I arrived late in the afternoon to the town of Sangkhlaburi after a seven plus hour bus ride from Bangkok. I had eaten some random banana chips and chocolate for lunch and was happy that Geraldine had told the kids from the home to wait for me at the 7-11 so I wouldn’t have to negotiate with the songtheaw drivers. To date, Geraldine had been my only point of contact at Baan Dada, and she had seemed pretty flexible about how long I stayed, when I arrived, and how much I paid for my accomodations.
I had tried to ask what exactly they wanted me to do and how much they already had developed for their English Curriculum for their nursery school, but her answers had been vague at best - my first inkling that maybe things wouldn’t be all that organized once I arrived. What I didn’t know then was that Geraldine was also a volunteer. She was from Singapore and had been at Baan Dada for three months and had taken over the administration of the organization since Dada was in the Philippines getting treatment for his hepatitis.
I came off the bus into the late afternoon heat and approached a group of kids hanging on the back of one of the pickup transports. “Baan Dada?” I asked my voice inflection implying the question. They laughed and looked away. I walked down the street and saw another group of kids and tried again, but again was met with head shakes, nervous giggles and some pointing toward the green pick up songatheaws in the lot.
I approached a driver and used my app to look up how to say, “I’m going to .. . . “ before my location, but he motioned to the motorcycles and told me that I had to go with them for 200 Baht. Knowing that prices are at least 2-3 X the price they should be, I looked up how to say 70 but was met with a shake of his head and no counter offer. I waited patiently only to see him look at a friend and begin talking.
I finally decided to walk away and see if I couldn’t find the kids in the 711 and wandered over to the store on the only street in town. There were no hostels that I could see, no massage parlors or hair braiders, nor shops selling post cards, there were no restaurants offering Western and Asian cuisine, nothing written anywhere in English at all.
If I had wanted off the beaten path, I had most certainly found it.
But now I wished I had upgraded to the pro version of my application to help me with my Thai as I attempted to ask a few more kids if they were from the Baan Dada school. Standard response: a giggle, hand up to their mouth and a shake of their head while looking downward.
Finally, sufficiently sweaty, hungry and having to go to the bathroom from not having peed in six hours, I decided motorscooter it was and walked over to the two men waiting with their motos in the shade. “Where you go?” one of them asked which gave me a bit of a boost since it implied that they had some management of the English Language.
“Baan Dada?” I responded and then watched as they talked to each other quickly and emphatically in Thai including some hand gestures that implied that Baan Dada was no where close by.
Finally, one of them got a piece of paper and wrote 150 on it and offered it to me. I offered 70 back and they shook their heads now talking emphatically to me. I imagined them saying something to the effect of, “Lady! You crazy! You know how far that place is??” But I persevered offering 80 as one of them took another fare and left the discussion.
After much more discussion with my badly pronounced Thai numbers, their broken English and our papers and calculators, I managed to convince the first guy who had taken off and since come back to take me for 100. I felt vindicated for my savings of less than $2.00 and thought of my brother and David who always laugh at how completely stubborn I get. It’s not actually about saving the dollar in the end – it’s about not being overcharged. (Later I found out that 150 was actually the standard price for the drive, but how was I to know?)
The driver took my backpack and put it in front of his knees, donned a helmet and motioned for me to get on. I prayed silently that my head wouldn’t become road decorations and followed his directions. We made no conversation as we wove our way out of the one horse town and into the mountains and valleys beyond. The air got colder and I thought of Sapa and worried about my two long sleeved shirts and one pair of pants in my backpack.
When we arrived, Geraldine rushed out, “Are you Jennifer? I am so sorry! The kids didn’t understand me.” But I was just grateful to have arrived in one piece and for only $2.75 at that.
We walked down the dirt path and stopped for a moment so she could introduce me to the other volunteers, a girl from Singapore (like her) and three German university students doing an internship for their social work degrees. They were eating family style around a table and welcomed me to the family.
We walked past the dining area, past some crops and she stopped to hug a small child as she explained that the kids were all doing their evening chores. We turned right at the rubber tree and walked another 200 feet before arriving at the volunteer huts.
The volunteer accommodations were indeed mere huts. One long building with two doors, both closed with padlocks. One of the doors was ajar and we entered to find a man working in a dark, dirty bathroom. “The lights don’t worked,” she offered by way of explanation, “so if he can’t get it to work, you may have to share with the Germans.”
I nodded and looked inside the bare concrete cell of a room. A mosquito net covered two skinny mattresses that made my thermarest for camping look like a luxury sweet. Holes dotted the pink netting. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. A small blanket was folded at the bottom of the mattresses. “You can choose whichever room you like,” she said, “The other girl from Singapore will sleep in the other one.”
The rooms were identical so I chose the one closer to the grimy bathroom and breathed in deeply. I had wanted rustic.
“Well, careful what you wish for Jen,” Rustic it was.
As we walked back to join the others for dinner, I asked Geraldine some more questions about what my role was and soon realized one thing was crystal clear: there was nothing in place to speak of. She explained that she had tried teaching the preschool kids English but they didn’t really listen and that there weren’t always consistent volunteers or a person that spoke English around.
I began to wonder whether my time here was going to be well spent as I ate some spicy green beans and tofu and listened to the German girls tell me that they had realized that while the kids were at school there was really nothing to do except hang out.
I was undeterred. I had not come here to hang out. I could do that at the beach and in a much more tropical location to boot.
