I’m officially halfway through Pre-Service Training (PST)!! Long weeks and hot bike rides have added up to some significant changes in my life – trying to adjust to a new normal that is anything but normal for me. It’s hard to put into words what this first month (almost two) in country have been like, and I’m not even sure that I’ll ever do this beautiful place justice. But I’ll give it a shot.
PST is like this: think back to finals week in college. Your biggest final is tomorrow and you’ve spent all week cramming everything you ever learned in that class inside your noggin. When your head feels leaden with information, you go to sleep with the promise that you can vomit that information onto the test in the morning. After, you inevitably feel lighter, less constipated with information. Are you remembering how dense, heavy, and packed your head felt in that moment?
Now, imagine that there’s no test. This is just your life now. All that information needs to stay up there, and your brain feels like the inside of a large purse – absolute chaos. Nothing is where you left it, even though you’re sure it’s in there somewhere. Some days my Thai is great and I feel like I’ve made progress, and some days I blank on how to say “Yes, I ate already” (which, if I communicate anything about Thai culture, is that this is an important phrase when you talk to the neighborhood grandmas). Some days, I feel like I’m at the bottom of the purse and subsequently forget English words. I SPEAK English.
We learn Thai for approximately four hours a day, and either proceed to teach a class in Thai for our practicum or consume more information in Youth in Development Sessions. I’m somehow always tired, even though my family looks at me around 8 o’clock and tells me to go brush my teeth and head to bed. I must wear exhaustion on my face. Which would make sense to me, because I feel it in my bones.
Somehow at the very same time, I leave every class re-energized. Exhausted, but so deeply hopeful about the future. I’ve fallen in love with this wonderful host family here in Thailand, and I regularly leave my classroom feeling a sense of pride in my instruction and a tenderness towards my students.
I’ve spent my whole life telling people that I’m not a teacher. Sure, it seems like my whole family is filled with teachers – Mom, Grandpa, Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins. Teaching seems almost to be in our blood. I defiantly majored in Political Science, took a job in Financial Services, and then signed up for the Peace Corps… where I have somehow found myself in a classroom over the last few weeks. I had no experience teaching, and I was tasked with teaching in Thai – a language I had been learning for maybe three weeks. My classroom seemed to always be moments away from descending into chaos, but I can feel myself come alive with the challenge.
When I talked with my family right after arriving here, I told them that this is absolutely, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The most uncomfortable, the most challenging. And I said it with a grin across my face.
Here are just a few moments or things about PST that help describe this experience:
I keep finding geckos in my room or toads the size of my hand in my bathroom, and I quietly whisper “I won’t bother you if you won’t bother me.”
My 9-year-old host brother Si greets me with a dab every day after school and plays “Young, Dumb, & Broke” on repeat. Not sure why those things are the parts of American culture that made it to Thailand, but there’s no getting away from them. I think I dabbed for the first time in my life just to make him smile.
Some days, my morning bike ride is through a fog that densely blankets the country side. It’s simultaneously wet and beautiful. My family checks to make sure I turn my bike lights on. Ben heung.
I am always sweaty and I’m actually getting jealous of Minnesota’s snow days. Once in a while, the evening will have a cool breeze that dances through our outdoor common space. On those nights, I stand with my perpetually wet post-shower hair and just exist in that breeze. The “hot” season is yet to come.
I walked three times around a Buddhist temple on a Thai National Holiday this week. The experience was punctuated with the familiar sounds of dogs barking and mothers yelling in Thai at their children. It was peaceful, beautiful, and made me feel like part of the community.
There is a Grandma who comes to my house once in awhile (I have no idea who she is or where she comes from). She asks me whether or not I’ve eaten, what I did that day, and sweetly holds my hands while she asks. I love her.
My Thai Mom teaches students at our house after school. I’ve started doing my homework out by the students, and I occasionally even have conversations with them I can understand. The other day I asked a little girl to write my Thai nick-name in Thai. She wrote “I love you” instead.
I have a community of 58 humans going through some of the exact same things I am. We laugh together, stress each other out, and are continually learning from and with each other. We drink a beer at the end of the week, talk about how wild it is that we get to do this for two years, and vent about our stressor of the day (or week). I’m not alone, and that’s so wonderful to me.
Every week, “resource volunteers” join us at our PST sessions. These are volunteers who are currently serving, and in theory their job is to teach us how to do our job. In reality, I think they’re there to say “Chill.” One of the last resource volunteers said that she has had an incredible experience at site, but she felt like she was in survival mode during PST. I don’t know if I’m quite in “survival mode”, but I’m definitely taking it day by day. This experience is exciting and overwhelming, joy filled and frustrating, encouraging and exhausting.
I’m glad it’s hard, otherwise it wouldn’t feel quite so rewarding. Everything worth doing is hard. I can do this, I can survive. Even if, for now, I’m just surviving.
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