Four days, three nights in Chaiyaphum, Thailand.

Before any kind of explanation about why I will probably move to rural Thailand for a few years of my life, why I can't stand Pattaya City, and why I left with no more jewelry, here's the cold bony skeleton of my time there:

Day one: Pop on the bus a few hours after docking in Lam Chaubang (about three hours south of Bangkok) for an eight-hour (surprise) van ride inland to Chaiyaphum, where 150 Thai English students awaited our group's arrival.
Night one: Smokin' good dinner somewhere outside, teacher training (song learning)

Day two: Early morning, first day of teaching.
Night two: Second outdoor dinner, outdoor Thai karaoke.

Day three: 'nother early wake up, second day of teaching.
Night three: Quick pack up, drive to homestay, homestay.

Day four: Dawn wakeup (by rooster), walk and offering to temple, walk back, breakfast, long goodbyes, board van for eight-hour trip back to Lam Chaubang.
Night four: Unwinding with group, bonding time.

Day five: Trip to Nang Nooch Traditional Village (in my opinion, animal hate park. I thought I was going to a "traditional village"), Pattaya City (capital woman exploiter of the world) with Zoya and Celia.

The wai (pronounced 'why') is used almost every time one greets another here: hands pressed together, lifted at lowest level to the center of the chest, or, gradually increasing in respect-level, so the fingertips reach the chin, or the tip of the nose, or the brow, or the brow with thumbs inside the nostrils, or above the brow (this is only used for worship.)

In order to wai correctly, one must know her place. A child wais to an elder, with her fingertips reaching her brow; the elder does not wai back. A student wais her teacher with her fingertips reaching her brow and her thumbs inside her nostrils (this is rarely strict but is understood); the teacher may nod but does not wai back (but I kind of did sometimes). When in temple, after serving the monks rice and several homemade dishes, a pious person wais above her brow, then bows forward keeping her hands flat against the ground until her chest is fully rested on her bent knees. This happens three times, while the monks keep their hands at chest level.

Martin, the Brit teacher who has lived here for four years, said there are hundreds of increments of the wai, and the most important thing to remember is to wai higher and often to elders, and lower and seldom to youth. My host mother, whilst driving a truckload (inside the cabin and in the bed) of people, nudged me to sowadi-kah and wai to the temples passing by. Mid-Thai sentence with the women in the other seats of the truck, she'd "Cara!" and gesture toward a blur of something and I'd automatically wai and "sowadi-kah." She'd smile, nod, pat my hand and continue the conversation.

She did this at least 10 times on the way back to school after I had spent the night in her home. I accepted the stern motherly direction, proof of her kinda liking me ... as well as her saying, "Lao-ah love Cara," over and over while pressing her forehead to mine before I boarded the van, after breakfast, after temple, before going to bed, and while I wept as she and her parents chanted and tied prayer bracelets around my wrist.

I'll back up. Here's what I wrote in the hotel room after our first day:

Step off bus, avoid puddles, big breath, fresh for a change. Employees in yellow (later found out this is for the king. Baby blue is the queen's color. Yellow is also Monday's color, which is also the day the king was born. Yellow and gold are the same, according to Nina, the impossibly thin and hysterical Thai teacher who loved to be in the front of the group and stand on her tiptoes so that her angular features peeked over everyone and say, "Cara! Look!" at whatever.

Once it was the way silk is dyed, because I asked. Once it was the bug that made the red color that bunches together like a piece of tree bark. Once it was vegetarian buns. Once bananas and durian fruit. Once from the bus it was a temple. I just got an email from her ... 12 hours after we left.)

Back to journal: Big multi-purpose covered area next to the wooden chair/desk area for students grades M 1-6 (7-12). We were to teach 17-, 18-year olds (true, but all of them acted no older than 13.) Their bus is open air, aluminum roofed. The fields of rice. So wide you could swim for miles.

Addendum: The eight-hour van ride was a surprise, and honestly, at the time, an unpleasant one; but quickly became the best way to see the shift from city to suburban to rural life. And also a great way to shop hop and try different snack foods during squatty potty breaks.

(Pumpkin chips anyone? No? How about green puff ball cookies? Or a soymilk box? Mushroom jerky? Blueberry chewing gum? Green tea toothpaste??)

