A long long story of our volunteer Jason...I spent a year teaching English in Taiwan and I enjoyed the experience: I enjoyed the change of pace from my previous times travelling, being able, in the little city of Hsin Chuang, to examine the rhythm of the area and its people over a matter of months rather than days, shivering with everyone else on January mornings as I paid my water bill at the post office, sweating with everybody else on August evenings in restaurants as I pointed at random squiggles on menus; I enjoyed working, teaching, being able to call myself an adult even as my job involved mostly playing games, pulling faces, perfecting my Charlie Chaplin impression surrounded by good-natured and intensely curious kids who were happy to help me wear myself out each day; I enjoyed, also, getting paid a very good wage, being able to live in luxury in my apartment complex while still saving a substantial sum.
With that wage, however, came all the indignities that inevitably attach themselves to paid labour: the smug jargon-spouting superiors in front of whom I have to bite my tongue and appear at the very least not unrespectful; the fellow teachers who gleefully admit to hating children and all I can do is smile and nod, smile and nod; the timecards to be punched upon arrival and departure, infinite forms and reports to be signed and completed on a daily or weekly or monthly basis with the threat of punitive measures should things not be filled in properly; the uniforms to be worn, the disgusted stares from the most moronic of the desk-staff because we Westerners fail to follow the local custom of polishing our shoes every single day; the complicated curricula to be taught by the book even though that book is occasionally wrong and often uninteresting; and so on. Taiwan is an uncomfortably industrialised rat-race sort of place where individuality is still seen as suspicious and education is privatised; Taiwanese children seem to live lives markedly more grim than in most other countries I’ve visited, being viciously overworked, endlessly tested and retested, striving to get grades that count for nothing at all. To teach there is similarly to be tangled in an insipid web of bureaucratic half-being.
So when I finished my year-long contract, the thought arose: if I like teaching but not the corporate claustrophobia that goes with it, would it be worth doing the job elsewhere, on a volunteer basis, so setting myself free to work according to my own terms, avoiding everything that had soured my experience in Taiwan? – being able, that is, to teach for one hour without having to waste the next two filling in forms and marking test-papers. Sure: my mind settled immediately on Thailand. I’d already visited The Land of Smiles twice and it was definitely my favourite country: the friendliest people, a relaxed atmosphere, and a great diversity of mood – from the carbon monoxide of Bangkok to the rice-fields of the northeast, from beach parties through jungles, from the seedy shore of Pattaya up to mountaintop temples around Chiang Mai, Siam is lacking in very little. (No snow though!) I think the Thai spirit is best indicated, not by its climate or its religion or its taste for gloriously spicy food, nor by its political and economical status as “developing,” but in the annual Songkran Festival: for three days the whole country erupts into one big water-fight. Public celebrations elsewhere generally fall into one of two categories (at least in those countries which have any public celebration at all – my own England is these days under the grip of a brutal if subtle tyranny of enforced greyness, a po-faced pessimism within which it’s hard to imagine any act of overt joyousness ever actually occurring and certainly not a full-on street party): either they are alcohol-soaked sweatfests in which the escapist oblivion afforded by that alcohol is the only and entire point, or else they’re sedate affairs, a chance for the whole family to spend some time together, like a funeral minus the corpse. But while Songkran may involve booze and/or family get-togethers, its energy is different, it’s relentless, fast and loud, safe but not tame, never relaxing: a bucket of water over your head – or rather a manic stream of buckets, hosepipes, water-pistols – has something of a Zen slap to it, standing there squelching in your boots, as irritated as you are amused but it doesn’t matter anyway cos here comes another: SPLASH!
Thailand it was, then. I looked on the Internet: there are loads of “volunteer” sites which operate on a “pay-to-work” basis, asking for cash in return for setting you up with an Authentic Exotic ExperienceÔ. These can only be scams: you don’t need a degree to teach in Thailand, you don’t need a TEFL certificate or any corporate connections, you don’t need anything apart from energy and if anyone asks for money then look someplace else. Eventually I found the Learn2Give website, shot them an e-mail and very soon afterwards I arrived in the Isaan area, rural northeastern Thailand, with everything arranged for me, a light timetable of classes in return for a room and all my meals. I taught for a total of nine months at two schools (plus a couple of English camps) before deciding to move on. It was, though, a very good time and I’ll be returning soon enough I’m sure.
