the night is lovely as a rose.

If you're reading this blog, you won't really be able to interpret it correctly without plugging in a pair of earbud headphones and listening to the second half of the album "Tallahassee" by the mountain goats while you read. start with the track "Peacocks". Bonus points to the person who actually does this and tells me which track I lifted the title of this blog post from.

I'm finding that I blog best when my room is filled with noise and I can plug headphones in. Most of what I hear is Bob Dylan singing "Desolation Row", but whenever there are silences in the song I can hear the faint exclaimations of one of my roommates in their native english, portuguese, thai, or khmer. I share a room with 8 other people. Abraham, Austin M., Taylor, Josua, X, Art, David, and Tearith. Every day this room is filled with laughter and plenty of other indiscernable noise and music. our collections of day-to-day items, meager by western standards, bulge at the seams of our bedposts and drawers.

in the first few days in any new place, there's this glossy matting that the human mind applies to a place. there's no nuance; you're either entranced or horrified by any of the given details of a place. but as the time and experience grows, and the cells in one's body begin to become more populated with the nutrients of fruit from the local market and water from the local aquifers, one begins to notice the subtle details that make a place what it is.

When I got to Ramsong (the name of Ramkhamhaeng university's Bang Na campus and the surrounding area, which is where I'm living), it was easy in the first week to view it all with the lens of excitement and newness. Even the darker things about the place that would make themselves visible could be accepted for the kerouackian thrill that poverty can bring. but as the time begins to linger and the faces of the neighbors become familiar, those things that make a place human begin to have a humbling effect. the gunshots heard at night, the men who make a daily practice of digging through trash cans looking for food and things of value, the stray dogs brawling in the back alleys. Poverty doesn't announce itself here in Prawet like it does in the heart of the city, there aren't enough of us pharongs here to make it economically viable. But it is here. and it's humbling. it makes a pharong feel spoiled, from your waterproof shoes that keep your feet warm and dry to your conspicuous white skin that guarantees you no fare-taker on the 48 bus will ever check your fare receipt. I'm getting used to the stares. Part of me wants to use my camera more; I try to avoid that sort of thing, trying to blend in, but I'm not really kidding anyone, am I? Besides, you pull a camera out and you're guaranteed a smile from most, although I have the nagging suspicion that the laughter is the sort of laughter we in america use out of nervousness or at the secret expense of others. The asian culture puts great importance on saving face, but when you're white in asia you don't have any walnut-shell-colored face to save. My camera is half-broken, anyways. if I use the zoom more than halfway, it has to be turned off and on again. Part of me is hoping it'll get stolen so I can muster up the moral relativism to spend a few thousand baht on another one.

The first week of actual lectures was wonderful. Each week we get a new teacher to teach whatever topic is at hand, who flies in for the week, and afterwards heads off to some other school of kids like us in some other subdivision of the world. which means that not only do you get to be taught by people from many walks of life, but the people themselves are filled with a past of adventures. Our first teacher taught about the ways God speaks, intercession, and prayer. The week has been really healthy for me, both because I'm adjusting myself to a decidedly non-trumanesque academic experience and because it really humbled me. I'm used to having a study environment that is built around a rubric and a syllabus - with very clear expectations and assessment mechanisms. this is different, because it becomes completely up to me to get out of these months of lectures what I want to. I won't be able to get to the end and hold up one of the first four letters of the alphabet as an oversimplified quantifier for my experience. What I loved the most about her teaching style was that, trying my hardest to make use of my liberal arts education, I was only able to make about 10 book-sized-pages of notes in a week's worth of class time. the content of those notes is GREAT, but I'm not being taught of the rise and fall of the roman empire. So much of what she taught were stories. Every little principle about what makes prayer effective or how God speaks was paired with anywhere between ten minutes to an hour's worth of our teacher's life. stories from when she was young and insecure in her faith, stories of when God called her to things she didn't want to do. Stories of God's grace and of his goodness. As the stories mounted I began to feel like I knew her, as her stories connected me to her life in the way that only shared experiences can do. 

