euthanAsia

There us a dog who lives in a cage right next to my house. Usually, I ignore the beautiful golden retriever, as it lies there, lifelessly bored out of its skull--I have never once seen its owner take the animal out of it's tiny living quarters (nor do I know who owns the creature, for that matter. Sometimes, if the retriever's up on its feet or looking in my direction, I make friendly woofing noises, letting it know that I notice it & that I recognise it. I don't really know if the dog cares or not, but it makes me feel like I'm at least somewhat engaging the poor creature.

Today, I came home, and after a particularly depressing weekend, I decided to go say 'hi' to the dog in a bit of a more personal way. Man, was this dog ever glad to see me. He sprang up from his catatonic stupour and started sniffing and pacing and panting, being all excited-like with his wagging tail--even jumping up against its fence to try and get closer to me. Then he started whining. I knew that he wanted to get out and have some fun with me, but there was no way for me to release the dog. After a good minute of the dog's excitement of human interaction, he seemed to calm down, sit by the fence and just pant gleefully, knowing that there was someone there watching him and being right next to him.

I was saddened that I had to leave. I went inside my house to grab my school keys & get some of my belongings that were locked in a room. When I hopped back outside to go & get these things, I looked at the dog in his prison: back to the catatonic stupour, yet this time it almost appeared that the dog was even more depressed.

I immediately had an overwhelming sense of compassion for the dog. Here he was, trapped & isolated in a cage that he didn't want to be in. He desperately wanted to get out, to have fun & to be with people. Then, when someone comes along & pays him a bit of attention, his hoped get raised to the point of ecstasy--someone noticed him! Someone wanted to be with him! Someone wanted to pet him & be his friend! But it was all for naught. The would-be friend quickly abandoned the poor dog and walked away, having better things to do that evening.

I bet that if I had got in that dog's head, it may very well have thought: "Why did you even bother coming over here at all? All you've done now is made me just that much more aware of my wretched prison."

* * * * *

This weekend, I had the "pleasure" of going on a PD day retreat with my fellow staff members. It was meant to be a spiritual retreat--a time where were were supposed to get reconnected with God & to build relationships with eachother. The intention was to encourage and strengthen us as individuals & as a "team."

All it did was make me all the more aware of how trapped I feel.

I was for 36 hours exposed to an opportunity where I could hang out with people, where I had no obligations toward school, marking, lesson planning, students or anyone else. I had a taste of freedom. It was delicious.

I was given the opportunity to have time to spend with God--something that my superiors wanted me to take advantage of. I was amazed.


We were asked to share words of encouragement about each other at one of our sessions. A lot of words were said, and all of them with good intentions. The only things that got said about me were that I was a good worker, that I strove for excellence and that I seem to accomplish what to others would be an impossible task. I was told that people wished they could be as diligent as me; I was told that people respected my efforts.

Now, don't get me wrong. I appreciate their words. I know that they were doing their best to encourage me. However, I wasn't encouraged. I do not define myself by what I do or by how much I accomplish. Work is work: it's a necessary evil of life. Granted, I live my life by the motto: "Whatever you do, do it with all your heart, working as if unto the Lord," but I don't desire to be defined by my workingness.

Later that night, we as a staff were all gathered together to hang out on the beach where we were staying with the intention of getting to know each other better. I sat down by one group of teachers, and half of them got up & left, because the sand was too dirty there (granted, it was rather gross). Those who remained didn't bother to acknowledge me, but instead, started to talk in whispered voiced. Another teacher came and sat down nearby me, but didn't say a word. I think he was in a contemplative non-talking mood. Myself, tired of being ignored, decided to try the other side of the group, hoping that there would be more of an interaction over there.

Walking around the highly-engaged group of people, busily chatting with each other, I was certain that when I sat down I'd be able to squeeze into a conversation or two. I think, though, that I must have some sort of social disease, because as soon as I sat down, the conversation that was going on tapered off to silence within the next minute. Those who were talking slowly turned themselves inward, engaging me with naught but their backs.

I think that my co-workers think I'm a workaholic. The sad thing is that I would much rather be hanging out. All they know of me is that I sit in my classroom, slaving away so that I don't drown in schoolwork & so that my students don't end up being grossly under-schooled. I think that they've defined me by this presentation of who I am. What they don't know is that it kills me a little bit each time that I have to say "no" to hanging out with people in light of my insurmountable responsibility. But, why bother trying to form new relationships when the people that you always hang out with are right beside you on this beach, right? It's much easier to talk with someone that you know and much easier to build a relationship once it's already founded. Of course I was left on the outside. And it made me feel like crap.

What was the point of going to a group hang-out session if no one wants to hang out with you? Why bother trying to build relationships if you're already on the "don't bother" list? How do you engage people if they make you feel unclean?


I hate my cage. Part of me wishes that I had never gone on that stupid "retreat"; all it's done has been to make me all the more aware of my current situation. It's better to never have been made aware of what was on the outside if you never can take part in it. Leave me to rot here until my penance is up, if all you give me is hollow shimmers of something greater. At least then I won't have to think of what I'm missing.

Post Script

An interesting quirk about speaking English in Thailand:

Last night, myself, Jon Fairbridge & our visiting friends from Canada went down to Khao San road to hang out. We stopped into the Starbucks there to caffeinate ourselves sufficiently for the evening. As I handed the barista my Bangkok Bank card, she asked if I lived in Thailand.

"Yes I do," I said.

"What do you do?"

"I am a teacher. I teach English."

"Where?"

"At an English school in Nonthaburi."

"Really? I am from Nonthaburi! Close to Nonthaburi pier," she said.

"Wow! And you work all the way down here?" I asked--Khao San is easily a half hour taxi ride away, about a 300 baht round trip.

"Yes."

"How come?" I wondered, since there was a Starbucks at the Central Plaza mall on Rattanathibet Road, not more that a 15 minute's walk from the pier.

"River taxi," she said with a smile as she busily worked behind the counter finishing up my drink.

Ahh, English as a Second Language! She spoke excellent English, with barely even any accent, but my question skipped right over her comprehension level due to this, perhaps our most irregular interrogative structure! In any other language, "how come" would have meant, "How do you come here" (as it would in Thai), but in English, it doesn't mean this at all.

It's amazing, the idioms that we take for granted, isn't it?

Learnage

Things that I've learned about myself so far this year:

• I'm pretty sure that my calling's not to be a Math teacher. I feel remarkably gifted in & rewarded by teaching--just not by learning math (and maybe not teaching high school students).
• I'm pretty sure that my calling is much more directed toward full-time ministry with a primary focus on outreach, as opposed to the outreach being a tacked-on thing. Three years ago, if you had asked me if I was going to pursue a life of full time ministry, I probably would have told you that you were out of your mind. Interesting how things change...
• Language barriers suck. I think that we (or me), as North Americans, largely miss out upon the mission field where we could have the greatest impact: next door. I myself have been made extremely aware at how poor of a steward I have been with the time I could be spending with the seeking / hurt individuals in my home community. Whenever I get back to Canada, I'm hoping that this will change.
  

Re-Leaf

It probably has been close to two weeks since my last, "cliffhanging" update, where I communicated a great deal of frustration, disillusionment, discouragement and exhaustion At the end of my letter, I said that something inevitably had to change--and that that change would have to happen quickly. Well, it did.

Thankfully, the change did not come as a heart attack, a car accident, a nervous breakdown or as some random tropical disease. It came as a realisation. A realisation that I myself am nothing; that what I do in my own strength amounts to little more than a pile of dust in the light of a broader perspective. I have been working my tail off for the past five and a half months, trying my best to do my best and be the best that I possibly could be--that's kind of who I am. Yet, despite all of my vigorous efforts, all of my sleepless nights, all of my work-filled weekends, I never felt like I was ever going to meet the expectations that were had on me--whether they were real expectations from my employers, perceived expectations that I thought (and maybe still do think) existed, manufactured personal expectations or any countless other benchmark that I was aware of. I always was feeling like I was falling short: other staff members would be having evenings & weekends free, making extra money tutoring or helping out / volunteering in non-school ministries and pretty much enjoying life while I felt as if I was rotting away in my classroom, pouring over my lessons, struggling with my work & with the content (teaching yourself the finer points of linear algebra is a bit tough--especially when you're expected to be teaching the same material to students the next day). I was discouraged, despairing and beginning to get depressed. But then, I realised something. I realised my real station in life--how much my own individual actions actually make a difference.


The Story

It became blatantly obvious to me on the second Monday of teaching after we had come back from our semester break. I had just burned my weekend away, sitting in my classroom pouring over minute details of trigonometric identities for grade 11 math and quadratic transformations for grade 10. I had planned these amazing lessons, where I was going to introduce the concepts to my students in many exciting, engaging ways, but as a result, I didn't get a chance to mark the grade 10 homework assignments. "No problem," I thought, "Most math teachers get their students to mark assignments in class. I'll just allot some time in one of the classes this week to do that, and we can all review together the more difficult questions." It was an excellent idea, I thought.

