I've been helping the English teachers at a couple of schools, and it's going fantastically. My host mother is a teacher at one of the schools I help out at, my host dad teaches at the other one. Yay for free rides! The students at the schools are so dang adorable. They always look at me, smile, and wai me. Waiing is a greeting used in Thailand and some other countries. When you wai someone, you put both hands together and lower your head a little bit. Then they return your wai in a certain way depending on whether they're older than you, younger than you, or some other indicator of status. Waiing is a huge part of Thai culture.
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| Me with the English teacher named "Kru Bee" and some other volunteers who came to help teach. |
When I walk by, the kids say "Pii Chabaa!!" (which is my Thai nickname and means "hibiscus"). Many of them say "good morning" too, and use a little bit of English on me. But then when I talk back to them and say "how are you?" some of them recite the "I'm fine, thank you" that they learned in school and others run away out of shyness. I wish they weren't so shy, because then they would learn English a lot faster! Oh well.
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| This lizard lives in one of the trees at the school. He can change colors. Pretty sweet. |
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| Students meditate in the morning before class. |
The younger kids are hyper and crazy, but when I can get them to pay attention, their brains soak in the new vocabulary like a sponge soaks up water. And they can reproduce the sounds I make very well. Everyone says that childhood is the prime age to learn a language, and I agree because I've seen it firsthand. The older kids are very smart too, but a lot of them are shy because they're so afraid of making a mistake and being laughed at by their peers that they don't want to give it a try. That's one of the biggest obstacles to learning, which is unfortunate. However, when they do try, it's very fun. They love to play games, which is a great way to learn. And they love to laugh at me when I try to speak Thai to them.
I've been adjusting very well to the new surroundings and culture here. For the first month, I was having a great time but I was still struggling a lot and going through a little bit of culture shock. So many things in Thailand are different: the way people look, the way people talk, the way the scenery looks, the way people behave, what's polite and what's impolite, what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. But last week while I was riding home in the car, I had this moment where I suddenly realized that I felt completely comfortable in Thailand. It was like this calm feeling just came over me, where everything that had been foreign to me before now seemed normal. The strange alphabet was no longer strange to me. When I see ants crawling on the table, I just ignore them. Jumping spiders don't scare me as much as they used to. It's normal to see stray dogs walking and sleeping everywhere. Crazy traffic maneuvers are commonplace. Furthermore, the idea of driving on the right side of the road weirds me out, as does the idea of not taking my shoes off when I go inside someone's house. Although I don't know everything about the language and culture, I feel like I'm not struggling to get by anymore, and the feeling is GREAT. It feels like freedom and it was worth every moment of culture shock I had to go through to get here! Although I will tell you one thing--I'm probably going to have some INTENSE reverse culture shock when I get back. I'll probably speak English weird too, and I won't be able to drive for about a week or two...so don't laugh at me.
I encourage everyone who gets the chance to drop everything and go live in a foreign country for awhile. It will change your life and your perspectives. It will open your mind a ton and you will learn more than you can imagine. It is exhilarating. Please do it, for yourself. Even if it's scary or difficult. The things that you learn from it make it all worth while. And when you come home, you come back as a better world citizen. You know more about what is going on in the world, and you are more aware of the fact that your little corner of Earth is just one small piece of a huge picture with nearly endless possibilities. When you live in another country, you realize that everything you took for granted at home may not actually be the case somewhere else. I can tell you one thing though: Everywhere you go, you will find kind, wonderful people. As Dr. Brown, the director of our Thailand program said:
"Anyone who tells you the world is a horrible place has never left his own backyard."
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