




























Could I but reach the pain–
Could I but touch the spot–
Could I but speak the aching word–
Could I but see through a clear glass, smudgeless of stain curling over the edges of reality, that burns the senses into dumbness, numbness, darkness and bleeds its bitterness into the currents of humanity—
Then, oh God, I would.
(It’s been a long day. I feel like I’ve seen a little bit of everything– innocence, laughter, pain, fear, kindness laced with subterfuge, depression, sincerity, deception, honesty. Hence the poem. From teaching 2 and 4 year-olds in the morning, to attending a college class at noon, translating for a sticky, depressing case at the station, and debating the principles of Christianity with a lawyer from another belief system, I guess I can see why I am little bit discouraged. I also don’t know if that last sentence is grammatically correct or not. Blame my PR teacher for making me doubt.)
I don’t know where my words have gone. It’s been months since I’ve written much outside of school assignments and I’ve poked around inside my brain countless times trying to figure out what is happening.
Maybe, I’ve thought, it’s because I’m not living right somehow. Maybe I am not listening well enough, or feeding my “muse.” Maybe I am not close enough to God right now to listen to what he wants me to write. There’s this niggling feeling that I must be doing something wrong if I am not writing.
Maybe it’s because I am experiencing burnout with school. Maybe the school assignments have squeezed me dry of all inspiration, even though I am taking a lighter semester than ever before. Maybe my Thai study and translation work have frozen my mind temporarily. Or the work I’m doing has distracted me from writing.
Or maybe its just a stage, a season of life in which I have to stop writing for a while. You’d think that living alone would be the perfect atmosphere to inspire writing, but so far it hasn’t.
Maybe it’s just a lack of discipline.
Whatever it is, for the next 7 days I am taking on a challenge to write and blog every day. From what I’ve experienced in the past, sometimes the best way to get the creative juices flowing is to start writing, so I’m giving it a try. The outcome may be lame, dry, and boring. I don’t care. I’m just going to write and blog the result.
Yikes. This is scary.
My days consist mostly of teaching, studying, and volunteer translation work. Life has fallen into a somewhat normal pattern.
The road to Saohin is rough and steep.
Saturday, February 1, six years after my initial decision to move to Thailand, was the first time I traveled the road to Saohin. And probably not the last.
On Friday January 31, I drove to Mae Sariang, a town in Mae Hong Son 5 hours away that I am quickly learning to love. The drive there, though long, was relaxing, and there was a sense of adventure and hope and “this is a day off of school” that I felt in the air as I drove. I stopped in a pine forest and took off my shoes and enjoyed the spicy smell of pines, making me think of both Sara Teasdale’s “pines, spicy and still”(Stars), as well as the words: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep” (Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, Frost).
I arrived in Mae Sariang around 5 and checked into my hotel. I left several times, once to buy food, once to go to a coffee shop, and once to chase down a song I heard wafting over loudspeakers.
The next morning I went to Saohin. They had told me the road was bad and life was rough there. Would I come look at it first before I would decide whether or not to do my 3 month college internship there? Could I come Saturday?
So I went with the teachers who had come down to the city for the day to run errands and pick up some other things besides this odd farang who wanted to live in the mountains. Aside from the fact that I spent the first two hours sniffing mentholatum in a desperate effort to keep my lunch of noodles from reappearing, I loved the trip up. After the first 61 kilometers, a rest, one little drammamine pill, and 20 children piling on the back of the truck, we tackled the final 37 kilometers. It took two hours (during rainy season it can take many more), crammed into a double cab pickup with 4 other people. I got to know them. And I like them.
Saohin was small, with a school, a police station, a temple and a few houses, more like a wilderness outpost than a true village. They said a church was up the road a bit in another village. Most of the 80 plus children come from other villages to study at Saohin.
(photo credit: กรุงเทพธุระกิจ) Sometimes this even happens, according to the news.
We went to Burma on Sunday, crossing over the border passport-less about 3 kilometers from Saohin. We toured some places, ate some sweet desserts and came back.
No phone service exists for most of the 98 kilometers from Mae Sariang to Saohin. Electricity is brought to the village via a few solar panels, but most daily work is done without the aid of electricity. Most of the cooking is done over an open fire, and washing is done by hand. No refrigerators exist.
I came back to Mae Sariang on Sunday night, mulling my experiences in my mind. Three months. Could I handle it for three months? Maybe. More than that? I don’t know.
