i'll sing you songs of Rice Cookers and Full Days

It’s just past nine AM this Wednesday morning, and I am feeling pleased—not only is it absolutely beautiful outside (trees so green my eyes want to melt, sky so blue my eyes want to melt, big buildings so white as the sun reflects off them my eyes want to melt) and I’ve just made a completely incredible cup of coffee. And if all that weren’t enough, there’s the faint sound outside only of birds and a little bell. No traffic yet. And my toast—I have toast, my most favorite thing in the world (well, not really, but it’s up there). Just on Sunday, our friends Karis and Maiko were generous enough to let us borrow a toaster oven. And so now, toast every morning for breakfast!

Should I take a moment to describe our kitchen? I guess this would also be the moment to describe many Thai kitchens. Mostly, they are non-existent. People usually buy street food. You see, there’s no need for a kitchen when all of Chiang Mai is a large kitchen, complete with smells both strange and wonderful, a small army of Thai women and men who sometimes bounce around as they prepare food for customers, or appear (and probably are) disgruntled at each new meal to make, or take a simple dish and turn it into an art form. Brittany and I are lucky enough that for lack of kitchen within our apartment, we live in a kitchen city. Anyhow, our kitchen is silly. We have stone-top counters, which are very low because historically, Thai people are a short people. The counters are not as shiny as they used to be because Brittany and I cut both limes and pineapples on top of it. I guess even food acid can be pretty potent when left on a shiny surface, which makes me a little nervous when thinking about the teeth in my head (also a shiny surface) which might be a little worse for wear giving all the limes and pineapple I eat. Set into our counter is a sink with one knob for cold water. The sink is stainless steel and has served as a place to not only wash dishes, but a countless variety of vegetables (hooray for veggies!). We have a little refrigerator, which is constantly packed with water, fruit, and vegetables, and also these funny juice drinks we found at a health food store. Imagine flavors like aloe vera, bua bok, basil seed, coconut, and then many names I can’t pronounce that taste familiar but I’m not sure why. Next to our sink are our two appliances: a rice cooker and a water boiler. And that’s our little kitchen (besides the cupboards, but I won’t bore you with idle talk about what’s in them).

I want to take a paragraph or two to sing praise to the rice cooker, as it has been our way of making food for the last eight months (when we decide to champion food preparation, rather then making our way among the larger kitchen of Chiang Mai). I have never met an invention I like more than a rice cooker. Without a doubt, it can do anything. If someone were to ask me what I would bring with me if I knew I would be deserted on an island for the rest of my days, likely I would take a rice cooker. We received it from our bosses, Mark and Christa, right around Christmas and since then have expanded from just making rice to crazy stunts like: steaming garlic! (whoo for health and bad breath!), steaming vegetables, reheating pitas, reheating all leftovers. I don’t doubt that if we had the time, Brittany and I would probably undertake the mission of making a rice cooker cookbook. I think it would be really nice and you might want to buy it. All this is to say, the rice cooker has saved us in many ways. As vegetarians (those particularly fond of vegetables), Brittany and I sometimes like to cook up what we’ve named “Vegetable Feast” and we would not be able to do this without the beloved rice cooker.

Our most recent rice cooker achievements:
• Steamed Garlic. We put this on everything and feel that a person would be hard-pressed to find a meal that Garlic doesn’t go well with.
• Mushrooms. Actually, this shouldn’t go in the achievement category because they tasted weird and made our apartment smell even weirder. Before becoming a vegetarian, I had a slight fear of all things mushroom (eating fungi?), but they have become more near and dear to my heart as vegetables have become my main food source. But I’ll be honest and say the odor permeating our apartment revived my fear slightly. The smell has dissipated though, and I have eaten mushrooms since then, and I am all together feeling better now about the whole mushroom fiasco. These things take time.
• Pumpkin. Recently, I have become overly obsessive about pumpkins. I’m not embarrassed of my great love for this squash—but perhaps I should be. I don’t know why—maybe because my Oregon-grown body knows that coming up soon at home is harvest time and because I can’t be surrounded by fall colors and harvest-y goodness, I have chosen instead to ingest it. I don’t think we’ll ever know, because what I do know has filled up all my thoughts. And that is: pumpkin is so incredible. And the rice cooker champions pumpkin. It steams the orange goodness up so perfectly that Ichabod Crane of Sleepy Hollow might offer up his pumpkin head (is that the right story? Maybe only on the Disney Channel) to be cooked in such a way. So for all of you curious people out there, I will probably be eating pumpkin for dinner tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next night, and the next….etc…and so forth.

In the interest of your brain (so you don’t feel less smart after having read this blog where I only talked about our amazing rice cooker), I’ll move onward and upward. Life here is what I would describe as full. At the end of a day, Brittany or I will usually exchange the following sentiment: “I feel like today could have been more than one day.”

