Bangkok and Burma

Having just told a member staff at the hotel I’m staying at that I’ve been in Thailand since September, his immediate question was, ‘so, can you speak Thai then?’ I laughed out loud, which luckily he interpreted as because it’s a hard language for me to learn. Clearly I can’t start telling Thais that, although I’ve now been in Thailand for over three months, I may as well have just arrived in Bangkok from a different country. My Thai is limited to hello and thank you, and, although it would have made my visits to Mae Sot a little easier, I never had any intention of learning Thai.

So, Bangkok is a bit of a culture shock. Even the first time I went back to Mae Sot from the refugee camp was a culture shock – I’d forgotten how to deal with money for one thing! I came through Bangkok in September and hated it and, coming from the mountains in northern Thailand, I hate it even more! After all, I was happy living in the mountains; I’m not a city person at all. It also brought delayed flights, beg bugs, sore throats (I blame the pollution) and just a general feeling of claustrophobia.

Anyway, I don’t feel like I’m here as a tourist. I want to continue to do more work at the border, either in camp or in Mae Sot, and if I can’t, I want to go home for Christmas. Tourism just doesn’t relate to what I’ve been doing at all and it’s not why I came out here. It’s also hard to adjust to ‘real’ life and I feel bad being a tourist when my students can’t even go as far as Mae Sot.

Do I want to go to Burma? No, not really. In fact, not at all. I’ve spent three months teaching students who have fled from their country for numerous reasons and many of them can’t return. Who am I to go to their country? Even though the NLD’s boycott on tourism has been lifted, there’s still a debate over whether tourism’s good for the country. In the controversial 2009 Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar (controversial because of the boycott), one of the first chapters was titled ‘Should you go?’ and the next ‘If you go’. Almost every other sentence in the 2012 book tells you how to avoid giving money to the government. Don’t use the trains, for example. They’re unreliable, slow, owned by the government and some of the railways were built by forced labour in the 1990s.

Before I came, I read as much as I could find on EcoTourism and responsible tourism in Burma. There are some good websites out there that are worth reading. Unfortunately, as Burma’s opening up, tourists are flocking there and it’s not possible to be picky and choosy about where to stay and how to move about the country. Four weeks before I was due to fly to Burma, I tried to book some hotels – not something I’d usually do in somewhere like Burma – and I couldn’t believe the response. In two and a half hours on Skype, I heard ‘Fully booked’, ‘fully booked’, ‘sorry’, and ‘no rooms’ more times than I care to count. Actually, Skype counted for me. I called 46 hotels and managed to book three. But the three that I’d booked didn’t work out. I was still without anywhere to stay for a couple of nights. With a lot of re-arranging, I sorted it, but we’ve got to move hotels in Yangon (Rangoon). We can’t even stay in one place for three nights. The second hotel’s costing $40 a night and the rooms don’t have windows!

In Bagan, though, things were looking worse. I’d called every hotel I could find everywhere and still had nothing. I was getting to the point where I was wondering whether to pay $250 a night for a room or fly back to Thailand. Luckily I did find somewhere in the end. The next problem was transport. Burma’s a big country and I didn’t want to travel by train knowing that the railways are government owned and were partly built by forced labour. I hate buses at the best of times and the thought of spending 15 hours on one doesn’t appeal to me. But yet again, all of the flights are booked. Well, we didn’t check Myanmar Airways – it’s state owned and it’s safety record is appalling. Whether we can actually get on a bus or a train we are waiting to find out once we get to Myanmar. We’ll see what happens!

On a different note, I feel that I should have updated my blog more whilst I was still in camp. I should have explained more about the everyday life in camp and I should have answered peoples’ questions a bit more thoroughly. But it’s hard to explain the reality of something that’s so, so different and so, so hard for people to relate to, so I apologise for giving up.

Tomorrow I head to Chiang Mai and then to Yangon. Right now, I’d rather be back in Mae Sot, somewhere I never thought I’d miss…

‘Teacher, Do you have finished your breakfast?’

Sometimes, I think it was fairly easy to move to a refugee camp. In many ways I guess it was. The things that I expected to be hard weren’t at all – the living conditions are fine, drinking water’s easily accessible, it’s easy to buy anything I need from the market, and the people are friendly and welcoming. Teaching without a photocopier, a projector, a printer, constant internet access and other teachers to share ideas with is now completely normal. I expected to have a constant headache from the heat, but I seem to deal with humidity much better than with dry heat. All is good.