The other thing about my M-F is that it's very structured. it begins with a team workout at 6:20, and needs to end by 10 or 11 in order for the next day to begin. 15 of my meals each week are shared with the other members of the DTS. I'm convinced that in order to truly love community, one must begin to practice the art of losing to oneself an inherent attribute of man. We're buggable. we let things get to us. when you share a room with 8 other people, a shower with 10 other people, and a house and most meals with 27 other people, every little detail begins to reveal itself. It makes you better, shows you things about yourself that you wouldn't know otherwise because you see it in someone else and it drives you crazy. A microcosm of this is the bed I'm typing this from. I'd type this out from the desk, but there's one desk and nine of us, so it's always taken. the bed is constantly draped with wet clothes that aren't mine, and the bed often shakes from the movement of someone else's body. its' underside is stuffed because the drawers are full. and there's a part of me that wants to revolt. run home to a place where I have 800 cubic feet all to myself. OH, that sounds like a mansion now. but I won't. community bugs me, but the problem is that I absolutely love it. it's the most honest interpretation of beauty that humans are capable of. We become conditioned to love one another because without love there's no logic to all the inconveniences we voluntarily accept. It's the love that sustains our patience, that makes this whole crazy life worth living anyways. I would speak more eloquently about this, or provide pictures to accentuate my point, but I have to wake up in six hours to make breakfast for 24 people. Life is beautiful.

suitcase heart, Pt. I

Friends all around me talking into computes in languages I don’t understand. For a while I can take the language for the beauty inherent in its audible aesthetics. Soon, however, the headphones come out and my mind is able to find comfort in its native aesthetic language, the sounds of Abigail Washburn’s banjo and fiddle. 

Before I left home I performed a sacred ritual, required of every pilgrimage to Kansas City: a trip to the Westport Half Price Books, to rummage through the clearance albums and books. A few gems glimmered in the rough, as though placed just for me, for this exact time. A collection of essays on Thailand, written in both English and Thai. A small book of poems written by a homeless adventurer in Prague. The book about Thailand is obviously more relevant to my locale, but the adventure book, “off the map”, perhaps fits most perfectly the location of my soul. It opens with a handwritten preface: 

This is what it means to be an adventurer in our day: to give up creature comforts  of the mind, to realize possibilities of imagination. Because everything around us says no you cannot do this, you cannot live without that, nothing is useful unless it’s in service to money, to gain, to stability. 

The adventurer gives in to tides of chaos, trusts the world to support her - and in doing so turns her back on the fear and obedience she has been taught. She rejects the indoctrination of impossibility.

My adventure is a struggle for freedom.

I wish to write a book like this one, even for solely my own benefit. a book of stories, of lives, shoestringing together the big and little things that make life on this earth seem so significant in all its temporary transitory fleetingness. A suitcase heart of memories and people and places, with words dripping with feeling and emotion. It feels ridiculous keeping a DTS journal, a personal journal, a blog, and writing a book, and keeping spare journals around to scribble poems and recipes and thoughts, but what’s a life anyway? dust, I suppose. a lot of it will probably either be written or regurgitated here. so don’t you worry, dear readers.

I woke up early, as I’m getting quite used to at this point. my directions were laid out meticulously, as I didn’t want to have any risk of getting lost. I hadn’t been alone in a week, and I hadn’t been into the center of the city, so I decided to do both at once and hope for the best. If I missed a connection and ended up stranded, I had five or six numbers scribbled down to call for rescue from a payphone. there were two buses that would take me where I wanted to go; the 48 and 46 bus. “Get the 48”, I’d been advised. “It has aircon, and you’ll be on that bus for hours.” I had  “สถานีพร้อมพงษ์” handwritten in my rudimentary thai, and I pointed at it to the coin-taker of a very non-airconditioned 48 bus. “Phrong Phong BTS”, she said, and motioned for me to sit, as thought I would be sitting for a long while. So I sat and took in the city. The morning wind flowed through the bus, making up for the lack of freon-cold with the feeling of windy, loose freedom. This freedom I speak of isn’t the kind our forefathers threw tea into the ocean for, it’s the  other kind. The raw freedom, the kind that keeps you on your wits and takes the lives of dicey motorcyclists. The kind that keeps the wheel in spin, choosing the rich and the poor and leaving everything all in chance. As I got closer to the towering center of the city, the space that divided the two got smaller. Stacked malls filled with all the treasure and opulence in the world backed up gracefully to tin-shack slums and polluted streams and the dust of twelve million people.