The sun went down and the cold settled in along with the mosquitos. We met with the school aged English group, 3 girls around 9 or 10 years old, a 16 year old girl and a teenaged boys. The 4 German students (a young man had shown up during dinner) and I took turns playing games and singing songs with them, but I couldn’t help but feel that there had to be a better way to do this.
I laid down that night on my cold, hard bed and dreamt of the forest and kids from BVHM together with these Thai children singing songs. The floor was so hard that anytime I rolled over, the floor woke me up. The wind blew and the blanked barely covered both my feet and my head. I couldn’t wait for the sun to come up.
I ran fast in the morning along the dirt road that led out of the home and down the street past the other huts and jumped out of the way when a dog came aggressively at me.
The internet had not been working in the morning and I wondered how I would get any research done about the English program when I got back. But first I needed to sweat. I ran up and down the hills past a small body of water and out onto what seemed to be a main road.
I ran opposite traffic despite the fact that most pedestrians seem to accompany the cars and waved at the few locals that looked at me as I ran by. I could see them shrugging at each other as some of them smiled back, some wished me “Sawadeeka” and some just shook their heads and averted their eyes. A group of men on a pick up yelled something at me as they drove by and I was happy to not understood them.
I passed a toddler waiting on a motorcycles sidecar by herself and she turned around to watch me go. I passed a building with 50 pre school aged kids singing and jumping along with their teacher. I passed a barefoot monk dressed in orange robes who nodded serenely.
On my return trip, the woman who had averted her eyes by the general store called out as I passed and I looked over my shoulder as I ran to see her give me the two thumbs up. I bowed in return and kept going.
When I arrived back home, the door to the Germans’ door was still closed. It was close to 9 am. “Could they still be sleeping?” I wondered. I had used the disgusting bathroom before running with my headlamp, but would I be able to shower and feel clean there? I entered with trepidatiously and looked around.
The dead worm on the floor looked like it had been dried to the floor years before. The tube to drain the sink was inside the sink itself and what I hoped was dirt and mud was all over the floor and walls. I tried the light. Still not working. I wouldn’t even be able to see as I navigated the filthy space. And where would I put the soap? I could not shower here. I knocked on my neighbors’ door and called out hello as they had told me to do. When no one answered, I sighed, resigned to the disgusting shower ahead of me.
But then I heard a return hello and quickly pulled on my shorts. Sure enough they had still been sleeping and my knock had woken up Celi. She agreed to let me shower and Elena agreed to help me clean my bathroom later that day after seeing its conditions.
After my shower I sat talking to the Germans, and they shared their instant coffee with me and I was grateful that I hadn’t gone ahead and given up caffeine as I had planned. I had already given up every other creature comfort. The least I could do was drink Nescafe.
It was now 11 am and I was determined to be productive. I left the volunteer hut and headed toward the dining hall where I found 6 or 7 children in the 2-3 year old age range playing alone on abandoned tractor. They waved as I walked up and all wanted to climb on me, hug me and have turns using me to turn flips. Soon their teacher came out from the kitchen and shooed them up the nursery area to put them down on the concrete floor for their afternoon nap.
I went up to the office and found the internet was still not working. I decided that I could write up the English lesson structure and turned on one of the ancient looking PCs on the desk. It asked me for a password and I looked around the office, but found nothing that resembled one. I tried the second password. This one had two log ons but still I didn’t know the password. I walked around till I found a man and asked him if he spoke English. He shook his head no and I stood watching the 2 year olds sleep wondering what to do. Geraldine was no where in sight and it was already almost noon.
Another man walked out and I said something about the password on the computer. He responded, “Baan Dada Oath 1” and I assumed he had understood. Sure enough it worked and since the internet wasn’t working, I set out to write up and English lesson sequence.
When I went to save it, I found that there was a folder labeled volunteers and after some digging, found previous notes on English lessons taught and what the volunteers in September had left to be done for the next group. Some serious systems work was in order. I had some lunch from the always pre set volunteer area and wondered how long the carrots and potatoes and rice had been out as I ate. The internet had come back up so I chatted with home and tried to figure out how to make this time worthwhile for the kids at Baan Dada and for future volunteers.
Just then Geraldine got back and showed me the materials in the pre school area. Here is what I had been wondering about. There were plastic fruit, puppets, games and some books in the area. This is what I needed to be able to plan. As we sat perusing the materials, two of the girls woke up and promptly sat themselves in our laps pulling books off the shelves to “read” with us. This is what the pre school kids needed – lap time. An idea was formulating in my head.
I sat reading and playing in English until it was time for all the kids to do math with their regular teacher and then headed back to talk to the German girls and Casey from Singapore. They were just as excited as I and we wrote up a list of tasks and questions to ask Dada when he returned the next day.
Then it was time to clean the bathroom. Casey, Isi and I grabbed all the cleaning supplies they had bought in town and braced ourselves for the dirty task ahead of us. There were three rooms and three of us. I have been in dirty bathrooms in my life. Fraternity house bathrooms, train station bathrooms, bus station bathrooms, even bathrooms on the side of the road in developing countries in between major cities, but this bathroom took the cake.
We filled up containers of water and splashed them on the floor and sprayed the cleanser on every surface. We scrubbed and scrubbed and sprayed and sprayed and splashed and splashed until finally an hour later, Casey and I agreed that it was clean enough to use. The light finally had started working as well, and Celi had made a list of tasks for the week.
It was looking like I might be able to be useful at Baan Dada after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment