Hoe-Uh Oh-Uh

Fine Feathered Felines:

It’s been a while since I’ve poured my feelings to you from my wobbly desk, mosquitos whirring by my head and pomelo digesting in my stomach. Hello again friend.

My introspective writing has been put on hold for many a reason. First of all, I have, of late, taken on responsibilities above and beyond what my fellowship description outlines. These include: thinking about and doing things for my future (such as procuring employment beyond my AJWS fellowship and securing sub-continent flights), Burmese lessons, exploring ideas to fundraise for a variety of worthwhile causes here, playing Thailand travel agent for an upcoming visit from the brother, mommer and popper (shweet), waking at 6 am once a week to partake in “cooking duty” with my students (see also: Laura acts inept with firewoodà Laura creates a dehydrating heap of salty fried eggsà Laura nags students not to add MSG to everythingà Laura is relegated to the mortar and pestle and forms a nice right bicep), relearning all the math I forgot during a six year hibernation period so that I can teach it to my students, relating soccer balls and their patchwork to Earth and it’s tectonic plates, developing fleeting thoughts about bringing art to borders here, there and everywhere, and shaking the roseapple tree in front of the office to harvest it’s luscious fruit. Utter deliciousness.

Secondly, after seven months here in Thailand, Burma, the border, or whatever one could call this complex town, my life here no longer comprises of a “stint.” Those goats making noises like old dying men no longer shock me. They are the Starbucks around the corner. The gorgeous and wrinkled woman smoking her morning cigar at the market is to me that stoplight you pause at before turning right in your daily commute to work. The barefooted monks and their 6:30 am chant is now just a backdrop; dissolved into the ether of sensations, smells, charms and vices of the East.

These formerly exotic items have become my life. And inspiration to write about the normal is, at times, quite difficult to come by.

And this, I then realized, was enough in and of itself to write about. After a seven month adventure on a peaceful, painful, and utterly stupefying border, I have arrived at the fact that I am no longer an outsider looking in. I am a local, a resident, that white girl who runs to the pagoda in the morning.

It’s funny how these things happen. It’s not clear if it’s the visa-run leaving and coming back, the impending family visit, the Laura-izing of my house (Mr T sticker above the bathroom light-switch), or the fact that the water bill man knows my name, but suddenly, two days ago, for the first time ever, I told my friend not that I was going to “my house,” but rather that I was going “home.” It was this same day that I combined a few words from my limited Mon vocabulary into this same phrase to answer my students when they asked me, perched in the office doorway and scrambling for my sandals, where I was going.

“Howa owa,” I replied.

:) Laura

ps. Those near future plans mentioned above are the following: Directly after my teaching is complete here in sleepy Sangkhla I will head up north to spend half my week in a refugee camp teaching and the other half in a bustling border town called Mae Sot, a home of delicious coconut-milk noodle shops and NGOers doing brilliant and unconventional work to counter the abuses so easily dolled out by the Burmese military regime. I will be working with a large NGO focusing on education and my scant pocket money will be supplied by both your and my tax money, dear U.S. citizens (thanks to funding from an org known as USAID). This stint will be short, with the possibility of extension in the future if all goes well, and I then have a plane ticket booked home on May 17^th, exactly one long, sweaty, bug-bite laden and eye-opening year after I arrived here.