“What Do You Believe In?” | Kayla Kawalec (Thailand)

“What do you believe in?” asked in America, can be close to a threat. You can proudly display your beliefs like a bumper sticker or wield them like a flamethrower, burning lines in the grass – sometimes, at the same time. You don’t have to scroll too far down your preferred social media feed (where it seems like most people get their news as of late) to find a story about beliefs bringing some of us tightly together and sharply dividing others – and not just in America, but globally.

Joining the Peace Corps meant relocating from America, a racially, religiously, culturally, and ideologically diverse country of 330 million, to Thailand, a comparatively homogeneous one of 71 million. This isn’t to say that there isn’t diversity within Thailand – because there is, but it’s much more subtle than in America. When I moved to the rural town where I will live for two years, the population shrunk further to under 7,000, and the similarities between people multiplied just like you’d expect in any small town back home. This seemed like less of an adjustment for me, the person used to seeing all colors, shapes and sizes of people regularly than for the majority of my new neighbors, most of whom can count on one hand the number of foreigners they’ve ever encountered in person.

My first exchanges with my neighbors, consequently, focused on the things that made me different: my relationship status (single) and the fact that I was in Thailand alone with no family, my exact height and weight, and that my light brown hair and blue-green eyes were natural. These questions were expected and either answered or deflected without much of a thought. But one continuously caught me off guard:

“นับถือศาสนาอะไรคะ náp thěuu sàat sà nǎa a-rai ka. “What do you believe in?”

For the record, the people in my small town in the north of Thailand, overwhelmingly believe in the tenets of Buddhism – 98% of them to be precise. The other 2% are Christians who attend the lone church in town (dwarfed literally 10-fold by the wats (temples)). I know these facts precisely because I can easily find them on our local government office’s website.

In America we tend not to talk about the big three around the dinner table: money, religion, and politics (although I think that last one is harder to avoid as of late). America has a gruesome history of persecuting people for their beliefs and while my white, orthodox upbringing gives me significant privilege, there’s knowledge of the pain minority groups have endured. So I was curious to see how Thailand, the land of smiles, would treat an outsider to the majority’s religion.

Buddhism is intrinsic to most Thai ceremonies, whether it be in a religious institution or not. For example, we “wai” (putting your hands together and bowing) to the Buddha during most ceremonies.

Ahead of these, I’m often asked that question of belief. People want to know if I will be wai-ing the Buddha alongside 99% of my Buddhist coworkers or abstaining like the one Christian in my office. I worried what Thai people would think if my truthful answer is that I don’t subscribe to a specific religion. Would they think I was phony for wai-ing alongside them? Or would it be more phony not to wai when I don’t belong to a religion that tells me there’s only one god like my Christian coworker?

I’ve always strived to not stand out here, to not be the obvious, oblivious farang (foreigner). I take pains to be respectful. I try to avoid being performative or appropriative. I wouldn’t even know how to convey the concepts of “performative” or “appropriative” in Thai. As far as I know, there are no direct translations. These are words filtered through my American lens — which tells me that I should be inclusive and celebratory of people’s differences — while also staying in my lane. But to my Thai neighbors, asking me about my beliefs was as innocuous as wanting to know what Americans eat for breakfast (which they also, really, really want to know). They didn’t care if I wanted to wai, but didn’t call myself a Buddhist, or enter a wat and make merit (by donating money or just sitting and praying to the Buddha), or join in their ceremonies, or abstain entirely.

I’ve lived in Thailand now for 18 months, and while it still takes several minutes of explanation when I tell people that I only eat fish meat, I’ve reduced my response to the question of my beliefs down to one very vague, but all-encompassing, very Thai, phrase: “ได้หมด dâi mòht.” To me it means many things. It means: “ I believe in anything, everything; I’m flexible; I’m learning; I’m still figuring it out; I don’t want to choose just one thing; and, I want to accept many things.”

Dâi mòht means that I joined my Christian coworker and my town’s single church for a handful of Sunday services and an over five-hour marathon caroling excursion last Christmas.

Dâi mòht means I wai the Buddha when I enter a wat . . . but not always. I’ve asked monks for blessings and given them offerings, been sprinkled with ceremonial water, and accepted bracelets for protection and prayers.

I’ve sat through hours-long wat services, meditated with the “congregation,” and watched the Buddhists surrounding me (including monks) answer phone calls, fall asleep, or not know when they’re supposed to wai – in other words, be human. I even teach at a school for novice monks (like a private Christian school in many ways), and I can tell you for a fact that the “baby monks” are some of the naughtiest of all of my students.

Popcorn, the cat, is not an offering, he just likes sleeping on the spirit house sometimes

Dâi mòht has made me realize that the “beliefs” of my Thai friends and neighbors are a lot more nuanced than “98% Buddhist” implies. I make offerings to the spirit house outside my front door regularly – which isn’t part of traditional Buddhist beliefs, but a form of animism popular in my area – at the behest of my landlord.

I’ve attended ceremonies with my friends to raise ghosts and ask them for a good crop yield (also, suspiciously, an opportunity for Thai people to play loud music and drink a lot).

This year, I learned about a Chinese belief (that Thai people taught me about) called ‘ปีชง bpee chong’ or the ‘challenge year’. It describes the phenomenon when your personal zodiac is in “conflict” with the zodiac sign of the Chinese New Year. Your bpee chong is believed to produce a variety of obstacles, including sickness and misfortune, throughout the year. If you saw my “Thorns” from the March Sticky Rice (PCV/ Staff group web site — photos of accidents that I’ve sustained within the past few months coinciding with the Lunar New Year in February), maybe you’ll understand how easy it was to “believe” in this one.

I have learned more about tolerance and openness from my “religiously homogeneous” community than I expected to. Thai people believe in many things, so my religious ambivalence is easy for them to accept. Living here is making me more accepting and tolerant too. Part of the privilege of being here for me, the foreigner in a foreign land, has been the opportunity to build empathy. Part of the challenge is just trying to keep up when I’m scrutinized more for the fact that I don’t eat chicken than who or what I choose to bow to (or not) that day.

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I feel it necessary to state the obvious that this is my individual and privileged (for the aforementioned reasons) experience and that other volunteers from diverse backgrounds serving in Thailand surely have different stories from my own.