Welcome to Earth.

365

2010-12-15T10:12:00.000+07:00

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.

communing with nature, part ii

2010-08-05T12:45:00.000+07:00

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.

beggars would ride

2010-06-20T14:50:00.000+07:00

I don't know why it never crossed my mind that Alma and Josiah might be put back in jail with the others. Perhaps because life has barrelled forward at an alarming rate recently, not unlike the out-of-control eighteen-wheeler in your more cliche action movies: you can't stop it, much less hope to make it go backward. We couldn't put everything back the way it was before, couldn't un-arrest the Vietnamese or reverse their conviction or untangle the distrust and dislike between them and Albert and Khruu Aajaan. The last few months have really hammered home the point that once something is done, it can't be undone.

Most of the time.

Josiah is a good kid. Quiet, except around friends his own age. Plays a mean game of Snakes & Ladders. He automatically reaches for my hand when we cross the street, and occasionally keeps holding it for the next kilometer or so. He has been known to eat donuts and ice cream for dinner. (I've been known to let him. Just the once.)

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."

the day of lost children

2010-05-11T14:25:00.004+07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

the broken record

2010-05-02T16:35:00.000+07:00

"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."

autoclave

2010-04-21T18:00:00.000+07:00

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.

a calm and reasoned debate

2010-04-11T15:50:00.000+07:00

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!"

how to lose your mind in 7 days

2010-03-28T15:00:00.000+07:00

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:

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.

Wednesday: Sally and the bug-eyed baby

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.

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.

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.

negative proof

2010-03-25T13:25:00.001+07:00

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 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.

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.

the number 23

2010-03-20T11:40:00.001+07:00

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.

retro: into that good night

2010-03-12T15:25:00.001+07:00

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.

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.

snow white

2010-03-08T21:35:00.000+07:00

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?

gertie

2010-02-27T10:30:00.001+07:00

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.

thai for beginners

2010-02-18T15:55:00.000+07:00

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.

a letter

2010-02-17T11:11:00.000+07:00

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

a primer

2010-02-16T13:35:00.002+07:00

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

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).

THE STAFF

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.

odyssey

2010-02-08T15:40:00.001+07:00

Welcome to Thailand! Oh, I'm so glad you've decided to visit me at the shelter. You'll love it, I promise. It's an easy trip out from the city, as long as you follow a few simple instructions.

The shelter isn't too far from the city, but the trip can take more or less time depending on the time of day and your mode of transportation. Traffic is relatively light in the late evening, and if you're riding pillion on a motorcycle driven by a complete lunatic, you can easily make the trip in 15 minutes, especially if they're driving "Thai-style" (i.e., ignoring the laws of traffic and human decency).

(And I definitely don't know this from experience, so you can stop clutching your pearls, Mother.)

If you value your life and have some time to kill, you can take a songthaew, a pick-up truck outfitted with benches in the back. They're cheap but slow, and often crowded to the point of uneasy physical contact. (Also known in Thailand as "any physical contact whatsoever, especially between a man and a woman, or with a farang, or if God forbid the head or feet are involved, or if it's hot outside, or on a day that ends in -day.")

If the songthaew is full, you can avoid the crush by hanging onto the little metal ladders on the back of the truck. This can be a fun way to observe the passing scenery, which usually includes buildings, uglier buildings, empty fields, lunatics on motorcyles, an absurdly large hamburger sculpture, and countless drivers with their fingers up their noses. A word of caution, though: if you are weighed down by the standard American Weeble-esque ass, you may wish to thread your arms through the rungs of the ladder so as not to end up on the pavement at the mercy of the lunatic bikers.

Once you've been on the songthaew for about half an hour, you can get off, either by ringing the little bell on the ceiling or by allowing your now-aching feet to slip off the back of the truck. As for when to debark, the trick is to know your landmarks. I tell new volunteers to count the temples and then look for the little sign with our shelter's name, but I personally tend to look for the big purple billboard near the turn-off. The day they change that billboard is the day I can no longer find my way home.

From this point, it's about a 1.5 kilometer walk to the shelter. Though "kilometer" probably doesn't mean much to the Americans reading this, does it? I might as well say, "It's about a banana Klingon to the shelter." To put it in perspective, I will say that the walk is comparable to 2/3 of a Friends rerun on TBS, but with more snakes. (Or fewer snakes, I guess, depending on how you feel about Jennifer Aniston.)

We do have a fair number of serpents out in these parts. One day I was out on the motorbike with Winifred, one of the Vietnamese women, and we barely avoided running over a massive python squirming across this very road. "Was that a bad snake?" I ventured, hoping that I had merely hallucinated its incredible girth and the toddler-shaped lumps along its middle. "Very bad," Winifred said, laughing nervously. Ever since then, I've sworn off walking down this road after dark. Except for that one night. Actually, maybe twice. Four times at most.

(Totally kidding, Mom! Oh, come on, stop writing me out of the will.)

Moving right along... You probably won't see any snakes yourself, but you will pass a few dogs along the way. Most of them will be stretched out on their sides, baking in the sun. The odd alpha dog will offer a token growl, but the majority of these mutts will size you up through one slitted eye, decide you're not worth the energy, and go back to sleep.

Having said that, it's at this point that you should pick up a good-sized rock from the ground. Stick it in your pocket. You might need it later.

You'll notice that the road has changed from pavement to dirt. You could have gotten off the songthaew earlier and taken a different route, on a paved road, but it's a longer walk and the road is busier and less pedestrian-friendly. There are also more people milling around shops and homes along that road, which means you're guaranteed to be laughed at. A volunteer once speculated to me that the Thais were laughing at us because we were walking, while anyone who's anyone has at least a bicycle to transport them from place to place. It's a solid theory, but I don't buy it. I think they laugh because we're farang. That's the only punchline you need.

Anyway, on your left, you'll see some cows. On your right, you'll see more cows. Up ahead, you'll see - well, you get the idea.

The road passes by a number of rice paddies. If you'd walked this way a month ago, you would have seen dry, hard fields that seemed to be producing nothing much besides cow poop. Most of the farmers have irrigated their paddies now, turning them into a patchwork of murky mirrors, interrupted by sprouts of bright, bright green.

You're now passing a chicken factory on your right. I can't lie: it's pretty grim, even for someone who hates chickens. Step lively, now.

Up ahead is the crematorium. I'd guess from the architecture that it's used for Buddhist cremations, but I've never asked. For all I know, it's where they burn dead cattle, or the bodies of farang who ask dumb questions. Then again, there's a soccer field in front, so maybe it's a Maya thing.

We're getting close to the shelter. That's our neighbor's house, just ahead. Oh, look, their dogs have come out to greet you! Why hello there, fellas! Why hello!

That reminds me. Remember the rock in your pocket? You can take it out now. Get a good, firm grip on it, like you're holding a baseball. Or a grenade.

Hey, one of the dogs is coming up to you! Cute little guy. You're an animal lover, right? Me too. So anyway, what I want you to do is to take that rock in your hand and throw it right at that dog's stupid mangy head.

I'm sorry, man, there's no way around it. Cujo over there may look friendly, but he will not hesitate to chase you, and if he catches you, he's going to sink his cute widdle teeth into the meat of your leg. Everyone throws rocks at him to keep him at a safe distance.

But hey, you've made it! You've survived Thai traffic, the midday heat, possible snake attack, demented dogs, and probably a fair amount of laughter by Thai onlookers. Now you're safe in the loving embrace of the shelter, with our giant bathroom spiders, monstrous mosquitoes, displaced cobras, insolent pigs, shrieking jam-covered children, and Vegemite-eating Australians. So now that you're here, what would you like to -

Hey, where are you going?

Come back!

Don't leave me here with the Australians!

retro: the scorpion king

2010-02-01T13:45:00.000+07:00

I talk a lot of crap about Paraguay. Tripe this, Nazis that, demonic host mother wah wah wah. It's actually a fine country, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from going there. The thing is that, on a personal level, my time in Paraguay was without question the most unpleasant travel experience I've yet had. To this day, I have semi-regular nightmares about being sent back to live with my host family.

There is one arena, though, in which Paraguay stands heads and shoulders above the competition: bugs.

As in, there really weren't any. There was the occasional spider the size of your hand, but they were fairly passive and easy to kill. Our most serious pest problem involved frogs. And fleas. And foot parasites. Okay, on second thought, there were plenty of bugs in Paraguay.

Nicaragua, though - Nicaragua presented a whole new set of plagues. The latrines were filled with equal parts human waste and genetically-enhanced cockroaches. I was beset by swarms of mosquitoes, which had been virtually nonexistent in Paraguay. Worst of all, Nicaragua was the country where I discovered scorpions.

Scorpions are the worst.

I was only stung once during my first summer in Nicaragua, but it was more than enough to put me off the whole thing for life. The incident in question occurred when a scorpion of unknown size, species and political loyalties scampered over my hand in the middle of the night and thoughtfully decided to leave his calling card. If any of you would like to experience such a thing for yourselves, I would recommend that you get a friend to wake you up by stabbing you in the hand with a cattle prod. And then have them turn up the voltage. And then kick you in the stomach, just for laughs.

I jolted awake to a burst of fiery agony, pain flaring across the back of my knuckles and up my pointer finger. "HURGH," I said, clutching my hand to my chest. "GLRRK. HRBRBTL." Deprived of both oxygen and vowels, the only coherent thought I was able to process was that I had to be quiet, so as not to wake anyone up. Imminent death is one thing, but there's just no excuse for inconveniencing folks.

I rocked back and forth for a while, mouth open in a giant, wheezing O - the only time in my memory that I have ever been too incapacitated to curse. My fingers didn't seem to be moving very well, but I figured that was just a side effect of my failing nervous system, so I wasn't too terribly concerned. I looked forward to it, actually. Sensory deprivation sounded like an excellent idea at that point.

Looking back, it's clear that I probably should have said something. "Hey, Josefina," I might have whispered to my host sister in the next bed. "Listen, I hate to bother you, but I think I'm dying." Instead, I heaved one shaky breath after another, fingers fever-hot and swelling up like balloon animals, and eventually passed out.

I was fine, of course. My hand was swollen in the morning, but the searing pain had given way to a dull throb of discomfort. Within days, the soreness and the swelling had both vanished, and I pushed the incident to the back of my mind, a mildly amusing story to tell my friends when I came home.

A few days later, my partner J and I were sitting on my bed, preparing for the next day's class. I was sitting against the wall, head tilted back against the rough dried-mud surface as I tried to think up a better strategy for wrangling 45 small and insolent children. Anything had to be better than our current tactics of menace and bribery - though, admittedly, we would happily have carried on with these if they had actually worked. (Is it any wonder I went on to study politics?)

Out of the blue, J said, "Hey, M, could you come over here for a minute?" In retrospect, she was remarkably calm, especially for someone whose own run-in with a scorpion had resulted in the kind of screams known to shatter glass and knock satellites out of orbit.

"Why?"

"Just come here," she said evasively.

Confused, I scooted over to her part of the bed, at which point she grabbed my face and turned me around to see the World's Largest Scorpion sauntering up the wall right next to where my head had been.

It is impossible to exaggerate the size of this scorpion. It was larger than my hand; very possibly it was larger than God's hand. I've owned smaller cats. I could not believe that something so huge and evil-looking was allowed to exist. It seemed to upset the natural balance of things. Like, surely if this monstrosity was allowed to roam free, the world should also be filled with giant kittens and bunny rabbits, to compensate.

When I get to this point in the story, people invariably ask me the same question: So how did you kill it?

To which I invariably reply: Motherfucker, are you high?

Because, of course, I did not kill it. I didn't happen to have my armor-piercing bullets with me, and a grenade might only have made it angry. In all seriousness, the only weapon that could have taken this thing down was a machete. Besides, it was almost certainly some sort of god, and I wasn't willing to risk bringing its wrath down upon my unprotected head.

Too stunned to beg for mercy, J and I just watched with shock and awe as the scorpion strolled up and over the wall, easily slipping through the gap between wall and roof, and disappeared from our lives forever.

