Emily's first blog from Thailand :-)
Where to start in writing a blog.... first, my name is Emily, I am twenty four and I am currently living in Mae Yao, Chiang Rai, Thailand. I flew in from Sydney - Bangkok - Chiang Rai on Monday afternoon, which is only a week ago, but it already feels like I've been here for a very long time, but a short time also!
I am staying at a Thai NGO that works largely with hilltribe people. There are a lot of people from the hilltribes around Mae Yao. The NGO teaches English, has a microfinance project, an anti trafficking project, and also a citizenship project. Volunteers are largely from Japan, Canada, USA, and Australia as well as many from Thailand.
The place where we are staying, if you can imagine, imagine this.... I am staying in a mud brick house with about twenty beds in it. Outside, there are big hills on either side, covered in bamboo, forest and a field which I think is being fallow at moment so that it can generate properly before the planting season. Everything is covered in a fine dust. It is getting into the hot season, which means that the air perpetually looks smoky where we are. If you walk down from the girls room, there is a pond with a bridge over it, and a kitchen with a roof made of dried banana/bamboo leaves.
Down the road, if you keep walking to the little shop where we buy toilet paper and snacks (you buy all your own toilet paper), you walk past rice paddies stretching green and green and green into the distance where there are hills with a few wooden villages sprawled across them. and then sky.
I am constantly in awe that I am actually in Thailand, actually in Chiang Rai. I am having the best time every time I just see the Thai script (EVERYWHERE) because I try to read it everywhere I go. I got really excited the other day when I was able to read the numberplates. It says เจิยงไร - just for the record, this means CHIANG RAI I read the signs!!!
I have been placed in the outdoor team for the first two weeks to get me orientated to the organisation. After that I will start working as an intern. There are two teams: the indoor team and the outdoor team. The indoor team concentrates on teaching English etc to kids, hill tribe housewives, child care centre and also some schools. The outdoor team focuses on construction.
Typical construction work here = making bricks.
All of the bricks that are used here are made onsite, in a painstaking process that takes a couple of hours. Apparently the record for brick making is 115 in one day, which was the record we set the other day. Brick making involves:
- digging dirt up out of the ground
- BAM BAMMING the dirt in a sack with a big stick
- sifting the dirt
- sieving the dirt
- mixing it with sand and cement
- setting the bricks one by one.
So far I havent done anything involved in the brick making (yet) but that is because the outdoor team is quite large at the moment. But in the past week, I have helped carry bricks in a brick line (you pass them along the line to the building); I have helped carry concrete in a concrete line, raked an entire hill that was covered in leaves as big as your chest.... And a building is being built at the moment from scratch. We put down half the concrete floor just the other day.
Teaching English
I have also taught at an English camp!! I went along as they were short of indoor people. We went to a school in Mae Yao district on Friday. I was paired with a guy called Tristan, and we were designated to teach about SPORT. We taught classes for one hour each from 9.30 til 4 with a lunch break, to students ranging in age from seven to seventeen, so we had to keep tailoring the lesson.
We made pictures of different sports,basketball and tennis and table tennis, and wrote the English word underneath. Then we played a game we made up called 'what sport is this?' where the class would have to call out what sport we pointed to. We also taught verbs like 'play' 'like' and 'like to play'. One lesson really bombed when we tried to explain Bingo. No one could understand when we were trying to explain to draw a square in their book. We tried to explain for about ten painful minutes. Painstakingly time ticked by. I was even rifling through my phrasebook in the class thinking HOW DO I SAY WRITE in Thai!!!! (its khian for all those out there needing this knowledge equally badly). Anyway apart from that one, our class went so well and we were throwing around a tennis ball in the class, getting the class to say responses and questions in English. A key sample:
Do you play basketball?
No I don't play basketball.
Do you play tennis?
Yes I play tennis.
Do you like cricket? (often pronounced QUICKET)
No I don't play quicket.
We were trying to suggest ways of pronouncing things by singing out lalalalala which helped with making the L sound. Often r and l are slurred together here so chiang rai can sometimes be chaing lai.
