Goodbyes

What is the latest with you, Pimonrat?

Does anyone rest in the sala where we sat?

Is brother Ek the same - act and scream like a brat?

Can you still run like the wind, Pimonrat?

This is the beginning of a poem I wrote in 1996 (unpublished), when I was still working through my departure from Peace Corps and Thailand.  Entitled "Faces from the Past," it focused wistfully on six of my favorite students and my memories of them.  Amidst the snows and cold of the New Hampshire winter, I was having a hard time facing the idea that I might never return to Southeast Asia.  My two-year experience there had done wonders for me - it was like being reborn.


During that winter, I wrote poems, created journals and photo albums, and I even sat down and wrote a Christmas note to each student in two classes and all the teachers at my former school.

As far as I knew, I would never see Thailand again.

Over the next few years, things changed dramatically.  I returned to Thailand for a short trip in 2000, went back with a job in 2001,  got married in 2003, and have now lived here more years than not since then.

There is some poigancy as I read the poem now.  In 2012, Pimonrat, who was one of my favorite students during my Peace Corps years, died because of a long-standing illness.  I attended her funeral, under dark clouds and rain near her home in my former province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, and felt the great sadness of seeing a younger person, who had become a mother to two sons, pass out of this world much too soon.

Life has moved on.  Over the last tumultuous year, I lost one opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia, spent a harsh winter in the United States battling snow and another cold winter, engaged in phone interviews for jobs in NYC, wrote out an entire Fulbright application, underwent an intensive CELTA course for a month during the hot season, and at the end of June, finally secured a job in South Korea, at a place called Woosong University in the city of Daejeon.  I will see snow again.  I will see baseball.

Things can change very quickly in our lives.

I decided I needed a celebration.  And so, for the last month, I have been around the country.  My celebratory travels have taken me back to Nakhon Si Thammarat, in the south of the country and as far north as Chiang Rai, on the border of Myanmar (I lived in Chiang Rai for over two years), and in August, Supalak and I were able to host our good friends from the United States, who had never traveled here before.  

It was an amazing month, filled with dinners, parties, reunions with people I hadn't seen for a long time, and travel by plane and bus, and rental car.  

I will always remember in particular the reunion I had with some former students of mine, who were 8th graders when I was in Peace Corps, and who are all 30+ years old now.

In particular, I will remember the one moment when one of them posted on Facebook my hand-written note that I had written during that cold winter of 1996.  She had kept it for the last 20 years.  What a wonderful thing to know that my hopeful note, sent in the dead of winter, had survived the heat and damp of Thailand for the last two decades.

For a long time now, I have always carried the conviction that one should mark the occasion between great shifts in one's life, and moving wholesale to another culture falls in that category.  This is a big move.  We are leaving Thailand for now to seek more opportunity, better pay, and to experience something new, to learn and to grow, and I'm sure all this will happen.  At the same time, I know I will miss Thailand and the patterns of life that seem normal to me as anything else, but I also hope Thailand will become a better place. 

When will I return?  I don't know the answer to that yet, and I can't but feel a vague sense of longing for the time I can "settle down" for good with my books and papers.  There is no confusion this time as I look at the future.  I know I will be back to this country eventually, as I depart for a colder climate and kimchi, and that, in some ways, is a comforting thing.

In the last verse of the poem I wrote in 1996, I continued to probe the emotions of my experience during Peace Corps with the final verse:

And what is the story with you, Wanpen?

Do you ever think of your old Ajaan Ben?

Will we ever see each other again?

Would we still feel as strongly as we did back when?

I found my answer during my travels and to all of these, it is a strong "yes," for Wanpen was one of my former students that I reunited with during my tour.  We talked and traveled, and relived the memories we had, and built a few more.  Going back to Nakhon Si Thammarat has always felt like going home, and I feel as strongly about that place as any other in the country.

And so I know I will miss you all, dear friends in Thailand, and look forward to the days of our reunions and meetings in the near and distant future, even as I look forward to all the good things to come with this opportunity in a culture I have yet to learn about, and to all the possibilities that will come.

Life is a journey.  Onward we go.