Oceans Away

Scared

I realized yesterday that more intense than my thoughts of how much I’m going to miss some of the awesome people I met, seeing little Thai kids or monks every day, the amazing food I get here, not even having the option of watching tv, and the millions of other little things that make living here so great, is my feeling of fear about entering my old world again. 

I feel more alive here. I feel like a fuller, more awake, more aware person. I talk easier, I smile easier, I laugh more, I dance when there’s music on. I listen to people fully and whole heartedly. I take more interest in reading the New York Times and haven’t even thought about Western pop culture in 6 weeks (and shit, does that feel amazing). 

I realized this the other day during my 2nd belly dancing lesson, instructed by the wonderful Shadia. The first one was during my first (maybe second) week, and it felt so awkward. I was convinced I wasn’t doing it right and didn’t feel comfortable “free dancing” with Shadia. This past time, there were only 4 of us doing it and we were all free dancing and possibly looking like total fools but we did it and we didn’t think about it and it was fun. Those of you who know me well will realize that is not exactly characteristic of me. 

I’m afraid that I’m going to go home and get sucked back into the stream of things and turn back into the unfulfilled half-awake person that I was. I realized after I started doing it that I’ve been scrambling to think of things I can do when I get home to keep this from happening. I researched volunteer opportunities in Lakewood. I’ve looked up yoga studios’ costs and schedules, I’ve found belly dancing lessons in Wooster. I realized how fucking sick I am of doing essentially nothing at home. I was bored out of my mind and knew it and didn’t know what to do about it and here I feel better and now it’s about to go away and I’m not sure how to handle it and not sure what to do about it and not sure how many people I’m going to offend when I come back with this attitude.

And I’m scared. 

New Peoples, Weird Times

We got a ton of new people in the last 24 hours. 12 are here now, 2 are on their way. Almost all girls. Having new people here makes me realize how long I’ve been here, how comfortable I am here, how much I’ve learned here, and how gradual the process was. It’s awesome that there are new people here ready to help out but I kind of miss our intimate little group we’ve had going lately. Also, so many of the new people are here for 3 weeks or less, and it’s like, what’s the point? It’s funny to see the different reactions from the staff and old volunteers when people say how long they’re staying - there’s a big difference in reaction depending on whether you’re staying for 1, 2, 3 weeks or 4+ weeks. I cannot believe I only have 4 more nights here. 

This weekend was pretty good. I got pretty sick (stomach) gradually in the middle of the day on Friday and didn’t eat anything between lunch on Friday and lunch on Saturday; my body just did not want to to hold on to anything. I chose not party and stay in town on Saturday, so I walked around the night market with Shadia and Kristin, who also decided to spend the night at Mirror. It was fun. I drank a Sprite and felt a lot better, got some energy and a tiny bit of appetite back. Kristin and I got some take out from the vegetarian restaurant and brought it back to Mirror and sat at the kitchen eating our delicious food and had a beer and it was great. Kristin is probably the person I’ve gotten along with best here; she’s freakishly like me. We’re both vegetarian, both do yoga (she teaches at school so we’ve been doing it together every morning), we both have beagles, elephants are our favorite animals, we are both fascinated by and love reading about buddhism, our itunes libraries are almost identical, the list goes on. I wish she had arrived here earlier, I’m going to be sad to say bye to her. 

I slept for TEN HOURS Saturday night, which is more or less unheard of here. People are normally up by 7:30 and I slept till 10. It was FANTASTIC. In the morning Kristin and I walked down to the little shop, got some drinks, and wandered around a nearby Akha village. Then we took a tsung tao into town to pick up the others who had stayed in town and we all went to an ostrich farm. Hahahaha Andy Chris and Rhae rode the ostriches but I didn’t, I felt super awkward about it. It was absolutely hilariously ridiculous though. There were little bunnies EVERYWHERE and I found one that wasn’t too scared so I scooped it up and carried it around for a while. We sat down at a little cafe and I had an amazing and uber chocolatey iced mocha. On the way home we stopped at the market to get bananas for our banana boats that we would cook later :) On the way home the tsung tao driver let us get on top and ride the rest of the way on top of the tsung tao. It was soooo much fun and sooo beautiful and we got the strangest looks from all the Thais but it was so great. I took a video, I’ll post it soon. 

