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.