This week, our up-the-hill neighbor invited us to come for dinner. Gabe buys little snacks from his in-home "store" every day, so he and Gabe have an ongoing relationship developing. His wife was one of the women who first introduced me to the fine art of river bathing, so we were excited to spend some time with them.
His wife and maybe some other ladies in the household had cooked up a feast for us. We had rice, of course, with the broth from a long-stemmed plant that had been boiled in water, and fried fish, fried and seasoned frog, and venison. It was delicious! We've had fish a few other times, but this was the first time we'd been offered red meat since we've been here.
The way one eats here is squatting or sitting on very low stools around a low table. Everyone at the table has a tin plate (if there are more people than plates, you just eat in shifts) filled with rice. Then you pour the broth over the rice, and start spooning toppings onto the rice. You eat with your fingers, so it's a bit of a messy endeavor.
One difference between American style food and Karen food is the presence of bones - in America, we usually try to remove bones as much as possible - although not every bone can be removed from chicken or fish or whatever - but here, it's just normal to have all the bones in the cooked food. I must admit, I chewed my fish carefully to make sure I got all the bones out before swallowing because the last thing I want here is a perforated intestine! Gabe found the frog skull he bit down on at one point a little disconcerting. I, personally, was having a little bit of a hard time with the hand-like front legs of the frog and the presence of it's skin!
The venison, however, was fantastic!
After dinner, we sat around playing with their toddler and visiting a little. We learned this couple has been married for 3 years and the husband is 26 years old. He's a medic here and sometimes helps with teaching at JSMK. Their younger child is 4 months old, and she was fussy because it was hot.
The wife invited me to go to the river and bathe after dinner, so i stopped by my house to grab my laundry pail and my lunghee (tube swimming dress/towel thing) and joined her. There were other ladies splashing in the water and washing their clothes, so I didn't talk much, but i enjoyed listening to their chatter. I'd taught "can" that day in class, and one of the things my students had learned was "can swim" so the students that we there had fun repeating "I can swim. Can you swim?" to me and to each other.
As for the rest of this week, we've chuckled a few times over how not-private our housing situation is here. The camp usually starts to wake up about 5:30 and work starts at 6am. We usually have our alarm go off when the roosters start to crow at 5:30 and we try to be heading out the door to either do a morning hike or head over to the PT field and do a workout. One day this week a crew of guys started coming up to our sleeping area about 5:35 to gather their tools for a construction project they were doing... And continued to come up and down the stairs for the next 40 minutes or so. Our "house" is also the storage shed for many things. I ended up taking my clothes to the bathroom to change because I didn't have any guarantee that I'd have 45 seconds of privacy to put on my workout clothes. Another night, after we'd gone to bed, a woman came upstairs shining her headlamp around the porch to search through totes in order to get more mosquito nets for the patients at the hospital. We literally never know when we're going to have people in our space.
This morning, as I was kneeling on the floor to be below the bamboo partition level of our upstairs porch so I could discreetly pull my shirt on and apply deodorant, Gabe came up the stairs and as me and started laughing. He said, "I promise I will take you somewhere soon where you don't have to change and put deodorant on while kneeling on the floor." Oh, what luxury!
It's been getting hot - I added the nearest city that I know of to my weather app so I can see the forecast - with temperatures reaching a high of 105-108 for the next 5 days. Usually this hot part is during my English class, which meets from 1-3pm. With no fans around, we pray for a breeze! After class we retreat to the space below our house to wait out the heat and hope for some wind. About 4:30 people start migrating down toward the river to do their nightly scrub. One day we took our Qwirkle game down to some large, flat rocks and play Quirkle with our feet in the water. Little fishes kept coming over to nibble the dried skin on our toes.
We have one more week of teaching here - maybe an additional day depending on the schedule for when we leave - and I have to admit we're both pretty excited to be finished with teaching for the foreseeable future (although we know we might get to Greece and find that's the best way to serve, in which case, we'll thank God for all the experience we've gathered this year and we'll jump right in!). It's been a good experience and we've enjoyed getting to know our adult students, but without a curriculum or even a plan of what to teach, it has definitely been attention consuming and required a lot of creative energy.
Yesterday we finally figure out the names of our preschoolers. They group of adorable kids show up each day to the preschool, but they don't know the phrase, "What is your name?" in English, and we kept forgetting to ask what it is in Karen. We've tried a couple times to demonstrate what we're asking by asking each other, "What is your name?" And answering, "My name is Teacher Dani" or "My name is teacher Gabe." But our students always just repeat one of those phrases back to us when we direct the question at them: "What is your name? My name is Teacher Dani. My name is Teacher Gabe."
Finally, yesterday, I grabbed a white board and a marker and used the ever-handy stick-figures to draw a girl. I pointed to it and said, "Teacher Dani" and then pointed to myself. I drew another figure - a boy - and pointed to it and said, "Teacher Gabe," and then pointed to Gabe. Then I drew another, shorter, figure and pointed to it and then pointed to the title boy next to me and said, "What is his name?" The director's son, who seems to be the most bold with his English, immediately caught on and started giving the names of each student. We quickly transcribed each name onto a whiteboard, had the child hold the whiteboard, and then took a picture of the child with their name. Let's hope having the power of names on our side will help us keep that bunch of mostly little boys in line, since we've been getting progressively more rambunctious behavior each day!
In other news, the earthquake here in Myanmar didn't impact us in any way - I'm not even sure what time or what day it happened, as we felt nothing. The only way I knew it occurred was because we started getting texts and Facebook messages from people asking if we were OK.
