Luck at Wat Chedi Chai Mongkon

I left Khao Wong when the roosters started crowing and a red-orange sliver of the sun had just risen over the mountains in the distance. A small lake reflected the cool morning’s stillness and as I sped off down the empty road, the breeze actually made me feel a little chilly.

The countryside was still waking up. Stray dogs were still sleeping in the middle of the street, some only casually raising their head to watch me speed by before falling back asleep. Farther down outside the Wats old ladies kneeled on the side of the road with baskets of sticky rice waiting to give monks daily alms. The monks, barefoot in bright orange robes, patiently walked out of the Wats onto the road to collect their only meal of the day.

Arriving at home I had time for a shower then walked outside to see Mon and Min dressed politely—long pants and ‘nice’ shirts—ready to go to the Wat. I could tell it was a special occasion; they had the family’s digital camera out. It was obvious the kids didn’t use it often; they were taking pictures of everything. As we waited for Pee Maew’s sister-in-law, Pee Dop, to pick us up the kids took turns taking pictures. Min snapped shots of tall white mushrooms springing up in the front lawn and Mon took pictures of red ants eating a praying mantis just before Min kicked it, scattering the ants and causing the mantis to fall apart.

Pee Dop arrived with breakfast, Nori Seaweed Lays Potato Chips, and we headed out on our adventure. The smell was enough to stunt my appetite for any food at all. I politely refused some breakfast, explaining that falang don’t eat potato chips for breakfast. As the sun continued to rise into the morning sky, we drove east towards Laos in route to Wat Chedi Chai Mongkon.

Halfway there a snake slithered across the road in front of us, nearly becoming road kill. It set off a commotion in the car—what I first thought to be fear, but was actually excitement because, they explained, seeing a snake on the road is good luck.


I hadn’t realized there was A/C on in the car until we arrived and I stepped outside then immediately started to sweat. A large dirt parking was surrounded by tourist traps: stores loaded with useless crap and cheap toys irresistible to kids. In the parking lot nearly a dozen people had set up small tables selling film, each one by stacking the small film boxes up into a pyramid. Small carts sold som tam, sticky rice, cokes, and hot coffee. Pee Meaw bought us each a coke, poured into a plastic bag with ice, that we cared by its handles and drank with a straw. As we walked onto the Wat’s grounds we walked past some old men selling traditional, hand crafted Thai instruments.

Gold six-headed snakes called Nagas protected the main entrance of Wat Chedi Chai Mongkon from evil spirits. The Wat had many other classic pieces of Thai Wats—statues of monks, elaborate gardens, gold chedis—but this Wat was very different than any other I’d ever seen. Usually the Wat is different than a church in that it isn’t single, large building of worship, but many buildings on the land, each with its own specific purpose. Here, however, although there were smaller chedis around the main building, it had a huge main structure with six different floors. Even the most famous Wat in Thailand, Wat Phra Keaw in Bangkok, only has rooms to enter and never a staircase heading up to a second floor. Here, there were enormous chambers with high ceilings, elaborate paintings and detailed moldings gilded in gold.

The center of the first four floors each had huge Buddha’s surrounded by large bouquets of lotuses, large orange candles, and elephants with ivory tusks. At the base of each of these alters were fine rugs, upon which we knelt, wai-ed the Buddha and bowed three times.

The higher we climbed in the temple the more spectacular the view over-looking Isaan was but, especially at this arid time of year, the view over the harvested rice fields is little to behold in comparison to the Wat. Still, the height was great enough that Pee Meaw started to get freaked out and she refused to go anywhere near the edge saying that even looking out made her feel as if she were falling.

The steep stairway up to the final floor was indoors but it still gave Pee the heebie-jeebies. Just sitting at the base of the spiral staircase she looked worried about how tall it was. At first she said there was no way she could make it up there, but with a little convincing from the kids, she agreed to brave the hike. It was the first time she had confronted her fear of heights, but this time was worth it; at the top was a shrine encasing a bone sliver of Buddha.

I thought the walk down would be the hard part and going up would be no problem but as the stairs went higher they also became smaller and wound more tightly. I have a modest fear of heights and I was a little uneasy about walking up. Pee Meaw was freaking out. Watching her made me worry because I thought she could faint at any minute. She had a death grip on the railing and was visibly breathing heavy; her eyes were flooded with worry.

Pee crawled up the final steps and when she reached the top, she scrambled across the floor away from the stairs to a place she thought to be safe. The room was painted serenely, fluffy clouds on a powder blue sky, again border by gold trim. The shrine of the Buddha’s bone was elaborate but it was impossible to actually see the bone. We assumed it was there, perhaps felt its presence, prayed to it, then Pee Meaw began her long walk down stairs. Again, I was worried for her, but scooting the whole way down on her butt, Pee Meaw made it down without a problem and felt proud she had overcome her fear.

