When life gives you dragon fruit…

Trusting the Universe once more, I jumped into the van of Aom and her husband, a young couple who owns an international teacher placement agency, and rode with them for about eight hours to Khun Han. Khun Han is a district in the Sisaket province in Eastern Thailand, at 50 kilometers from the border with Cambodia and not far from Laos. It is a farmer town and pretty small.

When we arrived it was late and went straight to bed in our old and mold-stinking hotel. I was too tired to think, so I pushed my first reaction, which was to run away, to be dealt with in the morning. I get that uncomfortable feeling anywhere I go. I even have it when I go to Argentina, where I lived most of my life. I try to think it as an inertia effect: you are comfortable where you live (happy or not) and suddenly (after just a flight or a land ride; not after months or years of roaming) you find yourself in an unknown place where you will have to figure out how to subsist. I imagine it is our survival instincts that act in response to this threat, making us want to run away.

The length of this feeling of distress varies according to the destination. I vividly remember arriving into a dark hotel room in Chiang Mai at 5 AM after traveling for two days. I had just resigned from my hateful job and left my life as I knew it in Washington, DC, to study Thai massage for a couple of months. As I dropped my bags on the floor I thought “What the hell have I done?” Only five minutes later I had fallen in love with the city.

Khun Han, on the other hand, is not as enchanting as Chiang Mai.

Early in the morning we went to school to meet the director and staff, who are very kind. The school is huge with 2400 students and 104 teachers, including another international teacher and an empty position. Next, the unsuccessful home search started. There are very few apartments to rent in town and the one they wanted me to rent has no internet access. Alas! I am a little spoiled but not having internet at a small town where the locals do not speak English… My homesick levels would spike drastically. The couple from the agency then tried to leave me at a teacher’s home and go back to Bangkok. That was the moment were my delayed reaction of running away kicked in. I called Jam in Pattaya, who wisely recommended not quitting until I found another job, and sadly cried. The couple felt really badly and instead left me at a nicer hotel and promised to find an apartment with internet access for me within a week.

As I found out later, there has been quite a bit of turn over for the international teacher positions. The school fired a teacher because, he came from Cameroon and, apparently, his English was very poor.  Two other teachers simply “disappeared” in the last couple of months, after being in town for a few days. The only teacher who has been here since classes started in May is Paul, a 42 year old man from England who is very helpful and also rather exasperating. He lives at school with his Thai girlfriend.

Stuck at a small town in the countryside, at hundreds and hundreds of kilometers from anywhere, missing my family and friends in Argentina, in America, and my latest friends scattered around South East Asia, I decided to stay put and make the best out of this situation. Life is not giving me lemons, but tons of other fruits like dragon fruit, rambutans, mangosteens, and others than I cannot name. Therefore, I will enjoy them all –except for the disgusting durians, mind you!