I had tried to give myself plenty of time by eating a quick breakfast at one of the ubiquitous 7-11 convenience stores that populate a corner of each block of the city. I needed to get to church by 10:30 and didn’t know what I was in for, so I was shocked to be shaken out of my awe by the coin-taker, who gestured me off the bus at 9:25. I got to the church and was whisked in before I realized I had an hour to kill. I was social for a while but tuned out a bit. there are only so many times one can say “I’m Austin from Missouri, I’m here for YWAM’s Bangkok DTS” and make the small-talk about jetlag. Still, the people were kind and hospitable and I sat down, my old trusty bible providing some reading material to make myself look busy and not be a bother to the worship team that had let me in.

A while later I went upstairs to the coffeeshop and got a latte. more expensive than what I’m used to in Dok Mai, but still a steal compared to anything back home. 30 baht, about a dollar, for what would run four dollars in independence and be made with burned beans because all independence has is a starbucks. I went downstairs to one of my favorite sights in the world: a close friend. It sent me a shock of joy to see Grace. In a whole new culture, with all new people, it’s a special thing to have time someone you don’t feel compelled to have to share your whole life story with in order to have community. As for church, I enjoyed the message of encouraging others, but I’m still getting used to having to wait after every sentence for translation. It’s teaching me patience. We got lunch afterwards, which was an even higher ratio compared to Dok Mai (about double), but reasonable when I remember that a 55 baht meal is still about a dollar and 85 cents. We meandered to an open-air market, and the darkness of Bangkok that eluded me began to show itself in small slivers of physical and spiritual poverty. In our first week, we had been spared the brunt of Bangkok’s very real socioeconomic problems. This day alone began to open me to the pain, both through the vignettes of poverty evident in the architecture and in the faces of despair that pass briskly in the markets, begging for change as though a few baht will bring the healing they’re searching for. 

We met up with a few more of Grace’s friends from her campus ministry, the Grapevine, which meets at a campus in the north part of town. soon we were off to their weekly outreach playing games with children in rougher parts of town. I felt a bit awkward at first, but i’m getting a little more comfortable interacting with thai people and making my rudimentary attempts at the few phrases I’ve been taught so far.

The day passed shorter than usual. Spending so much time in transit seems to shorten the time. as the sun set I wound my way back south to Dok Mai through the skytrain and another very unairconditioned 48 bus. it was more noticeable now that the city had been given a chance to sweat. It’s a feeling of accomplishment to navigate a foreign city without getting lost, and as the day has passed I feel like more of a citizen of Bangkok, and not just the area surrounding Ramsong. and now the real school begins, and along with it a strict M-F schedule that begins with group exercise at 6:20 AM. the bed, she harkens. a day’s adventure ends, but a new one awaits in the morning.

Details

So far, this blog has read much like a travelogue, detailing the things I did. I'm going to try to get away from that a bit, and try to take more artistic liberties, because I think it's missing the point. I could fill up whole pages following along the shoestring of my day, "I did this, I did this, and then then this." and that's boring. lots of exciting things are happening, but painting them with broad strokes doesn't describe why this first week in bangkok has given me joy. it's the details. the little things and small moments and sights, that give me new feelings that I haven't felt before. so here it is: the things that have made me feel.

• The hope and love in the eyes of my fellow students, who love like family though our friendships have barely begun. the way that each day new details spill out and give my understanding of them shape and form and substance beyond whatever my first impressions gave.
• The way the dirty laundry water runs off the rooftop and down the sides of the building, as the clothes of assorted housemates catch the breeze and give the wind shape. 
• All the beautiful language, only portions of which I'll understand. Today I've heard at least snippets of thai, english, german, dutch, spanish, and indonesian. the sound of P'Steph's southern accent after her bloodstream begins to feel the effects of the ice cream. the connection I feel with each of my thai-speaking friends each time they teach me a new word.
• The way the roads meander, the way the cars swerve, and the feeling of raw vulnerable freedom that comes from each crossing of the street. the way the stray dogs coexist with men, finding empty landings to occupy and walking alongside you as you walk. the smile that comes to the faces of Thai passerby at Farangs, laughing both with you and at you and smile at you.
• The way each spice makes the dish so uniquely thai and so filled with flavor and depth and substance, the way you can know where in the country the recipe (and perhaps its chef) came from just by knowing what ingredients go in it.
• The feelings of stories I can't share, from places I can't name, from people who give me joy. The way the thai and expat missionaries worship. 
• The heat and the sweat and the joy and the sorrow and the moments of homesickness and the moments where you wouldn't be anywhere else. the scattering of pictures on my small portion of wall, reminding me of people I miss, many of whom I won't see for a long time. the facebook statuses from friends making that sacred car-ride from the cities of missouri to make it in time for truman week. the longing that comes with knowing I won't be there, the joy that comes from knowing the blessings that are in store for my underclassmen friends.
• the promise and the mystery of each new sidestreet, each passing moment, each coming night. The way the first few jetlagged days breeze by and feel ancient even days later, and the sense of urgency that that brings. The way the shower temperature and the calorie intake and the bacteria in the water begin to become "normal" and the way my body now accepts this firm bed as my own, when days before I would toss all night. The feeling of finding home in a strange new place.

