Danger!

On Sunday, I became part of the Thai Witness Protection Program. I was sitting on the floor of my house (because I have no furniture and it's cooler that way anyways) reading the Bangkok Post and finishing my lunch. I had almost no warning before the attack came. My assailants were dressed in identical bright red uniforms and suddenly, at the stroke of 2:30pm precisely, my house was full of them. For a moment, I panicked. Then, I ran. I grabbed a bag that was near the door and hopped on my bike, slamming my door down behind me and locking it quickly. Several of them came out of the house after me, but I was on my bike speeding away.

In the bag I had grabbed was my bathing suit and towel, so I decided to spend the afternoon in hiding out at the reservoir. It was the hottest part of the day to be out on the highway on my bike, but the invasion of my house had left me no choice. I got changed in the bathroom of an Esso station along the way.

I had forgotten, however, about the drought. There was almost no water in the reservoir. The Thai news has been full of reports about the "cloud seeding" technology Thailand is using to try and increase rainfall in drought areas. Military planes have been diverted from whatever duties it is military planes perform in peacetime and now spread "rain inducing" chemicals into clouds at night. The Thai King has access to all of this technology from his home computer and receives nightly cloud reports on the situation.

While most of Thailand was waiting for rainy season to begin, Mae Sot had received its first big rain on Saturday. It was a fabulous storm full of lightening and thunder that took out the power grid along Main Street. I went out into the street to watch the lightning. It was incredible. The wind was so strong it had the palm trees bent almost in half. The bamboo trees were being whipped about, leaves flew through the air in wild whirlwinds. Some of the lightning was almost blinding, some of the thunder actually made the house shake. It felt like mountains were falling on us. The Burmese people peddling quickly through the rain to get home, must have thought I was crazy: a big white girl out in the mud dancing through the rain laughing, but they laughed with me. And the rain just kept coming down. After awhile, I went inside for a hot shower and to get dry. I curled up in my hammock near the front entrance with a steaming cup of coffee and a blanket and listened to the sound of the rain on the tin roof.

The rain the day before hadn't seemed to do much for the local reservoir, however. I pull up covered in sweat only to find the pitiful shores lines with fisherfolk and their multiple fishing rods propped up into the mud while they rocked away in their hammocks. I lay in the shade of the bamboo trees and looked at the leaves swaying in the bright blue sky and watched the endless parade of ants in the branches above and on the ground below. "At least," I thought, "they will not find me out here."

But you can't hide forever and since Thailand, for all I know, doesn't really have a Witness Protection Program and since, even if they did, it wouldn't help me anyways, I resigned myself to going home.

"How was your swim?" asked my neighbor as I pulled my bike up outside the house.

"I didn't actually get a chance to swim," I replied. "Are they gone?" I asked, looking nervously at my locked door.

My neighbor shrugged and then went back inside to his work.

I opened my door nervously, expecting and onslaught. Nothing. I parked my bike inside and entered the house, scanning the floor and watching carefully where I stepped. Nothing. They had all left.

I was describing the incident to a long time Mae Sot resident last night over dinner. "I think the rain might have flooded their den," I explained. "They looked too big to have just hatched."

I have heard about the hatching that happens after the rains, especially for those of us who live in teak houses. After a storm, the termites hatch in huge numbers. Termites, when they are first born, have wings. They fly around for a little while, then drop their wings and disappear, burrowing into wood, I would imagine. I have been told that one or two times a year, they hatch in such hordes that you need to sweep your floor of the huge pile of wings they leave in their wake. Someone I know described how they couldn't' get down their stairs, there were so many wings lying in drifts on their floor.

"Tell me what they looked like again?" my Thai friend asked.

"They were bright red and about two inches long."

"Round or flat?"

"Definitely flat."

My Thai friend had an expression on her face I had seen once before. It was in Taiwan when I had described a cute little green snake I had encountered once when hiking alone on a mountain trail. My Taiwanese friend had gone pale and then proceeded to tell me that I had made the acquaintance of one of the most poisonous snakes in the country. My Thai friend had the same look.

"You should be very careful," she said. "Those things are really poisonous. Even if they touch you I have heard you have to go to hospital and they will cause you a lot of pain."

In some ways, it almost made me feel better. When I saw the horde of them wriggling across my floor towards me, I felt like such a girly-girl. All I could think of was jumping up and down going, "Ewwww! Ewwwww!" So it turns out that I did the right thing after all in evacuating the premises and hiding out until they had all gone. I have since investigated every corner of my house and found no trace of them, but you never really know when those red devils will strike again. That is definitely one of the things that I hate about tropical countries: damned insects and frighteningly poisonous things.

On Mute

Have you ever heard of an English Speaking class being taught by someone who couldn't speak?

On Thursday I had a sore throat. I woke up Friday morning, up in Umphium camp, able to speak only in a whisper and feeling otherwise fine. I was two hours from any substitute teacher and faced with only four weeks of class to go and a lot of things left to cover. I couldn't afford to cancel class just because I couldn't speak. On with the show!

It was quite the hilarious day. I taught in a whisper, writing things on the board, having students speak for me. Actually, I didn't do a lot of teaching, I got my students to do it for me. Not being able to speak kept me incredibly student-centered, always our goal, and focused on my 80:20 (student talking : teacher talking) ratio. What struck me afterwards is how easily my students went along with me. They never seemed to question my ability to teach a class without a voice. We had a great time. Of course, by the end of my five hours of teaching on Friday, I was quite exhausted.

The weekend went by fairly well also. I slept and read a lot. But it was not any more frustrating trying to communicate with people than it normally is around here. I went to the market where I don't speak Burmese or Thai, so not being able to speak at all was no big loss.

Three days later, I am gradually getting my voice back, but it is still quiet. I went out to the bar on Saturday night armed with a pad and pen, scribbling little notes to people and communicating mostly through their lip-reading skills and my body language. It was less difficult that I had imagined.

I encountered only one annoyance: a Norwegian woman who couldn't believe that I didn't lose my voice regularly. "If I couldn't speak, I'd be freaking out! You're dealing with this so well, you MUST have done this before." She actually didn't say that to me, she wrote it down on my pad of paper. Perhaps she was under the impression that my hearing was temporarily out of service along with my speaking ability. Her writing was almost illegible though. She kept bringing the conversation back to how sick I must be right now. Wasn't I so miserable? I'm sure it wouldn't have been that annoying if people weren’t so frequently wanting to feel sorry for me about my variety of illnesses and heath issues. Do people want to be pitied? Is sickness some special state they are secretly aspiring to? What is up people?

As I need to return to work tomorrow, I am going to have my first adventure with the Thai medical system this afternoon, which should be fun, particularly as I can't speak. But this weeks little ranting blog has a point:

Take a minute out of your day right now and think about all the things that you have that you are thankful for. Don’t just sit there and nod at another gushy cliché that belongs in a chain-email, really think about it for a second. Because being silent for a few days has made me learn a lot of things: about listening and judging how important what I have to say is before I have said it. But I am really looking forward to going back to being the big noisy girl that I am. I am thankful not only to be living in a world of lush greenery but that I have the capacity to see and appreciate it. I work in a place where you need your feet to get you where you're going and I have two healthy feet to take me there.

Amen.