After that incident on Monday with Somsi, the girl with anger management issues, Nikaela, another volunteer and I confronted the directing team about her hitting people, more specifically Aing. She had been put on the router to look after him about once a week, and now she's off the router all together. Yes, I felt really bad, especially when the founder of the organization talked to her and subsequently provoked her to cry by herself for hours. She's not being sent away, but I personally don't have the devices to handle someone like her and the organization obviously doesn't either. The concept of special education just isn't within the capacity of the staff here...never mind that special education is an extremely progressive concept. The staff's rather reluctant to even let her work in the kitchen because they're scared of her holding things like knives. And of course, her story is tragic. It starts off with her mother dropping her off at the door of a shopkeeper when she was a baby, and then the shopkeeper handing her over to us. They tried putting her in government school, but that definitely didn't work out. They tried the vocational school on site, but that also wasn't working. When she doesn't want to do something, she has this tactic of standing completely still and acting completely non-responsive...and she's suffered a lot for it, whether she realizes it or not.

In the States, we are told at a really young age that we can be anything we want in the future. It doesn't matter if you spent recess bullying kids for their lunch money and dunking heads in toilets. You can still be president when you grow up. It seems like here especially, you start off with limited options and doors keep shutting in every direction before you even hit puberty. There aren't many chances to redeem oneself.

Maybe I've spent a little too much time here and I've become desensitized to the corruption and misfortune in these people's lives...but she's not the only person with a sad story to tell and I don't feel any worse for her than I do for any other kid living on site. The other kids are good to her. They might be afraid of her, but they treat her just like anyone else on site: as a sister.

Ever hear of something called “Prickly Heat?” It’s pretty amazing actually. It has the same effect as Vicks vapor rub except it’s intended for raw and itchy flesh, just like my skin from a couple days back. You apply directly after showering and this cool mintiness just starts digging into your pours. In any case, no, I haven’t visited any doctor for my recent bout with the Ebola virus, Eczema or heat rash, whatever it was killing me a few days ago. It’s not gone, but it’s definitely better than it was two or three days ago.

Just fresh enough to get me back to work on Monday morning. I taught three classes, rather painlessly…I thought to myself that despite the fact that I don’t meet with any of these groups of these kids to make any substantial progress with them, I’m lucky to have them. There’s a great chunk of them that are really focused and willing to learn new things. And even the ones who’d rather be somewhere else than in a classroom are respectful to me in a way that I never was to my own teachers growing up. Every class ends with the students clasping their hands in the “wai” position as they say, “Thank you teacher” in Thai.

And then yesterday afternoon I had my first taste of what working in a real inner city school might be like…it didn’t go over so well.

Somsi is a fifteen year girl who lives on site and works in the kitchen. She doesn’t go to government school and she doesn’t take any classes at the vocational school either. Somehow, someone decided, she should just work in the kitchen because she’s just not cut out for very much else. The first time I met this girl 5 months ago, she was sitting at the lunch table eating noodles when she started convulsing and spitting out of control. Two of her peers appeared out of nowhere and like clockwork, they brought her into a resting position. She had had an epileptic seizure. Her epilepsy is probably linked with all of the reasons that she is not in school and is not receiving a range of vocational training.

Aing is a 4 year old boy who came into Lorna’s arms sobbing yesterday because Somsi made his foot bleed by stomping it with a rock. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Aing forgets or neglects to do his chores, not because he’s a bad kid, but because he’s 4 and he doesn’t understand why doing his chores is important. Somsi sometimes thinks she can make him understand by screaming at him and hitting him. She takes it a few steps too far, by most people’s standards. Lorna had Aing in her arms and Somsi started reaching up to him to scratch and pinch him. Lorna started reprimanding her saying, “ya know what? You’re being mean. Knock it off.” Somsi’s response? She slapped Lorna across the arm. Lorna flipped, of course, as I would have, and told her to go away and to never EVER touch the children or staff like that again. And she walked off.

Lorna needed to get out of the office as she’d be coming back in to work for a few hours in the evening. So she left Aing with me. I let him sit on my desk while I was typing at the computer. Not minutes later, Somsi appeared again, though she came into the office without my inviting her. Now Aing was technically breaking a rule, hanging out at my desk, but he was hiding. He started visibly shaking and got off my desk to hide behind my chair. When Somsi gets mad, it looks like Satan has taken over her soul. Her eyes become hollow and dark, her brows knit and her mouth purses up.

