The elementary school English Camp last Friday was many things simultaneously, this blog entry is on the joy of having other volunteers come to the house for a day or two. I haven’t had a house guest who’s an English speaker except for once or twice in the last 11 months, so having 5 arrive was great. I counted my forks and then bought more so we wouldn’t have to share at breakfast. I wanted the kind of forks that don’t bend when you use the handle to scoop out peanut butter. The ones that bend are the ones that are available in my small town. I bought all they had in the hour-away city but the flooding in Bangkok impacted distribution of products to the stores so it still wasn’t enough. I had a trip to Bangkok for the dentist within the last month, so I checked there and got what I wanted. I bought mugs as I’d been drinking my tea from a cereal bowl. I cleaned more than I generally do (sad but true). I tried to line up things to sleep on but only got grass mats, sigh. I had a wide mattress for the married couple and an air mattress for one other guest, one guest brought an inflatable thing that unfortunately had a leak, and that left two of us on the floor on mats and one on the floor because the thing leaked. Oh, well, it wasn’t for long.
The best part was having folks around for conversation and reality checks on my experience in Peace Corps-Thailand. I’m fascinated how hungry I am (starved?) every time I’m around another volunteer, to compare notes, get a sense that everyone is startled by what occurs at work, and try on other people’s strategies and attitudes about coping with the huge differences between what’s normal in our working lives back in the US and what’s normal here. And others are about as intent on this agenda as I am. The easy parts of this experience are enjoying the people of Thailand, the children, the small-town setting, the climate, and learning so much every day. But the easy parts aren’t as interesting as the challenges. So we talked and talked about what’s making our heads spin and various ways of responding. This conversation is about “negatives” but the conversation isn’t negative, it’s focused on trying to understand things that are, I hope, just outside our comprehension. It’s about finding ways to go about our days somewhere between our local Scylla and Charybdis: the whirlpool is adopting the local Thai attitudes and approaches to work which in a sense looses the whole ship, and the rock shoal is insisting on being too American in our focused, intentional, linear, driven way. Choosing to err on the side of the rock shoal only “looses a few sailors” but the ship doesn’t go down. Or maybe I have it backwards. Anyway you can see what my choice is in this matter. I’ don’t want to resist Thai approaches and attitudes, in the sense of working against them, but I am not willing to conform, either. I don’t know how to do the “salad bowl” metaphor that we’re each an ingredient and we don’t have to be the same. And metaphors fail at their edges, I do want to become somewhat more Thai, sort of, somehow, slightly, in ways that I may or may not be able to articulate. Here’s for sure: Thailand is teaching me to tolerate being confused at some level for months on end.
I also very much enjoyed planning and cooking foods that would be reminders of home. The planning was fun because I planned many options and the ones I didn’t prepare are things I can make for myself in the coming months. I tend to favor “pantry meals” which are things made from non-perishable items in cans, dried, pickled, and so on. When I get home from work I don’t really want to head into town to buy foods. Shopping for food familiar to farangs (foreigners) is limited in my small town, of course, and I’m not so good at thinking up pantry style things to make with local ingredients. That could be a project for the next months, too. (Although Thais don’t typically prepare pantry type meals, so the choices are very limed.)
At any rate, here’s what I managed to prepare: walnut rosemary bread, oatmeal bread, a Christmas bread for breakfast that was sort of like heavy panettone, Waldorf salad, German potato salad, and pasta salad with tuna. I found salami, cheese, and Dijon mustard in the foreigners’s market in Bangkok, as well as several ingredients for those things above. We had roast chicken, vegetables, and fruits available locally, and some Thai dishes. The teachers repeatedly stopped by with things they thought we might like, for example coconuts, to drink the fluid inside. By the time we left for Bangkok to enjoy the rest of the 3 day weekend I had put a huge amount of food into the freezer and now that I’m back I can live on vegetable soup, casseroles, and bread pudding made from the surplus of bread for some time. I set out the leftover pasta salad and some other excess items on the back porch as I’m befriending the nearby dogs.
Oh, and the camp itself was a big success, I think. This elementary school English camp was such a positive experience that I’m looking forward to the next English camp, which will be a the junior/senior high school. It might be next month, but I’m not yet willing to believe that the first date we set for the event will actually be the date of the event. Time will tell.
Love Is the Only Rational Response 