I just returned from my second trip to the hospital this week.

It isn’t my favorite spot in Mae Sot. It does the job, and I would be admitted there if need be; but it’s a little scary. It could definitely be used as a set for a horror movie.

Either way, the first trip was for my sweet friend, Mary. She is now limping with a broken, casted foot.

And this evening, just as Stephen had left to go pick up the visiting volunteers for a prayer night, the neighbors ran up to the door.  At first I thought they were saying “cold water,” so I grabbed a bowl and filled it from our water cooler. It was about then that I realized they were saying “hot water.” I turned as they pulled the little screaming toddler into the light. I saw his little chest was burned, and the skin was coming off in sheets. He had grabbed a cup of water for a drink, but it was boiling; he poured in down his chin and onto his chest.

I called Stephen to come back quickly, and the team jumped out of the car. I jumped in with the little boy’s two sisters and our dear friend, Mong Ey;  she is our connection to the community who speaks Karen.

And thus began the chaos of languages. The nurses kept asking if I know Thai, while Mong Ey used Burmese to talk to the girls, and the girls used a little bit of Thai to speak to the nurses. I used Karen with Mong Ey and some English with the nurses and staff.

I wish I knew more languages. But I’m thankful I did know enough Karen for us to get by, however choppy it may have been.

The little boy was bandaged up and treated quickly, but it took another hour or so to sort out paperwork, again between Burmese, Thai, Karen and English; manage to get our hands on some antibiotics and pain medicine; and pay $9 for all the services.

Whew.

If I wasn’t tired enough today, I am now.

But the little boy is doing better and sleeping, and I received an animated Karen lesson for the day.

Learning a new language is difficult.

Karen is admittedly one of the easier languages, so I’m glad we’re starting here. It’s fairly logical and straight forward, which I now see that English is not in the slightest.

Even so, it’s exhausting, and there are times you just want to bail and play the “How about I teach you English instead?” card.

Today in our lesson we discussed classifiers, which is admittedly the most nonsensical aspect of the Karen language that I have discovered to date. I’m not sure if this is common information, but the classifiers work like this, if you translate it to English literally:

I have older sisters, four {insert classifier}.  I will buy pumpkins, two {insert classifier}. I have shoes, one {insert classifier}.

So, you state your object or item, the number, and then the classifier. In the case of sisters, the classifier is for people, because they are people. Easy enough, yeah?

Or an animal: Do you have a cat, one animal?

I can follow this, and it seems simple enough, because there is a category. For the people classifier, you would use this for people: teachers, students, drivers, chefs, businessmen, friends, sisters. For the animals classifier, you would use this for animals: dogs, cats, pigs, horses. Okay. I can follow that.

However, I only knew of three classifiers, and it seemed like there needed to be many more. Unfortunately, the whole concept is really difficult for many Karen to explain, because it comes naturally to them; they don’t know the rules, but what sounds right; and, well, it’s nonsensical. I can completely relate because English is much like this. I don’t know when to use the present participle or past or present perfect, I just know not to say that, but this instead.

Anyway, I broached the subject today. I asked Lavender, “I would like to understand classifiers. I know three: grah, doo, and plu. I understand when to use those. But are there more?”

She said yes, there was one more. She taught me this one, and we tried to identify a category: she gives us a word that uses this classifier, we try to make a connection and guess another word; she tells us if it works or not. This goes on until we can identify a similar theme, or we get too confused or distracted.

As we continued talking, I gathered a list of ten classifiers. And as haphazardly as that came about, I’m certain there are more.

Just to give you a taste, here are the classifiers, and their categories that we came up with:

Please note that it’s too difficult to insert all the Karen here, so I’m just going to sound it out. But if you were here, I’d write it and read for you and you’d be much more impressed.

grah: for people

doo: for animals with four legs that are not slimy

pluh: all things round (balls, corn, cucumbers, pumpkins, tomatoes) ; things that hold other things (a chair, a basket, a box, a bottle, a bag)

bey: for things you can read (books, magazines); things that swim (fish, boats); things that fly (birds, planes); things you wear (shirts, pants)

boh: for things that slither or are snake-like (snakes, lizards, rope, beans)

kah: “things”; from what we gathered, mostly things that you say in English because there isn’t a Karen word, such as a fan, shelf, etc.

koh: shoes, bicycles, cars; not sure on the connection here

dey: leaves (tree leaves, lettuce, spinach, kale)

paw: flowers; which, this is actually the word for flower, so you would repeat it, “paw {number} paw”

too: trees

Are you royally confused?

That was the point. Really? How can things you read, things that swim, things that fly, and things you wear be in the same category, while trees and leaves each have a category to themselves?

Oh, my. And this is only the first language we’re trying to learn.

I wrote this into a blog about a year ago, and I would write it every week if I could: things don’t really go as planned here.

Ever.

But really, I could say this to you a million times over, but it can’t really be understood without living it.

But as I was bicycling home last night and recounting our day–or really just the afternoon–I thought it was a prime example of things not going as planned.

I’ll warn you now that this might be way too many details for your interest.

It was a typical Thursday in most ways. I’m sure things had already surprised us in the day and we hadn’t accomplished most of the things we intended to, but it really took off at 3:00pm.

Due to Stephen’s motorbike helmet being stolen last weekend, we’ve been biking to work this week. If it’s raining, Stephen has taken the motorbike to protect the computer, but I’ve been doing a lot of biking. He’s felt bad about this, but I remind him that I’m the pansy who won’t drive the motorbike and that our computer is worth more money than most of what we own, and the conversation drops.

We had both taken our bikes to work, so we left at 3:00 to make it to our 3:30 Karen lesson, with a stop at our house on the way. The plan was to drop of the computer to prevent it from getting caught in the rain later and change into our gym clothes so we could bike right to the gym after language lessons.

