Two months in Thailand

I’ll be spending the next 2 years living and working in Northeast Thailand! I’ll be living in a small village in the province of Nong Bua Lamphu, fairly close to Laos (and about an 8 hour bus trip from Bangkok).  My site visit proved to be just another one of the awkward, confusing, scary and exciting moments that seem to be a part of everyday life now.  I met a lot of people, ate a lot of food, and didn’t understand a good portion of what people were trying to say to me in Thai (the fact that I understand anything still makes me incredibly happy on a daily basis…usually a very short lived victory until I’m lost again).  The weather was much cooler, which was awesome (70 degrees instead of 100 degrees) and definitely something I think I’ll appreciate during the ‘winter’ months.  Northeastern Thailand has its own dialect, so in addition to continuing to learn central Thai I get to start learning the northeastern dialect (which is apparently also spoken in Laos, so if/when I make trips across the border I’ll have no trouble communicating…hopefully).  The trip to and from site was an adventure in itself in some respects, especially considering it was the first time I’ve really traveled by myself in a foreign country.  I had a lot of new experiences along with a lot of unanswered questions (why is the music on Thai busses so obnoxiously loud? Why, on an 8 hour bus trip, did my bus stop about 20 times? Why do they feed me dinner as soon as I get on the bus? Why is the bus always so cold? What am I supposed to do when I get to the bus station in Bangkok at 4am?).  I have no doubt that the next couple years will be two of the most challenging (and hopefully most amazing) of my life.  I also hope to take full advantage of my vacation days and have some pretty amazing trips all over Thailand. 

I’ve started to feel at home here in our training villages and was surprised at how great it felt to come ‘home’ after our site visit.  I missed the place we’ve called home for the past 8 weeks and it was great to come back to something familiar (including host families that were anxious to hear about our visits and happy to have us ‘home’).  I distinctly remember my first night with my host family….it’s amazing how helpless you can feel when you can’t communicate verbally, despite the fact that there’s a million things to say…it’s also amazing how much you can communicate with someone without either one of you having a language in common.  I’m getting sad to leave after spending only 8 weeks here in this village with these people.  I’ve gotten into such a routine during training and I think the site visit served as another realization of just what I’m doing here – getting ready to live on my own in rural Thailand and try to figure out something amazing to do to benefit a community and people that I know next to nothing about. 

Before I left for the Peace Corps I remember reading so much about how the people that will be going through this with me are the people that will become like family.  In the first few weeks of training I wondered how I was ever going to find my place in this ‘family’, and also thinking that I can just do it on my own if all else fails.  Now we’re getting ready to go our separate ways in just a few weeks, and I’m amazed that the people who traveled here to Thailand with me about 2 months ago, that were all strangers, are now the people I rely on to discuss the fear and excitement of leaving for our sites and dealing with the dependable ups and downs of this whole experience.  I couldn’t imagine making so many new friends in such a short amount of time, and now I can’t imagine what I’ll do without these people that I’ve seen almost everyday since we arrived in Thailand.  I’ve also realized that without them I’m not sure I could get through this whole experience on my own.  It’s nice having family and friends back home that I can talk to who know me better than anyone, but it’s also incredibly comforting to have a new group of people that I can rely on that are going through many of the same crazy experiences and emotional traumas that seem inevitable.  In the next two weeks I’ll turn 29 years old and officially be sworn-in as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I don’t really care much about getting older or the fact that I’ll soon be in the final countdown to being 30 (what!?), but I can’t imagine a better way to spend the last year of my 20’s.