There are always those times when the dreams we dream start to become true, and reality hits us like the freezing splash of water of the dip shower I took on Saturday night in the teachers’ house. And odd little things start niggling at our minds. Can I give up my midnight habit of eating cornflakes each night? (no fridge= no milk.) Take cold showers? Live with no phone service?
But when I came back down, pictures of the village kept flashing through my mind. And I KNOW it sounds cliché, but a piece of my heart was left there in that dry mountain forest on the western edge of Mae Hong Son. And I knew I wanted to go back.
But the road to Saohin didn’t start on Saturday, Feb 1 when I left Mae Sariang. It didn’t even begin on Friday, when I left Chiang Mai. Or even when I started looking for an internship, searching through Google maps and finding places that became further and further away.
Perhaps it began one day under a little thatched roof when two of my friends and I were dreaming about what we would do when we would get “big.” I never thought the things we wrote down that day would actually become true.
Perhaps it started the day I traveled with the CMCC youth group to a Karen village in Doi Dtao, Chiang Mai, up roads similar to those of Saohin.
Perhaps it started February 1, 2014, when I made my decision to move to Thailand. Or perhaps the day I signed up to go to IGo.
Perhaps not. Perhaps the road to Saohin began when I was in the 5th grade and listening to the speaker with the funny Carmel name talk about her experiences in South America. Perhaps it started when my teacher gave me the book Peace Child to read. Perhaps it started when I picked up my history book and started learning about far away countries with odd sounding names.
Perhaps it started one day on the sandpile underneath a bunch of green ferns when I prayed to give my life to Christ.
I don’t know. But I do know that “road leads on to road” (Frost). I know that it looks like Saohin will be my home for three months starting hopefully sometime in June, with week long trips to Mae Sariang once a month. But that doesn’t mean the road to Saohin leads to my final destination. Perhaps the road to Saohin is only a road that eventually leads to other roads.
I don’t know. But a sense of deep joy and expectation fills me as in my mind’s eye I look up that road, winding, muddy and steep, to what lies ahead.
Thank you, Jesus.
Woven through each day like colors in the rain, the words
Couple together in a sheen of mist, these two words.
And when the pain throws its curtains gray over the world
Its anguish cloaking, I do not despair; I know the words.
For when its shadow lifts, the rain throws light like prisms
Into the sky where I catch them as they fall; these words.
These two words spell out my days; each gives wings to the other
Piercing through the rawness– alive, quivering, these two words.
For my name is Rung*, and when grief comes stealing through the rain
I know hope follows. It will, for I know these two words.
*Rung (รุ้ง) is my Thai name meaning rainbow
This is a Ghazal, written for my poetry and drama class. A ghazal is originally an Arabic form of poetry, must have 5 or more couplets, ends its couplets with the same words, and includes the name of the author in the final couplet.
“She’s a teacher here, for sure.”
The low murmur followed me out of the room as I left from a meeting with my educational adviser. I turned halfway and flashed the speaker a smile and left, leaving her to wonder if I really had understood her statement in Thai to the lady beside her.
I get it a lot. Wearing a dress and a veil often gives Thai people the idea that I am some sort of important person. I’ve been asked if I am a nun, a sister, a nurse. I have been called an ajarn (a word often used for a professor) when I went in to registration at my university.
I grew up wearing dresses around women who always wore dresses, so our wearing dresses did not really reflect much of our personality. It is different in Thai culture. Thai people view ladies who always wear dresses as เรียบร้อย “riab roi” (proper) and along with that word comes a host of other presuppositions: you are gentle, you are organized, you are ladylike, you are the epitome of womanhood. I am none of those and sadly shall never be. I am not very “riab roi” either. I ride horses in dresses, I play soccer in dresses, I run races in dresses, I climb up waterfalls in dresses, I milk cows in dresses, and I go hunting in dresses.
But in thinking about all of this, I came to the humorous conclusion that few people understand me well and no one understands me perfectly.
And that is totally ok. I know Someone who does understand me. I have imperfect perceptions about people around us as well.
So in thinking it over, here are some different identities people around me give me, or I think they do.
