Kornography

A friend and colleague of mine has begun spending his weeks(mon-fri) a few hours outside of the city, in the mountains of Mae Hong Son, teaching at a small local school surrounded by jungle. A hippie at heart, the return to a more simple way of life is undoubtedly part of what attracts him to this place, not to mention the opportunity to teach the students about building and playing traditional Thai instruments. After repeated requests to come and help him out with his English classes–foisted upon him due to the fact that his limited grasp of the language far exceeded those of the other teachers–I finally accepted, and spent the week up there, living in the way of the countryside, drinking rain water, playing soccer at dusk with the other teachers, eating well, and sleeping deeply in the clean mountain air.

students showing off their low-tech pinwheels –leaves on twigs– at the edge of a precipitous drop to the jungle valley below the school.
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These are from a ceremony where little boys become monks. For three days these 89 boys were lavished with gifts, and food and were carried around on the shoulders of their family members–never to have their little feet touch the ground. A whole series of roofed and elaborately decorated raised platforms–for dressing, sleeping, playing, storage, etc.–were erected in a U around a stage on which musicians, dancers, actors and comedians entertained literally all night long, to an amazingly engaged and attentive audience of hundreds upon hundreds of people. I was invited by the mother of one of my students, a 13 year old boy who–unlike many of the other boys who were only becoming monks for a few weeks in order to make merit, was planning on donning the robes for years, so as to be able to continue his education.

While there I was also able to spend time with a community leader with whom I had often worked (frequently over a bottle, or two, of rice whiskey) and another one of my students, who was the senior monk organizing the proceedings. Farming families save up money for years to pay for their sons to complete this honor, whose price tag–including multiple hand-made highly ornamented costumes (made by another one of my students, the local tailor), extensive decorations, countless cases of soda, and enough food to feed all of the extended family who come and stay for the whole three days–must be astronomical. I will never get the repetitive beat of the Shan drum and cymbals out of my brain; the music that brought men to dance in circles with costumed little boys on their shoulders.

One of the oft-overlooked benefits of living on the other side of the world, in a culture different from your own, is the ability to time travel. Here I am not talking about the whimsical 12 hour difference from home, that allows me to speak with my mom when she is going to bed and I am just waking up—truthfully not an entirely novel concept—nor the experience of being in a bamboo hut without electricity or running water, hours from a paved road. What is truly remarkable, is while on the other end of the line, mom is existing in 2007, thanks to a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, I am currently enjoying the benefits of 2550. (more…)

The Moonscape is the view off of my apartment’s balcony. Depending on the rain and the amount of earth-moving equipment, it can look like a moonscape, a big sandbox, or a series of puddles.

Within a few days of moving in (when my vocabulary consisted exclusively of “hello” “ten” and “vegetable”), I was attempting to ask about The Moonscape. It was the elephant lurking just out my window. From a neighbor who mercifully spoke English, I found out that had I moved in a few months earlier I would have been overlooking a beautiful, peaceful golf course (his words). Apparently it was a course only for important Royal Thai Air Force Generals and thier buddies (its on government land adjacent to the airport), and he had never seen anyone playing on it. This explanation accounts for the large lake, and the airfield-looking towers.

I started wondering what future use was intended. What could account for the insane amount of digging, undigging, redigging, flattening, trucking in of topsoil, and re-undigging, that seemed to occur every saturday morning at 6:45?

I asked the woman at the front desk what my backyard was purportedly going to become. “A golf course,” she answered matter of factly, “it should be finished next year.”

Have no fear, the irony was not lost on me. Had I lived in this apartment for any period of time except for exact time that I did, I would have overlooked a golf course. I was living in the inter-golf-course period, like a brief pause between ice ages. I came to love the moonscape, and it was infinitely more enjoyable to watch a man trying to navigate a big puddle in a miniature boat than people playing golf. Plus, there was the added benefit of the tower, which offered a friendly perch to countless local birds, where I dreamed of building a fort, imaginging the tin-can telephone linking up to my balcony.

Had I lived in one of the golf-course-ful eras, I would have missed out on watching a landcape evolve before my eyes as I ate my breakfast each morning. Hills migrated, birms rose from level ground, channels appeared and were filled in, rises flattened out: that which may take years and years of rain and wind happened in a few months, and I had a front row seat.

In today’s increasingly globalized—and thus shrinking—world, I am always excited to be exposed to things that I not only haven’t seen/tasted/done before, but things that I never even knew existed. With some things—food, or card games for example—there are seemingly infinite variations, so it is therefore to be expected that one will encounter something of which one was previously 100% ignorant—e.g. Burmese fermented tea leaf salad, or “say eight, say nine”, a Thai variation of Baccarat—but there are other categories, which for whatever reason are more finite, and it is the moment of discovery of something totally new within these, that I truly relish (I remember rushing to Wikipedia half way through the Olympic opening ceremonies when a single proud athlete marched under the flag of Nauru). That is why my discovery of takraw, a sport completely novel to my consciousness, was such a big deal. (more…)

I finally got to go to the Shan refugee camp, a place I had been hearing a lot about, and was really looking forward to visiting. (the area that I was in borders Burma, but more technically it abuts Shan State: within Burma there are different ethnic states, most of which are in some state of fighting for their independence, to which Shan state has perhaps the best case) Me and Meeber went on separate motorbikes, and upon arriving first, I was greeted warmly by the leader of the camp (the same man, I quickly realized, who Meeber had been telling me about). He rushed to get chairs (the customary plastic mold in primary colors that is ubiquitous in Thailand) and arranged them on the corner of an old metal table, left outside for many rainy seasons, with a rainbow of rusts half consuming the words ‘Rotary International.’ A boy emerged from inside with glasses and weak green tea. Within a minute, it became clear that he had no real idea of who I was, or why I had come, and although Meeber had been here a number of times—apparently never in an official capacity—he didn’t recognize the name of my organization when I offered it. Instead he saw someone who had specifically come to his camp—a process of navigating a pitched and pot-holed gravel track on a motorbike for about an hour—and welcomed him with open arms. (more…)