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!