As of today, I have been in Thailand for one year.
It's by far the longest I've ever lived in any one place outside of the U.S. It's three times as long as my time in London, and just slightly longer than all my projects in Latin America put together. It's about a third of the time I spent on my college campus.
Time has telescoped. When I'd been here for six months, I felt like it had been decades, but now I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that it's been more than a year since I hugged MD goodbye at the airport and wondered why she was getting teary-eyed when we'd done this so many times before. Looking back, I think that maybe she understood better than I did that I had no idea what I was getting into.
When I first decided to come, I promised Harriet that I would stay for a minimum of six months. Within two months, I had committed to a year. By August, I was telling people that I'd probably stay until June - then through the summer - then through the end of my next visa.
People are always asking me if I'm not homesick. Don't I miss my family? My friends? My own country?
I do miss MD, and I'm not just saying that because I know she'll be reading this with a pen in her hand, poised to strike me out of the will. I miss my friends, and my nieces, and my incredibly stupid cats. But I miss them - you - in a pleasant, wistful sort of way, the sort of warm nostalgia in which one is free to indulge from the viewpoint of a happy present. I enjoy thinking about everyone, imagining what they're doing, wondering how they've changed in the last year, and I look forward to our inevitable reunions.
But I'm happy, here and now. I enjoy my job. I'm part of a community. I spend every day among people I love: kids who make ghost noises outside my house at night, coworkers who slap my ass in front of visitors, women who invent gossip about my nonexistent love life. Most importantly, maybe, I really believe in the work we're doing here.
That's not to say that everything is wonderful and we all go about our days whistling a merry working song. This is a women's shelter, after all, and our work is frequently exhausting. Sometimes our women fight and cry and don't do their work and scream at their kids. In the grand scheme of things, we don't have a lot of full-fledged Success Stories. Everyone here - women, kids, staff, volunteers - is human, and flawed. We don't always do the right thing. Sometimes we don't even know what the right thing is.
And there are other things, smaller everyday things that don't merit much thought but are aggravating nonetheless. My work permit application is driving me cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. My stomach turns when I see that we're having jellied pig's blood soup for dinner, again. I'm always broke. The Chihuahua-sized rats in my ceiling are forever body-slamming each other and screeching at 1:00 in the morning. Decent cheese and bread are nearly impossible to find, and this country has done horrible things to the hot dog. I frequently smell like pee or poop or throw-up or some tantalizing mixture of the three.
And then there are the other things, the things that keep me up at night and make my stomach hurt when I think about them too long. Alma, Josiah, Winnie, Rosalind and Saul are all in prison, indefinitely. Sally is back in her village with a host of emotional and behavioral problems, a neglectful-verging-on-abusive family, and a baby she can't take care of. Gertie may or may not be safe in her village in Burma.
But that's just life, isn't it? Terrible things happen to good people, sometimes, and it's not fair, but the universe doesn't have a reliable system for filing complaints. The fact is, I can't get the Vietnamese out of prison. I can't undo what's happened to them. I can't guarantee that things will work out for them. What I can do is talk to them during furtive phone calls, and buy them new underwear, and daydream about happy futures for them. I can love them. It's not much, but it's something.
And there are new people to love, as well. There's the new Vietnamese refugee family, who I thought I would resent but have come to adore, helplessly and against my better judgment. There are new women, and new children, and new volunteers. There are fat drooling babies who have become restless toddlers, screeching hellions who have become rays of sunshine, kids who have learned to read and write and count to twenty in three languages.
I haven't written much here lately. That's a little bit due to laziness - okay, a lot due to laziness - but mainly it's because this is theoretically a travel blog, and I no longer feel like I'm traveling. Don't get me wrong: I have no plans to settle here permanently, and I will probably come back to the U.S. sooner than later.
But the shelter isn't just a place I'm passing through. For now, for the foreseeable future, it's home. I have friends, and a routine, and some pretty compelling reasons to get up in the morning. I have a life, and it might not be perfect or easy or particularly sanitary - but it's pretty damn good.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
communing with nature, part ii
I was alone in the office for a while yesterday, which was kind of weird. Even with Harriet and Albert gone, I'm still sharing space with a small army of people: Agatha, Robin, Betty using the sewing machine, Nancy writing up grocery budgets, Blanche doing the admin work, volunteers teaching English (they used to teach elsewhere, but apparently they like having me nearby to answer questions), various small children who are generally crying or peeing or both, not to mention the world's most god-awful annoying cat.
So anyway, I was alone in the office, for once, which meant that I was the only person around to witness the big old snake scooting right in the door like it owned the place.
And, look: I've long since made my peace with the snakes here. I really had no choice. They're always frantically darting out across the path in front of me, like deer on a highway, because it literally does not occur to them that they could just wait two seconds for me to pass by. I see them wriggling and swinging in the trees next to the spider path. At night, I hear them dicking around in the irrigation ditch under my house.
(Aside: a volunteer recently asked if he could walk barefoot into the ditch to do some clean-up, and I was like, "Sure! I mean, there are snakes and frogs and bizarrely razor-finned fish in there, and you will probably die. But whatever, man, I'm not your dad.")
So anyway, the snakes and I have an agreement of sorts. I make plenty of noise to let them know I'm coming, especially at night, and they stay the ever-loving hell out of my way. I don't scream or grab a machete when I see them - unlike some people I could mention - and they haul ass in another direction. I do my thing, and they do theirs.
This snake had evidently not received the memo, because it attempting to do its thing in the office, a small building with limited escape routes and a no-shoes policy. There's a no-snakes policy as well - I checked - but as everyone knows, fucking snakes can't read for shit.
In the five seconds it took for me to think, SNAKE SNAKE OH GOD DO THEY REALLY HAVE TO MOVE LIKE THAT, the snake disappeared under a desk, leaving me standing there barefoot and catatonic, a pillar of salt in a pee-stained t-shirt. Completely stunned by what had just happened, I stared at the desk with intense concentration, as if by the power of my mind it might levitate or become transparent or, even better, explode and kill us all.
None of these things happened. I eventually summoned the courage to peek under the desk, but the snake was nowhere to be seen. I wasn't about to play hide-and-seek with the legless bastard, so I slowly went back to my desk and sat down in my chair. With both my feet up on the seat. For two hours.
Because, man, things are always crawling on me here. Geckos dart up my leg while I'm showering before bed. Millipedes get frisky with me while I'm in bed. I'm forever picking ants off my neck and arms, out of my nose and bra. (I don't want to talk about it.) I wake up every morning with bright red bites from the spiders that manage to infiltrate my mosquito net. I have actually had a snake zip across my feet out on the spider path, and somehow managed not to shit myself and die. I try to be a grown-up about these things. Whatever, I love waking up to millipedes on my calf! Come on, geckos, at least buy me a drink first! Ha! ha!
But you guys, there was a SNAKE in the OFFICE. Actually, for all I know, it might still be in here. Like I said, this building doesn't offer a lot of escape routes, and someone generally notices when a snake slithers across the floor. So just think about that the next time you're having a bad day at work. Your coworkers might all be idiots and your papers could probably be pushed by a monkey, but at least your risk of snake attack is < 0.1%.
And then! Oh, yes, there's an "and then," because when is there not, with me? And then I went out for my Thai lesson, to the little gazebo where Khruu Aajaan and I try not to strangle each other, and just as I was grabbing the whiteboard, a massive huntsman appeared out of nowhere right next to my hand. This was not the sort of spider you might keep under a cup on your bathroom floor - firstly because that would be like attempting to trap an rhinoceros under a trashcan, so you would really need a saucepan or a salad bowl or something, and secondly because upon finding that spider in your bathroom you would immediately evacuate all your vital organs through your, ah, asterisk and the spider would feast on your still-warm remains.
Back in the gazebo, I made a horrible, strangled noise of despair and jerked my hand back at approximately the speed of sound. Instead of investigating the cause of my panic, Khruu Aajaan peered curiously at my stricken face, like a dog that won't stop staring at your finger when you tell her to fetch.
"Spider! Big spider!" I said, or would have said if I weren't choking on my tongue. It came out more like, "HRGLDIBLRNK."
Khruu Aajaan eventually deciphered my gurgling and wild gesticulation, and finally glanced over at the whiteboard, from which the huntsman had by now vanished without a trace. He chuckled. "Mai bpen rai, mai bpen rai," he said, parroting the catchphrase of all Thailand. No big deal.
Mai bpen rai my adrenaline-shocked ass, buddy. Okay, so huntsman spiders aren't usually the biting sort, at least not where humans are involved, but I reserve the right to fear any arachnid that could beat me in an arm-wrestling match.
I'd like to say that all this is making me a tougher, more resilient person, a slightly more feminine Bear Grylls, capable of laughing off or snacking on any vermin that crosses my path. But the truth is that I have learned nothing. I am a bug-fearing woman-child and always will be. I deal with it - all of it, all the snakes and spiders and millipedes and the unspeakably boisterous rats in my ceiling - only because my sole alternative is death, and there are too many mangoes in the world for that to be a viable option. If I could somehow kill off every single creepy-crawly in this province, I would do it in a heartbeat, and to hell with the ecosystem.
As it is, I am become Death, the destroyer of invertebrate worlds. I crush helpless rolled-up millipedes on my bedroom floor; I mutilate any ant foolish enough to approach me; I smash spiders into the bathroom wall and leave their spider children to starve. Anything smaller and less powerful than me is fair game, and as soon as they cross a certain annoyance threshold, they are finished.
So just keep that in mind, cat.
So anyway, I was alone in the office, for once, which meant that I was the only person around to witness the big old snake scooting right in the door like it owned the place.
And, look: I've long since made my peace with the snakes here. I really had no choice. They're always frantically darting out across the path in front of me, like deer on a highway, because it literally does not occur to them that they could just wait two seconds for me to pass by. I see them wriggling and swinging in the trees next to the spider path. At night, I hear them dicking around in the irrigation ditch under my house.
(Aside: a volunteer recently asked if he could walk barefoot into the ditch to do some clean-up, and I was like, "Sure! I mean, there are snakes and frogs and bizarrely razor-finned fish in there, and you will probably die. But whatever, man, I'm not your dad.")
So anyway, the snakes and I have an agreement of sorts. I make plenty of noise to let them know I'm coming, especially at night, and they stay the ever-loving hell out of my way. I don't scream or grab a machete when I see them - unlike some people I could mention - and they haul ass in another direction. I do my thing, and they do theirs.
This snake had evidently not received the memo, because it attempting to do its thing in the office, a small building with limited escape routes and a no-shoes policy. There's a no-snakes policy as well - I checked - but as everyone knows, fucking snakes can't read for shit.
In the five seconds it took for me to think, SNAKE SNAKE OH GOD DO THEY REALLY HAVE TO MOVE LIKE THAT, the snake disappeared under a desk, leaving me standing there barefoot and catatonic, a pillar of salt in a pee-stained t-shirt. Completely stunned by what had just happened, I stared at the desk with intense concentration, as if by the power of my mind it might levitate or become transparent or, even better, explode and kill us all.
None of these things happened. I eventually summoned the courage to peek under the desk, but the snake was nowhere to be seen. I wasn't about to play hide-and-seek with the legless bastard, so I slowly went back to my desk and sat down in my chair. With both my feet up on the seat. For two hours.
Because, man, things are always crawling on me here. Geckos dart up my leg while I'm showering before bed. Millipedes get frisky with me while I'm in bed. I'm forever picking ants off my neck and arms, out of my nose and bra. (I don't want to talk about it.) I wake up every morning with bright red bites from the spiders that manage to infiltrate my mosquito net. I have actually had a snake zip across my feet out on the spider path, and somehow managed not to shit myself and die. I try to be a grown-up about these things. Whatever, I love waking up to millipedes on my calf! Come on, geckos, at least buy me a drink first! Ha! ha!
But you guys, there was a SNAKE in the OFFICE. Actually, for all I know, it might still be in here. Like I said, this building doesn't offer a lot of escape routes, and someone generally notices when a snake slithers across the floor. So just think about that the next time you're having a bad day at work. Your coworkers might all be idiots and your papers could probably be pushed by a monkey, but at least your risk of snake attack is < 0.1%.
And then! Oh, yes, there's an "and then," because when is there not, with me? And then I went out for my Thai lesson, to the little gazebo where Khruu Aajaan and I try not to strangle each other, and just as I was grabbing the whiteboard, a massive huntsman appeared out of nowhere right next to my hand. This was not the sort of spider you might keep under a cup on your bathroom floor - firstly because that would be like attempting to trap an rhinoceros under a trashcan, so you would really need a saucepan or a salad bowl or something, and secondly because upon finding that spider in your bathroom you would immediately evacuate all your vital organs through your, ah, asterisk and the spider would feast on your still-warm remains.
Back in the gazebo, I made a horrible, strangled noise of despair and jerked my hand back at approximately the speed of sound. Instead of investigating the cause of my panic, Khruu Aajaan peered curiously at my stricken face, like a dog that won't stop staring at your finger when you tell her to fetch.
"Spider! Big spider!" I said, or would have said if I weren't choking on my tongue. It came out more like, "HRGLDIBLRNK."
Khruu Aajaan eventually deciphered my gurgling and wild gesticulation, and finally glanced over at the whiteboard, from which the huntsman had by now vanished without a trace. He chuckled. "Mai bpen rai, mai bpen rai," he said, parroting the catchphrase of all Thailand. No big deal.
Mai bpen rai my adrenaline-shocked ass, buddy. Okay, so huntsman spiders aren't usually the biting sort, at least not where humans are involved, but I reserve the right to fear any arachnid that could beat me in an arm-wrestling match.
I'd like to say that all this is making me a tougher, more resilient person, a slightly more feminine Bear Grylls, capable of laughing off or snacking on any vermin that crosses my path. But the truth is that I have learned nothing. I am a bug-fearing woman-child and always will be. I deal with it - all of it, all the snakes and spiders and millipedes and the unspeakably boisterous rats in my ceiling - only because my sole alternative is death, and there are too many mangoes in the world for that to be a viable option. If I could somehow kill off every single creepy-crawly in this province, I would do it in a heartbeat, and to hell with the ecosystem.
As it is, I am become Death, the destroyer of invertebrate worlds. I crush helpless rolled-up millipedes on my bedroom floor; I mutilate any ant foolish enough to approach me; I smash spiders into the bathroom wall and leave their spider children to starve. Anything smaller and less powerful than me is fair game, and as soon as they cross a certain annoyance threshold, they are finished.
So just keep that in mind, cat.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
beggars would ride
Most of the time.
&
But Alma - Alma is my kid, in a way that Josiah will never be. She needs me more than he does. She whoops my ass at Go Fish. She explains soap operas to me. She claims to tell me secrets she doesn't tell anyone else. She trusts and relies on me in a way that makes me want to live up to her expectations. I am her friend and confidante, and she is my favorite kid in the world.
&
We don't tell them the truth.
I go with Matthew to pick up the kids at school. Matthew is a German volunteer who got swept into this mess shortly after he started working at the shelter. Pippi needed someone who spoke Thai to accompany her to the jail, and Matthew was able and willing. Two months later, he's as irrevocably tangled in all this as any of us. Josiah in particular is very attached to him.
The students stare at us as we walk across the courtyard, fascinated by the sudden intrusion of two very white farang into their daily routine. Matthew waves at them, and most of them grin and wave back.
