Trek End Game

This Thai blog actually STARTS on Dec. 20, 2008; to get to the REAL start, look to the right margin of this page and click on Dec. 2008. That will get you to Dec. 20 and a full explanation of why and how we went to Thailand. Then you'll see to full story.


For all of you awaiting the next venture in my Chiangmaitrek, there's only one way to say this: I've prematurely returned to the cozy confines of Bowling Green, my wife, my family, and my friends. While not all of my goals were reached, many were and I will remember Thailand fondly.

Why an early return home? Because I realized that I am not wired for an extended stay in Chiang Mai. I take full responsibility for the struggles I created for myself...struggles that soon became overbearing.


It took two weeks without Dianne to support me to realize that I could not manage the taxing demands of transportation (I had no car or scooter), food, heat and living alone. I weighed those taxing conditions against tackling my too lofty goals and realized that I had reached my limits. Rarely have I disappointed myself and others who were depending on me; at Payap and in Chiang Mai, I needed to retreat. Sometimes one must put one's own mental and emotional health first. I did that and now sit at my MacBook looking at a frozen pond and gray skies of the American midwest winter. My life is ahead of me again, and I return to Stephen Daedalus to say that I will reach out to discover what the future holds.

I've included in picture form the five angels who made my life in Chiang Mai good: Tong, my "driver," Dr. Pearl, my department supervisor, Daeng, our condo manager, Jum, a waitress from Sakura Japanese restraurant that Dianne and I identified as our source of sustenance, and Supattra, my bgsu graduate student now working in the US Consulate in Chiang Mai. These five individuals represent my Thai friends who gave so much to me; I could add ten or more others who provided a welcoming home away from home. I salute my new friends and thank them for all I was given.

POSTSCRIPT
It's a month after after my return from Chiang Mai and I've been settling into the familiar confines of home, family, friendship and routine. My psychological state has returned to something feeling very much like normalcy, even as I still ponder how I could have been driven to leave something I had worked so hard to attain. After all, I still see Thailand as a place calling for the likes of me to come and give of myself.
Certainly, the forces that drove me home were many, but one that stands out is described by Atul Gawande in a recent New Yorker article, "Hellhole: Is Solitary Confinement Torture?" Thailand was in no way hell and Chiang Mai in no way torture but I resonated with the piece which starts with Harry Harlow's monkey experiments and ends with the psychoses suffered by prisoners dealt solitary confinement.

The picture is of my office in the MA-TESOL Department.
"Everyone's identity is socially created: it's through your relationships that you understand yourself...." Gawande makes a strong case for ending a "soul-destroying loneliness" that hostages and prisoners held in solitary confinement experience. My own friends here in the US have recounted their own loneliness in the early months of military service, or the expected homesickness with almost any kind of extended travel. One conclusion is that the ties that bind us to sanity are many and invisible, and most of them are tied to our homes, our family, friends and our past. When those ties are rent asunder, even when other and new loving linkages are provided to fill in the void, there can be a terrible emptiness, one that is filled only by the likes of a Greg Mortensen.

English Camp at Watpranonnongpheung School

Math camps. Computer camps. Physics camps. Outdoors camps. Why not English camp? Hard for a farang (westerner speaking English) to get your head around. Think again. There are six billion of us on the earth. A minority of that group speaks English, fast becoming the language of choice for commerce, travel, many forms of prosperity.

Dr. Pearl's undergraduate ESL methods class for its third time traveled to a rural elementary school to spend the morning at English Camp. This wonderful invention is meant to teach children, this time fourth and sixth graders, simple English words and sentences. In the three hours I was there, I witnessed about 50 children broken down into four groups to rotate through four games.


Among the games were charades, bingo, and find the letter in the pile of strach and make a word out of the found letters. From the laughter and smiles of the children, I'd say the venture was a success.

One of my TESOL colleagues commented at lunch when I returned from Camp that the lack of teacher training for and the paucity of the actual English instruction destines most of these children to the most minimal fluency in English. This might be different in some suburban and urban schools.


I was wondering how large the English Camp idea is and googled it. Not too surprisingly, there are many all over the world suited for many different economic levels and with various personalities. One that caught my eye is called Dragonfly English Camp. Its web literature reads:

A Dragonfly English Camp package provides your students with the trip of a lifetime to one of our partner resorts and hotels. We have carefully selected Thailand’s best English Camp locations where we know that out students will be happy and well taken care of.
We have locations by the sea, in the hills and in other popular tourist destinations to choose from depending on the style of camp that you plan on running. We also cater for many levels of budget starting with the large dormitory style accommodation which anybody can enjoy ranging up to the 5* hotel style accommodation which provides your students with exceptional luxury.

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TE 812, Language in Literature, three hours a week for five weeks, six students, Fridays from 1 til 4, my first time teaching in Thailand. Buddhism is infectious in this country, wats are everywhere, and I must admit that as I prepared for this course, I was reading two paperbacks, Karma for Today's Traveler, by Phra Bhasakorn Bhavilai, with David Freyer, and The Heart of the Buddha, by Chogyam Trungpa. Both affected me deeply as I thought about teaching.

