Snow in Sawankhaloke by Bill Preston (Thailand)

by Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80)

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It was the hot season in Thailand. I had recently left Yala, my first site, in the deep-southern province near the end of the dangling elephant’s trunk of Thailand that latches on to Malaysia. Having completed my first year as a Peace Corps English teacher in a Thai secondary school there, I had just relocated to Sukhothai, the provincial capital of the north-central province and name of the nearby old city, with its ancient ruins of the original Thai capital. I was starting over in another part of the country, preparing for a different assignment with new groups of teachers and students.

Joining a new project

In 1978, several volunteers and I were offered the opportunity to join a new project, a collaboration between the Thai Ministry of Education and Peace Corps Thailand. The idea was to place pairs of volunteers, who had taught previously in secondary schools, in three of the Ministry’s Regional Supervisory Units (RSU). Each Regional Supervisory Unit  served several Thai provinces, with the primary goal of supporting and training teachers.

Volunteers selected for this assignment had three main tasks:

• to team teach English for half a year with a Thai counterpart in two secondary schools within the region (teaching half the year in each school);
• to conduct ongoing teacher training for all the English teachers in both schools;
• and to conduct three-week intensive English language seminars during breaks in the school year.

About two dozen teachers were chosen from various schools in the region to attend these special seminars. In achieving these goals, many more Thai teachers and students would have the opportunity to interact with the English native-speaking volunteers, and teachers throughout the region could share ideas and learn from one another.

Thai-56 volunteer Kevin Quigley and I were chosen to join the RSU based in Phitsanuloke, which served in addition to that province, Sukhothai, Uttaradit, and Tak.

Before moving to Sukhothai, I’d spent a few days at the Peace Corps office in Bangkok researching and gathering materials for the upcoming intensive English seminars. During that research, I discovered that volunteers could borrow films from the U.S. consulate in Bangkok. Consulting the list of available films, I chose several, including, rather whimsically, Nanook of the North, a black-and-white documentary about Inuit life in the Canadian arctic. Had I known that the film had no spoken dialogue, I might have reconsidered using it for my aim in offering films was, in addition to providing a change of pace from the academic skills work, to expose teachers to English via a different medium. As it turned out, the film did provide, if not additional language input, a genuine change of perspective in a rather eccentric and surreal way.

Our first seminar

For our first intensive English seminar Kevin and I traveled to Sawankhaloke, a town about an hour’s drive from Sukhothai, located in an area once renowned for manufacturing a beautiful style of pottery. That the area had been famous for ceramics forged in its fiery kilns was not without modern analog. As we discovered, teaching teachers there eight hours a day during the three-week seminar in the height of the hot season was not unlike working in an oven.

Having grown up in Maryland and New Jersey, I was not prepared for the Thai hot season. During my year teaching in Yala, I would typically return to the teacher’s room after a class, shirt sodden with perspiration and plastered to my chest, as if I had walked through a lawn sprinkler. Looking back on that Sawankhaloke seminar, through rippling heat waves of memory, it seems as though those three weeks unfolded over the course one very long and languid, unrelentingly hot, humid day.

We broke out Nanook of the North near the end of the final week. The timing seemed auspicious. The end of the seminar now in sight, we were all pretty maxed out on English— we, as trainers, beginning to run out of material and fresh ideas, and they, the Thai teachers, approaching the kind of saturation point that typically accompanies such intensive study, beyond which there promises to be only diminishing returns. To say nothing of the heat.

It was sometime around mid-afternoon, the unforgiving sun beating down relentlessly on our classroom, giving one last brutal pounding before grudgingly starting its ever-so- slow slide into late afternoon. The air in the classroom was astonishingly inert, not unlike all of us, seriously immobile after another intense morning of English grammar, pronunciation, conversation, reading, writing, and the indolent aftermath of our recent lunch break.

The Canadian arctic was not on anyone’s mind, certainly there were no visions of Inuit hunters dancing in our heads. Nonetheless, and throwing caution to the non-existent wind, we pulled the shutters against the blinding glare outside and proceeded to project the film on a bare classroom wall.

And suddenly, in the flickering images, there we were: transported out of the lush, vivid, sweltering tropics into the stark, frozen, monochrome arctic of northern Quebec. As the film unfolded, our discomfort in the stifling classroom seemed to recede as we suspended collective disbelief, allowing ourselves to enter the Inuit world of Nanook, his family and friends, and bear witness to their daily struggle for survival. There, in one scene, was Nanook engaged in a tug of war with a seal, while a group of fellow hunters were coming across the ice, with their dogs, to his aid. In another, Nanook and the hunters were inching up upon a herd of walruses.

Clearly, we were not in Thailand anymore, where, according to a famous Thai proverb that expressed the country’s abundant good fortune: “There is rice in the fields and fish in the water.” In this severe, barren land, the only food came from other animals, which people hunted to survive. Nor was there wood or thatch or bamboo available for shelter.

As we sat in our heavy wooden chairs behind heavy wooden desks inside our wooden-shuttered classroom, Nanook and his friends proceeded to construct an igloo, carving huge blocks of snow, stacking them in a circle, cutting out holes, and then using sheets of ice for windows.

When the film ended, we sat in startled silence, momentarily suspended between two worlds.

The spell was broken

The spell broken, we threw open the shutters, reverting to our verdant world — the sun still there, blazing in hazy blue sky, the air static and sticky as ever. Looking from our windows, the trees and flowers seemed somehow more vibrant, resplendent, as if we were seeing them for the first time, with beginner’s mind.

It had not snowed in Sawankhaloke. Yet, for the brief time watching the film in the space of that darkened classroom, we had pursued those seals and walruses through ice and snow. We had felt that igloo’s icy embrace. We had breathed deeply the frozen air.

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(Bill Preston Thailand 1977-8o)

Bill Preston worked as a community organizer in a VISTA program in Yonkers, New York (1970-72). In the Peace Corps (Thailand 1977-80), he taught English and trained Thai teachers of English. For many years, he developed English language courses for several educational publishers. His reading and writing anthology, A Sense of Wonder: Reading and Writing through Literature, was published by Pearson Education. Strange Beauty of the World, a book of poems, was published by Peace Corps Writers.