Don't Panic

At the end of this week, I will start again where I left many years ago.  I will be living in a house.  The difference this time is that the house will be in Thailand.  I spent a good portion of my younger years caring and tending a house and the garden around it as well as raising two sons.  Now, after so much has gone by, I will recover a life I have missed.

Nee is still in Bangkok, getting classes on farming, as we are also buying a piece of land here in town.  My town is Fang, Chiang Mai, a farming community 150 kilometers north of the city of Chiang Mai.  I am only a few kilometers from the Myanmar border.  For the last year, I have been teaching English in a large private school across the street from my one-room apartment.  Starting next week, I will be in a house just behind the school in a very modern neighborhood, similar to one I might find in an American suburb.  If I had stayed in the US, I might have been able to regain my momentum and gotten another house.  My luck looked like it was more likely I was going to be living in my car, though, and so I am here.

My new home starting this weekend

Meanwhile, I continue to teach.  This year started quite differently from last.  The first time I walked into a classroom then, I had never been responsible for teaching a class before.  I had been through brief teacher training, though most of that was in front of nursery school children.  My first job long-lasting job was at my current school.  I had done a brief assignment in the south deep inside a rubber plantation and far from any shopping or entertainment and rain fell every day, all day, leaving all I owned damp and miserable to wear.  I knew I wanted to go back north.

As of this writing, I have one more month of teaching until I end the first semester of my second year here.  I feel as if it only just began.  Teaching here is exhausting, occasionally frustrating, challenging, but most of all, it is great fun.  Each day I come into one of my 16 classes of 50 students each to see their smiles.  Whenever some personal matter came up that left me feeling depressed, I would go to a class and all would be forgotten.  My only thoughts are of my students and how I can get them to speak more clearly and feel confident in their own abilities.

I will continue to write my adventures as it looks like we may be heading in directions I had never considered before.  Stay tuned.