Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Yu song con

One week in our new home, one 5 foot snake crossed the road, one palm sized arachnid on the wall and one very severe case of streptococcus. Today, which is July 4th in Thailand, is approximately one week before our 6 month anniversary here. Next week we will depart south to celebrate 50 years of Peace Corps presence in Thailand with a few American and Thai dignitaries as well as many volunteers presently serving and from years past. Following the anniversary ceremony, our group, 124 will be meeting in another suburb or the BKK for our second training session which will last another two weeks. All said and done we will be out of our site for close to the rest of July and have a chance to swap stories and talk about progress with the rest of these crazy people who think they belong out here. While we have made some very close relationships at site, and are even able to communicate a little more than where we are going or coming from now, it is always nice to see some fellow Uh-mericans and get an idea of who has been more effective than you out her so far :)


Since we last spoke...
We have gotten out of under the wing of our host family for better or worse. We are eating a lot less MSG. I am now weighing in at just 64 kg, which takes me back to sophomore year in high school statistics, I think. No bread, no cheese and very limited beer has got me in the slim trousers. Our new house is quaint, cute, and now has drinking water, rice, a bed, and a bunch of tables in it. For me seems like a pretty good set up but for Erin seems like it needs a lot more work. We spent a good chunk of our "readjustment allowance" on the purchase of a nice queen size bed which ran us about 7,000THB. Our host mothers response when she heard about this price was that she has never seen or heard of a bed that cost seven thousand baht. Most of the Thai's that we live with sleep on what we have heard referred to as Thai beds. These Thai beds are spring-less mattresses about four of five inches thick and were a cause of many poor nights of sleep for us before we bought our new "ti-noan" (bed). I know that for many who may be reading this the word: "princess" or question: "what about hardship" may be coming to mind right about now. You can save it. There are plenty of other things to make someone miserable when living between jungle and rice paddy at 17 degrees latitude. Last week I discovered one in the form of a Thai strep throat virus. It started with a migraine level headache that lasted approximately 8 hours and then declined into a sub-migraine level headache that accompanied a fever for another couple days until turning into a sore throat that prohibited sleep throughout the weekend. As any one who has lived close to me can attest, although I am a person who likes to imbibe on fine barley and malt beverage, I rarely take medication, even Advil. Well this fix had me begging the the doc for something stronger that 800 mg Ibuprofen I was eating like PEZ. It has been a very rough week.

So six months in and how else are things besides sick again? Things are good. We continue to find ourselves in situations of incredibility and every so often it looks like I might actually have some serious work to do. While Erin is chugging away at the schools, I am still working on building relationships with various members of the community. We are taught that we must first create trust with people before even beginning to understand the issues and help with the solutions. It feels like I'm getting there. The public health workers I am now spending a lot of time with, have many good ideas and even specific plans for programs pertaining to topics I was brought here to help with. As soon as we return from the south next month, I am scheduled to begin teaching a class to all of the district public health workers. The idea is that I will focus on interaction between health and environment with related English terminology. My pressing goal is to get a local Thai tutor to further my speaking and reading skills. In our first visit from Peace Corps personnel last month, the office I am working in agreed to provide funding for projects; now I just need to get to writing them up and pounding the pavement (dirt road) some more.

Happy Fourth of July everybody! Put another piece of cheese on that burger for me.
RED

No comments:

Post a Comment