The week started, and when it came time for me to dazzle my students with amazing teaching & learning techniques... They wouldn't even pay attention. My Grade 11 students (a class size of 3) were just "not in the mood" to learn: One refused to sit at a desk, but instead, lay down and began to sleep; another student chose to play with a Rubik’s cube throughout the class; the third decided that it was more advantageous to stare off into space instead of learning math. When I asked what was going on, they balked my inquisition. Choosing to switch my teaching approach for that day, I asked them to take out their textbooks and turn to the section that we were studying. None of them--not one--had brought their textbook to school that day, nor had they bothered to bring notebooks or even paper to class. Joy.

So, grade 11 was a failure that day. All of the work that I had poured into trying to engage the students was for naught. Hopefully, Grade 10 would be better. Well...... It wasn't. A homework assignment was due that day, so instead of collecting them, I thought that I would get the students to mark their own. It was a fiasco. Only 2/3 of the class even did the homework, and when it came to marking, half of the students refused to even look at another person's work--making excuses ranging from "I don't understand this math" to "I cannot read their writing" or even "I cannot find their homework" (when it had just been handed to them to mark). After sorting out their logistic protests, the whining ensued. "Why do we have to mark someone else's work?" "What is the point of this?" "How are we going to learn from marking assignments?" and, my personal favourite, "You are just lazy, Mr. Daniel. You're making us do your work because you don't want to do anything!"

I was dumbfounded. Crushed. My students accused me of being lazy and not doing work, when they themselves couldn't even manage to sit down for 20 minutes on the weekend and finish their homework assignments. They called me lazy; when I had just spent over twenty hours on the weekend coming up with ways that would help them learn the material better. I couldn't believe it--and what's worse is that a bulk of the class all grunted in assent with this last vocal attack.

There's a limit to how many pearls you throw to swine before you realise that they're just going to poo in them anyways. That day was my breaking point, and on Tuesday, I decided that, instead of giving them my dazzle, I would give them a satisfactory instruction performance--no extra work, no sweating through how to make this information more accessible, no lateral thinking exercises in how to make abstract mathematics more concrete. I would just lecture, review and coach.

They didn't even notice a difference. Not a single one of them. The rest of the week was devoid of Math-o-lympics; free of games, mind-challenges; missing the pictures and the puzzles and not one of them even blinked. The good students were doing just as well; the struggling students were still struggling at the same rate; the hellions were still as hellionish as ever. Why had I been working myself to death for something that the students didn't even appreciate?

That same week, I was given a written notice that I had failed to submit lesson plans for the next week on time. Every Thursday, our lesson plans for the following week are due. I have never been able to come close to meeting this deadline, usually just squeaking in my lesson plans my Sunday at 11pm or Monday morning. This week, when I had been totally demoralised by my students the last thing I needed was to be told that my efforts, again, were not good enough. So, I rebelled.

Instead of trying to do my best to get my lesson plans in as soon as possible, I decided that I wouldn't even do any of my lesson plans until I had a reasonable amount of time to do them--which ended up with me completing lesson plans the night before I'd be using them. Did the world end? Nope. Did my performance as a teacher suffer, when my lesson plans were completed the day before the lessons instead of the week before? Nope. In fact, they probably were better (or at least more efficient), since that way, I could tailor each day's material a bit better in response to what had happened in class that day.

As a result of these events, I've decided that striving for excellence while here at GES is an unattainable goal. Despite all of my efforts, nothing is good enough for anyone anyways, so why should I bother working myself to death? Experimenting with being "adequate" as opposed to being "spectacular" has shown me that the amount of difference that "spectacular" makes in comparison to how much work, stress & time it takes to "achieve," is just not worth it. Am I going to go the extra mile to try & teach students who would rather sleep, rather talk, rather play games or rather spend their parents' money on whatever their hearts desired than making an effort to learn (especially when they know that they can buy a passing grade from our school)--especially when they accuse me of being lazy? Nope. I'll help the students who want to learn; I'll help the students who even at least make a bit of an effort. Am I going to lose sleep over missing manufactured deadlines and administrative make-work projects? Heck no. I don't have the energy or remaining stress tolerance levels to even try to play that game.


The Results

So, I've changed my approach. I'm learning to take work a bit more lightly, which allows me to get more sleep ( though I still am needing 2 Red Bulls a day just to make it to 5:00 without passing out in front of my students). I've actually spent time with people & have had conversations for what feels like the first time since July! We'll see how this whole new approach works out.

We have a PD weekend next week. It's supposed to be a spiritual-retreat dealie, which I am earnestly looking forward to. I haven't had uninterrupted time to spend alone with God & honestly pursue Him in months. Pray that there would be an opportunity to do just that.

Kand, my 10B student who chose to follow Christ, transferred out of GES at the beginning of the term to go study in Australia. Pray for her, that she'd get connected to a good set of Christians over there--I doubt she even knows where to look for them.

One of the biggest problem-students in my classes, a girl named Soda, is beginning to realise how horribly lost she is in school. She has about a 40% average in both Math & Chem., and that's completely due to lack of effort. She's an intelligent girl, but her attitude towards school, authority or anything that stands in her way of getting what she wants when she wants is rotten. On Friday, she asked me for help--the first time this year--and it was clear that she hasn’t learned a thing since the beginning of September. As a result, I'll be spending some tutoring time with her in the mornings before school to try & help her catch up. Pray that this would be an opportunity to reach into her life & show her Christ. It's the brazen, unruly students who typically need love the most, as often times, they act the way they do due to a severe deficit of love.

I've been asked & have begun to adapt and produce Shakespeare's The Tempest, which will be performed by the student body (hopefully) by the end of the school year. Pray for wisdom, guidance and for help from my associated staff members to pull off this gargantuan project.

That's all I have for now. If I continued, your eyeballs would fall out & my schoolwork wouldn't be getting done.

Peace.

An Overdue Update

Well, October has come and gone. Its 31 days felt like a little less than 24 hours for me over here, what with the end-of-term, report cards, regular classes, the two-week break from school and the return to classes. It definitely has been a whirlwind.

To make this a quick update, and to spare all of those who are actually interested, we'll jump right into the essential parts: School, my break & my current outlook on everything.


School.

We finished off the first term of school here at the beginning of October, meaning compiling grade books and making report cards... from scratch. Nowhere are there any nice bits of software to help make things easier or to streamline the process: every single character on every single report card had to be individually typed and perfectly formatted. Even if so much as one missing space (or one extra) was detected by the administration, the whole report card would have to be redone. Many of the teachers think that this is a bit excessive, especially since these report cards are for high school & will most likely be thrown out by the end of the month anyways (who cares if they all aren't 100% identically formatted?!).

After compiling my grades, I discovered that my expected class averages were achieved—between 65 & 70% for both Math & Chemistry subjects. What I wasn't expecting, though, was what I found out on the Monday after our October semester break started. Before leaving on our adventures, I noticed a half-dozen of my students at the school, waiting around for something. I asked them why they were here on break and they told me that they weren't on break—that they were here to go to school. Surprised, I asked them what subject. They said "Chemistry."

It then dawned on me that half of the kids there were in the 10B class—which only received English Language instruction—while the other half were the students in my class who had failed (precisely because they never handed in a stitch of homework & consciously decided to doodle on their chapter tests instead of actually filling them out). Asking Aaron, our administrator, about this on the way to the airport for our getaway, he said that he just found out about it himself. Apparently, these kids were going to be instructed in Chemistry for the next two weeks because their parents were paying for extra instruction to help the kids get a "step up" before the next term began. All of the instruction would be in Thai to assist them in knowledge acquisition.

Then Aaron's cell phone rings. It's the school asking him where the teachers had put their midterm examinations. The school was wanting copies so that the kids could retake the exams. Aaron apologised, say that he didn't know and that since he was already in a taxi, he couldn't help them find these tests. After the telephone call was finished, Aaron promptly turned off his cell phone.

Thailand is notorious for being a country where you can buy anything. This includes academic grades; even at our school. Apparently, after all the foreign staff has handed in their marks and issued report cards, the Thai staff enter these grades into the students’ records for the Ministry of Education. This is how the rich kids who don't do any school work and refuse to complete their tests end up being promoted to the next grade level: If mom & dad have enough baht, then your passing grade is purchased.

It's considered shameful in Thai culture for someone to fail & to be held back an academic year, and parents don't want this to happen. The kids all know about this practise—in fact, it was a couple of students in my class who told me exactly how it works. Since we are a private school, and since tuition is so "high" (compared to public Thai schools), it is generally recognised as the parents' & students' right to be able to pass any class that they take, as long as the school is compensated enough for this trouble. The irony, of course, is that these students who will eventually graduate (financially) from our institution will enter the greater community (maybe even university) without a high school education, and the school's own reputation will be destroyed, since the greatest testament to a school's excellence is the calibre of its alumni. Word will spread about how poorly educated the students from this school are (even if it's only 1 in 10 students who buys their diploma) and as a result, no parents will want to enrol their children at that institution. It makes a lot of sense if you have foresight enough to consider the ramifications of your immediate actions. Though, just as Aaron turned off his cell phone after that conversation, so will I do likewise & continue onwards.


