9 posts from January 2008

it's that time again. time for another weekly lesson teaching the thai language. this week i figured you should learn one of the very first things i learned to say, "thank you". this is another good phrase to know because like i mentioned before the thai people are very kind and welcoming so it's good to know how to be polite. once again english phonetics can vary but thank you in thai is khop kun.

Khopkun

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the way i remembered words sometimes is through association. for thank you just remember cops and robbers. well robbers is a stretch but raccoons look like little furry crooks and if you're from the deep south those shadowy eyed creatures are called coons. so next time you want to say thank you in thai just say cop coon. dont for get to add the polite particle. men would say khop kun krap and women would say khop kun ka. and remember thai is a tonal language so be sure to click the links to hear the phrase spoken. check back net thursday for another phrase

our team took a trip to the mae hong son, a small village in the mountains of northern thailand, to put on an english camp for the local children. this is the second part of our story in a multi-post series telling about our trip and the things we did. it’s early friday morning after a long overnight trip up the mountain roads and we've just unloaded ourselves off of a tiny bus into the darkness of the morning at a place that they told me was supposed to be a bus station.

we're all tired, not many of us got rest, but i am in high spirits because of the amusing events on the ride up to the mountains. i learn that jenny's uncle will be picking us up after his shift... which seems to be not for another 4 hours or so. well, we have some time so we start walking. i think we were going to go stay at a temple and just grab some shut eye for a bit but that plan failed some how. i wasn't asking too many questions, but i do know that after we walked a few blocks one direction we turned around and headed the other way. eventually we cam to a police station. jenny's uncle was a police officer and instead of waiting for him we decided to go meet him. anyway short story even shorter, we spent the night at the prison (no not in the cells... although i kind of thought that would have made for a cooler story). i unsuccessfully did my best to catch some z's. i was too lazy to dig out my thermarest so i just leaned against my pack and listened to my ipod. a few short hours later we rose to go eat breakfast with jenny's uncle at a shop in a near by market area. it was soup of some kind that's all i really remember. then robert told us to look around and buy some food for lunch since we wouldn't have it provided for us in the village we were going to. no problem right? well, this wasn't quite your local h.e.b. it was kind of nerve racking knowing that i had to find my lunch in a foreign market place, not knowing the language or half the things being sold. if i chose to play it safe and just grab a light snack then i'd have to go a whole day on the mystery soup of the morning and the cornetto i bought for the bus ride. drew and i browsed the narrow aisles of venders looking sheepishly at their wares. we bought some fruit and meet up with the rest of the group who was buying some fried chicken and sticky rice. getting some for ourselves we headed back to the police station. we packed all of our bags and our persons into the small pick up belonging to jenny's uncle and took off for the first village.

driving up the mountain roads in the crisp morning air was a good refreshment for one on so little sleep. we came to a place where the road ran along a river and stopped at what seemed to be a guard post (apparently we were spitting distance from the burmese boarder). we could go no further by truck because the road a long been washed out by the river it followed. so we made our way down a slope and hopped in a long-tail boat. the river ride was even more scenic than the truck ride had been and we were all wide-eyed as we cruised past the abundance of greenery. reaching a small sandy shore we unloaded our supplies and walked a short distance to the village. jenny's uncle, our ambassador of sorts, led us to the small school. it reminded me of stories my mom had told me of her early education in buffalo valley, tennessee. there were about 20 students probably from the ages of 6 to 15 all taught by the same teacher in a one or two room building with a large open area in front. the kids were very shy and spoke hardly any english, but we started to play games with them, doing our best to explain the concepts with our fellow thais as translators. this was were i felt more at home playing with kids comes more natural to me than befriending college students. we ran around and had some fun and then we passed out gifts for the children and their families. afterwards, we had our market meal at one of the houses and most of us ended up taking a nap to make up for the bus ride.

