Mock Unit. Real Life.

I always have trouble trying to decide what to blog. I realize that I still need to clarify how the whole program actually works but at the same time, we're exposed to so many different experiences that I feel I have to record those before the initial emotions fade away...
So I'll have to write about the program structure later - that's less meaningful and interesting than this. 


It's interesting that I go to school in one of the most HIV/AIDS prevalent cities in the US and yet, I am most consciously aware of the issue when I'm an ocean away in a country that suffers from the same disease. We started a "mock unit" on HIV/AIDS and this involved visiting a hospital to meet with volunteers of TNP+ - Thai Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS. I don't think I've ever consciously been in a room with so many HIV/AIDS victims who regularly talk about their personal struggles, their roles in a greater organization and their efforts in communities and governments.

Their struggle is a unique one, considering the national culture and traditions that surround and challenge them. Since it's such taboo to talk about sex and drug use, it's just as difficult for people to talk about preventing HIV/AIDS or dealing with it. The TNP+ volunteers all went through some sort of discrimination, isolation, depression, judgment or loneliness because their community or hospitals were uneducated about the disease. It's terrible to hear how often these victims have considered suicide before finding support in TNP+.
But it isn't the exchange with TNP+ workers I want to blog about...

It was the home of a villager with HIV/AIDS that really opened my eyes.
Different groups visited different individuals and my group visited an older woman - her name was Meh (mother) Tong Sai. She was probably a little older than my own mother - she looked fragile, tired and her cheekbones were sunk in as a side effect of the medication she was taking.
She told us she had just gotten back from a religious ceremony and she was a bit worn out.
That's quite a shock considering that 15 years ago, her community didn't allow her to attend religious ceremonies because she had HIV.
Her community also wouldn't let her make food. She had to wash dishes with gloves because she had HIV.
Her community condemned her because she had HIV but her husband and children didn't.
Her community never stopped by her home to visit her when she was too sick to work and laid in her dark room alone because she had HIV.
Her community wouldn't buy food from her because she had HIV so she had to travel to other markets where they would't recognize her and she could tell observant strangers she just had diabetes.

She had no idea until her fourth and last child was born with a cleft lip and the doctors had her tested. Once her village found out, the discrimination was instantaneous. She quietly cried as she told us her children were bullied, abused and harassed in school. She didn't care that her alcoholic husband gave her nothing from the money he made, she didn't care that the house was still spinning while she told us her story, she didn't care that she could die tomorrow - all she cared was that she would live for her children. She is staying in her marriage and she is still struggling to travel and sell her goods at different markets for her kids - so that they'd grow up and find happiness. Without TNP+, she wouldn't have had the strong medical and moral support she needed to get her though this. Her older children still pay the tuition for their younger siblings and they often send money back to her - they have been her strongest lifeline these 15 years.

There's nothing we could really say for a story like this and at some point, I didn't know if I wanted to cry out of pure sadness, empathy or outrage. Ignorance couldn't possibly be bliss - not if it meant an entire community would ostracize an innocent woman and her children. I think a lot of us just felt helpless in that situation - how could we show empathy or support? We couldn't do anything but tell her how much we admired her for her strength and wished her and her children the best.
In response, she told us that she wanted to be an example for the younger HIV/AIDS victims - to show them how to survive.
how your heart will survive.

I took away from that experience a humbling lesson.
Even as privileged Americans, there was nothing we could ever offer her, but we had everything to learn from such a life - you could really see such solid strength and calm hope in her fragile body and her silent tears. An incurable disease, an entire community of ignorance and discrimination and a neglectful husband couldn't break her down - not when she had her children to love.
I don't think I would've been so lucky to have such an experience had I learned about HIV/AIDS in DC. To be surrounded by what we would classify as poverty and yet, be blind to all of that in comparison to this woman of unshakable faith and strength...
this must be how you really live and learn.

There's much more about HIV/AIDS I learned that day that I could write shamefully long blog entries about but I'll save that for a rainy day...For now, this was what mattered.

Cauc[Asian] Comparisons: A Korean-American's Take on Thai Culture

This was a short submission I wrote for the newsletter we put together. A compilation of our perspectives and observations will be put together into a pdf and sent to family and CIEE members. 
This was my chosen topic.

