First impressions

A volunteer and staff member picked me up from the bus station on 2 mopeds. Those of you who saw me off on my way to the airport in New York know that I traveled relatively light…but come now, I still packed 6 months of clothes, my computer and books for teaching, leisure and travel. I mean a car would have been nice, especially since that’s what they said they’d be bringing. I was told I brought more stuff with me than the average volunteer. Oops. The staff member Pi Chom put one of my bags on the back of her moped and just let it balance while she sped off onto the highway back to the center. The volunteer Cindy put my other bag in front of her bike while I carried my hiking bag in the backseat of the moped. It wasn’t comfortable. I’ve noticed in this country, especially in Mae Sai, that people reeeeally like to tempt fate with their mopeds and motorcycles. I mean sure, I understand not being financially equipped or even having the volition to invest in an SUV or station wagon. But that doesn’t mean that a 6 person family should try to all pack in ontop of a motorbike, smallest children dangling off the driver’s legs or ontop of his shoulders, all without helmets. That’s my ethnocentric thought of the day.
We pulled into the driveway and there were kids everywhere and they scattered like a flock of pigeons to avoid the incoming mopeds. It was around their lunch break and so they were romping around playing, eating lunch. I noticed I was getting stared at walking around the place when Cindy turned to me and said, “You’re the first foreign male volunteer we’ve had in about a year, so you’re quite the novelty.” Cindy was actually listening to the Thai banter that was going on around us, and it occurred to me later on in the day, after hearing her communicate with staff, that she’s totally fluent in Thai. She’s probably more fluent in Thai than any westerner I’ve ever met. She’s been here for the last year and a half and has just picked up on it studying it independently with staff and students. She walked me into the administration building and introduced me to my desk, which was pretty exciting. In the last 7 months of temping with Metro and working with Happys Paws and Starbucks I sure as hell never had my own desk.
A few kids came running inside with baby powder all over their faces, laughing and screaming. They paused to take a break to reapply another layer baby powder. “They like to make their skin lighter because they think lighter skin is more beautiful than their own. We have these arguments with each other insisting that the other has more beautiful skin than our own.” I guess that’s not any worse than white people’s obsession with visiting tanning booths, but it somehow struck me as tragic to see this kindof complex in a group of 8 year olds.

I got to meet up with some staff and Cindy told me to come to her level 4 and 5 English classes. These would be two of the classes I’ll eventually be taking over in the next couple of weeks, as Cindy’s finishing up her term by the end of March. I’ll also be taking over level 6 and possibly working 5 nights a week with a group of students who are taking some test for a scholarship of sorts.
It’s funny that they managed to divvy up the English classes into 6 groups, coz the reality is, they’re all at very low levels of English proficiency. Level 4 was a discouraging group to start with, there being a little over 25 kids in the class and most of them resting their heads on the table or worse, screaming and shouting to each other in Thai. I tried to get one boy’s attention by looking straight at him while I was having the class repeat a word written on the board like, “Green” and he looked at me kindof ticked and just responded “Arai?!” (What?!) Cindy warned me that the level 4 group is really tough group to work with.
I can’t really say I blame the kids for their lack of interest in English, knowing some of their situations. This school doesn’t foster exclusively kids pulled out of the sex trade. It also fosters kids at high risk of entering the sex trade as well as poor village and hilltribe students and students of refugee families from Myanmar. A lot of them don’t have papers and a lot of their families are kindof trapped in Mae Sai. In one direction of the highway, there’s the border to Myamar. The other way, you can’t leave Mae Sai without passing through two police check off points within a couple of miles of each other. On top of that, because a lot of these kids are coming from places like China, Myanmar and Laos, Thai is actually their second language, making English their third. Where does the motivation even come from to learn English when a lot of them haven’t even finished learning Thai and a lot of them won’t ever have a real opportunity to use English in their lives? The Level 5 and Level 6 English make me feel like I actually have a purpose here.
These kids are so focused. They’re still at a really low level of proficiency and they need a lot of training in some basic phonetics (a lot of them can’t say ‘plate’. They call it a ‘face’ no matter how much you break it down for them sound by sound) but they sit there either paying attention to the worksheet I put in front of them or me, and they actually make an effort to absorb the information in front of them. One girl asked Cindy if she could come in on Saturday with her brother to have some extra English lessons. She asked me if I’d be up for it and I said of course I would. It’s the few students like that that make it seem like the experience here will be totally worth it. It almost makes me wish I tried harder when I was a kid in school.

So I know for certain I’ll be working with level 4, 5 and 6 throughout the week. I don’t know much about this evening course for the potential scholarship students, but I’m supposed to meet with the director this Monday to discuss that in further detail. In addition to teaching here, I’ve also been given the position of volunteer coordinator. As in, I’m supposed to recruit foreign volunteers and actually modify the application form so that we can do a police background check. As of now, pretty much anyone can apply to volunteer here and there’s pretty much no screening process whatsoever. I realized that myself when they let me in. I could have been an axe murderer for all they knew. I’m also co-hosting the radio station a couple of times a week with some other volunteers, and when some of them leave in April I’ll be expected to be in charge of a couple of shifts a week on my own. I’m not clever like my Dad and I can’t think of what I could possibly say over the radio that’d be in anyone’s interest. Luckily, there won’t be too many English speaking listeners out there and I can talk about pretty much anything I want for the hour long session. The only subject that’s taboo, I’m told, is Burma. We don’t wanna piss them off, evidently.

I got a motorbike! Ok, it’s not exactly the style I might have hoped it’d be. It’s not a Vespa and it’s not Red, Green or Blue. It’s a Honda Dream, it’s off white and it’s a little old. I just learned how to drive it yesterday and so I’m still not completely comfortable on it. When I come to stop signs and awkwardly stumble my feet towards the ground, the Thai locals are especially emphatic with their name calling “Falrang! Falrang!” (Whitey!)
And after a few days of being sick and having to stay indoors pretty much until the end of the weekend, nothing was like getting ontop of my moped and going down the highway to the monkey caves. It’s liberating, almost in the same way that driving a car…no a convertible is…I’ve no such license for this bike and from what I understand, most people don’t.
That’s it for now. I’ve had some interesting work to do and a lot more to come it seems like. The lack of free time sometimes makes me forget how much I regret not being able to be home during some really important times with my family, but I do think about home quite a bit, nonetheless.