That night we made a bonfire and made banana boats, which I’d never heard of before, but basically you slice a banana open, stuff it was your candy bar of choice, wrap it in foil, and stick it in the fire. Yummmmmmmmmm. We had a pretty early night but it was fun. One last night of our awesome little group before all the newbies arrived. 

Today I’m going to the hospital where we teach/play games/make crafts with sick kids. Should be very interesting. 

I look forward to seeing you all :)

Awesome Video

you should all watch this video. It almost makes me cry. I know I’m gonna watch it when I start to really miss this place, and it’ll make me cry then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEMcZg3It8

I really want to come up with an I.S. that will allow me to come back here. I think I could come up with something good, something politically or socially based. Something about social activism, perceptions of justice, maybe Thai prejudice, something along those lines. I could get funding to come back, do some interviews, maybe spend some more time with hill tribe people, etc. Showering here in the winter would be the closest I’ve ever been to hell though. 

They’re spraying some sort of stuff today that keeps mosquitoes from reproducing, in order to prevent the spread of dengue fever. No one’s had it here, but apparently it’s not uncommon in the area. :-\

I discovered what they drink in heaven

PINEAPPLE KIWI SMOOTHIES. oh, and COFFEE BANANA SMOOTHIES. You can get smoothies here for 15 baht, which is the equivalent of….maybe 45 cents. I’m going to be obsessed with them when I get back. My plan is to buy at least 100 kiwis, peel them, and freeze them, so I can make these smoothies year round. 

This is by far the dumbest blog post ever, but I just needed to document my love for these brilliant concoctions, so that I will never forget them and continue to make and enjoy them for decades to come. 

Eye-Opening Week

This week was really…good. It wasn’t very eventful, which was nice, because I have been soooo freaking busy since I’ve gotten here. I still haven’t had a day in which I didn’t do anything. On Saturday we went to Big C (huge mall/grocery store), bought too many groceries and a coffee Oreo Blizzard (yes, Thailand’s got DQ), then went to town and spent most of the night with P’Noi, who was having a vegetarian BBQ. Jesus, were those vegetables and tofu good. Even the meat-eaters were raving about them. James even said “omg, those vegetables were amazing. And I don’t even like vegetables”. What could we expect though? They were made with his mom’s sweet chili sauce!

Oh I forgot to mention the going away party and talent show we had on Friday. I was a backup dancer/singer for Rhae and Calina’s lipsyncing to the Glee version of Don’t Stop Believing. It was epic. James and Julian did a hilaaarrrious act where James sat on Julian’s lap and Julian was his arms, you know what I mean. They did “A Day at Mirror”, I’ve got the whole thing on video, I’ll put it up when I get back to fast internet. We also all wrote on each other’s t-shirts, since 5 of the people who came to Mirror with us were leaving, and it was so sad and cute and we all got drunk and it was great.

Anyways…several things about being at P’Noi’s made me realize things that I’m going to miss about Thailand, and things from the western world that are fucking ridiculous. Take his BBQ brushes; they were made out of some banana leaves and a rubber band. Think about all the people you know who probably spent $15 on a damn grill brush from Bed Bath and Beyond or Amazon, one that was mass produced in some factory somewhere, and P’Noi made an awesome one out of some leaves. Free. Efficient. Effective. Conservative.
Let’s take a look at his bathroom - It’s behind a wooden door that looks like a small stall door, and by that I mean it comes down to about 2 feet off the ground and goes up to about 6 inches above my head. Inside there’s a floor made out of stones and dirt. It’s actually quite aesthetically pleasing, the stones are rather nice. There’s a squat toilet, which you flush with a bucket, a sink which you turn on with a wrench (only cold water), and a little basket for his tooth paste and tooth brush. Mind you that this is the bathroom in his shop, which is coincidentally also where he lives most of the time, where he sleeps on the bed which people lay on whilst getting tattoos. When he’s not in his shop he stays in the mountains or with hill tribes. But, back to the point, think about your own bathroom. You’ve probably got a toilet which uses disgusting amounts of water every time you flush it, a sink and shower with hot and cold water that someone probably paid thousands of dollars for, a floor that cost at least a few hundred dollars, and bottles upon bottles upon bottles upon bottles of shit that you rarely use, or used a few times and then forgot about, you get the idea. And I guarantee you that even in your most wildest dreams, you are neither as happy nor as content as P’Noi. That is a promise.

