anyway that is what's going on so i'm sorry if some of the following blogs make little or no sense or are just plain boring.

i forgot the best part

i forgot to talk about the best part of the slum homestay. the last night we had a dance party in the street and it was amazing. the houses are all really close together and the whole community acts like family, most of them really are, so people would just stop by to dance a little or just watch the farangs (foreigners) make a fool of themselves. there was lots of beer and a couple of ladyboys and this one really chubby guy who was doing this ridiculous/amazing cheerleading dance which someone took a video of and i will find a way to post here because it was crazy. ok so maybe it isn't as interesting when relayed as it was being there but, as usual, we made the most real connections with these people to whom we can usually only say "what is your name?" and "is this food spicy?" t0 when beer was involved. parties bring people together even if they can't speak the same language. we are pitching the idea of a bar crawl to learn more thai and really connect with the university community to our teachers, i'm not sure if they will go for it though.

slumming it

ok so as you may have noticed i do not have the energy to write in a remotely good way, deal with it yo. so i just came back, about 10 minutes ago, from my landfill/slum homestays. I spent one day at the landfill, we did a "tour" for about 4 hours, and worked with the scavengers for like an hour. In case you did not know these people existed, which i did not, this is what they do: they live next to the landfill and go out 4-6 times a day to go through the new garbage as it is dumped in the landfill to find recyclable materials to sell back. they live off of the money that they make from that, and they pretty much have to work all day to do so. we slept there that night and then we went out with our families for the 7am garbage dump to help scavenge. most of you know that i have a slight problem with smells, so i struggled through most of the time there, you would think that there is just a garbage smell, but there is in fact a whole range of subtly different smells that hit you at different times so you can never get used to it. we put on these rubber boots and cloth gloves and used these rake/pitchfork things and just waded in there. i honestly have no idea how they do it everyday. there were sooo many maggots just everywhere and you have to reach in and brush them off with your hands to see if their home is a valuable piece of garbage. i also had some pretty nice encounters with roaches, belize broke me in to that a little bit, but having a roach crawling on your neck is just not something you can really prepare for.
after spending just the one full day and one night at the landfill we went to the slums. they are these mini communities that cover pretty much all of the land next to the railroad throughout the city. we all expected them to be really intense and run down, but it turned out we were in one of the "rich" slums, and the one i was living in was actually a little nicer than my first homestay. the only thing was that the ceiling was really low, i couldn't stand up straight in any room. we were there for two nights and three days, and i dont really have much interesting to say about it honestly. my "meh" (mom) worked as a cook in the market so i spent a lot of my time just sitting there while she cooked. if you want to know more about slum issues or landfill issues i have a lot to say, but it would bore most and is just too much work at the moment. hope everyone is having fun where ever you are, i am leaving again today for a "retreat" the location and conditions of which our group leaders refuse to tell us. i'm praying for a week stay in the hotel sofitel, which is a five star hotel right down the street from us (literally right next to the slum community as well) but i think the chances of that may be slim. later dudes.

forays into buddhism

unfortunately i know absolutely nothing about buddhism and this program does not teach a whole lot about it, none up to this point in fact. we did, however, have this really cool buddhist ceremony to welcome us to KKU. It was a string tying ceremony that is supposed to call back the spirit that protects you in case it got knocked loose on a long journey. i knew nowhere near enough thai to understand what the monk was saying, but he said some prayers for a long time (while my leg fell asleep and reached a point of numbness that i never would have thought possible because there is a specific way that girls are supposed to sit to make sure that their feet are not pointing towards anyone, its sort of the cheerleader sit but more tucked under) and then he went around and said a prayer to each of us, put some flowers around our neck, and tied a little white string around our wrist. then they handed out more of them and everyone did the same to their homestay families who had come to the ceremony too. it turned into a pretty cool thing because since none of us knew thai we just sort of made up little prayers for the person's life and wished them health or whatever they wanted. it is hard to explain but it was really great and really created this great sense of happiness and family. corny i know but hey. we all ended up with a couple of inches worth of strings around our wrists, now it looks like we all have really thick, really poorly made, off-white bracelets on. i am clearly well on my way to being crunchy. none of us know how long we are supposed to leave them on though. anyway i hope everyone at home is having a great time too, and that you are enjoying any free time that you have, because i have none and, let me tell you, it kinda sucks. well that was a downer ending but yeah. peace.

baby's first homestay

so i have just come home from my first homestay, and it was definitely an experience. we were all assigned a nung sow (phonetic thai for little sister) from the school that we went to for our thai classes. mine was a third grader named view. my room was a king bed, bed being a very general term for a pallet on the floor on which you sleep, on a concrete floor covered with contact paper. there was a huge cabinet thing to create a kind of room area with one foot of room on either side of the bed. the rest of the "house" was some sort of recycling depot, i think they may have colllected bottles and stuff like that to sell back to make money, im not sure. so the whole thing was basically a garage; it had a tin roof which only came down to about five inches above the walls. which means that along with everything that came in through the doors and windows which were never closed, these huge lizards were always climbing over the walls to chill in the house. the rest of my family seemed to all be part of an extended family which i could never really get an explanation of because i dont know enough thai at this point. they all lived in this house across the "courtyard" aka mud pitt which i only saw the living room of. there were 4 kids who hung around with my little sister and me all the time, and some neighbors, so the room was always packed with crazy kids. My hong nam (bathroom) is like the majority of thai bathrooms unless you are in a western tourist hotel: a squatter. there are these two little ridged foot spots on the sides of a flat porcelen thing with a hole on one end. you squat over it. when you are done you use a bowl to scoop water out of a bucket next to the "toilet" to "flush" (move the waste products towards the hole) and also to splash yourself to get clean. i really have not yet gotten used to that and don't see it happening anytime soon. the shower is a huge basin of water with the same type of bowl which you fill with the cold water to dump on yourself. the water just goes down a drain in the corner of the room. that was actually not bad at all because it is so hot all of the time. i got ridiculously bit up by mosquitos or something, during a class i counted and i have at least 112 from the knees down. they looked pretty horrible for a while but i took a benadryl and some of the swelling went down. it has all been really interesting so far, there is about 20 minutes of down time per week which is getting exhausting, though this weekend we dont have too much. i only got about 4-6 hours of sleep a night at most in the village because my family had alot of chickens and roosters within 20 feet of my would-be-sleeping-head and dogs running around and for some reason they were always going in and out on motorcycles all night. the yie's (grandma that ran the house and did all the cooking) kitchen was two electric burners and a fire outside under a tin roof type thing, which is also where the table where we ate was. my favorite thing to eat was cow neow (sticky rice) and my yie thought that it was hilarious, she started referring to me as cow neow by the end.

messages from the other side of the world

So I decided to just create a blog so that i don't fill up anyone's inboxes with lengthy descriptions of every little thing i do. hopefully this way you can just check to see if i am still alive at your leisure.