Journal: Something about this country feels like coming back. There's a direct, initial reaction from the natives that encourages such comfort. Placement: white. Surprise: white? Here? Eventually excitement: white! Here! And a huge smile, normally some kind of greeting if there's time and a slight bow or wai or sometimes an extension of a hand to touch mine. Sometimes just a giggle -- like the woman at the register who took Michael's money and he said thank you, Kopun-kah, like a girl would, instead of Kopun-crrahp like a boy would have.

English camp was a bundle of playing games, singing songs, acting like monkeys or elephants, taking breaks for snacks and taking photos of each other. And by each other I mean all the students insisting on more and more photos with us or of us. One at a time, then in a group, then with everyone, then a new student would come and the cycle would repeat. Benjamin's height and green eyes mesmerized the entire female student population. He was a movie star.

Teaching was fun and silly but at times unbearably frustrating. In front of the whole group of Thai students, Dan asked, "So, who here can read Thai?" Blank looks all around, shifting of the eyes, nervous fidgeting. "Okay, who here IS Thai?" More blank looks, someone shuffled, a few girls laughed... The students had six years experience with English, but never practiced speaking nor listening. No one around the area spoke English. I almost cried when I was alone with 17 students, five of which were the only straight boys in the entire group and were not having it. "Can anyone think of a song?" Silence. "A song, like a melody." Silence. "Hmmm..." to mary had a little lamb. Silence still. "Help me out here guys. A song. Hmmm. You know? Like a song." Good god, is there another word for song that I could say? Could I act out song? Okay I'll dance around. Danced around. "Do you understand?" Silent. Nothin. Nada.

One of the boys started rapping. Okay. That works. "Oh! Good! That's great, let's work with that." He backed up and blushed. I scared it away. Gah! The struggle! But other than that one isolated hour, we were all successful. We learned the words for "tickle" and "itch" and "champion," which are three words more than we knew before camp.

After all the English learning, it was my turn to make a fool of myself. One of the last activities had half of us, the teachers, read in Thai in front of all 150 students, without knowing what we were saying. My speech was translated as a story about how rich my father is, and how I live on a boat because he's so rich and I clean toilets on the boat, but that's okay because I get to see the world and everyone tells me I'm special. Hmmm.

Some of that is kind of true... One girl in particular helped me pronounce and write the words phonetically, while the others laughed or chirped in to help emphasize the rrrrrrrruah or bek or boohhn. Ever feel insensitive to ESL students? Try pronouncing Thai. Not even understanding it, just try shaping your mouth and rolling the r's but not l's that are placed right next to each other or grunting or sliding up in the back of your throat to make that sound that's like bouncing.

A propo bouncing, we did karaoke with the Thai teachers for hours and hours outside after eating a ridiculicious meal of no-shrimp pad thai, stir-fried veggies, sticky rice, hed (deep fried bean string that looks like back hair but tastes like bean jerky. Mmmm, real good) sour and hot soup, cabbage soup, tofu, and pineapple. Wowwow the food. So far Vietnamese is still my favorite. (Holy moly, the egg sandwiches. Sorry chickens.) But Thai comes in at a close second alongside Japanese (with the exception of Hong Kong sweets, and Chinese coffee, which are in a totally different category and kick the butts of all others qualified similarly. Oh and the sweet chewy fruit I had in Vietnam was tamarind, and now I understand why my housemate Grace from Burma always made tamarind juice as a treat. We bought some packaged and it has a bit of a chili-esque kick.)

The restaurant was separate from the dining area. The kitchen was across the street from where we sat, and waiters brought food to us. We sat on top of a small pond (anyone uncomfortable near stagnant wawa? Three cheers for deet!) under a canopy, and still they hooked up the karaoke machine and speakers. There was Bohemian Rhapsody, Unbreak My Heart and Billie Jean from the American side, but the Thais took the cake with their love songs. (Again, Benjamin was the heartthrob.)