I’ve found myself not dreading the crappy toilets with buckets to flush but rather thinking, “I cannot believe how wasteful the toilets at home are! We should use buckets too!”. I’ve started turning off the water while lathering in the shower not only because they are ice cold but because I think about the fact that there is limited water in this part of the world. The fact that we even have water to shower in, not even to drink, but shower in, makes us so lucky here. I’ve been thinking about how strange it’s going to be to go to a home that is normally occupied by one person and is 4 times the size of a hill tribe person’s home. It’s going to be strange to go home to cabinets that have been stocked with the same shit since 1994 that has long since been forgotten. It’s going to be strange to go home to a population that never thinks about these things, has never seen these things, has never thought these things. I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but it’s just what I’ve been thinking lately.

I feel so so so so unspeakably grateful to have had first-hand experiences that have shown me that money and possessions poison everything. I always understood the theories behind the preachings of anti-consumerism, the idea that it’s easy to become obsessed with money and possessions and easy to lose sight of what is important, but I understand it so much more now and have seen it with my own eyes. I sincerely hope that I can keep these memories fresh in my mind and can keep holding on to everything this place has taught me. I hope that I have the audacity and courage to live differently and maybe inspire others to do the same. I promise I’m not going to install a squat toilet or build a bamboo hut in my backyard (although I know I could, if you have me some bamboo and a machete). I really need to give this some more thought and see if I can sum it all up more succinctly.

I also just want to say that I am very pleased with how Ryan and I have been through this whole experience. I’m relieved to know that I can get on just fine without him. I can be happy and be myself and have my own life and be fantastic. And during all that, I can miss him greatly. I am not relieved to be away from him; I miss him every day. I do not dread seeing him again; he’s one of the few things I’m looking forward to. But I know that we are not dependent on each other, that we can live separately, and to me, to us, that is important.

Everything is going to be different now

I’ve had several conversations today about the various ways it’s going to suck to go home. I think it must be because a bunch of the big group that I arrived with is leaving, and the rest of us are at least half way done with our stays, but everyone seems to be freaking out a little about leaving. 

I don’t really know what to say or how to explain it…but we all know that we feel different and that going home is going to be, in the very least, strange. 

A bunch of the girls just barged in because Dot got stung by a scorpion and we had to look it up. Apparently they’re rarely harmful, but we’ve got a scorpion in our room, so there’s now a party to find it, so I ought to go do that in a second. 

Let’s just say that, when people ask me “how was it?!” I’m just not going to know what to say. It’s been an experience unlike any other. I really really hope it has changed me as much as we’re all thinking, because it would have only changed me for the better. 

Time to stop flipping shit, because I’m only just over half way done. 

25 minutes of free time!

Just got back from Jalae child care center, where Rhae and I worked on the ABCs and played with play doh. In 25 minutes, we are off to town to go to the hill tribe museum. We think that they would be willing to sell post cards that some volunteers made to raise money for the hill tribe scholarship fund, which is a project started by Mirror Foundation that aims to raise money to send hill tribe kids to school. I bought some of these myself, so a few of you will be receiving some (I hope to mail them today). 

So I haven’t posted in forever, let’s think about what I’ve done…

Taught monks, a few times. They are so awesome and shower us with snacks and are so eager to learn. One of them gave Wendy and I a quick meditation lesson before we left last time. Ha, meditation lesson from a Thai Buddhist monk. My grandpa would be so jealous. 

