Thai Fact Check is an ongoing series written by Morgan Shupsky who uses her personal experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer to fact check everything that you may or may not want to know about Thailand.
Morgan Shupsky, 134 YinD
This October, we hit the six-month anniversary of being at our sites, and following that anniversary the most common question I’m being asked is either: Did six months fly by? Or, Do you feel like you’ve been there forever?
Honestly this is a hard one to answer because my answer changes frequently. First of all, something you should know about me – I’m a huge “countdown-er”. As in, I always had the countdown app on my phone for my birthday, Christmas, the last day of school, etc. No matter what month it was, no matter if my birthday had just passed or was two weeks away – I’ve always been desperate to see the quantifiable number between today and whatever event I’m looking forward to.
So I’m sure you can imagine that I’ve got quite a few countdowns going on right now. We’ve been in Thailand for 9 months and have 17 ½ left (because we came late into January), I’ve lived in my own home for 3 months, there’s 3 terms left and each term has 100 days so we only have 300 days left at each school, and I could go on and on. I’ve tried to fight this habit and live more in the moment, but I’ve realized that knowing where I am in the process has helped me be more in the moment.
For example, the other day I went for a bike ride around my community. I still smile, wave, and wai just about every one I see while I’m out, and I started wondering if that was too much, as the Thai people aren’t waving or greeting each other every time they meet and they don’t feel the need to acknowledge strangers they pass on the street. But, because I’m painfully aware that I only have 17 months left here, I know that 6 months of my waves, smiles, and wais are already gone. I only have 24 months in this community total to introduce myself to as many people as possible, to play UNO with the kids in my neighborhood (even though they eat all my snacks and constantly tell me my tones are wrong), to go walk the dta-laat (market) and tell all the grandmas that I don’t want to date any of their grandchildren (no matter how handsome they are), and to try my hardest to express my gratitude to this community for taking me in.
When I think about service like this, it feels like it is flying by. It feels like it could never be long enough to integrate into a society where generation after generation has lived, where quite literally everyone knows everyone, and where any language progress feels like it makes the tiniest difference when it comes to having real conversations. When I think about only having three more school terms with my students who slow down to wai me every time they race past me on their motorcycles while I’m biking, it seems like time is passing impossibly quick. Every time I’m invited to my host family’s house for dinner to eat moo-gra-tat it feels like there could never be enough nights left.
However, on weekends and off days when I have no work and spend 10 hours reading and knitting, it feels like time is creeping by so slowly that I have enough time to knit a quilt and read a book cover to cover. On days when I feel like I’m in one conversation after another that I can’t keep up with, I can feel the seconds ticking by at slow-as-molasses speed. During lessons when the kids want to play a game and I want them to learn about food groups, I feel like I can’t even count slow enough to match how long those hours feel. But such is life – the challenges proceed so leisurely that I have plenty of time to analyze just how frustrating they are, wondering if it’s my fault and what I could do differently, while the great times sweep by so quickly that often the high of success and joy after the fact feels more real than the actual source of it.
So I guess my short answer is: As time goes by and I integrate further and further into my life here, time goes by faster and faster with the occasional very slow days mixed in.
The first three months of service felt like they were a year long while the past three months felt like they were two weeks long. But today, if you catch me on a particularly uneventful Saturday, I’ll swear that the day is actually 56 hours long. While if you ask me on a Friday after doing a super fun holiday lesson all week, I’ll say that the whole week passed in two seconds flat.
This is the line graph of Peace Corps service and its constant peaks and troughs. If you put all of the volunteers’ line graphs showing their perception of time in service on top of each other you would have quite an insane spread showing the pivots, contradictions, and 180s we are constantly making. But we all have our methods for coping with this – whether it be taking up hobbies, traveling, going on crazy long bike treks, or finding ways to cook American comfort foods at site. At my site, my countdowns will continue and so will my smiling and waving at everyone I pass for the next year and a half.
THAI FACT CHECK – Has six months at site gone by really fast? Or really slow?… Yes.
Sticky Rice 
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