On the way out we stopped on the fourth floor to ring the bell. A large brass bell, we each struck in an odd number of times for good luck. On the ground we stopped at a fountain and attempted to throw coins in the fish statues’ mouths, again, for good luck. I was wondering how much this good luck was really worth and just then Min, after failing to throw the coin in the fish mouth, stepped in a huge wad of gum. Perhaps there was something to the good luck.

Tuesdays With Coffee

The first cup of coffee is always filled with ants. I learned this the hard way, not from ruining my first cup on my first day, but by ruining first cups on consecutive days during my first week. Then I started to open the water kettle and try to scoop out the ants, but this only scattered them in the water, forcing me to empty out the entire pot. The best way to avoid ants in your coffee is simply to throw the first cup out the window.

Still, I’m weary of drinking coffee out here. First of all, it’s instant coffee and isn’t good. Second, the food here is hard enough on the western digestive tract, and a hot cup of coffee in the morning often makes a bad situation much worse. Still, today, even my daily cold shower couldn’t wake me up, and I have to have some caffeine.

I meet the other falang teachers under the shade of a large tree standing between the soccer field and basketball courts. All 2,500 of the students stand on the shade-less soccer field for morning assembly and announcements. I hum along with the Thai national anthem, then bring my hands together to pray along with their Buddhist prayer. I look out into the sea of students and bow my head when they bow theirs.

After the prayer we sneak back to the English Department to finish our instant coffee. I wai all the teachers I pass on the way, so as to not offend anybody with a lack of respect. The girls walk straight to the office, but I make a quick stop at the school store and buy four donut holes for three Baht and a fake orange juice for ten.

Back in the office I look at my notes from the previous Tuesday, the last time I had 3/3. The outlook is bleak. Though they are decent students, the class is the Thai equivalent to freshman, and has over 50 students. Though the students don’t have the TV/videogame-induced ADD of American students, it still takes a special lesson plan to maintain the attention of that many pubescent kids at once. I wonder if my coffee will help at all.

The donuts are stale but edible. I place the mandatory straw into my orange juice and when I suck, I taste orange but the texture is entirely foreign. I immediately think of ants. But I know what its like to drink ants, and it’s not ants. It tastes more like rice. I look at the label of the orange juice and see it’s written in Chinese. Fucking bubble tea. I dip my stale donut holes into my instant coffee and check my watch.

Sometimes morning assemblies go on for the better part of an hour, well deep into first hour, but this only happens when I have first hour off. Today I teach first hour, and so the assembly ends early, and students are in class on time, a feat worthy of praise. I walk slowly across campus to class, plotting what I might do with my simple lesson plan, I smile and say, “Good morning” to all the students who I walk past me. Some students wai me, others are getting smart to the fact that I could care less if they wai me or not.

I walk up to the second floor of the building and down the hall to the classroom marked 3/3. Outside a girl is standing behind another with her hands covering her friend’s eyes. I put my books on the bench and silently signal to the girl that I will switch my hands with hers, covering the girl’s eyes. Without alarm, the blinded student allows us to switch hands, then attempts to figure out who the new pair of hands belongs to. A blind detective, she feels my hands with her fingertips, then lead her hands to my wrists. She feels the hair on my forearms, and, wondering what it is, pulls at some of it. With the pull of my hair, she realizes I’m not Thai. She ducks away from my hands, twisting her head back to confirm her fear, that yes, it is Ajarn Dustin, and she dashes into the classroom, completely embarrassed.

I forget that I’m tired, that I didn’t know what I was going to do with my lesson plan, and sit down to take roll. Roll is uneventful though the students laugh every time I mispronounce a nickname or when a student states, “Absent!” instead of “Present!”

I stand up in front of the class and see 45 pairs of eyes staring curiously at me. I remember its not so much the content of my lesson that dictates whether the kids will learn, but how I present it. I teach with energy the kids find contagious and soon we’re having fun, and just happen to be learning some English in the process.

I teach a dialogue of “How are you feeling?” with a follow-up question to ask why they feel that way. When I picked the nine feelings to teach, I did so quite arbitrarily, and only now, in the middle of teaching them, do I know which parts of my dialogues are successes. For these kids, the feeling of “happy” is fun to talk about, because the reason I gave them for being happy is, “…because I’m in love.”

Though their English is bad, every student knows what the phrase “I’m in love” means and no one can say it with out a smile and a giggle. I start choosing two students at a time to practice the dialogue together and everyone thinks it’s a dating game. I pick one boy and shouts of a girl’s name are called out, and applause erupts when I give into the match making. The couple sheepishly mouths the dialogue and after, sit down to an applause and high-pitch “woo’s” from the girls.



