Happy Buddhist Lent

Betcha didn't know that Buddhists have Lent, did you? I'm giving up cigarettes and alcohol. Which shouldn't be hard since I've basically given up on both anyway. But it's important to acknowledge the fact that I have given them up. Sort of a positive feed back loop (A&P term, Sarah gets it). Anyway, it's easier then giving up coffee.

We went to the temple to walk around the big thingy but it turned out that this was supposed to happen the next day. The next day the kids were too tired from picking bamboo shoots (or "shoot bamboo") to head back, and I was too tired from my run. So I guess we are all crappy Buddhists who will be reincarnated as chickens.

Poor kids had to rummage in the forest looking for bamboo to eat because I guess there isn't any other food here. Yesterday they had to kill one of the chickens.

Ignorance Was Bliss

I was reading through some of my old blog entries of Yemen and Samoa and realized that my life isn't as exciting at it was when I lived there. No being attacked by goons with firecrackers, no near-miss kidnaps in Marib, no students writing about the color of their panties. I think that a lot of this can be blamed on the fact that Sonia isn't here with me and she stubbornly refuses to come. I think that Thailand is too rugged for the little princess anyway.

It might SEEM like my life is boring, but I assure you it is not. As I read more of my Anatomy and Physiology book every day, it turns out that my life is really in high mortal peril every minute. It turns out that moving, my heart's continous beating, breathing, and other processes that keep me alive basically all boil down to a few measly Ca+ ions being in the right place in the right time!

Yes, I am learning how even the slightest movement requires a plethora of chemical reactions to happens, ions released and collected, and neurotransmitters being produced and reuptaken. Makes me want to lie on my bed and not move to introduce as little stress as possible and save any space Ca+ ions for the pumping of my heart and the contractions of my diaphragm.

But that's no good, according to the book, because if I don't move then my muscles will atrophy into little puddles. So instead I thought that maybe I should just move as little as possible-- like when I absolutely have to get up to eat, teach class, or make coffee. Which is convenient, because that's pretty much what I do anyway.

No good either. The book has informed me that unless I take in at least 30 minutes of exercise a day, my bones and muscles will decompose into little piles of dust by the time I am 35. Now I've heard all this before, but unlike the previous carriers of this message, I am not being offered a chance to join a gym or buy the latest slim-fast craze. No, my book simply offers in excruciating molecule-by-molecule detail how this decomposition will happen.

So, as a result, I have been jogging every day. Not an easy feat in tropical Thai weather, let me tell you. But I feel better about this workout program then ones in the past. For starters, I don't have to get up to do it, which was the doom of past attempts. I jog at dusk, when I am starting to burn out slightly and even running for 30 minutes seems more appealing then another chapter of physiology. Plus, that's the time that the mosquitoes come out, and I don't think that they are very good at hitting a moving target.

Dang!

My new favorite student 'o the week is Ms. Dang. Dang is pretty incredible. She came here and not only did she not speak a word of English, she was also illiterate in her own language, Thai. She couldn't read or write. (She could, however, say "chocolate". A woman after my own heart.) Talk to her in English and she'd just repeat what you said. Today, she can respond to most pleasantries such as "how are you" or "where's Emmett?" or "is this stuff spicy?" and even "I'm thirsty/hungry/angry/tired." She's worked her butt off and it shows.

Meanwhile, I have been really busy. I have been studying Thai and also working on my prereqs for nursing school. I got my 1100 page Anatomy and Physiology book in the mail (thanks, Sarah!) and I am also taking Chemistry and Psychology. A&P is nearly impossible! During a Thai lesson, Dang sat with us, fascinated, interjecting long strings of Thai. She could not understand that just because I could say "Hello, I am hungry" I couldn't understand long rapid 30-second monologues. To get rid of her, I finally opened my A&P book to the cut-outs of pregnant women and developing fetuses and shoved it at her. That shut her up for the rest of the lesson, flipping through the pages in wonder. She couldn't read the words, obviously, but she was quick to pick up that the drawn pictures of cut-away vaginas and GI tracts were part of her body. I was impressed. Now, whenever I am sitting at the table she'll come up and demand to see the "baby book".

