All the Things I Didn’t Tell You about Thailand – PART 1
20 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
So happy to be back at the beach
I’m not exactly sure how to proceed with this blog now that I’m no longer a volunteer English teacher in Thailand, although I am still very much living for the prospect of joy. Maybe I’ll update the little tag on my title to say: “The Prospect of Joy: Notes from a 26 year old unemployed college graduate with nothing better to do than write and watch birds down at the creek all day”. Too wordy?
Well, I’m home. That’s an awkward half-jump picture over there, but you can guess from what’s going on that I’m pretty excited to be back on the beach in California. I wrote to my dad, who picked me up from SFO, a few weeks before coming home: “I don’t care how tired or jet lagged I am; please take me to the beach when you pick me up. Thanks.” It’s only fitting that we drove over to Ocean Beach… San Francisco’s OB, anyway. The surfers were out, the air smelled salty, the wind was cold (cold!) and the sand was… sandy. There’s something about the rhythm, sounds and smells of the beach that resonate in my soul, and I don’t care if it sounds cheesy: being there I felt fully alive again.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t feel alive in Thailand. Thailand awoke parts of my heart and my soul that I didn’t know existed before. But the beach… the beach is special. The beach is a place where I feel much more connected to myself, to nature, to God. I can’t freakin’ WAIT to get out there and surf again!
In the few conversations I’ve had with people about my time in Thailand, I’ve realized how little I’ve actually told everyone about what I actually did, and what it was like. I might have updated everyone on me (I’m apparently much more narrow-minded than I give myself credit for) but I explained so little about Thailand. This realization struck me as my mom kept interchanging the terms “camp” and “village”, and after being annoyed at her for her ignorance I finally had to admit that I’d never actually explained the difference between a refugee camp and a village, to her or anyone. So, with that, here is part one of all the basic things about Thailand that I failed to write about while I was actually there.
Let’s begin with a basic vocab lesson, in honor of my mommy, to whom I didn’t explain very much to, as it turns out: 
CAMP – refers to the nine refugee camps situated (in Thailand) along the Thai-Burma* border where Burmese refugees flee to escape the various violent atrocities–rape, forced labor, pillaging–being committed by the Burmese army/government (same thing, really).
I visited the Umphium Refugee Camp near the Thai city of Mae Sot twice. There are nearly 40,000 refugees living in the Umphium camp alone. They get basic supplies from the Thai government, but the Thais are not particularly thrilled to be the hosts so many refugees. They accommodate them with as much enthusiasm as we accommodate the common cold: an inevitable existence whose presence they can do little about, except to treat it and hope it goes away eventually. Most of the refugees’ needs are provided for by NGO, “non-government organizations” who, in some semi-coordinated fashion, provide food, clothing, education and basic skills training to the refugees. They give them work, they teach them how to live in a free world, they help them survive. There is always a need for help in the refugee camps. But the camps are not, by any means, tragic places. If you hike up to the top of the camp and look down on the sprawl of bamboo huts and dirt roads the view is far from dismal, the sounds far from sorrowful. What you see is fields of boys playing football and women walking with their arms linked, talking and laughing, men working together in their tobacco shops. What you hear is guitars playing, kids laughing, and intermittent swells of chatter and laughter.
I don’t write this to make it seem like the refugee camps are fun. They aren’t. Someone needs to fix what’s going on in Burma and let these people return home as free people. I guess I write this
to note the resilience and beauty of the Burmese people to make the best of a truly awful situation. They have so little to be thankful for and they’re so joyful. I have so much to be thankful for and I have to make joy a deliberate pursuit.
VILLAGE – a town, basically. There are cities in Southeast Asia, of course, and towns, kind of. But there are also villages. It might be like saying, “There’s the city of San Diego and
the village of Julian, or Del Mar…” roughly, except again, we’d be dealing with bamboo huts and outhouses instead of beachside mansions. Villages are communities of people that exist co-dependently; their entire existence is wrapped up in their location and the handful of families who live, farm and worship with them. A village can be home to one particular people group or several different tribes. One village I know of is home to eight people groups, different tribes from both Thailand and Burma. But they all live peacefully together, depending on each other for basic survival.
Contrary to what my sister might have initially thought, villagers do not wear loin cloths, they do not have animal bones protruding from their noses, and they don’t make human sacrifices. At least the villagers I met. They do all have traditional tribal clothing, which is awesome and I came home with several handmade tribal skirts and bags to show you all, they have their own unique style of preparing foods, and OK, some of them do eat dog. (I don’t think I ever ate dog meat… although I never explicitly asked…) They have some awesome Christmas carols in complex languages I couldn’t even begin to understand and they have a gentleness that I think comes from living such a simplistic life. When you live in complete dependence on the earth and on each other, and on God, you cultivate a certain degree of sympathy/empathy that I think is relatively unknown–either extinct or extremely rare–to us here in the USA. The villagers were my favorite people.
Stay tuned. More to come. 