We don't tell them the truth - not the faculty, not Alma and Josiah. For the director we spin a vague story about taking the kids to visit their mother, and we explain to Alma in English that Winnie is being sent to Bangkok and we're taking them to see her. Matthew is doing the lion's share of the talking, but I note his evasiveness and follow his lead, never dropping a hint that the kids are in real trouble.
Our justification, our toothless and spindly-legged defense, is that we are trying to protect them. We're still hoping that the kids won't have to go after all, that there's a way out of this, and we don't want to ruin everything for them if that's the case.
It's not right. It's not fair, not to the kids or to their friends, and I'll see that all too clearly later, when there's nothing to be done about it. In the moment, though, there's no more than a twinge of guilt as both kids emerge from the sea of their classmates and follow us out to the car.
&
Alma is angry. She argues with her mother over the phone, sharp indecipherable protests in her first and native language, the one she's admitted that she's starting to forget. Whatever she's saying, it's not pretty. Five minutes ago she was happy enough playing Neopets on my laptop, but that was before we both found out that it's not just the police who want the kids to go to Bangkok - it's their mother.
Pippi will tell me later that Winnie was baffled and upset by Alma's reaction. Apparently Alma had been complaining, the way kids do, that the food was bad and she missed her mom and she hated it at the shelter. Locked up away from her children, Winnie spun these complaints into an imagined nightmare existence. She assumed that the kids would want to come back to jail, to be with her and Rosalind and Saul.
Alma ends the call and sits there in the chair for a long, silent minute. She stares at the computer screen, ignoring everything and everyone: me, the meowing cat, the tears dripping off the line of her jaw.
I squeeze her knee. "You want me to help you get your stuff together?"
She shakes her head, eyes still fixed on the colorfully deranged Neopets. She named one after me, at one point. They'll probably all starve to death while she's in jail.
I'm at a loss. I've seen her cry before, but there's usually something I can do about it. I can negotiate peace agreements between squabbling friends and offer remedies for a toothache, but I don't know what to do here. I have to get her moving, somehow, get her to pack up her things and Josiah's. Instead, I get up and retrieve some toilet paper and cold water.
She doesn't acknowledge me wiping down her face, or reflexively smoothing back the hair that invariably escapes from her long braids.
"Come on," I say gently. "Let's go get your bags together."
"I want to go to school," she says, in that clenched voice so universal to stubborn, unhappy kids. She still has tendrils of sticky wet hair plastered to the side of her face, resisting my efforts to tidy her up.
"I know," I say - the old standby, the words I offer when there is nothing else to say. This time they mean, "I'm sorry," but I can't say that to her. It's useless, empty sentiment. She deserves more. She deserves so much.
&
Halfway through packing the bags, she's calmed down a little. I can't even believe this kid is real sometimes. If I were in her place, they'd have to shoot me with a tranquilizer dart to stop my raging and carrying-on.
She moves steadily back and forth between the bedroom and the bench outside, where I'm cramming things into bookbags and duffels. Her face is sullen, mouth pinched, but she's not crying anymore.
"Can you bring these back to my school?" She hands me a small stack of workbooks, and I'm suddenly struck by the incredible injustice to which I have contributed. She will never see her school again. She will never turn in her half-finished homework or explain her departure to her teachers or say goodbye to her friends. Matthew and I took that away from her, from both kids, and I can only hope that they never forgive us for it.
She left a few things over at Harriet's house, so we head that way next, avoiding the stares of the women and the curiosity of the kids.
"Where will I stay?" Alma asks suddenly. Her voice is still gritty with recent tears. I frown, and she clarifies. "It's full, they said. But if it's full, where will we stay? Who will I live with?"
Shit. She's obviously overheard the adults worrying about the conditions in the Immigration Detention Centre.
"I think you'll stay with your mom," I say carefully. I can't bring myself to explain that full doesn't really mean full, not at the IDC. There's always room for five more, even when there isn't.
She thinks it over for a minute. "What if there's not enough food?"
The question makes my throat close up. She's eleven fucking years old. She likes princesses and Sonny with a Chance. She shouldn't be thinking about this. She's a child, and I'm an adult who loves her. I should be able to tell her, "You don't have to worry about that." But I can't, because she does.
"I don't want to go," Alma says. "I want to go to school and visit them on the weekends."
It's not that she doesn't love her mother, or miss her. She's just a whip-smart kid who wants friends, books, some pale imitation of a real childhood. She will miss her friends at school, Elsa and Dotty, Sheila and Priscilla, Pippi, Betty, Matthew, me. She's tired of having her entire life taken away from her, over and over again. And she's afraid: of the prison, of the years they will most likely spend there, of what might come after.
"I don't want to go," she repeats, looking up at me.
"I know," I say. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
&
We reach Harriet's house, and Alma goes about pulling her wet clothes out of the washing machine and down off the line. "Do you want me to go get a bag, so the rest of your stuff doesn't get wet?" She jerks out a nod, mouth pressed into a thin unhappy line, and I trudge off toward my house.
She's still standing at the open washing machine when I come back. Her back is to me, but I can see that her arms are loaded up with clothes - pleated navy skirts, Josiah's khaki shorts and knee socks, brightly colored jerseys and track pants for phys ed days. As I approach, she frees one thin arm and drags it across her face, scrubbing roughly at tears I can't see.
Of all the memories I have of Alma, the disjointed images tucked away in various pockets and files, this is one I know will never leave me: standing there in her uniform, hair frizzing wildly out of her braids, cradling the clothes she'll never wear again to the school I plucked her out of without a single word of warning. Clinging to that life with all her strength - as if it's not already gone, as if it's something she can keep.
&
Matthew drives, with Josiah next to him in the front seat. Alma asked me to sit in the back with her, and now she lies with her head pillowed on my leg, her shoulder hard and small under my hand. The positioning is familiar: she does the same thing in songthaews, dozing the miles away until I nudge her upright at our destination. She must enjoy the nap, or maybe she gets carsick like I do. I should have asked, at some point.
She scoots forward a little bit, toward the edge of the seat, and I reach down to rub her back without further encouragement. It'll be an awkward position to hold for the next twenty minutes. I'd keep it up for a year, if I could.
I glance toward the front. Josiah seems to be holding up okay, sprawled across the passenger seat in a way that takes up a remarkable amount of space, as small as he is. Matthew's eyes look sharp and focused in the rear-view, paying close attention to the traffic around us, but I think I spot a wet streak down the side of his nose. I look away, embarrassed at having invaded his privacy.
Alma rubs her cheek against my jeans; I can't tell whether she's scratching an itch or wiping away more tears. I wish I could tell Matthew to turn around, drive us somewhere else. I wish Winnie and the police would all decide the kids don't need to come after all. I wish, as Alma once suggested, that there was some kind of machine that would stop time, and we could just walk into the jail and open the door, and everything would be okay.
If wishes were horses, we'd have one hell of a get-away plan.
The car jerks as Matthew brakes suddenly. Alma's eyes open. "Are we there?"
I smooth back the fly-away hair. "Almost."
She scoots forward a little bit, toward the edge of the seat, and I reach down to rub her back without further encouragement. It'll be an awkward position to hold for the next twenty minutes. I'd keep it up for a year, if I could.
I glance toward the front. Josiah seems to be holding up okay, sprawled across the passenger seat in a way that takes up a remarkable amount of space, as small as he is. Matthew's eyes look sharp and focused in the rear-view, paying close attention to the traffic around us, but I think I spot a wet streak down the side of his nose. I look away, embarrassed at having invaded his privacy.
Alma rubs her cheek against my jeans; I can't tell whether she's scratching an itch or wiping away more tears. I wish I could tell Matthew to turn around, drive us somewhere else. I wish Winnie and the police would all decide the kids don't need to come after all. I wish, as Alma once suggested, that there was some kind of machine that would stop time, and we could just walk into the jail and open the door, and everything would be okay.
If wishes were horses, we'd have one hell of a get-away plan.
The car jerks as Matthew brakes suddenly. Alma's eyes open. "Are we there?"
I smooth back the fly-away hair. "Almost."
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
the day of lost children
I’m practicing my alphabet when Sally comes looking for me. “M!” she says. She clambers up next to me, tugging at my arm. “M, come here!”
Man, this kid never quits. I don’t even bother looking up from my workbook. “What do you need, Sally?”
“M,” she says, hand clamping around my wrist. “My sister is taking the baby.”
Bombshell. Citizens are advised to stay indoors and panic. “What? When? Why?” One question after another. I sound like - well, like her.
“The baby,” Sally says again, calm as anything, right before her face shatters into a thousand pieces. She falls into me, face turned into my chest, fingers clawing for purchase at my waist. “She’s leaving, she’s leaving. M. The baby.”
After she calms down from her initial outburst, she drags me over to where her older sister is walking toward the waiting Jeep, Sally’s baby in her arms. The social worker, Agatha, is trying to convince Sally to go with them, to see where the baby will stay, but Sally ignores her. She stands just inside the office, clutching the doorframe, and the three of us watch her baby disappear into the car.
The door slams, the engine revs, and Sally collapses. Something has buckled, her knees or maybe her heart, and she goes down hard, boneless and flailing like someone falling from a great height. I drop down with her, instinctively pulling her toward me, but she’s dead weight in my arms. Five minutes ago she was clinging to me with all the desperation of a drowning man, but now I’m the one hanging on, afraid to let go.
I try to get the story out of Agatha. Apparently the idea has always been that Sally would give the baby to her sister. I protest that Sally has obviously changed her mind, and that we have no right to make such a decision for her, and Agatha further informs me that Sally has been hitting and shaking her baby whenever she has a run-in with one of the other women. Of course we have to consider the security of the baby, the baby I would take a bullet for, and yet I can’t help thinking of the other women here who have been known to hit their children. They have been cajoled and reasoned with, have been given chance after chance to redeem themselves. We claim to be teaching these women how to be mothers, to be empowering them. Not giving up on them. Not stealing their children.
Sally cries for three hours straight, though “cries” does not really do justice to the force of her despair. She howls and sobs, keens and wails, gags and hiccups through the long, wordless moans that fill the spaces between lamentations. She is in agony, tortured, dying in slow motion.
I speak to her, gently, struggling for the appropriate vocabulary, as if anything I say in any language would make a difference. I hold her close with an arm around her shoulders, tucking her against me, until she squirms away to lie in a defeated sprawl on the floor. I rub her back, squeeze her knee and shoulder. I wipe each tear as it comes, damp fingers catching roughly on her hot, tacky skin. I cup her jaw, cradle her head, stroke her hair over and over again until she finally surrenders to a restless, exhausted sleep.
My fingers keep moving over her hair as she sleeps, unsure what else to do. She’s laid out in such a way that I can see the pulse in her throat, the flutter of skin between her collarbones. “It hurts here,” she said before, digging her nails into her chest, but as far as I can tell, her heart is still going, beating strong and steady, though maybe not quite the way it used to.
Man, this kid never quits. I don’t even bother looking up from my workbook. “What do you need, Sally?”
“M,” she says, hand clamping around my wrist. “My sister is taking the baby.”
Bombshell. Citizens are advised to stay indoors and panic. “What? When? Why?” One question after another. I sound like - well, like her.
“The baby,” Sally says again, calm as anything, right before her face shatters into a thousand pieces. She falls into me, face turned into my chest, fingers clawing for purchase at my waist. “She’s leaving, she’s leaving. M. The baby.”
After she calms down from her initial outburst, she drags me over to where her older sister is walking toward the waiting Jeep, Sally’s baby in her arms. The social worker, Agatha, is trying to convince Sally to go with them, to see where the baby will stay, but Sally ignores her. She stands just inside the office, clutching the doorframe, and the three of us watch her baby disappear into the car.
The door slams, the engine revs, and Sally collapses. Something has buckled, her knees or maybe her heart, and she goes down hard, boneless and flailing like someone falling from a great height. I drop down with her, instinctively pulling her toward me, but she’s dead weight in my arms. Five minutes ago she was clinging to me with all the desperation of a drowning man, but now I’m the one hanging on, afraid to let go.
I try to get the story out of Agatha. Apparently the idea has always been that Sally would give the baby to her sister. I protest that Sally has obviously changed her mind, and that we have no right to make such a decision for her, and Agatha further informs me that Sally has been hitting and shaking her baby whenever she has a run-in with one of the other women. Of course we have to consider the security of the baby, the baby I would take a bullet for, and yet I can’t help thinking of the other women here who have been known to hit their children. They have been cajoled and reasoned with, have been given chance after chance to redeem themselves. We claim to be teaching these women how to be mothers, to be empowering them. Not giving up on them. Not stealing their children.
Sally cries for three hours straight, though “cries” does not really do justice to the force of her despair. She howls and sobs, keens and wails, gags and hiccups through the long, wordless moans that fill the spaces between lamentations. She is in agony, tortured, dying in slow motion.
I speak to her, gently, struggling for the appropriate vocabulary, as if anything I say in any language would make a difference. I hold her close with an arm around her shoulders, tucking her against me, until she squirms away to lie in a defeated sprawl on the floor. I rub her back, squeeze her knee and shoulder. I wipe each tear as it comes, damp fingers catching roughly on her hot, tacky skin. I cup her jaw, cradle her head, stroke her hair over and over again until she finally surrenders to a restless, exhausted sleep.
My fingers keep moving over her hair as she sleeps, unsure what else to do. She’s laid out in such a way that I can see the pulse in her throat, the flutter of skin between her collarbones. “It hurts here,” she said before, digging her nails into her chest, but as far as I can tell, her heart is still going, beating strong and steady, though maybe not quite the way it used to.
&
The afternoon passes in a haze of misery. Sally sleeps for a while, one fat tear balanced precariously on the side of her nose, then wakes up and cries some more. She claimed around lunchtime that she would never eat again, but at about 1:30 she lets out a tremendous, stuttering sigh and says, “M? I’m hungry.” I take her back to my house and feed her some leftover sticky rice, convince her to drink some water. She follows me back to the office and sits with me for a couple hours, coloring pictures of Disney princesses. She doesn’t speak much, breaking her silence only to show me her finished products and to dismiss my lavish flattery.
Pippi finally arrives after dinner, another skipped meal, and Sally falls apart again. Even Pippi’s presence can’t make this better, and we’re all crouched together in a miserable huddle when the second bombshell hits.
“Look who’s here!” Elsa sings, an oddly cheerful tone, and I look up to see Alma standing in the doorway of Sally’s room.
Later on, I won’t remember letting go of Sally, or standing up. Elsa is beaming, eyes lit up with happiness at having her friend back. Alma is smiling too, playing along, but hers is horrible, small and eleven years old and so goddamn brave, the bravest kid in the world.
“Oh, kiddo,” I say, stupidly. I reach out for her, and she walks straight into my arms and starts to cry.
As I will discover later, things are not looking good. Our many attempts at bribery and persuasion have failed, and the Vietnamese have a court date scheduled for tomorrow. Conviction is inevitable, to be followed by a long stint in the Bangkok detention center and then a forced return to Vietnam, where repatriated refugees have a tendency to disappear or be accused of terrorism against the state. Somehow, though, Harriet and Albert managed to get the kids out, and now here they are, Alma and little Josiah. Free, safe, and orphaned.
Sally was brittle and unyielding in my arms, but Alma folds herself into me: arms locked around my waist, head tucked securely under my chin, face pushed hard against my chest. Her tears are quiet and breathless, little hummingbird body trembling so very slightly under my hands, and we stand there together for a long, long time.
