My Rediscovery

Surprises have become less and less common for all the people of Nan. The falangs come and go and everyone gets used to that. We are learning to speak more Thai and blending in better with the general populous. Our students high five us less frequently, though still pretty regularly. And the first black person to come to Nan is now part of the community. People still say hello and smile at us, but our celeb status has dropped significantly. Until now… I took out my braids and now I’m rockin my afro. And boy is the town in an uproar, the good kind of course, but an uproar nonetheless. My students, who surprisingly knew the word afro, were shocked when they first saw it. They smiled and giggled, but they called my hair beautiful in both English and Thai. The other teachers stared and pointed, then smiled. I let my students touch it and they really enjoyed that. When I went to the market to get my breakfast, people were really taken aback. Lots of women stared and then touched their own hair, as though it could have happened to them as well. One woman, holding a small child, walks up to me, and stares at my hair, gently grabs my arm, and moves my arm to touch her child. It was really weird. About a week later a man walks up to me and asks to take a picture with me because I am the first colored person he’s seen in Nan (that’s a direct quote). He spoke decent English because he had spent some time in the U.S. and apparently still retained some dated vernacular. Of course I gladly took the photo. People in the market make strange sounds when they see my hair and one woman sounded like she screamed. It’s really quite funny to see/hear. We are concerned that I might cause a motorbike accident.

I think the best part about the hair change is that people still seem to genuinely appreciate it, even though it’s not long and straight. Some of the students have been saying to me “Ajarn Karen beautiful,” unable to complete the full sentence. It’s kind of become a last name for me. This week my hair is in Bantu knots, I’m excited to see what happens.

Current hair , I think the kids will like it

A few other updates…

I’m really good at Muay Thai. We have been going regularly for the last few weeks and I’m pretty sure I’ll be a master by the end:). The language barrier still makes learning some things hard but it is getting better everyday.

Me on my first day of Muay Thai training

I'm good at kicking!

I have been recording some of the wonderful things my 6^th graders do. I am uploading a video of one of my best students Tor imitating a monkey. The song they are singing goes:

“Don’t wake a sleeping monkey, it will get up. It will stretch its legs. 1.2.3.4. It will open its mouth, it will yawn. And then it will chase, chase, chase, chase YOU!”

Tor is the sleeping monkey and Name is the student being chased.

Here is another video of one of the other people that trains with us at Muay Thai, my goal is to be like him!

The Cook wants your Blood, and other musings

This blog entry is a bit disjointed. Bear with me, I am the queen of non sequiturs.

So everyday at school we eat lunch in the cafeteria (canteen) with all the other teachers. Lunch is free for us and usually consists of lukewarm to cold plain white rice, some unidentifiable part of a pig, and a fairly spicy coconut soup. They switch it up with different unidentifiable parts of a pig, noodles, and the occasional fruit. Suffice it to say we are often still hungry after lunch. So last week we started politely eating as little as possible, without making it obvious that we hate it, and then leaving to eat lunch.

Last Wednesday we found out why the food was more abhorrent than normal. As we were just coming back from eating lunch at a nearby noodle stall, my co-teacher for 5^th grade, Ajarn Wandee (pronounced Wendy), walks towards us with the assistant director of the school. She gestures towards us and says “The cook wants your blood.” At this point we’re convinced that we’ve offended the cook and he wants us killed. We asked confusedly, why the cook would want our blood. My co-teacher responds “Because you are foreign.” After about another five minutes of conversation she explains that the cook is in the hospital and he needs a blood transfusion. Apparently he has a blood type that is extremely rare in Thailand and they want to test the foreign teacher’s blood.

So we leave (and Kathy misses one of her classes) to have our blood tested. Helena and I are not matches, but Kathy is the universal donor. In our flustered state, we weren’t really prepared to give blood. The woman on the bed five feet from us was bleeding profusely and no one realized, and we were concerned. So while they were questioning us I did my best to explain in disjointed English that we were all menstruating. It was pretty ridiculous. But it worked for the time being. They told us that we’ll have to come back this week (or at least Kathy will). Then on the drive back from the hospital, the Assistant director offers to buy us ice cream. It was all very strange.

Moving on…so last week we started hearing this strange animal call near the house. It sounded like a mixture of a cat’s meow, a gecko’s chirp, and a bird’s call. After being unable to sleep for a night or two we found a very young kitten living under our stairs. Apparently it’s a hobby of Kathy’s to take care of stray animals so we bought her some milk and tried to feed her. It didn’t take long at all for her to warm up to us. Probably two days later she was playing our laps and we had been adopted. We fed her more milk, gave her a blanket to sleep in, and moved her upstairs. The next night she had explosive diarrhea and vomiting, apparently you’re not supposed to feed kittens cow’s milk. Who knew? (Kathy did, she read it online and disregarded it). So a friend of ours took us to a local vet who told us that she was fine and that we should feed her this caloric supplement (it looks like black hair gel, gross). Anyway Kathy and Helena named her Hermlila because originally we were unsure of the sex. Helena said it was a boy and that we should name him Herman, Kathy said it was a girl and we should name her Delilah. So we combined to two. She’s a great cat, very adorable and fun to play with. Initially I was against it because having to leave a pet forever in seven months is going to suck, but no one listens to me.

Hermlila

She likes laps

Last week was a big week for us. In addition to having our lives threatened by the hospitalized cook and gaining a pet, we made a great friend. Her name is An and she is a student at the high school down the street from out house. She speaks very good English and the reason we met her is because she competed in and won the two English competitions we’ve been to. Next week she is going to Bangkok for the final round. The first time we hung out with her, she took us on a bike ride to one of the universities and to visit one of the now deceased Princesses’ homes. She also invited us into her home. She and her mother taught us how to make green curry. It was really delicious. She’s also teaching us a lot of Thai. She took us to a market we had never been to where we sampled cricket. It was pretty tasty except that the legs got caught in your teeth. But the best thing An did was encourage us to try taklaw. Taklaw is a Thai sport that essentially combines hacky sack and volleyball. You have to hit the ball over the net and to your teammates without using your hands (all other body parts, shoulders, feet, head, etc. are fair game). We have to get the basics down before anyone with any skill will try and teach us so we bought a ball and are gonna be practicing soon.

The traditional Thai noodles we used to make curry

Our final meal...delicious!