The two schools presented two very different environments. Khamkhuenkaeow is a town on the major road between Ubon and Yasothon, and the school there is huge – about three thousand pupils. At first I was dreading one thing: back in Taiwan I’d been mostly teaching kids aged 7-12 and whenever I had to teach older students I found them almost always to be no fun – surly, unresponsive, unwilling to invest any effort. In Khamkhuenkaeow I was to teach 16/17-year-olds and they could have been the same: a boring bunch who’d leave me feeling drained and empty. (Good classes drain you too, but in a different way: one of the things you don’t appreciate about teaching until you’re on that side of the classroom is how energy-intensive it is, how tiring. Good students leave you feeling physically drained but otherwise content; with bad or boring students it’s the opposite, you end up restless and fidgety but unable to quite think of anything at all.) I needn’t have worried: Thai adolescents are about as playful and enthusiastic as Taiwanese infants and it was always fun. Here in the first of my schools, it being a prominent and well-funded institution, the teachers were generally qualified, the students were used to encountering farangs due to various international exchange programmes, and the school was equipped with plenty of teaching resources. Most of these resources did, as it happened, turn out to be useless: I spent my first week playing games, by way of introducing myself and establishing a suitably manic mood, then moved on to teach using the books I’d been given. The fact that these books turned out to be full of piss-poor English spelling and grammar wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to my making use of them, but their complete lack of exciting content was. I wasted a few weeks dutifully plodding along, having the students memorise clunky passages relating to the nutrient value of various foods, I had them drone through irrelevant role-plays, learning what to say to an English-speaking doctor should they come down with gastritis. Soon enough I threw the books in the bin, settled on something else: poetry. I would introduce some goofy poem, have the students recite it, then prod them to notice the rhyme scheme around which that poem was constructed; afterwards I’d offer the class a title and have them write something using that particular pattern. Poems, songs, the structures behind them, and various games to keep things flowing: that’s how I spent most of my time at Khamkhuenkaeow.
Huay Yang, the second of the two schools, was different. The previous place had been small – not a 7-11 in the area! – but it’s on the maps. Huay Yang though is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, one semi-paved road with dirt-tacks running off it, a single school, a couple of temples, shops selling the bare basics, and houses, lots of shaky wooden houses. Everything else is rice-fields and herds of buffalo. Ten miles from the nearest town of Khong Chiam, which itself merits a single sentence in my guidebook, the school’s remoteness translates in practical terms to very little financial funding. While I found all the teachers to be very pleasant, very welcoming, they didn’t necessarily know anything about their subject – I remember overhearing an English teacher having his class chant after him, “I love you! You love I!” Huay Yang was a charming place, nicer than where I’d been before, but frustrating too. The students were bright but they’d never had the chance to become clever. (No poetry here, then: even the oldest kids, who had supposedly studied English for a number of years, couldn’t answer questions like “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?” so my job was to offer them simple conversational speech.) This wasn’t the fault of any individual teachers but rather of an environment which, having no expectations whatsoever of its children, encourages those children to have no expectations of themselves. The man who held the highest position inside the school spent every day drinking whiskey and watching TV, tacitly promoting the idea that a vulgar laziness is something to aspire towards. Without expectations, without the sense that what you’re learning might be worthwhile, there’s no possibility of discipline, and while the students were always friendly with me they were bemused too: if they wanted to walk out halfway through a class, or not appear at all, why shouldn’t they? I remember the first time (in Khamkhuenkaeow) a kid pulled out a phone and casually called a friend while I was teaching. I was shocked but I soon got used to it, because that’s what the staff do too, breaking off classes and assemblies to stand there chatting into their cell-phones. The complete lack of an attention-span was endlessly irritating as it meant I could never make much progress, I couldn’t really use drama or role-play, could only use the most simple songs, in fact I was never even able to impress upon my students that there are rules to the use of pronouns and so “I” and “you” and “he” and “she” cannot be used interchangeably. All I could do was drill the day’s question and its answer, question and answer, playing the same few games over and over – because introducing new games meant introducing new rules and the students wouldn’t sit still long enough. Most of my actual teaching took place outside the classroom: mostly I’d just play around inside, but those students who wanted to hang around with me before and after lessons (and most kids naturally want to be around farangs, given that they’ve spent their entire life in an area where everyone knows everyone, everyone always has and always will know everything about everybody), those students inevitably found my grammar and vocabulary seeping into their awareness. Probably the school set-up and all its half-arsed attempts at structure only ever get in the way of the organic process of learning. Anyway Huay Yang was fun, but it probably would have been more fun if I hadn’t insisted on taking seriously my role of English teacher.
