Two years since I last wrote in this blog and I'm around the world again. So I decided it was time to shake the dust off this old blog and use it once more.
This time I'm writing from Thailand, where I am visiting my mom who is a Peace Corps Volunteer here. I have a pretty cool mom. :)
First impressions of Thailand ... friendly people, HOT, lots of bugs, beautiful country, too many mosquitoes. I was here twice in 2004, for about 2 weeks each time. Once was to visit a friend teaching English in the south. The second was through work for the International AIDS Conference, held in Bangkok, and afterwards we traveled briefly to the beaches, also south. Parts of Bangkok have changed a lot in these past 7 years, there are now subways and sky trains and all sorts of public transit that was not around when I was here before, lots more developed in even just these seven years. I never did make it up north on either of those trips. This time, I'm up north.
Mom is placed in a village in the north east province of Roi-et. The rainy season has started and it is very green here (apparently it was much browner when she first got up here a couple of months ago). So far the rainy season means it storms several times a week, sometimes more, usually at night, but not always. I got caught in a rainstorm while site seeing in Bangkok and hung out on a covered bench for a good forty minutes watching the downpour with my tour guide.
She works in a government office, similar to a county or city government. She has been doing a variety of projects and figuring out a plan for her next two years. Everybody wants her to teach English, but her job is not a teacher, her job is CBOD - community based organizational development. She is doing a needs assessment, meeting with different community leaders, doing research on a variety of different health and social issues. She's interviewing elderly people in the area and is working on a project to get funding and a program for seniors, I'm sure she will have a post on that soon with more details. She is teaching a couple of English classes - one at a preschool where she works with the teacher. She's slowly going through the alphabet and doing story time on flannel boards. She also holds an English class at her house on Saturday morning for local neighborhood kids. She does the same stories. It's super cute. I'll post pictures later of those. And then she does one afternoon a week where she teaches English to her co-workers. I haven't been to that one yet, I think it will be tomorrow afternoon. The planning and prep for those classes already takes up a lot of time and she wants to make sure she has plenty of time for her other projects, so she's trying to set boundaries and not do more classes.
I think I have pretty major jet lag. Every afternoon I get super sleepy, that might also be the heat and humidity that I'm not used to. Fourteen hours ahead is hard to adjust to. I'm pretty much covered in bites, even after applying repellent daily. Mom has an electronic bug zapper, and let me just say that might be my favorite thing that she owns. :)
Seeing mom here is a bit surreal ... it is quite a bit different than her life back in Newport (in fact about as different as you could imagine). She had one of the best kitchens back home. Now, well, lets just say it doesn't really quite compare. The good news is that she has a sink, and a stove, and a washing machine, and a shower (all things that are not guaranteed to any PCV). Every day there is some sort of gross and/or dangerous bug that has crawled into her house that she scoops up with a dust pan and throws back outside. Her water will go out for hours at a time (or at least I think that is the longest it has gone out at this point). She bikes to and from work (always in her helmet unlike everyone else in Thailand except other PCVs) and "Sawa de ka" / says "hello" to everyone she passes. While still the local celebrity and farang, they are now more interested and curious to see who this new white person is with her. They all give her the thumbs up when she introduces me as "luk sow" (daughter).
She works with very nice people and has a posse of ladies who have taken her in. They take very good care of her and make sure she has what she needs and always take her to new places. But that also means that they think they have more control over her schedule than mom does and also think they know best. Having such concerned friends can be a double edged sword. But I for one am glad she has them around. It's good to know there are people looking after her. Even if they do bug the crap out of her sometimes. :)
More later, time to go make dinner, then close all of the windows before it gets dark - have to open them when we get home from work in the afternoon because it is so hot in here but close them so the house does not get swarmed with bugs. Just one of those daily occurrences that you don't really think about when you live in it, but again is just that much different than how I'm used to seeing mommy live.
KJ
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