I've since encountered lots of scorpions: big scorpions, baby scorpions, brown and red and orange scorpions. I've found them under my cot, inside my mosquito netting, investigating the contents of my backpack. I am notoriously trigger-happy when it comes to bugs - except for the occasional pet spider - but despite the fact that I hate and fear scorpions above all other vermin, I have yet to kill one. I'm intimidated by the difficulty of such an attempt, especially considering that my hand-eye coordination leaves a lot to be desired. But I'm also worried that, should I succeed in slaughtering one of the little bastards, I'll wake up one night to another visit from the scorpion king...and He won't be happy.

sally

2010-01-29T08:50:00.000+07:00

๑

I've mentioned before that Sally, our youngest resident, is incredibly attached to Pippi. She adores her. She calls her "sister" and brings her presents and sets aside food for her at mealtimes. She does these things for me, too, but I suspect this is primarily because I am Pippi's friend.

For her part, Pippi treats Sally like a sister. She is endlessly patient with her, brings her ice cream from the city, takes care of her when she's sick. She lets Sally use her cell phone to call her mother, even though Sally always gets confused and ends up calling half a dozen of Pippi's family members and friends. She'll run back to our house, brandishing the phone like a hand grenade, tinny Australian voices whispering, "Hello? Who is this? Do you know what time it is?"

Pippi stayed with Sally at the hospital, drowsing in chairs and empty beds, long after Robin and Harriet had left for the day. She was the only one there when Sally had her baby, a teeny-tiny girl approximately half the size of a Cabbage Patch Doll. When they wheeled Sally out of the operating room after the c-section, she squinted up at Pippi with her brow furrowed and murmured drowsily, “Sister. Baby?”

"Baby," Pippi confirmed, stroking Sally's arm. "Baby OK."

"Oh," Sally said, as if she'd been expecting a different answer. "Baby."

๒

Sally was deeply unhappy in the week following the birth. She'd never wanted the baby, had tried valiantly to ignore her belly and pretend there would never be a baby at all, despite the growing evidence to the contrary. Faced with the reality of a flesh and blood child, her flesh and blood child, she sank into a deep depression. Her silly, impossibly wide smile disappeared, replaced by a thin grim line. She avoided touching the baby. She barely spoke, just lay there staring into space, eyes wet and unfocused.

"What if we've lost her?" Pippi asked me quietly, as we sat worrying together at the foot of her bed. "What if she never comes back?"

It didn't help that Sally had had a cesarean section, a necessity considering her narrow, childish hips. The doctors had decreed that she was allowed to take one acetaminophen every six hours to manage the pain. Fucking Tylenol for what amounts to a minor disembowelment. Say what you will about the U.S. health care system, but you can get enough codeine to dope a rhino if you stub your toe real bad.

From my journal, five days after Sally came home from the hospital:

If this were the end of a feel-good movie or paperback novel, [Sally] would probably have named her baby something nauseatingly touching, like Hope or Faith. Here in the real world, she hasn't named her at all. She also doesn't want to breast-feed, so she ignores the baby's cries until one of the other women forces her to feed her, generally by saying, "HEY [SALLY], CATCH," and launching the baby at her nipple.

Compounding the problem was that fact that Sally was in so much pain that she hadn't been eating, so even when she was forced to breastfeed, she had nothing to give. She wasn’t allowed to give the baby formula, though, and so her tiny, delicate little girl went hungry for a few days, dehydration evident in her dry, dry lips. The baby was quiet, unnervingly quiet, but she mewled occasionally for milk. Her complaints were soft and squeaky, like she was still figuring out how her lungs worked.

Powerless to give this fragile little doll what she needed, I spent a lot of time rocking her in my arms while Pippi tended to her mother, my little finger stuck securely in her mouth to keep her calm and quiet. I sang to her, off-key lullabies and Steve Miller songs, and she sucked ferociously on my finger for hours.

๓

Sally seems so small without the huge hull of her belly. She's a little wisp of a girl, short with a spare frame. She's been up and about for a while now, mostly recovered from the surgery and the depression. Some of her mischievous energy has returned, and she smiles and teases almost the way she used to.

She drops the baby off with me sometimes, when she needs time to shower or cook or gather mushrooms. She checks in every fifteen minutes or so, poking her head in the door and asking, "M, baby OK?" She's feeding the baby formula now, so mother and daughter are both happier. The baby is still tiny, a thin pink fairy girl turning her face into my shirt, pursing and pouting her lips like a little Derek Zoolander. She hasn't grown nearly as much as Fran's hairy baby Blue, though she's just one week younger. She smells like warm socks and garlic bread. My love for her is almost too big to fit inside my chest; it leaks out in embarrassing little dribbles, a kiss here, a tickle there. I understand now what my mother said about not coming home with a baby.

Sally has taken to studying English with me, or at least pretending to. "ABCD one o'clock, OK?" She's not the most diligent student, but she likes hanging out. I praise her on her stumbling recitation of the English alphabet, and she praises me in turn when I manage to name all forty-four Thai consonants. "M, very good!" she says, one of her standard lines. She doesn't speak or understand much English, but she is an extraordinary improviser, managing to communicate a multitude of ideas by cobbling together a mish-mash of pidgin Thai and English with her hill tribe language and a healthy dash of pantomime. For the first few weeks, it seemed to me as though she and Pippi were speaking in code, like little kids who had invented their own super-top-secret ninja spy assassin Navajo language. I understand it now, for the most part - sometimes I even correct Pippi when she misinterprets what Sally is trying to say - but I'm still on the outside, looking in.

I'm Sally's friend, a good friend - but Sally and Pippi, they're family.

๔

What Sally wants most in the world - more than most people want money, or power, or to meet the love of their life - is to go home to her mother.

She's something of an unreliable narrator. Every day she has a different story: when she’s going, where she’s going, today or next month or next year, back home to her village or to stay with her aunt in the city, with or without the baby. When she doesn’t want us to go to the city for the day, she tells us she’s going that very day and she’ll be gone when we get back.

The assistant director Robin says she's been working on it, trying to negotiate the terms of Sally's return with the village elders. As it stands, Sally might be allowed to go home as long as she doesn't bring the baby with her. The thought makes my stomach hurt, but Sally doesn't seem to mind. Her aunt is willing to take the baby, and Sally just wants to go home, to forget the whole terrible business ever happened.

๕

Sally is gone.

Pippi and I stumbled over to her room at six o’clock this morning to help her move her belongings, a seemingly endless number of black garbage bags stuffed with clothes, baby things, and God knows what else – a whole watermelon, knowing her, or five kilos of rice. The burdens of motherhood have not made her any less of a klepto.

We found a few of our things balanced conspicuously on top of the diapers and blankets: a Thai-English phrasebook, the flashlight Sally had borrowed to navigate the dark path between our houses. Even my camera, which had a habit of wandering off and reappearing loaded with dozens of grinning, out-of-focus self-portraits.

Sally's sister was there to pick her up, and her older brother, the one she's afraid of. Her aunt was there, too, the one who is reportedly adopting the baby. The aunt took the baby from Pippi and cradled her, swaying almost imperceptibly as anonymous family members moved around us, hauling Sally's things to the pick-up truck they'd borrowed for the trip. The baby was asleep, oblivious to the new set of arms. She had a name, finally, though the aunt would probably change it.

The departure was abrupt. One by one, they all climbed into the truck without saying goodbye - the sister, the brother, the unnamed cousins. Sally. The aunt, cradling Sally's baby, our baby, little Pippi Two.

And then, just like that, they left.

Pippi and I waved as they pulled away, but the truck's windows were tinted and dark. We couldn’t see if Sally waved back, couldn’t even tell if she saw us standing there, fixed smiles on our grimy faces, pockets weighted down with the hard lines of the things she'd left behind: a phrasebook, a flashlight, a camera.

the argument

2010-01-19T16:25:00.000+07:00

"Seriously, cut it out."

This was just not my day.

"I'm tired of arguing with you. Just go, already."

All I wanted was to finish setting up the new volunteers' room. Was that asking so much? I didn't think so. And yet, every step of the way, something stood in my way.

"I'm doing my best, here. Help a sister out."

The room was mostly furnished already; the previous occupant had left the week before. I knew that George and Ruthie were an older couple, so I got the construction team to switch out the single mattress for the double bed from Pippi's room. Then I realized that the existing mosquito net was too small, so Robin scrounged up a different one for me, a round princess net with shiny pink ribbons. To tie the net to the rafters, I had to get one of the men to stand on a chair on top of the bed, wobbling around like a circus elephant.

"This is stupid. I can't believe I'm even having this conversation with you."

I'd planned to put the shelter's one large bedspread on the bed, but one of the women had wandered off with it. I asked Robin to put the word out; in the meantime, I struggled to make do with a too-small duvet patterned with enormous, clinically-rendered mushrooms. I'd had the foresight to stash an extra pillow in the cupboard, but I realized that I needed to go grab a clean pillowcase from my own room.

"Oh, come on, what do you want from me?"

I attempted to leave the house the same way I'd come in, the door where I'd left my sandals. However, while I'd been messing around with the mosquito net, someone had made the curious decision to padlock that door from the outside. I had no choice but to go out the other door, which meant abandoning my shoes.

Hmm.

CHOICE A: Turn left, cross this bridge

and this one

and collect my shoes at the other door.

CHOICE B: Take the long way, barefoot, past the pig sheds with their heaps of excrement and mud

and the chickens

and through the piles of organic debris where cobras love to sleep

and across the rickety bamboo bridge that cracks audibly every time an especially large mosquito lands on it

and over the potholed patch of ground where I sprained my ankle

and up the uneven brick path to my house

and then down the spider path (remember the spider path?)

and behind the women's residence, leaping over and tip-toeing around the mud puddles

and across the random stretch of pointy stones

and then back down the path to collect my shoes.

Naturally, I initially went with CHOICE A, but I lost my nerve at the first bridge. Normally I prance across with surprisingly little fear, ignoring the very real possibility that I could lose my balance and topple into the filthy, snake-infested water. This time, though, I could feel every creak and tilt of the board under my bare feet, and I skittered back onto solid land before I'd gone three steps.

I made it as far as the pig pens, and that's when I ran into my final obstacle, something standing literally and inflexibly in my way. Not the smell, which on a good day has a nearly physical impact. Not the inevitable pig shit, which squished unpleasantly into the arch of my foot. Not the chickens, who scattered in front of me like so many cockroaches. Not a snake or a brick wall or the Mongol army, but...

...a pig.

Perhaps you were expecting something a little grander. "A pig?" you say. "Is that all? It's a freaking pig. Are you telling me you can't outsmart a walking side of bacon?"

Your incredulity tells me that you have never shared a narrow path with an excitable pig on the lam. You have never taken a tentative step forward, hoping to scoot around the pig and continue on your way, only for the high-strung animal to squeal like Ned Beatty and dash down the path away from you. You have never stepped forward and then back, shifted uncertainly from side to side - like a chess piece, or a cha-cha dancer - trying alternately to mollify or outmaneuver an animal that will happily eat its own poop.

You have never stood barefoot in the cobra grass, warm dung clinging to your heel, and attempted, in all earnestness, to negotiate.

"Okay, pig. Here are my terms."

So what the hell do you know?

new faces

2010-01-17T14:05:00.001+07:00

We've had a sudden flood of volunteers recently. There are several new "9 to 5" volunteers - foreign, usually twentysomething folks who come to the shelter through volunteer-sending organizations. These volunteers pay a king's ransom to their organizations, and in exchange they receive food, housing in the city, and a ride to and from their "internships" every day. I can't really rag on the organizations, even under the cover of Internet anonymity, because I think that they generally do good work, and I'm quite fond of most of their staffs. However, I will say that it's way cheaper for a volunteer to deal directly with the shelter and either live on-site or rent a room nearby. On the other hand, some of the volunteers are city mice who probably wouldn't dig living full-time on an isolated farm and fishing spiders out of their tea. Different strokes.

Speaking of on-site people, it was just me and Pippi until this past week, when we welcomed three new long-term volunteers. There's Teddy, a sturdy Australian in his mid-20s, who will be living in the slightly decrepit bamboo house for the next several months, potentially through July. He's a very nice guy - a childhood friend of Pippi's, actually, and let me tell you, the combined force of their Australian-ness is sometimes overwhelming.

