I need to become more proficient in Thai. I guess that’s stating the obvious, living in Thailand and all. Yesterday I was asked to help a Thai staff member write English translations of 14 interns’ resumes, all students from Laos, Myanmar, China and Thailand. The woman running this operation, Pen-si, tried explaining to me that one intern accompanied impregnated victims of human trafficking to the hospital. In her super thick Thai accent, she explained to me very slowly, “Dey go visi- doctaw fo check fo,” and she paused, emphatically pointing her finger to her head “fo check, uhhh, IQ” Impregnated victims of trafficking visit the doctor to take an IQ test? “IQ test?” I asked “Yeyes” she nodded. I looked at her blankly for a few seconds before I pulled out my Thai English dictionary and looked up IQ, Intelligence Quotient. I was on the section that translates the English into the Thai word, using the Thai alphabet, so I just pointed it to her. “Yeys,” was her response. Something got lost in translation, me thinks. Something. If only I could have asked her what she was talking about in her own language.

The week of language immersion in Chiang Mai did very little for me. Things like the sortof foods we order in restaurants, gas and bike jargon, and commands like, “Careful!” “Sit down!” and “Go to class!” all came rather quickly. But let me tell you, the basic exchange of “Hello, how are you?” “Fine thanks! How are you?”: none of that does jack when you want to explain to a police officer that some you just got hit by an SUV breaking some fundamental traffic laws and you’d like to be taken to the hospital. It also doesn’t get you far when you try to ask a kid why he’s crying.

That happens just about everyday. It’s not unique from any school with young children, I imagine. A kid comes into the office with tears streaming down his or her face, I ask in Thai, “What’s wrong?” and then usually they’ll go off on some tangent that I don’t understand and I can do nothing but stare up at the ceiling and pat the kid on the back. Then most of the time a cough drop or a sticker is enough to placate the kid and the situation is, for all intents and purposes, resolved.

Sedteng worries me (the kid with the cigarette burn on his face). I was alone in the office after school today when I heard this sobbing sound coming from behind the door. I clumsily got out of my chair and knocked a notebook off my desk limping into the hall to find Setdeng sitting on the floor, clasping his neck with his hands. He had stopped crying once he heard noises nearby, but he was still holding onto his neck when he saw me. “What’s wrong?” I asked. He just stared at me, either knowing I wouldn’t understand him anyway or because he was hiding something. I knelt down and sat beside him and took his hands away from his neck where there was a bruise about the size of a pringle. It wasn’t brand new. “At home or at school?” was the most I could ask him in his own language. He looked down and pulled a plastic toy car out of his pocket and started rolling it on the floor.
We hung out in silence for about 2 minutes while I stared at him rolling this toy back and forth. Then Cindy came by and asked me, “Did you see that bruise?” “Yeah, can you ask him about it?” “I have, he just ignores me.” “Can you ask him again?” and so she did and then Sedteng just got up and walked outside to be by himself. We filed a memo to the social worker on site. It kindof seems like some sort domestic violence case: two cigarette burns on the face and a bruise on the neck within 3 weeks, all of which the kid refuses to talk about. Packing up my bag for the day, I watched through the window as a motorcycle pulled up the driveway with a middle-aged man with gray hair mounted on top talking on his cell phone. Sedteng ran up to the bike and hopped up the back, clutched his dad around the waste and the bike drove off.


Wednesday, February 1st

Last week I got to distribute English-Thai, Thai-English dictionaries to my higher level classes. A few kids were really excited and expressed their gratitude immensely. Cindy suggested I do a few exercises with them to get them used to finding words in the dictionary as most of them hadn’t seen one in their entire lives. She was right. Some of them had no idea how to use them. There’d be a word they didn’t recognize on a worksheet, like “continent”…and so rather than drawing a picture of a globe and pointing to every individual continent, I’d ask them to find it on their own in their dictionaries…three minutes later, no one’s found the word “continent” and I notice that they’re all looking at completely different parts of the dictionary. I looked over the shoulder of one of my front row students and he was on the “Y” section. So there was a little more hand holding involved in this process than I’d expected. But I figure it’s just as much of a skill in learning another language as anything else, so we practiced this a bit more before tackling the worksheets again.

I had a bad realization in my level 4 English class this week. They’re nowhere near any proficiency that a dictionary will do them any good, so I haven't bothered getting them any. My first class with them I tried giving them an exercise involving prepositions like “in,” “on,” and “under” and even with illustrations this was totally lost on them. Cindy told me they’re not ready for this kindof comprehension…but she’s not kidding, these kids won’t do anything that doesn’t involve just a series of nouns with games and colorful pictures and word searches in crossword puzzles.

So after dealing with the same 16 words with them again and again and again with pictures, mixing and matching and word searches, where I’d say the words over and over and over, I tried to test them. Individually, I’d walk up to each student and point to the words they were successful finding on the word search…I’d ask them to read out loud the word my finger was on. I pointed to the word “apple,” which now had no picture of an apple on top of it and the first student said “elephant”. “Never,” I thought. That’s not just a phonetic mix up, elephant was a different word on the list. I corrected her and tried pointing to the next word, “snake,” she paused and looked up for a few seconds before saying “pencil.”
This happened over and over with almost every student in class. So basically, while a lot of these students now know the few words I’ve tried to teach them, they’re illiterate, and I had no idea. I don't feel too horrible about not noticing this by class 6 with them. Some people in the states have graduated from highschool without knowing how to read. The Level 4 English students can recognize letters in our alphabet, but for the most part, they don’t know what sounds they make. I don’t know what I was expecting. I mean, I’m illiterate in Thai, but these kids have been doing exercises with our alphabet for the last 2 years. Where do we even begin?


P.S. Accident update: So I'm off the crutches and I'm back on the bike. I'm told sprains heel painfully and so I take it it's normal that last night was the first night I really wanted those pain killers the doctors gave me. Though I couldn't have them because I had locked them in my desk at school, worried that one of the kids might go through my bag and take them. This morning, my ankle was shiny purple. In the last 24 hours, there have been moments where it's hurt so much I've wanted to scream, but oddly, I can still walk with both feet, without the crutches. That is all.