Break.

My break was very much needed. At the beginning of the year, I was running on 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night, and not needing a single drop of caffeine. By the final week of school, I was down to 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night and up to 2 or 3 bottles of Red Bull a day just trying to keep my eyelids from collapsing. It was beautiful to get out of Bangkok, to not have to hear traffic, to not have to worry about stepping in random piles of dog crap everywhere, to not have to breathe in the smoggy goodness that is Bangkok air. The best part, by far, was the chance to get some much needed sleep.

I travelled with the Aaron & Katie Wong, along with the visiting Snyder family, to two very nice beachside resorts in southern Thailand, where we relaxed and adventured and did whatever we wanted to do whenever we wanted to do it. My first day there, I slept for 14 hours. I got up, ate breakfast, walked around on the beach for a bit and then took a 4 hour nap in the shade of a palm tree. It was great.

We did other things too though. Active things. We rented motorcycles and cruised around this island for the day, stopping every once in a while for good photo op's or for food and whatnot. We went snorkelling, sea kayaking and rock climbing. One day, John Fairbridge and I decided to climb up this 1237 step stairway to the top of the highest mountain in the region, at the top of which was a very large Buddhist shrine. How do I know that there were 1237 steps? They had painted markers indicating the number of stairs every so often, and 1237 was on the final post for the handrail at the very top of the mountain. It was definitely worth the trip: the view was amazing, and had the smoke coming from Indonesia's deforestation projects not been blowing in across the Gulf of Thailand that day, it would have made for a spectacular sunset.

Our sea kayaking guide, whose name was Mun Gee (yes, it does sound a lot like "monkey," and he made joking references to how his nickname was "Chee kee") said that, on the behalf of his people, he wanted to thank all of us from North America for our generosity in helping them recover from the tsunami in Dec. 2004. He said that all of the people around were very thankful, but that the majority of them did not speak any English but were always happy and excited to see foreigners because they wanted to thank them for their generosity. He told us that apparently 90% of all the funds donated went directly to work & relief projects for the effected areas (which I was surprised to hear. I would have thought that the government would have skimmed more than that).

All things, alas, come to an end, and this Monday marked the beginning of the new term. School started off very well: after day 1, the students seemed eager and ready to learn. On day 2, I received a new student in grade 10 without any prior warning, and the school hadn't given her any books or anything for the classes that she'd be taking (surprise, surprise). We're still trying to figure out what to do for her Chemistry text...

Speaking of students, the girl who chose to accept Christ back in July, Kand, didn't return to GES this term—also without any notice. I was told from her classmates that she had gone on an exchange program to study in Australia. Hopefully there she'll have good exposure to good people & (let's pray) a better opportunity to learn about Christ than what GES can do.


Outlook.

My current outlooks and perspective about everything right now is quite bleak. After the 2nd day of classes, my students returned to their usual non-caring, external locus of control attitudes, blaming me for giving them too much homework when they refuse to finish assignments & consequently complain that they don't know how to do the mathematics (since math skill is developed through practising math and not manual dexterity on PSPs or cell phones). A couple students even had the gall on Friday to tell me that I was lazy and I wasn't doing my job when—for the first time this year—I had the class mark a homework assignment.

It is attitudes like this that really make me wonder why I bother putting in 15 hours a day for these kids. I literally am in my classroom or at work in the office from 7:15 am to 10:30 at night, leaving only for a 30 minute lunch & a 30 minute supper break. It's an unsustainable level of work, and I acknowledge this. I became physically ill last term because of the levels of stress and lack of rest that my job is currently demanding from me, and I do not want to repeat the same fiasco. Something's gotta give, and it's going to have to happen soon...before I give out and collapse on the floor somewhere.

I decided, yesterday, to try a new approach starting tomorrow. This approach is a "take no crap, take no excuses" attitude, where I'm going to set a high level of expectation from my students. The good kids are already meeting or exceeding this benchmark, and those who don't will have to whip into shape, or else they'll be sitting in a detention faster than they can spell "supercalifragilisticexpialadotious."

On the topic of expectations, I've discovered that I'm pretty sure it's almost impossible to both be a teacher and be a missionary at the same time. The former requires that you take the posture of an impartial authority, so that when a student fails, they don't feel personally attacked (or when you're personally attacked by them, you don't let it bother you). The latter works better when you meet the people on their terms, in their space, on their playing field: trying to love them and invest your life into theirs with the goal of sharing Christ with them. If both can be done, it's mighty difficult. I applaud any person who can do this with hormonal, defiant & spoiled rich teenagers.

To be really honest, I don't think that I've had much of a ministry impact on Thailand at all since the middle of July, when my course-load shifted from Math & basic English to Math & Chemistry. I simply don't have the time, and because of that, I really am beginning to wonder what the crap I am doing here. I decided to come to Thailand with the purpose of working in some sort of ministry-related activity, and right now, I don't see how teaching children about the finer points of quadratic equations and stoichiometric balancing really advances the kingdom of God in Thailand, where what feels like (from my perspective) the majority of Christians are foreigners—either teaching or working for multinational corporations—who don't really feel compelled to learn the language or reach out to Thai people at all, as it would extend beyond their comfort zones.

I think, perhaps, I am feeling rather starved of edifying Christian community (an 85 hour work-week will do that to ya) and just straight up time with God. Our organisation, which claims to be a ministry, really gives no opportunity or avenue for spiritual support—at least in a way that I can relate to. We’re required to go to church on Sunday, yet the only churches that I’ve found have congregations that either are: a.) full of partying, extraverted socialites who’re always on the go; b.) filled with professionals, their wives and pre-teenaged children who daren’t leave their personally-constructed white-man ghetto; or c.) conducted in Thai. The one prayer meeting / corporate worship time that we have as a GES staff happens twice a month and feels rather rigid, religious and empty. There is no focus on staff members' spiritual health really at all, and all the attention is, instead, directed on whether or not you have completed your paperwork on time. Rather than ensuring the priority of the staff's spiritual health and well-being, we are given 30 minutes of mandatory “devotional time” with our students (which are 90% Buddhist and don't want to hear about Jesus for what is—for some of them—the 6th year of the same stuff) each day—and those that are the most receptive (the new kids) barely speak a sentence of English. Of course, the irony with this is that every other class gets Thai-English Bibles, yet these new students aren’t so lucky. What do they get? Nothing. Not even a devotional instructor who interacts with them for more than 2 hours each week (consequently making the devotional time rather irrelevant to whatever actually might be happening in their lives).

I’ve been finding myself really questioning what I’m doing here & why I continue onward. Pragmatically, I stick around because I signed a contract, and my name on that contract is my word. I don’t like breaking my word. Also, I get reimbursed for my airfare if I stay the full term, which is another pragmatic plus for my retention. Those things aside, I find it extremely difficult to rationalise my work and my efforts here. I mean, the students who actually do their homework and who actually try are a joy. I love ‘em to death and I have great hopes for them. Honestly, there probably make up just as much of the classroom population as the rotten apples (maybe even more), but it’s the yeast that taints the flour; not the other way around. Regardless of the students who are good or bad, how is teaching here any different than teaching back in Canada? It’s not that I’m disinterested in teaching; it just never was my primary motivation to come here and do this.

In the middle of writing this update, someone asked me why I don’t do anything about this situation. Perhaps I have learned too much from my students & consider change as being beyond my control. I feel too overwhelmed with work and duty to try to even get around to making the effort to instigate change. That, and my personal history is chalk-full of instances where I try to get the ball of change moving only to be ignored or squelched by the powers that be. Let’s just say that I have no faith in my ability to motivate or to inspire people. Maybe that also translates into me not having faith in others’ willingness to change. I don’t know. All I do know is that I don’t feel that me raising these concerns to you or anybody else is really going to change anything (perhaps prayer would. Please consider this something to bring to God, if you’re a praying person).

Am I having any impact for God in this place? I’ve no idea. The answer would seem to be “probably.” I presented the gospel to my students in July and one of them wanted to follow Jesus. Yes, that is super awesome. It’s huge. It’s enough to have made this entire experience completely worth it. I just wish that the school would have done a better job helping follow up with her decision to follow Jesus instead of ignoring her desire while celebrating the cute grade 4 student who accepted Jesus several weeks later. I try to remember to pray for her whenever I find myself remembering to pray—which, unfortunately, has been rare since the middle of August.

To sum up, I’m discouraged. Really discouraged. I feel like Luke Skywalker when he crash landed on Degobah and was invited into this strange creature’s house for food while he was looking for Yoda:

LUKE: Look, I'm sure it's delicious. I just don't understand why we
can't see Yoda now.

CREATURE: Patience! For the Jedi it is time to eat as well. Eat, eat.
Hot. Good food, hm? Good, hmm?

LUKE: How far away is Yoda? Will it take us long to get there?

CREATURE: Not far. Yoda not far. Patience. Soon you will be with him.
(tasting food from the pot) Rootleaf, I cook. Why wish you become
Jedi? Hm?

LUKE: Mostly because of my father, I guess.

CREATURE: Ah, your father. Powerful Jedi was he, powerful Jedi, mmm.

