A continuation of study!

Now that I've been home for a month and a half, my life is dramatically less interesting than it was a year ago. I'm enjoying the activities I've sorely missed, most especially poring in the library and spending half a day, if not most of it, reveling in the available literature.

I'm not going to lie, I'm going stir-crazy with the lack of a structured regimen to my days. While reading, running, and cooking are noble activities, I'm ready for some good work. However, trying to break into the non-profit business is really tough, and with the backdrop of last year's massive lay-offs reducing my chances from little to none, job hunting can be really discouraging.

My hope right now is to get exposure into the nonprofit business of global development, especially ones that emphasize and support grassroots movement. That might be distant yet, but hopefully, these aspirations achieve fruition.

For the moment, I've embarked on a writing project. If you're interested in tuning in, feel free to visit methinkprettyoneday.tumblr.com

Same Same, But Different

Coined from a colloquial quip, "same same but different" is a Thai jargon used to highlight similarities while conceding to differences. Versatile as "mai pen rai," it can be summoned for conversations of everyday significance or for others with higher import. I use this now to reflect about myself and how I think I've changed over the past year while volunteering in Thailand.

I admit it's very hard to track the internal changes one goes through in a year, especially with a momentous experience such as this. If there is one thing I learned from my thesis, there is no use tracing change and transformation; they are deep and eternal. However, when I revisit myself from last year, I was nothing more than a bright-eyed fresh graduate, insulated by the amniotic bubble of Whitman College. Admittedly I didn't think I had enough time in college to commit a substantial amount of time for community projects. What I knew was limited to books and academia; I had little occasion to put theories into practice. While I deeply value my education, it was high time that I expanded and encouraged my learning in other ways, especially at a critical point after graduation.

I review my WorldTeach objectives written before my service and honestly, while it feels affirming to have volunteered and taught English at a village school, I think my students have done more for me, than I could have ever done for them. I went to Thailand hoping that I could make some lasting changes; instead I come home, humbled with lasting impressions. I went to Thailand to teach, and instead, I learned about myself.

WorldTeach. World. Teach. What a wonderful summary of my experience, although I read this now differently than I did when I first applied for the program. It is beautifully ironic that I remained a student while officially employed as a teacher. In my year in Thailand, I learned about the world, in global and local terms, and where I fit in both contexts. As I traveled to the other side of the Pacific, the expanse of my perspectives widened. Community service became the underlying motif of my experiences, tying them all together. I bore witness to the eternal spring of happiness located in work that is in service to others. I never expected how profound and rich this happiness can be, until I dedicated my work every day to serve the community.

As I lived a life modestly stripped of Western accoutrements, I found that I could adapt to a lifestyle that can thrive without the stronghold of advanced technology. Here in the States, the new gadgets of convenience strip away our uses of intelligence and strength and shrink our worlds to further insularity. I don't mean to indict the West of excesses, but the consumer culture is more apparent. We can live richly without extra baggage, especially when we also focus our culture towards enriching our local and global communities.

As for being a teacher, it would be a lie and a disservice to my work if I viewed it through rose-colored glasses and forget to acknowledge its challenges. While teaching the most adorable kids in the world has plenty of rewards, I quickly discovered aspects about my personality that I wanted to improve. I really learned, through the hard way, the value of patience, fortitude, humor, and the ability to frame things in a larger perspective rather than fixating. I learned that while papers can be rushed and written in a day, the things that count cannot be fixed nor finished easily (that includes myself!).

I come from this experience bursting with inspiration. I am inspired and humbled by service on an international level, I am inspired by the humble communities in Nakhon Phanom, and I am also inspired by my fellow WorldTeach volunteers, who have grown with me throughout our year of service. I am still the same person, but I have also grown in many different ways. Now that I am about to encounter the unknown, I know that this time I am armed with inspiration and an internal compass, fashioned from my volunteer experiences, pointing me to the right direction.

Thank you to all who have remained loyal readers of this blog. You have been a part of a wonderful and transformative adventure.

Forever Bound to Community: Scenes from My Last String Tying Ceremonies

From Na Bpong School

All my students lined up to give me strings

with the village elders

From Thai Samakee School

I had at least a hundred after the week was over!

It was definitely hard to hold back the tears as each and everyone of my students, teachers, and community elders tied a string around my wrists. I cried anyway, the tears just came rushing forth as I felt the presence of grace and warmth envelop the room, encouraged by the physical links of hands, arms, elbows, and shoulders. (Traditionally, this string tying ceremony encourages the physical contact to emphasize the interconnection of the community: welcome to the human network!) As the students lined up, preparing to tie their strings, so did lines of memory rush forth, conjuring ordinary yet special impressions of my teaching life. When I think about the meaning, significance, and magnitude of this single act of well-wishing, I am so deeply touched of how the local community embraced me as part of their family in the past year. While the strings may be gone now, I will always feel their presence, a reminder of home in a distant land, and that ever-persistent tug to return.