Pippi finally arrives after dinner, another skipped meal, and Sally falls apart again. Even Pippi’s presence can’t make this better, and we’re all crouched together in a miserable huddle when the second bombshell hits.
“Look who’s here!” Elsa sings, an oddly cheerful tone, and I look up to see Alma standing in the doorway of Sally’s room.
Later on, I won’t remember letting go of Sally, or standing up. Elsa is beaming, eyes lit up with happiness at having her friend back. Alma is smiling too, playing along, but hers is horrible, small and eleven years old and so goddamn brave, the bravest kid in the world.
“Oh, kiddo,” I say, stupidly. I reach out for her, and she walks straight into my arms and starts to cry.
As I will discover later, things are not looking good. Our many attempts at bribery and persuasion have failed, and the Vietnamese have a court date scheduled for tomorrow. Conviction is inevitable, to be followed by a long stint in the Bangkok detention center and then a forced return to Vietnam, where repatriated refugees have a tendency to disappear or be accused of terrorism against the state. Somehow, though, Harriet and Albert managed to get the kids out, and now here they are, Alma and little Josiah. Free, safe, and orphaned.
Sally was brittle and unyielding in my arms, but Alma folds herself into me: arms locked around my waist, head tucked securely under my chin, face pushed hard against my chest. Her tears are quiet and breathless, little hummingbird body trembling so very slightly under my hands, and we stand there together for a long, long time.
&
Rosalind reaches out for me as soon as she sees me, bony hands latching on and pulling me close until we’re both pressed up tight against the cell door, arms wedged through the bars and folded uncomfortably around each others’ bodies.
It’s been a long time since the last time.
She’s always been skinny, our Rosalind, but ever since her appendectomy and the shit-storm that followed, she has been disappearing before our eyes. I too am a lesser woman than I once was, two hundred extra pounds of grief notwithstanding, but together we still bring to mind Herbert’s old assessment of a human 10: one sharp, one round.
“You look not well,” Rosalind says, pulling back far enough to examine my face. I don’t know what to say to that. I never know what to say to her these days, veering cautiously between distraction and comfort and questions. I usually try to make her laugh, but that’s a lost cause tonight.
She asks if we saw Josiah and Alma. “I always fight with them,” she says, “but now they are gone, I miss them.” And then she’s crying, hot and guilty, and I want to break apart the world and put it back together the right way, a way that makes sense.
It’s been a long time since the last time.
She’s always been skinny, our Rosalind, but ever since her appendectomy and the shit-storm that followed, she has been disappearing before our eyes. I too am a lesser woman than I once was, two hundred extra pounds of grief notwithstanding, but together we still bring to mind Herbert’s old assessment of a human 10: one sharp, one round.
“You look not well,” Rosalind says, pulling back far enough to examine my face. I don’t know what to say to that. I never know what to say to her these days, veering cautiously between distraction and comfort and questions. I usually try to make her laugh, but that’s a lost cause tonight.
She asks if we saw Josiah and Alma. “I always fight with them,” she says, “but now they are gone, I miss them.” And then she’s crying, hot and guilty, and I want to break apart the world and put it back together the right way, a way that makes sense.
We detach after a few minutes, and now it’s Winnie I’m holding through the cell door, Winnie’s tears I’m trying awkwardly to smooth away, all thumbs, as if I haven’t had enough practice today. Beautiful, gracious Winnie, a scant ten years my senior and yet somehow the epitome of motherhood in my eyes, flexible and strong. Winnie, who has tried to save her children at the expense of her own heart.
I can’t help her. I can’t give her children back, and I can’t save her from what’s coming. Barring divine intervention, she and Rosalind and Saul will be convicted as illegal aliens, and someday soon they will be sent back to Vietnam. Perhaps they’ll be arrested straight off the plane, disappearing like others have before them. Then, too, there will be nothing I can do for them, or for any of them. I can’t give Alma her mother, or Sally her baby. I can’t promise them anything or say one word that will soften that killing blow. I can’t begin to understand their pain. In the shadow of what they’ve lost, my love is a pale, insignificant thing. It is nothing at all, but it is all I have to give, and tonight in my sleepless bed, it will be all I can think about: the shape of their bones against mine, the damp salty heat, the bars between us.
I can’t help her. I can’t give her children back, and I can’t save her from what’s coming. Barring divine intervention, she and Rosalind and Saul will be convicted as illegal aliens, and someday soon they will be sent back to Vietnam. Perhaps they’ll be arrested straight off the plane, disappearing like others have before them. Then, too, there will be nothing I can do for them, or for any of them. I can’t give Alma her mother, or Sally her baby. I can’t promise them anything or say one word that will soften that killing blow. I can’t begin to understand their pain. In the shadow of what they’ve lost, my love is a pale, insignificant thing. It is nothing at all, but it is all I have to give, and tonight in my sleepless bed, it will be all I can think about: the shape of their bones against mine, the damp salty heat, the bars between us.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
the broken record
"I miss Pippi," Sally says. She's only said it ten or twelve times in the last five minutes, which is an improvement on the five minutes before that. She looks up at me expectantly, thin arms wrapped around her knees. "M, I miss Pippi."
"I know," I say. It's the same words, always, but I've been experimenting with different tones. Sympathetic. Tired. Sad. Frustrated. Annoyed. Distracted. "I miss her too."
I do miss her, my old roommate and confidante. Mostly, though, I'm full-up with missing Winnie and Alma and my dear, ridiculous Rosalind. They were moved to a different city last week, five hours away; I spent the weekend with them, soaking up the sound of their voices and the light of their smiles, gripping their hands through the cell door. One day, the police even relented and let us use a visitation room. This whole week has been haunted by memories: Winnie cracking my knuckles for me, Alma's stumbling recitation of the book we brought her (A Little Princess, because she loves fairy tales and I need her to believe that she will get a happy ending), the weight of Rosalind's skinny legs leaning against mine.
Back in the real world, Sally says, "I'm going home."
God, how many times can we have this conversation? I try to speak past the frustration blocking my throat. "I don't think you should."
She shakes her head, stubborn as always, a pretty teenage goat. There ought to be a cartoon. "I'm going home to the mother," she insists, and I don't have an answer to that. She might be working my nerves today, but there's no way I'm reminding a 14-year-old that she's here partially because her mother doesn't love her enough not to abandon her. "I miss Pippi," she says again, plowing ahead with her familiar argument. "I don't have friends anymore."
"Oh, really?" We've been through this a thousand times, but it still stings, somewhere in the over-sensitized mess of my heart. "Okay, so I'm not your friend, right? Julius isn't your friend. Betty isn't your friend. You don't love us. Go home, then. I don't care." It might sound cruel to an outsider, someone who doesn't get how we work, but I have to try to speak her language. Nothing else gets through to her.
She scowls, grabs at my foot, then my ankle, yanking at me hard enough that I can hear the creak of my old-lady bones. "M," she protests, and then again, louder, like she thinks maybe I'm not listening. "M." She doesn't say anything else, but she doesn't need to. God knows we've been through this enough times.
"Okay, Sally," I say. "Okay."
She stops pulling, and we sit together for a few quiet, melancholy minutes, her hands still wrapped loosely around my ankle. I'm grateful for the respite, but I'm feeling a twinge of regret for snapping at her. She looks sad, that dense kind of sadness that sits heavy in your chest, sugar in an engine, clogging up the works. I want to slap her and then tuck her into bed with a teddy bear.
"I miss Pippi," she says.
"I know."
"I know," I say. It's the same words, always, but I've been experimenting with different tones. Sympathetic. Tired. Sad. Frustrated. Annoyed. Distracted. "I miss her too."
I do miss her, my old roommate and confidante. Mostly, though, I'm full-up with missing Winnie and Alma and my dear, ridiculous Rosalind. They were moved to a different city last week, five hours away; I spent the weekend with them, soaking up the sound of their voices and the light of their smiles, gripping their hands through the cell door. One day, the police even relented and let us use a visitation room. This whole week has been haunted by memories: Winnie cracking my knuckles for me, Alma's stumbling recitation of the book we brought her (A Little Princess, because she loves fairy tales and I need her to believe that she will get a happy ending), the weight of Rosalind's skinny legs leaning against mine.
Back in the real world, Sally says, "I'm going home."
God, how many times can we have this conversation? I try to speak past the frustration blocking my throat. "I don't think you should."
She shakes her head, stubborn as always, a pretty teenage goat. There ought to be a cartoon. "I'm going home to the mother," she insists, and I don't have an answer to that. She might be working my nerves today, but there's no way I'm reminding a 14-year-old that she's here partially because her mother doesn't love her enough not to abandon her. "I miss Pippi," she says again, plowing ahead with her familiar argument. "I don't have friends anymore."
"Oh, really?" We've been through this a thousand times, but it still stings, somewhere in the over-sensitized mess of my heart. "Okay, so I'm not your friend, right? Julius isn't your friend. Betty isn't your friend. You don't love us. Go home, then. I don't care." It might sound cruel to an outsider, someone who doesn't get how we work, but I have to try to speak her language. Nothing else gets through to her.
She scowls, grabs at my foot, then my ankle, yanking at me hard enough that I can hear the creak of my old-lady bones. "M," she protests, and then again, louder, like she thinks maybe I'm not listening. "M." She doesn't say anything else, but she doesn't need to. God knows we've been through this enough times.
"Okay, Sally," I say. "Okay."
She stops pulling, and we sit together for a few quiet, melancholy minutes, her hands still wrapped loosely around my ankle. I'm grateful for the respite, but I'm feeling a twinge of regret for snapping at her. She looks sad, that dense kind of sadness that sits heavy in your chest, sugar in an engine, clogging up the works. I want to slap her and then tuck her into bed with a teddy bear.
"I miss Pippi," she says.
"I know."
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
autoclave
The Vietnamese are being deported.
Sorry. I meant to bring you glad tidings this time, honest. Things just got a little jumbled up along the way.
Not all the Vietnamese, you understand. Just the ones I love the most. Rosalind. Winnie and Alma and Alma's brother, a sweet kid named Josiah. Saul, the bastard, though I'm pretty sure this whole thing is his fault.
They left the shelter last week, disappearing in a poof of smoke. They didn't tell anyone they were going, not even me or Pippi. I was a little mad, but mostly hurt that they didn't trust us enough, that they thought we might betray them. And I missed them, of course. I missed them a lot.
They'd claimed to be going to Bangkok, but they were spotted around the city by Albert, Robin, Pippi, and who knows who else. They should have been more careful. They should have been more fucking goddamn careful.
They were arrested yesterday morning by the immigration police. Maybe one of their new neighbors turned them in. They themselves think it was Khruu Aajaan, their former roommate, but I can't bring myself to believe that. He couldn't have known where they were hiding, I don't think. Anyway, if I did think it was him, that he'd narced on them, I would have to kill him. And there's no sense in all of us warming that jail cell.
If we don't get them out, they'll all be deported to Cambodia. They have no papers, nothing at all, so they'll surely be arrested while crossing the border. The Cambodian government may throw them in jail, or it may send them back to Vietnam, the motherland, the place they fled after having been targeted, imprisoned, tortured.
The options are not great. Elizabeth and Albert managed to buy Nancy's freedom in a similar situation a few years ago, and we might be able to do the same with the Vietnamese, since Thai policemen tend to have remarkably greasy palms. We've already tried to pay, but for once, the po-po aren't having it - or, rather, they say they'll accept a certain amount, then change their minds when we offer it. By "we," of course, I mean a Thai citizen. Farang have no leverage in these situations, nor should they, I suppose.
But it could still work, if we landed upon the magic number. What we need is time, and we don't have it. They're threatening to take them to Bangkok tomorrow, and from there to Cambodia. They might be bluffing, trying to scare us, but maybe not.
Pippi has spent most of the last two days at the jail, trying to work out what the hell is going on and what we can do about it. She brings them food, since the police station would happily let them starve, women and children alike. There are no cots in the cell, Pippi says, no chairs or cushions. Everyone sleeps on the floor.
I wish I were there with her, with them, but I'm not. I have shit to do, stupid shit, e-mails to process and staff meetings I'm required to attend, and Pippi thinks it's best if the police don't see too many farang involved in this. I'm trying to help from the sidelines, digging up information and passing it along to her at ground zero, but it's hard. I want to be there. I want to do something.
In Pippi's absence, Sally has become increasingly dependent on me. She's cried, a little. Once or twice she's sidled up for an uncharacteristic cuddle. Mostly, though, she sits next to me with her knees pulled up to her chest, asking the same questions again and again, apparently hoping that I might magically divine the answers between rounds: what, when, where. And of course, like a toddler: "Why? Why? Why?"
"I don't know, Sally," I say. "I don't know. I don't know."
Not for the first time, I find myself wishing I were the crying sort. A good sob might make me feel better, or at least like my grief and frustration were active, alive, instead of this dead weight crowding up against the press of my ribcage, a black hole where positive thinking goes to die. I don't cry, though. Instead, I pace, around and around the tiny main room of my house, arms crossed, hands tucked tightly against my sides like I can somehow hold in the inevitable decompression. I'm going to blow any day now; I can feel it. They'll be finding pieces of me for months after, heart muscle and bile, lead in my stomach.
Hour after hour, around and around, feet blistering against the smooth rub of the floorboards. I try not to think, but strange thoughts keep floating to the surface.
If Gertie ever comes back, this will kill her.
Did Rosalind say it was her grandmother they poisoned, or her grandfather?
Alma was supposed to go back to school next month.
Walking, walking, walking. Waiting.
Sorry. I meant to bring you glad tidings this time, honest. Things just got a little jumbled up along the way.
Not all the Vietnamese, you understand. Just the ones I love the most. Rosalind. Winnie and Alma and Alma's brother, a sweet kid named Josiah. Saul, the bastard, though I'm pretty sure this whole thing is his fault.
They left the shelter last week, disappearing in a poof of smoke. They didn't tell anyone they were going, not even me or Pippi. I was a little mad, but mostly hurt that they didn't trust us enough, that they thought we might betray them. And I missed them, of course. I missed them a lot.
They'd claimed to be going to Bangkok, but they were spotted around the city by Albert, Robin, Pippi, and who knows who else. They should have been more careful. They should have been more fucking goddamn careful.
They were arrested yesterday morning by the immigration police. Maybe one of their new neighbors turned them in. They themselves think it was Khruu Aajaan, their former roommate, but I can't bring myself to believe that. He couldn't have known where they were hiding, I don't think. Anyway, if I did think it was him, that he'd narced on them, I would have to kill him. And there's no sense in all of us warming that jail cell.
If we don't get them out, they'll all be deported to Cambodia. They have no papers, nothing at all, so they'll surely be arrested while crossing the border. The Cambodian government may throw them in jail, or it may send them back to Vietnam, the motherland, the place they fled after having been targeted, imprisoned, tortured.
The options are not great. Elizabeth and Albert managed to buy Nancy's freedom in a similar situation a few years ago, and we might be able to do the same with the Vietnamese, since Thai policemen tend to have remarkably greasy palms. We've already tried to pay, but for once, the po-po aren't having it - or, rather, they say they'll accept a certain amount, then change their minds when we offer it. By "we," of course, I mean a Thai citizen. Farang have no leverage in these situations, nor should they, I suppose.
