Last night I took an overnight bus from Bangkok that dropped me off in front of my house at around 5:30am this morning. I was thrilled to finally be home after almost 2 weeks on the road, and have a chance to crash for a few hours of much needed sleep after the 9 hour ride. But when I opened my door, I noticed something odd – the doormat inside my house was missing. Why would a doormat be missing? Did my landlord come in and take it for some reason? It was too puzzling to ignore for the moment, so I did a quick check around the house, and finally found what I was looking for... sort of. The doormat, or at least what was left of it, was under my bed. This is what it looked like:
My only thought was that a hungry cat or dog somehow got into my house and for some reason decided to quench it's appetite on gnarled cotton. By now I was sufficiently freaked out, thinking there must be some scared, rabid animal hiding in my house. I looked around again... nothing in the bathroom or kitchen. But then I noticed, in a corner of my bedroom where I hang up some of my clothes, some stray shreds of the doormat. I took the clothes off the rack to look underneath, and made a startling discovery: all the doormat shreds were piled up in a nest. And something was moving inside it. Holy shit.
Somehow I gathered myself enough to take a closer look, and what I found were baby rats, probably not more than a few days old. Freaking great. To add insult to injury, they had chewed up the bottom of my 2 nicest dress shirts and had gotten into my stash of See's lollipops that my mom gave me a few weeks earlier. I considered my options... to a Thai person, the obvious choice would be to bash the little things to death with a stick. But somehow I couldn't bring myself to kill them, so I swept the whole nest, baby rats included, into a dustpan and dumped it outside on my porch. That is where they remain right now as I sit at work, trying to figure out what to do with them. Never did see the mother rat either... so something tells me the fun is just beginning.
So, hitting the high points of the past few months... my dad's visit was a blast. It was nonstop and exciting, from bike rides through ancient ruins in Ayutthaya to an overnight boat ride through a thunderstorm. Not to mention that his visit to my site coincided with the King's birthday, also known as Father's Day in Thailand. The timing couldn't have been better. We were honored the entire day, from my dad's ribbon cutting at the bathroom opening ceremony to the District Chief inviting us to the front of the crowd during the evening's festivities. In the pics, you'll notice how my dad was immortalized forever in a sign over the bathroom:
My mom's visit a few weeks later was great as well. We started with her and Tom's tour group in Bangkok, then after their tour ended, they came down to check out my site. Unfortunately this one didn't coincide with Thai Mother's Day, but they were still quite well received. It was a lot of fun letting them see the community and the people's relentless efforts to shove food at us, no matter how much we told them we were very full in as many different languages as possible. We spent a night on a beautiful, albeit overtouristed, island close to my site called Koh Phi Phi – whose claim to fame is that it's the setting of the movie “The Beach”, and also one of the places hit hard by the 2004 tsunami (although the only evidence of that now is in pictures). To wrap it up, the last two nights we stayed in Bangkok in probably the nicest hotel room any of us had ever been in. Guess the rat experience is the Peace Corps version of karma.
A week after my mom left, it was back on the road again – this time, to meet the new group of volunteers who just arrived in country last month. I was lucky to get an opportunity to help out for a few days with their training. It was a great time and a really refreshing week for me. To see the energy and motivation of the new group was a big lift. It put a lot of things into perspective about our one year here so far (really, one year... crazy). And as easy as it is to feel like we are constantly fighting an uphill battle and not getting anything accomplished, the truth is we've come a long way – longer than we probably let ourselves realize most of the time. But again, it was just really refreshing to see the positive attitude of the new volunteers and hopefully carry some of the energy back to my own work.
As far as that work goes... not a whole lot new to report unfortunately due to all these distractions away from site. It's looking like we have about 10 villagers genuinely interested in converting their farms to organic, and had an initial meeting with a potential fruit buyer, but so far it's still too early to tell how successful this will end up. A real challenge is coming into focus, and that's the fact that my counterpart with the organic farm (Pii Peera) doesn't get along too well with the people at the SAO. This wasn't really earth-shattering news to me, but it did shock me when my SAO's Nayok and Balat (the Mayor and Chief Administrator) told me they wanted to do this project without Pii Peera's help, basically because they say he isn't trusted in the community. There are clearly some deeper issues there that I may have been too quick to ignore at the outset. But Pii Peera has too much knowledge and too many contacts in organic farming to shut out completely, and if it weren't for him this wouldn't even be happening in the first place. For now I've gotten them to agree to let him be involved as a resource, and I guess we'll see how it plays out from there.
Another project that is on the horizon is a family development workshop. I'm very lucky to have someone living close to my site named Wipada who has been working as a language trainer for the Peace Corps for many years. She also happens to be very involved in a family development program called Krop Krua Kem Keng (Strengthening Families). She invited me to help out at some of the workshops close to her, and now we're trying to bring it to my site. My SAO's Balat and I just went to a training in Bangkok to see what other communities have been doing, and it seems like we're all on board with the idea. Looking forward to getting the ball rolling on it.
That's about it for now, but hopefully things will start happening now that I'm actually going to be at site for more than a week at a time. As fun as it was being with my parents and with the new group, it will be a relief to have a chance to actually start doing something at site – or at the very least, make sure people know I'm still alive. And keep the rats at bay.