Committing to Memory

All About Me Mini-Books: Semester Projects. I asked my students to use the material they've learned this semester and create mini-autobiographies.

It's difficult to even begin to describe my students. Ever since leaving Nakhon Phanom, I feel almost like less of a person walking with a vacancy of purpose. That is a little exaggerated, and dramatic, of course. In actuality, I feel like this urgency of purpose, waiting to be channeled and manifested in my next steps. But I will always carry with me the wonderful memories I have with my students that have shaped and defined my experience in Thailand.

My students from both elementary schools are just like kids from everywhere. Just like any other vivacious students from anywhere, they like their fair share of  amusements. They like to play with bugs (maybe bigger than the ones from the States!), boys like to torment girls, and girls like to flaunt their intellectual superiority in the classroom. They love to sing (they like to request "Hey Jude" all the time), dance, and play. Most of the time, they like to learn too.

My students are not like kids from everywhere. There are certain dimensions to their childhood experiences that are unique to their circumstances. In a lot of ways, they are encouraged to mature a lot faster, because they are allocated adult-like responsibilities on a daily basis. Consider the photo on the bottom of this entry, of a great student of mine. His name is Pbad, and while a US counterpart might begrudge the task  of returning chairs to classrooms and his parents might consider suing the school, Pbad manages and carries the request without complaint. Consider also, the video below of my first-graders being asked by their teacher to multi-task:

Initially, these unconventional practices at school seemed so absurd. Teachers barking instructions while sitting in the shade were a little hard to swallow, and sometimes the requests were a bit, let's say nit-picky. But at the heart of these practices lies the ideal of students making individual contributions to sustain the school, in a community with little to no resources or funding. Everyday, it seems like the students themselves run the school. They arrive early to mop the floors and clean, they are in charge of morning flag ceremonies, prepare lunch every day under the supervision of the teachers, put away dishes, and so forth. Their schools stand because of their hands. The world doesn't lie before their feet; usually they have to get down and polish it first, while counting to a hundred in Thai.

While they are just like any other students every where when it comes to mischief, they bring the attitudes they've inculcated from sustaining the school into my classroom. They are very eager to help, and they will perform pretty much everything that I ask them too. Sometimes, it took a while to seduce their personalities out of their coy shells, but in time, they were more willing to display their playful sides and more willing to exercise more agency in the classroom. 

I will always remember their attentiveness, their eagerness to learn and please, and their incorrigible displays of appreciation (my bags are never lacking in origami hearts). I will always remember the funny moments--most of them to my embarrassment-- but  all of them were comic reliefs, tending to assuage my larger anxieties.  I will never forget the challenges, the stresses, the self-doubt, but I will always remember the heart-affirming advances, such as watching my students develop and display tangible proofs of progress. I will always remember their unrelenting efforts to teach me Thai and their ridicules of my pronunciations. I will always remember their hospitalities and their grace. I will remember their unexpected visits at my home and their frequent recourse to smiles in the events of misunderstanding. I will always remember the laughter, from first-grade peals, to 6th grade pubescent, cracking bellows. I embrace these all, and commit them to memory.

Valerie Travels to India: An Afterthought

Steph and I traveled to India; we didn't take a vacation. While the thoughts of balmy beaches and sun tans seemed so enviable while we were enduring a painful train ride or shooing an unrelenting tout, I had an amazing time. India kept me on my toes, and I always wondered, "what's next" each passing minute. We tasted India's serenity and chaos for a brief two weeks and experienced a perpetual pendulum swinging between many extremes. We saw beauty, ugliness, happiness, desperation, wealth, poverty, kindness and apathy.

India took our breath away--sometimes literally. From crossing the streets of Kolkata which can be a near death experience, smelling the stench of the streets, navigating the anarchic trains stations, to seeing the amazing view from the hills of Darjeeling, eating the best cuisine in the world, marveling at the incredible moving sight of the ghats-- India took our breath away.

In the few quiet moments I had, either when looking at an awesome view or observing a Purja ceremony, I experienced these transient moments of brief suspension, of fleeting detachment from the present, and encountered this unbelievable ecstasy only ever afforded to travelers, of pure awe and wonderment, and I just couldn't stop thinking to myself, "I can't believe I'm in India."