LUKE: (a little angry) Oh, come on. How could you know my father? You
don't even know who I am. (fed up) Oh, I don't even know what I'm
doing here. We're wasting our time.

I’m not sure what I’m doing here, and I definitely feel like I am wasting my time (somewhat. I mean, teaching is a noble thing to do; it’s just not what I expected to be doing exclusively). I’m working wa-a-a-ay too much to live a healthy lifestyle, and my spiritual state has drowned in the khlong behind the school (that’s an open sewer, for those of you who don’t know). All of this is unsustainable. Something inevitably is going to change. It’s just a matter of what and when.


I’ll keep you posted.

15 hours later

It has been 15 hours since I talked with Mr. Sombat. I just talked with my fellow teacher, Matt, who went to have lunch at Sombat's place, and the elderly gentleman told him the same story as I was told yesterday. The doctors looked inside him from the top down & from the bottom up looking for this problem that they had seen before, but they couldn't find anything anymore—the lesion had completely healed. Mr Sombat told Matt that it was our God who had healed him. Apparently, there were some Thai people having lunch at the same time as when Matt was there, and Mr. Sombat turned to these people & told them about how our God—this God of the Christians—had healed him from this illness that was supposed to have had him 'under the knife.' Matt told me that the look on these Thai people's faces as Sombat told them the story of his healing was a look of wonder and amazement.

A non-believing man tells of how this foreign God heals him from this potentially life-threatening sickness. That is amazing. That is "Book of Acts" type stuff. This isn't you're ludicrous "my leg feels stiff & then the preacher put his hands on me & now I can move it... but then 18 hours later, it's just as stiff as it was before" placebo effect rubbish. This is real. A bona fide miracle.

God still does do this stuff. That's awesome, and I find myself humbled in light of it but awe-struck at the same time. What a crazy/beautiful God.

“Your God. I Believe Your God Heal Me.”

I’m literally flooded with emotions right now. I don’t know what to think—it is like my head is not on straight &/or I’ve been smacked across the back of my skull with a heavy, blunt object.

There is an old gentleman who runs a food shop / sidewalk eatery out of his house that pretty much every farang staff member at GES has gone to for who knows how long. His name is Sombat, and apparently he has been dealing with a rather serious gastrointestinal problem for many years. It had become so bad in the recent months that the doctors were telling him that they would have to perform surgery in order to fix whatever was wrong. The downside is that Sombat is well advanced in years—probably about 70 years old—and as far as surgery goes, the older you get, the less advantageous the risk of an operation becomes.

His pre-op screening was scheduled for Wednesday—yesterday. On Tuesday this past week, one of my fellow teachers, Matt, & I stopped and talked for a bit with Sombat after we had finished our meal. Matt asked if we could pray for him before he went to see the doctors the next day. Sombat, like the majority of Thailand, is a Buddhist, and because of this, he graciously accepted the prayers offered up for him to a foreign God, since any good thing has got to help (right?). We quickly prayed for the man as we were standing in the shop, asking God to heal him & that Sombat would know—if he did get healed—it was because of God that he was healed.

Wednesday came & went. Today, I just finished my meal at Sombat’s place, and after paying, I asked the man how his doctor’s appointment went. He told me, as best as he could with his limited English, that the doctors took a scope and looked up inside him from underneath & down from the top side for the problem. He told me that the doctors said the lesion in his “stomach” had sealed up, motioning with his hands by taking his pinkie finger and wrapping around it with his other hand, as if to seal off the tip from the rest of the finger. Instead of the surgery that the doctors had told him was going to be mandatory, they gave him some medicine to take & he was told to sleep a lot for the next month, until he went back for a final check-up.

He stopped, looked at me and said, “Your God. I believe it was your God that heal me.” There was a look on his face of unmistakeable joy and honesty that it would have been impossible for me to in any way think he had just been polite, trying to make the farang who prayed to his foreign God feel good for offering up “good hopes.”

I walked away surprised, overjoyed and completely taken away. I’ve pretty much been a basket case ever since. Here I am in Thailand, feeling useless & drained; on the verge of giving up on my God because he supposedly threw me here in Thailand to do stuff for Him, but all I’ve been doing has been schoolwork. The first—and most recent—time that I ever prayed for God to do something big was to heal my best friend’s father from his cancer. I had firmly believed that God would; then 3 weeks after rigorous prayer, my friend’s dad died. I was sent in a tailspin, having to reassess everything that I had ever believed: This God who I was serving—was He even real? He told us to ask Him to do stuff & to “believe and not doubt” that it would happen, and that it would, but here I was, totally devastated by the fact that God didn’t come through in the way that I had expected when my friend’s dad passed away.

I find myself reaffirmed that God does listen; that prayer does work; that God does love; that God exists. Furthermore, I find myself horrified at how I’ve let my walk with God very much slip away, recounting the many adventures that we have had together in my life.

Then there was this man, a Buddhist, who had more faith in my God than me. A man who believes that a God who was not his own reached out and healed him. That takes faith; more faith than I can confess to ever having. God has always been mine—He’s always been “there”; a part of my existence. There hasn’t really ever been a leap to grasp Him for me, as fundamentally, my very life has been founded on Him from day one of my life. I grew up in a Christian home & decided to follow Jesus at a very young age, so in that respect, I’ve had it easy. On the other side, though, I’ve never been subjected to the “otherness” of God—having to reach out and take hold of a supernatural being & relate with him without really having a background to set that relationship. I haven’t had to decide to switch allegiances from one god to another or from one set of religions / spiritual beliefs to another. Yet, here is this man who credits this God, which wasn’t his own, for restoring his health.

Increase my faith, God. Increase my faith.

And you Christians who are reading this, pray for Sombat—that this event would lead soon to his decision to give his life over to Christ.

Le Struggle

It's been a long, busy month.

I remember in June saying that I would try to post updates to this blog about my Thailand adventures every other week. Perhaps I was a bit too ambitious; nonetheless, I still hope to be able to do that.



August Highlights

To sum up August over here at GES in Thailand—at least for me—there is only one word: Gong Show. The first week of the month heralded the last week of our interim Chemistry teacher's presence, as she was to return to school on the 7th. Being the resident Chemistry teacher, it was my job to take over the course load that she was bearing & incorporate it into my already busy schedule. At that time, the school hadn't really considered that 8 of my 24 hours of in-class instruction were directly conflicting with the Chemistry course load that I was to resume. Having been myself filling in for another class—the English 10B course—I didn't really have any flex room, and the school didn't really anticipate the fact that there would be no 10B English teacher when I took over Chemistry. I'm pretty sure that the Thailand mentality of "ignore it & it will fix itself" came much into play here, where my thoughts are that they were hoping I'd be able to teach all of the high school math classes, all of the high school chemistry classes while still managing to teach the 10B English class at the same time. In fact, the first copy of my revised schedule reflected just that—that I was to do all of this. Thankfully, the laws of physics overruled the school & my restriction of only being able to be in one place at one time won out (though, as we will see later on, this wasn't an isolated case).

Jumping into Chemistry was alright, for the most part. At the beginning, I pretty much had to have the students tell me what they'd learned in the course so far, for although the previous teacher covered the content, with these students there is no guarantee that they retained a single thing. As for my 10B class, they were pretty much abandoned for a whole week, until the lines of communication finally connected & it was discovered that the school was short one teacher. For the next two, weeks, however, the 10B class was completely dissolved, being conglomerated into he 10A class—a student body whose English proficiency is, for the most part, pretty good (in contrast with 10B who, at the beginning of the year, didn't know what a door or a window or a stair was). The 10B parents were becoming a bit upset with the school, for the students were placed into classes & were not given any textbooks with which to study. The sad thing is that not a single person knew how long these students would be remaining in these classes.

Then one day, there was a bit of a "melt down." I was asked to come into the Thai administration office for a chat, and pretty much I was told that the parents of all the 10B students were making very angry phone calls to the school, questioning the academic standards of the school and—since I was technically the "home room" teacher for the 10B students—that I was the primary cause of this "failing" of the school in the parents' eyes.

I was taken aback, to say the least. After being lectured about not doing my job, about not teaching these students, about not having enough textbooks for these kids, about failing these students' parents & failing the school in one of my primary job requirements, I was then officially directed to create a new ESL class which would occur at the same time as my current ESL instruction time, where I would be responsible for an intense, comprehensive instruction plan for these 10B students, to help them with the coursework that they currently were taking. The great irony was that not only was I not teaching the 10B students at all any more, but that having the 10A & 10B students who were enrolled in ESL for the morning (which is supposed to be a total of 14 students, but only one ever shows up) to be part of the same class for ESL in the morning was strictly forbidden—there would be too many students in the one classroom. I mentioned this to my employer, but it fell on deaf ears. I was, then, perforce to teach two separate classes 5 times a week at the exact same time. End of discussion.

