Thailand Year One (1970-1971) by Peter Crall
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Thailand Year One (1970-1971) by Peter Crall The first portion of our Thailand training program took place on the Hilo campus of the University of Hawaii on the Big Island. We were the thirtieth program to train for Thailand and, with our limited perspective, we thought that was a huge number since we had been only the second Libya class. The Thai programs would go on to number in the hundreds. The candidate volunteers in our group were housed in tropical veranda-style dormitories on campus. Ours was called Hale Oahu, pronounced "hah- lay". It was a little cramped but was surrounded by swaying palm trees and singing birds. Warm breezes carried the scent of flower gardens to us, so it was easily tolerated. The food was great and I especially remember the huge platters of fruit - pineapples, mangoes, papayas. The training regimen was similar in structure to that for Libya but seemed more manageable, perhaps because this was the second time around for us. The roster of trainees included quite a few volunteers from the Libya program, so it was a bit like old home week as we saw a lot of familiar faces One very pleasant relaxation was hiking up the Wailuku river that flowed into Hilo and swimming in a pool beneath a lovely cascade called Rainbow Falls. The cold water in the hot weather was delightful. Local teenagers would also come there to swim and relax and I thought that was very Polynesian. My final impression of Hawaii was that it was even nicer than all the good things I had heard about it. On February 15, we hitchhiked across the island to Hapuna Beach State Park, which is on the north shore. Our ride took us across vast plantations of sugar cane which covered the land everywhere in an unvarying blanket of green. This was the face of industrial agriculture. The local man who drove us said he was tired of looking at it. By contrast, the Hapuna coast is nature untamed. It catches the same powerful surf as the Bazai Pipeline on Oahu. I heedlessly swam out from shore into the crashing breakers. Not surprisingly, a large wave caught me and drove me deep underwater, forcing air out of my lungs and disorienting me. Just as I struggled towards the surface for a breath, another wave came smashing down and pushed me under again. Somehow I managed to get a few breaths and swim back to the beach. It was a close call. People easily drown under such circumstances and I was very thankful that fate spared me to finish training, because, jeez, I hadn't even seen Thailand yet. I remember the very first words from the lips of our Thai instructor on our very first day of language class. She said "tueng"" and "toong" in rising tone without us knowing the meaning ("arrive" and "bag"). This was to start the process of familiarizing our ears to the five tones in the Thai language. Her name was Patira and she would go on to marry a volunteer named Dave Kalis and wind up living in the Cleveland area. For some reason, Royse and I were asked to be chaperones at a junior high YMCA dance, which was easy work and I don't recall having to break up any inappropriate behavior. I remember one training couple in particular, Charlie and Julie Weber, who were fun to be around and exceptionally proficient at Thai. The story circulated that Julie was a Habsburg princess. The Thai language staff were very impressed with that piece of news, since royalty is a big thing for them. One pulled me aside and whispered confidentially, "Mr. Peter, is it true that Mrs. Julie is a princess?". Another language star was Susie Miller. She soaked up Thai like a dry sponge and would go on to read, write and speak like a native. We had a great weekend outing to the vast, steep-walled Waipio valley north along the coast from Hilo and had the place virtually to ourselves. We relaxed in a small cabin and cooked fish that I caught in the freshwater Wailoa stream flowing across the valley floor. The luxuriantly green, rain-softened landscape made us feel like we were living in a Hiroshige print. Our ride to this piece of paradise was provided by one of the training staff who was broke like us but still wanted a car, so he paid $75 for a 1949 Hudson, which, with prayer and careful use, ran until the end of training. In mid- March we flew to Thailand for the second half of the training program. I remember the flight over as a grueling ordeal of sleepless jet lag. There was a stopover in Guam for fuel. We griped but, really, we had it much easier than trans-Pacific travelers just twenty five years before. In the late 1940s, for example, before jet travel became routine, missionaries departing California for a remote post in northern Thailand could expect a trip of several months, first by steamer, then by train, oxcart and horseback to their assigned village. Now that took faith. The Thai 30 training and preparation continued at Bangsaen, a little village southeast of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand. The weather was hot and humid, but daily life in a beach village in Thailand is delightful and this was a relaxing counterpoint to the built-in stresses and demands of training. You had sea breezes and the sound of surf. Food vendors were everywhere with delicious, exotic items. It was easy to see why a zillion American expatriates lived in Thailand. The only dark cloud I recall was an incident involving Susie Miller and another trainee named Tom Hudson. They were walking back to the Teacher Training College one evening after dinner and were robbed at gunpoint. Tom was sufficiently traumatized that he resigned from the program the next day and flew home. Susie had a strong commitment to living in Thailand and she persevered. During this time I got a letter from Dad saying Mom had undergone a radical mastectomy for breast cancer. That was a real shock, but I was encouraged by the doctors' opinion that they got the malignancy early. The second half of training accelerated our introduction to the complex fabric of Thai society. India and China have both had major influences in the evolution of Thai culture. Theravada Buddhism arose in India and spread to Southeast Asia. Its sacred Pali language makes up about half the Thai vocabulary. The Thai language is tonal like Chinese and Vietnamese and the country has a large Chinese population. Many national holidays mark events in the Buddhist calendar. The Thais celebrate their own New Year in mid-April with the Songran festival. Traditionally it is a time marked by merit-making and family reunions. Water is poured over Buddhist statues and over the young and elderly to symbolically wash away sins and bad luck. This has evolved over time into wild water fights, especially in the big cities. During our Bangsaen training, we went up to Bangkok for a weekend and that trip was an eye-opening introduction not only to Thai holiday excitement but to the dangers of the road. As we rode a bus up the crowded high-speed coastal road, a car passed us like a bullet on a blind curve and disappeared ahead, weaving in and out of traffic. I thought the obvious: this guy's going to crash. Sure enough, a minute later, we came upon the catastrophic wreck I had expected. The car had hit an oncoming vehicle head-on. Drivers and front-seat passengers, unbelted and airbag-less, had gone through the windshields and were mostly dead. A semi-conscious passenger in the back seat looked out in a daze. Our bus just kept on going. And this kind of fun continued once we got to Bangkok. We were on a city bus at the height of the Songkran frenzy. As usual, the bus was jammed full. I was standing several feet behind the driver and holding onto the ceiling grab bar. An enthusiastic festival-goer stepped off the curb and heaved a very large water balloon at the windshield of the bus. Instead of bursting harmlessly in a shower of wet fun, it shattered the window like a bomb, sending the non-safety plate glass flying in lethal shards everywhere. The driver's face was badly lacerated. Somehow I was untouched but other passengers near me were cut up and were dripping blood. In the screaming and chaos, as they helped the bleeding driver out of the bus, I yelled one of the few Thai words I knew, "Rong phayaban!! Rong phayaban!!" [Hospital!! Hospital!!]. No one really listened to me but they did bundle the poor guy into a taxi for a trip to get emergency care. During our years in Thailand, we regularly read in the English-language Bangkok Post about traffic accidents. This grisly drumbeat of highway disasters often involved bus accidents, which made great newspaper copy because of the number of victims involved. Very frequently the story of a bus mishap would end with the statement that the bus driver had fled the scene of the accident. This punch line was repeated so often that a running joke developed that somewhere in Laos there was a village populated exclusively by fugitive Thai bus drivers. Even though most of Thailand experiences some kind of dry season, the baseline impression you get is one of extreme verdant growth.