Busy, Me?

I haven’t written on my blog for quite some time and I can actually say it is because I have been somewhat busy (I am saying this without a smirk on my face!). For the past few weeks I have been at site for a week and then away at meetings for a week. I am actually getting sick of all the traveling mainly because it takes forever to get to any destination from my hilltop perch. This excessively long duration of travel is due to the fact that Northern Thailand is very mountainous and the roads snake through jungles, canyons, and peaks. It is very scenic, but after traveling the same road on a bi-weekly basis it gets somewhat hard to enjoy. Anyway, the following is what my life has consisted of in the last month.

My journeys began with a trip to Bangkok for a Community Enterprise Committee (CEC) meeting. CEC works on facilitating PCV’s work with small business generation and income generation development as well as helping to build the capacity of the interested members of the PCV’s community. I have decided that I want to be part of the committee because many projects that PC Thailand volunteers work with deal with small business and income generation. The goals are ambitious but realistic and in the end I have lots of time on my hands. Right now there are three of us from group 119 that will be taking over the committee once the members from group 118 leave in about six months.

I returned to site for about two weeks and I was once again on the go. I left my mountain for the wedding of one of the volunteers from my group. John is in his 50’s and has found his true love here in Thailand. Although it is not common, given his age and determination he was able to get married in the city of Pitsanulok on September 9. The wedding was an interesting occasion where we got to view the traditional Thai customs interspersed with the random farang gesture. After the wedding was over I rode with several other volunteers to Bangkok in order to attend a Project Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting. The meeting was scheduled for the whole week and it was promised that the outcome would “revolutionize” Peace Corps Thailand volunteer training. Mr. Stephen Moles was sent from Washington to conduct the training on “Training Evaluation and Design.” The outcome was to create more realistic and measurable competencies that should be achieved during Pre-Service Training and for each competency write new learning objectives. It was a fairly complex process but the results were excellent. The end result will be that volunteers will have a clearer idea of what is expected from them during the training period and the results will be measurable, which is something highly important when seeking funding from the government.

After the training was finished I was once again on the train back to my mountain villa. On the train I met a Chinese guy who had chosen the English name Mark. Mark spoke impeccable English to the extant that when I first started to talking to him I assumed he was an American. We talked for quite some time and by the time we arrived in Chiang Mai he had decided that he wanted to come visit my village. He stayed in Chiang Mai for a few days and then he took a bus up to the town of Pai which is the closest city to my village. I went to Pai to meet him because it is pretty difficult to find where and when the pickup truck leaves for my village. While we were waiting for the pickup to leave we ran into a French couple that Mark had met in Chiang Mai. After a short discussion Cloe and Regis had asked if it were possible that they could visit my village as well. The more the merrier so I invited them up. Mark came up with me that day and we spent the next day checking out the other villages, attending a small Christian mass, and eating dinner with my neighbors. The following day, before Cloe and Regis’s arrival Mark and I toiled all day to construct a table for my house. Cloe and Regis arrived in the afternoon and I then had a full house. It was fun to host people and they really enjoyed their stay. Mark promised me that he would be up to visit the following year.

Along with two people from my tambon, Mark, Cloe, Regis, and I boarded the pickup for Pai. The two members from my tambon, See La and Mae Tome, were accompanying me to a CEC conference in Pitsanulok and my new found friends would continue their journeys in Thailand. We left my site at 7:00 a.m. and See La, Mae Tome, and I arrived in Pitsanulok 13 hours latter. What a ride! Mae Tome is the leader of a women’s group that sews and also does a little baking while See La is starting a farm to raise animals in order to sell the meat in the tambon. The CEC conference went over many business skills including accounting, the cooperative lifecycle, marketing, and Successful Case Replication among others. It was also a chance for them to display their goods and network with other participants at the conference. Around 10 volunteers and 20 counterparts were present and I think it was a big success. I will be working with Mae Tome to create unique packaging for their weavings as well as look to expand the market for the products. I will also help See La create packaging for his product and create an accounting scheme.

While at the conference I was chatting with Erica who is a volunteer from group 118. She told me that she was taking some vacation to go to Pai and wondered if I was heading back that way. Of course I was so we ended up hanging out in Pai for a night. The allures of my site caught the imagination of yet another person and soon Erica and I were on the pickup up to my site. Actually Erica had met Mae Tome on the bus ride back to Chiang Mai and had been persuaded that she needed to go visit her house. That night we ended up walking 45 minutes each way to Mae Tome’s house for a Karen dinner. It was excellent food and Mae Tome was thrilled that she got to host two farangs for dinner. She told me that I could come back and have dinner whenever I wanted and that I was more than welcome to stay as well so that I didn’t have to walk or ride my bike home in the dark. It was a great experience. Erica left today and now I have a few days before I have to leave once again for Bangkok for a follow-up PAC meeting where we will finish writing all of the learning objectives for the Community-Based Organizational Development program.

You have just relived, in a shortened version, my life for the past month and a half. I feel like I am becoming an actual Peace Corps volunteer and not just a language learner and very patient listener! I hope everyone finds themselves well!