Snapshot of Service is an ongoing series dedicated to showcasing the reality of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand. Featuring the small moments, captured in a single image or a series of photos, that may make up the routine and mundane in our daily lives, but are also the essence of what it means to serve.
Alyssa Strong, 135 TESS
In life, we are all our biggest critics, and Peace Corps Volunteers are often extra hard on themselves. There’s typically no blueprint for our specific sites, so we have a lot of expectations for ourselves and what our service should look like. We create our own definitions of what makes us good and bad volunteers, and oftentimes, beat ourselves up about not doing enough. Or maybe that’s just me.
After a year in the Thai classroom, I frequently find myself stuck and questioning if my work is actually making a difference. Peace Corps Volunteers are just planting seeds. We usually don’t get to see the beautiful things that blossom from the time we dedicate to our communities. But if we’re lucky, we get a glimpse of the buds.
My primary 2 class is one of my biggest classes, and this is the first year I am actually able to manage the classroom enough to teach them. When they were in primary 1 last year, I often spent the entire hour trying to figure out how to get all 22 rascals on the same page so that I could simply start the class. So this is my first year of what feels like actually teaching this class, and it has been a slow process to say the least. We’ve been on Unit 1 learning the same 12 words about school supplies for about 3 months now.
Anyway, I happened to run into one of my primary 2 students at a noodle shop in town. I asked her, “How are you?” in English because I ask my students this everywhere I see them. After she responded, I went to order my noodles and sit down at my own table.
As I waited for my noodles, I overheard her start to teach her family questions we have been working on in class, like “How old are you?” Then I heard her ask her family, “Do you know what a สมุด (sa-moot) is?” And they answered “book,” to which she corrected them and said “No, สมุด (sa-moot) is a notebook and ‘book’ is หนังสือ (nang-seuu).” With excitement, she continued teaching them that ‘tape’ is also เทป (tape) in Thai, and that กาว (gaao) means ‘glue’ and so on.
I’ll admit she is one of my better students in the primary 2 class, but English is not a language that Thai children need at home or practice much with their families. So hearing a student practice English with her family made me light up inside and even laugh out loud a little at the intensity of her instruction. I love that I am teaching little teachers.
My presence at the noodle shop was a little reminder to my student of all the English she has learned this year. I did not have to do or say anything. I just had to exist in a noodle shop in my community to be a reminder for her. A nudge to share her knowledge about English with her loved ones. It made me realize that my presence in Thailand is a suggestion that there is so much more to the world than what is right in front of us. There is power in your presence as a Peace Corps Volunteer; power in the sign your presence brings to your community members.
Sticky Rice 