Today she found the section on breathing and circulation and so I taught her how to use my stethoscope to listen to her own lungs and heart. After listening to her heart and mine she went running to her house to listen to the hearts and lungs of all the other girls. I taught her about her pulse and she ran around checking that too. Then I tried to explain to her through gestures about how the cirulation system works (not easy, you try it!) and she got the basic idea. I explained (or gestured, rather) that the heart sped up through lots of movement. She leapt up and started to jump and jog in place so that she could hear her heart go fast. Then she put the stethoscope around her neck and announced that she was a doctor. The pictures are her reading the A&P book and wearing the stethoscope.

Unfortunately, I don't really know what her story is. She only finished 3rd grade, and she speaks Thai, not Burmese. I don't know why she didn't to school-- she should have been able to go to the Thai school. Her family, like all families around here, isn't rich but do seem to have enough money to provide her with a cell phone and nice clothes. They should have been able to handle the school fees. When I asked the others what she was doing while not going to school they said that she was cleaning the house. Cinderella incarnate, I guess.

And the bug of the week is *ba ba bum* FROGS! Yes I know that they aren't bugs but they are everywhere. Little guys the size of a fingernail. Walking around campus I have to watch the ground constantly so that I won't step on them. I can't take a picture because they are too small to focus on. They are adorable and step up from last week, which was large hand-sized spiders.

What are the kids listening to today?

So, once upon I time I worked for this great startup called MongoMusic. They allowed you to make music lists and would then recommend music based on what you liked. It worked really well and I found some of my favorite music at the time there. Then we got bought out by Microsoft. Microsoft promised us that they wouldn't touch a thing about our online radio and then proceeded to not only gut the functionality of the startup but the people who'd they relocated from California to Seattle and proceeded to then fire when they started getting comfortable. (Disgustingly, this plan to "rehire" the people into other places at Microsoft-- because a music analyst is such a hot commodity there-- was announced on 9/11/2001.)

But the radio was still pretty good until they finally threw out the MongoMusic one (whose code, I am proud to say, was given a major overhaul by yours truly and then viewed by thousands daily) and then I left the country and didn't revisit the site since.

I went there today out of curiosity and found that the music radio that had been written by a startup and removed and replaced by some Microsoft creation had then been removed and replaced with code written by another startup. Makes perfect sense, don't you think?

So I've been sampling some of the music clips off Amazon to find something that's worth spending my money on and I'm pretty shocked to discover that all my favorite bands now suck. The Indigo Girl's new album contains not only recycled musical themes from Rites of Passage but actually contains recycled lyrics as well. The latest Sarah McLauchlan album is a *blah* Christmas Album! WTF?!? Even Suzanne Vega let me down.

Where I am going with this:
The reason that I went back to MSNMusic was that I was hoping that they'd finally turned on MongoMusic's recommendation service because I desperately need some new, modern, music. My old heroes have let me down. So please tell me, what are the kids listening to nowadays? If you were a fan of the alternative Cranberries/Sarah McLachlan/Melissa Etheridge type then please shoot me a line to let me know what the hell you are listening to now.

Life's Small Victories

Some of my hard work has finally paid off. After weeks of harassment, my students have finally started to wear their motorcycle helmets. I got two of the male students to wear helmets for a 2km trip to Nai Soi without any fight as all (usually the students just laugh at me when I insist on wearing helmets for this trip) and one of my students, Wanna, knocked on my door to ask if she could borrow a helmet to go to Mae Hong Son. I was so surprised when she made the request that I thought I must have misheard her!

It's just plain common sense. The director of the school has had his health greatly compromised because he wasn't wearing a helmet and was caught in a landslide when driving to town. I would have thought that that would be enough to get them to protect their heads, but they still insisted that helmets aren't needed. I gave them a rather gory and exaggerated version of my own accident and I figured that they were just laughing the silly white girl behind their concerned faces. Apparently not!