I’ll always remember our first exposures to American culture in Thailand. The group would excitedly point out the first McDonald’s and KFC or marvel at the stores that screamed Abercrombie & Fitch or Express in every way but the name. But no one will remember as well as I do when we see traditional Korean clothing (hanboks) sold at the night markets or hear Korean music playing in coffee shops and electronic stores. The prevalence of Korean entertainment and culture is much more extensive than I realized. Almost everyone I meet has asked me where I’m from though I plainly speak English and I have yet to meet a Thai unfamiliar with at least one Korean word or a popular Korean music group.

It isn’t something I can explain but it is something I can feel and describe everyday.  I never expected my Korean-American upbringing to present itself as an advantage in so many ways. I’m not gawked at as often as my friend with blond hair and blue eyes. I order spicy food without fear and eat strange cuts of meat at homestays without questioning. Being a smaller, shorter Korean-American, I shop much more comfortably in Thai boutiques and for the first time in a long time, I don’t struggle to find shoes to fit my 5 ½ size feet. I’ve assimilated to the new culture relatively easily compared to my white American friends as well. Whereas the Caucasian-Americans in my class see a cultural contradiction, I see its similarities to the Korean culture I’ve grown up around. The polite greeting wai comes more naturally to me when I greet elders because my Korean heritage intrinsically has me bowing in respect.  Additionally, learning Thai isn’t as difficult when my Korean speaking, reading, and writing abilities helps me accurately pronounce Thai phonetics and numbers.

All the same, being Asian in a Southeast Asian country will still have its limitations because I am also an American, a farang. It’s as if the cultural connection is crystal clear one moment and fuzzy the next. I’m not used to eating rice with my hands and the family structure within villages still confuses me. My roommate watches more Korean dramas than I do and I’ve yet to find a Protestant church to attend on Sundays. I’ve noticed that the Thai’s traditional perception of an American has yet to include an Asian-American who found most of her heritage growing up in small Korean communities in small American towns and not the mother country itself. Thais I meet find it a little difficult to understand that I’m not completely integrated with the Asian culture I was born into. At the same time, I find myself wondering whether I’d understand more or less if I had been raised in Korea my whole life. But I realize that the differences between Korean and Thai culture can be just as gaping as that between American and Thai culture. It’s simply that the little things I understand come to me naturally and I’m grateful that I have a small cultural foundation to build my new experiences upon.

Hence, I count myself as lucky. Thailand, I hear you loud and clear. 

A Day in Comparison

A Typical Day in Khon Kaen University
With Thai class at 9 am, I get up around 8 to get ready and meet my friends for breakfast around 8:40am. My shower is warm enough to soothe me but cool enough to wake me up because there's a little water heater attached to the bathroom wall but there isn't any stall. It's just a bathroom sink, toilet, towel rack and a showerhead with a drain on the tiled floor. I change, get ready, walk down from the third floor and meet my friends in front of the apartment located 500 feet away from the CIEE office and classrooms. Within a 500 feet range of that CIEE office, there are stationary shops, multiple food and fruit vendors, a 7-11 (they're like Starbucks. EVERYWHERE), and a "cafeteria" that offers a variety of food stalls. A lot of stores and stalls aren't open yet and we still have yet to figure out what opening and closing hours are for Thai workers. Some of us get cut pineapple pieces or crunchy guava with cold sweetened coffee but I get these fried dough balls covered in sesame seeds and potato inside from a friendly vendor who waits outside the 7-11. Sometimes I'll get one little bag of sticky rice and three sticks of chicken skewers that were grilled earlier this morning. In total, it costs about 15 baht for breakfast - half a dollar.


Three hours of Thai includes review, new vocabulary, repetition and basic writing/reading skills. Sometimes we'll play games at the start of class and the ajaans will bring us bread from the bakery as prizes to share with each other. They teach using a sort of Rosetta-Stone method and we aren't allowed to speak English or take any notes while we're learning.


Then I'll go out to eat lunch with a couple of friends. We've found a noodle place to put on our top list of favorite and easiest places to eat. Since a lot of us have dietary restrictions or preferences, we've learned that ordering vegetarian by saying "jai" (like the letter J) can be relatively complications-free. Ordering at new restaurants is hard since we can't yet read and understand so we look for the pad thai and smoothie stalls in the cafeteria.


Next, we'll have another Program Facilitator Activity or a session for ROO (Resources for Ongoing Orientation). That usually means we'll talk about being global citizens, meditation, personalities types and traits or globalization. This can go on for 3 hours while we brainstorm, reflect, draw our reflections or thoughts and hen share our caveman-like illustrations. It's like elementary school all over again! But deep. Very deep.