“No you’re not welcome in here, go away.” And she looked at me like I had said something terribly unjust. “No really, leave.” And for a good thirty seconds she just stared at me telling her over and over again to get out until I realized that that obviously wasn’t going to work. I got out of my chair and put my hand on her shoulder and said again, “Please leave” and not a second went by before she knocked my hand out of the way and threw a punch in my direction. I caught her fist before she could do anything, but then she started scratching at me like a rabid squirrel. She was fuming and grinding her teeth, but she was also really pissing me off. It was an effort to not break her fingers as I clasped them together to protect myself. I walked her towards a Thai staff member’s office and spewed profanities under my breath in English, none of which she would have understood if I had said out loud anyway. Not wanting to deal with her anymore, I just dropped her off in Chulai’s office, explaining to her what had just happened. She could deal with it better than I could.

Lorna said the slap she got from her hurt pretty badly. If she uses the same force on kids 1/3 her size as she does on adults, she’s definitely traumatizing them and I don’t think she should be here anymore. And that was it. That may have been the first time in my life anyone ever tried to punch me. And I gotta say, it made me mad. Sometimes I ask myself if I’d ever be equipped to work with inner city kids from New York. And if that’s the sort of thing that happens on a regular basis, then forget it.

I'm mutating. Yesterday I had to leave the office at 3 because my stomach was itching so much, that I needed to go home and jump in the shower and cool off. Afterwards, I tried lying in bed with the fan pointed in my direction with my shirt off and I noticed my stomach turned into a giant rash. My hand started itching in the middle of the night yesterday and I started scratching it a little bit, only for the skin to turn blotchy and red just like my stomach...and now it's spread to my elbow and my thigh and under my knee. I'm supposed to go to Chiang Rai today to do a report on the living and education system of the kids living at the new Tantawan (sunflower seed) school for vocational training. That's at least 4 hours today of non-relief from the itchy madness that has apparently consumed me. I will not scratch, I will not scratch, I will not scratch.

Some people might have heard that it was the 60th anniversary of the Thai King’s coronation this last weekend: The longest reigning king in Thailand, and the longest reigning king in the entire world, ever in history. Thailand isn’t run under a monarchy anymore, though sometimes I think it’d be better off it were. The prime minister is mildly liked by some….strongly disliked by some. there have been protests against his continuing his presidency or prime ministry, whatever you wanna call it. He came to visit Mae Sai a few months ago, weeks before his election and it was rumored that people were given 200 baht to feign allegiance to him by handing him flowers.

The king, however: everybody loves the king. The biggest mistake anyone could possibly make in Thailand would be to insult the king in any way. Even inadvertently stepping on a piece of currency with the King’s face on it is a huge no- no. That’s even grounds for jail time. If you go to the movies in a major city in Thailand, after the previews finish, the audience stands up while a tribute to the king airs for two minutes, showing different clips of the king traveling around the country to under-privileged areas and hill tribes, communicating with villagers and drawing out development plans. It’s quite moving. The royal family is also largely responsibly for transforming opium plantations into orchid gardens. Some of the most amazing flora you’ll ever see grows out of these places now.

On the news, people celebrated the coronation, all wearing yellow shirts (the king’s color) and many with tears their eyes. The King, unfortunately, probably enjoyed these festivities less than anyone else that attended. He's about 80 years old now and perhaps a little bit senile. He was complaining about his foot hurting him and no one let him sit down. Twenty Five monarchs from all over the world came to pay their respects and celebrate. It's like an event from a previous century. Here in Mae Sai, the kids all drew various portraits of the king and hung them on the walls of the school building. There's a framed photograph of the king hanging in a sortof shrine. Amost every kid asked me to take their picture holding the king's portrait.