But, in terms of understanding the culture, I’m always going to be slightly out of my comfort zone here. That, too, is normal for me – I’ve been away from home the entire year and I’m just glad that my first time living as the only native speaker anywhere in sight was with Warsaw Kayak Club on a kayak trip to Slovenia. Thanks WAKK Habazie! I can’t imagine what it would have been like living here as the only volunteer around if I’d come directly from England.

Every day, about 10 times a day, I’m asked ‘do you have finished your breakfast, teacher?’ Or the same question with lunch and dinner. I’m asked at the weirdest times – like half way through an English class – and I never know what I’m supposed to say because it usually strikes me as a bit of a silly question.

I’ve been reading ‘Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour’ by Kate Fox. Written by an anthropologist for the ‘educated individual’, it offers a hilarious insight into the hidden rules of English etiquette. She points out that, in England, the question ‘how are you?’ is not actually intended to provoke an honest answer from anyone except closest friends and family. It’s just a polite formality that must be observed. And, as such, the answer rarely varies in anything except wording from ‘I’m fine, thanks’ or I’m very well, thank you.’ The same is true with the English ‘obsession’ about the weather. She points out that talking about the weather is like testing the ice with a stranger. You’re permitted to carry on and discuss the weather, or other things, at great length, or you can just mumble an agreement and leave it at that.

Maybe asking if I’ve finished my breakfast is just a polite conversation starter here. I mean, I get asked if I’ve finished my breakfast at 10:05, when I’ve just finished teaching first period. Clearly, I’ve finished my breakfast! If I have third period off, the period before lunch, I am inevitably asked if I’ve finished my lunch. This is despite the fact that two of my students cook for me every lunch time and, during third period they’re still in lessons. To me, it’s a stupid question, but to them maybe it’s something polite to say?

The other really common one, which I find really funny, is, ‘have you taken a shower, teacher?’ Asking that question in England or much of the Western world, people would assume that you’re applying that they smell and they need to take a shower. Luckily I’d be warned about this so I know that that’s not necessarily the case, but it still feels like a little invasion of privacy every time I’m asked. To us, showering’s a very private thing, but here, people shower outdoors in a longyi whilst talking to their friends, family or neighbours. It’s a very social part of the day, whereas back home it’s almost like a hidden part of life.

Phone conversations can also be challenging. Whilst the custom in England is to call and introduce yourself – ‘hi, it’s so and so speaking, are you free/ do you have ten minutes?’, here I’ll answer the phone and get ‘hi teacher, do you know who this is?’ NO! How would I? And sometimes, which is almost worse, I do know who it is but I can’t remember, or can’t pronounce their name anyway. I was asked by one teacher, with whom I was talking about cultural differences, if it’s rude for the caller to ask you to identify him. I said no, but it’s very strange, and then I thought about it a bit more. Deliberately putting someone out of their comfort zone, asking a question that’s generally not possible to answer would indeed be considered a little rude.

One Sunday a few weeks ago, I’d had a very busy day. In the morning, I went to one of my student’s houses for breakfast, and then we walked half-way across camp to get to church on time with another student. I’d agreed to go back to the first house after lunch, although I was tired and was starting to regret doing so. However, I wanted to speak to them as they’re a fascinating family and have excellent English. Just after lunch, however, I received a very strange phone call. ‘Teacher, you will be too tired to come so I think you should not come this afternoon. But of course you’re always welcome to come here’ OK, actually I was a little tired, but they didn’t know that and that wasn’t the point. What were they trying to tell me? Is this some polite way of telling me that they didn’t want me to come, that they were busy, or that they were actually genuinely concerned about me? Was I supposed to agree and say that yes, I was tired, or disagree and say that no, I’d love to go? I still have no idea. But, as I was actually tired, I decided not to argue and didn’t go.

Another day, two of my students said that I didn’t call them in the previous week and they’d been waiting for my call so that they could cook dinner for me. Well, how was I supposed to know that? Surely they could have just called me? I don’t get it! Probably, they were too shy to call me, like most of my students.