We arrived home to find the electricity off, which I didn’t think much about. This happens often enough that we were sure it be back on by the time we returned for dinner.

We arrive at our teacher’s house for lessons about 3:40pm to find her not there. We walk into the entry way and sit down, as usual, because sometimes she’s a little late coming from an errand or something. We all run late around here quite freely.

Another Karen woman visiting our teacher comes out speaking in faster Karen than I’m competent with. I caught that Lavender, our teacher, was at the market, but not much else. We sat down to wait.

Another Karen woman runs out, this time with a phone. She has called Lavender, who then tells us that she is at the market, and tomorrow is good for lessons.

Thursday: regularly scheduled lesson, discussed and confirmed at previous lesson on Tuesday. And we’re here.

Friday: not a regularly scheduled lesson.

Oh, okay.

Stephen and I discuss our options: we could bike back across town the office, in our gym clothes, to work for the remaining 45 minutes or so until 5pm. Or we could go to the gym now in appropriate clothing, have dinner, and then go back up to the office tonight.

He has been a little swamped recently, so he wanted to work more hours anyway. We decide to do this: workout until 5ish, bike home, make & eat dinner, then head back to the office about 7pm for a few hours of work while we watch episodes of The Office.

We get to the gym, already sweaty from biking everywhere. And about ten minutes into my run, here is where it hits me: did we pay our electric bill this month? It’s in the “early twenties” of the month, and that’s usually the cut-off point that we barely miss…

Let me just explain: I’m a faithful bill payer. We’re not really the late people on that sort of thing. We pay within the first couple days, or at least week of receiving a bill.

But this country doesn’t always send you the bill.

We learned this a couple months ago, when our internet was shut off. I talked to the office manager and explained that we hadn’t paid for three months, but they hadn’t brought us a bill. How was I to pay it? How can they cut it off if they don’t give us a bill? Also, this has happened before: they won’t send us a bill for one, two, maybe three months, and then we get a large one. It doesn’t bother me; it’s just one less trip to the shop.

She responded in exasperation, because apparently this is obvious, “You still have to pay the bill even if they don’t give you one!”

Oh, so I’m supposed to go the company, about the day its due and ask if I owe them money?

In my opinion, if the company can’t be responsible enough to give me the bill, I shouldn’t be required the responsibility of paying the bill. Personal opinion.

Anyway, I’m jogging on the treadmill and it hits me that there is a pretty good chance our electricity isn’t going to come back on tonight.

Suddenly a night at the office seems pretty appealing: electricity to charge our computers, sit in the aircon, and see each other.

We head home, and Stephen attempts to see if the electric office is still open at 5:30pm. We missed them, so we meet at a pad thai shop to grab some dinner, sans dirty dishes or opening the fridge, and go to the office.

We stay until 11:00pm, because the air is nice, Stephen is getting a lot done, and I’m thoroughly laughing at The Office.

We go to head home, and Stephen sees that the motorbike gas light is blinking, at which point he remembers it was earlier, too…he goes off to get gas while I bicycle home through a ghost town of Mae Sot. I pass two cars, five people, and about eighty dogs.

And street dogs at night are scary. But that’s for another post.

I go up to the house to find a flower stuck through our padlock: a little present from the kids. This one is a fake rose, but they like to stick anything in there as presents for us: picked flowers, sticks, partial vegetables from our compost. This one is much sweeter and makes me smile.

And then we fall asleep in a very, very hot house.

“Every time I get a call from an area code I don’t recognize, I hyperventilate because I’m sure it’s the IRS calling to tell me I accidentally broke a rule I didn’t know about and I’m going to jail.

But, mostly it’s just Jim from Sweetwater Sound.”

Stephen and I had a good laugh over this email from Kim, and I thought all of you who kindly signed up for Sweetwater’s giveaway in September or this month might appreciate it. Apparently you’re all receiving a number of calls, catalogs, and emails.

Oh, and I should mention that Kim oversees a non-profit, The Spero Project, and that is why she is afraid of upsetting the IRS.

And, we’re still hopeful! This month’s drawing for $33,000 worth of microphones, which include six that would be ideal for Stephen’s recording here on the border, ends in just seven days!

“All I have seen
teaches me
to trust the Creator
for all I have not seen.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since we don’t have a television and relatively little entertainment options, Stephen & I watch through television seasons that we have on our computer.

Sometimes I do believe it becomes a waste of time, but when I think back over some of the hardest parts of this year, laughing to a 22-minute sitcom at the end of the day can go a long way, and I don’t think it’s all bad.

We’ve watched through Friends quite a few times, to the point that it was being quoted too often between us. We decided it was getting a little out of hand.  We’ve also enjoyed quite a bit of Modern Family.  I think I quite liked both of these shows because they presented very American-ized lifestyles: coffee shops, Western houses with soft couches and carpet, families and friends. It also helps that sitcoms tend to stick to “first world problem” story lines and throw in as many funny quips as they can.

As lame as it may seem, I have found that the fascods of facebook and sitcoms have been surprisingly tranquilizing.

Either way, we managed to get the seventh season of The Office added to our collection. This seemed a great reason to start over from the first season, we started that a couple weeks ago.

I have to say it’s not as much of a mollifier as the other shows, and I have a few theories.  For one, it lacks the real relationships of family and friends. It also has more “politically incorrect” aspects to it, which is bothersome when you are over-working yourself to accept and appreciate differences in the culture and friendships around you.

But I’ve decided the real culprit lies in the entire scenario: their office isn’t so different from ours.

And it scares me.

We’re just an odd bunch with very little in common, and among so many cultures, you can be offended by someone pretty easily.

And I don’t really know how else to describe it. It’s a little too close for comfort.