Then there's George and Ruthie, an older American couple who are planning to stay until the end of March. They also seem nice, if a tiny bit more flustered than your average volunteer. Normally I'm pretty good at connecting with older adults, possibly because of the whole Baba Yaga thing, but Ruthie and George are apparently resistant to my charms. It's all I can do to squeeze the barest smile out of them. Tough crowd. Hopefully they'll relax some as they get used to the pace and atmosphere of the shelter.

They're hardly new arrivals, but I've been spending a lot of time recently with the director Harriet's three kids, all of whom attend international schools but speak fluent Thai.

12-year-old Elsa is a complicated soul. She's a nerd who doesn't much care about school, a geek who loves Twilight and Tamora Pierce but has never read Harry Potter. She seeks me out regularly, and I truly do enjoy her company. She's surprisingly mature for her age, so much so that I often forget that I'm talking to someone who's not allowed to shave her legs yet. She has strong opinions on just about everything, from Edward vs. Jacob to the prevalence of slavery and misogyny in ancient Rome. She asks for piggyback rides, then tells me quite seriously that the longer I stay at the shelter, the more I'll understand the human face of true evil.

Elsa's little sister Dotty is an odd duck herself. She is brutally honest in that way that only 8-year-olds can pull off, blurting out whatever comes into her head with no padding or editing. A couple weeks ago, she wrapped her arms around my waist, then said to me, with a certain degree of awe, "You're even fatter than my mom." Minutes later, she told me that she was glad I was the new volunteer coordinator, because no one else would have been as nice and funny as I was. She also loves to do that little hand trick where you slot your fingers in with another person's and then part your hands, allowing you to view what looks vaguely like either an anus or a certain part of the female anatomy. I once overheard Elsa scolding Dotty about her little hobby, saying, "When I was your age, I was learning massage, not showing people buttholes."

Finally, I've been trying to charm Elsa and Dotty's 14-year-old brother, Dexter. Everyone has told me that he doesn't really talk to anyone, refuses to be drawn out, so I always feel inordinately proud of myself when I engage him in conversation or persuade him to help me with a Sporcle quiz. What can I say? My days are a string of embarrassments and misunderstandings, peppered with small victories and pleasant surprises. I'll take my little pleasures where I can find them.

retro: a terrible thing to waste

2010-01-12T12:30:00.001+07:00

I love brains.

Yeah, I said it. I hate stomach, intestines make me gag, and the next person who tries to feed me bull testicles is getting a sharp stick in the eye.

NOT FOOD.

But brains - oh, delicious brains. I am a fervent disciple of the Church of the Sacred Encephalon. I would eat that shit with a spoon. Straight from the skull, if necessary. Straight from your skull, maybe. Watch yourself.

I have not always been this way. I did not sally forth from the womb as some slavering, brain-hungry zombie child. In fact, for nineteen years, I lived a full, happy life totally devoid of brains in any form.

Picture unrelated. What?

Then I went to Mexico.

Michoacán had great food. Have I mentioned that? I cannot stress it enough. Mexico has one of the highest obesity rates in the world, right behind the U.S., and I don't blame them one bit. If I lived and ate in Michoacán full time, I would be the size of a house.

Our little city was swarming with taco vendors. My staff came to favor one near the town square, a small but efficient operation that sold the world's most delicious soft tacos for less than it cost to buy a corresponding antacid tablet. The meat was finely minced and expertly grilled, spicy and savory. I couldn't get enough.

I assumed, like an ass, that the meat must be beef or pork. In my own defense, let me remind you that I was very young, very stupid, and very, very hungry.

Anyway, it wasn't until the third or fourth taco that a fellow staff member let the cow out of the bag. "You know that's brain, right?" she asked around a mouthful of tortilla - so casual, like she was remarking on the weather or the latest project gossip. No big deal. You know your bra strap is showing, right?

I looked down at my half-eaten taco. What had so recently seemed innocent and nourishing now represented a personal betrayal on the scale of long-term adultery. I considered discreetly disposing of it via our entourage of street mutts, but I knew I'd never live it down. Besides, it was pretty tasty, brain or no brain.

So I ate it. And then bought another, and ate that too.

All told, I ate an estimated five billion tacos that summer. They were all delicious beyond the telling of it, and every last one of them wreaked unspeakable horror on my G.I. tract. Totally worth it. Besides, in the end, that little taco stand provided me with not only the best damn tacos I've ever had, but also an incomparable source of entertainment.

Let it never be said that one man's troubles cannot be made more bearable by foisting cow-brain tacos on his unsuspecting volunteers.

Sure, a couple of them said they'd never forgive me for tricking them, but I expect they'll come to appreciate my deceit in time. In the meantime, I remind you all that you should search me out when the zombies come. If I'm clean, I've got a machete and a frighteningly over-thought strategy; if not...well, I know a great supplier.

slapstick

2010-01-06T11:00:00.001+07:00

Everyone is slowly warming to me, which is a relief. I have a terrible, near-obsessive need to be liked. My presence must not be merely tolerated, but yearned for and delighted in. It's absurd; you'd think I was a spoiled only child, raised by parents who hovered anxiously and applauded my every sneeze as an act of genius. I was and am spoiled, there's no denying that, but I do have a sister, and MD was never what you'd call a helicopter parent.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I am hell-bent on endearing myself to everyone I meet. I am burdened in this mission by my crummy personality and shitty attitude, not to mention lack of quantifiable skills. (Wait, is talking during movies a skill?) Fortunately, I cannot walk ten feet with falling over or otherwise humiliating myself, and this seems to appeal to people. The staff at my hostel in Bolivia warmed to me only after I sprained my ankle and was reduced to hopping everywhere. My host sisters in Nicaragua were shy and reserved when I arrived; then I fell out of a hammock, everyone laughed, and we passed a pleasant evening making fart noises into our elbows.

Then there's Rosalind, one of the Vietnamese refugees at the shelter. Rosalind is the administrative assistant in the office, and I'm forever asking her for this or that. She's quiet, but I knew from seeing her with the kids and the women that she had a wonderfully playful, silly side. I'd been trying to win her over since I got here. She was unfailingly polite, but she never chatted with me or hugged me from behind, the way I saw her do to a couple of the other farang.

A couple days ago, that all changed. You see, what had happened was - uh - well, I electrocuted myself. Hard. Hard enough that if I were a character in a comic strip, my hair would have stood straight up and my shoes would have flown off, followed shortly by my socks and possibly my entire epidermis.

The current connected powerfully enough that for several seconds I couldn't let go of the power strip, and I let out a little yelp of terror. My screech brought people running. By that time I'd managed to shake off the power strip, and Harriet (the director) assumed I'd seen a rat. I had to explain that, no, I hadn't seen any kind of vermin, it's just that I was a total jackass who didn't understand the concept of electrical current.

It was completely mortifying, and I covered my face with my hands, acting out a little pantomime of shame for the benefit of the non-English speakers. Most of the women grinned, the way Thai people often do in such situations, so as to dispel tension and minimize your loss of face. And then, out of nowhere, sweet, reticent Rosalind laughed - nay, guffawed, serene Vietnamese comportment be damned - and threw her arms around me, and that was that. Within hours, she was talking to me about her zits and offering to paint my nails if they ever grow past "nervous lesbian" length.

Rosalind wasn't the only person here who took a while to decide she liked me okay. Fran told me recently that when she first met me, she thought I was much older and kind of mean. "The kids did, too," she said casually.

Ah. That explained why many of the kids were so distant to start with. I guess I can't blame them. I think about what they see when they look at me: farang, oddly-shaped, mustachioed, with wild frizzy hair and a limp. I am Baba Yaga without the cool house. It's a wonder they speak to me at all.

I asked Fran what made her change her mind about me. She said that it was the way I laughed all the time and chattered with her - she realized I had to be young. In essence, I think, she realized I was too dumb to have yet lived a full life. And that's really the crux of the matter: people are slowly realizing that I am too incompetent to be mean-spirited, too scatterbrained to represent much of a threat. For now, I am just another farang, another wacky white girl sticking my fingers in their babies' mouths and wrestling with their toddlers. But someday soon they'll realize that I'm also a prime source of entertainment, whether I'm falling down, hitting my head, setting my hair on fire, or sticking my fingers in electrical sockets.

And you know what? They're going to love me.

retro: the way to my heart

2010-01-03T16:45:00.000+07:00

I love milanesa. Of all the foods I tried in Paraguay, milanesa is one of perhaps three that I would voluntarily choose to eat over, say, fried cardboard. It's a pretty simple dish, just pieces of thinly-sliced beef or chicken, breaded and fried, often with a dash of cumin. It's not so different from chicken-fried steak, I guess, except that chicken-fried steak is uniformly disgusting, whereas milanesa is a gustatory delight. Don't ask me to explain the wind, okay?

One evening in mid-July, my partners and I returned from our mid-summer break/training session to find that our host mother had made milanesa for dinner. Thank God. Finally, something we actually wanted to eat. Dude Partner and I dug in happily while Lady Partner, a committed vegetarian, looked on.

As we ate, DP and I discussed the food in front of us. Was it chicken or beef, we wondered? It looked too pale to be beef, but it didn't taste like chicken either. Curious, we peeled away the breading to get a better look at the meat within. This was a mistake. The meat looked distressingly gooey, as though someone had blown his or her nose onto it before frying it up. We chewed more slowly, pondering this development. The milanesa was awfully hard to cut. And it was so chewy, like trying to sink your teeth into a whoopee cushion.

"What kind of meat is this?" we asked our host brother.

He shook his head. "No, no, it's not meat."

The generic word for meat in Spanish mainly refers to beef or pork, which explains why our vegetarian partner was frequently served chicken and, disturbingly, hot dogs. ("I'm sorry, I don't eat meat." "...and?") We tried again. "What animal is it from?"

This he could answer. "Cow."

Well, that narrowed it down. "What part of the cow?"

Mouth full of the mystery non-meat, he merely hammered on his chest.

My partners and I fell into a hushed, heated debate. Heart? No, heart would be too tough. Lungs? Who eats lungs, anyway? Pancreas? Gallbladder? God, what else was even in the chest?

By this time, our host brother was laughing at us. "Tripa," he said patiently. "It's tripa."

Tripa. Sounded like - but, no, that wasn't in the chest. The guy had worked at a carcinería, a meatpacking factory. Surely he knew where the damn stomach was.

Well...he didn't.

At least the milanesa was edible, if somewhat less appealing after we registered its gummy, goopy nature for what it was. The real challenge came a week later, while our supervisor was visiting. Strangely enough, our sup was also a vegetarian, so it was a particularly bad night for our host mother to serve Broiled Stomach Pilaf.

The milanesa had masqueraded well, but this dish was unmistakably composed of offal. Fat, rubbery chunks of stomach nestled on a bed of plain rice. The smell was nauseating. The "meat" was plain, unadorned. It was unashamedly stomach, grayish and weirdly furry on one side. My partners and supervisor and I stared at it, and then each other, each silently running through the same list of options.

A. Eat it. Die.

B. Don't eat it, thereby insulting host mother and risking starvation. Die.

C. Flee on foot, heading for the mountains. Stumble upon the ghost monkeys or the rumored al-Qaeda training cell. Die.

The future was bleak.

Daringly, our supervisor attempted to cut the Gordian knot with an advanced weasel maneuver. "I'm sorry," she simpered apologetically, eyes artfully wide and innocent in her face. "I'm awfully sorry, but the thing is, I'm a vegetarian."

Our host mother frowned. "So?"

Thrown by this brusque response, our supervisor faltered slightly, then pushed on. "Well, I mean, I don't eat meat." Her eyes were growing wider by the second. She looked not unlike a Bratz doll.

"It's not meat," our host mother said, shoving a forkful of innards into her mouth.

Our sup was persistent. "But, you see, I don't eat any part of the animal." Clear, straightforward, unambiguous. Even a master weasel like our host mother couldn't argue with that.

"Ah," our mother said, appearing to concede. "I see. Well, why don't you wait a moment, and I'll get you something else." She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

It seemed that, against all odds, our sup had emerged victorious. She flashed us a triumphant smile. "Was that so hard?" she whispered, a touch patronizingly.