But it could still work, if we landed upon the magic number. What we need is time, and we don't have it. They're threatening to take them to Bangkok tomorrow, and from there to Cambodia. They might be bluffing, trying to scare us, but maybe not.
Pippi has spent most of the last two days at the jail, trying to work out what the hell is going on and what we can do about it. She brings them food, since the police station would happily let them starve, women and children alike. There are no cots in the cell, Pippi says, no chairs or cushions. Everyone sleeps on the floor.
I wish I were there with her, with them, but I'm not. I have shit to do, stupid shit, e-mails to process and staff meetings I'm required to attend, and Pippi thinks it's best if the police don't see too many farang involved in this. I'm trying to help from the sidelines, digging up information and passing it along to her at ground zero, but it's hard. I want to be there. I want to do something.
In Pippi's absence, Sally has become increasingly dependent on me. She's cried, a little. Once or twice she's sidled up for an uncharacteristic cuddle. Mostly, though, she sits next to me with her knees pulled up to her chest, asking the same questions again and again, apparently hoping that I might magically divine the answers between rounds: what, when, where. And of course, like a toddler: "Why? Why? Why?"
"I don't know, Sally," I say. "I don't know. I don't know."
Not for the first time, I find myself wishing I were the crying sort. A good sob might make me feel better, or at least like my grief and frustration were active, alive, instead of this dead weight crowding up against the press of my ribcage, a black hole where positive thinking goes to die. I don't cry, though. Instead, I pace, around and around the tiny main room of my house, arms crossed, hands tucked tightly against my sides like I can somehow hold in the inevitable decompression. I'm going to blow any day now; I can feel it. They'll be finding pieces of me for months after, heart muscle and bile, lead in my stomach.
Hour after hour, around and around, feet blistering against the smooth rub of the floorboards. I try not to think, but strange thoughts keep floating to the surface.
If Gertie ever comes back, this will kill her.
Did Rosalind say it was her grandmother they poisoned, or her grandfather?
Alma was supposed to go back to school next month.
Walking, walking, walking. Waiting.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
a calm and reasoned debate
I argue with Sally all the time. Pippi does too. There's really no avoiding it. The only possible way I can imagine that a person might go one single day without arguing with that girl would be to crazy-glue her mouth shut, lock her in the cellar, and shove pointed sticks into your own eardrums. And we don't have a cellar.
Sally and I argue over serious things sometimes, like how she refuses to study and is careless with the baby, but most of our arguments are short-lived and stupid. Sally, we can't go to the market at 8:00 at night. M, you didn't shower and you smell bad. Sally, I can't let you use my phone because I don't have any minutes left. M, why are you only taking one fish, you obviously hate me and you're going to starve. Sally, you know I can't give you any money or we'll both get in trouble. M, for God's sake, you must eat two fish or we will all die screaming. You're a buffalo. You're a monkey. No, you're crazy. No, you're a child. No, you wear diapers.
Whatever, don't give me that look. Like none of you have ever gotten into an argument with a 14-year-old over which one of you wears diapers.
You have to understand that I love Sally, far more than I can put into words. I really do. I worry about her, and I want her to make the right decisions, and every so often I fantasize about throwing myself into traffic and bringing her right along with me.
Like this morning, for example, when she rolled up to my humble abode at 6:40 AM shouting, "M! M! Where are you?"
Now, I get up without complaint at about 7:00 during the week, but I will defend to the death my right to sleep in on Sundays, when the women and volunteers are all off-duty and everyone does their own thing. I was especially tired this morning, since the heat had kept me awake until well after midnight. I'd been hoping to sleep until the luxurious hour of 8:00, but Sally would not be deterred.
"M!" she shouted. The house rattled as she stomped up the steps to the porch, then again when she flung open the entry doors. "M, what are you doing?"
"I'm sleeping, Sally," I mumbled, rolling over and pulling the sheet over my head. "What are you doing?"
"M!" she shrieked again, reproachfully this time. She sounded deeply offended, as if I had told her I was busy shooting heroin with my favorite underage boy-whores. "Wake up! M sleep big big!" This last bit she said in English; it's one of her favorite lines, combining the novelty of English with the pleasure of unjustified condemnation.
"Mai sleep big big, you liar," I groaned. I considered explaining that I'd slept for a mere six hours, but couldn't be bothered to puzzle out the required vocabulary. Besides, she wouldn't have cared. "What do you need, Sally?"
"I'm leaving! Get up! M sleep big big!"
Most of the women had already left to go home for Songkran, arguably the biggest holiday of the year. Sally had indeed mentioned that she was leaving today, though at the time I'd been pretty sure she was lying. Occasionally, however, she spots a real wolf, so I grudgingly hauled myself off the mattress and set about searching for clean clothes. "I'm awake, I'm awake," I grumbled. "One minute."
Having requested Sally's patience, I really should have been able to predict that she would jerk open my bedroom door as I was halfway into my pants. "M!" she said, brow furrowed with disapproval. "What are you doing?"
Fortunately for our relationship, I don't know the Thai words for, "What the fuck does it look like?" or, "Experimenting with cold fusion - it helps if I'm naked." I settled for snapping, "Getting dressed! I need a minute!" and slamming the door shut in her face.
In the thirty seconds it took to make myself decent, an ominous silence descended on the house. As I slid my door open again, I braced myself for any number of unpleasant developments. Sally had decided she hated me for snapping at her. She had found and was in the process of demolishing my stash of M&Ms in the fridge. She had entered a catatonic state as a result of her brief but traumatizing exposure to my ass.
She had...disappeared?
Now it was my turn to play Marco Polo. "Sally?" I called, peering into the bathroom. "Sally! Where did you go?"
"M! M, come here! You have to come here!"
I followed her voice outside to where she was standing by the "meditation pond," a little man-made pool filled with the darkest, foulest water you've ever seen. The water arrives pre-polluted by our neighbors at the chicken factory. We've asked them to clean up their operations; they declined, but magnanimously offered us 300 chickens in "compensation" - one of the weirder bribes I've heard of.
"M, look!" Sally held up an enormous fish, which she'd apparently yanked from the pond, where several of its comrades were floating listlessly on their sides. "The fish are dead, M. Do you see?"
"Yeah, I see. Gross. Where's Pippi?"
She pointed to the bamboo house, where Pippi had taken to sleeping. "She's in bed. Pippi sleep big big!"
"Uh huh. And when are you leaving?"
"Tuesday," she said cheerfully, dropping the dead fish back into the pond with a splash.
"Sally," I said, digging my fingers into my forehead so they wouldn't be tempted to reach out and strangle her. "Did you get me out of bed before 7:00 on a Sunday to show me a dead fish?"
She cocked her head and squinted at me, not unlike a puzzled dog, and I realized I'd been speaking in English.
"I'm going back to bed," I said, spinning on my heel.
Her voice followed me back as I walked barefoot through the grass, up the steps, and into my bedroom, locking the door behind me: "M! Come here! What are you doing? You're lazy! You're a child!"
"You're a lunatic," I muttered under my breath, collapsing onto my mattress.
"M! M! You wear diapers!"
Sally and I argue over serious things sometimes, like how she refuses to study and is careless with the baby, but most of our arguments are short-lived and stupid. Sally, we can't go to the market at 8:00 at night. M, you didn't shower and you smell bad. Sally, I can't let you use my phone because I don't have any minutes left. M, why are you only taking one fish, you obviously hate me and you're going to starve. Sally, you know I can't give you any money or we'll both get in trouble. M, for God's sake, you must eat two fish or we will all die screaming. You're a buffalo. You're a monkey. No, you're crazy. No, you're a child. No, you wear diapers.
Whatever, don't give me that look. Like none of you have ever gotten into an argument with a 14-year-old over which one of you wears diapers.
You have to understand that I love Sally, far more than I can put into words. I really do. I worry about her, and I want her to make the right decisions, and every so often I fantasize about throwing myself into traffic and bringing her right along with me.
Like this morning, for example, when she rolled up to my humble abode at 6:40 AM shouting, "M! M! Where are you?"
Now, I get up without complaint at about 7:00 during the week, but I will defend to the death my right to sleep in on Sundays, when the women and volunteers are all off-duty and everyone does their own thing. I was especially tired this morning, since the heat had kept me awake until well after midnight. I'd been hoping to sleep until the luxurious hour of 8:00, but Sally would not be deterred.
"M!" she shouted. The house rattled as she stomped up the steps to the porch, then again when she flung open the entry doors. "M, what are you doing?"
"I'm sleeping, Sally," I mumbled, rolling over and pulling the sheet over my head. "What are you doing?"
"M!" she shrieked again, reproachfully this time. She sounded deeply offended, as if I had told her I was busy shooting heroin with my favorite underage boy-whores. "Wake up! M sleep big big!" This last bit she said in English; it's one of her favorite lines, combining the novelty of English with the pleasure of unjustified condemnation.
"Mai sleep big big, you liar," I groaned. I considered explaining that I'd slept for a mere six hours, but couldn't be bothered to puzzle out the required vocabulary. Besides, she wouldn't have cared. "What do you need, Sally?"
"I'm leaving! Get up! M sleep big big!"
Most of the women had already left to go home for Songkran, arguably the biggest holiday of the year. Sally had indeed mentioned that she was leaving today, though at the time I'd been pretty sure she was lying. Occasionally, however, she spots a real wolf, so I grudgingly hauled myself off the mattress and set about searching for clean clothes. "I'm awake, I'm awake," I grumbled. "One minute."
Having requested Sally's patience, I really should have been able to predict that she would jerk open my bedroom door as I was halfway into my pants. "M!" she said, brow furrowed with disapproval. "What are you doing?"
Fortunately for our relationship, I don't know the Thai words for, "What the fuck does it look like?" or, "Experimenting with cold fusion - it helps if I'm naked." I settled for snapping, "Getting dressed! I need a minute!" and slamming the door shut in her face.
In the thirty seconds it took to make myself decent, an ominous silence descended on the house. As I slid my door open again, I braced myself for any number of unpleasant developments. Sally had decided she hated me for snapping at her. She had found and was in the process of demolishing my stash of M&Ms in the fridge. She had entered a catatonic state as a result of her brief but traumatizing exposure to my ass.
She had...disappeared?
Now it was my turn to play Marco Polo. "Sally?" I called, peering into the bathroom. "Sally! Where did you go?"
"M! M, come here! You have to come here!"
I followed her voice outside to where she was standing by the "meditation pond," a little man-made pool filled with the darkest, foulest water you've ever seen. The water arrives pre-polluted by our neighbors at the chicken factory. We've asked them to clean up their operations; they declined, but magnanimously offered us 300 chickens in "compensation" - one of the weirder bribes I've heard of.
"M, look!" Sally held up an enormous fish, which she'd apparently yanked from the pond, where several of its comrades were floating listlessly on their sides. "The fish are dead, M. Do you see?"
"Yeah, I see. Gross. Where's Pippi?"
She pointed to the bamboo house, where Pippi had taken to sleeping. "She's in bed. Pippi sleep big big!"
"Uh huh. And when are you leaving?"
"Tuesday," she said cheerfully, dropping the dead fish back into the pond with a splash.
"Sally," I said, digging my fingers into my forehead so they wouldn't be tempted to reach out and strangle her. "Did you get me out of bed before 7:00 on a Sunday to show me a dead fish?"
She cocked her head and squinted at me, not unlike a puzzled dog, and I realized I'd been speaking in English.
"I'm going back to bed," I said, spinning on my heel.
Her voice followed me back as I walked barefoot through the grass, up the steps, and into my bedroom, locking the door behind me: "M! Come here! What are you doing? You're lazy! You're a child!"
"You're a lunatic," I muttered under my breath, collapsing onto my mattress.
"M! M! You wear diapers!"
Sunday, March 28, 2010
how to lose your mind in 7 days
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this week was totally fucked.
Gertie's arrest was the worst news to break, obviously - I can still barely think about it without wanting to break something or curl up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor - but it was hardly the only stunner. Observe:
Gertie's arrest was the worst news to break, obviously - I can still barely think about it without wanting to break something or curl up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor - but it was hardly the only stunner. Observe:
Monday: Rosalind and the ugly baby
Rosalind went into the hospital last weekend with acute appendicitis. I skipped my usual Sunday visit to the Vietnamese house, so I didn't find out until Monday. Very few people knew what was going on, and my frantic questioning of all the Vietnamese turned up exactly zero details.
I had a hard time finding Rosalind at the hospital, since she was pretending to be Cambodian and had given the hospital staff a fake name, but I hunted her down eventually: a pale, stick-thin figure drowning in blue hospital pajamas. Her hand was cold and clammy, bony fingers slippery with sweat, clinging weakly to mine as I held them both against my heart like some kind of goddamn Victorian damsel.
The incision was surprisingly large, not unlike an off-center cesarean section. "It's like you had a baby," I told her. "A really ugly baby." She laughed, then cringed with pain, and I regretted the joke.
I asked her if she wanted me to stay, and she said yes. So I did, perched on the bench between Winnie, who rested her head on my shoulder and massaged my hand, and Saul, who told me the whole story - that is, as much of the story as he could get out between Rosalind's frequent interruptions. "He's lying," she'd say, rolling her eyes a little. "That didn't happen."
Objectively, of course, she looked like deep-fried crap: greasy hair sticking up in all directions, dark puffy bags under her eyes, nails yellowed and bare of polish for the first time in our acquaintance. But she was awake, and smiling, and okay. Beautiful.
Her standard line is that she doesn't want the baby. Under pressure, though, she's admitted to Pippi that she does like the kid, but her mother won't let her keep her. Pippi is trying to convince her to stay here with Pippi Two for a couple years and finish school, get her shit together, but Sally is determined to give the baby away again and leave the shelter sooner than later.
Fran had been planning for a while to take Blue back to Burma. I wasn't the only one who strongly opposed this idea, for reasons that should be glaringly obvious, but she was insistent. The problem, she said, was that Blue needed papers. Without the assistance of his douchebag father, who had unsurprisingly vanished without a trace, he couldn't get papers here in Thailand. If she didn't get him Burmese papers within a certain time frame, he would be doomed to statelessness, belonging nowhere.
On Thursday, Fran went with Agatha the social worker and somehow secured the necessary Thai papers. I doubted very much that the process was particularly legal, but I didn't give one single flying fuck. What mattered was that Blue had the papers he needed, and Fran wouldn't have to take him back to Burma. They could stay here, safe and supported, and start building a real life.
On Friday, though, Fran went out again and found an apartment. She told me she's leaving on April 1. No doubt she'll go straight back to the bars, where it's easy to make money and even easier to find yourself knocked up and abandoned.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Rosalind is home now. I've gone over to the Vietnamese house almost every day this week to spend a few hours with her, gossiping and shooting the shit. I keep forgetting that I'm not supposed to make her laugh; yesterday she got the giggles so bad that she had to haul herself to her feet and hobble out of the room. She walks like an old woman, hunched over and clutching her incision. She spends most of our time together lying in bed, one skinny hand wrapped around mine or resting on my knee or fiddling with the seam on my jeans. Her medication makes her sleepy, and I usually sneak out after she's dozed off. It doesn't matter: she knows I'll be back.
