FAQ: Why Thailand?

I’ve just returned from my 2^nd winter session studying for my Master of Arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Why Thailand? Because everybody in the Azusa Pacific University TESOL program already lives and teaches English in Asia except for me and two other women who are also part of Educational Services International in Europe. Thailand is the closest, freest, and cheapest place to stay, and the time and place coincides with several other conferences for other sending organizations and Asian school holidays. For me, it makes a nice escape from my cloudy, snowless city winter in Slovakia. But imagine trying to explain to the passport controller in Frankfurt, Germany why you’re coming in from Vienna, Austria but you work in Bratislava, but you’re going to Thailand to study English, but you’re really from the New York. (Obviously they let me through).

The first week’s course was one of my capstone classes called Action Research in Teaching English as a Second Language. So I’ll be researching the effects of different kinds of peer and teacher feedback on written assignments in my writing classes and how they affect error correction and writer confidence. (I actually think this is interesting.) Then the second course was called Second Language Assessment- another really practical immediate application to my teaching.

It was so refreshing to be a student again and soak up wisdom from professors I think really highly of…and have some time to think…and soak up some heat and sun…and eat spicy food with spoons and chopsticks…and lots of fruit…and have my own room for a week until my new roommates arrived…and drive up to the Thai/Myanmar/Laos border on the weekend…and be encouraged by my cohort mates with similar stories about teaching, working, studying, and being a foreigner.

It was all great fun, but like all holidays should do, it made me appreciate being back ‘home’ in my own European city again. Throughout the spring I’ll finish the work for these two classes, and then in July I’ll travel to APU's campus in Azusa, CA to present my research and take two final classes- Teaching Pronunciation and a second capstone called Language Curriculum Design. I’ll finish the work for those two classes during the fall semester and receive my M.A. in TESOL in December of this year. That was quick!

To cease from striving

Before last Saturday I had never been in a place I would call God-forsaken. But somehow drinking the "welcome to Laos" snake whiskey felt equivalent to internalizing the sin that separates me from God, like eating the fruit in the garden of Eden, and then getting kicked out. This garden was flat reflecting pools in rice paddies which gave way to dusty villages, banana trees in fields burnt out of hillsides, and valleys that dropped off below the road as we wound our way up into the mountains into the late afternoon.

For hours as we drove I watched the scenery go by and thought about how Adam walked with God in this same cool of the day when everything is gilded, and how I was far far away from such a place. Doubts settled deeply in me and stuck like layers of dust and sweat and truck exhaust as we finally all piled out and stepped into the village. It was beautiful but heartbreaking. I didn’t want to be a tourist anymore; I wanted to run out of there and get away from God and my thoughts on a hillside somewhere, like Adam and Eve when they became ashamed and tried to hide from God in the heaviness of sin. Why is it that evil in the country seems to settle down like cool air into hollows? My little god-box was broken and I wondered: Where is the God I know here? Who is he really? Does his hand reach even this far? Can he see me even here? Does he apply at all here? And I was afraid.

But O Glory! Sunday morning back in the city I heard a message preached on grace which was really nothing that I had never heard before, but somehow this time I GOT IT! (Maybe the different translation of my little pocket-sized Bible that I packed to save space allowed me to pay more attention to the words and not just skim over them like another old memory verse: yadda yadda yadda.) What I knew before is still valid, but now I have this deeper understanding, and it is essentially this: that grace is a gift, that in striving to earn it I loose it, that by faith alone I am a child of God’s, and by clothing myself with the righteousness of Christ I CAN walk again with God, just like Adam did in the cool of the day, every day.

And so everything ties together back to the word which resounded with me at home over Christmas: I can “cease from striving” and fall back into grace. Hallelujah! This must be what it means to go farther up and further in to God. And who I am continues to be stretched.

Discernment

One day after class a friend and I decided to walk instead of taking a red taxi truck to the city center. More than once we turned one way but had the gut feeling we really should have gone the other way. Still, it was kind of fun get a deeper a sense for Chiang Mai: dust in my nose and on my bare feet, couples whizzing by on scooters and motorbikes, exhaust and dirty air except for the occasional heavenly whiff of jasmine, and then the gagging vomit smell of overripe papaya. Scents and traffic pulsed at us in waves like alternating pockets of warm and cool air.

Then turning down a trafficless street, I felt my whole self observing, soaking in information, aware of the play of sun and shadow, every face looking down from a window, and every crack in the sidewalk. And then suddenly my stomach clenched and I looked up from the ground to take in the street we had just walked into. Temple compounds rose up on either side of us, and monks in orange were kneeling and chanting up ahead. It was as if we had walked into another pocket of air or another wave of scent where the spiritual realm was as tangible as the smell of incense or the sensation of air moving the hairs on my arm or the back of my neck. We were all very aware of each other but pretended not to watch as we kept walking by.

It made me wonder about all of us foreigners traveling to Thailand. We Westerners are all either humanitarian-missionary types, or hemp wearing, faux-Buddhist backpackers, or eye-contact avoiding middle aged men on the prowl for girls, free from the home constrains of conscious. All tourists here are running from something; all expats are hiding away.

What do they think of us all when we come here? How does our God apply here? And what do they think of us all when they come to Europe to see our cold, drab, empty, stone cathedrals? Do they know better than us that God does not live there, alone by himself, available to the public only on Sundays and according to the schedule? How will they know that God lives among us, not in temples of stone? How will they know that the Holy Spirit teaches my own spirit and prompts me even to turn to the left or right on a street, if I choose to go the wrong way?

My Mind's Eye Sees Blessing

Old Testament fathers’
old tanned faces in the evening
and ancient eyes covered over with cataracts,
still see and prophesy as
their sun-spotty hands shake
and reach out and rest heavy
on the heads
and shoulders of their children
and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren,
standing still and pronouncing
blessing words,
and blessing
over them.

And I see my own Grandpa
not so ancient, who
got up from reading his newspaper
in the living room one evening
with a “Well Beckeeee!” and
wrapped his arm around
my shoulder saying “The Lord
bless you and
keep you”
and other good things
I don’t remember
because I was trying not
to cry.
And the next morning
with our tight tight hug
which could almost break
your ribs he was
standing still and pronouncing
blessing words
and blessing
over me.

New Vocabulary

John le Carre says, "Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." So, theoretically I knew there would be reverse culture shock. But to say I experienced it seems like a pre-bottled cliché cover-up to slather over the various indistinguishable symptoms I felt when I came home for Christmas. Oh source of angst! What supplies the aquifer from whence cometh this melodrama and this silly silly mood? Ahem!

There’s another term called culture fatigue which better describes the way I felt- my arms were tired from pulling at the little black barge of responsibility of looming grades and assignments, like trying to walk through waist deep water without knowing which shore to head towards, burdened down, striving, fatigued. And yet my heart was full from just being there, at HOME, soaking up my people, and the comfort of my food, and the regular everyday sights of my country, and as much physical touch as possible. And then I was whisked away and deposited back on the other side of the ocean, with plenty of time on the plane to think. I used to always look up at planes streaking across the sky and wish I was on them. Now I just want to stay put for a while.