After the few days of teaching, each of us was assigned to a student who had agreed to host us for one night. Some of us drove off on the backs of motobikes (Michael), some jumped into truckbeds (Lindsay), others were loaded onto trailers (Paige & ). I had the longest ride, and so was put in a van along with a few other SAS students (Ben, Katie, Tina, Kristy) and Thai students. My homestay sister, Papua, lives about 40 minutes from the school in the countryside. We drove along endless rice paddies, marshes, sugar cane fields, jungle-like vegetation, farmers, shacks, ponds...I cried in the view and had to ask Benjamin to sit next to me. My photos don't do the color justice. The sun was setting as we drove, avoiding and bouncing into the holes in the road. Nothing, nothing, nothing looks like it. Postcards are not enough. It felt something like looking out into the blue of the Pacific those first days on the ship. You are completely surrounded by the brightest and deepest green you've ever seen. The sun sinks, dripping orange all over the wetland, and our hosts barely noticed.

We passed fields and fields and fields, and there was one man, standing meters from his motorbike that was parked on the road, in the middle of the green, bent over, straw hat towards us, and blur he was gone. He was the only person for miles. Green, green, green, green fields, rice, water, rice fields, green trees, banana trees, holes in the road, dust, water, green wide fields, grass rice.

Benjamin was the first to get to his house, then Tina, then Katie, then me. From the van I couldn't see the house. Bushes lined the street. We turned into the vehicle area, and stepped out. The entire first floor is visible from the outside. There are only three semi-walls and one giant pull down garage door-type wall (it was open at the time).

Papua's mother wai'd to me, I wai'd, she touched my arm, led me to the sitting area, which was a small loveseat next to a wooden case with her son's running trophies stacked inside. The air was cool, fans were blowing in each room. Papua's grandparents sat on a table to the left of the entrance to the house. The grandfather looked curiously at me, his eyes squinting cloudy but functioning. The grandmother listened. She was sitting on her legs covered in skirt; a small, tanned, thick wrinkled blind woman bundle. The grandfather was smiling.

I took off my shoes to walk around on their dusty, dirty floor. Papua's mother's eyes, too, had glassy cataracts. Her long hair was pulled back away from her face, her skin was blemished. Her hands were small and round, calloused on the tips. She is a silk weaver. Before this, I had seen the full silk weaving process. Under simple shelters, a dozen women or more worked to first gather the cocooned worms into baskets made by the men in each household. The worms were boiled in a large pot, in which they float atop the hot water. She pats the layer of bobbing robin-egg-sized cocoons, which sticks the silk together in strings on her narrow paddle. There is a hole in the paddle, which feeds a hole in the wheel contraption that is balanced above the pot of water. She pulls the silk through this whole system and drops the string into the basket. The silk is surprisingly strong. It's then taken and bleached, dried, dyed, dried, dyed, dried, dyed, colored like tie-dye. The women tie off sections of the silk they don't want to be, for example, red, and dip the bundle of string in a dye made from red insects found on trees. The silk exposed to the dye becomes red, while the silk protected by the tape stays white. This is repeated for every different color the silk is to absorb.

Papua's mother does this for a living, to support her entire extended family. After greeting me, welcoming me and introducing me to the everyone, she took me into the kitchen and asked what I like to eat at home. "Vegetables," I said. She smiled, and removed a large pot lid to uncover an enormous plateful of fresh vegetables. She pulled a plastic wrapped slab of tofu from her small ice box and looked to me for approval. "Oh! Great!" I said, and she asked if I'd like to help her cook it. "Of course!" and the younger sister pulled in a plastic chair on which I was to sit.

The mother dropped a block of butter, then the tofu into a very large skillet. The sizzle. The smell.

We ate dinner outside on the big table-like four-legged piece of wood on their "porch" which was covered by a green tarp that enclosed plants, a hammock, two of these sitting places, and about 25 people from around the area for eating and eventually dancing. We ate and ate, until "im lau kah" I'm full. "Kopun-kah" Thank you. How was it? "Alloy, mai?" It was delicious. "Alloy, mah."

After dinner, Katie and myself were asked to dance for everyone. (By the way, once the food came out, everyone in the neighborhood came over. That included the SAS students who were dropped at different houses. Each showed up on moto bikes within the hour. It was some kind of wonderful family cookout.) The grandfather played a local flute organ for us to dance to. The mother came up to show the step of gracefully pulling and pushing with fingers curved backwards. Everyone clapped and sang and laughed with us.