But we had all underestimated the magnitude of our host mother's cunning. Our sup realized her mistake moments later, as Mommie Dearest returned from the kitchen, self-satisfied smile firmly in place, with a plate piled high with cold, slimy hot dogs.

duality

2009-12-30T08:50:00.002+07:00

Sometimes I imagine that life at the shelter is like one of those sitcoms or Disney Channel movies where there’s an alternate universe, a mirror image of the real world. The hero gets trapped in the mirror world, but eventually they escape back into their own reality, newly appreciative of the family and friends they’d taken for granted.

In this world, the real world, Fran is a sweet, pretty woman in love with her baby and her boyfriend. She likes practicing her English and has been known to sweet-talk me into watching action movies with her. She laughs at everything – fart jokes, Blue’s pursed lips and wiggling legs, the way her shirt is instantly soaked in breast milk whenever she hears a crying baby. She cradles Blue’s furry head in her hand and brings him close to kiss, kiss, kiss his squashy face.

Sally is a silly teenager with a penchant for pulling faces. She calls Pippi “sister” and scolds her incessantly for real and imagined offenses, from skipping a shower to having a visible bra strap. She brings us presents, mostly absurd quantities of things she’s nicked from the kitchen – a gallon of homemade dishwashing soap, a bag of cane sugar as heavy as a toddler. She sets aside food for us when we’re late to meals. She asks Pippi for candy and ice cream whenever Pippi comes back from the city, and Pippi almost always has something for her. She’s a good kid.

The kids are imps and scoundrels who enjoy rubbing their jam-covered, sand-caked hands all over my face, hair and last clean shirt. They sit on my knee and twine both their legs around one of mine, distractedly pressing their toes into my calf. The boys climb into my lap like big spiky-haired kittens, pulling my hands to their mouths to kiss and sometimes bite. The two-year-old girls, Duckie and Polly, are inseparable and always up to something, whether they’re flinging themselves off the table or demanding to be picked up and dangled backward.

In the other world, the dark mirror world, things are different.

In that world, Fran is a Burmese refugee without papers, naively trusting in the good heart of some douchebag tourist who won’t give her his phone number and usually doesn’t respond to her emails. Due to some complicated red tape, her baby can’t receive Thai citizenship unless the father confirms his own identity and nationality, which he most likely won’t, because that would create an irreversible link between himself and his child and he’d much rather disappear back into his comfortable European life. So Fran and Blue will be like so many other families here: undocumented, constantly afraid of being discovered and deported.

In that world, Sally was raped when she was thirteen. When her family discovered that she was pregnant, they threw her out, and she lived in the forest outside her village for several days before she was discovered by a teacher and sent to the shelter. She doesn’t want her baby, even hates it on some level. She was sent to the hospital with labor pains a couple days ago. Pippi went with her and witnessed Sally completely losing it, moaning and sobbing for hours, ripping at her hair. “I want to go home,” she begged, over and over again, in the few words of Thai that she and Pippi both know. “Sister, please, I want to go home.” She refused to let the doctors examine her and tried desperately to hold her hospital gown closed over her breasts. Pippi was temporarily kicked out of the room, and Sally stood next to the bed, facing down the doctors and nurses like a wild animal backed into a corner, screaming for Pippi and then, horribly, her mother.

In that world, the kids have been pulled from abusive homes, the slums, the gutter. Some of them live in fear of their mothers’ infrequent but furious beatings. Little Duckie’s mother disappeared a few months ago. She calls sometimes, promising to come back for Duckie but saying she doesn’t have the money yet. If she doesn’t come back, Duckie will probably have to go to an orphanage. You can’t blame her mother too much; like Sally, she got pregnant at just thirteen.

So there you have it: both sides of the coin. They’re both true, of course, but you knew that already. There is no mirror world, no dark reflection of a gentle and carefree reality. Life here and everywhere is funny and sad and bleak and heartbreaking and bright, all at once. These kids aren’t the worm-swollen toddlers you see on the news, defined by their misery and need, and the women aren’t the hollow-eyed rape victims you see in photo essays in Newsweek, utterly destroyed by the hand that life has dealt them. Those images are symbols of tragedy, and they tell a story that makes you hurt and then encourages you to forget, to push away that awful pain, because otherwise the weight of it all would be intolerable. In the end, you do nothing, because it’s all too much. You can’t fix every country’s government. You can’t convince all the warring factions to lay down their arms and go back to their families. You can’t adopt each and every starving orphan, and even if you could, they’re probably too damaged to ever live normal lives. You can’t save the world, and there are some things you can never change.

I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. I didn’t write about those stupid “two worlds” as a kind of Very Special Episode, an exposé about the dark side of life at a women’s shelter. I was trying, in my ham-handed way, to show you that there is always a spark of joy, even in the midst of horror. There is always laughter. There is always hope.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. Volunteer somewhere, anywhere. Look up the wish list of a local women’s shelter and consider donating a couple items, maybe something you’ve already got that’s been collecting dust in a cupboard. Learn about what’s going on in the world – even just one country, even just one town. Do your research. Write your senator. Run for senator. Raise money. Raise awareness. Save the world.

Do it now. Not tomorrow. Don’t wait until things calm down at work, or you’ve lost that pesky holiday weight, or for some magical day when you have more time or money or energy. It’s so much easier than you think. All you have to do is start.

Happy New Year.

some pig

2009-12-29T14:20:00.001+07:00

Here's a funny thing: sometimes, when you live on a farm filled with things like spiders and cobras, and you walk down the same narrow path every day, two different spiders will persist in spinning their webs across that path. Right at face level. Every single day.

Here's another funny thing: sometimes, when you're like me and have the memory of an aging goldfish, you will totally forget about the spiders and walk right into both webs. With your face. Every single day.

Speaking of spiders, we discovered that Charlie - what? Yes, I named our bathroom spider Charlie. No, that's not weird. No, you are a freak. Whatever! You don't know him like I do!

Anyway, Pippi and I checked on Charlie and discovered that he was still alive after about a week in solitary. He was hanging out on the side of the cup, so Pippi quickly slid a plate underneath, trotted out the front door, and hurled him, cup and all, over the hill.

"I thought when you said you were going to throw him, you meant you would shake him out of the cup," I said.

Pippi made a face. "Do you really want to use that cup again?"

She had a point. There is a fine but clearly defined line between lizard toast and spider tea.

Somewhere out there is the world's most disoriented spider.

My very favorite resident, Fran, had her baby last week. She named him Blue. I use pseudonyms for most everyone on this here blog, but that name is so perfect it deserves to be shared. Baby Blue has the most hair I have ever seen on any man, woman or child - a Samson-esque amount of hair, the kind of hair you expect to see on a Persian cat or a Yeti but not a six-pound newborn. On the night he was born, millions of bald men across the world wept fat tears of self-pity without even knowing why.

Fran is absolutely ass-over-teakettle in love with her baby, and so am I. The bottoms of his feet are like silk, and he scrunches them up and kicks his little frog legs whenever he yawns. His fingers are long, long, long, curled into tiny pink fists the size of walnuts. He is a remarkably pink baby, far ruddier than the average Thai child, which Fran says must be due to the fact that his father is white.

I would like to kick that father in the teeth, but Fran is in love with him, the sort of unqualified adoration that makes you think a voodoo potion must be involved. It kills me that such a beautiful, warm woman as Fran could pin her hopes and happiness to this scumbag European who's half a world away and obviously doesn't give two shits about her, but there you are. Of course, the unfairness of it isn't lost on me: if Fran were with someone who truly cared about her, she wouldn't be here. I would never have met her, and we would never have had the chance to sit together in her dim, quarantined room, tracing spiderweb patterns on her baby's unlined feet and prophesying the man he will someday become: terrific, radiant, humble.

another riddle

2009-12-28T08:18:00.005+07:00

Q: Who was walking back from setting up a new volunteer's room at dusk, stepped into a hole in the ground, and sprained her ankle?

A: Okay, seriously, how is this even a question? Surely it couldn't be the same person who, in the very first post of this blog, summarized her travels like so: Mostly I fall down a lot. And cuss. Sometimes both at once.

I didn't actually fall down this time, but I did cuss to beat the band. Pippi was a little stunned. "I'm not sure I've heard you drop the f-bomb before," she said.

"FUCK FUCK MOTHERFUCKER," I replied. "HIJO DE PUTA. FUCKBUCKET. THIS WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD TIME TO EXPAND MY THAI VOCABULARY."

Fortunately, I have managed to work out a way to walk on it. Painfully and with a certain amount of je ne sais quoi (literally, "looking like a jackass"), but mobility is mobility. Never mind the fact that I am an evolutionary oversight - I can limp around almost as quickly as a hog-tied turtle. I hope that image haunts your dreams tonight.

a christmas story

2009-12-25T11:03:00.004+07:00

My dear, lovely, completely insane friend Veruca is visiting me, and it is pretty great. We've been doing lots of things that I would never do by myself, like eating gouda and drinking cheap chardonnay at the little wine-and-cheese shop near the hostel, and also some things I do all the time but which are more fun with a partner, like eating street fruit by the moat and throwing the peels at the cranky pigeons.

We celebrated Christmas Eve at a nice restaurant by the river, where we gorged ourselves on fried seaweed and cheese and ice cream. Then we searched out the least sketchy bar around and played pool, terribly, while old hairy nasty Western men canoodled with young Thai girls all around us. (I did say "least sketchy.") Strange visitors kept wandering up to the bar: hordes of creepy men, of course, but also marching bands playing off-key interpretations of Joy to the World, and once an elephant. Because, you know, it's Christmas, which in this Buddhist country apparently translates to "oh, what the hell."

This morning Veruca gave me a bunch of bootleg DVDs and we watched Korean soap operas in our pajamas, and now we're going to eat waffles and get our nails did and call our mommies and probably end up in another bar surrounded by dolled-up ladies in skin-tight sequined mini-dresses. Christmas!

Veruca has brought the joy of the season into my heart, and I am never going to let her leave. Perhaps I'll keep her under a cup in the bathroom.

communing with nature

2009-12-21T12:22:00.006+07:00

So last night I was on the front porch trying to get a gecko out of the toaster, and Pippi said to me, "This is ridiculous."

I poked inside the toaster with my fork. "What do you mean?"

"At this moment, we have a cat under the floorboards, a big hairy spider in a cup on the bathroom floor - "

(The original plan was to slide a piece of paper under the cup and transport the spider outside, but Pippi lost her nerve. That was two days ago. Every time one of us uses the bathroom, we remind each other, "Don't kick the spider!")

" - cobras in our front yard - "

(The women harvested the rice from the field in front of our house a couple weeks ago, and all the snakes that had been living there fled to the field behind our house. A couple days later, they harvested that field, and the snakes slithered away to yet another field. A couple days later, they harvested that field, and - well, you get the idea. We stomp real loud when we walk anywhere at night.)

" - a frog in our toilet water - "

(We're supposed to use the water from the bathroom sink, which flows directly into a cement container, to flush the toilet. The only problem is, the water is stagnant and dirty and it stinks, and so Pippi and I have been trying to dry out the container by using the kitchen sink for all necessary ablutions. Don't get your eco-friendly hemp panties in a twist - the kitchen sink water goes into the irrigation ditch, so we're still not really wasting water. Besides, there's a frog in there! As if sticking my arm into a dark, smelly hole in the wall wasn't bad enough, now I have to dodge toothpaste-spattered frogs while I'm at it.)

" - and now we've got a gecko in the toaster." She watched critically as I banged on the outside of the toaster, resulting in a terrific racket, but no gecko. "Just leave it."

"You're the one who wanted toast."

"It's too scared. It's not coming out. Just leave the toaster out here overnight."

I pointed the fork at her. "We are not having a repeat of the spider incident. We cannot live like this. This gecko is coming out now."

"It's just going to climb back up to the roof," she said.

True. The geckos sit for hours on our ceiling, but they have a nasty habit of abruptly losing their grip and plummeting to the floor - or into your cup of tea.

"Fucking geckos," I muttered. Another jab with the fork, and suddenly I heard a flutter of movement inside the toaster, the pitter-patter of little scaly feet. I dropped the toaster onto its side, and the gecko sprang out and disappeared under the house.

"Well, that's done," Pippi said. She stood up and stretched, then headed for the fridge. "Toast?"

"It's going to taste like lizard," I said, scooping up the toaster and wiping the fork off on my jeans.

