STICKY RICE MAGAZINE (Thailand)
Great to know that Sticky Rice magazine continues to flourish, and that you now have a podcast as well. A…
A podcast —
Chaa Thai is a podcast spilling the tea on Peace Corps volunteer life in Thailand!
Each episode, hosts Dano Nissen and Morgan Shupsky interview a current Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and do a deep dive on their experience at their host site. The tea is that there are as many examples of what service is like for a volunteer in Thailand as there are volunteers — join us as we get a taste!
As a Thailand V volunteer (1963-1965) who taught English as a second language (Pitsanuloke). This is great news. Keep up the good work and have fun. Thailand is a great place and the Thais are wonderful people.
Sawasdee Ka! Great to see “Sticky Rice” is still out there. I have one small but, I feel, important suggestion for our collective consideration. May I suggest that this wonderful PCV was not a “victim” of the COVID evacuation- but rather was impacted by the successful safe evacuation of all PCVs- kept alive and thus enabled to return to country to finish out his service. Words matter, and as imperfect and traumatizing as the response to the COVID pandemic was- I think it’s important to acknowledge the enormity of the challenge faced by Peace Corps while trying to respond to a global healthcare calamity in real time. Thanks- and yes keep on keeping on- eat all the sticky rice and mangoes you can. RPCV Thailand 101
Great to know that Sticky Rice magazine continues to flourish, and that you now have a podcast as well. A brief bit of trivia. When my group (Thai 58) arrived in country in March 1977, the magazine was called Hey You! We assumed it was so named due to a frequent way that some Thai men (women never did this) would address a random foreigner (such as a PCV) on the street, possibly expressing the few English words they knew. In any case, one of the Thai 58 volunteers suggested that we rename the magazine to something more appropriate, and we did: Sticky Rice.
In subsequent issues of Sticky Rice, volunteers sometimes submitted photos for the cover. Below is a link to one I took in the ancient city of Sukhothai, my second Peace Corps site back in 1978. It was inspired by a photo I’d seen many years earlier in an issue of National Geographic, long before I’d heard of Sukhothai, not to mention ever thought I might live there one day.
Glad that the name has stuck (no pun intended) and Peace Corps is thriving in Thailand. Best wishes to all, keep up the great work!
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPI16urXcZlY6XM8A3nCKpPCiDA3VwabN2ncoecpUGm4C3acdmRN5M7-F7da6Ibvw/photo/AF1QipME6_XI_xR5VoPCeo3OGDiTfh0Bn6maqelIcotU?key=WS1FanhZMjEzOF9EaFFzcnNfdklCd2Rwbklua0hn