And something else that I’ll always hate is that, as a teacher I have a high status in what’s a very status-conscious society. Add to that the fact that I’m a volunteer, I’m not paid, I’ve come all the way from England and that I’ve chosen to come here, I get a ridiculous amount of respect. I’m treated, if it’s possible, too well. Everywhere I go, I’m offered food, food and more food. And this is from people who are refugees, have no real income and eat ration rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet I get the best food anyone has to offer and it’s very rude to turn it down; food is an incredibly important part of culture here. On some days, I’ve been bought or made three different delicious lunches (enough for two people by themselves) by three different people and been expected to eat them all!

All of this is part of the experience, and the last two weeks, now I’m teaching again, have been great. I’ll be sad to leave in a couple of weeks, although glad to eat something that’s not rice.

A frustrating month

One of the biggest problems in a refugee camp is boredom, and I understand why. In my free time, when I’m not planning, teaching or eating, there is nothing to do. Even hand washing my clothes twice a week, which takes a good hour, is a welcome distraction from the void. I know it’s a little different for me – I can’t speak Burmese or Karen, there aren’t any other foreigners around, and the level of English spoken by my students isn’t high. But still, I’m only here for three months. Many of these people have been here for years – some more than 20.

I feel incredibly guilty going to Mae Sot for a few days; my students can’t leave camp at all. One of the teachers said to me, ‘did you enjoy Mae Sot? We want to go, but we can’t’. And he’s probably (in some ways) one of the luckier ones; his daughter and her family have resettled to the US, he has UN refugee status, and he’s waiting for an interview with the US DHS (Department of Homeland Security). That’s not to say there’s any likelihood of him leaving any time soon – the process takes years and years.

Another friend arrived in 2006. Her husband arrived in 2003 and has got a UN card, was interviewed and rejected for resettlement in Australia, and was granted resettlement in the US, along with their daughter, in 2009. However, my friend is classed as a ‘new arrival’ (she’s been here six years!) and therefore is on a very, very long waiting list. She’s lucky – she does have a UN card, but she’s waiting to be called for interview with DHS. In the meantime, her husband has been waiting for her since 2009 (that was his choice).

So, I can’t exactly complain that I’m bored. What I can complain about, though, is that I’ve had exactly a month off now, and I wasn’t told about it. Had I been told about it, I could have been given other work by the organisation I came here with – I could have gone to teach at a school in a different camp, or maybe given my time to an organisation in Mae Sot. Instead, I’ve had quite a frustrating four weeks.

I was initially told (by my students, not by the school), that there would be exams for two and a half weeks, so school would be closed. Then, the three days before school shut for exams, each morning I found (after having done my planning), that there wouldn’t be any lessons – an NGO was visiting and it was World Teachers Day. This was unexpected, but not unsurprising. There are very few countries that plan every minute of every day like the UK does. And I’m in a refugee camp – there’s always tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. The one thing people do have plenty of here is time.

At the end of the exam period, though, I was then told that there would be a holiday for almost two weeks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t told before, and, as I still had my lessons every weekend, I couldn’t really use the time constructively. I did, however, manage to teach at another school in the camp for four days, which was very worthwhile. It happened to be very different to mine and for selfish reasons, it was also good as I was able to see much more of camp when I walked there and back each day.

Having managed to kill my last weekend of the time off doing a visa run and meeting up with some other volunteers in Mae Sot, I came back to camp only to find out (after, of course, I’d planned my lessons) that I had another few days off. This time, I was ready to scream! I’ve basically wasted two-thirds of my time here.

I was prepared for my time in camp being a little lonely – after all, there’s a language barrier to cross, there aren’t any other volunteers anywhere near me, and I can’t freely walk around. I knew that communication would be an issue due to the language barrier, but what I’ve found is that the issue isn’t the language barrier; people just don’t think to – or don’t want to – tell me anything.

I say don’t want to, because unfortunately, if my school had said that they were going to have four weeks off, there’s no way that they’d have got a volunteer when they did – they’d have had to wait until November. My school have also asked me to say that I’m rushed off my feet, because if I don’t, there’s no way they’re going to get another volunteer soon.

Maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe I’m not. Probably, I just don’t understand the culture differences enough to hazard more than an educated guess.

There’s a rat in my room!