after we were well feed and well rested we made our way out of the village back to the boat. traveling on we made our way to one of the long neck villages. it was pretty cool to see in person a culture that most only see on the discovery channel or the travel channel, but i felt like too much of a tourist. i don't like feeling like a tourist. i'm pretty sure that if you came up to me and said, "hey john, (or marty... or any other of my many names) you're such a tourist.", i would take offense. it may sound odd, but my mom knows how much i hated doing touristy things on our family outings. she thought it was me just trying to be cool and not be seen with my parents but it was more about not liking tourist. now i am all about traveling to interesting places which is what one might say a tourist does, but there's a difference between being a "tourist" and traveler. tourist are pretentious and ethnocentric. they are demanding and inconsiderate. basically their existence continually increases the cultural divides that cause problems in our world. ok ok that last part may be stretching it but let's just say that to me tourist is a four letter word...erm... with "ist" on the end. anyway our trip to the long neck village was exciting but it did kind of put an itch in me so i wasn't saddened that it was somewhat short lived. as we cruised along in the long-tail boat back to the truck at the guard post my mind drifted to other things. it had already been an exciting day, but it wasn't over yet. we still had a temple to go to and i had more cornettos to eat.

our team took a trip to the mae hong son, a small village in the mountains of northern thailand, to put on an english camp for the local children. this is the first of a multi-post series telling about our trip and the things we did. it’s thursday night right after cell group and we are all packed into the back of the joaw ford scrambling to get to the bus station. we barely make it and as we file on to the small bus everyone stares.

 
ok so we were on this bus ride up to the mountains. it was eight hours long in this little cramped seat that was not exactly what i call sleep friendly. this was an overnight bus ride by the way (8pm-4am). adding insult to injury the road up to the mountains was a combination of the road to camp of the hills and a roller-coaster. anyway drew and i were crammed in this two seat row, knees squeezed behind the chair and he's not feeling well either. eventually some people get off (did i mention we were constantly starting and stopping), so i moved to a three seat row with one other thai guy to let drew stretch out some (however, one stop later a thai guy, possibly drunk, sat next to him in the spot i moved from). the funny part though is that the thai guy (let's call him bob) that was next to me pulled down his bag and put it in the window seat. so i'm in the aisle seat, bob's in the middle, and his bag is in the far seat. smart move for bob, he could now protect his bag and use it to support him as he slept... nope. bob fell asleep alright, but he did so on me. at first it was no biggie. he just did the kind of leaning thing, which i could ignore. then his head dropped to my shoulder. i couldn't take it anymore. it was too funny. i had to show julie who was on the other side of the aisle from me. she started to crack up. this of course led me to start to snicker... but i didn't want to wake bob up for fear of being rude and making things awkward. i couldn't help it. my shoulders started to bounce as i tried to constrain my laughter. then i let it slip, a shoulder heaving chuckle. bob jolted. still trying to hold in laughter i stared straight ahead hoping he would just readjust himself towards his bag and go back to sleep. bob did go back to sleep (almost immediately) but he forgot to lean on his bag. within minutes bob was snuggling up to me again, head drooping on my shoulder. i mustered all my strength to hold in the laughter, hoping i could use the insane curves to gently push bob back towards his bag. no luck. somehow we seemed to be making only right hand turns... i couldn't help it. i tried, really i did, but all my compressed laughter shifted from my mouth and my gut to my shoulders. uncontrollably they began to gyrate up and down at the speed of laughter. bob's head bounced up from the shoulder blow.

 
now before i continue there are two things i need to paint clearly in your mind. first off, i have very bony shoulders. i mean seriously whatever those two long skinny bones that go across your chest are called they basically come out to make spikes on the place that bob's temples were resting. secondly, this may be unknown to those who have not had a class with a cadet from the corp at texas a&m university but there is a strange phenomena that happens sometimes when someone is sleep deprived but forced to sit upright. i don't know the medical term for it but basically as the head starts to drift slowly downward it picks up speed due to the increased torque provided by the direction of gravity and the increasing angle of the neck. at a given point the pull becomes too great and tension forces suddenly fail. for the unconscious sleeper this means a rapid downward jerk. the spike in acceleration instantly wakes up the body and allows for a last instant recovery flinging the head back upwards, allowing renewed vertical repositioning. unfortunately this instantaneous jolt of down and up motion is not able to revive the sleeper longer than a few seconds so the process repeats. the resulting effect is a human bobble head. (now that i think about it that might be the scientific term "bobble-head syndrome". on a side note this is made even more hilarious when the sleeping corp member is in a chair that has a bending back. imagine a backwards bobble-"upper body" effect on the front row of class as a professor is giving a lecture.)