It was great fun teaching English. Sometimes I would speak in Thai like - do you understand? in thai. (Khaw cai may?) Everytime I did, they kept laughing. So i stopped after a while! But apparently they were laughing because they are impressed I speak Thai, not that I am necessarily bad at it. Since then I, I have started speaking Thai more confidently, as I learnt Thai for around 30 weeks last year in Sydney. (Chan rian phaa saa Thai 30 aathit leew thii Sydney). i am able to hold basic conversations with Thai people and am trying to learn more and more.
What I will be doing
I will be starting work on the Anti-Human Trafficking Project the week after this (aathit naa). This project goes into villages and performs dramas for the hilltribes about the dangers of human trafficking to inform the community. Often hill tribe girls are recruited from the North. The project is running severely low on funding, so by me helping out there I will be working on funding proposals and things like that, it will be made more clear closer to the time. Already I did some translation work the other day for a girl working on the project. She is Japanese. She doesnt write English well, so she had written the stories of some of the individuals that had been impacted by the NGO and then I helped to make it sound more academic and better English.
So it looks like at this point my main activities will actually be in the Anti Human Trafficking Project. The first two weeks I am so glad I am on outdoor team as it gives me a chance to meet the other volunteers and be friends with them. Most of the volunteers are from the USA or Canada. There are about four or five of us from Australia. Apparently 'reckon' and 'heaps' are Australian words that they find really funny.
Housewarming at an Akha village
I have also been to an Akha village. We had a housewarming party for Suda, who is a girl from an Akha tribe that volunteers at Mirror. Her parents and her were moving into a new house. The house warming party was in the house, and because it had been newly built, none of the furniture was inside it. Instead, virtually the whole village came to her house, and sat on the floor on tables, on chairs, everywhere possible in the whole house! And we were all served food. I am not sure of what I ate. I think at some point there may have been some seasoned offal. (It was good). Raw meat was also available. The village was beautiful, with wooden houses, and some people dressed in the traditional Akha dress, which some of you may have seen before. It constitutes an embroidered headdress as well as embroidered clothing.
As we were leaving, there was a large fire on the hill. Fires here are quite normal, and the hilltribe people know how to fight them effectively. On my second day, we had a fire near Mirror (about 200 - 300 metres away from the girls dorm). Seeing the fire, at first I was thinking 'oh NO' as I am used to Australian fires that spread fast through a forest.... But here, the forest doesnt catch in the same way, and fires are lit to meet the fire by the communities. So while we were leaving the Akha village, there was a fire on the mountain nearby across the valley. It was quite beautiful, like really big fairy lights. The flames were quite large in some places. But everyone was not even looking at the fire!!! It was all about the party. Apparently some people were already dealing with it and setting off fires to backburn to meet the fire. So it was all good. But its just such a difference in culture.
Chiang Rai
At the moment, I am in Chiang Rai (the town). On Saturday afternoons, we can be dropped in town by a song taaw (a truck with open sides and a roof) as volunteers have Sundays (wan aathit)and Mondays (wan jan) off . Chiang Rai is not very big. There is Thai script everywhere of course, so I am having a great time reading it. Last night we went to the Walking Market, where a whole street is filled up with lanterns and fairy lights and there are stalls in two lines down the road, filled with everything from watches to clothes to awesome food. There was a big grassy area where a Thai band was playing and heaps of people were dancing. It was great.
Also in Chiang Rai is the Night Bazaar, which we have been to twice this week. It sells a lot of touristy things like embroidered bags, beautiful baggy pants and skirts. In town, I also ate deep fried crickets, which are very small, about as big as the top end of your little finger. They are crunchy and they are like what you would eat in front of a TV. I also went to the Fish Bar. It is a place where you put your feet inside glass tanks full of fish and they nibble the skin off your feet. The first five minutes are excruciatingly awful because all you can think of is the fish eating you.
This week I will be going to a homestay in a hilltribe village. At the moment, I am not sure which village it will be, but it will probably be an Akha or Lahu village. We will be doing some construction work as well as interviewing the community about their culture, history and recording demographical statistics. I am really looking forward to it, and look forward to speaking with the families in Thai, and learning a little Akha/Lahu as well.
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