Getting Lost in Thailand.

“Laundry is picked up in the morning on Mondays. Just leave your basket with dirty clothes on the porch and then when you get back from work she will return it cleaned, folded. The school pays for this. Only, do not put socks, underwear, bras in the basket. These things are personal for us in Thailand; you will wash these by hand. There is a bucket for this in the kitchen.”

The thought of hand washing my underwear in a bucket makes me cringe internally, but I smile, nod, and say something neutral indicating my attentiveness to the barrage of information that’s been coming at me in an unrelenting stream for the past 20 minutes in this van speeding out of Bangkok. So far we have discussed my new house, the other American girl who I will be living with, the bills that the school will pay for, the bills I will have to pay for myself, the bicycle I will be given for transportation between school and my house, and of course, my work schedule. In my hand I clutch a small slip of paper bearing a few Thai characters but mostly just numbers indicating times and grade levels of the classes I will be teaching. Sompit, the school coordinator for foreign English teachers like me, has explained details of these classes to me already.

It is a secondary school of the six upper grade levels, and I will be teaching at least one class for all of them. There are seven periods a day, just like my old high school in Florida, but the students have different classes each day of the week. Most of the classes I will be teaching are in the English Program, in which students’ families pay to put them in smaller classes where almost everything, including science and math, is taught in English. However I also have some classes with the general population-huge classes of 50 students who only hear English once or twice a week in their language class.

I am nervous.

I am less than confident in my ability to teach these classes. I have never taught in a classroom before and have no education background or training. The agency that I contracted with to place me at this school provided a week long orientation in Bangkok for all new teachers -just some basic classes on teaching activities and techniques-but I feel comically unprepared.

I look out the window of the school van we are riding in. Packed traffic the likes of which I’ve never seen surrounds us on all sides of the highway. Swarms of motorcycles weave in and out of the cars, coming perilously close to crashing as they inch through tiny gaps at terrifying speeds. The Bangkok skyline is expansive but is diminishing behind us as we make our way out of the city towards the rural town where my new home will be. There are skyscrapers across the horizon; I’ve never been in a city this big before. It hits me in a sudden wave of panic how far from home I am. I know no one here. I am alone in this strange new country for the next half year.

Sompit is trying to ask me more questions but now I am overwhelmed. I feel a lump in my throat and pinpricks at the corners of my eyes. I pretend that I am carsick and ask if it’s okay for me to close my eyes for a bit to try to sleep. She is very accommodating and shows me how to recline my seat back.

I am not sleeping.

I am thinking about how much lies ahead of me and how utterly alone I am. What if I get sick? I’ll be in a hospital on the other side of the world; I won’t be able to just call my mom or my best friend. No one will be there to take care of me. I thought long and hard about my decision to move to Thailand and teach English, but now all of it seems so brash and hasty. What was I thinking? What am I even doing? I don’t belong here. I swallow the lump in my throat and pretend to sleep.

*****

I am in my new house, alone. Sompit helped me bring my luggage in and took me out to dinner. It was just a roadside food stand but it was delicious. Khao Phad Pak, vegetable fried rice, soon to become an almost daily meal for me here. Thailand’s vegetarian options are actually pretty limited. After dinner Sompit dropped me off, leaving me alone for the first time since arriving in this country a week ago. My roommate, who has already been teaching at the school for one semester, is travelling for the weekend and won’t be back for another day or two.

I sit down at the small table pushed against the wall next to the refrigerator. Sompit has left a few basics in there: bottled water and a few cartons of soymilk. There is no AC in this part of the house so the air is hot and humid. I feel beads of sweat forming on my face and back. In Thailand you take your shoes off when entering a house so I am barefoot. I feel cool tile beneath my feet. It is dark outside but bright under the harsh lights in the house, which doesn’t feel like a home.

I look at the wall in front of me and see two pictures, postcard sized, left there by my current roommate or former inhabitants of this house; it has been used to house the foreign English teachers for years. One picture is a silhouette of a single figure wearing a backpack and standing on a mountain. Large bold words are plastered across the bottom: “Take a hike.” The other picture is a group of friends sitting around a campfire on a beach. Its message: “Get lost.” I look at these pictures and wonder about who put them there. What travels did they go on in this strange new country, what did these images mean to them? The enormity of what I’ve done and what is yet to come hits me in a wave again, like it did in the van. It feels preposterous that I should be here at all. Unbelievable that I’m embarking on a new phase of life with not just a new job or a move to a new city, as someone more reasonable may have done for a fresh start, but a whole new country, a completely different culture.

This time I don’t need to pretend to be asleep. The wave escapes me in a laugh that is also a cry, impossible to tell which. There are so many opportunities open before me, which is both terrifying and thrilling. I came here with hopes that I could enter a new world and be something different, yet here I am, still just me, sitting alone in a small house, completely bewildered by this new life I am creating. I laugh-cry some more because I don’t know what else to do.

It’s completely ridiculous that I am here. I love it.