Today's Thoughts...
What do sing-alongs and color relay races have to do with teaching university students in Thailand? Absolutely nothing and everything, I found out two weeks ago. You see, Elena and I were invited (read: coerced, dragged, and all but smuggled) to participate in a weekend English Camp for young kids in the city of Uttaradit, about three hours away. No big, right? Swoop in, teach some songs, play some games, and we’re good. Well, it sort of went like that. SORT of. The three hour ride was fun. Elena, myself, and three young teachers all crammed into one of the teachers cars and belting out the tunes to Toni Braxton and Backstreet Boys, we made our way flying down the highway, stopping once or twice for coffee, bathroom breaks, a light soup dinner, and fruit stalls for plump white juicy fruit called lang-sad that peels like a tangerine inside, but bursts with some sticky sweet deliciousness and sits about the size of a walnut. Munching and meandering down memory lane to 5th grade pop songs, we arrived around 9pmish at our hostess’s adorable wooden bungalow home. After standing on the porch for something like fifteen minutes, her wet and harried mother rushed to greet us and let us in, dripping in her bath towel. Her father sat in the next room in front of the cartoon channel and grunted some acknowledgement of his daughter when she entered. Now that I think about it. I never heard more than three words from him directed towards any of us, the Thai teachers included. Hmmmm…
That night, we stayed up a bit to prepare songs and games for the next day. Flash cards, color wheels, “I love you, You love me,” Barney-style sort of things. Exhausted and slightly hungry, Elena and I climbed into our sleeping bags and snored through the night. We woke up to our faces being tickled and trampled by the family cat who had taken a liking to the hair poking out of our floor mat nests. We got up, the front doors of the house having been thrown open for light, and showered fast to get ready for the day. Terribly hungry, I asked where we could snag some snacks for breakfast and was given a small cup of coffee. So I figured they just were a coffee loving bunch and too hardcore for breakfast. That’s when I first noticed the other two Thai teachers snacking on food they had stashed in their bags. Nibbling on the corner of a piece of pastry, I got into the car and headed to the middle school nearby. The children were fabulously adorable, all with their matching uniforms and matching haircuts—each little girl had a neatly coiffed bob and each boy, a close cut cropped top. We split them into teams—the Lion, The Bear, the Panda, and the Giraffe (their choices with the latter team instantly regretting their name when they learned the English pronunciation; they fondly referred to themselves as the Gee-laffs).
That was the easy part of the day, singing songs the other teachers were convinced we knew and grew up singing though I don’t recall ever learning “Hello my friend, we meet together” or “We Charge,” but okay. That day, those songs were my childhood favorites. We tried and unsuccessfully instructed them in a round of “Rain, rain, go away,” but settled for “Old Mc Donald” since the animal sounds thrilled them. Then, I spent two sessions teaching them to say black instead of brack, blue instead of brue, and gray. To my amazement, it appears that the phenomenon of mispronounced r’s and l’s and other common speech mistakes are not in fact products of an inability for the children to pronounce these sounds, but years of instruction by teachers who simply can’t. My kids had no trouble pronouncing anything correctly, but as soon as I listened to the other teachers instruct them on the same material, I understood instantly. I mean, when we’re listening to the kids being taught “Ten Litt’n Indians” rather than “Ten Little Indians,” a lot of things start to click. The day rolls on with claps of thunder, lightning, and the usual buckets of rain in the afternoon. We dine on an Uttaradit specialty of fish and rice and plough our way through the early afternoon. As a reward, we all decide to get massages, not quite the relaxing, existential experience some massages are, but the Thai knead-the-kinks-out-of-your-soul kind of massage complete with elbows in your groin and fingers poking your vitals. Afterward, I felt like I’d gone through a meat grinder, but true to the rep, I was smoothed out and not a kink remained.
Late as we were from getting our massages first, Elena and I, once again famished, hurried to see what food was left to eat. As it turned out, while we were being kneaded like old cookie dough, everyone else had managed to pick through what was set out for a “snack” as our host called it—the infamous Thai gataaa. Gataa (a grill with soup boiler that you cook yourself) is not quite our favorite as Elena and I have been positive each time we struggled to cook on the grill and boil our soup that we were actually ingesting ecoli, salmonella, and everything in between from half cooked meat we couldn’t manage to sizzle properly. We pretty much picked our way through the remnants, constantly pilfered by friends and family that sort of wandered into the abandoned classroom where the gataa was set up. I felt something like a cavewoman, hunched over my coals and raw meat, trying to protect it from the scavenging birds that swooped in and plucked the juicy morsels from the spit. Nibbles done, we went home with everyone else and waited in vain for dinner to actually happen. Our host had informed us earlier that our gataa episode was merely a prelude to the evening, an appetizer if you will. After a few hours at home and constant repetitions of why don’t you shower and get ready for bed? Don’t you want to shower off and get in bed? Elena and I slowly realized there was no food forthcoming. With the fish from lunch long since burnt away chasing after adorable children all day and the slim pickings from the gataa well on their way to edible history, we went to bed (squeaky clean!), with angry grumbling tummies.
The morning proved much the same and it was then that I realized that while our Thai teacher friends had stashed away munchies to last through the weekend, our host and her mother merely sucked and nibbled on lang-sad all weekend long, constantly remarking on this diet or that quick-fix weight loss technique. We were stuck essentially in the Thai version of The Biggest Loser and I wasn’t too happy about that. We woke up to the doors flung wide open once more, the cat still prowling over our sleeping heads, and five or six cousins, aunts, and uncles all gathered to watch the sleeping farangs (foreigners) and remark ecstatically when we woke and spoke to them in some Thai. I swear it’s like a magic trick and people just want to watch you do it again and again and again. Usually eager to put my Thai skills to the test, so hungry I could devour an elephant, I was in NO mood for charades and niceties., but I bit my tongue, smiled as is the Thai way, and growled my way to a calmer zen. Grumpy and yes, still hungry, we hit the road again after several hours of waiting while our host and her mother primped and fussed their ways to beauty. For lunch, apparently the meal of choice every day, we went to a gorgeous floating restaurant on the water at a nearby reservoir/river and munched our way into food coma.
Munched so much that Elena and I both felt sick the whole ride back to Chiang Mai from stuffing ourselves silly. Lesson number one million forty-five— eating is apparently optional when you’re dealing with divas on diets :)
