In the hall of the mountain king

It's Monday night and after a rare cup of genuine, un(condensed milk)defiled coffee, I am recharged and excited to be on the edge of the second half of the ISDSI semester.
Two friends, Annie and Stephanie, and I spent the last three days mostly underground crawling through muddy passages on a caving course with a local climbing group called CMRCA, and it was amazing! There are no pictures because I am still waiting for my camera to resurface, but honestly they could not capture it anyway. The goal of the course is to teach some basics of cave exploration so that hopefully you can explore on your own in the future. We learned how to set up an anchor and some knots to allow us to rappel into shafts and then come back up the ropes using all kinds of fun and expensive gadgets clipped into our harnesses. The furthest down we rappelled was about 30 meters into a dark hole, and in another descent we passed through a space so small that several of us almost got stuck on our hips (too much sticky rice!) or chest depending on gender.... Looking back up into the opening from the darkness of the room below, I saw a rennaissance masterpiece of sunlight and blending shadows as the next climber eased down the rope, backlit. It was overwhelming and too beautiful to stop staring at.
Because it was rainy season, some of the cave passages were flooded with mud and water, and we got to duckwalk withour heads tilted to fit into the small space of air above the water and swim in mud and guano (bat poop) enriched pools. The most intense part of the course for me was not descending into dark pits but putting my helmeted head underwater to duck through a small hole in the rock and resurface in the next room. Underwater+underground+claustrophobia+ no light= very memorable, to say the least.
The last day we got to "lead" our guides through a cave and decide which passages to pursue to try to find the exit. This place was infested with bats and we spent the last 1/2 hour crawling on our bellies in puddingesque mud through a tight tunnel with the occasional bat flapping by. Needless to say, we felt pretty hardcore emerging into the sunlit world a solitary brown/grey and sloshing back to the parking lot victorious! Our guides were really knowledgable and we are planning to revisit CMRCA to boulder on their wall and maybe do some climbing later.
I have been refreshed so much in the past week and a half by growing relationships with my fellow students, reconnecting with my host family, and spending time out of doors using my body and spirit and not just my mind. I was surprised by the effect of the caves on me, from living formations to even fairly creepy cave dwellers (animals, not people, just to clarify!). Emerging from a tiny passage into a hall of colums and stones that have been forming mostly unseen, drip by drip, I felt like I stumbled into a cathedral. I found worship in just taking in that place.
I got a call from my host mom inviting me to gin khao (eat) with my family and a list of almost all the people I had met while living in Mae Rim for five weeks. Kat, the other girl who lived near me, and I arrived on Saturday night to find out that they were all related, which I could actually identify with due to many a Mennonite gathering, and it was a New Year family reunion! That was illuminating for all of the relationships we had been trying to figure out and also tons of fun. We made it into the family picture for the year, almost got added into the family tree, and got third (actually last) place in a banana eating competition. So good. Our families have been nothing but generous with us and as we learn more Thai we are able to know them better too.
Today I met with Katheryn, a British woman who works with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, about a possible internship for this summer. I think I reinforced all kinds of stereotypes and amused the rot deng (the closest thing to public transportation) driver when I asked to be taken to THE McDonalds in Chiang Mai, which was a landmark close to our meeting place. His response was, "Go Mac Donnal? Hahahahaha.."
Anyway, the project that I have been e-mailing with Katheryn and her boss Liz about is really exciting! They are working with the Thai government and minority communities to develop multilingual education curricula, which would enable children to be taught in their ethnic language and standard Thai. This is a really big deal for validating and helping to preserve the cultures of groups that are classified as 'low caste' by Thai society and have even been referred to as animals by some in government. From what Katheryn said, it sounds like the communities have varying goals and time tables for these multilingual projects, and SIL is having to work with complicated issues like what script to use for instruction and how to evaluate the effectiveness of programs for government requirements. There is movement also to use TPR, total physical response, with younger minority children learning Thai. This is something we also tried to use in Buffalo to teach refugee students a new language through methods involving the use of the whole body and allowing kids to communicate understanding through more means than written or spoken language. Very exciting!
The downturn is that is doesn't seem there is really a place for me to work with them as an intern this summer. I have not by any means mastered Thai and have minimal training and experience in an area that is mainly for people with masters degrees or more. If I did intern with SIL I would be doing mostly observation for this literacy aspect and then data analysis for the Survey department, which would mean lots of slave labor paperwork and computer research in an office. So.... plans change! One of my best and oldest friends (Becky, that's you!) gave me some great advice on this subject - I am experienceing new things I never knew about before, so I shouldn't be afraid to divert from what I always thought I would do to match this growing world. Thanks friend:)
So, this week will be sorting through internship options via ISDSI, reading intense amounts to prepare for our next expedition course into the forests of Mae Hong Son province, and going climbing for free on Ladies Night at CMRCA. On this course we will be backpacking and spending time in Karen villages in northern Thailand, and it is one of the big reasons I wanted to come to Thailand. Rousing discussion is already beginning as we are looking into preservation vs. conservation of wilderness and trying to understand the skewed balance between people and the natural world.
It seems that the protests and riots in Thailand are at least at a stall, and things feel less tense than they did a week ago. Chiang Mai was not affected at all like Bangkok, but there were some road closings nearby by the red shirts and everyone was talking about the latest news from the ASEAN summit or the capitol (al?). I asked my Pau for his opinion and he said," I go to work, I eat rice, I don't like to think about it." The protests this year, both in the airport closing and now during Songkran, have really hurt the tourism industry which is a significant part of Thailand's economy. One shop owner I talked with estimated that only 20-30% of expected tourists came to Chiang Mai, which is ordinarily the destination for New YEar's, for Songkran this year.
Ok, I am off to catch up on other world news and then ride out the rest of my caffeine buzz on a wave of forest ecology readings. Thanks for checking out my blog; know you are in my thoughts and much loved!
Melissa