A couple of nights ago I freaked out a little because there was a rat in my room. I’d known it hangs around there; I just hadn’t seen it before and had persuaded myself that it was probably just a mouse or two. It wasn’t; it was a very big rat and it leaves its business all over my room at night. Then it was joined by a cockroach. Clearly, the reason I have a mosquito net is not for the mosquitos!

The next day, I told my student that there had been a rat in my room. ‘Have you eaten rat?’, he replied. ‘It’s delicious!’. ‘Do you want try it?’ Erm? NO!!! But I’ll stop complaining. After all, it’s not going to do anything to me, just any food I’m stupid enough to leave out. And I’m in a refugee camp. Rats aren’t exactly the biggest of issues around here.

That day I went to teach at a different school in camp for the day and I met someone who had been born into the refugee camp. Well, that’s not unusual. There are children all through camp who have never seen the outside world. But this was a post-10 (grade 11 or 12) student. The year of his birth? 1990. That makes him 22, and he’s always lived in a refugee camp.

I don’t know whether this information should have surprised me, after all I know that the camp originated in the mid-1980s. My own knowledge of UNHCR, refugee status, refugee camps, and how people move in and out of them, is shamefully limited. It did surprise me, though, because most people I’ve spoken to over the age of about 17 arrived between 2005 and 2012.

Despite that, he’s still continuing with his education, trying to develop his skills so that when he gets out, there’s a possibility that he can create a life for himself. That’s unusual here, because nobody is made to go to school. Speaking to one of my students today, he said that there are approximately 1000 children in school here, and that only 30% of them continue after 10^th grade. I have no idea how accurate those figures are (and I’d guess that they’re not very), but I do know that there are approximately 45-50,000 people here. If only 1000 children are attending school, that’s a shockingly low figure.

The majority of people here don’t value their education. And why should they? They can’t comprehend a future in an unknown country at an unknown time if or when they leave. They are worried about their day-to-day existence. They do not want to live on ration rice and yellow beans, but without money and a few entrepreneurial skills, that’s often their only option. And how will basic education help them to feed their family here?  I’ve been told that they are lazy (which seems to be a really bad insult here), that they eat, sleep, and lie in their hammocks swatting flies all day.

But the students I teach are different. Clearly, they too have no idea where they will be next year, let alone in five years’ time. But they want to learn. They want to understand the world. They want to learn English, engineering, maths, IT, and to use the internet so that when they leave, they have the chance to make something of themselves. They work and work and work, and are desperate to learn English. Even more inspiring are the people who are running the school, and the people who are teaching in it. They don’t have to do anything. They were educated before they arrived here, but they have chosen to make a life for themselves: they have chosen to work hard without pay.

I have been speaking to two sisters a lot. They are both teaching in primary schools, and they both hate it. So why do they do it? Because they’ve finished education, and they want to have something on their CV for when they can leave here. They want to be successful and they are doing everything they can to help themselves from within a refugee camp. One sister had just completed the first year of a law degree in Rangoon and the other had just passed her matriculation exams to enter university when they were forced to leave to come here. Their father is well educated. He was a lawyer and can speak English well. This family know what they are missing out on by coming here, and in some ways, I think that’s worse than not knowing.

I’ve been asked many times, ‘teacher, are you happy here?’ and ‘teacher, do you want to live here?’ The answer to the first is invariably ‘yes’: the students and staff here are amazing people who would do anything for me. The answer to the second question is very difficult to answer to anyone with limited English. I could easily move here and live without any problems for a year or even for years. I do not feel the need to leave the camp – I can buy everything I need here. But that’s the thing: I can buy everything I need – I have money. Other people don’t have that luxury. It’s easier to live here than I thought – there’s drinking water, clean toilets and the food is better than I expected. But I don’t want to be a refugee. I don’t want to be stuck here. There’s a big difference between choosing to move to a refugee camp for three months and being a refugee. I have the possibility of a furthering my career in the very near future. I can leave whenever I want. I can go back to Mae Sot and sleep on a bed with a mattress and have a shower with running water. These people can’t.

A snippet from Sukhothai

Whatever people say, you do need to hire a bike in Sukhothai. Well, unless you’re one of those people who are happy, after walking just 50 metres to the next monument, to melt into a little pool on the floor with a throbbing headache and no energy to do anything for the rest of the day. Maybe if you manage to visit at sunrise or sunset, you could get away with walking.