but now back to bob. so out of some freak coincidence the frequency of my shoulder gyrations and bob's... bobbling matched perfectly with a 180 degree phase shift. in other words my shoulder would spike bob's head up in the air and as his head went up my shoulder would go down and as his head came back down my shoulder would be heaving up to meet his head. this probably happened a handful of times but the utter ridiculousness of it made it seem like it lasted for a good minute. eventually the blunt trauma was enough to wake bob up to slightly reposition as i continued to hold in my laughter (i assumed it wasn't polite to laugh uproariously on a bus full of sleeping thais). then the spinning cogs in my mind came to a brilliant conclusion. how could i solve the problem of bob's bobbling? i would just lean forward slightly, resting my head on the back of the seat in front of me and then as he slid my direction on the next big curve nothing would be there to catch him and he would be forced to come up with a less socially awkward sleeping arrangement. i don't know if the curve was just not big enough or if the muscles in bob's slumbering body were just strong enough to resist the forces, but the quick slide into nothingness plan i had devised was less than successful. instead bob had gently drifted from a mostly upright position to a mostly prone position behind me. that's right my plan to avoid an uncomfortable situation resulted in a short thai man lounging across my back at 3 in the morning in a dark bus with the top of his head just barely peaking into the aisle. i signaled julie again and she almost died. at this point my laughter was quelled by the total unease i felt. bob eventually woke up, but didn't say anything to me. we both just pretended nothing had happened. i knew that i was called to be a bridge and a magnet to the thai people but i didn’t expect that role to be played out so… literally. and that is how our trip to the mountains started.

so my apologies for such a delay in posting any updates but i was sick for a short time after our group's trip to the mountains last weekend. to catch everyone up to speed i'm just going to quickly cover some of the cool things we've done since my last update and i'm working on putting some more pictures on my new flickr account (i think i've reached some kind of limit on vox).

two sundays ago now we went to walking street which happens every sunday. basically, they close down a huge section of streets and the whole place becomes a big market. i mentioned before seeing more amazing things that i could have thought possible. well walking street probably doubled that. a few people were handing out flyers for muay thai fights for monday night. that peaked the interest of the three of us so monday (our day off) at night we got a rot dang (“auto red” i think, basically the taxis of thailand) to take us to the place on the flyer. we didn’t really know what to expect, but julie said she had heard that if you sat on the front row there was a chance you might get blood on you. yikes! we were seated (ya on the front row) and we ordered cokes and we waited, wide-eyed and curious. the listing said there would be a total of nine fights! we were almost mortified when small kids no more than 8 or 9 were led to the ring. don’t worry the matches were friendly (like sparring in karate). the combatants slowly got older and older and the fights got more heated. the big fight was supposed to be spain vs. thailand, but it was a huge let down compared to some of the other fights (spain won easily and we were rooting for thailand). the most awesome part of the whole night was when three guys entered the ring and were then blindfolded. as the bell rang the three of them bolted up and started swinging wildly. it was more of a comedy routine with the three fighters bumbling around like clowns, the referee getting attacked several times and then pushing the blind opponents into each other. i got the whole thing on video and i’ll try to post it if i can. afterwards the three fighters went around getting tips from the crowd. all in all it was a fun night. 

