Eczema

Certain characteristics are bound to identify you as a foreigner living abroad. In a place like Turkey, you're going to stand out among the dark haired, olive skinned masses if you've got strawberry blond hair and pale, reddish white skin. Using language, too, is a dead giveaway. In Thailand the contrast is even more drastic because height and facial structure come into play as well. While it's possible to get specific with these differences, the specifics don't usually get articulated. Instead, they are usually lumped into the issue of skin color. He's a farang (a white foreigner). In other words, he's not one of us.

In a place like Chiang Rai, there are enough farang tourists, retirees, and workers that you don't surprise people with your presence the same way you do in a place like Kayseri. If you go to a 7-11, for instance, the your skin color isn't going to make anyone take a second glance. However, if you're in gas station in Kayseri (and if you know enough Turkish), you are almost guaranteed a conversation with the cashier about where you are from, why you are here, and where you currently work.

If you listen carefully, in both settings, however, you are going to be spoken of. You'll hear the word yabancı (foreigner in Turkish) or farang used to characterize you. I understand that these words don't always carry a negative connotation, but they do serve as a constant reminder that this place must not be your home. Not your real home anyway.


Poetically, it's my farang skin that's revolting now that I'm here in Thailand. I've had eczema for years, at least since I was a teenager. It usually sticks to certain locations on my hands, wrists, fingertips, and occasionally my neck. Over the summer in Turkey, it began to get worse on my neck and it didn't clear up during my short visit to the US. I tried to wear collared shirts to cover it or at least distract from it, and while that may or may not have worked, it didn't improve the situation.

In Thailand, my eczema has exploded with a vengeance. While I used to consider it a mild inconvenience, I've now seen it take the form of blotches over my shins, my back, and my face. Through some stroke of luck, it doesn't break out over these places at the same time; rather my skin acts like a hit-the-gopher arcade game in which the moment you've got things under control, another outbreak occurs elsewhere. And true to form, the sensation feels like something trying to jump out of you. It's like there is a being inside me that will only let up after I've scratched and torn off the outer coat.

I have spent the equivalent of days skimming and reading articles and forums about eczema online. I have nearly maxed-out the amount of tabs allowed by my web browser in my search for a treatment strategy that will work. I have experimented with diet, environmental triggers, use of lotions, and use of topical steroids. I have gone into pharmacies and shown pharmacists my skin with my fingers crossed that the pharmacist speaks English. I have begged for Benadryl or any new cream that will help. I have spent countless hours, lying in bed, my skin greasy with lotion, getting stuck in a thought loop about how stress triggers eczema and how if I can decrease my stress, then I can decrease my eczema, but my eczema and all my attempts at reducing it makes me stressed, so I'm never going to succeed.

I have had days when I am so fed up with trying things that I don't do anything to help at all. I just try to act like a normal person. And then I inevitably go into a bathroom and look into a mirror or see a picture of myself on Facebook see that this strategy isn't helping either.

Recently, I haven't even wanted to leave the apartment. It's embarrassing--to have red patches all over your face that you try to explain away as sunburn. Of course you can say what it really is, but if your friends are Thai, you might end up in a prolonged explanation, trying to find a Thai word equivalent.

What adds gravity to the situation is that every itching or burning sensation that travels across my skin like a group of fire-breathing ants reminds me that my skin may not be able to adapt to the environment here. I am a true farang, and this must not be my real home.

Today, after realizing that looking up Google images of eczema helps remind me that I'm not alone, I finally searched for eczema support groups. While I didn't sign up for any, I did read some personal stories that helped put my relatively mild case of eczema into perspective. The symptoms of eczema can be worse than the ones I experience. The social effects can be more deleterious: Children with eczema are likely to get bullied. Teens with eczema finally feel normal when they go to camps for kids with irregular appearances. Relatively, adults have it easy, especially those who are married.

As far as fitting in here in Thailand is concerned, there are enough positive aspects to the environment that outweigh the inconveniences caused by my skin condition and my farang-ness. Adapting to the environment may not mean integrating seamlessly, but having a treatment plan is likely to help. A coping plan. I knew a guy from Yemen during my Masters program who said he was able to get through culture shock in the US by learning to laugh at it. I rarely find much humor in culture shock, but I think I understand the underlying sentiment. Accept that differences are going to exist, and do what you can to minimize the negative effects.