Feeling greatly encouraged, being told that the school's failings to its students were my fault because I didn't have enough textbooks for the kids (which, apparently is my responsibility, even though the school didn't order enough textbooks to begin with)—even though our English administrator told me to not bother with textbooks for these students, since they couldn't understand the material anyways and that they would be moved to a new class as soon as things were worked out—I went back to my classroom, trying to figure out how in the world I would be able to teach two classes at the same time without being in the same room. No, no I didn't do that. I instead thought of just walking off the school property and never coming back. I had had it.

But then, my first class of the day began & the students—praise the Lord for them—lit up the gloomy day with their smiles, energy & enthusiasm for the material. Were it not for my kids, I most definitely would have been gone before lunch that day.

After school, I talked to our English administrator, telling him about this "meeting” that I had had in the morning. I let him know that there was absolutely no way that I could be doing this, and I asked for his advice help. He picked up a sheet of paper off of his desk and handed it to me, saying, "Here."

Not sure what I was receiving, I looked at the sheet & was immediately met with a wave of dumbfounded relief. He had handed me a schedule for the new 10B teacher, and after a second of me looking at it, he said, "That should probably help." No kidding. Needless to say, my anxiety and stress levels immediately dropped from a balmy 300% to a more manageable 85. Oh, and I decided to remain teaching at the school.


Current Conditions

Right now, if you were to ask me how I was doing, I would probably tell you that I was drained, strained and empty. I've been chastised from some of the lower grade-level teachers of doing too much work, that my personal health (mental, physical & spiritual) would be at-risk were I to remain working at the same rate that I currently found myself. They're right, admittedly, but I unfortunately cannot see myself reducing the workload. I am teaching advanced Mathematics—algebraic theorems & trigonometric proof that I myself don’t even fully comprehend, yet I am responsible for disseminating said concepts to the children in my classroom. Needless to say, I spend hours pouring over the material to try and wrap my mind around the information enough to be able to present it to the students in each & every lesson. Suggestions have been made to me to let the students teach themselves, but I don't know if these students—who, as a whole, haven't the determination to complete 6 homework questions in 3 days—would be capable of "teaching themselves." At present, I employ a cooperative learning approach to instruction in my class, grouping the students into teams, where a representative distribution of abilities (poor students & over-achievers) are compelled to work together in order to progress along a scheduled system of rewards. It works out well, but even the brightest students wouldn’t be able to teach themselves this material. Ask yourself: could you effectively master the concept of "rationalising the denominator of radical expressions" all by yourself, or do you think that someone who's at least been exposed to this stuff sometime before would be of great benefit to your learning?

That being said, I am at an impasse. I feel torn in many, many directions. I am overwhelmed with the amount of work that I have to accomplish on a week-to-week basis—so much so, that it beings back dreadful memories of those 100+ hour school weeks during final projects with my double-major (the temporal investment here doesn't appear to be as much, but the feeling is reminiscent—one of dreadful drowning). However, I am fully aware that the only way I can accomplish this task is to rely wholly on God. And there's the catch: I've no time to give myself a respectable meeting with God anymore. Deadlines, projects, marking, content mastery & lesson plans all haunt me for 18 hours each day, leaving me only with a 6 hour respite in my dreamless sleep.

Add on top of all this, the desire to retain some semblance of a presence within our community, and I might as well tie those concrete shoes onto my feet before jumping into the swimming pool. I am consumed by work; I am stretched by community; I am torn by my relationship with God. As a result, I feel empty, broken and useless.

I have not felt more alone spiritually right now than ever before. God seems to me to be a distant memory, and I constantly have to fight off the thought that Christianity is a delusion. I feel abandoned by God, yet I cannot cast Him off: I've seen Him & experienced Him too much to say that He isn't real. He just seems to have gone on hiatus or something. Or rather, I am probably much too busy doing stuff that I do not give Him the time of day to commune with me.

Would I say that I'm under spiritual attack? I'd love to, but since I am currently _in_ this situation, I cannot really say that I am—the thought that I've been living a hoax is just as prevalent in my thoughts, so there is no consolation; there is no way for me to judge without bias. You, oh reader, probably can. If you're of the spiritual persuasion, you'd probably conclude that there is a war going on & since I've placed myself in a front-lines ministry position, I'm apt to be attacked pretty heavily. I myself just do not know. Not anymore.

All I know is that I'm tired; I'm empty; I'm stretched to capacity & I would like some rest. Please don't quote any Bible verses to me about coming to God to get rest—that will only exacerbate my frustrations.



But please, do pray.

Three Weeks and Waning...

Hello, friends and family!

It has been a long three weeks, let me tell you. Much has happened since my last update, though I do not know if I will take up too much of your time with the details. I want to communicate effectively the activities that are happening in my life and with this ministry at GES, and not bog you down with a deluge of words (though if you would like more details, don't hesitate to drop me an e-mail).

The last time I left off, we here at GES were going away for what was called "overnight camp." My original perception of this outing was that the students & staff would be spending time in the Thai country, living in tents and cooking over a fire. As it turns out, "camping" in Thai culture really means "staying in a hotel away from Bangkok."

For three days, the students and teachers from grades 5 through to 11 went to a 4 star resort called "Fountain Tree," where our meals were catered, where we were given free access to their archery range (though, only 5 shots each), paintball course (only 30 paintballs—pretty much just a "taste" of what the sport's really like), paddle boats, soccer field and swimming pool. It was pretty much just a get-away, where the kids were allowed to eat as much junk food as they could afford while also not having any parents to tell them to go to sleep. Seeing that we were a group of 120 strong, pretty much the whole resort was booked for our school. It was interesting.

Much fried rice and bottled water later, and having two games of capture the flag under our belts, the school returned to the city to finish off the week with two days' worth of classes. As I said, it was a very interesting experience. I never really expected to go camping in a hotel, while sharing a king-sized bed with one of the other teachers.

The following week was school as usual. When I arrived here in June, I was told that I would be the "homeroom teacher" for the Grade 11 students—four very intelligent young lads—but after the first week of school, the administration introduced a new homeroom with students that were barely exposed to the English language. This was the 10B class. It turned out that the ESL teacher from last year was returning to GES shortly, and seeing as she was the Grade 11 students' homeroom teacher last year, the administration thought it best to keep them with an instructor who had already cultivated a working relationship. While she was away from the school, I'd be conducting homeroom activities with Grade 11—leading devotions, being responsible for student behaviour during morning flag ceremonies, etc. As a result, the 10B students (whom I had officially been given, when the school found out that this other teacher would be returning) were, for the interim, globbed with the 10A students—those kids who had a relatively decent grasp of English—and their homeroom teacher.

Why do I tell you all of this? Well, it was this week after "overnight camp" that I officially began taking the reigns of 10B's homeroom activities. Up until that point, I had only been exposed to the class through our daily 90 minute classes of English acquisition, which I was given as filler while the volunteer teacher from San Francisco took over my Chemistry classes. It wasn't bad—the kids are great, for the most part. They're usually active and willing to learn/listen/engage in the classroom activities, and when I started leading their devotional times, I was excited to be able to a.) Use the relationship that we had built through English classes and b.) Reach these students at a level of English and at a level of exposure to Christianity (all but one of these students had never been to GES before, meaning that there was a 98% chance that they had never heard about Jesus) that would allow me to reach them effectively.

My first devotional session with these kids, I asked them what they knew about God & Jesus. One of the students asked why Jesus had to die, and there I began with creation, the Fall, the first coming of Christ and the wages of sin. I explained to them the matter at hand, and the extent of the love that God must have had to desire so eagerly for a restoration of the relationship between ourselves and Him that he would willingly kill his only Son in order to bring about redemption. I then told them how Jesus conquered death, and hoe both Jesus & God wanted to have a relationship with each individual—including these students sitting in the class. Learning something about "sales" from my time as a retail manager, I was taught that the biggest failing of making a sales-pitch (or evangelising) was forgetting to close—to present the chance for the individual to accept or reject the proposal. Armed with this knowledge, I asked the class if there was anyone who would like to have a relationship with Jesus. One girl in the corner raised her hand. "Perhaps she didn't understand what I was saying," I thought, so I quickly re-presented the implications and the information of the gospel message in a different way. I asked a second time if anyone wanted to be friends with Jesus: this same girl with the same amount of resolve raised her hand, not caring what those around her were thinking. I was ecstatic: my heart leapt. Then the bell rang and they were off to their next class.

She was sick the next two days, and the male students from Grade 10 upward are sent to military training on Fridays, which means no school for those grades (by implication, this also means that my first four days of the week are 25% longer than normal school-days). The following week had a 4 day long-weekend, giving me only 2 days with which to touch base with my students, and it just so happened that this girl was in some sort of accident (my students tell me in their broken English, which also might have meant that she was still sick). I therefore, haven't had an opportunity to build upon her initial decision, nor do I know how she's doing—or if the decision was based on personal motives and not "to please Teacher."

If you could pray for this girl, that would be amazing. Her name's Kand. Pray that her decision to follow Christ would well up within her, that God would found her fledgling faith and secure her in her conviction to follow Jesus.

When I broke this news to the other teaching staff, no one really seemed all that excited. This came to me as a shock, seeing that those involved in my next most intensive outreach ministry—Crowsnest Lake Bible Camp—would have been hooting and hollering, praising God for another child being brought to Him.