one other really cool thing was that we met two brits while at the fights and they told us they were rock climbing at places all across southeast asia. the next day robert took us on a “mystery” equipping trip. we went to a place called crazy horse and guess who we met there? our two new friends from mother england, climbing. we said ‘allo again and then went on exploring some caves that robert showed us. one place we climbed down into was quite dark. robert lit a lighter and showed us the four walls and then told us to find the other way out as he extinguished the light. it took the whole team searching but we finally found a huge opening that lead to a grand room with a small hole in the roof about 100-200 feet above us. (it turns out one of the “walls” was only from the waist up) the place where we did our equipping time was called (and get this) anxiety state crisis. after a gut churning climb up a small cliff we came into a beautiful cave with a large opening with early morning light flooding in. again beauty surpassing my ability to describe (just wait for the pictures) and this is where we did our morning study.

the last exciting thing that has been happening is that julie and i are learning to drive the joaw ford. i love driving in thailand. left side of the road, driving a standard, shifting with the left hand, no power-steering, in a place where traffic laws are more like guidelines. i wish americans drove like they drive in chiang mai. let’s just say space is used efficiently. :-P 

that’s all i have for now i’ll get pictures up asap and be checking back soon for a multipart report of our trip to mae hong sorn.

this is the first of a weekly post teaching the thai language (or passa thai). as well as learning to speak some essential phrases hopefully you will learn a bit of the culture as well.

so i figure the first thing you need to learn when taking on a new language is how to greet someone. salutations in thai are both more complicated and simpler in thailand. what do i mean by that? well, greeting someone involves more than just spoken words. there is the social custom of wai-ing and the ever so important smile. however, once you learn all of this things it's a lot easier because the same greeting covers  "good morning", "good evening", "good afternoon", "good night", "hello", and "good-bye".

first, let me explain the wai (pronounced just like "y"). the way you wai is by holding your hands together, palms joined, in front of your body. sounds easy right? well, that's not the whole of it. who wais who first and how high you raise you hands is also defined by custom. normally a person of lower status wais first. most of the time this means younger people. as far as how high to raise your hands there aren't clear "rules" but here's what i would say as a two week observer. if it's a younger person gently touch the tips of your index finger to your chin; someone of the same age or a good friend gently touch your index fingers somewhere in the nose to brow region; an older or important person somewhere in the forehead area. for the king you should probably have the backs of your thumbs touching the top of your forehead. also the lower you bow your head the more respect is shown. if all else fails i always go with "monkey see, monkey do". all of this said the thai people are very friendly and probably won't mind if a foreigner doesn't fully get the whole wai-ing thing perfectly.

Sawadee

next, lets cover the spoken part. i don't know the best way to spell it in english but basically "sawatdee" or "sawaddi" are two good approximations.  then to be polite you add the male or female polite particle, krap or ka respectively. so men would say "sawatdee krap" and women would say "sawatdee ka" (note: krap isn't pronounced exactly how it looks. it's more of a klup/klap with a soft "l" that sometime isn't even heard)

finally, don't forget the smile. It's the last key ingredient to a proper thai greeting. thai is also a tonal language but i won't even begin to go there right now. well, i hope you learned something interesting and check back for more lessons on passa thai.

so i wanted to wait a week after arriving before i wrote my next update to all of you (you know to get a feeling for what life here was like) and wow what a week it was. in one week i think i've tasted, smelt, seen, and done more new things one person could expect to experience had they fallen into another dimension and in some ways thailand really is somewhat of an alternate reality.

culture shock?

no.

more like culture amazement. i'm beginning to understand why they call it "amazing thailand", i'm struggling to find the words to describe it all. i think you should know something about me. i find it very hard to tell people things if i can't fully and accurately communicate what i want to say. maybe it has something to do with a limited vocabulary and a non-fondness for the english or maybe something deeper, but never the less it's something i struggle with. so i can tell you about the things we've done so far but it makes me squirm a little bit because there really isn't a way for you to get this any more than hearing a nice story and looking at some pictures. and man it is so much more than that. let me just say right now to any who may be thinking about it "go on a mission trip" and the longer you can stay the better i think. i'll leave it at that... for now.