A bit before this, before we ate, before everyone showed up, Papua's mother pulled me onto the sitting area where the grandparents were sitting and waiting, pulling white string into thin sections in a golden dish. They motioned for me to give them my left wrist. Papua's mother went first. Holding both ends of string in her hands, she stroked the inside of my wrist with string while all three of them chanted and prayed and touched me. The grandmother supported my raised elbow and rubbed my back, the grandfather stroked my hand. He went next, with rough fingers holding such a delicate string, and stroking over and over my pale forearm. They were so close to me, hovering over the prayer. The grandmother kept rubbing my back with her heavy hand the entire time until it was her turn to tie the bracelets. I had no other reaction but to cry and smile and listen. The grandmother took the longest, held me the longest, chanted the longest. Her fingernails, cracked and thick, were stained red from eating with her hands. They smelled sweet, like mild curry, and curiously, softly ran over the skin of my arms and shoulders.

After tying the knots on the strings, each of them twisted the ends and rubbed the knot into my arm. She did this, and then kissed it. By this time, the daughters had circled around the outside of their elders and were watching in awe at my tears. This is a tradition in Thai culture. Something regularly done to everyone. They're used to it. We just had an exam for which I read an article about how much the capitalist culture, especially in the U.S., is feeding an inaccurate desire with things. It's not more stuff we really want. It's community.

That night I slept on a hard "mattress" (I think it was arranged boxes) with two of the sisters and their friend upstairs in a room with a tin roof and curtains instead of doors. Through the door on the other side, the only other space upstairs, the other sister and cousin shared a bed. Before falling asleep, the girls sang. We all sang something. In a few minutes, the mother came in, and the girls showed me how to pray: get on my knees facing my pillow, wai three times and bow to the pillows, then got under the covers. At dawn, roosters crowed, and we woke before the sun did.

I was shown to the shower (the high faucet), took a quick cold rinse, next to the basin of water used for bathing, then followed the group to temple, where three monks sat in front, to whom we offered rice and several delicious looking dishes.

From here on things get blurry. We returned from temple to eat our own huge and wonderful breakfast with everyone from the night before. They had all joined us to the temple, too. Goodbyes were looming, so photos were taken. Hundreds of photos. Other students received gifts from their host families: Benjamin was given gorgeous red silk; Katie and Paige were given beautiful long skirts; others got smaller knickknack like gifts. My host mother handed me a printed photo of her 10-year-old daughter at seven years, dressed up in a pageant. She pressed it to my chest, and told me to take it to America. I'm still unsure what she meant. The gifts given to the others must have cost every spare baht their host-families had.

Amidst the blur, the sisters and I were struggling to separate. I had already slipped the bead bracelet I've been wearing for months off my wrist and onto Papua's mother's during the prayer session. I lifted Papua's hair and asked if she had pierced ears. She nodded with a smile. I took the earrings out of my ears, the ones I borrowed from my mother (the ones you bought at the museum, mom. The green swirls.) and put them in Papua's ears. Afterwards I began to second guess my spontaneity, but Benjamin, who had been watching behind me, said the look on her face was worth it. She was tearfully thanking me. She had none. After this, all inhibitions were called off. The little one had already asked for my watch, and so that was loosely wrapped around her wrist. I pulled the jade bead bracelet that I had bought at Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, from my wrist and rolled it onto the 10-year-old sister's. The ring I've been wearing for nearly a year now, my beloved Echo's ring, I gave to the 13-year-old cousin. She hadn't stopped holding me, either by the elbow or the hand or around my waist, since I met her, and cried when I pushed it on her finger.

The oldest of the group, a friend of Papua's, was equally grateful at the hairclip I plucked from my hair and put in hers. These girls were not dying; they were not starving. They had clothes and food and a toilet. And somehow, in Thailand of all countries, they were innocent. None had seen a westerner before, nor any place outside their town. Their mother could afford to cook with butter. And so I thought it appropriate to pay forward the love by which I'm continuously supported and on which I am constantly reliant, and to leave a foreign memento for each of them. I'm sorry if this in any way offends those who gave me these as a reminder of them. Believe me, if I needed to be reminded of you all, I would not have given the tokens away. But at this point, it felt so natural to share my reminders of female love and support with other females whom I had grown to love. The Japanese bracelet, the American bracelet and earrings, the Chinese watch and hairclip, the Italian ring. Mom, Jo, Shea, Echo: If I'm not articulate enough, I hope you will understand. How special you are to me, and how close you are in everything I do.