Isaan is, then, a poor area, but not strikingly so. No-one seems to go without food or half-decent clothes, there’s no shortage of cars and TVs and other technological junk, and if most houses are missing a wall or two still no-one’s likely to freeze to death. Certainly people have much less purchasing power than in the West, and there’s a general sense of diminished opportunity: the futures to be followed, to be lived by the boys and girls I taught, seemed shut to them, they’ll follow whatever path is laid down by their parents and their community, most likely they’ll end up doing exactly what their parents did and what else is there to do anyway? The influence of Western media, Western style, is noticeable though, and its – our – plastic glamour and pseudo-decadence perhaps functions as a liberating influence in suggesting other futures, other potentials, so subverting provincial determinism. Perhaps not: the bands and shoes and movies that constitute the vanguard of Capitalism may do nothing but harm, may raise young eyes to stare at peaks they can never hope to ascend, may deliberately and cynically obscure from those eyes the real charm and beauty of the people and places they know and inhabit. Of course you don’t have to go to Thailand to see this: everywhere you are there’s that gulf between the intensity of the adverts and the sluggishness of the days – that’s how technological junk gets sold. In fact, Isaan seems to have much less of a problem than the West as regards sacrificing real quality of life for false dreams: perhaps a lack of affluence guarantees a certain vibrancy, a certain happy resignation – Thailand is without any doubt a vastly more pleasant place to be than, say, England, where everyone has so much more opportunity to buy and to sell and to explore and everyone seems to hate themselves and everyone else too. Another thing you can see up close in northeastern Thailand (something very much related to the difference between media portrayals of how humans interact as opposed, very much opposed, to traditional notions of how people are supposed to get along), is the social dynamic wherein pre-Feminist mothers strangle the psyches of proto-Feminist daughters. Again this is not unique to the place, and in fact the sublimated clitordectomy is a feature of cramped villages the whole world over. Here though it starkly shows the central reality of contemporary Thailand: this is a country that’s “developing,” a society in a transitional state, with custom facing uneasily the prospect of Progress, that Trojan Horse with the threat of global cultural homogeneity snug in its belly. Thailand vacillates between Democracy and military rule, it gladly invokes freedom then bans Youtube, bans Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” from the Bangkok International Film Festival to please its good friend the Iranian theocracy. Perhaps the very many dilemmas facing the country will be resolved, perhaps by the usual measure of razing those dilemmas along with every other issue down to the lowest common denominator of uninspiring flatness and bureaucracy, the silent scream that becomes ever more silent, ever less of a scream as every generation is detached further from their personal history, their local culture, until finally, when everyone’s finally forgotten that they know a few things they’re not supposed to say not even to themselves, a nation can proudly proclaim it is well and truly developed. 2013: Songkran Festival banned due to Health & Safety considerations… Stay home instead and watch other people on TV enjoying themselves, or pretending to enjoy themselves, what’s the difference? Perhaps though there’s some other way out of the trap wherein prosperity brings with it an unending pointlessness, stagnation, perhaps Thailand can retain its charm, can keep developing and not stop, not die a death of the soul, that death you don’t notice, don’t even notice not noticing… Maybe: the country is certainly equipped to handle contradictions without being torn by them – how else could a culture that is so very Buddhist be possessed by such rampant if unacknowledged alcoholism?
But enough about Thailand: let’s talk about me. Frustrations aside I’d say I got what I wanted from Isaan: in some ways teaching there was worse than in Taiwan, in other ways it was better, but the differences between the two definitely provided the challenges I was looking for, having to design my own lessons rather than following the schedules set down in books, having to come up with my own resources, being able to set my own pace, shamelessly slacking off when I hadn’t the energy, extending classes for as long as I liked when they were going well, and setting homework whenever I wanted to. Generally I wasn’t expected to do that but I must be the only teacher ever to actually enjoy taking my work home with me: go a little crazy with a pack of felt-tip pens and you can provoke students to similar acts of brazen aesthetics; by making it clear that not just the dreary drudge of sentence composition but also the drawings and doodles and scribbled insults are desired and will be replied to, you offer some small outlet for expression. It’s like George Bush said: “You’re either with the terrorists or you’re with me,” and just as I set homework and marked and decorated it even though I didn’t have to, so students generally did that homework even though there was no disciplinary threat forcing them to do so, no real concern at all. My volunteer status also had advantages and disadvantages: there was a great sense of not being tied to anything, no contract, no responsibilities – so when, for example, I was asked (in both schools) to wear a uniform, the ubiquitous yellow T-shirt, I refused, politely, firmly, no room for compromise there, partly because the whole point of volunteering was to avoid such degrading nonsense, partly because yellow really isn’t my colour, but also as a tactical means of distancing myself from the school apparatus: I knew that the less I looked and acted like a teacher, the more likely it was that students would allow themselves to be taught by me. On the other hand, though, I could never feel settled: in Khamkhuenkaeow one day I got the idea to redecorate my