let the uncomfortableness commence. so we arrived in chiang mai a little over a week ago now. the first people we met was our mentor, robert reagan, and three short-term interns from singapore and malaysia (mit, adelina, and han). after a nice breakfast at a nice little place called bake and bite we headed to the christian zone (the name of the place we are staying), met a few more people, and began to unpack our things. the christian zone is a three story building close to payap university. the first floor is a hangout area for the students (equipped with ping-pong table), an office, a library, and a few other small rooms. the second floor has a small kitchen area with a balcony, robert's office, a computer area, and a few dormotory type rooms for interns such as us. finally, the third floor is a large open area with windows lining both sides and is used for church services and large meetings (there is also a baptismal with a lovely mural in one corner). drew and i are currently sharing a bunkbed in one of the rooms on the second floor (nothing foreign about that as we have already shared a room last semester in college station). that night we had a amazing meal and small impromptu devotional at robert's house with his family, some former interns and some of the thai christians.

over the next day or so we began to familiarize ourselves with our new environs. the university is less than a block away. there are a number of eating places on campus as well as several right outside the zones front door (i'll do a post later on about the different meals we come to know and enjoy). the food is amazing and it's really a big part of our ministry. in the past lunch time on campus has become a key tine for meeting people and make friends with the thai students here. the other interns took us for a walk along a small river that borders the campus which lead to a large open area that was oddly serene for a landscape found in the city. julie and i ran around the campus that first morning. it's not very large coming from the comparatively monolithic campus of tamu, but it seemed quaint and sufficient with the beauty of lots of flowers and a few small ponds and the ever so essential football fields and volleyball/basketball courts.

our first group activity was cell group which takes place every thursday night for the payap church. just a small gathering with singing and sharing (mostly in thai) that is all started with a common meal (i told you food is a big part of the ministry). afterward we got to hangout with everyone and play games and continued singing. the next day we went as a group to what we were told was a bb gun paintball-esque place [LINK-TO-COME]. fortunately the "bb guns" were only automatic air-soft rifles [LINK-TO-COME]. nothing say lets be friends like shooting small plastic pellets [LINK-TO-COME] at high velocities at each other. right after we returned from doing this we packed up for another trip to a "house-boat" for a day and night of planning/relaxing/getting to know each other. now back in the states a house boat is a small to mid-sized boat that happens to have an area to live in, kitchen, bed, bathroom, etc. well what we eventually came to was more of a small floating hotel. again that word amazing pops in. we drove a good distance up into the mountains in the back of the jao-ford [LINK-TO-COME] (the church pickup), scenery becoming even more beautiful and the air becoming cooler as we drove higher and higher. the pictures can do a better job than my words can. suffice it to say that once we got there we were blown away. being an engineer i was amazed that the entire structure including ourselves was supported by bundles of bamboo. the morning view was even more majestic than what we saw the night before. it is the kind of sight the makes your heart melt with appreciation for God's love and His power. it is that it was the kind of beauty you want to share with the person that means the most to you.

a truck-load of credit to robert for know how to motivate and energize his charges with the natural blessings thailand has to offer. we returned to the zone after a breakfast and some morning equipping time feeling rested and renewed. (equipping time is time we spend with robert every morning or sometimes afternoons learning and discussing various things related to out work. currently we are going through what is called the "red book"). church on sunday was even more fascinating. i love music as i've mentioned and singing in thai was just... well... amazing. for the lesson jan, robert's wife, translated through theses little wireless earpieces that you see diplomats and dignitaries wear during  meetings at the UN. probably not as high tech but still you can be sure that drew and i felt pretty cool about ourselves. it's really very motivating to learn the language when you are surrounded by it (and i'm a computer science guy, new languages are our business). drew and i are both going to lead sunday service at least once while we are here and we both think it would pretty stinkin' awesome to close with a prayer in thai, no translation needed.

