These are the dogs that our dorm recently (and unofficially) adopted. I don’t remember the name of the dog to the far left, but the one in the middle is Malagorn (papaya) and the one to the far is right is Mike. We came back from our Sukothai trip and Mike was suddenly living in our dorm. By the next week, there were three more dogs. They have continued to live here at PIH as our adorable “guard dogs.”

RANDOM UNNAMED ARTICLE THUS FAR THING
Yesterday, toward the end of my lunch, I looked down and noticed a strange looking black lump in my food. I looked closer. It was a large black ant. Gingerly, I picked it out with my fork and placed it to the side of my plate. As I was arranging my food for the next bite, I noticed a similar looking lump near one of the prongs of my fork. Another ant. And another. And another. A thorough sifting rewarded me with a handful of well-cooked ants. I had already finished two-thirds of my meal.

Four months ago, if this had happened in America, I would have had my meal taken back without a doubt, utterly repulsed. After a semester in Chiang Mai, Thailand, ants are only one of the many unique things I have eaten during my study aboard experience. Nowadays, it seems ridiculous for me to imagine rejecting edible food when just a few kilometers to the west there are millions of displaced people starving in the jungles of Burma. But that’s just the day-to-day reality of living Thailand. Well, that and rice.

Before leaving, a number of people asked me: “Do you speak Taiwanese?” Um no, I do not, and neither do most people in Thailand.

At times, it can be incredibly confusing to be caught up in such a myriad of different cultures and attitudes. Rice is served with every meal. Traffic drives on the other side of the road. To unilingual American ears, the language is completely foreign and complicated (in Thai, the words “near” and “far” are exactly the same except for the tone). Since my arrival, our dorm has adopted four stray dogs. Toilet paper is virtually non-existent. There are no knives, couches, or trashcans. No matter where you go, there will be at least one wat and one 7-11. As an America, I get to field questions like: “Do people in America only eat hamburgers?” and “What’s the difference between a stove and an oven?”

Commonly, I’ll ask an English speaking Thai person something like, “Should I bring that to you today or tomorrow?” and they will reply, “Yes.”

.. And then clearly something conclusive should go here but I haven’t decided on what.

I have gotten comments that my recent blogs aren’t as entertaining as the older ones, which is true. It’s weird to have experienced so much; in a lot of ways, I have a hard time finding the quirks of “Thai-ness” to be funny. In a way, I’ve reached a point where either everything is funny or nothing is. It’s hard to find the middle ground between feeling completely overwhelmed by extreme world problems and being consumed by trivial drama. Nevertheless, I blog on. That being said, my mother is probably the biggest fan of my blog and enjoys emailing me encouragement/praise.

Here are a few gems:

“I just read your ant blog – how hilarious!!!  Bathing with ants – I guess you get rid of all the small microscopic bugs on your body that way – LOL.”

“Reading the pig blog now – what a maturing experience!!”

“This sentence is making me laugh.  Re-read it – it sounds like you stayed in Lisu for 6 years: ‘Adjan Otome, who lived in the Lisu village we stayed at for 6 years…’ “

In addition to reading my blog, she also emails it out to an extensive list of “adoring fans”

“I sent your blogs out – getting comments back about how well you write and how mature you sound.  People are very impressed – I think this has been an amazing experience for you – life altering.”

She also lets me know when new members have been added to the mailing list:

“And another fan!!”

I emailed her once and got this as a reply:

“Please don’t interrupt me – I am in the middle of your Tutoring II blog.”

And then afterwards: “Katie – that blog was so cute!!!”

Especially as we are getting close to Thanksgiving (tomorrow!), I am really starting to be ready to come home. It’s great to get such wonderful emails, but I think I am starting to miss the “real life” Mom and other members of my family.

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.

At the Healing Family Foundation, these rules seem to be less present. Dancing between sexes is common, along with hugging, hand-holding and other simple touching. The playful “butt-slap,” which caught me totally off guard the first time I saw it, is also pretty common. Here in Thailand, the presence of non-sexual touch is one of the really unique aspects of the HFF. It really serves to emphasize the comfortable atmosphere and general “family” feeling that one gets.

For my ICU class, we had to submit a photo that demonstrates the “juxtapositions, cultural fusions, and intermingling concepts between seeming paradoxes” present in Thailand. This was my submission, from the Lisu village titled “Technology in Traditional Settings” in the “tradition vs. rapid globalization” category.

