Some more pictures...

A few more teachers from my schools tying strings around my wrists in my welcoming ceremony. The woman next to the lady in the white hat is my landlord. She lives right next to me and is awesome!

All the teachers from Chumchon Banpetch School before we walk in the parade.

Concentrating really hard here. I knew about 3/4 of what I was saying during this little speech. My co-teacher helped me write it in Thai.

They also had a bunch of random games with schools from the area. The prize for each event was your choice of a case of beer or a case of soda. They had me up onstage handing the prizes to the winners and I don't think I gave one case of pop the whole time.

Looking out my back door...into my outdoor kitchen

The table and chairs where I sometimes eat.

Here's my living room where I get to hang at night.

My glorious cold-water shower! I didn't actually even expect to have a shower. When I first saw the house it had a bucket bath and squat toilet, but when I moved in my landlord had put this and a western toilet in...

This is my front porch. There are a lot of tables similar to this one where you can play checkers on the squares in the middle. I'm thinking of trying to bring chess here...don't know if that'd fly or not.

I call this one hands. It was a cool moment at a temple when they were pouring water to be blessed and two other sets of hands were helping this woman to steadily pour her water into the container.

During Songkran Festival many families travel around to various temples to pay respects to deceased loved ones. In this picture, seven monks tied a string from the door of a tiny mausoleum where the remains were across their laps and then began to chant and pray.

Beautiful sky in the province of Chanthabury.

This is also from the province of Chanthabury. This is in southwest Thailand is famous for being a fruit province. Above is a picture of a durian, which doesn't really taste or smell that good. But, people love it here. Hense the 10 foot statue.

My co-teacher actually thought this was a picture of one of my friends. I guess all white people do kind of look alike.

As school begins...

That last entry was written a bit before it was posted. This one will be more current with what’s been happening here with me. School starts tomorrow! I’m really excited to be starting my co-teaching and filling my days with something other than riding my bike around trying to communicate in Thai! The weather has turned to the rainy season, which means that in the next four or so months Thailand will expect rain frequently if not everyday. It is still fairly hot when the sun is out, but after rain it cools off and let’s everyone relax. One downside to the rain seems to be the drastic increase in the number of bugs I see. Troops of ants, swarms of mosquitoes, bumblebees as big as fat purple grapes and other bugs I have never had the pleasure of meeting. Did you know that ants here will even eat plain rice? I discovered that when I followed a trail of them and looked into my rice bucket to find it invaded by the little buggers. Best of all is that all these insects seem to be quite at home in my abode…the battle will rage on.

This means I have officially moved into my own place and out of my host-family’s house. Yay! My house is a little two-story place that is perfect for one person. I have been attempting to cook my own Thai food (still working on being good at it). I think out of the four or five dishes I have cooked one of them has been really delicious. The others were just okay but edible. Almost everyone here uses electric rice cookers, which makes that really easy. All you do is plug and press. Then, about half hour later you have a pot of rice. Most people here use gas stoves with a single burner, maybe two. My landlord is a teacher from my school and she has helped me out tremendously with getting the house ready, fixing it up and providing nearly all the furniture and other household stuff I needed. As I have heard from other areas of the world, Peace Corps Thailand has been called “Posh Corps” or “Soft Corps” because of the great food, friendly people and relative “second-worldness” of the country. So, my amenities include: washing machine, stove, sink, TV, DVD player, western toilet (as opposed to the challenging “squat toilet”), shower (cold water) and refrigerator. These things are great to have, but don’t let these fool you. They are just things and things don’t necessarily make integrating into another culture any easier. They just make cooking and washing easier : )

