Moving forward

And just like that, it’s hot season again. (Note: all references to things being cool, cold, or otherwise not warm should be taken with a grain of salt by anyone not currently living in the tropics.)

Since mid-December, we’d been wearing long sleeved shirts to bed, snuggling down in long pants, and pulling a thick blanket up over our shoulders every night. No fan. No open windows. The world was a familiar winter one of head colds and hot tea, with the added bonus of biking to work in sweatshirts and wearing socks all day. Thais laughed at us as we donned clothes similar to what they were wearing, and we all sipped warm drinks and told each other, naao, naao (cold, cold) instead of the usual awkward-silence-filling rawn, rawn (hot, hot) usually uttered while waving an impotent hand across your face as if to create a breeze. Showers were torturous as we doused ourselves with water that had chilled all day, sometimes putting off bathing for a full 48 hours before we really felt compelled to brave the iciness and lather up. After all, we weren’t sweating, right?

Then, about a week ago, it all changed. Mornings that had been freezing excuses for staying in bed an extra hour melted away, and we started melting again as long afternoons filled up with sun and heat. Work became sweaty and uncomfortable again. Naao became rawn. Fans went on. Windows opened.

A year ago, we endured cold season with smirks and offhanded comments. This year, although even the Thais say it’s unusually cold, we are eating a little crow because we too seem to have acclimated to the shifted temperature range; our blood and skin must have thinned considerably. A teacher checked the mercury thermometer at school two weeks ago; it was near 9 a.m. and we were standing around shivering outside the office. Sip-jet ongsaa, he pronounced. Seventeen degrees. Celsius. I did the conversation on my phone, and became immediately ashamed of my purpling toes: 66 degrees Fahrenheit. A warm spring day by some standards. So, we’re fitting in a little here, to say the least.

Other signs we’re “fitting in” have multiplied as well. A couple of weeks ago, we were called to join a meeting in our village at which the villagers were going to be voting in a new water board (the old water board was being disbanded under charges of having done something other than maintaining the water tower and filter with the past five years’ worth of money). We sat quietly in the back and took notes. We waited patiently while the man conducting the meeting ensured that one person from every water-using household was present and accounted for. Josh was sent by some neighbors to add his name to the list in lieu of our absentee landlord. It turned our landlord’s name wasn’t on the list, anyway. We listened through the explanation of the voting procedures and watched those around us raise their hands to vote as the decision to kick out the old board was made final. After the votes were tallied, someone queried whether we’d voted or not; it seemed she wanted to make sure we had.  (We hadn’t. She asked why, didn’t we know what was going on? We said yes, but our residence wasn’t on the list. This was an acceptable excuse, I guess.)

Our neighbors have begun accepting food from us, even food that I claim is Thai food that I cooked myself, they seem willing to eat.

The kids I teach wave and yell hello, even when I’m not teaching them.

People I bike past on a daily basis and have spoken to at length only a few times say they’ll miss me.

Everyone’s starting to ask about when we’re going back home.

And that seems to be the one thing that everyone here and everyone at home seems to have in common.

Part of the reason we hadn’t been writing the blog (or that I hadn’t, anyway) during the cold season (aside from all the travelling and business that I laid out as an excuse in the last blog post) is that since about September, we’ve been mulling over—really, agonizing is a better word—the possibility of staying in Thailand for another year. And we didn’t want to agonize over it in public, or alarm anyone, or jinx anything, before we made up our minds one way or another. We were presented an opportunity to move out of our community and to a big city in Isaan (Northeast Thailand), to work with a university, and university students on some different projects that are more directly related to our experience (and we hope, our ambitions).

After the torturous process of changing our minds on an hourly basis, finding ourselves almost entirely out of sync with each other’s thought processes, negotiating the ups and downs of finalizing the details of the position – all those minor things about where will we live? who will we work with? what will we do? why would we want to go there? when will we move? – and generally realizing that what’s required in this instance, as in just about any other, is a leap of blind faith (in other people’s and our own good intentions, in the potential for everything to just work out, dammit), we’ve decided to go for it (with very few of the answers to the above questions entirely worked out).

What that means, exactly, we're not fully sure. As the details unfold, so will the stories. Stay tuned!