My third class does not go so well. I walk in and immediately the students tell me they are hungry and want to go to lunch early. I laugh and take roll, marking late students tardy. The late students huff and groan, unhappy with my unfair record keeping.

Half way through the class five more students show up. “Where were you?” I ask. They all look at each other, hoping someone will step up to be the spokesperson for the group. One finally does. He offers the one word explanation of: “toilet.”

These students do not speak a lick of English. They are difficult to teach because they have given up on English years ago. They will be farmers, policemen and sticky rice vendors. I ask them if they all went to the toilet together. They don’t understand a word, sit down, and pretend to ignore me. This is why I don’t care whether the students wai me: if they want to show me respect, they have the opportunity to do so in the classroom. I bring the boys up to the front of the classroom for interrogation.

I ask them again, but this time in pigeon English: “You go toilet?” All the boys nod nervously. “You go? Five boys?” Looking at each other, they all agree and say nod their heads again. “Five boys, one toilet?” They nod again. In front of the class I give a overexaggerated look of surprise and disgust. I look at them again and they all begin to look worried, like they might have said the wrong answer to my question. “In America,” I explain, “one boy, boy toilet.” Their eyes open up, realizing what I’m getting at. “But in Thailand, one toilet, FIVE BOYS?!” I say in astonishment.

Each of their faces turn even more red as the entire class laughs at the thought of all five of them simultaneously using a single toilet. “No, no…” they plead, waving their hands negatively. They try to explain, but in two words their English vocabulary has been exhausted. I tell them to go sit down and they waste no time returning to their seats.

The call on the same boys repeated through the lesson, hoping to teach them that if they don’t want to learn, they should just play hooky. The rest of the class, though enjoying my picking on the boys, continues to beg to go to lunch early. I now decide I’ll keep them speaking English through the bell.

I look down at my watch and see that twenty minutes remain in the class. As I continue my lesson, a sudden shift in my stomach makes me instantly uncomfortable. I immediately regret having the cup of coffee. I continue to speak though I hardly concentrate on the words coming out of my mouth. I suddenly feel very hot and sweaty and realize twenty minutes is far too long. I quickly mobilize the students into pairs for practice speaking them sneak out the door, and down the hall to the nearest bathroom for a nightmare date with a squat toilet.

By the time I return, only a few students remain and I excuse them to lunch. I too walk to the cafeteria wondering if I can muster up an appetite for an omelet on rice. Still sweating and a little light-headed, I give a student 10 Baht to fetch me lunch. I sit at the teacher’s table and look at (not read) the daily paper reminding myself, No More Coffee.

Ants: Resolution (read "ANTS" posts before)

At first glance it looked like a big crack winding across my bedroom wall, traveling from one corner to the other, up and over the door. Immediately aware it didn’t belong, I focused my eyes and saw the crack moving. It was the ants again. Where they were coming from or where they were going I had no idea, but their two points of visible travel were holes in my wall, and the little black spots scurried from one to the other with some important mission in their tiny little ant brains.

Shoes I could throw out the window, but now they decided to take over my home. I was at a loss for what to do. Pee Took came to have a look, and peered into the ant holes as if to see what exactly the ants were up to in there, behind the walls.

Then he hit the wall hard with his fist. Like a reading on seismograph, the perfect line of ants scattered in different directions then slowly fell back into order. From the main crack in the wall ants began to pour out. I was unsure how this was helping out situation. Pee Took made a Thai sort of “tsk tsk” sound shaking his head then without saying a word, walked out of my room.

Ten minutes later the ants calmed down, returned to their crack and trail along the wall, and Pee Took came back with a spray can of ant killer. He flooded the holes with it and the ants went haywire. They must have spread the message down the line quickly because even the winding path on the wall split and ants started running in all directions. The floor started to collect small little black dots.

Just when I thought that would be enough, the ants kept coming. Just when I thought we must have killed them all, more came rushing out and then, they started coming out another hole in the next room. I can’t imagine how many ants were —or still are— in my home. Next we took to chalking up all the cracks with poison. Instead of wasting an entire spray can of ant killer, we just lined the holes with the white chalk and watched the ants continue to pour out. This method was just as effective but much slower. The ants ran out, tried to get away, then started to act drunk, walking funny, then fell to the ground.
My floor became a mass grave of ants. It was half disgusting and half amazing. Pee Took then explained to me that it was the rain. At first I thought he meant that when you find huge amounts of ants, it means it’s going to rain. What he really meant, and what makes more sense, is that when it rains the ants all run inside. It had just rained and all the ants came to post up in my place for a while. Pee Meaw wasn’t so sure though—she maintained with her same theory that she put forth about my shoes: jealous Thai girls were stuffing desserts in the cracks of my walls.