Phew. Leaving was hard. The whole van started spewing stories of what they did or saw or what their home stays were like, and Benjamin and I sat next to each other in complete silence for almost three hours. Not everyone had had as beautiful and ineffable an experience as we had. One girl left the home, and went back to the hotel. One girl fell ill. One boy didn't enjoy it -- it was too "rough" for him. I'm writing this the day before we arrive in India, four days since we left Thailand, and I still feel my words are stiff and inadequate -- unprocessed.

It's a common sentiment on the boat now that we are going to have to process our experiences when we get home. There is so much that we have seen, and felt and not known what to do with, that needs to come out in some way -- has to be expressed and heard by someone else, or not heard but just articulated, or maybe just made sense of -- but there is no time nor space to do it on the ship.

And some of these things just don't make any sense, some questions that nag at us and nag at us and nag and nag are questions we've never had to think about before. Such as, how in god's name did Papua's mother resist the sex-trade industry, and maintain a happy, sheltered female-dominated family in the fields of Thailand? And will she?

Pattaya City. I spent about five or six hours in Pattaya, a coastal city along the Gulf of Thailand. I read about it, and saw documentaries about it ... but, Jesus. Prostitution is illegal in Thailand -- youth prostitution is, too. But prostitution is also the number one career path for urban women. "Urban women" includes women who grew up in Thailand's cities, women who grew up in foreign cities, young girls who grew up in Thailand's countryside, and young girls who grew up in foreign countrysides. Ages range from nine years old, at which point the girl will be "broken in," (a few nights of sleeping with multiple men, sometimes as many as 15 or 20) to mid-twenties. By this time, most young women have caught something, HIV or an STD or anything else, and she is kicked out of the brothel and sent either home, where she is unskilled and, thus, useless, or to a sick brothel, where only sick men are allowed to shop and only sick women are allowed to sell. Either way, the women are not given medical attention. At all. None. Nothing. No doctors for prostitutes. No money to pay the doctors, either, even if there were doctors, if she's out of work.

We never made it out of the coastal area of Pattaya, and so missed whatever is beautiful about the city. (Although they did try to flash shiny sparkly things at us before going into town. We went to the gem factory. Egh. It was Hershey's chocolate ride for rich snobs.) I heard some good things about the neighborhoods far from where we were. Mostly, no one liked being constantly bombarded with things to buy, whether they be wooden snakes or silver teacups or an hour with this woman. The sheer crowdedness of the city was uncomfortable and not at all similar to the Thailand I had seen for four days prior. It was disgusting. Pictures and photos and advertisements with naked women in your face being naked all over the place, naked and sexy and sexy girls! And look! And buy, buy, buy sex! Sex, sex, sex! Women are items to buy. You are an item to buy. How much, white? How much for one hour? No? And your friend? Strip clubs, man's paradise, little pieces of wood whittled to look like a woman on all fours and paintings and posters and t-shirts. Shows with drugged, dizzy women. Trash and dirt and sweat. God it was humid. And to know that children were the ones inside those "love hotels" was nauseating beyond description.

Owners of these brothels, not the pimps, go out to the countryside, or bring in from foreign countries, clean prostitutes to keep their businesses going. At times, foreigners who visit the country are kidnapped and forced into the system. Many times, a child's family is told that their daughter will go to the big city, work in an office and send money back. The family is also given about $2,000 for the inconvenience of losing a worker. (Even though females are not much of a priority...anyexpletivewhere it seems.) As the girl is taken to the city, she is told that the $2,000 given to her parents is now her debt to be repaid. In addition, she must pay her rent, food, electricity, laundry, medical bills -- ha, they mean birth control pills -- and a portion of what she earns goes to the pimp. She makes next to nothing, and is kept there in debt and fear of her family being hurt. And by "there" I mean co-occupying a cell maybe five feet wide and eight feet long. About room enough to fit a bed.

I don't want to end on a negative note, but we also saw an elephant village circus thing that I thought was going to be an actual "village" but turned out to be a tourist haven for buying t-shirts and feeding bananas to elephants who get hit on the head with hooks on the end of long sticks. That sucked.

But I will go back to Thailand. The country won. And the people in the country won.

Tomorrow morning, we port in Chennai, India. I will be spending three days studying yoga philosophy, meditation, and movement. Another day, I'll go to a festival, and another I'll go to a theosophy center with my octogenarian professor, Doris Wilsdorf. Until I get back, namaste'.