"We've got butter."

"Lizard toast. Gross."

Pippi rummaged around in the fridge. "And Nutella."

"Yeah, okay."

the motorcycle diaries

2009-12-19T11:06:00.006+07:00

If you were awoken last night by a faint, high-pitched shrieking sound, please don't be alarmed. It was just an echo from northern Thailand, probably some dumb American girl flying down a craggy dirt road on a greasy motorcycle, pursued at a safe distance by a slightly crazed Australian shouting, "Don't be a pussy! Speed up! Speed up!"

Last night my roommate (code name: "Pippi") and I went with the shelter's assistant director ("Robin") to Makro, the local bulk superstore. Pippi and I ran around like idiots and got lost a million times, like toddlers off the leash. Frankly, I think Robin would have been glad to abandon us in the plastics aisle if she hadn't needed our help carrying everything to the truck.

By the time we got back to the shelter, we'd missed dinner, so Robin offered to take us into town. (This after Sally had shoved half a dozen eggs into our hands, insisting that we take them for dinner. We don't have a stove or anything in our house, so I don't know how she expected us to cook them. Over a light bulb, perhaps?)

Pippi took one of the motorcycles and I climbed onto the back of Robin's, and we zoomed off toward town. I clung to Robin the whole way, my hands like catcher's mitts on her insanely tiny waist. I felt like a fucking Ent.

We went to a casual place with lots of different counters that sell all sorts of dishes. Robin ordered for us, bless her. Pippi and I got pad thai with shrimp, huge gruesome shrimp with crunchy legs and baleful little faces, and ice-cold banana smoothies and sticky rice with mango. What did you have for dinner? Easy Mac?

I hadn't really interacted much with Robin, so it was nice to spend some time with her. She's a former resident of the shelter, and she manages a lot of the women's issues. She also speaks some English, so she's occasionally pressed into translating duty. She doesn't talk much, at least not to me, and I assumed incorrectly that she was rather serious. She's actually wonderful. Not that serious people can't be wonderful, but they probably wouldn't have laughed off the thousand times I got the motorcycle stuck in the mud this morning. If nothing else, she's got patience in spades. Patience and courage.

a scattering of random thoughts

2009-12-17T10:35:00.002+07:00

The flight from Chicago to Seoul was torturous. I sat in a window seat, trapped by Snorebag McArmrest-Thief and Camel Woman. (How do you not get up to pee even once during a 15-hour flight? That is not natural.) I did manage to sleep some, enough that I seem to have avoided jet lag entirely.

The director's husband picked me up at the airport. He didn't have a WELCOME SO-AND-SO sign and we'd never met, but he zeroed in on me immediately. Presumably he looked for the most rumpled, unkempt and dazed-looking woman there.

Immediately after arriving at my little house, I discovered (1) a massive wasp in my bed, and (2) the biggest, fattest, hairiest spider I'd ever seen, easily the size of my hand. I don't particularly want to kill these kinds of bugs - partially because there would be an unholy mess to clean up - but I also don't care to find them nestled on my pillow, ready to snuggle. One of the reasons I never went to the Dominican Republic with The Company is that all the vets talked about the fat, hairy tarantulas that would perch on your mosquito netting and stare thoughtfully down at you, as though estimating how many legs they would need to use to hold your head in place while they ate your face.

My roommate has the audacity to be lovely, confident, and funny. Can you believe that shit? It's not enough that's she's fearless to my neurotic, matte finish to my glossy (I'm oily, shut up), sleek to my frizzy, smooth to my bumbling - no, she has to go and beat me at my own game, too. Whatever, bitch! You're going to have wicked bad wrinkles someday!

My house is built a couple feet off the ground, which I can see through the half-inch gaps in the floor. I'm guessing that the gaps are intended to facilitate ventilation, but considering that the back half of my room is built over an irrigation ditch, they're mostly going to be facilitating the easy entrance of mosquitoes. And kittens. My favorite kitten found her way under the house this morning, situated herself directly under my bed, and whined until I got up and went out onto the porch to play with her. Currently she's draped in a hot, furry sprawl over my forearm, forcing me to type one-handed. Evidently kittens don't speak Thai or English, but they do understand cuddling. And I'm fluent, motherfuckers!

One of the other kittens went to sleep in a cooking pot and ended up getting quite singed. He reeks of burned hair, and also wants to cuddle. I move to a farm halfway around the world and I'm still covered in cat hair. Figures.

Our youngest resident is 14, due next week. I'll call her Sally. Sally is incredibly attached to my roommate, and will often seek her out before meals to alert her that the food is ready. Yesterday my roommate and I decided to have granola and coffee at our house instead of going to breakfast, but Sally had different plans. She practically dragged us out of the house, then indignantly told the other women that she had cooked a special dish for us, and when she'd gone to find us, we'd been drinking coffee and eating sweets. The nerve!

I'm going to be just fine.

retro: meet the nazis

2009-12-12T06:25:00.001+07:00

I have a confession to make. I am not generally fond of owning up to my mistakes, but I also have a wildly overactive conscience, and the guilt is killing me. So here it is, my big confession: for the last six years, I have been telling people that I knew a family of Nazis in Paraguay.

This is totally, totally wrong of me. Prejudiced and sophomoric, more concerned with cheap laughs than human dignity. Honestly, I'm a little ashamed of myself.

The truth is, they were only probably Nazis.

To their credit, Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis managed to blend in much better than my partners and I did. Despite their misleading title, they weren't a married couple, but rather brother and sister, and each had made respectable marriages to local (i.e., "real") Paraguayans. The man was fair of hair and square of jaw, tanned to within an inch of his life, like Val Kilmer in Top Gun. His sister was equally blonde, a large agreeable woman who sold sweets to the kids at the primary school. Our host mother referred to them both somewhat liberally as her cousins. (I don't mean to sound snobbish, but in a town with a whopping three surnames to go around, everyone is your cousin.)

Obviously, something was off. One look at their pale eyes and flaxen hair told you that these folks were not from around here - and before you nerds get all het up over recessive genes and shit, can I just remind you: three surnames.

So how did these strapping Aryan specimens come to live in our town?

Paraguay, as I like to think I've made pretty clear, is not a place to which any sane person would relocate. Your average emigrant would sooner stock up on Tang and freeze-dried ice cream and blast off for Mars. But self-imposed exile in the ass-end of nowhere becomes a lot more attractive when your alternative is life in prison for your enthusiastic participation in a brutal genocide.

See, a lot of Nazi soldiers and higher-ups flew the coop at the end of WWII, and a number of them ended up down South America way. (You know, like Portugal.) Like many of its neighbors, Paraguay was at that time under the control of a military dictator, a charming son of a gun by the name of Alfredo Stroessner. As a fervent nationalist and grade-A dick - not to mention proud owner of one ugly-ass mustache - Stroessner naturally felt a certain affinity for Hitler and his regime, and so he cordially invited the fleeing Nazis to lay low at his pad until the heat died down.

Not pictured: one single shred of human decency.

Oddly enough, the heat never did die down. While Hollywood would have you believe that each and every escaped war criminal went on to build enormous nuclear weapons and/or torture Dustin Hoffman, the reality is that most of them took a look around their new homes, shrugged, and resigned themselves to relatively harmless, patently boring lives in exile.

(As for Stroessner, he was eventually overthrown and brought to justice for his terrible reign of repression, torture, and fear-mongering - by which I mean he hung out in Brazil for the last seventeen years of his life, drinking caipirinhas with a bunch of other exiled dictators and, needless to say, yet more Nazis.)

Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis were not old enough to have taken part in any genocidal activities themselves. No doubt their parents had settled in our town when Mr. and Mrs. were children, perhaps even before they were born. They had been raised Paraguayan and, as I mentioned earlier, had both happily married locals and produced a number of adorable non-Aryan children. There was no blood on their hands. They could not justly be condemned for the sins of their parents, and yet my partners and I did so instinctively. Their appearance marked them as alien, suspect, and we eyed them with distrust, hypothesizing amongst ourselves about the nature of their crimes.

Our host family did not feel the same, and so we occasionally found ourselves joining Señor Iceman and his family for meals. No doubt eager to impress the norteamericanos, his wife invariably served intestine soup. I am deliberately not calling this soup menudo. Both dishes revolve around offal, but menudo is generally flavored with chile, lime, cilantro, and other tasty condiments, while this soup was nothing more or less than intestines au jus. I could barely eat it, although my suffering was mild in comparison to some other volunteers'. I distinctly remember one entry in our supervisor's route journal that announced, K ate cow intestines and barfed TWICE!!

Our host was a loud, gregarious fellow, and he enjoyed chatting with me and my partners. One night, he took it upon himself to explain to us why we as Americans were perceived as intrinsically cold and aloof. Being lectured on our people skills by a Nazi was bad enough, but the worst part was that he was right. He spoke emphatically, frequently reaching out to lay a hand on our shoulders, and every time he extended a hand toward Lady Partner, she visibly shrank back in her chair. In her defense, she understood very little Spanish, and so was oblivious to the topic of conversation. Still, it was embarrassing. Here we were, trying to defend the generally affable nature of our people, and LP was cringing away from our cousin's hand like it was covered in horse shit and plague sores.

Night had fallen by the time we left his house, the new moon plunging our surroundings into a darkness unimaginable to anyone accustomed to street lamps and light pollution. My partners and I strode briskly off down the familiar road toward home, putting some distance between ourselves and our host family, and immediately fell to arguing. Dude Partner and I attempted to communicate to LP that her behavior had been embarrassing and insensitive; LP attempted to communicate that we should mind our own fucking business.

"I have personal space issues," she said defensively, storming ahead of us down the enormous hill that led from the primary school to the church.

"I have cow intestine issues, but you don't see me being such a baby," I snapped back, a bit disingenuously, as that evening's stew had brought me perilously close to a full-on meltdown. "Suck it up, already."

DP was a bit more sympathetic. "You have to compromise," he said. "You don't have to go around hugging everyone, but he's our cousin. That's just how they roll here."

I would have agreed, but I was distracted at that moment by the sensation of my foot suspended dreamily in mid-air. It was dark enough that we couldn't see the placement of our feet, and, rocket scientist that I was, I had unwittingly strolled onto a ridge of exposed rock. This wouldn't have been so bad, except that, as is often the case, the ridge stopped when it was good and ready. I did not, and so I face-planted off the edge, arms flailing like the wings of an angry goose, and skidded face-first down half the length of the hill.

Stunned into silence by the abrupt and dramatic nature of my fall, my partners stopped bickering and hurried down the hill to stare at my prone body. Twenty feet behind us, the darkness echoed with the raucous laughter of our host mother, who never saw an accident she didn't approve of. My knees and elbows were hot and stinging with pain; later inspection would reveal that I had managed to shave off several layers of skin, simultaneously packing the open wounds with sand. To add insult to injury, I was lying in such an awkward position that I couldn't figure out how to stand up without sending myself tumbling further down the hill.

Goddamn fucking Nazis, I thought.

Of course, it wasn't really their fault. It was my fault, for not paying more attention to the placement of my feet, and it was LP's fault, for being so goddamn obstinate, and it was God's fault, for putting that rock where it had no business being, and above all it was Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis' parents' fault, for moving to Paraguay half a century before and setting the whole thing in motion.

I rolled over, staring up at the pitch-black sky and the curious faces of my partners, neither of whom were making any effort to assist me. Our host family was catching up to us, tittering noisily in Guaraní. I hated them, hated all of them - our stupid nasty host mother; my stupid gawking partners who didn't care enough to drag me off the ground; the stupid neighborly Nazis who didn't even realize how out of place they were.

The fall had obviously rattled a few things loose - teeth, brain cells, my last remaining ounce of dignity - and I couldn't help wondering, as the blood rushed to my brain, what the original Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis would have thought if they could have seen me at that moment: the young idealist, the idiot, angry at a country that refused to let her save it. So quick to judge, to instinctively recoil from anyone who didn't fit into her view of the world. Unable to move past her prejudice, to reconcile her naive expectations with the strange, gloriously unpredictable quirks of reality.

