Houston, We Have a Problem

My poor, poor Macbook. For some reason or another, it won’t turn on. I have charged it, but the light on the plug is switching between red and green. Also, only three of the five indicator lights on the battery light up. So I’m not sure what is wrong with it; all I know is that it won’t turn on. We took a trip this week to the city and stopped at a computer store, but they didn’t have any experience with Apple products, so no luck there. Lam says there is an Apple store in a city about two hours away and that we will eventually get there. Alas, the blogs have hit a roadblock. Luckily, this has been a pretty uneventful week. Unlucky, however, I had two masterpieces on my computer that were ready to post. Unfortunately, they are now stuck in Apple purgatory. They will be posted though, as soon as my computer is fixed.

As for this week, it has been hot! Definitely the hottest since we have been here. The
Thai people can handle it a lot better than we can; this is just the beginning of their hot season. Still, most try to stay in the shade as much as possible and we follow suit. We have a fan in our room, so on Tuesday night we were playing cards in front of it when the teachers from the preschool where we teach showed up. They were there to take us to their village for dinner and a “meeting”. Once there, we found out that all the villages in our region have three nights in February when the annual festival is held. Tonight was the night for the village of our teachers. We had no clue they were coming, but we have learned to roll with the punches here. When we arrived, all the teachers from our school were there; about 8 total. They are already an extremely energetic bunch, and were even more so tonight. Dinner was served immediately, and was one of our favorites: fish lettuce wraps. They set out the fish, noodles, various sauces, veggies, and peanuts in the normal family style. Then it’s basically a free for all. It is a nice change from all of the soups and stews we normally eat. They even had pop! Throughout the dinner, many of the festival-goers were taking their turn at the karaoke machine on the porch. Of course they forced us to karaoke for them, “A Hard Day’s Night” will never be the same for us, or them for that matter. The only male teacher at our school then took over the mic and Stephanie, the teachers, and I proceeded to act as his backup dancers. It was a night full of laughs, and allowed us to get much closer to the teachers at our school.

After teaching on Wednesday, we returned to Plaboo to find that a class from a school about 2 hours away had come to our school to learn about the tye-dye group. The women in this group make clothes from local cotton and sell them to sustain themselves through the off season from farming. Since we haven’t gotten a chance to see this process for ourselves, we joined in on the field trip. We arrived at the workshop, which is about as big as a small classroom. P’Pen, one of our favorite villagers who plays cards with us constantly, greeted us first. Everyone got a swatch of the cotton, which feels a lot like linen. They then showed us the intricate way they fold the material, anchor it with sticks, and then tie wraps around it to create the patterns. After the folding and tying, we headed to the dye. There were three large cauldrons filled with red, green, and black dye. All the dyes come from natural materials, for example the green is created from the bark of mango trees. We dumped our creations in the boiling pots and waited. When they were done and unfolded, we were able to see the designs. The designs are much more detailed than standard American tye-dye. The women make pants, shirts, scarves, bags, sheets, and blankets out of the dyed material. Once we can incorporate Pay-Pal onto the website, they will be available for purchase in the U.S. It’s a really neat process and I hope to try it out myself when I return home.

Thursday, we accompanied Lam and Om to Mahasarakham to run some errands. We stopped at a restaurant that served food from the organic vegetable garden on site. It was very tasty, but didn’t sit too well with me. After lunch, we traveled to the village where the cotton is bought for the tye-dye group and it was here I started to feel really bad. We still had one more stop, Big C, the Thai equivalent of Walmart. On the way there we listened to Lam’s American CD from the nineties. So there I was in the pickup truck, listening to 98 degrees and Mariah Carey, on my way to Thai-mart, feeling like complete crap. Needless to say, it wasn’t my best day here.

Friday was spent preparing for the leadership camp coming this weekend to the Farmer Community School, where we live. It is for high school kids and will run Saturday through Sunday. We learned the contents of the camp and helped prepare the games and other activities. We also learned that we would be among the 30 participants in the camp, which should be interesting considering we don’t speak the language. That night, Sao, the Plaboo high-schooler who I have become especially close with, came over and had a ton of English homework she needed help with. We spent the night completing sentences and performing reading comprehension. I felt like I was studying for the SAT again. She loves when she finally understands the material, so it’s really fun to work with her.

The camp began early Saturday morning with all the kids arriving and excitedly signing in. All the girls from the camp will be sleeping in the loft with us, so I prepared myself for giggles and gossip. The camp was fun, confusing, long, and effective. We played a lot of team building games, some of which I will definitely be bringing home and converting to drinking games. Most of the time, we had to watch a round before we got what was going on and then we jumped in. All the participants enjoyed a lot of laughter at our expense, mostly because we had no idea what we were doing for the majority of the day. At night, they had a very moving activity with candles about harnessing energy within and focusing on yourself so that you can best help those around you. The kids seemed to really respond to the camp, and were very active participants both days. The camp will continue this coming weekend with the second half. Once again, Lam displays yet another thing she has successfully implemented in this community. She is most definitely a Wonderwoman. 

Update: It seems my computer is back in action!! I tried an SMC reset (whatever that means, I found it online). Anyways, it worked!! Let the blogging continue! As soon as my computer recharges, the blogs stuck inside will be posted. Happy Birthday to me.