March 29, 2011
Today was supposed to be a good day. I was supposed to meet with the visa coordinator and she was supposed to tell me that I was good to go in Bangkok. I called her up, and asked when I should come. She said now was fine and gave me directions for the song thaew driver. I remembered pretty well where the building was, and found it ok. I sat down and she said “I have the bad news for you.” I was like, “No. Way.”
So, apparently, the airport gave me a transit visa, rather than a normal 30 day tourist visa. I have no idea why, and nobody has ever seen this stamp before or heard of anyone having this problem. Yesterday she talked to the embassy and they said if I had a tourist visa, it could get changed to a Type O in Bangkok no problem, but with a transit visa, I have to leave the country by April 21 and reenter. This puts a crimp in the whole teaching thing! Also, incredibly stressful. I barely feel comfortable making my way around in Thailand, and now I have to go to an entire NEW country and find my way around? Great.
Plus, remember how I already bought my ticket for Bangkok? Yeah, that was awesome. It costs more to cancel than it did to buy the ticket in the first place. So, the new plan is to go to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. Both of these sound so foreign to me and the concept is kind of terrifying. I need to know where to go, who to see, what to do, and what paperwork to take. I don’t even know what language they speak in these places! (before you post comments all over the place, yes I know now that Singapore is a British protectorate and they speak English.)
OK, here is what I finally decided to do: Keep the flight to Bangkok on Thursday night and hang out with Stephen and Allison on Friday. Fly Saturday morning to Singapore (about $55) which is way cheaper Sat than Sunday night (about $200). Stay the weekend in Singapore and be at the embassy an hour before opening Monday morning so I can get my visa request in first. Hopefully pick up the visa at the end of the day and fly back to Chiang Mai Tuesday morning. Of course, I can’t buy my ticket til I find out whether the visa will actually get processed in one day, so that will be more expensive still!
Oh, and she still doesn’t have internet or a working printer, so I still don’t have the paperwork to take to the embassy.
I decided to walk back to Taw Saeng and think. I should have had my ipod with me cause my thoughts just freaked me out even more! When I got back to the center, I immediately jumped online to update people. I was really happy to see my sister and Ahna online and I talked to them for a bit and they tried to calm me down. At this point, I was so stressed and feeling so not in control of the situation that I just felt like I’d burst into tears at any second.
Finally, the group gathered for songs and prayer. I was really fighting back tears for most of it and then when they prayed for me, I did cry a little bit. The kids started coming, so I had to pull it together! One of the women from church had given me a kids book about Psalm 91 and God’s protection over us, so I thought it would be a good one to use for library time. When school is not in session, they have listening comprehension for library time. So, they read a story in English and have to answer questions about it so they understand what it is that they are hearing in English. I thought I’d have a whole big age range in my class, so I came up with some harder questions, but I ended up having middle school age kids.
It actually worked out really well, though, because Judy was with me and translating and then Lucy, my teacher came in too, so I was trying to use some of the words she had taught me yesterday. Even as the teacher, I still want to get an A from my teacher. Hahaha Well, basically, we’d read each page, then the kids would have to figure out what it meant in Thai using the English words they knew already. Then, we’d read the question on the board and they’d have to translate that into English. Then, they would actually answer the question. It was quite the process, but they all did such a great job! Every kid was participating and answering with good responses. They definitely earned their prizes at the end of class!
After library was art class. I was in charge of today’s origami project. Field showed it to me on Sunday, and today we were supposed to do a crane. I was like “Oh, yeah, we made cranes in 4th grade. I can totally do a crane!” So. I cannot do a crane. At all.
I had two girls today, Sunny and Molly. Here’s the deal. There’s an origami book and paper. The book shows one fold and has like a paragraph in Thai of instructions. I cannot read Thai, and the pictures leave a lot to be desired. Sunny is a genius at origami. She read the instructions and was showing me how to do the folds. I just kept saying “I’m glad you know what you’re doing, cause I have NO idea.” She would just chatter away in Thai and do a bunch of folds. Molly and I kept looking at each other and shrugging out shoulders, like “I don’t know how she does that!”
We got to a point where we were supposed to fold the crane’s wings down, only to realize that we had folded wrong and the wings were attached, not foldable! We backed up one step at a time, til we decided we just needed to start over. I decided to just let Sunny figure it out and then I’d try to emulate her. She actually did it! It took some refolding and repositioning but she did it. Then she finished mine, and then Molly’s too. At this point Molly was like “OK, easier one.” She picked a boat and we started on that. Again, I only got to about step 10 til I was like “WHAAAAT???!!!” and Sunny had to finish it for me. Hahaha
The last part of the day was English class. My class learned some words about family last week: mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, brother and sister. However, I was not confident in their comprehension of this when they did presentations on Friday, so I asked Field if I could do another week on family while she was gone and teach them some new words. I taught them aunt, uncle, cousin, son and daughter.
Yesterday when I was doing my lesson with Lucy, I had her teach me all these words in Thai, so I could tell the kids the correlation. Judy was with me in class to give instruction, but she was shocked that I knew those words and could pronounce them. She was like “Heather! You haven’t even been here a week and your tones are amazing!” I don’t know if I mentioned this, but Thai has 5 tones: low, mid, high, falling and rising. It’s hard. So that was encouraging. She was saying that she’s been here for 5 years, and my tones are already almost as good as hers!
Anyway, so the kids practiced saying the new words and the Thai meaning, and then we played a game of memory using cards with family words on them. We are implementing the use of points in a big way this week. If the kids got a match and could say the English word: 5 points. If they could then say remember the Thai equivalent, 10 points! We took off points for cheating and added them for sitting quietly when it was someone else’s turn. After we played a few rounds, I decided to switch gears and do a game of hangman to try to teach them the spellings of words. They LOVE hangman, so that was fun. That took us to dinnertime and I told them that if they walked quietly all the way down the stairs, they’d get 20 points each! Normally, those kids tear out of there like their hair is on fire and sound like a herd of elephants on the stairs. Today, it was so quiet, I had to check behind me to make sure the kids were still with me! I tell ya, points work!
Next step is to add rewards for point levels. The plan is that when I get back from Singapore, Field, Inna, Judy and I will sit down and construct a point system and come up with a quarterly reward system. I’m thinking something like a movie one quarter, the zoo one quarter and maybe a pizza party one quarter. I think we could do something smaller monthly as well, like an ice cream or pizza party, or face painting using the paints we brought back in November. That was a HUGE hit.
After dinner, Ryan helped me with some blog stuff. He’s going to show me how to password protect some posts so I can put up some pictures of the kids and post some of the more sensitive stories.
When I got home, there was Bible study at my house! I was excited because I haven’t been to Bible study in a while, so it was nice to have it. I guess it rotates, but today it was here. We had 7 people including me and discussed Hebrews 11. It was an interesting discussion. The end of the chapter talks about people who were martyred for the cause and we talked about why you don’t hear a lot of stories about getting sawn in half for your faith. I suppose it’s not a big selling point for Christianity. “Hey, follow Jesus! You might get sawed in two, but at least you’ll go to heaven!” haha. Anyway, it was nice to have a good theological discussion. Our group consisted of two Aussies, a Brit, a Philipino, a Russian, and three Americans. Good mix of cultures and people! Love the multi-cultural aspect of being in a foreign country.
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