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Embracing Inevitables
6/23/09
Hello from Bangkok!
We just finished orientation, an important week for us to slow down, learn humbly, and prepare to simply be with our teams and our Thai hosts.
We’ve spent most of our time on Pradipat Road, moving between a guesthouse and a hotel for our daily activities. The sidewalks are filled with food vendors and restaurants spilling beautiful smells and sizzling sounds into the street.
We’ve been on our own for lunch most days, and I’d like to share how our Bangkok (BKK) team fared on Friday. This was our first lunch without very knowledgeable staff or Thai speakers—we were just a bunch of American students looking for food this time. Four years learning bold pedestrian skills at Indiana University did not fully prepare me for the high speed, teeming chaos of Thai roads, but after an exhilarating crossing, we sat down on the ubiquitous blue plastic stools that are in most restaurants on this street to begin ordering.
This is a long and confusing process, especially when the menu is written in Thai. Christopher happily pulled out his phrasebook to find “What do you recommend?” and he and Albert were pulled up to the front area by one of the servers to check out the specialties.
The other table pulled out their phrase sheets, and Crystal led us in ordering noodle soup with chicken. We ate delicious noodle soup with duck (the chicken was somehow switched) and though we didn’t ask for drinks, somehow we ended up with cups of ice from an obliging server. Crystal used some Thai and learned our server’s name as we paid. We left feeling pretty victorious about navigating a restaurant in Thailand on our own.
This simple experience taught me one of the biggest lessons of the week. My bold teammates were unafraid to use Thai, look and sound silly, and interact with the people working in the restaurant. This unabashed approach isn’t a new concept, but I have yet to learn how to do it myself. Various lessons and activities during orientation showed me that it’s of the utmost importance.
A favorite InterVarsity diagram about approaching cultural differences identifies “the Inevitables”—frustration, tension, confusion, and embarrassment. As painful as it is to experience any of those feelings, they are truly unavoidable if I want to be fully involved in another culture and live in relationship with the people there.
As the entire Asia Trek team scatters to sites in BKK, Manila, and Calcutta, I hope we all embrace the Inevitables openly, resting in the grace of God and the grace of our host cultures to guide us lovingly and gently.
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