Apple Pie in Thailand

My service agency, the Healing Family Foundation, has done a lot for me, especially my supervisor, Mr. Nakayama. I came to Thailand with quite suppressed (but nonetheless grand) delusions of being able to make some lasting and meaningful contribution to the service agency I had been paired with. To put this into Maussian terms, I wanted at least an equal give and take relationship between me and my service agency, although I was ready (and more than willing) to give more than receive.

So what does this have to do with apple pie?

To briefly summarize the ideas of Marcel Mauss (who you may remember from my post on Rice) gift giving places people in various positions of superiority and inferiority. Gift giving always implies a measure of inequality, as the gift-giver establishes his superiority by showing his ability to give while the gift-receiver, forced into a position of indebtedness to the giver, is placed in a position of submission. Inequality remains until the gift-receiver is able to reciprocate equally.

To service-learn here in Thailand is to be constantly indebted. As I do not speak Thai, I constantly rely on the generosity of others to relay to me what is going on/instructions/etc. As I am (relatively) new to the agency, I rely on other people to model the institution’s norms. In addition to all of these, my supervisor has taken me to dinner at his friend’s house, he continually provides “special Thai dessert” for me to sample (he told me one day, “We had a staff meeting. Our new project is to make you fat.”), and just this past week he took me and a few of his guest/friends to the elephant conservation camp.

I feel pretty grateful to the Healing Family Foundation for all the gifts they have bestowed upon me. I think an important part of the short term service-learning that we are doing is recognizing that immediate reciprocation in the tangible and measurable form we want is not always possible. For example, I want to be able to say that I am leaving behind something that will help promote the Foundation here in Chiang Mai. This is not feasible, considering the short time I am here, the language barrier, financial concerns, etc. In this way, I do not feel like I have been able to repay my debt. I think service-learning is about absorbing as much as possible (and accumulating much debt) until we are in a place where we are able to indirectly reciprocate in a “Pay It Forward” sort of manner.

Anyways, despite this, I wanted to find a way to say “thank you” and show my appreciation. My supervisor and the Foundation’s president, Mr. Pradit, constantly ask me what Americans eat (“Hamburgers every meal, yes?”) and ask me to explain things like Halloween and Thanksgiving, which I am pretty happy to do. I wanted to do something appropriately American for them and the artists. So, in honor of the Thanksgiving season, I decided to make them apple pie.