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.
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