Anyway, so I stopped to use the toilet, locking my bike up outside (luckily – I nearly didn’t bother). When I came back, an old man was looking a little confused trying to cycle off on my bike. A little confused because I’d locked the front wheel to the fork with a really flimsy lock, so the wheel had turned almost a full rotation before the lock became tangled around the brakes and stopped him dead. The toilet attendant was looking at him with a befuddled expression on her face, a little unsure what to do at this point. I had less of a problem – he was white, so I could be 99% certain that he’d speak at least a little English.

When I approached him, I showed him the key and unlocked the bike, proving that it was mine. I’m not completely surprised he was mixed up as every hire bike is identical. Well, except the colour. Mine was a garish pink, and his – maybe 10 metres away- was red. I figured he’d just apologise and give me my bike back.

Instead, he didn’t get off the bike, he just rambled on about being sorry. Sorry for what? He hadn’t actually taken my bike. I tried to distract him. Show that I wasn’t angry with him (yes, I’m a primary teacher). Where, I asked, was he from? At this point he looked at me a little flabbergasted – flabbergasted that I hadn’t already read ‘Miami, Florida’ on his baseball cap and clicked that that’s where he’s actually from (Why would he be from the place mentioned on his cap?? I mean, I’d be prepared to hazard a guess than less than 2% of the red Cape Cod lifeguard hoodies that I saw when I visited Cape Cod with Danbee were actually worn by people from Cape Cod. The same with Oxford University hoodies).

Then I realised that he must have really been trying to turn the wheel – the brake cable was completely sheared out of the brake levers. I do know how to fit a brake cable but there was no way that I could mend this, even with the tools I didn’t have. It needed a new one. That’s when the toilet attendant gave up and came over. I couldn’t work out if she was about to start laughing or screaming at him. She helped me to tie up the cable so I could ride without it being tied up in my spokes, and with a lot of hand gesturing, explained to him and me that his bike was 10 metres away. Before relinquishing the bike, he started waffling about the fact that, because I’d rented the bike from a shop, the damage was their responsibility to repair. I don’t think it works like that, but I wasn’t going to argue; I just wanted the bike back!

When I did take the bike back a few hours later, the lady didn’t even notice.

Sukhothai in Pictures

This gallery contains 12 photos.

An hour’s drive to a different planet

The night I came back to Mae Sot a couple of weeks ago, I met up with a couple of friends (also other volunteers) to catch up, which was really nice. It turned out that there were quite a few friends of friends of friends there. They’re really inspiring people – mostly volunteer EFL teachers and NGO workers – all with interesting stories to tell.

Yet I couldn’t believe how uncomfortable I felt. Going from being the only native English speaker around to being surrounded by people (mostly really friendly uber-outgoing Americans) was a big change. I’d only been away three weeks and it seemed I’d forgotten what it was like to go for one drink in a bar. I felt overwhelmed and as though I’d literally just arrived from a different country – or planet for that matter. I had actually come from just over an hour down the road.

I think what actually got to me, though, were the conversations. They were just the normal kind of conversation you’d expect from a group of Westerners living in a Thai border town. Yet the conversations had NO relevance to the life I was living in camp and seemed absurd – clearly they weren’t: we discussed things like Korean pop music, good places to eat, and the hygiene of the meat on the local market. That’s when I realised how different my new life is. The things people were talking about in Mae Sot just didn’t apply to me – and vice-versa.

It took all of a couple of hours, though, before I was back into the swing of a normal life – I realised what I hadn’t when I was at camp – that I miss being able to discuss and debate things in English.

What? I actually have to think again…

 

Where are they when you need one?

I’d been in camp for three weeks before I headed back to Mae Sot for a few days to pick a few things up and sleep on a mattress rather than a bamboo mat. This was a couple of weekends ago, by the way – I’m finally catching up on the updates. I hadn’t found it particularly hard moving into the camp, but on returning to Mae Sot it was like I’d completely forgotten how to live in the real world. I was drenched through from one of the last monsoon rains that decided to dump itself on me on the journey back, and I needed to get to my guesthouse.

