Stayin' Alive

First of all, I would like to apologize for taking so long to get to this entry. Granted, it has been a crazy busy month in which I can count on one hand the number of days I've been at site, but that's no excuse for taking over 2 months to update you all. That being said, I'll admit I'm not really sure where to begin with this one considering all that's gone on recently... so I guess I'll just type freely until my fingers or brain give out.

Carly came to visit. It was beyond great having her here. In the time she was here, I'm not sure she could've gotten a better Thailand experience. Meeting both my host families in Surat and Chainat; lounging on a beautiful beach as we could see a rain storm coming towards us in Koh Samui; getting treated to genuine Thai hospitality when my Chainat host family, in response to a request for nail polish remover, took her to get a full manicure and pedicure; staying at a cheap hole in the wall guesthouse one night in Bangkok (run by a couple of the friendliest Thais around), and staying in one of the best hotels in the world the next night (The Oriental, thanks to the one and only Meema); experiencing some genuine Thai nightlife with a bunch of other volunteers at an all-Thai club until the sun came up; screaming at the hand-sized spider that found its way into our bathroom; partying with some new friends from Israel; and stuffing ourselves silly with the best breakfast buffet we will probably ever have. It was an amazing vacation, and couldn't have asked for a better first visitor.

Let's see... there was an English camp that I got to help out with last week at Zerina's site. They were easily the most tiring 3 days I've had as a volunteer, but I thought equally as fun. We had about 150 students each day, 4th through 6th grade. Plenty of singing, playing games, and of course being paraded around the school with hero status. The kids were great. The English part of the camp was kind of pointless, because they all seemed to know the vocabulary beforehand. Which was nice, because that meant more time for fun and games. The most memorable part was how awed the kids were at our presence. A few of them came up to us on the first day and asked for our autographs. When the other students caught wind, they all flocked to do the same. Before we knew it we had close to a hundred kids swarming us with their little English camp booklets and pens. It brought me back to the days I would wait with my dad after Phillies games for the players to come out and sign stuff. What a crazy experience to be on the other end of that. I've felt like a celebrity quite a bit in Thailand, but never to the extent that these kids made me feel like one... and I gotta admit, I loved it.

Of course, sometimes I actually do find the time to be home, hard as that is to believe. My typical day goes something like this: I get up at 6:30, ride my bike to a local shop to eat kao dtom (rice soup) and pau-dong-go (fried dough) with some of the village leaders (which generally means I sit quietly while they all talk in an impossible-to-understand Southern dialect). Then I go home, take a cold shower, and ride my bike to the office around 8am. The first hour or 2 I generally sit at my computer and check email, update myself on sports and other news, etc. Then the rest of my work day is really up to me. Most of the time, I try to find some excuse to get out of the office - today I rode my bike around to talk to people about the organic farming project explained in my last post (more on that in a sec). Some days I'll check out what's going on in the schools. And there are no doubt plenty of days where I will stare brainlessly at my computer screen until lunchtime rolls around - I call that "adapting to the general work environment in Thailand", which is just another form of cultural integration and hence me being a good Peace Corps volunteer. Ahem. Anyway, I then go to eat lunch at one of any number of little shops in the area. As you are probably well aware by now if you've been reading this blog, I love all the food here with very very few exceptions. But if I had to choose, my favorite lunchtime meal is a dish called "laap muu". It's basically minced pork meat with some liver and intestines thrown in if you're lucky, and my host sister Pii Lek makes it better than anyone else in Thailand. So more often than not, I find myself at her shop. Of course, you have to eat it with kao niao (sticky rice) which you ball up in your hands and dip in the juice before eating. Yum. After sufficiently gorging myself, most afternoons I'm scheduled to teach at one of the schools here. But, much of the time when I get there the teachers tell me that they aren't learning today because they have to practice for the Mother's Day show next week, or the sports day in two weeks, or they are learning muay thai (Thai boxing) today. Oh the wonders of education in Thailand. After teaching or not teaching is completed, it's really just more of the same - either sitting in air conditioning on my computer, going around the village on my bike, or sitting at my host sister's shop to chat with my favorite group of local Thai women (the Thai desperate housewives, which may not be too far from the truth). Most nights I like to go eat dinner at my host mom's house, not only because she's hilarious to be around but also because she makes the best food in town (your mom's cooking always tastes the best, right?). Get home just before dark, cold shower, and spend the rest of the night reading a book or watching a freshly-downloaded movie. That pretty much covers 95% of my life here, so consider that retribution for taking so long to post this blog.

Finally, an update on the organic farming project. Things are looking good at this point. A month or two back, I had a surprise meeting with someone from a fruit exporting company who was in town to check out the organic farm mentioned in the previous blog entry. Turns out this guy is interested in how we're trying to promote organic, and he has committed his company to buying and exporting our fruit as soon as we get a new farm up and running. Pii Peera, who has his existing organic farm, is confident that we can do this within 1 year as long as we have the land. So this Friday at my office, we are having a meeting between everyone who may be willing to help out with this project, and also 11 people who are potentially willing to convert their farms to organic. My SAO has already committed to funding around 30,000 baht, so it all looks pretty promising at the moment. Hopefully it will stay that way...

Until next time (and I promise next time will not be another 2 months).