Ants: The Trilogy

Pee Meaw joked that my ant problem was from jealous Thai girls sneaking over to my place and hiding desserts in my shoes. Charming, but impossible, it made me laugh and somehow I didn’t expect the ants to come back. I had torn apart their colony in my curtains and then shook them out of my shoes. They were resilient but I was hopeful I would never see them again.

Not only did I see them again, but this time, the ants came back with a furious, two-pronged attack I never saw coming.

After school today I was taking off my black shoes and putting them on the shoe rack when I thought I should check the my brown shoes, just to make sure the ants weren’t attempting a move back in. I didn’t see any ants crawling around, but then when I touched my shoes, again, my hand was covered in ants. They really are tiny little ones, but I can’t tell you how fast they move. I didn’t expect them and so I grabbed the shoe casually and it was only a matter of seconds before they had my hand covered. Disgusted and pissed off, I threw the shoes outside.

This was only a day and a half after the last infestation but these ants came back with reinforcements. I still cannot f*$&ing believe how many ants were in the shoes. Soon my entire porch was covered in ant chaos. In my fury I began to stomp the ants in a futile attempt to them all. If someone was watching from a distance I must have looked ridiculous. Stomping wasn’t working, so I began to dump buckets of water over my entire porch. Watching the drowned brought me happiness. I pounded my shoes as hard I could on the ground to shake the others out and them promptly drowned them too. Dozens of ants were still scrambling on and in my shoes, but I stopped short of soaking them.

When I gave up and decided to move on, I was still pissed off at tiny little ants, and took a shower to cool off. As usual, there were random ants crawling around the bathroom and, in underserved retribution, I took the shower sprayer and drowned all of them, just for being ants. A Buddhist country or not, I was in no mood, and killed ants without worrying about my reincarnation in the next life. I watched the small trails of ants fall from the wall and wash down the drain with a grim smile.

When I grabbed my towel off the door and started to dry off, I looked down and I noticed there were more ants crawling on the floor. I wondered how they survived the flood but at this point I no longer cared. I grabbed my dirty clothes hanging off a separate nail and noticed there were more ants crawling –frantically- on the wall. Still, it didn’t click.

It wasn’t until a minute later, walking into my bedroom that I felt a little itchy. I looked down and saw tiny ants crawling all over me. I dropped my towel and the little fuckers were all over it. I couldn’t believe it. The little bastards had reinforcements waiting for an ambush in, of all places, my towel. I ran back to the shower, rinsed myself off again, checked my other towel—twice—then dried off and got dressed.

I may have won the battle, but these ants are crawling in more than my curtains, shoes, and towels; they’re in my head. I constantly feel small twitches on my arms and legs and think it’s ants crawling on me. If I see a single ant, I worry that there’s another million coming just like it. When I close my eyes, in the darkness, I see ants crawling on the backs of my eyelids.

ANTS

After the last ant infestation in my bedroom curtains, I hadn’t thought of the possibility of another attempt by the colony to re-establish their residency in my home. Evidently my ignorance was just the opportunity they needed to rebuild their nest, this time in a place even less likely than my curtains. I was rushing out the door to play Thai pick-up basketball (which is arguably stranger than massive amounts of ants) when I noticed an ant highway crawling up my shoe rack. (Note: Since shoes are not worn indoors in Thailand, one of the four pieces of handmade furniture I have is a shoe rack that looks more like a nightstand.)

I kept some food on top of the rack so I immediately assumed they were after a bottle of coke or, perhaps, Grandma’s cookies (sent straight from Higgins Lake in ten days. Thank you Grandma!). I followed the trail to one of my shoes and I assumed something must be behind them. I pulled them out from the rack and in an instant, I had dozens of ants crawling up my arms. I instinctively shook them off and then, with a finger in each shoe, I pulled them off the rack and onto the floor. The short drop was enough to disrupt the entire colony. Ants flew from my shoes. They were the same kind of ant that had built a home in my curtains; tiny little bastards that run quickly, especially when they’re party’s been crashed. There were so many of them, my shoes looked black instead of brown and I was expecting the ants to congregate under the sole, lift up the shoe, and run away with it. Though certainly organized, I guess the mass ant pick-up-and-run trick is only for picnics in cartoons.

I threw the shoes outside then began to sweep the evacuees off my doorstep. After giving the ants a chance to exit on their own accord, I then took to slamming the shoes on the concrete. A third of the ants fell out, a third stayed where they were, and the other third crawled up my wrist. Unsure what to do, I left the shoes outside and went off to play some ball.

When I returned home later that night, my shoes still laid outside my door, empty save a few renegades still hanging out. Since I don’t own another pair of shoes for school, and there’s certainly no store to buy shoes in town (the Thursday market would by best bet locally) I left them outside in hope of a full evacuation. The next morning, my shoes were empty, ant-free, seemed to have had no damage, so I wore them to school. The ants have been a surprise twice now, and I can’t help but assume they’ll be back.