Pippi Two is absolutely gorgeous. She's so much bigger than the little fairy girl that left in January: the first time Sally shifted her into my arms, the weight of her took my breath away. She's still thin, but her arms and legs are terrifically strong, and she holds up her own head like a champ. Her eyes are enormous and pitch-black, and she stares at me while I hold her, her squishy pink mouth forever pursed in an expression of mingled concern and curiosity. I can still get her to stop crying by jamming my finger in her mouth. And sometimes, when it's just the two of us, I'll still sing to her, just to watch her tiny, sparse eyelashes drift down over those massive cartoon eyes.
Blue is not the world's cutest baby. He looks like an old man, jowly and grumpy-faced, and his shorn hair is growing back in the most hideous Friar Tuck pattern. He's hard to please, unhappy on his back or when it's hot for him to lie on his stomach, and he tends to fall asleep with his sweaty, bristly head shoved right up under my chin. To make matters worse, he's had wicked diarrhea recently; I don't mean to be dramatic, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve wiped that kid’s ass more in the last couple weeks than I’ve wiped mine in my entire life. I sit at my computer, unable to type with my hands full of this Benjamin Button baby - sweaty and scratchy and heavy, leaking poop like a punctured water balloon - and when Fran asks if I want her to take him now, I shake my head. "Mai bpen rai," I say. It's okay.
It's okay.
I had a hard time finding Rosalind at the hospital, since she was pretending to be Cambodian and had given the hospital staff a fake name, but I hunted her down eventually: a pale, stick-thin figure drowning in blue hospital pajamas. Her hand was cold and clammy, bony fingers slippery with sweat, clinging weakly to mine as I held them both against my heart like some kind of goddamn Victorian damsel.
The incision was surprisingly large, not unlike an off-center cesarean section. "It's like you had a baby," I told her. "A really ugly baby." She laughed, then cringed with pain, and I regretted the joke.
I asked her if she wanted me to stay, and she said yes. So I did, perched on the bench between Winnie, who rested her head on my shoulder and massaged my hand, and Saul, who told me the whole story - that is, as much of the story as he could get out between Rosalind's frequent interruptions. "He's lying," she'd say, rolling her eyes a little. "That didn't happen."
Objectively, of course, she looked like deep-fried crap: greasy hair sticking up in all directions, dark puffy bags under her eyes, nails yellowed and bare of polish for the first time in our acquaintance. But she was awake, and smiling, and okay. Beautiful.
Wednesday: Sally and the bug-eyed baby
For once, she wasn't bullshitting. She arrived at the shelter with Pippi on Wednesday, bringing her goggle-eyed baby girl with her. Unfortunately, the reasons they're both back with us are rather grim. You may recall that Sally gave Pippi Two to her aunt. Soon after, the aunt apparently decided she didn't actually want the baby, so she shunted her back to Sally. Meanwhile, Sally's parents decided to move to the city - without their youngest daughter and infant granddaughter - leaving Sally alone with the baby she didn't want in a village that really didn't want them there. Cue Pippi's arrival, a few calls to Harriet and Robin, and Sally's (sort of) triumphant return.Pippi left on Sunday for a surprise visit to Sally. She wasn't due to arrive in Sally's remote village until Tuesday, so I was surprised to answer my phone Tuesday morning and hear Sally herself shrieking at me in broken Thai - hello, I miss you, do you miss me, the baby is big, I'm coming back.
"Say what?" I gurgled, wondering if someone had slipped something into my water bottle, but she had already hung up in a fit of excitement.
"Say what?" I gurgled, wondering if someone had slipped something into my water bottle, but she had already hung up in a fit of excitement.
Her standard line is that she doesn't want the baby. Under pressure, though, she's admitted to Pippi that she does like the kid, but her mother won't let her keep her. Pippi is trying to convince her to stay here with Pippi Two for a couple years and finish school, get her shit together, but Sally is determined to give the baby away again and leave the shelter sooner than later.
Friday: Fran and the hairiest baby of all
Fran had been planning for a while to take Blue back to Burma. I wasn't the only one who strongly opposed this idea, for reasons that should be glaringly obvious, but she was insistent. The problem, she said, was that Blue needed papers. Without the assistance of his douchebag father, who had unsurprisingly vanished without a trace, he couldn't get papers here in Thailand. If she didn't get him Burmese papers within a certain time frame, he would be doomed to statelessness, belonging nowhere.
On Thursday, Fran went with Agatha the social worker and somehow secured the necessary Thai papers. I doubted very much that the process was particularly legal, but I didn't give one single flying fuck. What mattered was that Blue had the papers he needed, and Fran wouldn't have to take him back to Burma. They could stay here, safe and supported, and start building a real life.
On Friday, though, Fran went out again and found an apartment. She told me she's leaving on April 1. No doubt she'll go straight back to the bars, where it's easy to make money and even easier to find yourself knocked up and abandoned.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Sunday: silver linings
Rosalind is home now. I've gone over to the Vietnamese house almost every day this week to spend a few hours with her, gossiping and shooting the shit. I keep forgetting that I'm not supposed to make her laugh; yesterday she got the giggles so bad that she had to haul herself to her feet and hobble out of the room. She walks like an old woman, hunched over and clutching her incision. She spends most of our time together lying in bed, one skinny hand wrapped around mine or resting on my knee or fiddling with the seam on my jeans. Her medication makes her sleepy, and I usually sneak out after she's dozed off. It doesn't matter: she knows I'll be back.
Pippi Two is absolutely gorgeous. She's so much bigger than the little fairy girl that left in January: the first time Sally shifted her into my arms, the weight of her took my breath away. She's still thin, but her arms and legs are terrifically strong, and she holds up her own head like a champ. Her eyes are enormous and pitch-black, and she stares at me while I hold her, her squishy pink mouth forever pursed in an expression of mingled concern and curiosity. I can still get her to stop crying by jamming my finger in her mouth. And sometimes, when it's just the two of us, I'll still sing to her, just to watch her tiny, sparse eyelashes drift down over those massive cartoon eyes.
Blue is not the world's cutest baby. He looks like an old man, jowly and grumpy-faced, and his shorn hair is growing back in the most hideous Friar Tuck pattern. He's hard to please, unhappy on his back or when it's hot for him to lie on his stomach, and he tends to fall asleep with his sweaty, bristly head shoved right up under my chin. To make matters worse, he's had wicked diarrhea recently; I don't mean to be dramatic, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve wiped that kid’s ass more in the last couple weeks than I’ve wiped mine in my entire life. I sit at my computer, unable to type with my hands full of this Benjamin Button baby - sweaty and scratchy and heavy, leaking poop like a punctured water balloon - and when Fran asks if I want her to take him now, I shake my head. "Mai bpen rai," I say. It's okay.
It's okay.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
negative proof
Gertie never made it across the border.
I’ve heard two different versions of her “origin story." It's hard to say which one is more accurate; both were told to me by people who ought to know the facts, who had no reason to bend the truth. Both are horrific, but then, people rarely end up at this shelter because of anything less.
In the first version, Gertie was trafficked over from Burma and put to work in a sweatshop, where a supervisor raped and impregnated her. She escaped and came to the shelter.
In the second version, she was raped by a Burmese general. She became pregnant, and her rapist ordered her to have an abortion. She refused on religious grounds. When the military threatened to kill her for her disobedience, she paid smugglers to get her into Thailand.
I don't know which story is true. Maybe they both are, to some degree. I hope not.
We know that she didn't make it out. We know that she got picked up by the Thai police. We know that it's been almost a month since the arrest, and no one has heard from her.
We don't know - possibly never will know - exactly where she is or what happened to her. But we can make an educated guess.
The Thai police are not exactly known for their stalwart defense of the people, especially refugees, who are not recognized under Thai law. Barring a miracle of God or nature, they would almost certainly have sent Gertie back to Burma.
In the best case scenario - the far-fetched daydream that allows me to get up in the morning - they kicked her across the border with relatively little fuss and she was allowed to return to her family. We’ll never see or hear from her again, but she's safe. As safe as you can be in Burma, anyway.
A far more likely possibility is that the Thai police turned her over to the Burmese authorities – the military – who are not known to spare the rod when dealing with "repatriated" refugees. Burmese prisons are nothing to joke about, even in the (frankly doubtful) event that she has not been raped or tortured.
Worse still, if the second version of her story is true, she would have been turned over to the same military she was running from when she came to Thailand. If they realized who she was, she would have been raped brutally and repeatedly, most likely tortured, and possibly killed.
&
I’ve heard two different versions of her “origin story." It's hard to say which one is more accurate; both were told to me by people who ought to know the facts, who had no reason to bend the truth. Both are horrific, but then, people rarely end up at this shelter because of anything less.
In the first version, Gertie was trafficked over from Burma and put to work in a sweatshop, where a supervisor raped and impregnated her. She escaped and came to the shelter.
In the second version, she was raped by a Burmese general. She became pregnant, and her rapist ordered her to have an abortion. She refused on religious grounds. When the military threatened to kill her for her disobedience, she paid smugglers to get her into Thailand.
I don't know which story is true. Maybe they both are, to some degree. I hope not.
&
We know that she didn't make it out. We know that she got picked up by the Thai police. We know that it's been almost a month since the arrest, and no one has heard from her.
We don't know - possibly never will know - exactly where she is or what happened to her. But we can make an educated guess.
The Thai police are not exactly known for their stalwart defense of the people, especially refugees, who are not recognized under Thai law. Barring a miracle of God or nature, they would almost certainly have sent Gertie back to Burma.
In the best case scenario - the far-fetched daydream that allows me to get up in the morning - they kicked her across the border with relatively little fuss and she was allowed to return to her family. We’ll never see or hear from her again, but she's safe. As safe as you can be in Burma, anyway.
A far more likely possibility is that the Thai police turned her over to the Burmese authorities – the military – who are not known to spare the rod when dealing with "repatriated" refugees. Burmese prisons are nothing to joke about, even in the (frankly doubtful) event that she has not been raped or tortured.
Worse still, if the second version of her story is true, she would have been turned over to the same military she was running from when she came to Thailand. If they realized who she was, she would have been raped brutally and repeatedly, most likely tortured, and possibly killed.
&
I have tried to present this straightforwardly, sticking to the facts as I know them and building a likely chain of events, using what I've picked up from first-hand sources as well as reports from human rights groups, activists, journalists, and survivors. I have tried to think with my head, not my heart. I have tried not to jump to any conclusions.
Above all, I have tried not to associate the Gertie I'm writing about here with the Gertie I know. The friend who teases me and gossips with me, who takes my arm and falls asleep on my shoulder in the songthaew, who always alerts me when there is papaya salad to be had. The student who scolds me if I'm late, who taught me to write my name in Burmese, who reads aloud with slow determination and invariably says "a-n-d...and!" and "ans-wur" no matter how many times I correct her. The seamstress who has the aesthetic sense of a five-year-old, who loves bright colors and flower headbands and teddy bears patches, who's always presenting me with retina-scarring color combinations and asking if they're beautiful, as if I could say anything but "yes" to that hopeful face.
The mother who was traveling with her two-year-old daughter, a thoroughly spoiled mama's girl with a boy's haircut and a split thumb like her mother's.
Above all, I have tried not to associate the Gertie I'm writing about here with the Gertie I know. The friend who teases me and gossips with me, who takes my arm and falls asleep on my shoulder in the songthaew, who always alerts me when there is papaya salad to be had. The student who scolds me if I'm late, who taught me to write my name in Burmese, who reads aloud with slow determination and invariably says "a-n-d...and!" and "ans-wur" no matter how many times I correct her. The seamstress who has the aesthetic sense of a five-year-old, who loves bright colors and flower headbands and teddy bears patches, who's always presenting me with retina-scarring color combinations and asking if they're beautiful, as if I could say anything but "yes" to that hopeful face.
The mother who was traveling with her two-year-old daughter, a thoroughly spoiled mama's girl with a boy's haircut and a split thumb like her mother's.
&
What do I know, anyway? Maybe they let her off easy. Maybe she and Opal are back with her family. Maybe they're still sitting in a Thai prison. Maybe I've totally misjudged the situation. I'm no expert, you know. I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
the number 23
I am not in the habit of doing anything particularly special for my birthday. Last year, if I recall correctly, MD and I went out for a nice but low-key dinner. The year before, it was my first day staying in someone else's house on a cooperative farm in Costa Rica. Two years before that, the big day was spent mostly in a minivan with four people I didn't know very well, trying valiantly to get from Denver to Phoenix - a 16-hour doozy, during which I never mentioned that it was my nineteenth birthday.
The thing is, I don't like to make a big fuss, or make people feel like they're obligated to be nice to me or give me special treatment. If you hate me the other 364 days of the year, the anniversary of my birth shouldn't be any different.
That's not to say I don't appreciate some small acknowledgment. Like most people, I'd be a little upset if everyone forgot entirely, but a simple, "Oh, by the way, happy birthday," from a few loved ones is more than enough to keep me from going all Molly Ringwald.
This year, I planned to keep things pretty quiet: dinner in the city, Skype chats with a couple friends, maybe treat myself to a massage and a new book. I hoped that most people wouldn't realize it was my birthday at all.
No such luck. I have no idea how the news got out, but everyone knew by the end of the day. I think I remember mentioning it offhand to Elsa a few weeks ago - probably when she expressed surprise at my tender age of 22 - but I assumed she'd forgotten until Harriet searched me out to deliver a pair of huge, fabulously garish earrings, which were so perfectly me that I immediately switched them out with the pair I was wearing. Harriet made a point of telling me they were from Elsa, probably because she didn't want me to think she'd chosen such ugly things. (Elsa told me later that her mom had in fact thought they were too big and loud, but Elsa had insisted that they were my style.)
I must have told Rosalind, too, because Alma informed me she's the one who spilled the beans to the Vietnamese. Alma and Winnie ambushed me in the morning with a joyfully off-key rendition of Happy Birthday, as well as three different cards: Winnie's short and sweet, Rosalind's in textbook-perfect English, and Alma's almost invisible under a thick layer of stickers. I blushed and cringed and thanked them - and then, like the coward I am, I ran away. I intended to hide in the office, but it proved no sanctuary, as our social worker Agatha pulled out an incredibly sweet card that George and Ruthie had left behind for me. (They've been in Vietnam for the last two weeks, so how the hell they knew, I have no idea.)
Later in the morning, Betty came in and stood next to my chair, a terrible scowl darkening her normally cheerful visage. Slightly alarmed, I asked what was wrong. She continued to glare at me for several seconds, then abruptly burst into a huge grin and flung herself at me, bellowing Happy Birthday at the top of her lungs. "Shut up, shut up," I wailed, totally in vain, as she just cackled wildly and squeezed me tighter.
Later still, Winnie came to the door of the office and asked me to come with her. It's not an unusual request, and the reward for cooperation is often papaya salad, so I happily joined her for a stroll behind the women's residence, arms slung around each other's waists. We meandered along, idly discussing the plague of tiny frogs that had suddenly descended on the farm that morning, and it wasn't until we approached the gazebo and I saw all the women gathered together that my brain started howling, "IT'S A TRAP!"
The women burst into that hateful song, led by a beaming Betty, and I smacked Winnie's shoulder and hid my crimson face in my hands like the socially inept ingrate I am. Then I noticed Pippi walking over from the office bearing a serving dish piled high with ice cream, the melting tower obscured by a mass of flaming yellow candles. Everyone sang again, presumably because they enjoyed watching me squirm, and I managed to blow out the candles and thank everyone without passing out or embarrassing myself any further.
