Thailand

My time spent in Thailand has probably been the best part of the entire Semester at Sea experience so far. I went outside the normal realms of being a tourist to volunteer at an English camp in Northern, rural Thailand. It was an SAS trip that was organized/sponsored by the Volunthai program (An organization that works mainly to teach English to Thai students).

Our group was small, only about 16 people (15 students and one member of the staff who was our leader), so we fit easily into two vans for the long drive to the Ban Khwao province. We stopped briefly for lunch at a Thai mall and then hit a couple rest stops, but spent the majority of our first day in Thailand in the vans, watching beautiful scenery pass us by (about 8 hours) and wishing we could get out to tae pictures. When we finally got to the hotel, we were tired and hungry, so we luckily only had enough time to set down our bags and bounce a couple times on the beds before they put us back on the busses to drive us across the road to dinner. At dinner on the first night we met the people who had organized the camp and who were in charge of doing all the real work. Most of them spoke English and Thai, so they would also serve as our translators in the next couple days. Dinner was amazing, fried fish, soup, veggies, fruit – and pretty much everything was at least a little bit spicy. It was also at dinner that night that I committed the huge social faux pas of attempting to shake the hand (they just don’t do that here, they bow their heads and make prayer-hands) of the big man who was in charge of everything. It was really awkward. Luckily, the Thai people are also incredibly warm and friendly and not easily offended by stupid Americans, so I’m pretty sure it all worked out. But it was horribly quiet and awkward for a good many seconds after I touched his hand. After dinner we had a quick meeting that explained how the camp would work, the tentative schedule, and really just got us super excited about meeting the kids the next day.

Our first day of camp was a busy one. We woke up around 7:00, got ready, had breakfast at the school, and had time for another short meeting before the kids arrived. I keep saying kids, which is rather incorrect, because the students were aged 15-18, not the little elementary-school kids we had been expecting. We went through the boring speeches of the opening ceremony and then got to spend the rest of the day singing songs, playing games, and dancing, to give the students a chance to practice the English they already knew (we weren’t really there to teach them, we were there to give them the opportunity to get comfortable using English with native English-speakers). Kids in Thailand don’t feel the need to grow up as fast as high-schoolers do at home, so they were all willing and excited to play games with us, and sing our silly songs, and that was really surprising. After camp that day, we took a tour of the silk factories in town (the major industry of the area) and I ate a silk worm!!! (terrible texture, but it tasted like a bean!). We had the chance to watch every step of the process, from the worms themselves to the dying of the threads to the little shop where they sell silk everything. And that night we had another amazing meal with our Thai hosts (pad thai in Thailand is the best thing ever!) This time they pulled out the karaoke machine and we had ourselves a multi-cultural little dance party that night that was ridiculously fun. It was so cool that people who don’t even speak the same language can have so much fun laughing and dancing together. They attempted to teach us how to dance traditionally, and as a group we failed pretty miserably, but had a lot of fun.

The next day we played more of the same awesome camp games, sang songs, and ate lots of interesting Thai snacks. We had a traditional Thai lunch where we sat on the floor (feet pointed away from everybody else) and ate sticky rice with our bare hands. We had another long fancy closing ceremony at the end of the day where everyone who had played any part in camp at all got recognition for it, which was very nice. We then headed back to the hotel, packed up, and were sent off to spend our last night doing a home-stay with on of the students and their family.

My Thai sister (Nat) picked me up in a tuktuk (old truck/taxi-type thing) and we drove to her home for the evening. The home stay was the most incredible part of the whole experience. I feel like I learned so much in those few hours. I went to temple, was given a bracelet by a Buddhist monk, saw a crocodile, helped to cook dinner, sang and danced with the family, learned to weave baskets, took a shower from a bucket on the back porch, figured out how to flush the toilets, fed the monks, met the whole family… everything. I did everything. And I’m sure there is also so much that I missed out on. My experiences at the Buddhist temple were probably the most interesting. Meeting the monks, having the opportunity to offer them food and bow to them and just to take part in a really important ritual of daily life was so cool. Indescribably cool.

Heading back to the school the next morning, we took a tuktuk ride of the area. I’m amazed by how absolutely beautiful Thailand is, everything is green and growing. There are chickens and skinny cows and buffalo running everywhere. And the air is perfectly clean and pure. I’m doubtful its as nice in the big cities, but it was pretty much a paradise in this rural province. When we got back to the school, we had to load up for the long drive back to the ship. I was surprised by how emotional the goodbye became. As we said goodbye to the students, the teachers, our host families, there were hugs and crying all around. Nobody wanted to leave. Nobody wanted us to have to go. It was awful. But we did it, we got in the vans and drove away, waving for as long as we possibly could. We stopped for lunch on the drive and again had incredibly delicious Thai food and at a rest stop a little bit later and I ate a grasshopper!! (there was a guy selling them on the side of the road and we thought we ought to try them out – tasted a lot like a potato chip!) The rest of the ride we basically spent reliving our experience and making plans to return to Thailand.

I’m actually serious about the idea of returning to Thailand. We were so completely welcomed there, that it would be hard not to go back. I had thought people were kind in Vietnam, but deep down they wanted us to buy things, whereas the people I met in Thailand really just wanted to meet us, to learn from us, and to let us into their homes and their lives. It was awesome. It was one of those almost cliché feel good experiences in which you are sure you learned more from the people you were helping than them from you (the workcamp feeling). I’m going to try and stay in touch with my host family and with the other volunteers who had been there to be in charge of everything. Thailand is an awesome country, I’m going back. There is so more to see and do than I got the chance to experience, and I want to re-experience all the things I just did for more time and with more people. So, I’ll just have to go back.