Wednesday, December 15, 2010

365

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.