WHO THE GENERAL THAI PUBLIC THINKS I AM
WHO MY CLASSMATES THINK I AM
WHO FELLOW NON-ANABAPTIST AMERICANS THINK I AM
WHO CHRISTIANS FROM MY HOME AREA THINK I AM
WHO NEWLY ARRIVED EXPATS TO THAILAND THINK I AM
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
WHO PEOPLE IN NEED OF TRANSLATION OR EDITING THINK I AM
WHO MY HOUSEMATES THINK I AM
Photo by 立志 牟 on Unsplash
WHO MY HOUSEMATES THINK I AM IN EARLY MORNING
WHO MY FAMILY THINKS I AM
WHO SOME OF MY STUDENTS THINK I AM
WHO OTHERS OF MY STUDENTS THINK I AM
WHO MY TEACHERS THINK I AM
Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay
WHO I THINK I AM
Image by Isa KARAKUS from Pixabay
WHO I REALLY AM
This past semester I took one of my favorite classes ever, Intercultural Communication. Some of the themes we studied in the first part of the semester were communication, identity, and culture; later we delved into issues such as child soldiers, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, child marriage, and genocide. As a part of the class, we each came up with a creative project or reflection on what we had learned, since a lot of the material was heavy and dark. Since I love poetry, I took the chance to come up with my own spoken word poetry piece and performed it. I pulled from the theme of identity that we had studied in the first half and combined it with some of the issues of the second half, using the metaphor of shoes to describe how we can empathize with the oppressed. Below is the poem that I wrote and performed as spoken word. (photo credit above: pixabay.com)
You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their feet.
But you can never really know a person until you walk a mile in their shoes.
My father’s boots were tall and strong
Like him
Made to stride through the mud to spread straw for cows on cold winter mornings
Or through tall prairie grasses to hunt for the stray calf lost in the wheatgrass
On sunny spring mornings when the swallow swooped over dewy meadows
My mother’s shoes were tiny and timid
Like her
Black and trimmed with tucked-in edges that she wore for Sunday church
Her shoes fit in with all the other women’s shoes
When lined in a row when sitting on the backless benches
Except hers couldn’t touch the floor
My ancestor’s shoes were rough and rugged
Like them
They trod the hill paths of Germany
Slipping through the forests silently, stealthily
Stealing through the starlight to meet in caves
By underground rivers in the dead of night to be rebaptized–
Radicals and reformers.
Their shoes took them to the courts of Zurich, preaching and persuading
And some to their deaths
To burning at stake, drowning in the Lammat River
My ancestor’s shoes carried them onto boats
Fleeing on boats coming across wide, wild waters
Where they became a band of bewildered immigrants
In a nation and a tongue not their own
The words they spoke became heavy on their Swiss German tongues
And their fear of facing the fires again
Closed their mouths;
The firebrands and reformers became the silent in the land
Die Stille im Land.
Their shoes changed from strong mountain shoes
And religious rebel shoes
To quiet and capable shoes
Plowing the land and planting corn,
Until the East became too crowded
Then they pulled on their traveling shoes,
Their plain pioneer shoes
Boarded wagons and trains and boats
And staring into the setting sun, braved the dust, and
Gritting their teeth against the drought,
They lost their children to the prairies’ grip
Grimly facing the taunts of neighbors who called them “those Germans”
When to be German was to be a Nazi
While their accents never fit in
Just like their shoes.
What kind of shoes do you wear?
What kind of shoes did your father wear?
What kind of shoes did your grandmother wear?
I want to know.
Some people wear ballerinas and brogues, bast shoes and brogans
Others trod in trainers, Tsarouhis, tiger head shoes, and toe shoes
Pampooties, peeptoe shoes, peranakans, peshaawaris, platform shoes, pointininis
And still others wear silver shoes, slingbacks, slip on shoes, slippers,
Sneakers, snow shoes, spool heels, stiletto heels, sailing shoes.
Moccasins and winklepickers, Mojaris and wellingtons, Mules and wedges
Some people wear moccasins that have seen the dust of trails
And the tears of those trails where millions died while weeping and walking
A convenient quiet massacre
Some little girls wear red leather tarkasin on their wedding day
Feet curling with fear while they say yes to a man three times their age
Who steals their past and their present and their future
Some people do not wear any shoes as they run
Panting and gasping through the jungle at night
While flames tongue the sky and gunshots pierce the silence
Some children wear crude heavy army boots
Whose marching beats out
Power
And plunder
And pain
And march them to destroy the ones who love them most
And themselves
Some children do not wear any shoes at all,
Since the explosion of the land mine that stole their father’s lives
Took their own feet as well
Some people took off their shoes before they stepped into the shower
The shower that stole the breaths of their shaved and shorn and shattered bodies
And all that was left was—
Shoes
Some babies wore tiny soft shoes, wrapped onto tiny soft feet
When under an Eastern moon their skulls were bashed against the tree
The Killing Tree, they called it
By soldiers with hearts of rubber wearing shoes of rubber tires.
Destroy them by their roots, they said.
