Uncountable Nouns

It doesn't take much for me to cry. It runs in the blood, we say. My mum's side . A family joke. It's almost inevitable for my mum or her sister to start sniff-ing (and later, let out a sob or two) during family gatherings; it's so inevitable that we're sure to spot an uncle or two yawning in a corner and not paying the slightest attention nor trying to summon a sympathetic look in the least. I take after my mum, and oh, what a thing to take after. Sometimes I detest it so much. I cry so easily. I'm a "jepsu" as Aos would call it. Little things like some childhood memory of Christmas, a kind unexpected gesture, a scene from a movie that reminds me of some place I've been to or seeing a person that looks like someone dear to me can make my eyes well up with tears.

So it's really no big surprise that I felt a little emotional as I was typing the last lesson plan for this term. It's just the thought of doing something for the last time (for this year at least) I said to myself. Today being the last day of class before the students take their test tomorrow, I thought it'd be a nice treat for them to have some food and drinks. So over some pizza and some iced tea, we did a review of the things we had learned over the term. But more than the review, I enjoyed the fact that the students are already so fluent in the language to be able to converse about topics like education, corruption, what they've become better at over the course of the term, the dreams they have, the changes they want to see in their country. the " little" contributions they'd make to make life better. The students are really bright and it's such a remarkable feat that they have reached the Upper Intermediate level and have learned a second language with such proficiency.

So after a class like that, and given my history of jepsu-ness, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at myself as my eyes welled up with tears after I left the class. I felt it strong and I felt it deep. I'm an emotional person- the feeling-feeling type, if you please. But I had a moment there and small though it may be, it was a moment of triumph for me. A milestone of sorts and a reflection of how blessed I am. And I in all my inherited emotional glory received it as an addition to the unending list of blessings.

We did Countable and Uncountable nouns this term. Makes one wonder if blessings are really uncountable or countable.

in-the-making

There By The Sea

Paper Parasols

But For Now, This Is How We'll Talk

Communicating through speech comes to a stop after some time. With basic vocabulary learned over a span of just two months, there's only so much you can say. There's only so much to talk about. There's only so much miming and gesturing you can come up with. So I sit back and feel a little frustrated as my brain tries hard to make sense of what they're saying. I try and slow them down saying "Khoy bo khao jai" (I don't understand). Being honest and trying to find a way to give myself a break at the same time. Yet they persist. So I smile and try to get myself interested. They want to teach me how to dance. They try to remember the steps and begin to sway their hands and move their bodies. Their fingers make delicate movements as their hands sway from left to right, right to left. I've seen the actual dance with the accompanying music. Suffice it to say that the girls' version sans the music is so much better. They beckon me to join them. I get up and try to get my pace right, my fingers begin to move slowly to their delicate rhythm. So we dance for a little while as the girls try to sing a song, the words to which they try to remember. But we dance.

I then sat back and watched them dance; thinking, "Communicating through speech comes to a stop after some time..." But when it does, we find other means through which we still try to communicate... even though it's just our bodies swaying to the humming of a half-remembered song.

Hnff!

No, I didn't go snorkeling. But I went Lao river-fishing. Of course I didn't wear that. This was just for a photo. We hardly caught any fish. But it was quite fun. We had to go on boats down the river to the other side. I screamed like mad when two of the girls took me on a test ride. The boat bobbed around like crazy. I don't know how to swim and I don't know how deep the water was but if I've had a near-drowning experience in the shallow end of a pool, you know what I can be capable of.

One of the girls was a fisherman's daughter. So she knew her stuff. She knew the pretty waterfalls and the way around them. She knew how to steer the boat. She knew what to do. She led me by my hand and took me into the foliage, up to the falls, cautioning me to place my foot on this rock not that. She knew the place. I almost felt like calling her "Pocahontas". She even had her long hair tied up in a side pony tail. Not that Pocahontas ever did, or could have. You never know.

Since there was nothing much happening at the fish-catching front, I ended up collecting some shells on the river bank and chewing burnt buffalo hide tossed in coal over an old woman's fire which we kinda took over.