Well, that week being over, there were plans for a couple groups of teachers to go away for the long weekend: some were thinking of going to a popular beach location called Hua Hin, while others were hoping to spread their wings a bit further and go to a tropical island in the Gulf of Thailand. Seeing as the majority of staff here are female, there isn't really much "guy bonding" available, and the only two single guys who are on staff had decided to go on a retreat with the church that they were a part of. Yep. That left me with hanging out with one of two groups of girls. That being the case, I decided to go the more adventurous route & hit up the tropical island, Ko Chang.

Our bus tickets needed to be purchased at the central hub of Bangkok's tourism industry: a place known as Khao San Road. This is apparently the "must-go" place for intrepid travellers, hippies and consumerism junkies. As a result, there were more farang (white people) in this street market than there were Thai folk. I felt extremely uncomfortable.

If there were any suitable picture to give you at home of how Khao San Road feels, I would have to describe it to you like this: I have come across no better a representation for a modern equivalent to Sodom & Gomorrah. The place is horrible. The tourists come and flock to the beer gardens, the brothels, the tourist shops to consume at to satiate any of their appetites for anything you could possibly imagine. The Thai folk, knowing that these white people are flush with expendable income, prostitute not only themselves, but their culture and their very identity just to make a Baht. Every 5th Thai woman is dressed up in a mock version of traditional Buddhist Thai costume, stroking these carved wooden frogs with polished wooden sticks, making them "croak." As soon as a white person passes one of these ladies, they start following you, stroking these frogs, and if you stop walking, the wooden croaking acts like a "money alarm," causing the convergence of about 10 more of these ladies dressed in the same garb to surround you, hoping—practically begging—that you will throw some bills at them as the sell out their culture. Along with these various barrages of wooden frogs, every third Thai man would come up to me, asking if I would like to see/sleep with any of his fine, beautiful ladies in the back of his shop. I felt sick. The place was covered with a dark evil that made me itching to leave.

Since being there, I haven't quite felt like myself. I've been feeling frustrated, sad and constricted—as if something were dragging me down, sapping my strength and sucking the joy out of my life. Initially, I thought that much of this may have been due to the news of my best friend's father passing away, but I've been leaning more towards the notion that there's been a hint of spiritual oppression plaguing me since wandering into Khao San Road unawares. Praying to God today about this, and using my authority in Christ to rebuke said oppression, I've felt a release and a bit of a renewal.

On the note of difficulties, I feel that the community we have here as teachers is falling apart. It breaks my heart to see and to hear that people are beginning to fight, bicker and distance themselves from others because of petty, insignificant things (like who gets to live in what room). It is getting difficult, and it seriously devastates me as I watch this body of Christ—perhaps the representation of God's love that this un-exposed country gets to see—crumble and fail.


Pray for us, I beg you. Pray that the staff would be unified. Pray that we would do everything out of love for others; not out of love for ourselves. Pray that we would all consider others as being more important than our personal desires. Pray that we would have the courage enough to be humble, the strength enough to confess to each other, the love enough to love each person.

And pray for Kand, as she starts her walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

Post Script

You know when someone tells you something, and you automatically filter that information into the, “Oh, they’re just over-exaggerating,” category, where you heed the person’s message, but decide to take it with a grain of salt & consider it less potent than the propounder implies? And do you also know that feeling of realisation you get when you discover that not only was the messenger telling the truth, but they might’ve even been down-playing the severity of the issue so as to not appear sensationalising the state of affairs? Well, I think that that feeling has just hit me.

Moments ago, I went for a short stroll down the sois (soi = residential street; road = arterial thoroughfare) behind the school. We teachers were told in orientation by an ex-pat who’s lived in Thailand for decades that the culture is largely one of appearances, and that they like to put their best faces on, while sweeping the secrets up, behind corners and under rugs. I don’t think that there’s any better way to exemplify this very attitude than in walking into the bowels of residential Bangkok. The deeper you go, the narrower the streets, and the more difficult the access, until you find yourself walking along a concrete sidewalk-sized “road,” surrounded by jungle and swamp, wherein dwelling after dwelling stands. I don’t think I would venture to call these places houses, so as to give you an improper idea of how many people live. These abodes are literally sheets of tin tacked together with an odd wooden beam here or there for some random structural support.

To be honest, I don’t quite know what to say. I can tell you that my heart was deeply moved, and that my eyes have seen past the veil of “everything’s groovy in Thailand” that the roads project. I often wondered how people survived here in Thailand, when many prices for items (save for the most basic staples) are comparable with prices at home and when the average monthly salary works out to be something like $700. Now I have a better understanding: these people don’t, for the most part, have anything besides the most basic staples. Now, is this true for the majority of Bangkok & the majority of Thailand? I don’t know. I’ve only been down one section of the soi network, which connects millions of people to Bangkok’s arteries much like capillaries in the circulatory system. Are other communities the same, where people are literally living in swamps, having nothing more than a few sheets of tin nailed together as a roof for shelter? I’m not sure.

I’d like to find out, though.

Update Part II: The Empire Strikes Back

This is the second week of the second month of my time here in Thailand. It's amazing how quickly time passed by. Looking forward, I'm discovering that I have already completed 10% of my contract time here with GES (at least for this year—who knows if I will stay for more?). It has increased my awareness and my feelings of the brevity of time. I feel like I've done so little in what appears on paper to be a lot of time, whereas what, in my mind, seems like only a few hours.

Hopefully, things will improve. I mean, they are already. I've seen myself spend less time undertaking the daily drudgeries of teaching paperwork, and what used to take me 4 or 5 hours has been compressed into 2 or 3 (they say that by month six, these activities will be able to be completed in something like 20 - 30 minutes. I can't wait!). All this being said, much has happened in these 6 weeks, and a lot of it has been boring, boring paperwork. In the future, I expect this to change & that will be nice.


On a lighter note, here are some highlights from the past two weeks:

The very first night after the very first day of classes (last week, Monday, the 15th), I was working late in the evening up in my classroom on the fourth floor of the school. Suddenly, my eardrums were barraged by what I could only describe as a rather potent roar—strikingly resemblant of a jet engine, yet a few decibels quieter. I knew that I wasn't in an airplane, and the airport was about an hour away. Just then, though, a peal of thunder broke through the encompassing white noise, and I knew that the beast roaring outside was none other than the rain.

It was an amazing thing to watch as the playground quickly transformed into a shallow pool, as the walkways flooded into rivulets and as the ground-floor hallways disappeared under a blanket of water. I laughed a bit in awe, watching what could only be described as a chunk of the Pacific being cast upon the city. The awnings over our open-air walkways between buildings wept with such ferocity that veritable walls of water materialised, veiling these corridors with a sheet of this warm, liquid film. I kid you not, nor do I even exaggerate. My laughter quickly shifted from that of awe to that of nervousness: I was on the fourth floor, having the keys to this building, and those keys needed to be returned to the central administration building, about 100 metres away. "No problem," I thought to myself, "The walkways are nice and dry underneath the awnings, and the water pouring off of them like a million fire hydrants saturating the sky all falls into the ground-level drainage troughs. It'll be nice and dry all the way to the office!"

Quickly, I gathered my things, locked my room & the school and began my trek to the office along the several interconnected strings of awnings from building to building. Everything was going well until I started to traverse the kindergarten complex. Remember those hallways that I had watched fill with water? Well, now that water was creeping dangerously towards the classroom doors (In Thailand, interior rooms tend to be about 2 or 3 inches above the floor. I didn’t really understand why for the first week, but after my first experience with rain, I soon figured it out. This example further confirmed my conclusion.), and I barely managed to skirt around the huge, huge puddle before heading to the last walkway which led to the main office. Here, though, there was no avoiding the puddle. By now, the water had been pouring so heavily that the drainage troughs couldn't choke down their air-borne beverage fast enough, leaving a nice, thick layer of water about 2 inches thick all over the ground. "No problem," I said to myself, "I have full-grain leather shoes: that means they're waterproof!" Waterproof they were, and I began to splosh through the deep puddle... Until I felt my feet get soaked. Yeah, so that 2" puddle decided to become steadily deeper the farther I travelled, reaching as high as the middle of my shins before I finally reached the office building. Suffice it to say, I was thoroughly drenched; however good my waterproof shoes were at the onset, they could no longer avail against the wading pool that was GES.

I returned to my room that night, dreading the morning and having to slip on my saturated shoes. Just thinking about it made me shudder, reminding me of many-a-morning while tree-planting back in 2002. Nothing, I don't think, is worse than having to get your feet wet even before you begin work. Thankfully though, Thailand is warm & air conditioners typically dehumidify. In the morning, when I gingerly approached my insoles to stuff them back into their cavernous abodes, I was greeted by a wonderfully dry surprise: the only things that were still damp were my shoes' "cuffs." Praise the Lord for air con.