I spat out a mouthful of blood-tinted sand and glared up at my partners. "Help me up, man," I demanded, "come on, what the hell are you waiting for," and DP stretched out a belated hand to drag me, stumbling, to my feet.

retro: shit happens

2009-11-29T22:45:00.001+07:00

When I first applied to volunteer with The Company at the delicate age of 15, I would never have dreamed of discussing bodily functions - mine or anyone else's - without a gun to my head and a blood oath that the conversation would never be made public. Human waste was something to be discussed only by highly-trained medical professionals and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I would no sooner have discussed bowel movements in a public forum than I would have lobbed the foul results at the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Let's just say times have changed.

Lady Partner suffered intense constipation for our first few weeks in Paraguay. It was understandable, at least for the first week or so. Everyone knows that travel can mess with your system, and the food our family was feeding us was enough to cork even the healthiest G.I. tract. It didn't help that LP was a huge germaphobe; she could barely look at our flimsy little toilet, much less park her ass and get down to business.

Take your time, Dude Partner and I told her. Don't push yourself. It'll happen when you're ready.

Two weeks into the summer, though, we all started to get concerned. Two weeks is an awfully long time to store ten pounds of cassava in your large intestine.

In desperation, LP confided in our supervisor, a fellow germaphobe. We had thought that our sup might take LP to a doctor, or at least offer some suggestions for speeding things along, but instead she shrugged off our concerns, saying that when she was a volunteer in the Dominican Republic, she had gone a whole month without pooping.

A MONTH. 1/12 OF A YEAR. ONE WHOLE FUCKING MONTH WITHOUT POOP.

A normal person cannot not poop for a month. She would die. Her body would slowly fill up with waste, like a hot-air balloon being inflated. Like that kid in Matilda who's forced to eat a massive chocolate cake, more cake than most of us could comfortably eat in a lifetime, until he eventually reaches the consistency of a sack of wet cement.

It's just an analogy, you understand.

Our supervisor was not a normal person. An inspiration to obsessive-compulsives everywhere, she shamelessly admitted to us that she never sat down on a toilet. Never. Not at a hotel; not at a friend's house; not in her own personal bathroom that she shared with nobody but Jesus. Her quadriceps were formidable, like cast-iron thigh guards. It made a strange kind of sense that this young woman might go for months on end without pooping. If you can go through life without ever - ever - letting your derriere touch a toilet seat, you can probably do pretty much anything.

One of my fellow staff members in Mexico was a trifle obsessed with maintaining digestive harmony. Worried about the potential consequences of the substantially "heavier" Mexican diet, he saw to it that our small kitchen was always well-stocked with bags and boxes of food-shaped laxatives.

Half of our food was labeled Doble Fibra, which is exactly what it sounds like. We had Doble Fibra cereal, Doble Fibra granola bars, Doble Fibra bread, not to mention at least three other brands of bran cereal and a stockpile of yogurt the likes of which the world had never seen.

It was frankly a little disturbing, especially on those days when certain members of staff would slump down at our little plastic table and moan, "That's number fourteen since breakfast." As careful as we tried to be, intestinal turmoil followed almost inevitably from our work - traveling between four towns every week, eating and drinking with up to twelve different families, then returning to staff house and gorging on cheap street-stand tacos. (Okay, so maybe we could have been a little more careful.) Our tummy troubles never lasted for long, but the bouts of illness were ruthlessly productive. Being forced to consume more fiber on those awful days seemed downright cruel, like giving blood thinners to a hemophiliac.

In my experience, there are few things that long-haul Company vets love more than trading poop stories. Like the girl who shit her pants in the middle of the night, hid her malodorous pajamas outside, and emerged the next morning to find that the family pig had disposed of them. Or the girl who reaped Montezuma's Revenge in an agave field with a whole busload of people watching her, and then had to get back on the bus. Neither of those stories are mine, but believe me, I can hold my own.

This competitive poop talk may seem like an odd hobby, but to hardcore Company folks, excrement is a relatively unremarkable part of daily life. Not just our own poop, either, but that of the people around us. Supervisors routinely ask their volunteers about their digestive health. If a vol is sick, their business becomes our business. (So to speak.) We run their symptoms by a checklist of indicators that tell us whether they need to see a doctor; if they do, the accompanying staff member is often obliged to translate every last sordid detail. As a result of this ongoing dialogue, Company staff members tend to be pretty nonchalant about poop, not unlike soldiers desensitized to violence. If it's not bloody or explosive, it's not a big deal.

Oddly enough, this nonchalance does not cross over into the rest of my life. I very rarely talk about poop with any non-Company friends or loved ones - partially because it doesn't get you invited to many dinner parties, and partially because I am keenly aware that such a thing is considered deviant behavior outside the bubble of international development NGOs. Many people are ashamed to have anyone realize that they are even capable of such an activity.

(Not to essentialize, but by people I of course mean women. I have never met a man who is not quietly proud of his body's every output.)

Don't get me wrong: even I am not interested in the intimate details of my friends' morning routines. Still, it's a shame that the subject is so very taboo, even in the abstract. Lighten up, guys! Like the book says:

Except my former supervisor.

retro: bolivia

2009-11-18T19:30:00.000+07:00

Editor's Note: The following is a series of journal entries from my trip to Bolivia in the summer of 2007. I was working with a professor at my college, an expert on the area who I shall creatively call Professor, to create a children's history textbook on the history of the Multiethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM) in the department of Beni. As part of the project, we went down to the TIM itself to present a draft to the Territory's leaders and rifle through their records. The trip was supposed to be relatively simple, easy, and productive.

I should have known better.

Wednesday: in which a plane is struck by lightning and La Paz is fucking freezing

I arrived in La Paz feeling like crap. I really shouldn't have been surprised. A contact at CIDDEBENI had said we should fly through Santa Cruz, as La Paz is unfit for human habitation. He was not joking.

La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, with an elevation of nearly two miles. (Suck on that, Denver.) The low levels of oxygen mean you're constantly gulping for air, always feeling like you're not getting quite enough. You get headaches and vertigo. Night terrors are common. So are isolated hiccups.

It's also freezing. Apparently it was the first day planes had been allowed to land in about a week, due to snowstorms.

Also, our plane was struck by lightning. It was...exciting. Professor slept through it. Mark my words: he will be the first man down when the zombies come.

We flew from La Paz to Trinidad in a wee little propeller plane manufactured by Fisher-Price.

Actual size.

It was so small that you could not walk to your seat, but were obliged to hunch over and shuffle. The extent of your crouch depended on your height: being short, I got away with Cro-Magnon Man, whereas Professor had to resort to Quasimodo's Brother Who Broke His Spine.

I sat at the front of the plane, near the open cockpit. I could see the pilots, and despite my initial concerns over the size of the plane, I was reassured that I was in good hands - not the pilots' hands, of course, since just then they were somewhat occupied making obscene hand gestures, but someone's. Also the pilots kept laughing hysterically, which I believe should be outlawed. If I am not allowed to bring toothpaste on the flight, the pilots are not allowed to cackle. It's only fair.

I was willing to cut them some slack, though, since it was obvious that they were just filling in for the nine-year-old boy who normally steers the plane via joystick. Anyway, I soon forgot to worry about them, since I spent most of the flight willing myself not to vomit. I had a very vivid image in my head of all the cells in my body, halfway through mitosis, gagging their little cellular brains out.

Thursday: in which I write a letter to the bats in my ceiling

Turns out that we arrived in Trinidad right in the middle of a cold front. The temperature hovers around fifty degrees during the day, then plummets at night. The hotel has no heating, and each bed is equipped with a single cotton blanket. Luckily, I'm alone in a three-person room. I do most of my writing and translating in bed, and at night I pile the three blankets onto one bed and sleep in my clothes. Still not as bad as Paraguay!

The water at the hotel comes in two varieties. Most of the time, it is delivered directly from an ice floe in the Arctic. In the early morning, though, the shower water is clearly piped in from Hell. Not the frozen, ninth-circle sort of Hell, either - I mean skin-scalding, blister-raising, pagan-incinerating Hell. Needless to say, there is no happy medium. Anxious to avoid third-degree burns on some fairly delicate areas, I ended up soaping up and sort of throwing water at myself, scalding my hands in the process. Real cute.

And now, a few letters.

Dear Professor,

One of the things which I don't really like about the way that you have, in the time that we have been working together, written the text of the book that we are producing, considering the variety of elements that go into our work and the time it takes for me to translate said text into elementary Spanish, is the tortured and grammatically implausible way in which you structure sentences.

Standing to the side so that the god of clauses may strike you down with precision,

ATTN: Family of bats, c/o my ceiling

You are SO LOUD. Quit the freaky bat sex or whatever and come down to eat some of these mosquitoes.

ATTN: Professor, c/o the Department of Redundancy Department

It is not okay to use the word "develop" three times in one sentence, no matter how long that sentence may be.

Dear young man who drives around and around Trinidad late at night with his car stereo turned up to 11,

You are going to Hell.

Regards,

Friday: in which we head to San Ignacio and somehow manage to not get ourselves killed

Today has been an exciting day. We left Trinidad about 8:30 this morning, taking a camión to San Ignacio. I have taken some fucked-up forms of transportation in my life, but this one is definitely up there in the ranks.

The truck is outfitted with a series of hard wood planks laid across the interior, creating makeshift benches. The only way to get on is to scale the side like a monkey (Professor's choice) or to haul yourself up the one little ladder and side-step along the edge like a suicidal stockbroker until you find a place where you can squish in with everyone else (mine). The "floor" is piled high with mounds of luggage and there are knees everywhere, so it's hard to find a place to put your legs, which is bad news once they start driving and you need to brace yourself. Most of the road between Trinidad and San Ignacio is extremely rough, and every time the truck hits a bump, everyone goes flying up into the air and then comes crashing down. Sometimes the planks fly up too, which is an adventure. My shins are ripped up and bruised from being braced against the bench in front of mine; I think I may need to have one of these splinters surgically removed. Needless to say, my ass hurts like hell.

Also, I'm covered in dust. It hasn't rained much lately, so the dirt road was relatively dry. Every time we passed another vehicle - truck, bus, car, bicycle, especially large lizards - we would all duck down and cover ourselves as a massive cloud of dust rolled through the truck. Ah, the many wonders of open-air travel!

The trip from Trinidad to San Ignacio is supposed to take three and a half hours; it took us nearly seven. You have to cross three tributaries of the Mamoré River on the way. Everyone gets off the truck, they stick it on a big floating wooden platform (powered and steered by a wee motorboat tied to the side), and you sloooooowly make your way to the other side of the river. This strategy worked well the first two times we tried it, but the water level in the last tributary was especially low due to the drought, so the ground was wet and the trucks kept getting stuck as they tried to drive onto the platform. They had to dig and construct a new ramp, meaning that we were stuck on the riverbank for a couple hours.

We eventually got to San Ignacio, where Professor and I fell out of the camión and took a couple taxis to a hostel. I suppose I should mention that all the taxis in San Ignacio are motorcycles. I tossed my bag on the handlebars, climbed on the back (side-saddle, because I am so ladylike and all), and off we went. I had a white-knuckled grip on the back of the seat, but mostly I was at the whim of gravity, my own balance, and the mood of my driver. It was fucking terrific.

The hostel is a nice little place with a pretty courtyard. The owner is a chatty old man who gave me chicha (a maize-based drink often fermented into alcohol) and, after a few minutes of conversation, asked if I was española. Not gonna lie: I love getting that question.

Saturday: in which Professor and I are not married, people like me better, and six men fall from the roof of a church

Apparently birds in the Amazon are fucking LOUD. Some of them sound like screaming children. That's not terrifying, or anything.

At lunch today, Professor was talking about how he's never received so much "positive attention" as we've been getting. He mused that perhaps it was because he's usually by himself, and loners tend to get left alone. I joked that maybe people just liked me better, and he laughed.

Dear Professor,

I was not really kidding.

Regards,

I keep getting addressed as Señora, which, okay - AWKWARD. It's pretty obvious that most people assume Professor and I are married, which is just...gross. When Professor obliviously introduces me as his ~*~student~*~, I actually feel guilty, like the two of us have run off to Bolivia to have a forbidden tryst under the guise of "research." Just typing that last sentence made me a little queasy.

Meanwhile, I'm proofreading the draft and the accompanying letter that Professor wrote to the subcentral [i.e., the local government], and I have to say, there's an awful lot of yo this and mi that.

