bad

I teach for two hours a day at Super English, an after-school academy. My students are three to six years old, but many of them have a higher level of English than the second-graders I teach in the morning. In my first class, I have the smartest of all of my students, a tiny five-year-old girl named Gun who is every bit as girly and headstrong as I was when I was a kid. She loves showing off her absurdly floofy dresses and raises her hand to answer every question. She's fantastic.

That class is now all girls, but I used to have a few boys, the most memorable of whom is Bamboo, a chubby five-year-old who is good at English but terrible at behaving himself. He's a fat little cannonball, just runs through life destroying everything in his path. Gun has no tolerance for his nonsense; she's always rolling her eyes at him, or shaking her head at me and saying, "Teacher, Bamboo is bad."

There's one central rule in my class: no speaking Thai. If they're not speaking Thai, they're not distracted, and generally listen and behave better. I'm strict on this rule.

So one day the kids are doing a worksheet. I turn my back for a moment and hear a smack. I spin around and Bamboo is hovered over Gun's desk, her Cinderella pencil case is in his porky fist, and her arm is raised. She quickly returns it to her lap and looks guiltily at me.

Bamboo launches into a wailing narrative in Thai, acting out what happened, clearly trying to tell me that Gun retaliated physically against his theivery.

Gun looks at him, looks at me, and waits. When Bamboo stops, waiting for me to punish his assailant, Gun purses her lips and looks me directly in the eye and says, "Teacher, Bamboo is speaking Thai."

No punishments were dealt that day.

enlaces

In lieu of an actual blog post (it's one of those days) here's some links to Levi's photos and a few articles I've written for our school's website. Enjoy.

Tai Rom Yen National Park
Chiaya
Weird Surat
Levi's Flickr Albums

el rollo de los visados

Getting a visa is a real bitch. In Argentina, the process included a thirteen-hour vigil in a sweltering warehouse-turned-public-office in a ghetto of Buenos Aires. To come to Spain, I made two trips to Chicago (a three-hour drive from my hometown) and spent weeks waiting for various papers with various official stamps from Washington, Madrid, Mérida and, inexplicably, The Hague. Upon arrival in Spain, I paid four highly stressful visits to the federal police station in Almendralejo (Zafra being too small to merit national police), where I spent hours arguing with one of the most arrogant, mean-spirited people I've ever encountered before finally leaving (half in tears) with my residence card.

So, when I read the website of the Thai embassy in Madrid and learned of the apparently simple and straightforward process, I should have been more suspicious. They wanted merely a package, delivered by a private messenger company, containing our passports, resumés, the paperwork from our Thai school, and a police background check. Since neither of us are registered with the Spanish police, we ordered this last item from a online company in the US and sent everything off with the required 55 euros each (because apparently in Spain it's cool to mail cash).

After a few days of radio silence, I called the embassy. No one there spoke English and the Spanish of the receptionist was broken and heavily accented in a way with which I was completely unfamiliar, so the conversation was...tricky. The background checks are no good, she flatly informed me. You've clearly just gotten these off the internet. We need something official, something with a stamp and besides, we can't read English. Get an official translation. That should also have a stamp. (Our boss in Thailand had warned us of this Thai affinity for stamps but I still had trouble suppressing my laughter at her insistence on this point). There was no swaying her, and my phone credit was spent, so I gave up.

Peter, our boss in Thailand, advised us to show up at the embassy to smile, plead, and if it came to it, panic and cry. So we printed off more internet background checks (the tab for the endeavour is over 200 bucks at this point) and caught the immensely unpleasant midnight bus to Madrid. After killing the early morning hours in a cafè, we rang the doorbell at the embassy.

The consular officer, a gorgeous Thai woman not much older than me, turned out to be tough and sarcastic and visibly furious with her lot--we'd had several phone conversations at this point and she was entirely fed up with me. 'This is from the internet again!' she exclaimed, her hands actually shaking in her rapidly-escalating irritation. 'I'll have to talk to someone else. Come back at eleven.' She flashed us an forced smile (or maybe she was just baring her teeth) and turned to the next customer.

From a café down the street, we sent a slightly desperate e-mail to Peter, who we calculated would be in the middle of his workday and probably too busy to help. We knew we needed help from someone who spoke Thai, and thought maybe if someone made a phone call to halfway around the world...right this second, preferably...a bit of a Hail Mary. The e-mail remained unanswered and as we walked back to the embassy in the pouring rain, I tried to whip up some tears.

As we waited in the lobby, my Spanish cell phone rang and Peter, who had been trying to call the embassy since receiving my e-mail, told me that his Thai wife would call me in a moment, and that I was to give the phone to the woman. She called, and I passed it to the baffled and aggravated receptionist. We were clearly making no friends here, but we had confused them into complacence and harassed them into a state of such profound annoyance that they wanted only to be rid of us. Send us this one more paper, my pretty amiga told us, and you can have the visas. Triumphantly, we left the office in search of wifi to thank Peter and his wife for their incredible helpfulness.

The visas arrived in the mail on Monday; everything is all stamped and official. Only twelve days left in Zafra.

pre-tailandia

In my experience with movement, particularly of the intercontinental variety, I've learned that it is entirely possible to be in two places at once, and in the case of life-altering relocation, I find it actually quite unavoidable. Three weeks ago, our contracts came in the mail from Thailand, a thick brown paper package with an elephant stamp, and ever since I've had my mind in Surat Thani while my feet remain stubbornly planted on Extremeño soil. Recent days have been full of paperwork and embassy phone calls, exposing me to the tricky animal that is Thai-accented Spanish and reaffirming my conviction that bureaucracy is the most maddening of all human innovations.

During classes I'm talking about my impending move with my students, who tend to think I'm a lunatic for going so far (presumably forgetting that I'm already over 4000 miles from my hometown). Between classes I'm making to-do lists and shopping lists--purchase shoes because apparently Thais have tiny feet and my size 8s will want for accommodation; call the embassy again because of something about visas and probably they want more money; now the airline won't take the credit card and they've made the dubious decision to handle customer service via Twitter, so spend the next few hours darting to the computer every spare moment to see if they've finally chosen mine out of the barrage of 140-character requests. My ever-tranquilo boyfriend is, predictably, relaxed and laughing at my frenzied state. But the truth is, I'm so excited that I'm loving the preparations. 

When not intensely engaged in logistical planning or Google Image Search daydream sessions, I'm making what I will (at the risk of being self-congratulatory) call a valiant effort at getting the most out of the remaining weeks here. My spirits have been only slightly dampened by the sudden appearance of the long-delayed rainy season, and I've been Spanishing it up with the best of them, all wine and campo and four-hour meals with friends. In moments of marinated pork loin, full-volume laughter in the plaza, and sunny walks through the freshly-bloomed wildflower fields, it hits me how much I will miss this place.