Maybe they’d all been commandeered because of the rain, but there were no tuk-tuks in sight. Well, there’s always a first time for everything: my first time on a motorbike taxi. Unexpectedly, though, the hard part wasn’t staying on the back holding onto four bags, but it was getting the drivers to take me anywhere. When I approached, they said guesthouse, 40 baht. OK. But what guesthouse? It turns out that they were commissioned (I assume) by Ban Thai, and therefore there was no way they’d take me anywhere else. They weren’t even going to ask which guesthouse I wanted to go to. Luckily I knew where Ban Thai is and didn’t just blindly agree to it – it’s about as far away as you can get from Picturebook.

After about five minutes of arguing, I realised that they really wouldn’t take me anywhere else. So I opted for the only landmark I knew in Mae Sot on the way to my guesthouse that wasn’t a guesthouse, Tesco Lotus (I hate myself, but I’ve actually found myself in TESCO a couple of times here. What country am I in??).

With that cheeky smile where they let it be known that they’re about to rip me off, they said 30 baht to TESCO Lotus. I could have argued, but coming to Thailand with GBP, the difference between 20 and 30 baht is nothing. And I hadn’t got my bearings so I didn’t know how much it should have been.

At TESCO, I phoned around a few friends – how do I walk to Picturebook from here? The problem is that most of Mae Sot is based around two parallel roads, and no one, including me, could remember which of the two it’s on. Eventually (maybe 20 minutes later – I’d first tried to use GPS on my phone, Google Maps, asking a few people including a Thai tourist who did his very best to help me), I realised that I could just phone the guesthouse. Simple, right? Well clearly I haven’t been living in the real world. Obvious things don’t occur to me. The guy drove around the corner and picked me up. Easy. That makes two times in my entire life that I’ve ridden a motorbike and another time in my life where I’ve forgotten how to function.

Experienced Naivety

For a lot of the time, I can forget that I’m in a refugee camp. My area seems more like the edge of a remote mountain village hidden away in the jungle than what anyone would ever imagine to be a refugee camp. I’m working at an organised school with fairly good resources (a computer room, for example), with people who study hard and speak conversational English. My lessons are fairly typical general English lessons; I just have to think more about making sure the examples I use can be related to the lives of the students I live with here.

Last week, though, I set the students a task of writing me a letter introducing themselves to me. I said that they could write about anything – their past, the camp, their family, what they want to do in the future. Some wrote about how they want peace in Burma, others wrote about the school I’m working at, others wrote about the camp. But around half chose to tell me about why they had come to the refugee camp. Here are some excerpts from their letters (I haven’t edited the English):

‘My father worked like as black marketing when I was a child. He took the oxes to Thai border and brought back the clothes in to the town with his friends. That was very dangerous job, so my mother didn’t like he do that. Sometimes it took for a month.’

‘I don’t have non much money to spend in my live.’

‘I live with my uncle family and my older sister in the house. Sometimes I miss my family…’

‘My father are dead may be 1997. I have about one year old. My mother and me are destitute. But, my mother are resolute for me… sometime she has a tear on her face, because she remember my father.’

‘Our family can hardly make both ends meet… If I continued my education, I must move to the city. It was very difficult for my family. We haven’t any relation in there so it will cost a lot… My parents borrowed money and sent me from here [the refugee camp] with their companions… I’ve finished high school in here…’

‘I live in refugee camp… my family live in Karen State [Burma]… My father passed me 1989 year ago.’

And the most harrowing:

‘Enemies came to my village and the enemies made my abuses my mother and my brother. We can not living in our village. We must go to the jungle. And we must to live in the jungle…. We can not eat rice. We must to eat the vegetable and fruit to forest. We don’t have school.’

In many ways the refugees have had more life experiences than most Westerners will ever have. They are mature about their situation; they have had time to come to terms with it. The students I have are continuing school longer than is necessary. They’re doing everything they can to have education so that if/when they get out of camp, they’ve got a chance of achieving something in the future. Despite some of the horrific stories they had to tell, many of their letters ended like this:

‘My ambition is to be a dedicated engineer. I’m sure, my dream will come true one day.’

In other ways, though, the students are so naïve. Obviously I know they live in a refugee camp, so there are certain things that they are not exposed to. But they mostly have some access to the internet and they almost always spend their evenings watching Korean movies. Yet on two major issues, I’ve had some hilarious, but incredibly awkward clash-of-the-cultures conversations. The topics? Religion and relationships.