What kind of shoes do you wear?
What kind of shoes did your father wear?
What kind of shoes did your grandmother wear?
I want to know.
Can I wear your shoes?
I cannot wear your shoes
They were not made for me.
But I can wear my mother and my father’s shoes
I can wear my ancestors’ shoes
And when I wear their shoes, I can know a little bit
A little bit
Of what it means to be invisible on the margin, the edge
To be born inconveniently.
To dread the knock on the door in the middle of the night
To lie haggard and hungry on a boat adrift
To live in a land where tongues cannot curl around strange sounds
And the name carried is synonymous with enemy.
To have fathers turn upon daughters and sons turn upon mothers
To bury children under a scorching sky
In a strange land
Perhaps I can know,
A little bit
When I wear their shoes
You and I, it’s
Complicated.
There’s nothing like the way I feel when I hear your voice
The way it makes my stomach quiver,
The way I love how you wrap your arms around me,
And the way I feel lost in you.
We’ve loved each other for a long time;
But…. it’s complicated.
I remember the first day I met you
Me, a farm girl from Kansas on her first flight, giddy, naïve, excited
When I jumped past the “authorized personnel only” sign to rescue my bag
From where it was headed into the unknown
And they shouted at me.
That’s when we first met, you and I.
Me, the farm girl with starry eyes who fell hard for you,
You–so much older than me, the one who had seen every kind of person in the world
Who had traveled to the four corners of the earth
I fell for you then, and I’ve loved you since
I fell in love with the way you whispered poetry in my ear
Of places you wanted to take me
Things you wanted to show me
Languages you wanted me to hear
People you wanted me to meet
And I’ve been in love ever since.
But…. it’s complicated.
I love the way you’re always alive and moving.
The way your heart beats late at night
When I put my ear on your chest
And listen to the sound of your dreams throbbing
The way Boeing 747’s do going down the runway.
I love the way you inspire me to dream,
To wander, to explore
To go where no one else has gone before.
I love the way I see every color in you;
And how every language under the sun
Rolls alive and rich on your tongue;
And when I hear you say the words
โปรดทราบ เครื่องของสายการบิน Air Asia เที่ยวบินที่ FD 3113
พร้อมแล้วที่จะออกเดินทางไปเชียงใหม่
ขอเรียนเชินผู่ด้วยสารทุกท่านขึ้นเครื่องได้ ณ ทางออกหมายเลกสอง
ขอบคุณค่ะ **
I thrill. No one speaks to my heart like you do.
And yet… it’s so complicated.
I love you, but every time I see you,
You rip me away from others I love,
Tearing like the tabs tearing from boarding passes at the gate.
You make me feel at home,
Yet you take me away from home and then tease me with memories of home in the eyes of the little blonde boy sitting in front of me at Gate 29
You bring me to places that stamp themselves onto my heart
Then you block them off from me
Like visas denied at the last minute.
You send me friends that become a part of me
Then break them away while my heart crumbles
Like the hard cookies on the flight to Shanghai.
You broaden my horizons and leave me in awe
And then collapse them like my luggage does after I’ve unpacked everything from it
You teach me things I never knew
Then change it all up, so I’m confused and can’t find my way
As if I were lost in Suvarnabhumi all over again.
And everywhere I go with you, you always, always make me pay
In tears
That are wrenched from a heart that wonders
Why I let someone do this to me
Can you see why I love you
And why I hate you?
It’s just…. complicated
But you’ve seen me at my lowest, my worst,
When I’ve been awake for 24 hours,
And smell like a pair of socks that were packed dirty
And left through two missed flights
While their owner slept on the hard floor.
You’ve taken me with all my baggage and dug around in it
Found all my dirty secrets, and let me into your heart anyway.
You’ve wrapped your arms around me while I sat crying
On the row of seats waiting for AA 2828 to leave Wichita
You’ve seen me alone and lonely in the masses
Yet, I feel at home when I am with you.
You enraptured me in Doha, where you were so quiet I too became silent
In Shanghai you taught me the beauty of doing nothing
You forced me to drink all the water in my bottle in Seoul in 25 seconds
I spent the night with you in Chicago while the snow fell and cold seeped into my bones
In Guangzhou we fought over the price of chocolate-covered blueberries
And in Bangkok I watched you, dazzled at the hundreds of different faces of you
I’ve drunk coffee with you in Tokyo, in Dallas, in Wichita
And held hands with you in Ho Chin Minh City.
In Chiang Mai you brought hundreds of people into my life—and then took them away again.
