Going home

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been away from my site and spending time in central Thailand for trainings and a little vacation time.  We had a 10 day Reconnect training where they brought all the volunteers together again to share experiences, reflect on the first few months on our own and think about the rest of our service.  All in all it was a weird couple weeks (and maybe that’s just me).  It was great to see friends again and hear about what other volunteers are doing at their sites, and to realize that a lot of us are facing similar challenges, frustrations, joys, and accomplishments.  We've been told many times that PC service has a lot of ups and downs, and getting everyone back together for 10 days after 3 months apart can be overwhelming in a lot of ways.  We’re able to see our own feelings about our sites and work thus far reflected back from our fellow volunteers, and it can be a challenge to take everyone’s experiences and stories and compare them to our own (of course you can’t really compare one volunteer’s service to another, but it's hard not to compare sometimes).  It can also be validating, knowing that we’re doing well and moving forward, despite our limited language skills and other obstacles.  Despite all the commonalities, we all live at different sites with different people we’re all at different points with regard to accomplishments and goals.  Some have thrived and are already working on some amazing projects with people in the community; some are struggling to find where they belong; some have no idea what they’ll really be doing for the next 2 years.  Some people feel great and optimistic about the next 2 years while others aren’t sure whether or not they’ll still be here in six months.  I’m somewhere in the middle of all of these, and depending on the day you ask, my answer might be entirely different.  One day I think I’m on the way to doing something amazing and the next day I contemplate going home (sometimes this all happens multiple times in one day).  I don’t actually want to go home yet and I’m determined to succeed here, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t crossed my mind once or twice (especially when my pizza/burger/cheese/American food cravings are particularly incessant).  It’s a weird dynamic when you put all these people together in one hotel for over a week, and as happy as we were to see each other, I think we were just as happy to move on and get back to site.  

After wrapping up the training I went to visit my first host family that I stayed with during PST and my first 10 weeks in Thailand.  It was strange how much it felt like going home and how comfortable and nostalgic it was to be back where it all started.  My host mom made my favorite Thai foods and I quickly realized that I’ve come to compare everything I eat here to her cooking (I also realize how spoiled I was with good food in the beginning).  It was nice to be able to understand so much more than I ever could during training, and to be able to share my experiences and photos from the last few months at site.  They even spoiled me and set up a bed for me in the only room in the house with a/c (by bed I mean a wooden bench with a thin mat on it). 

I spent some time in Bangkok before and after our training, and while it was great to be back in a city with all of the things, it’s amazing how quickly my monthly volunteer allowance can be spent on so many of them.  I was also able to spend a couple days in Kaeng Krachan National Park, the largest national park in Thailand in the Petchaburi province a few hours southwest of Bangkok.  I swam in a waterfall (for the first time ever) and saw a wild elephant, two things I've wanted to do since I got here.  It was beautiful and I always love exploring new places.  Now I’m finally back at site, trying to readjust and get started on the list of goals I created during the past few weeks.  It’s always an adjustment coming back to site after being gone, because usually when you’re gone it means you’re speaking English with other Americans and blowing off steam in ways that you can’t/don’t do at site.  After 3 weeks away it takes a little time to get used to being alone again and speaking more Thai than English and hearing the local dialect instead of the recognizable central Thai that I actually felt comfortable hearing for the last 3 weeks.  It’s weird to think that our group of volunteers won’t be together again until a year into our service (8-9 months from now).  It’s also weird to think about the fact that I’ve been in Thailand for 6 months now, considering I’ve never lived out of the country and the longest I’ve been abroad before now is about 2 weeks.  Life is just weird in general, but it’s become the new normal.  The first thing my host mom said to me when I got home was that I had gotten pretty fat while I was gone and obviously I had not been exercising.  Then she told me that she missed me and asked what I wanted to eat, and then told me twice more how fat I am now.  It’s good to be home.

A few pictures from our trip to Kaeng Krachan National Park...