“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
– George Bernard Shaw
Here’s the problem with communication: No one realizes just how bad they are at communicating until something drastic happens. From cruise liners crashing into icebergs, to entire governments going to war over a rumor (Shoot, did I just say something political?), to pretty much anything Christopher Columbus thought or said, it is a fact that the world really, really sucks at communication. And it’s not just a large-scale thing either. Communication blows all the way down to the human level. The divorce rate isn’t fifty freaking percent for nothing. It’s an epidemic, and there’s no end in sight.
To that end, the Thai culture is especially poor at communication. We think we’re making inroads, learning how to live here without stressing too much (after three months, I guess it’s about damn time!), and then we’re slapped across the face with the realization that we have no idea. There is this vast cultural divide that it would take years to properly bridge, and even then that bridge would be rickety, at best.
I’ve mentioned before how at school, the students serve as the janitors. They sweep, they take out the trash, and they wash our dishes. It’s a bizarre system, but it seemed to work. Recently, the kids had a three-day scout camp. There were no classes, but all the teachers came to school to participate in the activities. We didn’t have a role in the scout camp, so we had to come to school every day and sit alone in the office. Every day, we put our dirty cups in their usual basin for the students to come wash. When no one came to get them, we figured it was because the students had been relieved of their janitorial duties during scout camp, but the next week, still no students came to get the dirty dishes.
One afternoon, Bo, the new head of the English department, pulled Carlyn aside to explain to her that we were supposed to be washing our own dishes. This, of course, was news to us since up until four days previously, the students were the dishwashers. Carlyn said as much to Bo who informed her that the decision to have students wash dishes was that of Supalak, our coordinator and the unofficial former head of the department. Supalak had stopped spending time in the English department for unknown reasons (We think there was some sort of drama, but no one knows for sure) and instead taken up residency in the library. It seemed that in her absence, the rules she had laid down were being subverted by new ones.
Bottom line here was that the students would no longer wash our dishes; that was now our responsibility. It’s hardly like we make a mountain of dishes every day – between the three of us, there is at most five cups and a few pieces of cutlery – so washing our own isn’t some great inconvenience. The problem though was that no one told us. Supalak had been spending her days in the library for well over a week by the time Bo informed us of the rule change which probably means that in the interim, while we thought the students were still doing our dishes, one of the other teachers was. That hardly seems fair.
We’ve been doing our best for three months here to assimilate to the Thai culture and shed the image of the spoiled westerner (housing mishegas and salary dispute aside, of course), and in one fell swoop, we looked like divas through no real fault of our own. Obviously there had been discussion after Supalak left the English department about modifying some of her rules, but like most of what goes on at school, it crossed no one’s mind to let us in on the change. Not only did they not tell us, but they seemed a bit peeved that we weren’t following the new rule we had no idea existed. “You understand?” Bo asked Carlyn with the condescending tone you use to tell a nine-year-old for the fifteenth time to stop climbing on the back of the couch.
“I feel like I just got yelled at,” Carlyn said when she returned from her scolding. It’s entirely possible the conversation about doing your own dishes took place right in front of our noses since we wouldn’t have understood it even if we did know what was going on. And it’s understandable, I guess, when things like that slip their mind – it’d just be great if it didn’t happen so damn often. We have no issue at all doing our own dishes – we thought it was strange we didn’t have to in the first place – but now it looks like we’d been turning our noses up at the new rule for a week! Its times like this we have to chant mai pen rai under our breath until we achieve a satisfactory level of Zen.
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