Went to Chiang Mai and went zip lining through the rain forest, which was one of my most favorite things I have ever done. 

The mosquitoes have gone absolutely INSANE. They’re ravenous. They’re trying to take over. I’m going to get dengue fever. 

I don’t have a whole lot of time to go into detail about everything I’ve done, so let’s just say that I don’t think I’m going to be thrilled to walk into my house, when I get there in 20 days. 

I’ve gotten used to sleeping on a rock, to flushing the toilet with a bucket of water, to carrying around bottled water with me everywhere and not drinking from taps, to eating rice at least twice a day and suffering the consequences, to taking freezing cold showers with terrible water pressure (I don’t know if I would ever get totally used to it….), to sweating profusely and wearing bug spray 24/7. 

I’ve gotten used to the unbelievable beauty that is Thailand, to hanging out with amazing people every single night, to helping someone in some way every day, to being part of an amazing organization that is dedicated to making life better for so many disadvantaged people, to paying the equivalent of 95 cents for an awesome meal, to never being cold, to seeing the bright faces of smiling kids almost every day, and to all of the peace, compassion, and good heartedness that just swallows you as soon as you get to this place. 

I’m trying to hard to make the most of my last 3 weeks. 

Right now I’m sitting in Boonbundan guesthouse in Chiang Rai. It’s pretty much a dump but it costs us about $2.50/night for 4 people in a room with A/C. Everyone pretty much comes here every weekend to get out of the country, spend some time in A/C, take hot showers, and go to the night bazaar. 

I have been so unbelievable busy, which is great, because time is flying. I am starting to really love it here. I wish that I could share it more thoroughly with so many of you though. Pictures do not do the beauty justice, and these words do not do the experiences justice. I told Ryan, and I wholeheartedly believe, that I could stay here for quite a long time if he were with me. I think he would absolutely love it, especially this city. We’ve been hanging out with P. Noi a lot, who is a 3-time-ex-monk 24-year-vegetarian whom I’ve never seen wear anything but fisherman pants and a headband, who owns a tattoo shop/handmade leather bag shop/bar. He’s an extremely funny and genuine guy. When you walk past his shop, no matter what time of day, he yells “good morning! Sit down! Have beer!”. His shop is just adorable too, covered in foliage, littered with little stools for passerby to sit on and have a beer, and is now adorned with his new kitten, Elizabeth, whom he found yesterday, after she was mauled by a dog! P. Noi took her to the vet and now she hangs out as his shop. That’s the type of guy he is. Anyways, I think Ryan would dig it. I can just imagine him chilling with us and P. Noi and he would feel right at home in this little city. I’m gonna try real hard to make it back here some day. 

The most prominent experience since the last time I posted was my stay with an Akha hill tribe in their village. It was an extremely poor village, and none of them had ever seen Westerners before. The village consisted of maybe 15 houses, mostly one room, made of either concrete or bamboo. Many of them just had red dirt/clay floors. The night of the day we arrived, we had a meeting where we met the leader of the village and they expressed their gratitude for us coming to help, and one of the women cried! It was incredible to see exactly how much it meant for them for us to be there. They were so generous and hospitable and made us AWESOME food in ginormous portions. 

Our main purpose in going there was to rebuild a house that had been destroyed in a bad storm that happened a few weeks ago. We learned that the house belonged to a man that, due to injury or some medical condition, is unable to work, and receives only 500 baht per month from the government. That he receives any government aid is actually kind of surprising considering the fact that most hill tribe people are not citizens and I didn’t think they would get any aid, but 500 baht is roughly $15, maybe $18 dollars. So, we split bamboo that we had chopped down in the forest the day before, which involved basically beating the everlasting shit out of it with a machete (yes, I got to use a machete). We dug holes for the support of the house, put up the bamboo walls, and had to stop at that point because they needed special people to do the roof. We also made concrete and installed a concrete floor in another house, which was A LOT harder and more time consuming than it sounds. We all worked so hard, it was so gratifying. 