Thanks form our concern!
- Dani
His wife and maybe some other ladies in the household had cooked up a feast for us. We had rice, of course, with the broth from a long-stemmed plant that had been boiled in water, and fried fish, fried and seasoned frog, and venison. It was delicious! We've had fish a few other times, but this was the first time we'd been offered red meat since we've been here.
The way one eats here is squatting or sitting on very low stools around a low table. Everyone at the table has a tin plate (if there are more people than plates, you just eat in shifts) filled with rice. Then you pour the broth over the rice, and start spooning toppings onto the rice. You eat with your fingers, so it's a bit of a messy endeavor.
One difference between American style food and Karen food is the presence of bones - in America, we usually try to remove bones as much as possible - although not every bone can be removed from chicken or fish or whatever - but here, it's just normal to have all the bones in the cooked food. I must admit, I chewed my fish carefully to make sure I got all the bones out before swallowing because the last thing I want here is a perforated intestine! Gabe found the frog skull he bit down on at one point a little disconcerting. I, personally, was having a little bit of a hard time with the hand-like front legs of the frog and the presence of it's skin!
The venison, however, was fantastic!
After dinner, we sat around playing with their toddler and visiting a little. We learned this couple has been married for 3 years and the husband is 26 years old. He's a medic here and sometimes helps with teaching at JSMK. Their younger child is 4 months old, and she was fussy because it was hot.
The wife invited me to go to the river and bathe after dinner, so i stopped by my house to grab my laundry pail and my lunghee (tube swimming dress/towel thing) and joined her. There were other ladies splashing in the water and washing their clothes, so I didn't talk much, but i enjoyed listening to their chatter. I'd taught "can" that day in class, and one of the things my students had learned was "can swim" so the students that we there had fun repeating "I can swim. Can you swim?" to me and to each other.
As for the rest of this week, we've chuckled a few times over how not-private our housing situation is here. The camp usually starts to wake up about 5:30 and work starts at 6am. We usually have our alarm go off when the roosters start to crow at 5:30 and we try to be heading out the door to either do a morning hike or head over to the PT field and do a workout. One day this week a crew of guys started coming up to our sleeping area about 5:35 to gather their tools for a construction project they were doing... And continued to come up and down the stairs for the next 40 minutes or so. Our "house" is also the storage shed for many things. I ended up taking my clothes to the bathroom to change because I didn't have any guarantee that I'd have 45 seconds of privacy to put on my workout clothes. Another night, after we'd gone to bed, a woman came upstairs shining her headlamp around the porch to search through totes in order to get more mosquito nets for the patients at the hospital. We literally never know when we're going to have people in our space.
This morning, as I was kneeling on the floor to be below the bamboo partition level of our upstairs porch so I could discreetly pull my shirt on and apply deodorant, Gabe came up the stairs and as me and started laughing. He said, "I promise I will take you somewhere soon where you don't have to change and put deodorant on while kneeling on the floor." Oh, what luxury!
It's been getting hot - I added the nearest city that I know of to my weather app so I can see the forecast - with temperatures reaching a high of 105-108 for the next 5 days. Usually this hot part is during my English class, which meets from 1-3pm. With no fans around, we pray for a breeze! After class we retreat to the space below our house to wait out the heat and hope for some wind. About 4:30 people start migrating down toward the river to do their nightly scrub. One day we took our Qwirkle game down to some large, flat rocks and play Quirkle with our feet in the water. Little fishes kept coming over to nibble the dried skin on our toes.
We have one more week of teaching here - maybe an additional day depending on the schedule for when we leave - and I have to admit we're both pretty excited to be finished with teaching for the foreseeable future (although we know we might get to Greece and find that's the best way to serve, in which case, we'll thank God for all the experience we've gathered this year and we'll jump right in!). It's been a good experience and we've enjoyed getting to know our adult students, but without a curriculum or even a plan of what to teach, it has definitely been attention consuming and required a lot of creative energy.
Yesterday we finally figure out the names of our preschoolers. They group of adorable kids show up each day to the preschool, but they don't know the phrase, "What is your name?" in English, and we kept forgetting to ask what it is in Karen. We've tried a couple times to demonstrate what we're asking by asking each other, "What is your name?" And answering, "My name is Teacher Dani" or "My name is teacher Gabe." But our students always just repeat one of those phrases back to us when we direct the question at them: "What is your name? My name is Teacher Dani. My name is Teacher Gabe."
Finally, yesterday, I grabbed a white board and a marker and used the ever-handy stick-figures to draw a girl. I pointed to it and said, "Teacher Dani" and then pointed to myself. I drew another figure - a boy - and pointed to it and said, "Teacher Gabe," and then pointed to Gabe. Then I drew another, shorter, figure and pointed to it and then pointed to the title boy next to me and said, "What is his name?" The director's son, who seems to be the most bold with his English, immediately caught on and started giving the names of each student. We quickly transcribed each name onto a whiteboard, had the child hold the whiteboard, and then took a picture of the child with their name. Let's hope having the power of names on our side will help us keep that bunch of mostly little boys in line, since we've been getting progressively more rambunctious behavior each day!
In other news, the earthquake here in Myanmar didn't impact us in any way - I'm not even sure what time or what day it happened, as we felt nothing. The only way I knew it occurred was because we started getting texts and Facebook messages from people asking if we were OK.
Thanks form our concern!
- Dani
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