Karma is written by a Buddhist monk from Thailand who was a physics major in college, then a professional photographer, and then someone who attempted, successfully I think, to bring his own inner world together with the outer world, both based on order, cause and effect. By not starting with a belief in a God who shapes the universe, Buddhism asks us to use reason to work out an orderly system of belief and behavior. Along with The Heart of the Buddha, a more scholarly introduction to Buddhism, Karma got me thinking about how Buddhism and successful teaching / learning are connected. Here's the course purpose as I gave it to my students five weeks ago:

"Imaginative literature is language made into art and experience. We write and read literary art for delight and utility. The delight of literature is the joy of a good story, in whatever form the literature, seen as story, takes. Literature’s utility is the way it instructs us about life and enlarges our linguistic and personal fluency,our imagination and our reason. When literature works for us, it invites us to be compassionate beings open to our world.

The course will introduce us to the powers of imaginative literature (poems, stories and essays) as we apply those powers in a TESOL setting. There is no reason students learning a language cannot partake in the joys and wonders of literature, and every reason they should. I’ve seen students focus solely on ESL instruction in grammar, phonetics and vocabulary building, losing the larger picture of communication that language opens to us.

Since your instructor has never taught this course in this particular form before, it will be a growth and learning experience for all of us. Throughout the course, we will be open to self-reflection and course readjustment. The course, while very short, will succeed when it asks us to stretch our imaginations and reason, and when it reaches the highest goals of delight and enlightenment. With an equal emphasis on theory and practice, the course will empower us to be better ESL and English teachers.

Since I just mentioned enlightenment, permit me to borrow and adapt a few thoughts from the great Buddhist scholar Chogyam Trungpa. Enlightenment is the goal not only of Buddhism, but of most forms of human growth and education. Good teachers and students remove our own psychological and emotional barriers, and our obsessional attachment to habits and the things of the culture, so that we can ask the great questions of life and literature, questions that are already inside us and struggling to get out. Good teachers permit us to be open to our essential being, and to see with our fullest attention directed at the subject of study.

At its best, literature, intense feeling and thought shaped into art, invites us to combine the intellectual and rational with the intuitive and imaginative to see and experience the world clearly. When we can respond with our whole being to literature, as well as when we can create literature ourselves, we begin to open ourselves with curiosity, confidence, strength, vulnerability and a will to grow. We learn to take a chance, a risk. We learn that life is chance and risk.

By reading literature carefully and completely, we identify with what we see in the literature, and soon can become the words and images, the characters and metaphors. Such identification is a form of compassion. We discover soon that the knowledge and vicarious experience we gain from literature becomes wisdom through the compassion that guides our reading and living strategies."

Flower Festival and Carnival

We had for several weeks reveled in the Chinese New Year celebrations of festivals, fireworks and special foods in Chiang Mai when the Flower Festival kicked off yesterday morning at about 8 am with 23 flower-saturated floats parading over Kaew Nawarat Bridge. Tawee Layramen, my Thai friend for Montpelier, Ohio, and his sister Seichan picked me up at seven and left us at the bridge.


There, two sets of stands held dignitaries, one for judging the floats, the other for giving welcoming speeches. Then, for the next three or more hours a parade of sights, sounds and smells moved down the street to our delight.

This Festival is held annually in February here in CM, and by the looks of it, it compares favorably to our July 4th parades. It certainly celebrated the beauties of Thailand (each float featured one or more beautiful Thai women, usually sitting below the Buddha image), with schools, companies and provinces sponsoring the floats. There were bands, dancers, acrobats, the three kings, folk music and cultural performances, and I saw only a small portion of the three day celebration.

The Flower Fest is a national event, with performers coming from all over Thailand. I can conclude only by saying it would have been far more fun if Dianne's return to the US hadn't started two days ago. But I'm pleased to report that she's home safe and sound.

Meeting Rajabhat's English Department

On Wednesday, Jan. 28, Dianne and I were picked up by a Payap U. van and driver, and taken, with Dr. Pearl inside, three hours north to a luxurious four star Chiang Rai resort on the Mekong River. We arrived to breakfast and introductions to Rajabhat's English Department, about eight faculty and their chair. Our purpose was to evaluate their proposed English MA program, which we had seen in draft a week ago. The conference room held a long table around which the faculty were seated; introductions were made and we began discussion, starting with an opening salvo by Dr. Pearl (my Payap supervisor and department chair), and followed with my own two cents worth. Our critique seems to be well received; the discussion became animated at times and continued for almost three hours without break.

All this was just fine, except for one thing: The room was freezing cold. Probably in the mid 50s, and nobody said anything as the air conditioner blasted away full force. I could see that most of the faculty sat with their hands snuggled between their legs or under their thighs. After an hour, the temperature hovered in the low 50s. Nobody said anything. Actually, I was suffering less than most because before the meeting started, I made a quick escape to the hotel lobby and bought, for less that $15., a wonderful jacket made in China. Finally Dianne weied with her hands folded together and brought to her face and made a quiet retreat out of the room to contact a hotel employee. A minute later the temperature problem had been solved and the room became liveable again. I tell this little story because it's symptomatic of much of Thai life: few will speak up when there's a problem. The yellow shirts occupying the country's airports in Decemeber did it without army or police intervention. There was only one death associated with their protest, so one could say that turning the other cheek at times works.