I’ve been asked at least twenty times what my religion is. I’m not going to lie; I haven’t got a religion. Yet I’m definitely the only person here who hasn’t  My answer invariably results in an awkward silence while it takes people time to process this fact. Luckily for me, the school has had two other volunteers within the last eighteen months, and both of them apparently gave the same answer as me. The students don’t understand, but they are used to it. One of the older refugees said to me that most westerners he meets don’t seem to have a religion. Why, he asked, is that? A deep question that I certainly can’t answer. He did say, though, that because of their situation, many people in the camps turn to religion more than they otherwise would, be it to Buddhism, Christianity or Islam.

As for relationships, the conversations have been substantially more awkward. Most of my students know that I’m in a relationship but that’s all that they know. Yet the two students who have volunteered to look after me and cook for me speak to me a lot more. In church one Sunday, one of the girls whispered to me that there would be a wedding the next week that we could go to if I wanted to see it. The other student then looked at me and said ‘teacher, when will you get married?’ and the two of them burst into fits of giggling. Luckily for me, the middle of a church sermon wasn’t the right place for that conversation so I escaped having to answer that particular question.

Another evening, I was asked, ‘teacher, how many boyfriends have you had?’ The student had a very cheeky smile on her face at the time. I bent the truth slightly and replied that I’d had two, but then I played one down and said that it hadn’t really been a relationship and that it hadn’t lasted long. I said that I’d only had one real, important relationship. For approximately the next five minutes the girls were rolling around on the floor giggling like two twelve year old girls who have just discovered the meaning of some rude word. Finally, one of them gasped ‘teacher, for us, only one’. In this culture, it is actually inconceivable to think about having a relationship that doesn’t end in marriage. Living together before marriage is completely unheard of, as is having children.  At first I thought that the students really didn’t conceive it being possible to have a boyfriend and not be married, but I’ve gradually come to realise that they do understand that in other cultures this is normal. One student, for example, said to me that the last volunteer told them that in Australia, it’s possible to live together without being married. I said that yes, in many western countries, it is indeed. I think the questions are more to clarify that what they’ve seen in the movies, or heard from somewhere, and is so alien to their own cultural norm, is actually true. And they don’t have a lot of opportunity to ask these questions.

From my own background having trained as a primary school teacher in England, alarm bells were ringing at this point that this isn’t really a conversation I should be having with students. I certainly felt quite uncomfortable at times. Yet obviously I’m not in a primary school in England. And although my job is to teach general English, and I could quite easily reply that the number of boyfriends I’ve had is a private matter, one day these people probably aren’t going to be living in a refugee camp. If they do move to a third country – many aim to move to Australia, Norway or the US – and people in my position don’t have these awkward conversations with them now – they’re going to be more than a little overwhelmed with the culture shock.

Challenging Expectations: moving to a refugee camp

Bright and early last Sunday morning, I found myself struggling to clamber onto a tuk tuk with four heavy bags in order to get to a bus station in by 9 am. Why? To meet a student from the school I would be teaching English at for the next three months. He was even going to make the trip from his refugee camp to meet me and take me back there. How would I find him? Well, I might not know what he looks like, but he would have a fairly easy time working out who I was due to my skin colour!

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I had mixed feelings about moving to a refugee camp; I had no real idea if I was going to have access to simple things like drinking water, what any of the facilities would be like, and, perhaps most importantly, how I was even going to get in to the camp without the required permit. I didn’t fancy my chances against the heavily armed Thai security guards who have a fearsome reputation.  After all, I was trying to cart four bags along with me – I could hardly say I was just passing by. As it was, the students were prepared; four of them were on the other side of the fence to quickly scurry away with me and my bags. Surprisingly, there was a hole in the fence large enough that I hardly had to duck to enter, and there was a big enough gap between the guard stations that I don’t think they saw me.

As I trudged through the camp in the glaring heat, I was pleasantly surprised by what I witnessed. I guess that to me, refugee camps have always been associated with BBC News’s coverage of the ones that spring up suddenly and sometimes unexpectedly across borders in parts of Africa, for example, after a crisis; a drought or fighting (or both). They often rely on urgent immediate international aid from NGOs and the UN being flown in or dropped in by helicopter.