The Songkran Festival turned out to be really great. I stayed in my town for the three-day event “playing water” with everyone who came around. The first morning of the festival seven of the local schools participated in a parade. Each school made a float with an animal as their theme. Both of my schools participated, but I walked with my one school that had a gigantic elephant float. The day before the parade I even went and helped decorate it with flowers. The parade started in the next town over and ended about 2 kilometers from the start in a local “healthy park” as everyone here says. It’s a place where there are tennis and basketball courts, a walking path and community events can be held. Planners for the event had set up tents all around and there was a central stage where speeches were given (I even gave a speech in Thai!) and music was played. I may have written about this before, but the traditional idea of the Songkran Festival is a day of purification and rejuvenation through water. Monks, elders and myself were all purified. They sat us in chairs in a long line and everyone from the community walked past pouring scented flower water over hands and necks and saying small prayers for good health and happiness. I think I got the most water because everyone was excited about getting the “foreigner” wet! They also did a welcoming ceremony with me where each person tied a small white string around either one of my hands. First they would brush the white string on your wrist away from you “pulling” any ill feelings out. Then they would brush the string on your wrist towards you wishing happiness and welcome to you. They then tied the string around your wrist. It was really cool and I bet about two hundred people tied strings around my hands. It is then tradition to leave the strings on your wrists for three days before cutting them off. Every time I took a bath I had to wring these massive bracelets of white string out because they were sopping wet. The following two days of Songkran everyone is just riding around in pick-ups, cars, motorbikes or bicycles splashing each other and putting white “cooling” powder on each other’s faces. It’s also a time where many people start drinking when the sun comes up and stop long after the sun goes down. I couldn’t quite bring myself to crack a beer at 6:30 in the morning. I had to wait till at least 8:00 : )

In the summertime...

Another hot one here in Thailand. We are about at the peak of the hot season. This weekend will be Thailand’s biggest festival of the year, Songkran. It marks the Thai New Year and can last anywhere from three to five or more days. The way I figure it the Thai government declares each year how long the festival will last (actual days that are national holidays), and then local areas kind of make their own schedule anyways. The premise of Songkran is a huge water fight. Everyone actually says “len naam” which means “play water.” For three or more days the entire country is running around dousing each other with water, and no one is exempt from the fun. The elderly, young children and buses full of people are all fair game. I asked around and I think that at night when everyone is sleeping you are relatively safe, but I might just have to try and change that trend. This festival will be a nice way to celebrate the summer here.

Right now, the teachers from school are taking a break, and I am spending my days getting to know my community and studying Thai. I am still living with a host family but am hoping to be living in my own house sometime shortly after the festival. The town I am in is small and does not have the biggest selection of rental houses. School begins on the 14th of May, and I am very excited to be in the classroom again. Some of my most heartening experiences so far in Thailand have come from interacting with the kids. It will be nice to be able to see students almost everyday. Within my Peace Corps project, I have two primary goals. The first is to work with two different Thai teachers from two different schools about how to create a learning environment that is more student-centered. From what I have observed so far of English classrooms in Thailand is that there is a lot of attention placed on rote memorization, or repeating something until it’s in your head. There is also quite a bit of time given to the students to copy English words from the blackboard. So, a student centered learning approach can include making lesson plans that encourage the students to think critically, think independently, problem solve, create and ask questions on their own and also to get them comfortable speaking and listening to English. In the classroom, I will be co-teaching every time I teach. The idea is not for me to come and teach English on my own, but rather that we share ideas about teaching and carry those out in our lesson plans. Hopefully, after two years here, our co-teachers and the volunteers have shared different ideas about better, more effective ways to teach. The second goal of our project is to help with activities in our community. These activities can anything that the community requests or I suggest and someone wants to do. These activities may include HIV/AIDS/life skills workshops, teacher training seminars, English camps for students or helping with business endeavors (although for anyone who knows me, I dropped out of college after trying to switch to a business major J). We can also simply act as catalysts for helping someone start a project they have been thinking about. There are cases where the ideas are in place, but there may be a lack of knowledge on where and how to acquire the resources to carry out a project. So, in a nutshell, those are my two goals for my two years here. There are also other Peace Corps objectives that are somewhat unspoken. These include the sharing of culture between both the host country and the volunteer. Then, when the volunteer returns to America, he or she will often share knowledge of experiences from that country. Anyone want to be a Peace Corps volunteer yet?

Here is a picture from the Songkran festival in my town,