Highlight number two fast-forwards us to Thursday or Friday night of that same week. Again, the setting and time are the same: fourth floor of GES, late late late in the evening. As I'm in the middle of making my lesson plans for the following week, my body tells me that it would be a good time to check out the WC. Flicking on the switch to the fourth-floor loo, I waltz in, and on one of the sinks' cabinet doors, I am greeted by what I could only describe at the time as a sandy-coloured land crab—but this crab didn't have any claws. This one, instead, had eight beady eyes and a couple of furry fangs. Yup, folks. That's right: a huget—aka ginormous—spider. This thing was literally the size of my outstretched hand, with a leg-span of 8". I laughed as it looked at me: it was incredible! Seriously, the thing was the size of a little crab! After doing my business, I went to grab my camera & take a photo, but as things like this generally happen, the silk-spinning land crab decided to scurry off into a drainage pipe as soon as I got my camera back to document its enormity.

Talking about crazy animal adventures, often on the walls or on awnings, you hear the scurrying of little feet. Typically, the noises you hear are geckos running about, eating random insects and keeping the environment generally bug-free, which is every nice. The one downside to living among the wall-clinging geckos is that they tend to defecate wherever they walk, and this leads to little brown pellets randomly strewn upon any surface, as if the lizards were decorating for Extreme Home Makeover: Reptile Edition.

Anyways, this past Wednesday, while I was walking back to my apartment after a long bout of marking, I heard what I thought was the common scurrying of a reptile on the roof, but something was different this time. As soon as I had finished walking out from under the roof, I heard something fall to the ground behind me with a bit of a "slap!" It was big and dark, and at night in the low light, even still I was certain that this monster was no gecko. I've been told that there are rats in Thailand, so I considered for a moment that a hapless rodent had drunkenly stumbled off the roof and plummeted to the stony pavement below, but this beast didn't look furry and I couldn't see any feet. I took a step towards it in the low light, trying to figure out what had fallen almost on top of me, and then it raised its head, began uncoiling and stuck its forked tongue out at me. A snake. A pretty decent sized, dark brown/black snake had almost fallen on top of my head thirty seconds ago. I suddenly got all jittery, imagining what would have happened if that snake did manage to land on me. Now, I know nothing about the indigenous snakes in the region, so the though of catching it quickly subsided as I considered the possibility of it being poisonous. Ha! It's only right now that the idea that the snake may have been trying to strike at me from the roof has entered my head. Who knows? At any rate, I decided to let the reptile be and continue on my way. The slithery, scaly coil of blue blood seemed a bit defensive on the ground, and I had no intentions of keeping it company, so we parted ways & I went to bed.

Well, those are my random, unrelated stories for this update. On a more serious note, I'll discuss things that actually are related to what I am doing with myself here in Thailand. Two Thursdays ago, schools all over the nation celebrate "Wai Kru," which literally means "Show respect to the teacher/master." It's a very ceremonious day, where teachers are put on display and children sing, while bringing offerings of flowers and incense to the teachers and then bowing down before their instructors, touching their foreheads to the floor, where the teachers' feet are placed. To be honest, I felt a bit awkward participating. I mean, who am I that these people should be paying me not only mere respect, but outright veneration? I recognise that this is a cultural difference, but it reminded me of a passage (Matthew 23:6-12) where Jesus once spoke to the crowd that was following Him, telling them not to ascribe the titles of "Rabbi" or "Teacher" to anyone but to Jesus. After experiencing this ceremony, I now understand why Jesus was saying that a little more now. In cultures where wisdom, knowledge and understanding are highly esteemed—valued and honoured much more so than even wealth—the teacher, the sensei, the Jedi master is the preeminent figure in society. They and they alone embody that which others aspire to have. It cannot be stolen or usurped from them; it must be given or passed along by active choice from the one who possesses such knowledge. It makes more sense, now, to me that Jesus said these things, for we all are his disciples, learning to mimic him and absorbing as much as we can from our Master. None can be called "Teacher," because we all must come to the feet of the one who teaches us, humbly being willing to accept whatever he wishes to reveal in his time, on his terms.

On a less profound note, though, I've come to the conclusion that George Lucas &/or his production team for Return of the Jedi must have used Thailand for some of their inspiration—especially as far as the Ewoks are concerned. While we were rehearsing the Wai Kru ceremonies on Wednesday last week, the school went through the full assembly and did all the speeches and whatnot. During that time, I swear that I heard the words, "Toronto gosh," and, "Oo tee nee." For all you Star Wars uber-nerds like me out there, you are probably already grinning, but for those of you who are less nerdish in the ways of the force, let me explain...

In the Return of the Jedi, when Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, R2-D2, C-3PO and other random rebel alliance members are on the forest moon of Endor, trying to disable the force-field that protects the second (almost completed, but fully-operational—sorry for spoiling the surprise for those of you who are shut-ins and have never seen the movie!) death star, they all get trapped by the moon's furry little native inhabitants: Ewoks. They break out of the trap, and the Ewoks notice that C-3PO is shiny gold, so they start worshiping him. Everybody is taken to the Ewok's village in the trees, where the captured members of the rebel alliance will be eaten in a celebratory feast to worship the Ewok's shiny new god, C-3PO. In the meantime, Princess Leia waltzes in, having befriended an Ewok on the forest floor, and she tells them to let the people go, stating that they are her friends. They don't listen, so Luke tells 3PO (who can talk any language in the galaxy) to let them free or if they don't he [3PO] would get angry. They still don't listen, so Luke levitates the android and the Ewoks get scared, shouting all different random words in their own language, one of which is "Oo tee nee!"

Immediately after 3PO floats around in his throne, the Ewoks set the prisoners free, and the protocol droid recounts their epic tale of tragedy and valour to the warrior Ewok tribe. During the story, when C-3PO is talking about Luke's encounter with Vader in the cloud city of Bespin (see The Empire Strikes Back), he uses the phrase, "Toronto gosh!" and the Ewoks all gasp.

I couldn't help but be amused when I heard these very similar syllables strung together while the ceremonies for Wai Kru were being rehearsed and performed. I literally had to bite my tongue a couple times to keep me from laughing out loud as I did my best not to think of the brown children speaking a foreign language in front of me and paying their respects to us as little Ewoks who were worshipping us as gods who came from the stars. I'm so glad that I was in the back row of teachers; because I'm sure I had a huge, stupid grin on my face for the longest time. So, whenever you're bored and you find yourself sitting through two hours of listening to uninterpreted Thai speech, just think of furry little Ewoks, and you'll be amused throughout the duration of your sit!

Wrapping Up

Okay, time to settle this update and get back to living life in Thailand. Things of note for the upcoming week include one of our volunteers, Jason, leaving on Tuesday to head back to the States. We'll miss him as he goes, as it'll be like losing one of our family members. The teacher that he was filling in for arrived this past week with his family (the Saxtons, for those who might know them) and they've settled into Thai life rather well. Aaron and Katie, I believe, will be coming back this following weekend, so I'd ask that you pray for all this travelling as the "changing of the guard" occurs at GES over the next week. In 8 days, our overnight camp programs will begin, with the lower primary (grades 1 - 5) sleeping over at the school in tents on the fields for one night, and with the upper primary (gr. 6 - 11) students being shipped off to Pak Chong for a couple days' adventure. To help with all of this, a team from Liberty University & Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg, Virginia will be flying in late this week and undertaking a lot of these programs' execution (among other things). I'd ask that you pray for their health and safety as well. Above all, I'd ask you to pray that we here don't lose sight of the eternal by focussing on the petty things. The staff here is all well united, but that—as with all social dynamicst—can change in a heartbeat, if we let it. Pray that we work for the Lord with all our hearts, all our strength and all our determination. Pray that we glorify God in all things at all tines this week, and that our students would be able to see the love of Christ in spite of our imperfect selves.

Blessings to you all.



PS. I am hoping to post some more pictures on my flickr photo feed, and some of those pics may be student photos. For privacy reasons, I'm going to make the student photos accessible only to my flickr "family and friends" contacts, so if you'd like to see what my students look like, you're going to have to get a flickr account & ask me to be your friend. Otherwise, just enjoy the random snapshots that I acquire throughout my random bits of free time!

June Aftermath, Part I

Well, the first couple weeks of teaching here have been busy, to understate things! Let me give you a snapshot of the typical weekday for yours truly:

• 6am: wake up, shower, eat & prepare for the school day.
• 7am: sign-in to the workday, do some last minute photocopying & maybe check my e-mail
• 7:30am: staff meeting, prayer meeting or personal devo time, depending of the day of the week.
• 8am: personal devo time, except for days where I’ve had the chance to do so at 7:30. On those days, I teach ESL at this time.
• 8:30am: lead classroom devotions
• 9am: “Flag time.” Every student & teacher lines up outside of the classrooms, facing the Thai flag in the courtyard & we sing the national anthem as the flag is hoisted for the day. Announcements & birthday celebrations follow.
• 9:10am – noon: 90 minutes of lower-level English instruction & 90 minutes of prep time—half of the time, I get full 90-minute chunks… other days, I’m not so lucky.
• Noon – 12:30pm: “Lunch,” which typically consists of a mad dash to the cafeteria for tasty, tasty Thai food, where I shovel the sustenance into my mouth as quickly as my body can handle it, so that I have some spare time (usually about 15 minutes) to run off to the staff room & get some emergency photocopying done. Often—since the school only has one photocopier—when you hope to photocopy, someone else is usually already using it. On Tuesdays, I do not have this 15-minute luxury, as I’m on lunch supervision duty.
• 12:30 – 3:40pm: 2.5 hours of high school math instruction, with a 30 minute break sprinkled randomly throughout.
• 3:40 – 4:40pm: On Wednesdays, I’m on after-school supervision. Every other day, I usually start working on teacher homework.
• 4:40 – 10:30pm: Teacher homework with a 30-minute supper break happening anywhere between 5:30 & 7:00pm, depending on where I’m at with my homework.
• 10:30 – 10:45pm: lock up the campus, head home & get as much sleep as I can (usually 6.5 hours)

Saturdays are typically filled with personal correspondence & exercise for the mornings; teacher homework throughout the afternoons; and heading at 5:30pm to “Newsong,” the ‘underground’ church in downtown Bangkok, where a bunch of us teachers attend. Afterwards, we typically hang out for a couple hours at Siam Paragon, Bangkok’s most opulent shopping-mall, which is literally across the street from where Newsong meets.

