Swearing In

As of Friday I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer! Training is over and I can’t be happier. I’ve had enough of sitting around in conference rooms for eight hours a day having people talk to me. The last few weeks have been interesting and I think for the most part it is due to the fact that I have gotten some insight from current volunteers. Group 118 volunteers were amazed that our hub site in Sa Kaeo didn’t have air conditioning and that we actually had so few hub days. Apparently we endured one of the harshest training sites of the past few years. It has been rumored that Sa Kaeo was one of the last picks and that we only ended up there because several of the other sites had recently flooded and wouldn’t have been prepared for our arrival. To make things worse a lot of the residents of Sa Kaeo spoke Isan, which is the language they speak in northeastern Thailand and is pretty much unintelligible with Central Thai. I think many of us picked up some accents not congruent with the sites we will be working in. Oh well, it’s just another brick in the road.

We traveled to Bangkok last Sunday and spent the week doing some final training sessions and preparing for our momentous swearing in ceremony. Of course we took advantage of the week in Bangkok to explore the city. It is an enormous modern city planned in haste and consequently suffers from all the maladies of such. It is spread out across a large area and has horrible traffic. It is consistently in the high 90s and often in the 100s. It has ornate Buddhist temples, gleaming high rises, polluted rivers, steamy over-crowded markets, and did I mention the traffic. Everything costs about five times as much in Bangkok as in Sa Kaeo and a PCV’s salary surely isn’t sufficient. I suppose that is why no one is placed there. It is an Asian center for shopping and the malls are more extravagant and abundant than any other place I have ever visited. Gucci, Ferrari, and Rolex are mainstays in the malls while a few blocks away you can find the cheaply made similarly priced goods in the street markets. Pirating is ubiquitous. I could spend pages on what Bangkok is like and only scratch the surface, so I will let you fulfill your need to hear about it by purchasing one of the thousands of travel books written on this interesting locale.

Our main reason for being in Bangkok was our swearing in and working with our counterparts to come to a mutual understanding of the goals of the PC, ourselves, and our counterparts. I think that went very well in my situation. My SAO is very realistic and understands that it will be quite some time before I can actually begin to develop and implement projects within the community. My six month plan called for a lot of trips to the villages I will be working with, a lot of language study, and a lot of getting to know the culture and the people. When we finished figuring that out it was down to business. We had to get the protocol for meeting the Princess.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, the royal family is kind of a big deal in Thailand. In fact it is more than a big deal. I don’t think words can describe how reverent the Thai people are towards their king and his family. Before leaving Sa Kaeo we all received our bright yellow, shiny, shirts. A suit was what we were originally told to bring, but I think with a little persuasion from the Thai staff we were required to be uniform in order to pay respects to the Princess.

In the week leading up to the swearing in ceremony we had more sessions about various PC things but we also had the opportunity to discuss with our counterparts our roles and expectations for the next two years. My counterparts are really great and I think they have just the right expectations for me for the next six months to a year. I am going to study Thai and get to know the communities that are represented by the SAO. I think any higher expectation wouldn’t reflect the reality of being a PC volunteer.

The swearing in ceremony was a pretty elaborate deal and it went really well. We were all dressed in our shiny yellow and actually looked not too bad. We went through all of the protocol and although it was supposed to be about our swearing in it was by far more about the pomp and circumstance. We got pictures with the Princess and I was about one foot away. It is hard for me being an American to be awed by a royal person because of our lack of having that institution and for the fact that to me a human is a human and a privileged birth should not change that status. It will be neat to have the picture anyway! After the ceremony was over I ran in to one of the volunteers from group 117 that I knew. He asked me if I wanted to be interviewed by a PC Washington staff about my training experience. During the interview the lady running the interview found out I was a Masters International student and told me that she was doing a video for that program. She asked me if she could film me on the streets of Bangkok for the film. It turned out to be a pretty funny thing. First of all, the last place you are going to find a PC volunteer in Thailand is Bangkok. Secondly I was wearing dress shoes and a bright yellow shirt and finally I was getting shot in front of a Gucci store. I can’t wait to see that on video! After we got done I pretty much said my goodbyes to everyone and went out to celebrate with some of the 117 and 118 volunteers because I was staying the night that night.

The following day I had a doctor’s appointment so I got to stay one more night in Bangkok while most everyone else left for their sites with their counterparts. I went to the hospital with one of my fellow volunteers who had been to the hospital previously. I didn’t think about looking at my directions and figured I was going to the same hospital everyone else was going to. Well that was a mistake. I arrived at the hospital a few minutes early, went to check in, and was politely told that this wasn’t the hospital I was supposed to be at. It had taken us 1.5 hours to get from our hotel to that hospital and I figured I would miss my appointment. I jumped into a taxi and made it just in time. The hospitals in Bangkok are amazing. More like shopping malls and luxury hotels than hospitals. It was very efficient and the doctor spoke perfect English and was very knowledgeable. They take your picture and issue you an ID on the spot. It was far nicer than any hospital I have ever been to in the States. Ah the joys of full government health coverage where we are provided top notch services and don’t have to pay a dime! I was in and out in less than an hour.

After the hospital I talked to a couple of my friends that were still in town and we decided to meet up for one last Western meal at the Siam Paragon. I was a lot closer and got there some time earlier. I was wandering around when I ran into two volunteers from group 118 that I had met early that week. Danai and Jay took a lot longer than expected (because of traffic) so I decided to have sushi with Prasad and Brian. I know sushi isn’t quite western, but it was pretty delicious. It was also great to sit there with those guys and get the low down on what it was really like being a volunteer in Thailand. They kept on stressing that I would have tons and tons of time to occupy. At one point we started talking about doing laundry and I told them that while I was in Sa Kaeo doing laundry was the low point of my week. They agreed with me that laundry wasn’t that fun, but they confessed that as the months went by they started looking forward to doing laundry because it took up time. They basically told me that any activity that could take up time was welcomed. If anyone wants to send me books I think that is a very good hint that I will be needing them even more than I had originally thought. When Danai and Jay finally showed up I met them at the Outback Steakhouse along with Areerat and had a delicious iced tea with them. We sat around quite some time, walked around several malls trying to set up some wireless internet to no avail, watched a concert, and then said our good-byes. I got Danai to take me to the train station and I took the over-night train to Chiang Mai (much more comfortable than the over-night bus).

Right now I am sitting at my counterpart’s (balat) house in a town outside of Chiang Mai. He came and picked me up at the train station early this morning and I have had pretty much a whole day to relax. It was exactly what I needed. I think I had been running off of no more than 2-3 hours of sleep every night for the past week. Tomorrow we are off to my site. It will be the unofficial start to my Peace Corps Service. More crazy experiences will be soon to come!

I hope everyone finds themselves well and enjoying life as much as I am!