Mountain Mama

Today's Thoughts...

Contrary to my colleague’s hours snoozing surreptitiously and…not so surreptitiously at his desk (hahaha, he’s gonna kill me), typically, I manage to find myself with roughly 37-40 hours of work per week between classes, meetings, office hours, tutoring, poetry contests, lecture readings; I don’t even know what all goes on constantly, but somehow about 90% of the time, I end up a part of it. For example, when it came about that a regional poetry contest was being held at a nearby university in Chiang Mai, a packet of poems and two students plopped at my desk and in about three weeks, I was expected to prepare them to recite with fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. Considering that most of my students have the same speech impediments in English (that becomes dat, vulnerable becomes wulnerable, change becomes shange), I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to get these girls to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets and Wordsworth’s image-laden rhymes with even discernibly accurate pronunciation let alone a modicum of comprehension. On top of that, the head of the department insisted that I had to teach the girls rhythm and rhyme… for arhythmical and non-rhyming poetry. No clue. No clue whatsoever. I just shook my head and said okay. Well three weeks later after countless afternoons practicing “red leather, yellow leather” and “unique New York” and whatever other theater tongue-twisters and activities I threw at them, including a night trip to a café where the girls recited “O Captain, My Captain” as a three-woman skit for lookers-on, they were ready and off they went. I meanwhile, was thrown into a minivan and sent to Lamphung for the 11th annual speech competition to coach and cheer on our three contestants there. At the end of the day, the head of our department asked me to stay on teaching for another year, jumped out of her seat and at a grand 4’11 danced and jigged in the aisles, one of my students won 5,000 baht and 2nd place in the annual speech competition, and crowning joy, my very own coachee won first place in the poetry competition for a heartfelt and animated recitation of “O Captain, My Captain”! Needless to say, it was a day to celebrate.



And then we were sent to the mountain. Yes, a week later, Elena and I were terrifyingly coerced (no other word accurately describes the pouting faces, confusion and sheer power of peer pressure when fellow teachers thought for even a second that we WOULDN’T go) to climb Doi Khuntaan and camp out for a nice with first and second year students. All I wanted to do was sleep and sleep and keep sleeping for a weekend, fatigued as I was. Surprisingly and wonderfully, a large number of the students turned out to be my very own which was eye-opening. Nothing like a four hour hike, sweating, draining every body fluid imaginable beneath the burning Thai sun, to bring you and your students closer together. The most ridiculous thing neither Elena nor I could understand was why nearly ALL of the students chose to do the several hours hike in skinny jeans and make-up, even reapplying as they went! I mean I looked like road kill, and dying from heat exhaustion as they were, well…. they looked good. Some things just continually baffle me and this is one of them.



To block out the heat and exhaustion, I talked the whole way. Yep, that's me talking behind the camera as I take that shot. As is my custom (as anyone who knows me will readily attest to), I drowned out the pain with incessant palaver (sorry, Elena!), quizzing students about their lives, talking nonstop about my own, anything I could think of to keep thoughts of how many more kilometers we had to go out of sight, out of mind, gone, gone, gone. So we made the however many km trek and collapsed in hungry heaps at the top. Then the students spent the greater part of the evening playing all sorts of crazy summer camp games, some of which I dove in on foolishly, singing, crafting, eating, and in general loving life and this mountain. And it was a sight to behold. Beautiful, fresh air like we haven’t felt in Thailand and just as serene and soothing as you want to be.



When the day’s activities ended, we crowded into a cabin with the other ajarns and the real fun began. In the middle of the night I got up to pee and had to nearly choke myself to hold back the laughter and tears from streaming forth. Because Elena and I had been first to bed, we had not beheld the ritual of nighttime with the other teachers, but we didn’t need to. The remnants were right there in the room. I mean muu-muus, Superman PJs, Pooh stuffed animals, buzzsaw snores, swatting at invisible bugs, night masks, head gear-- I could barely contain myself. These were the same women hovering over the coffee pot in their sensible heels, none-too-flashy necklaces, knee-length skirts, blazers. Well, no more. It was another world and at 4am, I was there to witness it in a room full of dozing Thai women. Perfect. Hours and hours waiting in the train station and more hours on the train and we finally arrived back in Chiang Mai. Do I regret it? Not a moment.