Something Fishy

I finally have two days off after working by myself doing transect for three days. Transect days end up being very long because of the amount of walking at a timed pace and constant searching. Luckily it rained only after I finished, otherwise I would have had to wait for the rain to stop before I could commence walking the transect. Since no one was around I was really really tempted to stay in bed instead of waking up at 4 am. But, I couldn't ignore the transect. I did realize that when I was out walking that it is nice to be up early and appreciate the sunrise, calling gibbons, smell after the nights rain. Working alone makes the forest seem all the more vibrant and towering. I do like to work on my own sometimes...I carry defense spray and a radio. I realized it probably wasn't smart to do the transect alone with everyone gone, but like I said, I feel like the entire community is watching out for me. In the evening two separate people stopped by to turn on the generator for me. Wichian thought I would hurt myself trying and said girls shouldn't do that sort of thing. Well, I showed them and turned it on myself before they arrived! Unfortunately, that also meant I had to turn it off myself, which ended up being a walk in the pouring rain down the slick slippery path crawling with leeches. 

I taught the English class by myself for the first time tonight. I prepared some flash cards this morning, but the lessons end up being rather spur of the moment anyway because it is difficult to tell ahead of time how well the kids will listen. We never got to the flashcards. We did the usual "Today is Friday, September 19th, 2003" and then completed pronunciation of the remaining six letters of the alphabet (and vocabulary words) that we needed to get through. They get easily bored with that though because most of the children can read, but there are a few younger ones, so we still have to start with the basics. Next they wanted to draw a picture (usually indicates the end of class) or sing a song. I tried the "hokey pokey" because we've been teaching them body parts. It went ok, but they couldn't really sing the complicated words. Then we wrote some key words like left, right, in, out, and shake. I wrote the whole song for the older kids to write down, but they groaned at the length. We are going through the alphabet drawing pictures for each letter. Tonight was the letter "j" for jewelry. 

At dinner, Batong invited me to sit with her and eat. That was nice, but also forced me to eat her food instead of pick at it like I usually do. Dinner was an egg omelet with strips of onion insides. Yucky yuck, but I forced a quarter of it down. Batong asked if I eat fish and I replied yes without thinking and with a smile to be polite. Well, she brought me out my own full fish -- head, fins, guts, scales, everything. I don't know how much the Thais eat or how they go about it, but I picked in among the ribs and bones for a few white pieces and pulled off the skin and scales. I thought I made a good dent in it considering it looked and tasted disgustingly fishy.