I'll be coming up with new ones as they come to me. Hi, Tiffany.

I can tell that we are gonna be friends.

hey kids.

today was a great day. I don't feel like saying any objective "my time is going to be X here" statements because the DTS doesn't start until tomorrow, but today made me HAPPY.  It started off by taking my first shower since I left (forgot to pack a towel, picked one up at market. showers are a lovely thing.) I then went with Caleb and my new friends Josua from Germany and Taylor from Minnesota and we went to get breakfast. Rice! My favorite! 

Each meal so far has run about 30 baht (about a dollar). 

We got back, and as soon as we got back we met my new friends Stephanie and Brittany, both from california, and who although they never knew each other before, describe themselves as "the same person". they invited us to church, and so about 7 of us crowded into two taxis and adventured our way across town to [I have no idea where]. And oh, it was a trip, complete with Taylor's water bottle pouring out into his pocket and soaking his pants for the rest of the afternoon, and entering the highway via going  up the off-ramp and pulling a U-turn up onto the highway. The lines and arrows on the roads are just suggestions, you guys. I think americans are hampered by all our traffic laws. So much art and finesse is required in order to drive recklessly whilst not dying, and we really deny ourselves the experience.

We got to church about an hour early and so we went into the market for a while. Living in community is SO GREAT, KIDS. everyone is showing so much patience and earnestness in getting to know each other. we're developing our default facial expressions for when cameras get shoved in our face. Summer, if you're reading this, I'm borrowing heavily from when you pucker your lips. I hope you accept my plagiarism. 

It's so great to be getting to know new people who all have this great sunny attitude, wanting to be friends. new friends, if you're reading this from facebook-stalking me, Hi! now get off of the stupid internet and come play with me.

the hotel where we had church

We went to church. service started at two and lasted for about an hour. I don't know where I'll be regularly attending yet, the DTS leaders encourage us to get plugged in with a local church, but this one was pretty cool! the pastor and his wife are from Sweden. today they told us the story of when they were on a YWAM DTS (Like us!) in the Caucasus region of eurasia and were kidnapped and spent 6 months in a Chechnyan dungeon. COMFORTING. but the testimony they had of trusting god and having him deliver and learning to forgive their captors was truly beautiful. and the praise songs were great too, we sang each refrain twice, once in english and once in thai. The thai language is growing on me, even though I don't really know it. It's hard having to be humble and accepting that I will need to work really hard in order to speak even remotely as well as I speak english. I love having a mastery of the english language, being able to use big fancy words like "methodology" and "neopostmodern" and "pedantic". to only be able to speak as well as a three year old is humbling and frustrating. it doesn't matter what you know if you can't communicate it.

On the way back to Ram II (our home bus-stop), we took a bus. busses were also an adventure. it reminded me of good times in Cape Town, weaving in and out of lanes with traffic protocol being an afterthought, trusting the driver completely to deliver us without killing us. I love these kids I'm with, everyone has been great and friendly and open and my Thai classmates have helped us a lot in navigating and helping us order off menus. when we got back to ram II we went to the market to get dinner. Rice! My favorite! I need to start taking pictures of meals.

we got back, played some music on the roof, played some spoons. today was a beautiful starting point to our big adventure together, and I'm excited for tomorrow. Bright and early, 7 o'clock, the fun begins.

Friends, if you're reading this, facebook me. I want to make a skype-schedule, where at least once a week I talk to someone new. starting to miss all of you folks, especially those of you who got a summer's head start.