Most dramatic hour of my trip so far….

Well, seeing as how we are in rural Thailand, there has always been a lot of joking about eating dog. So, our guide asked 2 of the guy volunteers on our 2nd night if they wanted to eat dog. Because of his accent, they thought he said “duck”, so they enthusiastically replied that yes, they would love some duck. So, a man from the tribe walks up to a dog that was currently playing with another dog and some tribe kids in front of a bunch of the women volunteers, puts a leash on it, drags it over to the next house, hits it on the head, slits its throat, and then roasts, cleans, and chops it up, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING!!! Girls and kids were crying, some of the volunteers were cheering, some of us just got depressed for the rest of the night. It was CRAZY. Crazy. Everyone was asking how I felt about it, being the only vegetarian in the group, and honestly, I think I was one of the least shocked/troubled people in the group. I realize that there is an obvious difference between a dog and a chicken or a pig, but I feel basically the same way about it as I do any other animal. And I think that it’s important for people to be forced to think about what actually goes into producing meat as food. It’s gruesome. It’s violent. It’s sad. And it’s reality. 

That night, the Akha women dressed each and every one of us up in their traditional Akha wedding gear. It was GREAT. Pictures will soon follow. 

When we left, all the women cried. They touched their hearts and then touched ours, and hugged us, even though that is something rare in Thai culture. It was so fulfilling to see what an impact we had made. No one had ever come to their village to help them before, even though they are so unbelievably poor. It made me realize how much you can do with so little, how you can be happy with a one-room bamboo house, some rice, some vegetables, and family. I can’t even think of adequate words to describe the experience. 

Just yesterday we went for an elephant ride. I felt very controversial about it, but I had already paid for it, as it was included in my fees, and the elephants seemed to be relatively well-kept, so I rode the elephant. Honestly, my favorite part of it was standing with them, touching their trunks and their massive bodies, feeding them bananas, looking straight into their eyes. I just love elephants. 

Today I went to the most amazing waterfall on the planet. A bunch of us rode on motorbikes (I just witnessed a terrible motorbike accident yesterday, so I was terrified, and my life was constantly flashing before my eyes) and got lost a bunch of times but eventually made it to a national park, at which point we had to trek 1400 meters to the waterfall. The ride was gorgeous. It was cool because we were riding alongside a river, and it was just getting progressively more rainforesty. The trek was even better. Basically it was 1400 meters through a bamboo and palm tree forest. Again, I won’t even try to describe it, but I could not believe the sight I was seeing. And then. The waterfall. It was just….so powerful! We all swam in it, obviously, and it was big enough to produce an insane amount of noise and wind, and standing under it was exhilarating, breathtaking, beautiful, something out of a movie. There were slippery rocks behind it that you could sit on after you passed under it, which was kind of scary considering how slippery everything was, and the gross amounts of water falling on your head. We had to get pretty far up before we stopped feeling like we were drowning and could actually see. But man, was it worth it. Today was probably the most aesthetically beautiful day of my life. And the whole time I was in that jungle and standing under that waterfall, I was wishing that Ryan was next to me. He would just love it. 

Time for bed. We slept until 12 today due to our crazy and hilarious night out, but we are all so tired today, and I have a breakfast date with P. Noi, Julian, Emilee, and Rhae at a vegetarian restaurant in town at 9 am. 

I miss you all so much. I am no longer in any rush to get back, but I cannot wait to see all your beautiful faces again.

NO TIME

Oh man, I’ve been so busy. I just emailed my dad and I already have to go plug in my batteries, take a shower, and get ready to go to town. I have had no free time in foreevveerrr which is great but I also want to tell everyone what’s going on. 

So since I last posted, I have gone on a home stay with a hill tribe, seen a dog being cooked, built a bamboo house, installed a concrete floor, ridden an elephant, gone on a boat ride down the Makong river, washed my clothes by hand, and lots of other little things. I am dying to write more about it but I just don’t have time right now. Hopefully Monday.