Sundays have me up again at 6am to get ready to leave at 7 for worship practise at 8 at an ex-pat church in one of the more wealthy boroughs of Bangkok—Nichida Thani. A fair chunk of the staff make the pilgrimage to this part of town because it’s one of very few churches where the service is conducted in English. There are other nice perks too, like the church having a membership to the community’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the nearby Mexican restaurant which is pretty much the only place you can find food that contains cheese, sour cream or tomatoes. The GES staff are heavily involved with leading worship at this ex-pat church, and as a sound guy, I was roped in to help out the very first Sunday I went (the church basically only has one guy who knows how to even run a soundboard, and he’s often at church only every other week due to his working schedule. The congregation sees it as an answer to prayer that I’ve come along, especially since this guy will be leaving Thailand to go back State-side at the end of the month).

And that’s my week in a nutshell.

I’ve quickly discovered (and if you take a peek at my schedule, you probably will too) that teaching’s a much more arduous task than I initially thought. It seems that, right now, for every hour of in-class instruction, I have 2 hours of prep-work. They tell me that this will eventually trim itself down, as I get more used to the teaching gig & what actually is involved in instruction. Certain tricks of the trade get learned along the way, apparently, and I’m looking forward to that. One of the challenges that my position does have over the other teachers here—whether they’re returning staff or rookies, like me—is that I’m pretty much breaking new ground in all the subjects that I’m instructing this year. There is no curriculum for me to follow, no pre-formed resources, no previous lesson-plans or course-schedules on which I could model my classes’ pace or content. I’ve pretty much got to build the whole thing from scratch, which definitely is a challenge.

On top of all this, I’m teaching Math: a subject that I haven’t even touched in over 5 years. Needless to say, my mad skills are more than rusty, and I find myself having to re-learn much of the material in order to be prepared sufficiently to teach my students—who themselves are learning the material in a foreign language.

Well, it looks like I’ve run out of time again. Here’s hoping that the upcoming weekend will allow some time for me to continue painting the picture of teaching in Thailand. If you’re the praying type, I’d ask you to pray for staff health—there seems to be a bout of sickness roaming around the staff, and that mostly in the females as well. Pray for continued unity & for a deepening and strengthening of what currently exists. Pray that we would have energy and wisdom in conducting our classes and doing all the work that we have. If I could ask you to pray for one student in particular, I would ask that you pray for this guy in my grade 10 math class, Benz. He seems to be really hurting; he actively tends to remove or distance himself from everyone else in school. Pray that the words & love of Christ might become sustenance and life to him in spite of his current situation.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Here’s a gold star, just for you. *

An Open Letter

June 10, 2007

To the Readers of This Blog,

Greetings from Thailand! I am writing this letter to inform you all of a rather intense month that I have just had, which ended up with God placing me here over in Nonthaburi Thailand for the next year.

Five weeks ago, I received an e-mail from an associate of mine here in Thailand, Aaron Wong, who is administrating at Global English School, an English immersion academy with a primary focus on reaching the Thai children and their families for Christ. He had written me, asking if I would consider a teaching position with the school for the upcoming academic year, which would start on June 5. At the time, I was three months into a new management position with Staples, and the thought of dropping everything that I had been working at for the past year suddenly to fly to the other side of the world and work as a teacher/missionary seemed a bit fanciful, if not a touch ludicrous. Nonetheless, I've known God to do crazier things, and with that in mind, I wrote Aaron back, letting him know that I would pray about the opportunity and get back to him before the week's end.

After some discussion with God and with a handful of people at the Mount Carmel graduation ceremony at the beginning of May, it seemed very clear that God wanted me to take the steps towards going to Thailand, whether or not I would eventually end up there. Many obstacles stood in the way of my departure: I needed to maintain a certain level of income with which to make my monthly student loan & bill payments; I needed to get a work visa from the Thai government; I needed to ensure that my vaccinations were all in order; and I needed a place to store any belongings that wouldn't fit into two duffle bags for my flight across the Pacific all within four weeks. It would take a miracle, I thought, so originally, I had figured that God was testing me to see if I was really willing to commit to this radically sudden call to service—I never thought that it actually would work out.

Within those four weeks, my application for employment was approved by the school, my work visa came through (with 24 hours to spare), I found a place to store my car & furniture at a reasonable price, my vaccination rounds were completed (they all took one day instead of the projected three weeks with an earliest appointment time 10 days before my flight to Bangkok), funding for paying my bills was provided, my open-ended, round trip ticket went from costing almost $6,000 to just over $1,700 and the completely-booked flights to Bangkok managed to open up one seat for little ol' me to park my rear and ride the airways. Four weeks, and this all came together. There is no greater confirmation for me that God wants me to serve over here at GES than the fact that He literally orchestrated everything together perfectly, leaving not so much as a few hours' space between making this trip a viable possibility and having this whole exercise in faith nothing more than just an exercise. And here I am, finding myself in Thailand, thirteen degrees above the equator and thirteen time zones ahead of all you folks in Edmonton.


So what am I doing here, exactly, you might ask? Well, I've come to GES to teach and develop the curriculum for grade 10 & 11 math and chemistry subjects. Aside from a few weeks of rock-climbing instruction and another few weeks of random substitute teaching, I have never taught a class in my life. The school body here consists of 300+ local Thai children whose parents desire that their offspring gain a mastery of (or at least an exposure to) the English language. Pretty much every class will be taught in English, with instructional materials & textbooks imported from the United States. Such a method of instruction is rather common in Thailand, but what distinguishes GES from the other schools is that it is an institution with a Christian focus.

Thailand is a country where 95% of the population follows some form of Buddhism, and another 3 or 4% adhere to Muslim practices. Less than 1% of the Thai population has been exposed to Christianity, I'm told. The mission field is huge here, and the goal of GES as an organisation is to reach these people fro Christ—not through cultural imperialism or through random detached proselytising, but through intimate contact with the people, showing the love of Christ and the impact of His presence on our lives as opposed to life without Him. In Thailand, teaching is perhaps the most venerated profession, revered more so than lawyers, pharmacists or doctors. As Christian teachers here in Thailand, we have an opportunity to use this cultural respect for education in order to advance the Kingdom, and that is precisely our goal.

Through the upcoming year, GES will have an English-speaking staff of 25 teachers, each of whom will be working to show the love of Christ and to present the message of the gospel to the students and their families. I ask that you all would consider joining together with us in this mission field through active, directed prayer. Pray that the students, their parents and extended family members would be receptive to the message of Christ. There is a large cultural cost to become a Christian here, as many families will disown those members who forsake the household religion—whether it be Buddhism, Islam or the Thai indigenous animism. Pray that the staff would be a united body and a consistent, cohesive front as we display the characteristics of Christ to everybody around us. So far, everybody is getting along great and the staff is acting like a large, healthy and supportive family group, yet it is early in the year—things often change when the novelty of freshness wears thin. Pray also for the school's administration, that they would have the wisdom and the humility to follow wherever the Lord would have the school go. And most of all, pray for the local Thai Christians as they adhere to their faith in spite of the cultural adversity. There seem to be several "underground" churches here in the Bangkok region, operating underground not because of official persecution (at least, not that I'm aware of), but because of the cultural pressure against Christianity.


So here I am, in the middle of Thailand, five weeks after being asked to come. It is my desire to serve Christ as much as I possibly can while I am here, in whatever faculty He would have me. English classes begin for us on the 18th, with the first two weeks of June filled by staff orientation / development. Thanks for your interest & your prayer support. If I had more time before coming here, I probably would have said something in person. Sometimes, however, God is spontaneous like this, and it is up to us to follow wherever He takes us, regardless of how much warning is given.


The Lord's peace and grace be upon all of you.


PS.
We were just informed yesterday of some exciting things happening in the Jakarta churches. A report came to us that ten people were raised from the dead, and that a girl who was born without fingers grew them immediately after the people of the church prayed and laid hands upon her. God remains the same; it's our willingness to believe that is inconstant! How great is God!