I'm working on my blog writing style. it's a work in progress; the last time I blogged regularly I was 15 and used the internet to whine about my feelings. So be patient with me.

*written under the influence of sleep deprivation

As the plane took off from San Francisco, I plugged my headphones into the armrest, thumbed through a few radio channels playing forgettable pop music, and then I hit it. Channel nine was "Classic Rock", and I was instantly frozen that unmistakable hammond organ chord, shaking me to my bones with the raw emotion of the feeling of leaving and going far away for a long time.
how does it feel?
how does it feel?
to be on your own
with no direction home
like a complete unknown
like a rolling stone.


the song eventually ended, and the little plane on the map on the screen meandered its way  closer to the aleutian islands, with each little dot on the projected itinerary representing a hundred miles.


The previous day sent me all over the city, getting one immunization and finding out I needed another, driving back and forth through the city finishing last errands and making final goodbyes, and ending at 1:30. three short hours later, the alarm's squeals shook me violently into consciousness. We made it to the airport as the eastern horizon was starting to glow, and by the time the plane took off towards california the sun had risen, not to set again for another 36 hours. 

On the plane to San Francisco, I made a friend. The girl who sat behind me was named Madeline, she was seven years old, and she was traveling all by herself, except for her doll, La-La-Loopsy, and her unicorn, Sparkles. The danger of making friends with a seven year old not under adult supervision who has a unicorn in her possession is that the odds that you're going to get a unicorn thrown at you grows exponentially. She kept the flight attendant's hands full for a good portion of the flight and ran up and down the aisles and gave stickers and hugs to all of us who talked to her. As we got closer to california and the plane got low enough in altitude to see the boroughs of San Francisco, she decided that it was time to land the plane because she was tired of keeping her seatbuckle on. The clouds that floated around the city reminded her of how much she loves rainstorms, and how her sister would get scared but she wouldn't get scared. There's something indescribably beautiful about the way children are when the only adults around to stop them choose not to. 

I watched a few films to burn the first few hours. We had to watch everything together on the main screen, and they showed the films "Water for Elephants", "Rio", and "Win-Win". I love the awkward way that airline movies will cut scenes and haphazardly dub over cuss words in order to make things inoffensive. I talked for a few hours with my neighbor, Jessica. Airplanes have this wonderful element of chance, where if you're willing to speak up you get to learn all about someone else that would have never happened otherwise. I was on three flights, and I met three completely different people who I ended up in great conversations with. 

I got into Tokyo and had about 4 hours to hang out. It didn't help me that I was already completely exhausted from traveling, but I was able to see some neat toilets, and products that sound terrible (like Wasabi-flavored Kit-Kats), and had some really great sushi.

I normally can never sleep on airplanes. I once made it all the way from Cape Town to Kansas City without sleeping because of this tendency. but for whatever reason, before the plane even left the runway towards Bangkok I was done for. I only woke up for the meal for the first few hours, and I woke up completely only about an hour before landing, so I don't even really know how long the flight was without looking it up. I did end up talking to my neighbor, a Thai woman who lives in DC going home to see her mother for Thai mothers day (Happy Thai Mothers Day, Mom!).

I got into Bangkok still fairly drowsy, made my way through customs. this is the part of the blog post that I'm not going to write because it's all fairly obligatory, nothing particulary special happened except for the sheer neatness of it. Three of my leaders picked me up and we took a 20-minute car ride to the base. went to BED. woke up 5 and a half hours later, still super-tired but knowing I need to stay up all day if I want to beat jetlag.

It's fun waking up somewhere, when you've arrived at night and don't know what it looks like in the sun. The building I'm staying in is 5 stories tall and bright orange. There are buildings on both sides, and in front of the building is the Bang Na campus of Ramkhamhaeng University. In the back is several city blocks worth of wild pasture. This is my backyard:

The roof opens up into a small covered lounge and working space that allows for views of the whole surrounding area. Many-a-journal entry will be written here.

Caleb, one of the DTS leaders, took me out for my first taste of real thai food. it's everything one could hope for. I met several members of the DTS from Louisville, Kentucky, who are here on outreach. I was the second male member of the group to arrive, and two new members have trickled in.

I forgot a towel. I need to go find one before the stores close. I intend to make future posts not so travelogue-y. Bye!