This picture was taken while we were attending a ceremony to help heal a sick woman. We all went into the house and tied a string around the woman’s neck while she knelt on the floor. Apparently she had come all the way from Bangkok for this ceremony. From what I understood, she was suffering from some kind of extraordinary sore throat. In addition to the string tying and chanting, a pig (not Babe) was sacrificied and then specially prepared and consumed by the visitors. Among all these very traditional patterns (the bamboo leaves, the clothing, the cooking, etc.) was a giant Hitachi Washing Machine box. The Wikipedia tells me that this company is based out of Japan and is currently “one of the leading manufacturers in new technology.” In my baan (house) there was neither a floor nor windows, and yet, there was both a TV and a washing machine. This picture illustrates how globalization has successfully penetrated into some of the most seemingly isolated pockets of civilization.

Although I was quite conscious of the where meat comes from, I had never seen my food go through the “pig” to “pork” process. Normally, like most American suburbians, I think of “pig” as something I can pick up prepackaged from Safeway. I rarely associate what I am eating with the squealing hairy animal. Clearly, if I choose to think about it, I know (and have been taught from a young age) that these are one and the same. It’s kind of amazing how far distanced we have become from our food. While at UHDP, I was amazed to see what an actual pineapple plant looks like. It was weird to watch “Babe” go through his various stages and think that if the majority of people in the world want pork, this is what they have to do.

I wasn’t too thrilled about watching. Some people opted not to. I think some people felt like the event was of unnecessary shock value; I know quite a few people were offended. At the time, I was filled with a mixture of horror and curiosity. Once the pig was dead (and certainly once it was splayed open and its organs had been removed), I had no problem watching. I don’t wish to seem overly graphic or callous, but I feel like if you eat meat, witnessing the process by which it arrives in the grocery store is very important. I am not bothered by blood and once the pig was dead, it was dead. It was a little strange to watch them carve up something that I had seen alive just a short while ago. But that’s life.

Some people in our group have said that they want to continue to go through life imagining that meat comes from a grocery store shelf. For me, it seems much more respectful to the animal to acknowledge where it came from. The process made me feel very human. As someone who is constantly surrounded by technology and artificial environments, it is sometimes very hard to realize that everything I am consuming and viewing (including myself) is a product of nature. In that way, it was oddly refreshing. I wouldn’t be overly excited to do it again, but I felt that it was a good experience overall.

This picture is sized a bit larger than I normally like to format them, but I wanted you to be able to see some of the things I am about to point out without straining your eyes too badly.

This is Burma. The large structure in the foreground is the Thailand-Burma “Friendship Bridge” for people who are able to legally cross between the two countries. Unfortunately, this is not an option for most people, as Thailand refuses to accept most Burmese citizens fleeing from the government as “refugees” or “migrants,” and thus they have no legal status in Thailand. However, as you can see from the picture, tons of people cross the border everyday, as taking their chances with the Thai government for a small economic opportunity is a far better alternative to remaining in Burma. Standing on the Thailand side, we witnessed many people going back and forth on these black inner-tubes between the two countries. Overlooking the river were army posts on both the Thai and Burmese side, however, neither seemed inclined to do anything about it.

This picture is from our trip to Mae Sot, where in addition to visiting the Friendship Bridge, our group was also able to visit a Burmese refugee camp. As a student in the Burma class, I have spent a lot of time reading various articles and book chapters on the subject of the Burmese people and for a brief time, I was lulled into thinking that I had a grasp on the situation in Burma. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but really, neither are any substitute for reality. There is nothing like seeing things in person. And as much as I would love to tell you about my experiences there, I cannot even fully comprehend them. Standing in the middle of the refugee camp seemed beyond surreal. And when even I, someone who has witnessed these things firsthand, am unable to internally process these experiences, it seems impossible for me to be able to transfer them into words.

While tutoring, I was not just “teaching.” I was also learning. Thai is difficult to learn on paper; it is a very listening-intensive language. This is especially true for those of us in the Thai 101 class, since we cannot actually write in Thai and therefore, have to make up strange transliterations for sounds that do not exist in the English language. The canteen ladies would find it quite funny to listen to the way Tuti and I would try to pronounce words we had written down. By the same token, we had a wonderful time listening to them try to pronounce awkward English sounds.

Our favorite instance was probably the word “knee.” We spelled it out for them: K-N-E-E. And then they tried to say it back: “ka-nee… ki-nee… kynee.” Where did the “k” come from? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it comes from Old English (with possible connections back to Latin and Greek, of course). If I had to guess, I would say that at one time, the “k” was probably pronounced (like the “k” in “knight”) but it has been phased out. But having researched this just now, and having no idea how to explain this in Thai, I went with: “The ‘k’ is silent” or my best attempt in Thai: “Mai pood ‘k’.”  I am starting to realize that teaching and learning go hand and hand. I am trying to learn how to explain and verbalize what I am experiencing so that I can hopefully teach people back at home.