Dear Professor,

Consider yourself warned: if you attempt to take sole credit for this book, there will be a throw-down.

Regards,

We went by the church, which was fascinating. It's the original Jesuit mission church, as far as I know, so it's at least four hundred years old. The roof is held up with huge mahogany poles donated by the Territory. Apparently they redid the roof a few years ago, and six people died - by falling, presumably. I didn't really press the subject, but I get the impression they're not huge fans of professional scaffolding here.

Saturday night: in which I sprain my ankle, or fracture it, or something equally stupid

Continuing in my fine tradition of falling down a lot, tonight I stepped the wrong way on a broken sidewalk and went down like a ton of bricks, spraining my ankle in the process. I've never actually done such a thing before, but I'm making an educated guess that such is the case, since my ankle is swollen and I can't walk or move my foot without incredible pain. Looks like I'm pretty well crippled for the time being. I guess I just have to take it in stride, since I seem to be a walking punchline these days, but in the end it comes down to this: if you didn't laugh at any of the jokes in this sentence, you have no soul.

Sunday: in which I hop everywhere and ow ow it HURTS

Okay, I'm less happy about this whole thing now. It hurts really bad, and I'm starting to worry that it's broken. I'm also worrying about how I will possibly get around for the next few days, never mind back to the U.S. I can't put any weight on it - how will I climb up the ladder of the truck and clamber over to a seat? Once I'm on, how will I brace myself? How will I get off and on and off and off and off and on and off again, like the trip demands? How will I climb the stairs at the hotel in Trinidad, or the steps of the plane? How will I navigate La Paz? How will I run through O'Hare to make our extremely tight connection? We'll make it work out of sheer necessity, of course, but it's going to be humiliating and extremely painful.

I can't put any weight on the ankle, so I'm reduced to hopping everywhere. Going to the bathroom or changing clothes is a major undertaking involving foresight and ingenuity. I have no idea how I'm going to bathe.

Professor brought food back for me, and we ate at the table in the courtyard of the hostel. Of course, the table is across the courtyard from my room, a distance that covers maybe sixty feet but felt like eight billion trillion miles as I hopped along, clinging to Professor's elbow. It was one of the more humiliating walks of my life. We finally got to the table, where we were joined by the hostel's owner. The three of us had a pleasant conversation, including a discussion of how Professor was going to have to abandon me here and I would become ignaciana. The owner offered to marry me, so I guess I'd be set.

Professor says I have very much endeared myself to the staff here, but I don't know how much I personally had to do with that. Everyone loves a gimp!

Monday: in which I bore myself to death

I am so bored. Other than translating - a pretty thankless task in itself - I have approximately fuck-all to do. There are a couple Internet cafés in town, which would undoubtedly help kill some time, but I can't get to them. The fact is, laid up as I am, I can't leave the hostel to do anything: attend meetings, get food, wander the town. Instead, I've finished reading two books, re-read The Economist about a million times, and played innumerable games of Solitaire and Minesweeper. It's starting to screw with my head. Last night I dreamt I was playing poker in an airport with Gordon Brown. I don't even play poker.

Wednesday: in which we might be trapped in San Ignacio

I woke up to rain this morning, which is not a good sign. A little rain will tamp down the dust, but if it really gets going, the roads will be wiped out and we'll be trapped. Such is the capricious nature of the Amazon.

Thursday: in which we ARE trapped in Trinidad

We made it out of San Ignacio yesterday, due to a bit of luck and a very capable driver. I managed to secure a seat in the cabin of the truck, which was fortunate, as it would have been hell to ride in the back with my ankle still acting up. I was squished in with another woman and her sick baby. It sounds terrible, but it was actually a very pleasant 3+ hours, all things considered. The woman was actually a girl, a very pale 17-year-old from the upper crust of Puerto San Borja who got knocked up at a young age (15, if my calculations are correct) and married her boyfriend, as you do. She was taking her daughter to a doctor in Trinidad. The two of us made friends, then chatted and played with the baby for the rest of the trip. What can I say? I love talking to people.

My new friend was obviously afraid of the water crossings. Apparently a friend of hers was on a truck that rolled off the back of the platform, nearly killing everyone on board. (Aaaaand I just realized why they make everyone get off.) Also, I mean, she was 17 and had rarely left San Borja. Not exactly a seasoned traveler. She clung to my arm and hid her face in my shoulder for all the crossings.

So anyway, we're back in Trinidad. In a couple hours, we'll leave for the airport, where we'll catch our flight to La Paz and then back to the States.

15 minutes later:

HAHAHAHA. Oh my God, I am like a bad-luck token. It turns out there's a paro here in Trinidad today, a work-stoppage, and so everything is shut down - including the airport. And all other forms of transportation. The paro doesn't end until 6:00 PM. Professor and I are going to try to take an overnight bus to Santa Cruz and fly out from there.

Friday: in which I ride my last motorcycle

Turns out that the mototaxistas in Trinidad are even crazier than the ones in San Ignacio. Or maybe it's just that they have more competition. Either way, there were many moments on the way to the bus station last night when I thought, Well, I guess I'm going to die now. MD is going to lord this over me forever. Of course, when I jumped off at our destination, my first thought was: Let's do it again! My brain is trying to kill me.

We had to wait at the bus station for a few hours last night. The mosquitoes were out of control, grouping in numbers so high I believe the scientific categorization would have been "plague." They were vicious, too. I woke up on the bus this morning to find the evidence of their handiwork: big, red, swollen bites all over my wrists and, weirdly, my palms.

Friday evening: in which we get stuck in Chicago and my foot has swelled to the size of my head

Our flight from Miami to O'Hare was randomly pushed back an hour, so we'll miss our flight to Cedar Rapids - apparently the day's last flight into Iowa. Professor and I have won the fabulous prize of staying overnight in Chicago. I normally like staying in hotels, but (1) Professor and I are going to kill each other soon, (2) I want to be home, and (3) if there were a hierarchy in Airport Hell, O'Hare would be the gigantic tri-mouthed devil snacking on Judas Iscariot. Finding your ticket counter, finding your terminal, getting to your gate: it really is the epitome of going around your ass to find your thumb, as MD would say.

And it involves so much walking. I hate to complain - okay, who am I kidding, I love to complain. If God did not want me to complain, He would not have made me so prone to bizarre twists of fate. Anyway, I pretend to hate to complain, but I've been stomping on my sprained ankle for a couple days now, and it hurts like fuck. My whole ankle and foot are swollen and throbbing. My other leg hurts, too, from the way I've been limping. It got to the point today that the thought of taking another step made me want to vomit. Professor magnanimously offered me some migraine pills, which ironically have helped with the pain but given me a massive headache.

Early Saturday morning: in which asdfjkdhjsjkfds

God be praised, we did eventually make it to our hotel, after a series of events so miserable and infuriating that I dare not recount them for fear of sending myself into a suicidal/homicidal rage.

I finally got the chance to unwrap my ankle, after two days of stomping on it, and...wow. You would not believe how swollen my foot and ankle are. I don't believe it, and I'm staring right at them.

You would also not believe how utterly blanketed I am in mosquito bites - angry, vicious red spots surrounded by white circles. They are everywhere, in the most unlikely places, including my eyelids and the palms of both hands. I counted 53 on my left calf alone. Between the swollen foot, the rash of red spots, and what are starting to feel like swollen glands in my throat, I'm frankly amazed that Customs allowed me back into the country.

Saturday: home sweet home

Made it home. Time to die.

retro: costa rica

2009-11-18T00:30:00.001+07:00

Editor's Note: The following is a series of journal entries written in the spring of 2008, when I went to Costa Rica with my Sustainable Development seminar. My classmates and I spent two weeks in the cooperative community of El Silencio, working on various parts of the coop and studying how the town functioned. For the record, El Silencio is a lovely town and everyone there was very patient with our weird surveys and diagnostics. If you're looking for a chance to live and work in a small Costa Rican community, or if you'd simply like to see a small-scale agro-ecotourism project in action, check them out. Give the macaws a good kick for me, would you?

During our time in Costa Rica, I also turned 21 and accidentally won $300 in a San José casino. Good luck duplicating that.

Sunday, 16 March

I guess I may as well admit this: the hills of San José are making me nervous. People generally have one of three responses to my weird hill phobia, or sometimes all three: (1) that's stupid; (2) that's crazy; (3) get over it. If I may respond to each of these points in turn:

(1) Well, no shit.

(2) See above.

(3) GREAT FUCKING IDEA, I'LL GET RIGHT ON THAT. GOLLY, WHY HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT.

Tuesday, 18 March

I started writing about our visit to the Chiquita banana plantation today, but we're going down a really bad road and consequently my writing looks like I'm having a stroke. Tyler is laughing at me. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.

Wednesday, 19 March

Tell you what, it is hot as fuck up in here.

Oh, novelas, love of my life. So far there's been a sugar daddy, a secret pregnancy, and an affair. (EDIT: Two affairs! Man, these bitches are slaggin' it up all over town.) How did I ever live without these?

I am digging this host family already. I finally have a cool dad! Seriously, I have had burning Cool Dad Envy ever since I started doing AMIGOS. My host dad in Paraguay was a shadow of his insane wife, and the only word my Nicaraguan dad ever spoke to me was adios on the day I left.

Plus, I mean, shit - this is easy. Families who accepted you in advance and actively want to house and feed you? That's patty-cake, man. Easy. Your Mom easy.

Auuuuugh. I came home from our seminar meeting at the albergue (lodge) to find a fat cockroach on my bed. Not as big as the ones in Nicaragua or Mexico, but still, you know...substantial. And right smack-dab in the middle of my bed. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I was barefoot, sweating like no human being has ever sweat before, tired and dirty and weirdly paranoid. I adjusted my balls, batted the cockroach onto the floor, and crushed it with a shoe. I'd like to think of this as some kind of personal growth.

Having said that, there's nothing quite like a roach in your bed to make you nervous in your own skin. It's my bed! I sleep there! I'm helpless! What if I wake up and it's on my face?

Thursday, 20 March

As always, things look better in the morning. There's something about the combination of restfulness, early sunshine, and hey, no enormous cockroaches on my face! that really brightens the mood.

I've been told a few times already that my Spanish is good. The thing is that at this point in my life, my Spanish is not, in fact, good. I can only conclude that people are fooled by my accent, which is still pretty decent. I've lost a lot of vocabulary that's taking its sweet time coming back, and I make amateur mistakes with verb conjugation if I haven't thought it out ahead of time. I find myself talking around missing words more than I used to.

!DIGRESSION ALERT!

Reminds me of the time in La Piedad that I forgot the word for "envelopes." (In keeping with the spirit of this story, I will not mention the word here. Also, I have forgotten it again.) I was in the only open papelería I'd been able to find in the whole city, and anyway I like a challenge as much as the next idiot gringa with no survival instinct, so I just admitted to the woman behind the counter that I'd forgotten the word. I proceeded to describe in detail what I was looking for: yea big, rectangular, made of paper, you put on a stamp and the address and you send letters in it. The woman offered up the word, then gave me a patronizing smile and said, in Spanish, "So you don't speak Spanish, huh?" I was thisclose to snarling, "BITCH, I AM SPEAKING SPANISH RIGHT NOW." I mean, geez, is it a crime to forget a word now and then? (Sobres! That's the one.) Especially considering how much variation in vocabulary there is across Latin America. I'm lucky I remember my own name sometimes.

END OF DIGRESSION

I am thirsty all the time. [Our professor] bought enough garrafones of purified water to give us each one liter per day. Ha ha ha...ha. According to the wealth of experiential wisdom that is AMIGOS, you need at least two liters a day in good conditions. Meanwhile, we're hiking hither and yon and I personally am sweating out at least a liter per hour. (Conservative estimate.)

Saturday, 21 March

I've been working at the coop's wildlife rescue center. The center is home to eight scarlet macaws, eight spider monkeys, three white-faced monkeys, a wild pig, and five assorted parrots.

To get to the rescue center, I walk down the road a ways, climb the big fucking hill to the albergue, then descend into the forest. The "steps" constructed for this purpose were clearly designed by someone with an eye for human suffering. Probably Eli Roth. Every step requires serious consideration of the laws of physics, especially when the rain has left the way muddy and strewn with wet leaves. I only fell on my ass once today, so I'm doing better than expected.