Humpy

On the way down to Vientiane from Luang Prabang, there's this place, almost half-way down, I think. It offers you a spectacular view. I'm used to seeing hills, but the hills around here are different. More... dramatic, I'd say. So... humpy. I mean like the humps of a camel, of course. There's a picture of me sitting on the bench. But I think this looks much better.

Along the river Nam Khan and the Mekong, Luang Prabang sure can light up pretty

Stew Or Something Like It

So after a really long day, I came home with the girls. I was starving. We had some meat left in the freezer. So I delegated duties to the girls to take charge of the rice. It took me some time to "defrost" the meat in a tub of hot water. Then I struggled to slice them into really thin pieces so that they would get cooked real fast. I had some idea of what I was doing, trying to remember the taste of some meat stew cooked with some squash which I'd eaten many times back home. There was nothing much in the fridge, so I didn't have much of a choice. Garlic always does the trick for me. Well maybe tonight, it overdid it a little 'cause the entire house still smells of garlic, but anyway, the stew was made. I became a little conscious as I laid the dish on our small table... the girls eager to see what the "falang" (Lao word for "foreign") had cooked. I muttered "Ah, bo seb!" (Ah, not tasty!) a little nervously. They tasted it and one said "Seb, seb!", nodding and urging the other to go "Seb, seb!" in agreement. Of course, I knew that they were only being nice. But I was too hungry to care by then. I had three helpings. Ehe. I think the girls actually enjoyed it though. When a dish meant to last for two meals almost gets over in one, either the diners were really hungry or it was a damn good dish. Either way, I'm stuffed, happy and droopy-eyed.

Some change. Pun intended.

Sweeter than finding change in the pockets of old denims--- finding two hundred dollars neatly folded inside an envelope in my laptop bag.

The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Of late, I had really been thinking how blessed I am. I have been provided for in ways that are incredible over the past few months. In many ways, I have found my faith to be encouraged as I saw Him to be my Provider. I wanted to consciously make an effort to make the blessings that came in to flow out. Silly though the gestures seemed, I tried to bless others in small ways- buying food, filling up the gas tank, etc . though I was beginning to run short on cash. I think today's pleasant (an understatement, recollecting how I squealed) incident has encouraged my heart that I'm on the right track; that this could be a way of life, a way to be. I sheepishly grin to think that it took more than loose change to convict a cynic a like me.

November~ Chronicling Memories.

It's the first of November. For some reason, winter always has a way of surprising me. Like a guest arriving unannounced a little earlier than expected. Okay. Lousy metaphor. Simply put, when I woke up this morning, the air was chilly and I had to wear something warm. Assuming that the climate here is tropical, I came unprepared. How I miss my winter clothes...
I walked to work this morning. The sun was out and it was a beautiful morning. I'm normally not very generous with compliments to or what I say about mornings. Suffice it to say that I'm not a morning person. But it was a beautiful morning today. For the first time this year, I could smell winter in the air. I usually claim to smell many things in the air. For instance, I've uttered things like, "I can smell Kohima" or "It smells like Aunty So and so's house." Smells, like music, hold memories... Rushdie said that in one of his books, I think. And indeed, there are a myriad of experiences one can attach to such peculiarities.
I guess I thought that I could "smell winter" because on the way to the school, I got whiffs of some burning branches. I remember cold Kohima evenings when unused or bare branches of the pine for the Christmas tree would be burned. One could also smell yet other branches from other houses being burned in the local garbage dump. That's a "winter smell" for me. The smell of pine trees remind me of a particular evening one winter. My mum and I went up to a hill in the forest with her friend to get our Christmas trees (I don't think we can do that anymore :D). Our annual contribution to deforestation, one could say, before an ersatz one made a permanent substitution. Anyway, it was a beautiful winter evening. I can remember the tall pines silhouetted against the dark blue winter sky. I get reminded of this often, especially whenever I think about winter... and this memory, among others, is so poignant because it was just a few years before my mum's friend would die of cancer.
November makes me nostalgic about my school days. November meant the approach of the final exams. November meant the completion of S.U.P.W projects which involved the burning of the ends of satin strips to make flowers of some sort, and exhibiting them and finally having them hoarded away by the nuns. November meant religious math tuition till the night before the exam, the scrubbing of desks and benches on the playground, setting up the classrooms, and finally taking the exams. And sure, November also meant that school's nearly out for a good two months. Better still, November was a herald to glorious December.
...Glorious December. Much of it seems to have worn off as I've grown older though. I've heard the same thing being lamented by others. Maybe age has got something to do with it. Somehow, the farther removed the memories are from the present, the sweeter they seem to be. And the more fragmented they become, the lovelier they begin to seem.
It's the first of November. For some reason, winter has surprised me once again by arriving a little earlier than I expected. And yet again, it has succeeded in making me slip into a reverie of days long gone. November does that to me. Makes me want to chronicle memories.