Here, the situation is wholly different – and I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised. The established refugee camps where people are not in immediate danger don’t get BBC World News coverage. The camp has been around for years and it’s built up its own little economy with markets where you can buy anything and everything from fresh fish and vegetables to mobile phones, DVDs and clothes – if, of course, you have the money. There are shops, a large market, tea shops and restaurants. Society is – in some respects – clearly well organised. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not suggesting that the camp doesn’t rely on NGOs and UN workers – they clearly have a big presence. The French NGO Solidarites has installed squat toilets all through camp (well, at least all through the areas I’ve seen) and there’s a hosepipe system of running water through much of camp (not that we have toilets that flush and sinks with taps!) and through donors my school’s got a UV water filter which provides drinking water to our little section and another school. A lot of refugees aim to get work with NGOs.

When I arrived at the school, the warm welcome was immediate and unavoidable. Everyone was so enthusiastic to meet me, and so happy that I’m here. Many of the students are too shy at the moment to speak to me a lot, but they always whisper hello with a lovely smile, and tell me their names so quietly that I have almost no change of learning them.

Part a the school. My room is up the top right – I have a room on my own. The steep cliffs provide a beautiful backdrop. The concrete building at the bottom is the computer room, and the building to the right is a workshop. The garden is swept every day, and they’ve been planting new plants.

I’ve been looked after incredibly well. If I didn’t want to do anything, everything would be done for me. It’s a hard adjustment to make. Even though I am happy to wash my clothes on my own and carry my books to the classrooms 10 metres away, I still have to fight not to have it done for me sometimes! It was a bit overwhelming at first. Two students have volunteered to move out of their dormitories to live at the school site near me, and they go to the market for food every morning, and cook for us for lunch and dinner. The food they make is great, too! Nothing like the simple ration rice, oil and chili – with fried vegetables if I am lucky – that I was told to expect!

We have a hosepipe that fills up a large water tank for a bucket shower. A bucket shower, especially in this weather, is lovely. There’s no part of me that misses hot, running water. If the climate was cooler, however, it could be really unpleasant. The toilets are traditional Thai squat toilets (pretty much the same as the French ones) and they are flushed with a bucket of water. They are kept spotlessly clean, too.

The bucket shower. The large water tank is filled by a hosepipe, and the small bowl is used to wash clothes in and for showering.

I soon found out that waking up at 7:30, as I had on the Sunday I arrived, would be considered a ridiculous – and a hilarious – lie in here. The sun’s up by 6ish, although we’re normally surrounded by atmospheric misty clouds rather than direct sunlight. There are at least three different religions practiced here and I regularly hear the Muslin call to prayer and singing in the churches slightly before I’d rather have woken up. It’s a relaxing alarm clock, though. And when you do look out of the window at 5:45am, you’re sure to be rewarded:

It didn’t take me long to adjust to most things here. Waking up and going to bed with the sun is nice, as is a bucket shower in this humidity. It took me all of two seconds to love the work ethic and enthusiasm of the students here too (not that these students are representative of the entire population of the camp)! The one thing I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, though, is eating with my hands, and having other people use the hand they’ve been eating with (the right) to break up a piece of fish that’s on their plate and put the best part directly onto my plate. I’m also finding it slightly annoying that I can’t really go anywhere as I don’t have a camp permit. Even if people couldn’t see my skin colour, I stand out by virtue of being the tallest female here by about a foot. Anywhere I do go I must have a student with me at all times. Having been around the school a week, I’m no longer receiving all of the stares I did when I first arrived, but when I did manage to venture out to a nearby shop today, I received either a beautiful but hesitant smile or a piercing stare from every person I walked past (usually the latter). I certainly don’t ever want to be a celebrity!

While all of this makes it sound like a wonderful place to be, I can never quite forget that I am in a refugee camp. The UNICEF posters stuck up in the shower hut depict a young girl happily washing her hands in a sink, with a tap and running water and a bar of soap. Ironically, of all of those things, only the bar of ration soap exists.

One of the squat toilets, with the bucket to flush it. Where do you wash your hands?

And on a different note, although my school is linked with the volunteer programme through which I came here and has had volunteers on a fairly regular basis for much of the last 18 months, some of the other people I have met told that I was only the first or second foreigner they’d ever met. And then we come to the  teaching itself, which I’ll go into more detail about later. But how, for example, are students supposed to know if it is possible to change the height of the saddle on a bicycle when they haven’t left the camp in three, four, five, eight, ten -or more – years?