Yesterday was one such day, and I presume today will be the same. I woke up Tuesday morning early (for me anyway) after having had a weird dream where someone I used to know very well, burned me. Not with fire, for all you Freudians out there who are currently trying to analyze what this could all mean for my ego. Burned, as in disregarded. I woke up thinking to myself what this could mean for the day as I had a lot to do, and it’s never good to have one’s first welcome to the day to be burned be someone (even dream someone). But I woke up, and rather than thinking of the psychological implications of such a dream, I chuckled to myself and mumbled something along the lines of, “Oh snap! Dream burn…” and then rolled out of bed.

(Digression: I had toast yesterday too. And for those of you who are curious, the toaster oven, though small, cannot fit in our little kitchen, so it sits on the floor behind what might be a bar counter, but what we use as a storage place for pills, coffee, tea, bags, and boxes. It was delicious toast. We bought some lime marmalade at this shop and it is really incredible. Okay, end of digression.)

A team arrived at 8:55 AM yesterday and Mark and I met them at the airport. Immediately, I realized this team is magical. After having traveled for 20 hours, they were still sprightly, clever, and fun, and excited to have orientation all day. My official job title here at the Garden is Volunteer and Intern Coordinator. This means, I do my best to coordinate a volunteer team, or a single volunteer/intern to come join our community at GOH. This means, I have been looking forward to their arrival for months. They are from a church in Orange County and they will be with us for just 10 days. So we oriented them yesterday to the inner-workings of GOH and the workings of Thailand as a whole.

During one such session of orientation, my phone rang and who should be on the other end of the line than my dad (hi Dad!). I was so happy to be talking to him, as I haven’t spoken with him since I returned from the US in July. He’s doing well, by the way. And I got to hear about all things Riechers family in Eugene and it was wonderful.

At about 4:30 PM, it was time for Brittany and I to return to our Drop-In Center (the Orientation takes place out at another location where there’s more room and not the distraction of the most adorable and lovely children in the whole world). We needed to get back to the Center in order to bring dinner to the kids. I still don’t know how to drive the motorcycle, but I am getting pretty darn good at carrying a lot of stuff on the back of the bike, which I proved to the streets of Chiang Mai by carrying a large blue basket filled with three bags—two of which carried hot soup and the other white rice.

Last night was the first night I got to teach my own Kids’ English Class. I have taught Brittany’s class a number of times, and helped out with others, but last night I was able to take over the class our intern, Susan (Susan, I love you and I miss you and so do your students!), had been heading up. Five students are in my class regularly and they are all 11 years to 16 years old. Our class is small but this gives us a chance to really learn together. These five will prove to be very good Thai teachers, which is the deal we made yesterday—that I will teach them English, if they will teach me Thai. One of my students goes to a really high-level school in Chiang Mai, and thus, speaks English very well. The others, not so much—though they are so smart.

It is a sad fact that the school a child goes to very much decides how far they will go in life. I don’t quite understand all the workings of the education system here, but it’s just sad. If a child goes to a crappy school (and there are many here), the child won’t get an education they deserve which will debilitate them from going far and perhaps rising out of poverty. A neighbor of ours, who works at one of the better schools here, was telling us that they just got whiteboards and that they don’t have enough money even to get art supplies for the kids. Three or four of the students in my class live in slum neighborhoods. As the students and I hung out a little bit after class, doodling on the whiteboard and repeating English we’d learned in class, I considered what the odds are that these five will not be poverty-stricken their whole lives, that they won’t have to raise their own children in slum conditions, that my four girl students won’t end up experiencing sexual trauma and finding themselves prostituted and practicing English with their Western customers at a bar. It’s hard to know what will happen to them—I hope they don’t end up there. I hope so much for their lives and so with my four months left, all my hope will be poured into each English word I teach them, so that each phrase they learn is pregnant with it. I don’t think it’s the English that will save them; it would be foolish to think just language could do that. I do believe that love never fails, and I hope that they feel that love when we learn together, when they are at the Garden of Hope, so that it will never be an option for them to be treated less as less than human being. Until they learn to dream big for themselves, I will do it for them.

At 11 PM, I went on my way to bed (after having eaten dinner of pumpkin which was almost too delicious), body exhausted by the fullness of the day (trust me, there was more to say in this blog, but I didn’t want you to have to spend all day reading about it), though my mind wasn’t ready to give in. And I laid in bed, willing myself to have dreams which could be called psychologically healthy, but mostly waiting for today to come, I tried not to think about the toast and coffee which would start a very full Wednesday, or else I knew I would never fall asleep.

goodnight, good morning, good day to all readers.
all my love,
kelly