if you're still reading this you're beginning to understand my need to use a lot of words to convey the experience of being here. i thank you for your patience and i want to leave you with one last thing. the experience isn't a cakewalk despite the wonderful things i've tried to describe. no mission trip is. there are always team issues and other problems. i'll be the first to admit i'm still trying to find my groove, still trying to fit in, still learning to adapt to the culture. a fish, not out of water, but in waters of a different... feel. do you remember how when you won a goldfish at a fair or bought a guppy from the store they put it in a little bag and before you released it into you tank or bowl at home you were supposed to let the bag sit in the water for a bit so the temperature would adjust slowly for the fish. if you didn't do this i always imagined the fish felt awfully uncomfortable. it's kind of like that, an uncomfortable fish that is trying to clear it's head and understand this new home it's been placed in. but this is precisely why mission trips are so powerful. God can do amazing things with the uncomfortable, but it isn't too often that we are willing to place ourselves in situations that make us squirm like fishes.

today drew and i got on a plane (don't worry there weren't any snakes on it). we flew from texas and north carolina (respectively) and met up in chicago. i rushed to finish all of the last minute business i needed to take care of on the phone and we boarded a huge 747 to tokyo. i've flown on one of these transcontinental flying beasts a few times before last summer going to london, bucharest, and nairobi. the difference this time was that each of the times before it had been with BA. i remember being awestruck by getting to watch movies or tv shows the whole way with plenty of tasty meals and complimentary socks (which i still have several pairs of, what can i say they were blue and quite comfortable). ANA (our transpacific transporter) was even more impressive. british accents are really cool but when you are going on a serve abroad for six months it strikes you a little deeper when japanese is spoken first and then they offer a english translation second. we still had the cool movies and the meals (of which i got plenty, just one of the perks, if you can call it that, of traveling with a guy that is allergic to half the eatable things known to man), but this time we got warm face towels to clean up before the meal and along with flying with the daylight we flew (as drew put it)"into the future" as we crossed the international date line (i'm on the positive side of time once again).

it was a long flight to tokyo (made all the longer by the fact that the man in the aisle seat, blocking us from the leg stretching freedom provided by that aisle, was asleep for a good 80% of the flight), but jackie chan, chris tucker, and mr. bean made it pretty enjoyable. we made it at last and we stepped foot on to japanese soil about 13 hours after leaving the windy city. we were excited about the free internet we would get to use as we waited for our next flight to bangkok, but that turned into a disappointment we found only the standard pay-to-surf services that most american airports have (apparently julie flew threw hong kong not tokyo and so our hope we falsely raised).

Bkk1

we got on a much less crowded 777 to thailand at about 6 pm local time and slept most of the way to bangkok, only waking for a meal and some ice-cream. 7 or 8 hours later we awoke to instructions in japanese, english, and thai to return our seats to the upright position as we made our "final apploach". we said kop khun krup and domo ariegato to our flight attendants and began a hunt for mango and sticky rice (drew's favorite thai dish). going through customs we grabbed our bags and asked a gentleman in a light purple jacket where we could find our gate for the next morning’s flight. after eating some good thai food and talking to my mom on skype drew and i made our way to the area next to the desk we will need to check into and pulled out our thermarests. now we'll get about 3 hours of sleep and wake up to meet julie for our last leg to chiang mai. goodnight all.

as we were preparing for thailand the team was asked to create a profile about ourselves. each of us answered a series of questions about things like our history, our strengths, and our goals. one of the things we were asked to describe was what expectations we had for our time in thailand and how we thought we might respond if our expectations were not met. basically my answer was that i had no expectations, except to grow in wisdom and understanding and that this could always be met no matter where a person is (be it in texas working or overseas serving God). all that's required is a heart that is open and searching. i guess you could say that i expect my experience to be transforming and that i don’t think the nature of this transformation can be understood until i arrive on the other side of it. if you believe in the wonder of the way God works then you'll find it no suprise that last friday night after a meal with my family at p.f.chang's my fortune cookie read the following: "Sometimes traveling to a new place leads to great transformation."

Fortune