classroom, then that same day I discovered there had been several complaints to the Headmaster from the English Department, who resented the attention I was getting from the students. I stopped thinking about adding anything to the school: I was only passing through so what was the point? In terms of living arrangements, again there was no security: living with a local family, doing all that they do, is an excellent way of getting close to a culture (you’re still a tourist, you’ll always be a tourist, still you see so much more this way), but it’s a precarious existence: irritate or bore the family, be irritated or bored by them, and that’s it, you’re gone, move on. Huay Yang was vastly more accommodating, a consequence of their complete inexperience with farangs: in fact at first their friendliness was so overbearing, they seemed so terrified that I might ever have to spend more than three minutes in solitude, that I had to adopt an exaggerated prickliness to get them to back off and give me some space. That was okay: to the best of my knowledge none of the staff ever complained about my presence at Huay Yang. Unfortunately though, given the size of the school, I never had a classroom of my own there that I could have decorated…
Since returning – briefly – to England, I find that whenever I mention volunteering I always get the same question: “Do you think you did any good out there?” I hate that question, partly because it implies a certain saintliness on my part, a willingness to forego the splendours of civilisation and offer my time, my valuable time in which I could so easily be earning actual money, in order to selflessly dedicate myself, my energy, to charitable works in areas where they don’t even have nightclubs, not a single one. And of course it wasn’t like that: I went to Isaan cos I knew it would be fun teaching there, more fun than working in any of the offices or factories here and I hate nightclubs anyway. The other side of the question is its implicit overplaying of the issue of poverty: oh those poor poor people, stuck out there deprived of the splendours of civilisation, isn’t it awful, the lives they’re forced to lead, if only they can make good use of our missionary endeavours so as to drag themselves up from the near-savagery of their limited little lives and learn how to do joined-up writing. Again of course it’s not like that, these people lead decent lives whether I’m there or not, there’s no sickness in need of healing, no emptiness to be filled; the interest of the Thais in me reflects my interest in them, they see that life can be that bit more fun with a weirdo farang taking their classes than with any familiar face, and if I’m not fun then I’m of no interest and consequently of no use. “Do you think you did any good out there?” Clumsy and unpleasant as it is, I think I’ll answer the question anyway. In terms of teaching, no, not at all, I think that those students who were paying attention and who manage to retain the information will be marginally better at English than had I not appeared, which means that at some future point they may be able to enter a conversation with a farang and sustain it for at least three seconds: “What’s your name?” My name is _____! “How old are you?” I’m _____ years old! “What do you think about the political situation in the Middle East, eh? Do you reckon Andy Warhol was overall a positive or negative factor as regards art?” Er… And the conversation breaks down cos I never got to that in my question and answer sessions. As far as my presence goes, it’s possible that being in Isaan and demonstrating curiosity about their culture may inspire some reciprocal curiosity, may help inspire students in later life to move, to explore – but I doubt it and anyway that inspiration could be tragic rather than effectively stimulating if, as now, the money necessary to move, to get on a plane and go, is denied to the youth of Thailand. It’s much more likely that my name and face and words will be soon forgotten and there’s nothing wrong with that. “Do you think you did any good out there?” Well, one thing sticks in my mind: not in Khamkhuenkaeow but in Huay Yang, and in nearby Khong Chiam, in those remote areas where Westerners are, for the time being at least, rare (and where a helicopter flying overhead one time prompted a near-riot of giddy enthusiasm among my students), I was surprised by how timid the kids were. Elsewhere I was mobbed on arrival but here everyone held back, unsure how to react, how to act around me. The older students soon got used to my being there but the younger ones didn’t, weeks passed and they were still afraid to come too close, they hovered and stared silently, and when I said hello they ran. Weeks passed: but I wasn’t there for weeks I was there for months, and by the time I left Huay Yang all the kids in the school and in the area knew me and spoke to me, and where once they would hang back, now at last even the youngest mobbed me and tried to beat me up. (They meant it affectionately. I presume.) So that was a change, one that related to the children’s confidence and which demonstrated a noticeable increase thereof – and it’s not possible to grow more confident in one area of your existence without that sense of self-assurance spreading through every other aspect of your being. If a farang can make a lasting difference in Thailand (and, as I say, it doesn’t really matter whether s/he can or not), I would think that that difference is incidental to the teaching of English and, furthermore, is so subtle that the affected Thai children would never even know they’ve been thus affected. Nonetheless a diminished sense of fear in front of the unknown, a willingness to engage strangers rather than to shy away from them, a glad acceptance of the unfamiliar, even the knowledge that a teacher, an authority figure with more technological junk in his bedroom then there is in your entire village, is still someone on whose foot you can stamp as long as you’re smiling when you do it, that, that means something, that’s more important to a person’s development than whether they can discuss politics and art and other abstract rubbish that counts for nothing anyway.
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