A Christmas Letter

Dear Family and Friends,

Having seen my parents write a Christmas letter for years, I always wondered what it would be like to write my own. The genre seems like a challenging task--to encapsulate an entire year of palatable news into a page or page and a half. Now that I have a bit of a nuclear family myself including a wife and a kitten, I feel up to the task.

In general news, Jena and I finished up our time in Turkey over the past year from January to July. We spent lots of time with our American friends, Paul and Cece, and with our Polish friend Justyna. With Paul and Cece, we often went on adventures to Cappadocia and to the coast. Paul and I, and sometimes Jena and Cece, would go on night-hikes in addition to day-hikes because hiking at night is a wonderful sensory experience. One night, we were trying not to bust or slash open our ankles on sharp white boulders that were lit up by the moon; in the distance were dark castle-y outlines of Roman ruins and the Mediterranean Sea. Spending time with Justyna was of a different nature, though she also went hiking with us at times. Each week Justyna and I would meet in the instructor lounge at our university and discuss the poems and short stories that I had assigned for my American literature class. It was akin to a book club with only two participants; in addition to these meetings being intellectually refreshing amid the day-to-day grind of teaching basic English, they also helped me prepare my lessons.

Paul, Cece, and I searching for an entrance to an underground city located underneath a castle in Nevşehir

In August, after a brief and very pleasant trip back to the States, Jena and I moved to Thailand. When we rode from the airport to our hotel in our university's shuttle van, what struck me were similarities among developing countries. Due to my travels in North America, Mexico serves a baseline for comparison, and as much as Turkey reminded me of Mexico, so does Thailand. But this time instead of opening my eyes to an industrial city in the desert surrounded by hills and a drastic, dragon spine of a mountain, I was seeing the chaos of the tropics: tuk-tuks speeding down the shoulder of the clogged up highway, messes of power lines on the telephone poles, and more shades of green than I have ever seen in my life.

The hills of Kayseri (left) and the perpetual construction of Thailand (right)

Overall, life is better for us here in Thailand. The university we work for is more developed, the society is less conservative, and the climate is perpetually warm. As I write, I am sitting on our balcony in a tanktop, and birds are chirping from the green trees rising up from a grassy green lawn. It's in stark contrast to scenes like this:

Paul and his freezing hair while skiing and snowboarding on Mt. Erciyes

Jena and I on a winter hike with Justyna in Cappadocia (left) and Jena on our second day in Thailand (right)

To wrap up this letter attempt at a concise Christmas letter, I had better dedicate a paragraph to each of the other members of the family, Jena and Egg. Work at our new university is better for Jena. After a semester of demonstrating her skills as a writing teacher of General English classes, she has just found out that she will be teaching a rigorous Reading and Writing class to English majors in addition to her other classes. During our last six months in Kayseri, Jena learned to drive stick-shift on the lawless roads of Turkey, and she now drives our pickup confidently around our Chiang Rai. She continues to make me feel lucky that she's my wife. On a daily basis, she helps me stay in touch with reality by challenging my frugal ascetic lifestyle with her insistence that we make our lives more comfortable and sustainable by buying things like a water-heater for our shower, a washer for our clothes, and a couch for our living room. Overall, she's a daily inspiration to me.

Jena and Baby Egg

Egg. ... Egg is our kitten. He was born in mid or late August in a town that borders Myanmar, and our best guess is that he's mostly a Burmese Shorthair cat. Each day he grows larger, and I worry that he'll outgrow the small cat door that I built for him this weekend. We have begun to allow him to explore the world without a leash or constant supervision, and he has taken a liking to patches of sunshine, the smells of the gutter, and staring at ants. His is loving, playful, and quite chatty with his little chirps.

Jena and I look forward to another year together at our new home in Thailand. What we may lack in salary, we make up for in the quality of life. I remember a day in high school when my French teacher went around the room asking us what we needed for a good life. The purpose was to solicit use of the phrase, "J'ai besoin de" (I need). Most of my classmates provided cliché answers like, "For a good life, I need a big house." "For a good life, I need a nice car." When it was my turn, I wasn't sure whether my grammar was correct, but I said, "Pour une bonne vie, j'ai besoin d'être content." I think my teacher had to correct the grammar, but she and I seemed happy that my answer was out of the norm. Here's to another year of looking for moments of contentment in a sea of bizarreness and mundanity.