The meeting continued amicably and smoothly even though the substance of the discussion was anything but easy. The curriculum we had seen before arriving was mostly full of linguistics courses; the Dean of Humanities, who was also present at the meeting, was himself a linguist, and most of the faculty were too. Dianne made an impassioned argument for the humanities; I spoke of the US English major at most universities as a tripod of literature, writing and language study. Pearl supported this drift and enhanced it with her own arguments, persuasive especially because she herself has advanced degrees in linguistics. When we finished the morning, the curriculum had two tracks, one in writing and literature, the other in language and linguistics. And, finally, much to Dianne's and my surprise, the English Department chairwoman handed me an envelope with a thank you letter (in Thai), and a very generous stack of Thai baht.

Sunday Walking Market

The Sunday Walking Market at the Tha Phae Gate of the old town is wonderful, with great people watching, good food and hundreds of vendors all trying to sell their colorful wares. For the weary, there are also comfortable chairs and foot or head and shoulder massages. It sure beats T.J. Max or Filene's Basement. Come stroll through with us. We'll probably have to go again tonight since it's my last Sunday in Chiang Mai for awhile. And I forgot to mention, there IS a Starbucks on many, if not every, corner in Chiang Mai--at least where the tourists tend to congregate.

You can also see that selling at the market is a family affair--after, all, sweet babies and cute children could very well mean better sales.



Of course, the market is also a wonderful place for an impromptu picnic--or just the usual way many have Sunday dinner.

The place is always a shoppers' paradise. It's hard to choose just one--of anything or everything! "Madame--would you like two for a good discount?"

But there IS rest for the wicked--or at least, an inexpensive darn good massage! 60 baht for 30 minutes, less than 2 dollars.

On the way home, we could stop by a wat and purge all our capitalistic and materialistic urges for something more pure and cleansing.

The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Burma

In the interest of safety, there will be only one picture and one person's name (besides Dianne) in this entry. We met the Academic Coordinator of the National Health and Education Committee for Burma, Thein Naing, last week at what appeared to be an upper middle class ranch house in a typical neighborhood not far from Chiang Mai University. He coordinates a small group of about 15 Burmese refugee activists working in and around Chiang Mai to bring an end to the Burmese civil war and open doors to democracy for our neighbor, an embattled and devastated Burma whose living conditions approach what Dianne and I saw in Zimbabwe last April. NHEC is an umbrella organization with major spokes here and in Burma, aimed at educating for "critical literacy" (those thinking and language skills necessary to unravel oppression and dictatorship).

For educators, critical literacy is of course Paulo Freire's term popular over the last three decades and connoting the ability to stand up for human rights.

Burma, or Myanmar, the name autocrats selected in 1989, is a country of 48 million people. One internet source of demographic information, Intute, has it that such popuation "estimates for this country take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher death rates, lower population growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected."

Dianne and I certainly claim no authority on the subject of the military subjugation of Burma over the past several decades, but two years ago we were there, in Yangon, for about a week, visiting orphanages, factories, schools and museums, enough to see that the rulers had forgotten about the people, the country's infrastructure, and any kind of government representation by the people.

Our short stay, accompanied by 600 college students and the faculty and staff of Semester at Sea, was enough to bring us close to the people, to grieve for the inhuman conditions they were bearing, and to know that we had to act in their interests wherever and whenever we could. In fact, a good part of the motivation for our trip to Thailand has been the likelihood that we would make contact with Burmese refugees and act to affect what's happening in their country.

Two things happened in the past week that drove us to meet the activists in education behind the National Health and Education Committee. By sheer chance, we wandered into a gallery of Burmese art and met one of the activists, Vice Chair of the group; he quickly realized that Dianne and I were well poised to make a contribution and invited us to "headquarters." Several days later, a student added my class at Payap; of course, as destiny would have it, she is active as a teacher for NHEC, is Burmese, and pleaded with me to help. She said her own need was math curricula, grades 1-3. (I will be meeting with a Math Education faculty member from Chiang Mai University this Tuesday to see what connections can be established.)
The work of NHEC is many faceted: teacher education, materials development and distribution here and in Burma; curriculum development. The needs for Burmese education are immense. Thein described to us a recent trip to Deli, India, where books can be very cheap. Thein and colleagues carried boxes and boxes back to Chiang Mai.
The goals right now are for primary education materials and training. Four languages are used, English, Thai, Burmese and the particular ethnic group of the student group (Hmong, Karen (the biggest), Kachin, and Shan. Besides math curricula, the activists are searching for integrated curricula, e.g. natural science, citizenship, social science and the environment.
If you think you'd like to help, let us know.