I'm still pretty embarrassed about all the ballyhoo - so very unexpected because it's practically unheard-of around these parts - and I'm sure there were many people that were strong-armed into participating who really didn't give a damn one way or another. But I'm not so ungrateful as to demean the actions and effort of the handful of people who were behind it all, who just wanted to do something special and make me happy.
So even though they'll (God willing) never read this, let me just say for the record: thanks, you guys. I love you too.
The thing is, I don't like to make a big fuss, or make people feel like they're obligated to be nice to me or give me special treatment. If you hate me the other 364 days of the year, the anniversary of my birth shouldn't be any different.
That's not to say I don't appreciate some small acknowledgment. Like most people, I'd be a little upset if everyone forgot entirely, but a simple, "Oh, by the way, happy birthday," from a few loved ones is more than enough to keep me from going all Molly Ringwald.
This year, I planned to keep things pretty quiet: dinner in the city, Skype chats with a couple friends, maybe treat myself to a massage and a new book. I hoped that most people wouldn't realize it was my birthday at all.
No such luck. I have no idea how the news got out, but everyone knew by the end of the day. I think I remember mentioning it offhand to Elsa a few weeks ago - probably when she expressed surprise at my tender age of 22 - but I assumed she'd forgotten until Harriet searched me out to deliver a pair of huge, fabulously garish earrings, which were so perfectly me that I immediately switched them out with the pair I was wearing. Harriet made a point of telling me they were from Elsa, probably because she didn't want me to think she'd chosen such ugly things. (Elsa told me later that her mom had in fact thought they were too big and loud, but Elsa had insisted that they were my style.)
I must have told Rosalind, too, because Alma informed me she's the one who spilled the beans to the Vietnamese. Alma and Winnie ambushed me in the morning with a joyfully off-key rendition of Happy Birthday, as well as three different cards: Winnie's short and sweet, Rosalind's in textbook-perfect English, and Alma's almost invisible under a thick layer of stickers. I blushed and cringed and thanked them - and then, like the coward I am, I ran away. I intended to hide in the office, but it proved no sanctuary, as our social worker Agatha pulled out an incredibly sweet card that George and Ruthie had left behind for me. (They've been in Vietnam for the last two weeks, so how the hell they knew, I have no idea.)
Later in the morning, Betty came in and stood next to my chair, a terrible scowl darkening her normally cheerful visage. Slightly alarmed, I asked what was wrong. She continued to glare at me for several seconds, then abruptly burst into a huge grin and flung herself at me, bellowing Happy Birthday at the top of her lungs. "Shut up, shut up," I wailed, totally in vain, as she just cackled wildly and squeezed me tighter.
Later still, Winnie came to the door of the office and asked me to come with her. It's not an unusual request, and the reward for cooperation is often papaya salad, so I happily joined her for a stroll behind the women's residence, arms slung around each other's waists. We meandered along, idly discussing the plague of tiny frogs that had suddenly descended on the farm that morning, and it wasn't until we approached the gazebo and I saw all the women gathered together that my brain started howling, "IT'S A TRAP!"
The women burst into that hateful song, led by a beaming Betty, and I smacked Winnie's shoulder and hid my crimson face in my hands like the socially inept ingrate I am. Then I noticed Pippi walking over from the office bearing a serving dish piled high with ice cream, the melting tower obscured by a mass of flaming yellow candles. Everyone sang again, presumably because they enjoyed watching me squirm, and I managed to blow out the candles and thank everyone without passing out or embarrassing myself any further.
I'm still pretty embarrassed about all the ballyhoo - so very unexpected because it's practically unheard-of around these parts - and I'm sure there were many people that were strong-armed into participating who really didn't give a damn one way or another. But I'm not so ungrateful as to demean the actions and effort of the handful of people who were behind it all, who just wanted to do something special and make me happy.
So even though they'll (God willing) never read this, let me just say for the record: thanks, you guys. I love you too.
Friday, March 12, 2010
retro: into that good night
Over the course of my travels, I have slept in many, many beds. It's frequently been the nature of my work to sleep wherever there's a bit of free space: innumerable thin foam mattresses, a dozen creaky canvas cots, couches and floors and beds so hard they may as well have been floors. I have spent countless nights lying awake on these beds, tormented in turn by the heat and the cold, illness and nerves, itchy fleabites and upset stomachs and, on one memorable occasion, a particularly loud colony of frogs. Just the other night I discovered flying ant larvae nestled in my blankets, and have been suffering phantom creepy-crawlies ever since.
I want to take a moment to clarify that I'm not particularly afraid of snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of earthquakes or axe murderers or deadly nightshade, either, but when brought face-to-face with these things, I think it's only natural to realize with sudden clarity that they can in fact kill us. Some of the biggest assholes in the animal kingdom can be found in Nicaragua - this is, after all, the country that gave us freshwater sharks - and various parts of the country are home to coral snakes, bushmasters, and the good old fer-de-lance, each of which are bound to ruin your day.
Quiz time!
Q: Was the snake outside my house really a horrible, astoundingly deadly pit viper?
A: Unlikely.
Q: Was I, armed with a single drippy candle and my pocketknife, really about to go check?
A: Fuck off.
But never, and I mean never, have I had so much trouble sleeping as I did as a volunteer in Nicaragua.
Ironically, my allotted sleeping space was pretty nice. The bed was a real mattress, a luxury I have since rarely seen even in more affluent towns. No doubt it was my host parents' bed, quietly surrendered to me with the sort of selflessness usually seen only in anonymous kidney donors. There were no sheets to worry about; I just sprawled across the bare mattress, travel pillow smushed securely between my head and the wall. For the first couple weeks, my little sisters took turns sleeping with me. 11-year-old Julieta tended to tuck in close behind me, huddled against my back, while 9-year-old Marta was an aggressive cuddler, wrapping her arms and legs around me every night like a spider monkey. I was forever carefully unwrapping her and rolling her over onto her other side, only to watch as, like a perpetual motion machine, she instantly rolled back over and clung onto me again.
At some point, they both stopped sleeping with me. To this day, I sometimes worry that my host mother found out they were disrupting my sleep and ordered them to let me have the bed to myself. It's a stupid thing to let ruffle my conscience, but if I've learned one thing from my mother, it's that you can never have too much guilt or garlic. I feel guilty for stealing a piece of a stranger's pretzel when I was five years old, I feel guilty for things I've done in dreams, and I feel guilty for unintentionally forcing my host sisters to sleep three to a bed.
Our town had no electricity, so everyone went to bed shortly after nightfall. I got in the habit of reading to Marta and Julieta in the evenings - after we watched our novela on our cousins' car battery-powered television, of course. I had brought a stash of Spanish-language children's books, and every night we would sit on the edge of my bed, the girls pressed up close against my sides, and read Dr. Seuss. One of the girls would hold up a little white candle for light, dripping wax on the pages and occasionally "accidentally" singeing a piece of my hair.
One night, during a particularly spirited recitation of Cómo el Grinch Robó la Navidad, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Snagging the candle from Marta, I turned around to investigate, only to discover that the wall was swarming with ants. Not tiny, harmless ants, like the kind that would later plague my cereal in Granada. No, these were big, black, ass-kicking ants, the panzer division of the ant army. I knew from experience that a bite from one of those bad boys felt a lot like getting hit in the hand with a baseball bat. A baseball bat covered in spikes.
"ANTS," I said, calmly, to my sisters.
"Ants," they agreed. Julieta reached over and flicked one off the wall.
"ANTS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."
I believed then as I do now that compromise is key to cross-cultural understanding, but I straight-up could not sleep with my head tucked up against the Demon Ant Super-Highway. I began to sleep curled up at the foot of my bed, like a dog. My legs stuck off the edge of the mattress, but who cared? At least I had put a safe distance between my body and the ant battalion, although frequently a handful of them would trek all the way down the mattress just to see how I was getting on.
Then I noticed the scorpions.
Well, okay, I had noticed them before. What I hadn't noticed was that they tended to mosey across the outside wall. The wall I was now snuggling up to every night.
In other words: "SCORPIONS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."
Reasonably, I thought, I began pushing the mattress away from the wall a few inches. My 15-year-old sister Milagros thought I was insane. "They'll just walk across the floor and up the side of the mattress and get you that way," she said.
"LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING," I replied.
So that took care of the ants and the scorpions. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.
One night, I woke up around 1:00 A.M. feeling sick and over-hot. Venturing out to the latrine was not an option; at night, it swarmed with cockroaches the size of small dogs. I resigned myself to hours of misery, hoping vaguely that I would drift back into sleep but knowing enough not to count on it.
Half an hour into my ordeal, I was distracted from my suffering by a strange, clicking, sibilant sound. The house was built into the side of a hill, so that the top of my bed was level with the ground outside. And something was out there, on the other side of the wall. Something...hissing.
"Milagros," I whispered urgently. "Mili! Is that a snake?"
She sat bolt upright. "What? Where?"
I shushed her, indicating that she should listen. A moment later, we both heard it - a whistling hiss that trailed off into a series of clicks.
She swallowed audibly and said, "It's just crickets." She seemed uncertain, and I wasn't buying it. Crickets my ass. Since when did crickets hiss? Or have teeth?
Satisfied with her assessment of the situation, Milagros kicked Marta's legs away and went back to sleep. Whatever my fate was to be that night, I was going to face it alone.
I want to take a moment to clarify that I'm not particularly afraid of snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of earthquakes or axe murderers or deadly nightshade, either, but when brought face-to-face with these things, I think it's only natural to realize with sudden clarity that they can in fact kill us. Some of the biggest assholes in the animal kingdom can be found in Nicaragua - this is, after all, the country that gave us freshwater sharks - and various parts of the country are home to coral snakes, bushmasters, and the good old fer-de-lance, each of which are bound to ruin your day.
Quiz time!
Q: Was the snake outside my house really a horrible, astoundingly deadly pit viper?
A: Unlikely.
Q: Was I, armed with a single drippy candle and my pocketknife, really about to go check?
A: Fuck off.
Throughout that long night, as my stomach twisted and cramped, I listened to the snake slide back and forth on the other side of the wall. The roof was only casually connected to the walls, leaving plenty of room for a determined death-bringer to squeeze through and kill us all in our beds. Could snakes climb walls? I was pretty sure they could. On the other hand, most of my snake knowledge came from Jumanji and The Jungle Book. On the other other hand, it was a really short wall.
Either Disney lied to me about wildlife abilities and behaviors (ha ha, like they'd ever do that), or snakes aren't actually too interested in sweaty, unshowered gringa as a main course. Whatever the reason, the snake didn't slither over the wall that night, or the next night, or the next. In fact, it stayed outside for the next two weeks, jealously guarding its territory every night, until the day I left. I know this because I was awake for every one of those nights. I never intended to stay awake. I would doze off after storytime, then jolt awake a few hours later, my heart in my throat. The bastard was always there, gliding leisurely along the length of wall that separated us, occasionally slowing down as it passed my head as if to suggest that this was the night it would come over the wall and eat my face. I could never fall back asleep, so I would lie there listening to it until dawn, scratching my mosquito bites and amending my mental hierarchy of nocturnal enemies.
In this way, we passed our nights together: the snake moving back and forth along its familiar path, hissing and clicking, and me curled up at one end of my mattress, mud-flaked toes twitching nervously in midair, wondering what else might be hiding out there in the dark.
Monday, March 8, 2010
snow white
I am really, really white.
Okay, that's not really "news" as such. I'm English, Russian and German, which means (1) I'm a tremendous asshole, and (2) I cannot display my legs in public without blinding all onlookers. I am only slightly exaggerating. The supernatural paleness of my skin has been the subject of much discussion since I started traveling. My host mother in Nicaragua observed that my feet were the color of milk. The chatty nurses at the Ministry of Health used to say that I made all their photos look overexposed. In Mexico, I was regularly stopped by old women as I walked through their little towns and informed, quite gravely, that mine were the whitest legs they'd ever seen.
Some people can pull off the pale look. Anne Hathaway, for example. Gorgeous! Or Christina Hendricks - phwoar. Their skin is like fine bone china, and those bitches are working it for all it's worth.
They also clearly sleep underground, carry parasols and have not seen the beach even once in the last twenty years. The rest of us must balance our desire to protect our delicate complexions with the fact that most of Planet Earth is, in fact, outside. As for me, the instant I expose my pasty white skin to direct sunlight, my look becomes less "porcelain" and more "cracked terracotta."
It's easy to avoid the sun in Cleveland, as it's cloudy, raining, snowing or sleeting approximately 361 days out of the year. But the minute I venture out of the overcast haven of the Midwest and actually encounter that big shiny thing in the sky, my defenseless skin loses its ever-loving mind.
"FUCK OH MY CHRIST WHAT THE HELL IS THAT," it says, cringing away from the sun's rays like a small animal cornered by a slavering beast.
"That's the sun," I say patiently, slopping on another liter of sunblock. "It keeps us alive. Seriously, we've been over this like a million times."
"OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE," my skin wails, and abruptly bursts into flames.
So I spend most of my time abroad wearing a skin-suit the approximate hue and texture of a quality salmon fillet. I've built up a tolerance for the pain, but the sight of my sun-broiled flesh generally causes a great deal of alarm among my non-white associates. "What happened to you?" they demand. Invariably they reach out to touch, then hesitate when I flinch. "Does it hurt?" they ask, curious hands still hovering above my skin, as if warming by a fire.
"A little," I lie. "It's not as bad as it looks. Say, do you know where I can procure a large quantity of dry ice?"
Even when my skin's not falling off in sheets the size of playing cards, it's kind of a pain in the ass. I am evidently a rare mosquito delicacy, and my whiteness causes the flaming red bites to stand out like scarlet letters, drawing a lot of unwanted attention from every well-meaning grandma and taxi driver in a twelve-mile radius, each bursting with useful insights such as: "You know, you should really use repellent." And: "Have you considered pants?"
In some places, even my plain old unblemished skin is enough to draw a crowd. I used to dread walking through one of my "base cities" in Nicaragua, one of the only places I've ever felt distinctly uncomfortable about the nature of the cat-calls directed my way. This would be the town where, not thirty seconds after emerging from the Ministry of Health building, I was hailed by a group of young men. "Hello!" they chorused gaily, and then, when I didn't respond to their satisfaction, "You are a dirty fifty-cent whore." (Well, actually, they said it in Spanish, and they said "10-córdoba." Still, my going rate at the time was upwards of five dollars, so what the hell did they know.)
I've been called by a lot of nicknames. Chela was popular in Nicaragua, güera in Mexico. Both mean "white girl." More general terms like gringo/a and farang tend to mean this, too - while they technically mean American or foreigner, it's understood in many places that Americans are white. Just ask any Company volunteer or staff member of color; I guarantee they've had the following conversation more times than they can count.
LOCAL: So where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: California.
LOCAL: No, where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: Uh...I was born in New Jersey?
LOCAL: Look, where are your parents from?
VOLUNTEER: Annapolis.
LOCAL: And their parents?
VOLUNTEER: Same.
LOCAL: And their parents?
[15 minutes later.]
VOLUNTEER: Okay, fine, I think my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was born in China.
LOCAL: A-ha! Just what I thought, chinita.
