After 4 airports, 5 airplane meals, 31 hours of travelling, 3 time zones, 6 nights of falling asleep before 9:00 p.m., 12 highly caffeinated beverages, 3 mysterious bruises, and countless poor attempts at Thai, I’ve survived my first week in Thailand! Also, I am happy to say that I have officially gotten over the 11-hour time difference induced jet lag as of yesterday! Thank goodness Thai people are extremely gracious because I can’t say I was at my prime during much of this week. Not only were all of the people I’ve met completely understanding of the fact that my body wanted to sleep when it was the middle of the afternoon, but they have also been so patient with my almost non-existent Thai.
However, I can say I am absolutely killing the sahwàht-dii kah (said with a prayer-like, palms touching gesture with a slight bow), cháhn chûee Bridgid kah, cháhn ayúh yêe sihp sãam, sahbiedee mâi? (Hello, my name is Bridgid, I am 23, how are you?) game. Get past that, I look like a deer in headlights. I have to give myself credit though, I have been picking up more and more words everyday since being here and have been really good at using context clues to figure out what people are saying to me. The first few days were really hard and uncomfortable though. The only feeling I can associate with what it was (and still is) like to have people trying to talk to you and having not a clue what they are saying is the same level of awkwardness as when you are the only one that is sober at a party and everyone else is drunk. Luckily in the gated community I am living, appropriately called the Garden of Friendship, there are a few people that speak pretty good English. Also, my community member, Tamarah, and I begin daily Thai lessons with one of the residents of the Garden tomorrow afternoon so I am very excited to start those.
Thai is a really interesting language. Verbs are not conjugated, nor does it have any verb tenses. Instead, distinctions in tense are made by adding adverbs, expressions of time, or just by looking at the context of the sentence. There are also no plural nouns. Every noun just has one form. Also, pronouns are rarely used and the subject is usually derived from context. Sounds like the easiest language to learn right? Not quite. Thai is a tonal language with five different tones so the particular tone a vowel of a word is said can completely change the word. For example the word for beautiful is sõary, which has a rising tone over the o (like how you would say the last word of a question). But another word, which sounds eerily similar, and I haven’t quite figured out exactly what the pronunciation is means unfortunate/ ugly. I feel like whoever made the Thai language thousands of years ago and threw in those words just wanted to play a joke on farang (foreign) men coming to Thailand to pick up women. So far I have not made any major mistakes in changing the meaning of my sentences based on my pronunciation yet, but that’s probably only because I can’t make sentences yet. Just give me a few weeks.
Besides providing me with ample opportunities to practice my Thai, the Garden is also extremely beautiful. It is a gated compound in Nong Khai province run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and is about a 40 minute bike ride into the city of Nong Khai. To give you a little picture of how far out of the city we are, I drank my coffee the first morning staring at the cows (and them back at me) that live just behind a row of banana trees and a small wall in my new backyard. The Garden is home to the Care Center, an assisted living/ hospice center for patients with HIV/AIDs (where I will be working this year), the volunteer house where I am living, and six homes for families infected and affected by HIV/AIDs. Within those homes, there are currently five children who range from 3 to 15 years old. Three of the children are living with HIV and all of the parents in the Garden are HIV+. Tamarah and I have already gotten quite close to the two youngest girls, Naam (3) and Nonny (6), in the week that we have been here. We have played with them every day when they get home from school and I can already tell that they are going to be one of my favorite parts of Nong Khai. Today Nonny had me working with her on Thai script. She was very honest with me that my letters were awful. I have a feeling I am going to be illiterate here. But that’s okay. It’s very humbling to need to ask what different things say or mean, even if it’s from a six year old.
I think the biggest theme of this past week has been ‘humbling’. I can’t even count how many times I have said that I have felt so humbled this week. From watching women meticulously sit at weaving looms, creating more and more of a beautiful fabric, to the women at Hands of Hope, an income generating hand-made craft project produced by individuals living with HIV/AIDs, who merely said mei pen rai (don’t worry about it) after Tamarah and I messed up gluing on at least 20 bracelet labels. But the most humbling experience for me this week was watching my two main coworkers, Crisidad and Bon, nurses at the Care Center, give a sponge bath to a patient who is living with HIV but has also been paralyzed due to a stroke. Helping to give sponge baths is going to be one of my responsibilities once I start my regular work schedule in the next coming week and it was very humbling to watch Crisidad and Bon take such care and time to make sure this woman was clean. It was really hard to watch at points because of the emaciated state of the patient and because she has a huge sore on her lower back that goes through to her muscle tissue. But on the other hand, it was great to see that she was finally getting the attention she was deprived of in the major hospital setting that led to her bed sores. Giving my first sponge bath as well as my other roles this year, such as doing village outreach to the impoverished villages of the Nong Khai region and doing activities with the patients at the Care Center, is definitely going to be hard emotionally but I am also humbled to be given this experience to let individuals who have been so frequently shunned by society see that they are so worthy of love.
This year is definitely going to have its moments of joy and moments of frustration, but I accept both with open arms. It is currently the rainy season here in Thailand, which means it rains heavily at least once every day. But it also means that everything is an incredibly vibrant green. All day I have had one lyric from the song “I Have Made Mistakes” by the Oh Hello’s stuck in my head. It says “and the sun it does not cause us to grow, it is the rain that will strengthen your soul, it will make you whole”. I don’t think that could be any more true for the year ahead of me. So keep your prayers and well wishes my way! I can feel the love even from thousands of miles away!