In other news, Judy, the girl who suffered from a severe epileptic seizure a few months ago, has been living back on site for almost a month now. She still cannot speak and her motor skills are still extremely shaky, though she can walk. And boy, does she walk fast. A week ago she was walking around outside, supervised by two staff members, but with a shaved head. I had assumed that her head needed to be shaved for some sort of medical treatment she was being given. Just yesterday, I was told that her mother shaved her head in the middle of the night, performing some sortof ancient chinese ritual her ancestors once performed for sick people like Judy. This is the same woman who once forced her daughter to hold a live dog's head in place while she poked and scooped the inside of the dog's brain. Who left Judy's mother alone with her? Beats me.

Dayk is a 13 year old boy. He’s one of only 9 boys who actually lives on site. He’s not delinquent, but sometimes he acts out and gets angry, mostly coz he feels like there isn’t a single adult that he can connect with like a parent. Cindy may have been the closest thing to a parent this kid has ever known, and sadly, while Cindy committed to 2 years at the site, her life isn’t here, its in Canada. The day Cindy left, Dayk’s eyes watered, fighting tears from falling while he and Cindy pounded knuckles with each other to say bye.

Since she left, he’s been all the more determined to get out of Thailand to get to Canada. He’s been taking English more seriously, or as seriously as the school’s curriculum will allow him to. Dayk is another one of the kids on site that managed to slide through the cracks without nationality. His mother is a Thai citizen who works in a “massage parlor” and his father was Chinese. He’s since passed away. If he wants nationality; if he wants to get a passport, he has to be on a waiting list anywhere between 10-20 years.

One afternoon I was making Bingo boards in the activity room one day for my youngest classes. It mostly involved coloring in each square and writing the name of the color in English…obviously not hard, but TEDIOUS when you’re making enough for a class of 25.

The other day, Dayk found me and saw what I was doing and then said to me, “I wanna help!” I smiled, handed him a Bingo Board, a box of crayons and told him, “Thanks.” So he started filling in the blocks and then tried to write the words in English. For the color, red, he wrote, “reb.” I smiled again and tried to tell him, demonstrating on a piece of scrap paper, “It’s actually, d, not b.” This is a really confusing and subtle difference if you don’t actually use this alphabet in your native language. He nodded his head and started erasing his work. After a small pause he looked at me and asked me, “How come Americans speak English so well?” to which I responded, “I don’t know. How come Thai people speak Thai so well?” He nodded his head, realizing for the first time that English is the native language of most Americans. He paused for a little bit, looked a little disheartened and then asked me, “Why can’t I speak English?”

And this is where I felt like a failure and said to him, “You speak English better than any of your Thai or Burmese friends,” which was actually true, despite the fact that I had to have this conversation with him in Thai for him to understand me. At the end of the day, he’s part of the Half Day School, one branch of the organization, where the English language is taken about as seriously as Ethics was at my high school. In other words, it’s a joke. The school is supposed to be vocation-skills-oriented, so all book courses are cut in half of what they are in a proper school, and in the rank of priorities, English falls below Math, Science or Thai. In this school, what the kids know of English includes the alphabet, numbers (mostly) fruit and animals….some prepositions. In the last few months, my work has become more administrative and activity development oriented. Visitors have been coming in flux and so I spend every other afternoon with a stranger giving tours, answering questions, or corresponding with a prospective visitor or group via email. Very occasionally, I’ll get slammed with a surprise presentation to do.

I’ve been butting heads with the head of the education department about my classes being cancelled and my not knowing about it until the last possible second. I always smile at him, coz he always smiles at me. One day, while I was passing by him, we exchanged giant smiles and then I said to him, “Hey! Where was my level 6 today?!” “Level 6? Oh, they went on a field trip.” “Yeah, yeah, did tell me this BEFORE they went on a field trip? No, you didn’t, did you.” And then walk back into my office. Last Wednesday three staff members pulled all of the guys out of my level 5 class so they could help take down the tents that were set up for a ceremony the week before. I gotta say, this sortof thing happens and I get pissed. Out of the hundreds of kids in the half days school, there are more than a few handful of them that are eager to learn and I’m not given enough time with them to actually teach them anything.

It’s those moments I’m sitting with someone like Dayk who wants so badly to be able to LEAVE Thailand to live somewhere else, I feel like I’m cheating these people something I could be giving them. Activity development has been great and I feel like I’ve been able to contribute in a different way than I thought I would be…but something about this all still doesn’t sit with me right at all.