Afterwards, we've got free time so we'll find another place to eat dinner and do the reading for the next day. We haven't had a lot of assignments yet since we have yet to go into our "units" that last about 2 weeks. Laundry in the apartments is free so we'll wash our clothes or we'll walk and shop around one of the adorable-looking boutiques that offer dresses for less than $10. Somehow, the last 5 or 6 hours of the day is spent just running errands, buying more food/clothes and...just doing nothing.
Oh, and it rains almost everyday for at least 2 hours. It's truly monsoon season.


A Day in the Railroad Community
I'll wake up around 7am but my host mother and my little host sister has already been up since at least 6am. She's dressed in her school uniform and ready to go to school. I wake up and my friend Alex is living with another family nearby so we eat breakfast together - usually some sort of chicken, egg or pork dishes with rice. Once we're ready to go, my little host sister Ehm will hold my hand to follow the rest of the CIEE students to the elementary school about 5 blocks away. The dirt roads leading to the school are surrounded with huge puddles because of the rain from the night before. For two of the three days we were there, we have our own Thai class to attend, but one day the CIEE students and I attended a fun activity session held for the children and they taught us cute dances sung in English and Thai. One was a fruit dance including bananas, oranges, papayas, and apples. We drew pictures together and played animal charades that the teachers organized for us. When the kids aren't guessing during charades, they're trying to hold our hands, talk to us in English and play clapping games. Later on, we taught them camp songs nostalgically reminding me of our childhood like the baby shark song and the go bananas song. We eat lunch with the children and it's so amusing that the children won't let us walk around without making sure our hands are full with theirs.


Then, there's another program facilitator activity - something that'll help us learn about meditation or about our own personality styles, of course. So, for a moment, all the CIEE students are together but after a while, we're going back to our own host families with one or two other classmates. Alex has a little host brother who named himself Champ because that's what he wants to be in life. He will write words he learned in English while Ehm will draw her mom and a house and trees with the notebook and pens I bought for her as a gift. I'll do readings but I'm mostly distracted by Ehm and her hand games or her little two-year-old brother we call monkey (ling) who crawls and hangs around the couches in the house. The headman's son also lives very close to us and he'll watch the children play while he slowly puts some English sentences together and have a conversation with us. We learned that he took two years of English a while back so it helps a little. Champ and Ehm's mom have prepared dinner for us so the children, Alex and I eat but the adults wait til we're done to eat later - we're treated so special as guests in the families. After dinner, I tried to help my host mother make chicken skewers that she would sell at school/university the next day but I failed terribly at it. A for effort though. At night, I shower for the first time without electricity in the bathroom because there is no lightbulb in the small bathroom that only consists of a squat toilet and a big bucket of cold, unheated water. It's a little hard to see and I'm afraid of getting bit by a mosquito but the shower feels really good after a hot, humid day. My host mother lets me sleep in another part of the living room sectioned off by some cabinets. There are some blankets and a pillow on the floor surrounded by a mosquito net and a little fan. They give me these small luxuries while the mother, Ehm and her monkey brother sleep in another room under a different mosquito net.
I love mosquito nets. They don't exactly prevent ant bites though. I'll wake up in the middle of the night because I've itched myself awake and I try to fall asleep again with some anti-itch medicine. I'll hear the train pass by at least 5 times throughout the day and it's nice to hear it passing through the night. I'll fall asleep to the train until the sound of roosters crowing wakes me up again in the morning.
Time flies.

my little host sister, Ehm <3

Intro to Thai Culture

Thai Culture 101:

1. Wai-ing is the traditional way to greet others. For someone who is older than you, you bring both hands together and bend your head down to touch your nose to your thumbs. But it doesn't always go for street vendors or other careers considered "lowly".

2. Pointing your feet towards an elder is considered to be very rude so you sit with your feet tucked behind you.

3. It is customary to eat kao-niao (sticky rice) by rolling it in your hands and forming it into a ball.

4. Thai people don't really eat beef. Most of their dishes are egg, chicken or pork.

5. Students who went in the past said I shouldn't bring jeans or nice clothes but it's ironic because Thais place a lot of importance on physical appearances.

6. Then again, it is disrespectful to wear clothing showing the shoulders or the knees.

7. The smile is a natural part of life. :)

8. You don't use your left hand for much. It is usually the hand that wipes the butt after using the squat toilets D:

9. Pointing or putting your hands in your pockets is considered rude.

10. There is no tipping in restaurants or cover charges in clubs :)