"Mr. Malaria" Tun is still symptom free but now he is plagued by some sort of stomach thing. Took me ten minutes and the help of five other students to determine if he was having regular bowel movements or not. I was able to see for myself that his appetite hadn't changed much, but what happens at the other end I could not be a witness to. I'm not too worried because he's eating and other stuff on a regular basis so it's not an obstructed gut. I spent another ten minutes trying to determine it it was a stabbing pain, a cramping pain or a dull ache. After a while Tun just started to just say "yes" to all my questions which pretty much wrapped up my interview. If he's not better by tomorrow we're sending him along with 100 baht to the clinic to let those poor people deal with him.

Fly Away Butterfly

The students interrupted me during class to inform me that a butterfly had gotten caught in a spider web while I was teaching in one of the quasi-open-air classrooms. They coached me as I borrowed an umbrella and cheered when the butterfly flew away. That's really what I love about the school-- the respect for life. The only things that really get killed with a vengeance around here are the mosquitoes. This morning the cats followed me into the classroom and lounged on the students desks. Rather then kicking them off, they carefully placed their notebooks out of the way of the sleeping felines.

Butterflies were the bug of the week about two weeks ago, now it is ants. Ants is a decided step-down, but still an improvement over the previous weeks of the wasps and the termites before that. My favorite remains the few days of the fireflies where sometimes my room would be lit up so brightly by them that I could read in the dark.

Having a few low-key minor crisises. They are irrigating the rice paddies around the school and I am pretty sure that this is causing the water to get shut off from the school. We have large water tanks that hold about four or five days of water and they are getting pretty low. Fortunately it's also been really cool as we head into the real rainy season (what we had before was just practice) so one shower a day is adequate. In addition, we haven't had cell phone coverage in Nai Soi for about two days now. One of the students, Yoom, explained to me that this is because we've had rain for a few days and the cell signals can't get through the clouds. Since we don't have this problem in Seattle I am a bit skeptical of this technological explanation.

The student's language skills are quickly improving and I am trying to get more of a gist of their past histories. I've been focusing on the four boys from Lak Thai. They were here last year and either were, are, or will be Shan soldiers. (Hopefully this will be more clear when they finally nail down the different tenses.) I am just starting to learn about their situations. Tun, the kid with malaria, is a 19-year-old who apparently left his entire family in Burma and hasn't seen them in three years. The kids aren't terribly shy about talking about their families. Yee told me that his father died a year ago because he was old. When I asked him about it he started to laugh and another kid laughed with him, saying “he thinks it's funny that his father is dead”.

And the rains starts up again.

Malaria Shamaria!

Emmett, can I use your shower? And by "shower", I mean a bucketful of malaria water."

- Kevin, one of the new volunteers

Things have pretty much returned to normal. My malaria case, Tun, is up and about and running around like nothing ever happened and doesn't seem to be relapsing or showing any signs whatsoever that less then a week ago he was suffering from a possibly fatal disease. The other three Laktai boys (Aung, Lu, and On) are being closely watched since the four of them celebrated their brotherhood by giving each other tatoos with the same machine-- Tun going first, before he got malaria. So far, so good.

I have decided not to go on antimalarials. Sarah found a really great drug which wasn't hell on your liver and kicks in in two days. The drug is one of the few that is good for the strains of Malaria found in this area, but ironically it can't be bought here. I would ask for someone to send it but with the way that the mail goes here it will be the cold season by the time it shows up. I am still waiting for a chemistry textbook that I ordered six weeks ago. I have had about as much luck with the mail in my travels as Hilter had in Russia.

I did have my first major motorcycle accident and walked away rather miraculously with nothing more then a briused knee. I'm sort of glad that I got this out of the way as it was an inevitiable event. I was heading through an intersecion that had neither stop light nor heavy traffic when a car came out of the mysterous nowhere. I jammed on my brakes but forgot that I was supposed to use the footbreak. Years of riding bycycles and mopeds had trained by reflects badly for a motorcycle. The bike didn't stop and I was faced with the choice of trying to swerve around the car or taking my chances with the curb. I picked the curb. Fortunatly, when I flew off my bike I fell into a think bunch of Thai soft jungle bushes. God did punish me by giving them thorns. I couldn't believe that the bike was okay, with the exception of a broken fuel gauge and a flat tire. Check that one off the list.