EACH DAY BEGAN AT 4:15 A.M. WITH ROOSTERS.
Before the sun was even a promise in the east, every rooster in Nong Kha began screeching, competing to announce the morning. These were the ferocious Thai fighting cocks that strutted around our yard like pimps, keeping their many mangy ladies in line. Curiously, as decked out as these loud dudes were, the hens they lorded over looked positively plucked, like freaky living-dead chickens, bald and ready for Paa’s pot. Maybe they were molting or had feather mites. I never did find out. Whatever the reason, as the cock-a-doodling began each day in earnest, we couldn’t see any of them. Sunrise was more than an hour away.
Once we got used to the raucous pimp chatter, we usually slept until six. Then Logan and Jackson would hit the country roads together and burn up some miles, while Traca and I would either run, meditate, or do a little yoga. However the morning got started, we all reconvened for the first shower of the day around seven. Thais are very clean, and it was expected that we would take at least two daily showers. Actually, it wasn’t just expected, it was requested.
“You wheel tack showa een mawning and in eve-a-ning. Okay?”
We heard this from three separate people the night we arrived. As for the actual showering part, it was a little more involved than hot and cold knobs and a directional showerhead. In the bathroom, there was a large basin of standing water, a plastic bowl, a slightly sloped tile floor, and a hole at the base of the wall for drainage. To wash up, you filled the bowl with water and dumped it on your head until sufficiently wet. Then, you lathered up and repeated step one. The basin was filled with rainwater and it was a little cold, but that was fine. By seven o’clock, it was already eighty-five degrees in the house, on its way to one hundred or more, so a cool dip/dunk was always a good thing.
Breakfast was served at 7:30. We usually had rice, cooked Thai vegetables, eggs, fruit, sometimes meat if Fang wanted to pamper us, and always hot sauce. “If not spicy, it not Thai,” Fang was fond of saying as she served the daily mounds of food. I’m not sure what kind of ogre family she thought we were, but most days we managed to eat only about half the food we were given—even with Logan, the bottomless pit, on our team.
Eight A.M. and off to school. We looked like dorky missionaries, but that was the dress code. For the men: pants, collared shirts tucked in, and shoes, not sandals. For the women: long skirts and high-necked shirts, showing as little skin as possible. Thais are very conservative and modest in all aspects of life, even at the public pool. We went swimming one day to beat the heat, and every Thai swimmer, from the youngest to the oldest, wore knee-length shorts and a T-shirt. One teenage girl even wore sweatpants to splash around in. I’m telling you, Speedo is not getting rich off the Thai market. By comparison, Jackson looked positively naked in her bikini, but she simply could not conceive of a world where you swam in wet clothes. To her credit, she did wrap herself from neck to knee in her sarong as soon as she stepped clear of the water so as to avoid an international scandal.
After a morning assembly in which we sang the Thai anthem to the king and said prayers to the Buddha, classes started at 8:40 A.M. Classes were fifty minutes long and we taught three of them spread out over the day. Class sizes ranged from six to twenty-six in grades one through twelve. We saw every class at least once over the course of a week. As for the actual job, I can tell you this: Teaching English without a translator to a group of kids who really don’t speak English is not as easy as I thought it would be. For some reason—and this is probably because of my complete lack of experience—I thought we’d show up, start talking, act words out, clown around a bit, and somehow, magically, we’d have everyone reciting Shakespeare in no time. But this was not how it shook down. What we discovered was that these kids knew a lot of words, every obscure thing you might find on a flash card, like unicorn, X-ray, yo-yo, and zebra. But they did not have a single clue about how to put a sentence together or ask a simple question. They were also soft-spoken and shy, especially some of the girls, so conversation was often an exercise in embarrassment. And some of the boys were simply not trying. After all, if you were going to be a rice farmer like your father’s father’s father’s father, why did you need to know what color some falong’s socks were? In English?
In all honesty, there were days when we felt completely unqualified to pose as teachers, finding the students struggling with the most basic concepts and feeling as if fifty minutes were an endless chasm to cross. Other days, we found our stride, taught a lesson that seemed to work, saw real learning going on, and the time flew. As I’m sure every real teacher knows, it was fun to see the children getting excited in class. One student walked out of one of our best classes with a huge smile on his face. He was bursting at the seams to say something, and he paused in front of Jackson and me to express his feelings.
“I … am … happy!” he said.
I was thinking the same thing.
When school ended, around two o’clock, the rest of the day was ours. We walked home, bought a cold drink on the way, usually took shower / dunk bath #2, and then set out to explore. The kids liked to hit the town and play soccer with local friends, or ride the house moped up and down the main street, or wrestle with the gaggle of young schoolkids who stalked their every move. Traca started teaching yoga to a small but passionate group of local women. Or she and I would practice our Thai together or walk through the gorgeous, endless rice fields, down unmarked roads, through one village and then another. Many times, we heard the ubiquitous “falong falong” from all sides, but even that was changing. In our village, as we took a stroll one afternoon, we noticed the greetings were different. “Tee-cha!” we heard. Or better still: “Hello, Jawn. Hello, Tray-sa.” Nearly every home in Nong Kha had a child we were teaching, and as we walked by, parents came out, smiling, waving. Which, I must say, felt pretty good.
Dinner was served at seven o’clock. More delicious Thai food. Then another shower before bed. Unless there was some special event, a visiting guest to dine with, or a trip to town planned, we were almost always in bed before nine. And with good reason.
Each day began at 4:15 A.M. with roosters.