Phasa Angkit

It's the mid-term test tomorrow at ARDA. Besides other things, it means that I've been here and been working as an "ajaan" (teacher) of phasa Angkit (English language) for over a month and a half. Teaching the Upper Intermediate level hasn't really been easy. I've had a lot of I-know-it's-the-correct-form-of-grammar-to-use-but-I-can't explain-why moments. Having the smallest class in the centre has been such a relief though. I've had some good classes. But I've also had those ones where I've walked out feeling extremely useless and almost asking existential questions, I might add. Thankfully, they wear off easily. Either I'm getting stronger or plain indifferent.
I've wondered though, still am in fact, why I'm doing what I'm doing. Honestly, teaching the English language isn't what I really want to do. It's important, yes, and opens up greater vistas to non/ yet-to-be-English speakers. Sometimes I just want to throw my hands in the air (have done, in fact) and say "What does it even matter? What does it matter if they screw up their use of grammar, mess the syntax up, use a wrong preposition here, a wrong tense there... as long as meaning is communicated with a little bit of extra gesturing and facial expressions and miming and pictionary..." I guess I think about this more often on the I-know-it's-the-correct-form-of-grammar-to-use-but-I-can't explain-why kind of days.
On other days though, I have thought about how important it is to them to learn English. Most of the people here, or at least my students, aren't learning the language with the hopes of going to some English-speaking country. They want to work here. Some already are. But Laos being one of the rising tourist attractions in S. E Asia over the past decade, there's been a lot of scope for them to be in the tourism industry. Although they probably don't speak the language at their work places or schools, I guess knowing a foreign language adds a feather to one's cap.
It's also made me think of the effects of colonialism and how long-lasting they are. Besides other reasons, one of the main causes for the spread of the English language, or other languages too, was colonialism. I suppose the debate of 'Why should we learn the coloniser's language?' has become long redundant. It's just one of those things. Changes that take place. The kind of stuff that history is made of. Nevertheless, I still wonder how a language spoken by the inhabitants of a European country has become "the language"... the lingua franca of the world. And I wonder at myself after the what-does-it-even-matter moments pass; that having been a beneficiary of an English education, it is easy for me to be less considerate for them who haven't had that. Good thing though that they weren't colonised by the English. But well, they got colonised by the French anyway, a reason why French is still a major language that is offered in school curricula. Inter-mingling of languages is imminent as changes take place, nevertheless, every time I teach the language, at the back of my head, I feel like I'm being a part of a colonial reverberation.

For myself or for posterity's sake. Or whoever is interested.

I think I have a pretty good memory. Especially when it comes to remembering experiences. I can recall memories from childhood with vivid details. Details, yes. I tend to pay a lot of attention to details. But a small fear is that over time, with more and more experiences being had, I might begin to forget some. Or worse still, I would stop caring to remember. I've stopped writing in my journal, a habit I have had since I was six, for a long time now. I've just become lazy. Writing a blog seems futile to me. Well, it wouldn't be if one had a big audience to be writing for. But to write and leave these words floating in cyber space (if they float at all) doesn't make much sense to me. I'd much rather mail a friend and splurge all the details. But I want to remember. If not for anybody else, for myself. And well, re-collecting them memories by sieving through mails sent to people seems painfully tiresome. So with the mission to "pen" down my experiences so that I can one day, perhaps, recount them all to posterity (or to myself when I wish to relive my past), I'll give this a try.