So, obviously, I could have it a lot worse. I know that. I understand that complaining about my pale skin is kind of like bitching about the heaviness of my golden mantle and the discomfort of my diamond-encrusted shoes. At home and abroad, my pinkish epidermis allows me an insane level of privilege of which I'm usually not even aware. In a lot of places, due in large part to some tricky cultural and socioeconomic issues -
[Dear M,
Don't you dare detour into a discussion of cultural hegemony. Don't do it! No one cares!
Kisses,
M]
- uhh, where was I. Oh, right: due in large part to all that, light skin is valued and sought after in many places in a way that'll give you the heebie-jeebies. You can't walk into a drugstore here in Thailand without seeing shelves upon shelves of supposedly skin-lightening products with names like "White Radiance" and "White Perfect." In fact, I have yet to find a moisturizer here that doesn't claim to bleach the user's complexion. Lots of the women at the shelter use these or similar products, and more than one person has poked at the pale skin above my tan lines and told me that my skin is beautiful. Even the men on the construction team hide their faces behind hot, heavy canvas veils, because dark skin marks a person as a laborer.
So I'm lucky, undeservedly privileged, because, for better or worse, I'm as white as it gets.
But seriously, you guys: who do I have to bribe, kill or screw to get a decent base tan?
Okay, that's not really "news" as such. I'm English, Russian and German, which means (1) I'm a tremendous asshole, and (2) I cannot display my legs in public without blinding all onlookers. I am only slightly exaggerating. The supernatural paleness of my skin has been the subject of much discussion since I started traveling. My host mother in Nicaragua observed that my feet were the color of milk. The chatty nurses at the Ministry of Health used to say that I made all their photos look overexposed. In Mexico, I was regularly stopped by old women as I walked through their little towns and informed, quite gravely, that mine were the whitest legs they'd ever seen.
Some people can pull off the pale look. Anne Hathaway, for example. Gorgeous! Or Christina Hendricks - phwoar. Their skin is like fine bone china, and those bitches are working it for all it's worth.
They also clearly sleep underground, carry parasols and have not seen the beach even once in the last twenty years. The rest of us must balance our desire to protect our delicate complexions with the fact that most of Planet Earth is, in fact, outside. As for me, the instant I expose my pasty white skin to direct sunlight, my look becomes less "porcelain" and more "cracked terracotta."
It's easy to avoid the sun in Cleveland, as it's cloudy, raining, snowing or sleeting approximately 361 days out of the year. But the minute I venture out of the overcast haven of the Midwest and actually encounter that big shiny thing in the sky, my defenseless skin loses its ever-loving mind.
"FUCK OH MY CHRIST WHAT THE HELL IS THAT," it says, cringing away from the sun's rays like a small animal cornered by a slavering beast.
"That's the sun," I say patiently, slopping on another liter of sunblock. "It keeps us alive. Seriously, we've been over this like a million times."
"OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE," my skin wails, and abruptly bursts into flames.
So I spend most of my time abroad wearing a skin-suit the approximate hue and texture of a quality salmon fillet. I've built up a tolerance for the pain, but the sight of my sun-broiled flesh generally causes a great deal of alarm among my non-white associates. "What happened to you?" they demand. Invariably they reach out to touch, then hesitate when I flinch. "Does it hurt?" they ask, curious hands still hovering above my skin, as if warming by a fire.
"A little," I lie. "It's not as bad as it looks. Say, do you know where I can procure a large quantity of dry ice?"
Even when my skin's not falling off in sheets the size of playing cards, it's kind of a pain in the ass. I am evidently a rare mosquito delicacy, and my whiteness causes the flaming red bites to stand out like scarlet letters, drawing a lot of unwanted attention from every well-meaning grandma and taxi driver in a twelve-mile radius, each bursting with useful insights such as: "You know, you should really use repellent." And: "Have you considered pants?"
In some places, even my plain old unblemished skin is enough to draw a crowd. I used to dread walking through one of my "base cities" in Nicaragua, one of the only places I've ever felt distinctly uncomfortable about the nature of the cat-calls directed my way. This would be the town where, not thirty seconds after emerging from the Ministry of Health building, I was hailed by a group of young men. "Hello!" they chorused gaily, and then, when I didn't respond to their satisfaction, "You are a dirty fifty-cent whore." (Well, actually, they said it in Spanish, and they said "10-córdoba." Still, my going rate at the time was upwards of five dollars, so what the hell did they know.)
I've been called by a lot of nicknames. Chela was popular in Nicaragua, güera in Mexico. Both mean "white girl." More general terms like gringo/a and farang tend to mean this, too - while they technically mean American or foreigner, it's understood in many places that Americans are white. Just ask any Company volunteer or staff member of color; I guarantee they've had the following conversation more times than they can count.
LOCAL: So where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: California.
LOCAL: No, where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: Uh...I was born in New Jersey?
LOCAL: Look, where are your parents from?
VOLUNTEER: Annapolis.
LOCAL: And their parents?
VOLUNTEER: Same.
LOCAL: And their parents?
[15 minutes later.]
VOLUNTEER: Okay, fine, I think my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was born in China.
LOCAL: A-ha! Just what I thought, chinita.
So, obviously, I could have it a lot worse. I know that. I understand that complaining about my pale skin is kind of like bitching about the heaviness of my golden mantle and the discomfort of my diamond-encrusted shoes. At home and abroad, my pinkish epidermis allows me an insane level of privilege of which I'm usually not even aware. In a lot of places, due in large part to some tricky cultural and socioeconomic issues -
[Dear M,
Don't you dare detour into a discussion of cultural hegemony. Don't do it! No one cares!
Kisses,
M]
- uhh, where was I. Oh, right: due in large part to all that, light skin is valued and sought after in many places in a way that'll give you the heebie-jeebies. You can't walk into a drugstore here in Thailand without seeing shelves upon shelves of supposedly skin-lightening products with names like "White Radiance" and "White Perfect." In fact, I have yet to find a moisturizer here that doesn't claim to bleach the user's complexion. Lots of the women at the shelter use these or similar products, and more than one person has poked at the pale skin above my tan lines and told me that my skin is beautiful. Even the men on the construction team hide their faces behind hot, heavy canvas veils, because dark skin marks a person as a laborer.
So I'm lucky, undeservedly privileged, because, for better or worse, I'm as white as it gets.
But seriously, you guys: who do I have to bribe, kill or screw to get a decent base tan?
Saturday, February 27, 2010
gertie
It's funny when you get to the point of language comprehension where you can understand things you're not supposed to. Like yesterday, when Gertie was talking to Betty in Thai about one of the volunteers.
It's important to note here that Gertie is terrible with names. It took quite a while for my name to register with her - the double whammy of foreign consonants is enough to thoroughly intimidate most people here - and even then she called me by a simplified nickname for a long time, mostly because I thought it was adorable and didn't bother correcting her. In a similar case, we had a volunteer named Ruth back in January, who Gertie routinely called Fruit. (ADORABLE.)
Yesterday, the volunteer in question was a British girl with natural hair who had been working with Gertie for several weeks. Betty asked where something was, and Gertie told her to go ask that girl. "You know," she said, gesturing wildly around her head. "Hair."
I burst out laughing, and they both looked at me. "You understand?" Betty asked, a tad guiltily.
Gertie just grinned. "Gertie is a bad person," she said in Thai.
She is. She's also one of my favorite people. My computer is set up in the workshop where Gertie works, and I teach her English every afternoon, so we spend a lot of time together. She's been through all kinds of hell - trafficked, raped, blackmailed - but she is goo-goo in love with her daughter Opal, and she adores babies in a way that'll make your ovaries tingle. She's got spunk, too, and she's probably one of the funniest people I know. During our class yesterday, she told me about how she accidentally wore a belly shirt to a friend's funeral. (Maybe it doesn't sound funny to you, but you didn't see the way she pantomimed "dead," or the way she kept saying, "Seck-SEE! Seck-SEE!")
Gertie is going back to Burma next week, for two months. She wants to see her family for the first time in years, to finally introduce Opal to her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I'm worried that she won't make it back, that she'll get caught sneaking in or out. She's worried too. She told me that she's afraid Opal will speak Thai in front of the wrong person and give away their secret.
I wish I had a witty insight or humorous anecdote to wrap up this post, but I don't. Gertie is risking everything by going home. I love her, and I'm scared for her. I hope that she comes back to us safe and sound and on schedule, because this joint won't be the same without her.
It's important to note here that Gertie is terrible with names. It took quite a while for my name to register with her - the double whammy of foreign consonants is enough to thoroughly intimidate most people here - and even then she called me by a simplified nickname for a long time, mostly because I thought it was adorable and didn't bother correcting her. In a similar case, we had a volunteer named Ruth back in January, who Gertie routinely called Fruit. (ADORABLE.)
Yesterday, the volunteer in question was a British girl with natural hair who had been working with Gertie for several weeks. Betty asked where something was, and Gertie told her to go ask that girl. "You know," she said, gesturing wildly around her head. "Hair."
I burst out laughing, and they both looked at me. "You understand?" Betty asked, a tad guiltily.
Gertie just grinned. "Gertie is a bad person," she said in Thai.
She is. She's also one of my favorite people. My computer is set up in the workshop where Gertie works, and I teach her English every afternoon, so we spend a lot of time together. She's been through all kinds of hell - trafficked, raped, blackmailed - but she is goo-goo in love with her daughter Opal, and she adores babies in a way that'll make your ovaries tingle. She's got spunk, too, and she's probably one of the funniest people I know. During our class yesterday, she told me about how she accidentally wore a belly shirt to a friend's funeral. (Maybe it doesn't sound funny to you, but you didn't see the way she pantomimed "dead," or the way she kept saying, "Seck-SEE! Seck-SEE!")
Gertie is going back to Burma next week, for two months. She wants to see her family for the first time in years, to finally introduce Opal to her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I'm worried that she won't make it back, that she'll get caught sneaking in or out. She's worried too. She told me that she's afraid Opal will speak Thai in front of the wrong person and give away their secret.
I wish I had a witty insight or humorous anecdote to wrap up this post, but I don't. Gertie is risking everything by going home. I love her, and I'm scared for her. I hope that she comes back to us safe and sound and on schedule, because this joint won't be the same without her.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
thai for beginners
Hey, guess what? I can read!
This may not sound like such an accomplishment to you. Probably most of you possess a similar skill yourselves, or else you've hired someone to read your RSS feed aloud. (In which case, hats off for having that kind of disposable income in this economy.)
I'm told that my ability to read took my mother by surprise. Not because I was some kind of Baby Einstein, or the second coming of Matilda, or anything. In truth, I learned to read much later than my vexingly bright older sister, around the same time as most of my peers. But I kept it a secret, I guess, until the day my mother stumbled upon me reading a book aloud in the library. When asked why I hadn't told her that I knew how to read, I imagine myself shrugging and saying snidely, "You didn't ask."
Anyway.
I've been studying Thai for the last two months with the long-suffering Khruu Aajaan. George and Ruthie have also been studying, mostly basic vocab, but they're the only other farang who take lessons. Pippi studied with Khruu Aajaan for a couple days when she first arrived at the shelter, but she got fed up with the alphabet and the memorization. She's more concerned with practicality than academics, and so she now learns a handful of new words every day by asking people the words for telephone, purple, inside. The other volunteers do the same, with varying levels of success.
I, on the other hand, am a nerd. I don't particularly like studying, but I do like learning, and I've grudgingly come to accept that you can't have the latter without the former. I want to learn Thai; I need to learn Thai. Because it's rude not to. Because it'll make my life and my job easier. Because I like a challenge. Because I want to prove that I can. Because that brat Alma speaks four languages, so I really ought to be able to handle three.
Because, really, when am I going to have this opportunity again?
It's commonly agreed by everyone with attached brain stems that immersion is the best way to learn a new language, and I am nothing if not immersed. However, immersion in this particular environment does raise some difficulties, among them the fact that there are about a million different kinds of Thai. I'm learning Central or Standard Thai from Khruu Aajaan, but many of the women speak Northern Thai or Isan - that is, if they speak Thai at all, which brings us to the point that most of our women are not native Thai speakers. They're from Laos, Vietnam, Burma and various hill tribes, and Thai is often their second or third language. I try out my new vocabulary on them, and they stare at me blankly, leaving me to wonder which one of us is the dummy. (Spoiler alert: it's usually me.)
But we're giving it the old college try anyway, me and Khruu Aajaan. One hour every day, we sit together in the little gazebo and attempt to cram knowledge into my "brain" (i.e., a dense, petrified mass of assumptions, beliefs and phenomenally tenacious radio jingles).
From the start, my classes have been a mix of alphabet and vocabulary. In a typical class, Khruu Aajaan will teach me several new phrases or categories of words, quiz me on phrases and words I'm supposed to know, test my grasp of vowel sounds and tones, and have me write the alphabet over and over again.
In case you're wondering, the Thai alphabet is an absolute bastard. I know I'm lucky that there's an alphabet at all, that it's not like Mandarin or Japanese with thousands of symbols you have to memorize, but it's unforgivably complicated all the same. There are forty-four consonants. Some of them sound the same, and some of them look the same, but there is little overlap between these categories. When I first started, the symbols were wholly foreign. They looked like nothing, like little kid doodles, and I had a hard time processing that these squiggles translated to sounds. I learned to differentiate between the groups of similar-looking consonants by thinking of each shape as a vague sketch of some object or animal. "Gaw gai," my teacher would say, and I would think, Is that the tooth? The snake? The owl? The arched cat? The camel?
Once you've mastered the consonants, there are vowels to contend with - thirty-two of them. There's the quarter note, the turtle, the candy cane, the slug, and dozens of others. You can write different vowels before or after or above or below the consonants, or sometimes before and after and above if you really want to be a dick about it.
And then there are the tones: high, low, middle, falling and rising. The same arrangement of letters can make five entirely different words depending on the tone. Some people say tone doesn't really matter. These people are known in Thailand as "dumbasses."
So it's been slow going. I'm spurred on by three main things:
(1) the constant pressure to speak better, understand more, catch up to the other staff members;
(2) my stupid pride; and
(3) the occasional breakthrough.
Which brings us to today, when, as he often does, Khruu Aajaan wrote some syllables on the board to practice consonant sounds. There's a certain ritual to these exercises: he reads off the syllable on the board, I ignore the written letters in favor of parroting the sound coming out of his mouth, he shakes his head and repeats himself, I parrot him again, and he gives up and moves on to the next syllable.
Today, though, he suddenly stopped short in the middle of the exercise and gave me a funny look. He pointed to the board. "You read."
What? I don't read. I can't read. I can barely read English. Recognizing slugs and teeth and camels isn't reading; it's the linguistic equivalent of Concentration.
"You're reading," he said in Thai. "You can read. OK! I write and you say."
He wrote. And, despite my better instincts, I said.
So I guess I can read, sort of. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to be tackling the Thai translation of War and Peace anytime soon. I stutter and hesitate, and there are plenty of less common letters that I still can't identify on sight. Besides which, being able to read sounds off a page does me very little good if I don't know what they mean.
But still, this is progress. Better progress than I thought I would make, frankly. I can read. Maybe my brain isn't so unyielding after all. Maybe there's hope. Maybe I will actually speak Thai someday. Eventually. Some time before the Earth is swallowed by the sun.
Now if I could just get these goddamn jingles out of my head, we'd really be in business.
This may not sound like such an accomplishment to you. Probably most of you possess a similar skill yourselves, or else you've hired someone to read your RSS feed aloud. (In which case, hats off for having that kind of disposable income in this economy.)