Once I make it to the center, shaken but alive, I have a whole host of wonderful things to do. To start with, I get to scrape out the rotting fruit from the stands, doing my best to ignore the deeply unpleasant sensation of grubs between my fingers. (Fruit, it turns out, rots really damn fast in the tropical forest.) I also attempt to give the baby white-faced monkey his bottle. (He's a little...skittish. I can handle skittish cats, but skittish monkeys are a whole other story.) Then, after cleaning the cages, I cut up more fruit so I can have more grubs to scrape out the next day.

The worst part of all, even worse then the bare-handed grub-scraping, is cutting up the papaya. I stand by my opinion that papaya is a demon fruit, full of lies and malice. Sounds delicious, looks delicious - smells and tastes exactly like human vomit.

On the bright side, I do get to cut up the fruit with a machete. Shit, y'all, I gotta get me one of those.

Alejando the spider monkey likes to take showers. Really! We spray him through the cage, and he scrubs away with all due diligence. It's a bit spooky, actually. He looks exactly like a small, somewhat hairy person who for whatever reason has decided to live in a cage and shit on the floor.

Monday, 24 March

Macaws, it turns out, are mean fuckers. One attacked my coworker Johan today, and not for the first time. I did the only thing you can do in that situation: turned the hose on it. Macaws fear neither god nor devil, but they are scared as shit of water. Once he recovered, Johan cornered the little fucker and sprayed it until it was drenched. As it clawed its soggy way up the side of the cage, I couldn't stop myself from thinking, "IT EATS THE VOMIT-FRUIT IN PEACE OR ELSE IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN."

Besides being bastards, the macaws are seriously unnerving. They move with eerie symmetry, like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. When I clean the smaller cage, the two macaws in there will gradually edge closer and closer to me until they're perched right over my head, staring at me with identically tilted heads and sinister birdy expressions that suggest imminent homicide.

One of the white-faced monkeys has a nasty habit of leaping onto your head, biting your ear, and attempting to have relations with the nape of your neck. It's pretty funny. Also weird as fuck. But mostly funny.

Jesus fuck, it's hot. I come back from the rescue center and my host mom is like, "Hot lunch? :D?" I can barely work up the motivation to toy with it. All I want to do is drink every drop of water that has ever fallen from the skies.

Tuesday, 25 March

I had an extremely awkward interaction this morning with Juan Carlos, the guy who runs the rescue center. He was saying how some women apparently think one of the other volunteers is really handsome, and said volunteer made an obviously fake pass at him. This quickly devolved into a discussion of The Gays, complete with exaggerated mincing. JC turned to me at one point and said, "I don't understand it, M. With so many beautiful women like you, how can a man want another man?"

Reader, please picture this: I am literally dripping with sweat, bright red from heat and exertion, face smeared with rotten papaya and monkey excrement, plain (but feisty!) at the best of times - which this is appreciably not - and also, you know...queer.

"Uh," I opined, helplessly. WELL SAID, M OLD CHAP.

In other news, we have these Canadian volunteers working at the rescue center who are here as part of a rehabilitation program. None of them speak Spanish, and only a couple speak any English. (Fucking Quebec.) JC seems to have taken it upon himself to teach them about the sanctity of their lives and why they shouldn't smoke cigarettes. Yes, that's right. He is telling RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICTS in REHAB not to smoke. This will end well.

Wednesday, 26 March

Today JC left me in charge of the center for a couple hours. He told me to have the Canadian volunteers rake the paths that go up to the albergue (including the one with the unfortunate stairs). When I communicated this to the Canadians, they said they'd done it the day before. The sad part was, we still had plenty to rake - being in the middle of the tropical forest, and all. Super, JC. Demonstrate to the recovering druggies that they can do the same thing over and over and things will never get any better, no matter how hard they try. That'll learn 'em.

Thursday, 27 March

Our driver, Miguel, gave me a ride to Quepos, where I bought my ticket to San José and sat down to wait for a couple hours. There were a couple guys calling, "Taxi! Taxi pa' San José!" I seriously considered it for about 2.7 seconds, like so: I wonder how much that would - shit, to get axe-murdered? No, ta. I don't scare easy when it comes to foreign transportation, but I maintain a healthy fear of unregistered taxis.

Apparently Miguel really liked me. God only knows why. ...well. To be fair, it turns out that I am capable of being extremely charming for limited periods of time. For this reason, the people who like me best are often those who know me least. But the truth will out, unfortunately, and given time, the content of my character begins to shine through, like radiation seeping from Mme. Curie's pores. (Too soon?)

retro: the bad beginning

2009-11-15T04:28:00.001+07:00

I am 16 years old, surrounded by total strangers in a field in the heart of South America. It's late at night, I don't speak the language, and a man in a dress is trying to light me on fire.

Perhaps some background information is called for.

When I was 15, I decided to live in Paraguay for two months. (As you do.) To that end, I spent five months being trained by my local chapter of a volunteer organization I will refer to as simply The Company. (Nervous parents of volunteers are notoriously Google-happy, and some of the events I will be discussing would make their eyes roll back in the heads. So "The Company" it is, as dumb as it sounds.)

Why Paraguay? At the time, The Company had projects in eight countries. I could have spent my summer frolicking in the lush tropical paradise of the Dominican Republic, or eating tamales in Mexico, or comically struggling to communicate via mangled Portuguese in Brazil. Instead, I elected to freeze my ass off and eat cow intestines for eight weeks. Why?

In a nutshell: because I am contrary. It's true. Ask my mother; she's been saying it for years. I have a terminal case of yeahwellyourFACEitis.

So when our training staff told us that no one ever wanted to go to Paraguay because it was cold and the food was weird, I immediately decided: That. Right there. That is what I want.

Let me say now, with the benefit of hindsight, that such reasoning is remarkably stupid. Smart people avoid difficult situations not because they are big old pansy-asses, but because those situations genuinely suck. Not me. I am the girl who, when informed that all of my peers have elected not to jump off a bridge, decides to leap off headfirst as a sign of my courage and individualism. That'll learn 'em!

So I went to Paraguay. It was the first time I had really been outside the country, if we're considering Canada in this context to be not so much a foreign country as a suburb of the U.S. (No offense, Canadians! I like your beer!)

A word of advice: if you have never traveled outside the U.S., rural Paraguay is a hell of a place to make a crash landing.

And rural it was. Oh, we had running water and even electricity, but that was the extent of our luxuries. Our next-door neighbors were a brisk five-minute walk away. Pigs wandered around the front of the house, while our family's cows traipsed twice daily across the "front lawn" and occasionally got tangled in our hanging laundry. We frequently found ourselves chasing chickens out of our bedrooms and off the dining table.

I had done some background reading, and I knew that Paraguay was a fairly small country, having lost most of its land to neighboring countries in the last couple centuries. Still, to my untrained eye, gazing out across the fields, Paraguay seemed to go on roughly forever.

My partners and I were doomed from the start. We quickly became embroiled in psychological guerrilla warfare against our host mother. The food was frequently gross and occasionally unbearable. Sometime in July, the temperature plummeted, leaving us cold and miserable. We were bored out of our minds. Also, my hair looked like this:

Yowza.

So obviously it was a difficult summer.

That's not what I'm here to talk about, though. That stuff came later.

I'm here to talk about our very first night in the community, not two hours after we'd arrived at our host family's house. Not two hours after we'd hauled our bags out of the pick-up and lugged them into the rooms we'd be sharing with our new sisters and brother. Not two hours after our supervisor had disappeared into the night, abandoning us to our uncertain fates with hardly a fare-thee-well.

Half an hour after all that, our host family told us that the town was celebrating the Día de San Juan that night, and would we like to come?

For those of you who happen to be unfamiliar with Latin American holidays, St. John's Day is what you get when you take a normal feast day - food, revelry, a dash of religious devotion - and you set all those things on fire. Bonfires? Awesome! Burning effigies? Not only tolerated, but encouraged! Very careful games of soccer with a blazing ball? Oh, what the hell - you only live once!

You may be starting to put together a picture of how I ended up in that field, surrounded by strangers, running for my life from a man wielding a flaming cow skull on the end of a stick.

In fairness, I should note that he started out brandishing the skull at everyone. He swung and jabbed the object of terror at the circle of onlookers, taunting us, and various parts of the crowd would scatter as they found themselves in the Danger Zone. Our host family had long since disappeared, characteristically abandoning us the moment we arrived at the festivities, and I lost track of my partners almost immediately as we split up and ran in opposite directions.

As time went on, I began to realize that I was having exceptionally bad skull-related luck. Time after time, it seemed, I zigged when I should have zagged. No matter where I ran, the flaming cow skull of doom followed close behind.

I had become a target.

Why did Cow Skull Man choose me? He must have sensed intuitively that I would provide maximum entertainment. Fear! Confusion! Abject humiliation! I believe I spotted Mark Burnett crouched next to the sopa stand, taking notes.

So I ran, and the cow skull followed me. Maybe, I told myself insanely, maybe this was some kind of initiation ritual. Next I would have to jump over five cows and stick my hand into a glove filled with bullet ants, and only then could I call myself a man.

Everyone around me was shouting in Guaraní, the indigenous language spoken by 90 percent of Paraguayans and 0 white teenagers from the Rust Belt. I do speak the language a little now, enough to modestly demonstrate to a native speaker my innate talent for mental illness - how dog hand hungry water name? - but on that night, dashing frantically from one cluster of strangers to another, I understood not a word. They may have been telling me to run, or maybe to play dead. They may have been asking each other who the hell I was and what I thought I was doing, monopolizing their flaming cow skull like that. They could have been shouting the football scores, for all I know. What they were not doing was helping me in any way as I ran for my life.

"Come on," you may be thinking. "It wasn't that big a deal. It's not like he actually would have risked burning you."

My dear, innocent friends: you have far too much faith in the average Paraguayan religious performance troupe. This was not a lighthearted game, but an exercise in natural selection. Only the strong would survive; the slow and clumsy among us were picked off like sickly gazelles on an African safari. The town drunks had a particularly hard time of it, as Cow Skull Man mercilessly prodded them into submission until they lay in drowsy, smoking heaps on the ground.

("They're just borrachos," people told me later, as if a high BAC somehow protected these sad bastards from immolation. "They probably didn't feel a thing.")

On the other hand, no one died, minus one unfortunate cow. Clumsy oaf that I am, even I escaped with nothing more serious than shin splints and a mild case of self-loathing. So maybe I was safe after all. You think?

Q: Would my pursuer have killed or even seriously maimed me?

A: Of course not.

Q: Would he have hesitated, even for a moment, to stick that fiery cow skull halfway up my ass?

A: Why don't we ask the drunks about that one.

a riddle

2009-11-11T19:30:00.004+07:00

Q: What has two thumbs, an obnoxious affinity for sparkle text, and is in the process of acquiring a one-way ticket to Thailand?

THISBITCH
In case that was too subtle for you: I've accepted a position as volunteer coordinator at a women's shelter in northern Thailand. I leave the second week of December, which means I have about four weeks to wrap things up at my current job, get my visa, buy appropriate attire and supplies, pack, cuddle my kitten until he screams for mercy, get a sassy haircut, and of course panic. Oh, and learn Thai. It's bad form to move someplace without speaking the language, right? And to wander around going, "PANCAAAAKES," in an increasingly more demanding tone of voice?

You guys! I'm moving to Thailand!

HOLY SHIT I'M MOVING TO THAILAND.

hello, babies.

2009-11-11T19:00:00.002+07:00

This is a travel blog, I think. More or less. I get tired of locking and unlocking my school blog, and now that I am no longer 14 and obsessed with AFI, I think it's time I moved beyond LiveJournal.

I may archive some of my old travelogues here. That's a very fancy word, "travelogues." Dignified. Like they ought to involve long treatises on self-discovery and personal growth.

This blog is not about self-discovery and personal growth.

Mostly I fall down a lot. And cuss. Sometimes both at once. Once in a while I get arrested, but they usually let me go. I've had my fair share of cow brains and foot parasites. I am not a good role model, for anyone.

Don't try this at home.