Me 'n Egg

Best,
Alan

Hello from Thailand

Hi Blog Readers. Thank you for making the switch from Turkish Traves to the brand spanking new Thailandiasaurus.

Jena and I have been in Thailand for two weeks and six days at this point, and things are going well. At the moment, I'm sitting on our balcony (yes, we have a balcony!) which faces into a small patch of trees that are over three stories high. Our apartment is on the second floor of a small building (three stories), and the building itself is one of four that are positioned in this nice little circle, the center of which has more trees, a grassy area, and a few motion machines for exercising. I've already set up my slackline there for some afterwork relaxation and exercise after work.

But back to my current view. There's also a little pond just past the trees, and beyond that is the road. We're on campus, but this area of campus is specifically for married couples and married couples with children. Once in a while after school, we'll see a few students walk down the road that bisects the grassy inner circle, but it's no different than simply living in a neighborhood where students also live.

Inside our apartment, we have a living room, a bedroom, a hallway-kitchen, and a bathroom. Right now our apartment is a little stark looking, but we'll be putting up decorations and getting more furniture over time. Of course our apartment is not without a few less-than-charming characteristics, but it works for now.


I'm pretty happy with our new lives at the moment. It's a Saturday. We slept in. We went to a little house party last night. I'm relaxing in temperate weather on the balcony. I can see a big old lizard climbing a tree and bobbing his head up and down. Today I might slackline or see if Jena wants to walk to the reservoir.

Speaking of that, I went for a run the week before last week out to the reservoir, and I really wished I had had my camera. You go past some of the men's dorms, past a laundry shop that we use sometimes, past a little corner 7-11, and then you're on this windy tropical road. It goes up into the hills, and eventually there's the Wanasom Resort, which is an on-campus nature-retreat with rooms and at least one swimming pool that overlook over the reservoir. When you get past the resort, you eventually come to a small dam, and even though it's manmade, the barren side, which you'd expect to be concrete, is just dirt, and it's covered in green grass. When I first saw it, I wanted to take a picture across the water toward the tropical hills and affix the caption: Still on campus.

Our university of ten thousand students sits on a huge swath of land including flat former agricultural areas and tropical hills. Like me, my freshmen students, often comment on how beautiful it is. They say Mae Fah Luang has the nickname, "The University in the Park," and they claim it's the most beautiful university in Thailand. The school is only seventeen years old, and it was named after the king's mother. The story goes that she flew over this area of Thailand in the 70s or 80s in a helicopter. The locals pointed out how this region of Northern Thailand was being used for drug cultivation. She viewed the problem as being symptomatic of a people without many opportunities, so she took up residence here (in a chalet that Jena and I visited during our first week) to help the region improve itself. Her philosophy was, "Help people help themselves." Eventually, these efforts included starting a university in her name.

Currently I'm teaching a writing class that is framed by a semester-long problem-solution research project. Yesterday in class, I tried my best to connect this history of the university with the curriculum. One of the other teachers here suggested that I give my students a thorough concept of audience for their research projects. Rather than the audience being merely the teacher, he encouraged me to challenge my students to see the king's mother (who has since deceased) as their audience. I asked my students to write a paragraph about how solving their problem would help people in Chiang Rai or Mae Fah Luang University help people help themselves. As my students worked, they gave me all the indications that the topic was being taken seriously and that the wheels were turning. I read over their shoulders, seeing how they genuinely were interested in making their community a better place. At the end of a three-hour lesson, it was one of the most rewarding moments of the week.


So two weeks in, things are going well. Jena and I took this step with the intent to improve our lives after a difficult year in Turkey, and thus far there are many indications that we made a good move. We're still putting the pieces together: We're still sorting out the purchase a truck, and we still haven't figured out how to get drinking water delivered. But these are surmountable problems. The natural beauty, the fresh air, the open society are indicative that things are looking up.

Email Settings

Hi Friends and Family out there. Before you go any further reading my new blog, I want to highly recommend that you enter your email address on the side of the page. By doing so, you will receive email updates whenever I post, and you won't need to check for new posts every day, week, or month. The email notification may go to your spam folder, so watch out for that and adjust your email settings accordingly. That is, of course, if you don't consider my posts to be equivalent to spam. Thanks for reading.
Alan