I'm told that my ability to read took my mother by surprise. Not because I was some kind of Baby Einstein, or the second coming of Matilda, or anything. In truth, I learned to read much later than my vexingly bright older sister, around the same time as most of my peers. But I kept it a secret, I guess, until the day my mother stumbled upon me reading a book aloud in the library. When asked why I hadn't told her that I knew how to read, I imagine myself shrugging and saying snidely, "You didn't ask."
Anyway.
I've been studying Thai for the last two months with the long-suffering Khruu Aajaan. George and Ruthie have also been studying, mostly basic vocab, but they're the only other farang who take lessons. Pippi studied with Khruu Aajaan for a couple days when she first arrived at the shelter, but she got fed up with the alphabet and the memorization. She's more concerned with practicality than academics, and so she now learns a handful of new words every day by asking people the words for telephone, purple, inside. The other volunteers do the same, with varying levels of success.
I, on the other hand, am a nerd. I don't particularly like studying, but I do like learning, and I've grudgingly come to accept that you can't have the latter without the former. I want to learn Thai; I need to learn Thai. Because it's rude not to. Because it'll make my life and my job easier. Because I like a challenge. Because I want to prove that I can. Because that brat Alma speaks four languages, so I really ought to be able to handle three.
Because, really, when am I going to have this opportunity again?
It's commonly agreed by everyone with attached brain stems that immersion is the best way to learn a new language, and I am nothing if not immersed. However, immersion in this particular environment does raise some difficulties, among them the fact that there are about a million different kinds of Thai. I'm learning Central or Standard Thai from Khruu Aajaan, but many of the women speak Northern Thai or Isan - that is, if they speak Thai at all, which brings us to the point that most of our women are not native Thai speakers. They're from Laos, Vietnam, Burma and various hill tribes, and Thai is often their second or third language. I try out my new vocabulary on them, and they stare at me blankly, leaving me to wonder which one of us is the dummy. (Spoiler alert: it's usually me.)
But we're giving it the old college try anyway, me and Khruu Aajaan. One hour every day, we sit together in the little gazebo and attempt to cram knowledge into my "brain" (i.e., a dense, petrified mass of assumptions, beliefs and phenomenally tenacious radio jingles).
From the start, my classes have been a mix of alphabet and vocabulary. In a typical class, Khruu Aajaan will teach me several new phrases or categories of words, quiz me on phrases and words I'm supposed to know, test my grasp of vowel sounds and tones, and have me write the alphabet over and over again.
In case you're wondering, the Thai alphabet is an absolute bastard. I know I'm lucky that there's an alphabet at all, that it's not like Mandarin or Japanese with thousands of symbols you have to memorize, but it's unforgivably complicated all the same. There are forty-four consonants. Some of them sound the same, and some of them look the same, but there is little overlap between these categories. When I first started, the symbols were wholly foreign. They looked like nothing, like little kid doodles, and I had a hard time processing that these squiggles translated to sounds. I learned to differentiate between the groups of similar-looking consonants by thinking of each shape as a vague sketch of some object or animal. "Gaw gai," my teacher would say, and I would think, Is that the tooth? The snake? The owl? The arched cat? The camel?
Once you've mastered the consonants, there are vowels to contend with - thirty-two of them. There's the quarter note, the turtle, the candy cane, the slug, and dozens of others. You can write different vowels before or after or above or below the consonants, or sometimes before and after and above if you really want to be a dick about it.
And then there are the tones: high, low, middle, falling and rising. The same arrangement of letters can make five entirely different words depending on the tone. Some people say tone doesn't really matter. These people are known in Thailand as "dumbasses."
So it's been slow going. I'm spurred on by three main things:
(1) the constant pressure to speak better, understand more, catch up to the other staff members;
(2) my stupid pride; and
(3) the occasional breakthrough.
Which brings us to today, when, as he often does, Khruu Aajaan wrote some syllables on the board to practice consonant sounds. There's a certain ritual to these exercises: he reads off the syllable on the board, I ignore the written letters in favor of parroting the sound coming out of his mouth, he shakes his head and repeats himself, I parrot him again, and he gives up and moves on to the next syllable.
Today, though, he suddenly stopped short in the middle of the exercise and gave me a funny look. He pointed to the board. "You read."
What? I don't read. I can't read. I can barely read English. Recognizing slugs and teeth and camels isn't reading; it's the linguistic equivalent of Concentration.
"You're reading," he said in Thai. "You can read. OK! I write and you say."
He wrote. And, despite my better instincts, I said.
So I guess I can read, sort of. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to be tackling the Thai translation of War and Peace anytime soon. I stutter and hesitate, and there are plenty of less common letters that I still can't identify on sight. Besides which, being able to read sounds off a page does me very little good if I don't know what they mean.
But still, this is progress. Better progress than I thought I would make, frankly. I can read. Maybe my brain isn't so unyielding after all. Maybe there's hope. Maybe I will actually speak Thai someday. Eventually. Some time before the Earth is swallowed by the sun.
Now if I could just get these goddamn jingles out of my head, we'd really be in business.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
a letter
Dear Tobias,
Listen, kid, I understand that you've grown a bit attached to me. And don't get me wrong: I like you a lot.
I like how the gentlest tickle causes you to writhe around like you're being stuck with a cattle prod, banging your head against my chest, my arms, and occasionally the floor. (Yeah, it's probably not great for your developing brain, and you'll most likely end up incontinent and unable to tie your own shoes, but just think - this way you'll get toy trucks for your birthday for like the rest of your life!)
I like how you climb on my lap while I'm trying to eat and insist that I zoom you around like Superman. (Because once I've showed you something once, you decide that it's all you want out of life and we must do it constantly. See also: allowing you to bang around on my laptop keyboard, slinging you over my shoulder and running around in circles, aforementioned tickling.)
I like how, unlike most of your peers, you have never peed on me. (Though I've heard it said that you're the one who likes to whiz on everyone's shoes outside the office. If I ever confirm this rumor, I will skin you alive.)
But you, my small friend, are hands-down the filthiest kid here.
Your poor little baby teeth are rotting in your mouth, and while I understand that this isn't your fault, your breath is still technically classified as a biological weapon.
You have a habit of shoving huge spoonfuls of rice into your mouth, then getting bored and holding it there in a gooey, glutinous mass rather than chewing and swallowing. And then climbing onto my lap, laughing with your mouth open, and spewing your cud in my face.
You have a constant stream of snot running from both nostrils, and you flail around like a madman when I try to clean you up. Combined with your foul eating habits, this results in a nauseating mess on my shirt when you bang your face against me during tickle sessions. Worse still are episodes like yesterday's incident at the nursery, when I was bouncing you around face-to-face and you somehow managed to wedge your mucous-glazed nose and upper lip into my mouth. And I wonder why I keep getting sick.
I want to keep playing with you, I do. All I ask is that you make a token effort to clean up your act. Like swallowing your food, for example. Allowing me to wipe your nose. Keeping your slobbery, rice-speckled hands out of my hair.
And stop peeing on my shoes, you little bastard.
Kisses,
M
Listen, kid, I understand that you've grown a bit attached to me. And don't get me wrong: I like you a lot.
I like how the gentlest tickle causes you to writhe around like you're being stuck with a cattle prod, banging your head against my chest, my arms, and occasionally the floor. (Yeah, it's probably not great for your developing brain, and you'll most likely end up incontinent and unable to tie your own shoes, but just think - this way you'll get toy trucks for your birthday for like the rest of your life!)
I like how you climb on my lap while I'm trying to eat and insist that I zoom you around like Superman. (Because once I've showed you something once, you decide that it's all you want out of life and we must do it constantly. See also: allowing you to bang around on my laptop keyboard, slinging you over my shoulder and running around in circles, aforementioned tickling.)
I like how, unlike most of your peers, you have never peed on me. (Though I've heard it said that you're the one who likes to whiz on everyone's shoes outside the office. If I ever confirm this rumor, I will skin you alive.)
But you, my small friend, are hands-down the filthiest kid here.
Your poor little baby teeth are rotting in your mouth, and while I understand that this isn't your fault, your breath is still technically classified as a biological weapon.
You have a habit of shoving huge spoonfuls of rice into your mouth, then getting bored and holding it there in a gooey, glutinous mass rather than chewing and swallowing. And then climbing onto my lap, laughing with your mouth open, and spewing your cud in my face.
You have a constant stream of snot running from both nostrils, and you flail around like a madman when I try to clean you up. Combined with your foul eating habits, this results in a nauseating mess on my shirt when you bang your face against me during tickle sessions. Worse still are episodes like yesterday's incident at the nursery, when I was bouncing you around face-to-face and you somehow managed to wedge your mucous-glazed nose and upper lip into my mouth. And I wonder why I keep getting sick.
I want to keep playing with you, I do. All I ask is that you make a token effort to clean up your act. Like swallowing your food, for example. Allowing me to wipe your nose. Keeping your slobbery, rice-speckled hands out of my hair.
And stop peeing on my shoes, you little bastard.
Kisses,
M
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
a primer
THE PLACE
I work at a women's shelter on the outskirts of a city in northern Thailand. The shelter aims to support women who are either pregnant or have very young children. Some of our residents are still children themselves; many have been disowned or expelled from their villages. Some have been trafficked into the country, while others are from hill tribes and don't have Thai citizenship. Many have been raped or abused or both. Most have nowhere else to go.
The shelter is located on a farm, where we grow everything from lemongrass to papayas to pumpkins. And by we I mean people who are not completely lazy, which obviously excludes me. As a rule, you won't find me doing anything more strenuous than kicking chickens or throwing children into the fish pond.
The farm is home to the residents and their children, several staff members and their children, and a handful of long-term volunteers. Then there's the "9-to-5" volunteers who live in the city, the staff members who live in the nearby village, and the Vietnamese refugees who live together about 1 km away. Altogether, we routinely have 30-40 people milling around during the day.
THE JOB
THE STAFF
I work at a women's shelter on the outskirts of a city in northern Thailand. The shelter aims to support women who are either pregnant or have very young children. Some of our residents are still children themselves; many have been disowned or expelled from their villages. Some have been trafficked into the country, while others are from hill tribes and don't have Thai citizenship. Many have been raped or abused or both. Most have nowhere else to go.
The shelter is located on a farm, where we grow everything from lemongrass to papayas to pumpkins. And by we I mean people who are not completely lazy, which obviously excludes me. As a rule, you won't find me doing anything more strenuous than kicking chickens or throwing children into the fish pond.
The farm is home to the residents and their children, several staff members and their children, and a handful of long-term volunteers. Then there's the "9-to-5" volunteers who live in the city, the staff members who live in the nearby village, and the Vietnamese refugees who live together about 1 km away. Altogether, we routinely have 30-40 people milling around during the day.
THE JOB
I'm the shelter's volunteer coordinator. We have all kinds of volunteers: young and old (mostly young), Thai and foreign (mostly foreign), living on the farm and commuting from the city (mostly commuters), working here for as many as six months or as few as one (mostly one), superstars and space cases (I am not at liberty to clarify this point).
Harriet is the director of the shelter and therefore my boss. She is married to Albert, who handles most of the construction projects and financial stuff. Their delightfully weird kids are Dexter (14), Elsa (12) and Dotty (8).
Robin (33) is the assistant director and a former resident. She lives on-site with her daughter Priscilla (6) - who is currently learning to play the air guitar courtesy of one very mature volunteer coordinator - and son Otis (11), a sweet terror of a boy who will bring you a flower one minute and punch you the next.
Gertie (27) is our seamstress, a Burmese former resident. She is a tremendously sweet and funny woman, but her sense of complementing colors is absolutely demented. She lives off-site and comes to the shelter every day with her daughter Opal (2). She is currently visiting her family in Burma for the first time in years. I worry about her every day.
Nell (25) is the teacher at our daycare. She puts away an astonishing amount of pizza, especially considering that she is as tiny as a three-month-old kitten.
Nancy (33) is in charge of the shelter's kitchen. She is married to Maurice (34), the caretaker, and they have three daughters who are forever climbing up my back: Polly (3), Prudence (5), and Sheila (9).
THE VIETNAMESE
Rosalind (25) is quiet but secretly ridiculous, whether she's talking about her zits, stealing one of the shelter's kittens, or smearing cake frosting on everyone's faces. Until recently, she was the shelter's administrative assistant, but she quit because of her migraines and other health problems.
Winifred (34) spends about half her time working in the garden and the other half causing trouble. We spend a lot of time sneaking up on each other and grabbing each others' waists. Her daughter, Alma (11), speaks and reads flawless English, Thai, Vietnamese, and their tribal language. She also does a mean fishbone braid. Someday she will make the world her bitch.
Then there are the Vietnamese men who make up the shelter's construction team. I don't know some of them very well, but Saul likes to talk politics with me, Julius always keeps my glass full of Singha, and Herbert has very patiently taught me a handful of Vietnamese phrases (notably "I'm full" and "cheers!").
THE VOLUNTEERS
Pippi (23) is my roommate, a long-term volunteer from Australia. We spend a lot of time arguing about food. ("You put butter on sandwiches? What the hell is wrong with your country?" "You eat chocolate with peanut butter? What terrible thing happened in your childhood to lead you to this?") She keeps a jar of Vegemite in our fridge and eats pizza with a knife and fork, but I'm very fond of her anyway.
Teddy (24) was a long-term volunteer from Australia. We spent a lot of time arguing about whether women are obligated to shave their legs. I'm fond of him, too, but I'll deny it in a court of law. He left in mid-March.
George and Ruthie are an older married couple from the U.S. I like them, too. Maybe I'm getting soft and sentimental in my old age.
Khruu Aajaan is our sole long-term Thai volunteer, the teacher so nice they named him twice. (Possibly that joke is only funny to people who speak Thai.) He teaches Thai to (a) refugee or hill tribe women who don't speak it at all, (b) uneducated women who don't know how to read and write, and (c) dumb farang who are determined to learn despite the fact that they can't tell the difference between the five distinct K sounds.
THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Fran (26) is an undocumented Burmese woman. She is far and away the best cook at the shelter, and she totally knows it. She gave birth to her enormously shaggy baby boy, Blue, in late December 2009.
Sally (14) is a hill tribe girl whose village banished her. She gave birth to a teeny-tiny baby girl in late December 2009, and named her Pippi Two. She left the shelter at the end of January and was allowed to return home.
Minerva (22) is a shy but very bright Hmong woman. She has been doing the administrative work since Rosalind quit. Her son is Isaiah (3).
Daisy (29) is a Lahu woman and Fran's roommate. She came to the shelter with her baby girl, Bertha, and son Tobias (3).
Blanche (23) is a Thai Chinese woman. Her son is Abraham (1).
Pearl (15) is Hmong, and currently our youngest mother. Everyone is madly in love with her son Winston (1).
Etta (27) is from northern Thailand. Her son is Oliver (6 months).
Olive (20) is a Hmong woman currently finishing her last year of high school. Her daughter is Flo (3).
Betty (39) has an astoundingly huge, warm smile that splits her face and will knock you on your ass. She was recently named head gardener, so I suppose she's actually staff now. Her son is Harvey (5).
Duckie (3) was abandoned by her very young mother. She is attached to Pippi like a barnacle to the hull of a ship - that is, if barnacles were known to strip off their pants in public, hold up their arms to be carried to the bathroom, and demand, "Chee!" She left with her mother at the end of February.
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