I lost my heart to you in Kunming and in Phnom Penh and in Calcutta
And when I bussed back from Laos
Every bone in my body ached from missing you.
And yeah, you’ve messed up.
You’ve kept me waiting and waiting without an answer
You’ve gone back on promises, let other things come first
You turned a cold shoulder to me that night in Chicago
When I was freezing and no matter how many blankets I wrapped around myself, my heart was so cold.
I lost my trust in you when you made me pay an arm and a leg
For those dumplings in China when I was starving
And I will never forget the regret that filled my heart
In O’Hara when you took that $4 chocolate chip cookie from me
While I was distracted by you….
It still haunts me
You’re just…. complicated
And yet, I keep on coming back to you
Over and over again.
Even when you take people from me, people I love
I love you even when I have to pay thousands of dollars just to see you
And you keep breaking my heart over and over.
I love getting lost in your embrace,
Tasting all you have to offer
Watching the grace of your movements and the vibrancy of your color
I love us.
Even though…
We’re complicated.
*This is Slam Poetry (recycled homework again) something I did for my Advanced Oral Communications class. To listen to the performance, check out this link: my love affair with airports
**This is Thai writing meaning this: Attention please. Air Asia Flight FD 3113 to Chiang Mai is now boarding at Gate # 2. Thank you.
Just recently I have been reminded of the importance of community. I am by nature not someone who gravitates toward community, but I have learned and am learning how important it is to surround yourself with trustworthy people. These ladies, the Baanies, have taught me so much. Where I fail, they make up for it. My weaknesses are their strengths, my strengths are their weaknesses. Alone we could never do what we do now. They have taught me about friendship, about sharing, about beauty, about strength, about trust. Close to a year ago I blogged a poem about my “baanies.” Click here to read it. Now it’s close to a year later and with several of them leaving, I find myself a bit nostalgic. I don’t post these poems because I think they are masterpieces in the realm of poetry– they’re not. But even if the rhythm and rhyming is stilted and simple, it embodies some of what these ladies bring to life here in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Oh, we live in house that leaks when it rains
And spiders have tea in the cracks
But we are the Baanies so we don’t mind
Cause we’ve got each other’s backs
Judi went home, she said, “just because”
But we all really know why
There’s a guy named Mike she thinks she likes
Even though she’s back in Chiang Mai;
This Mike, we think, may be ok
But we’re keeping our eyes trained tight:
He’d better be good, and do as he should
Or we will all put him to flight.
Kim is well and busy as ever
And next week she is saying goodbye
To the tropics of Thailand for the snows of the North
For the handshake instead of the wai;
We’ll miss her heaps and all of her songs
And her passion and kindness as well,
But she’ll shine her light wherever she is
That we can surely foretell.
Crystal keeps life in this house refreshing
When naps in the bathroom she takes,
She likes to push others into the pool
And finds in her bike long skinny snakes;
She’s got a heart that is made of gold
(So her students would gladly say)
Coffee makes her happy (and of course us too)
She is just fun to be with all day.
Oh, we live in house that leaks when it rains
And spiders have tea in the cracks,
But we are the Baanies so we don’t mind
Cause we’ve got each other’s backs.
Melissa is as sweet and understanding as ever
And just in the weeks that passed
She bravely called a man to come kill our rats
(Even though her heart beat fast)
Her Thai is better than ever before
But she is going home in May
This makes us wonder who will clean the kitchen
And makes us sadder than we can say.
Nancy has learned how to speak Thai
And she’s really good at latte art
We all like to listen when she laughs
And hers is a kind, sensitive heart
She drives a funny, yellow Fino
A lot like a bumblebee, I’d say
She zips around corners and weaves through traffic
While we hold on tight and— pray.
Oh, we live in house that leaks when it rains
And spiders have tea in the cracks
But we are the Baanies so we don’t mind
Cause we’ve got each other’s backs.
Brit will be an aunt before too long
We’re all happy for her sake
She doesn’t lose her phone as much anymore
And you should see the fires she makes
She’s smart and selfless and loves little kids
And really, she’s almost Thai,
And when we think of her leaving for home
The only thing we want to do — is cry.
Lori’s still here and her hair is even grayer
And she’s slipped down her stairs a few times
She’s got itchy feet and she dreams of the mountains
And she still makes weird little rhymes
She’ll still be in school for another two years
And then watch out, she’ll be free
To travel away, to teach or to train,
Or be whatever God calls her to be.
Oh, we live in house that leaks when it rains
And spiders have tea in the cracks
But we are the Baanies so we don’t mind
Cause we’ve got each other’s backs
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