Isaan (or Esarn)

Isaan is "as Thai as Thailand gets" in the words of my friend Fritz. This is where you will see rice paddies for as far as the eye can see, water buffalo grazing in fields and along the roadsides, monks out for their morning alms runs at six am, ancient Khmer ruins straight out of the jungle book, and the Winston Churchill-looking faces of Asian elephants as they whack roots on the ground with their prehensile schnozes to clear the dirt off of them. My experience in Isaan was relatively short, but that won't be the case for long.

After one heck of a bus ride, I arrived in Khorat (Nakon Ratchisma) feeling rather gross. Ice-cold fruit, my saving grace, made me feel leagues better as I scoured the town for an Internet cafe to upload some pictures and relieve their weight from the overburdened memory of my camera.

Khorat wasn't great to be honest, granted, I wasn't there for very long, but I read up on it in Lonely Planet and found a euphemism about every six or seven words. Basically, it's a hub to get to other places, but I didn't see much worth sticking around for outside of volunteer work - and my contacts weren't there. So I moved on to Buriram.

Buriram, I actually like quite a bit more, despite Lonely Planet's description as "the forgetable capital of Buriram." I didn't think it was bad. On a tip from our teacher trainer, Dave, I hit up a Rajabaht school - kind of the Thai version of state college - and checked out their Education department. I was immediately surrounded by a group of principals who wanted volunteers. This happens to me somewhat frequently because people don't think of the problems of hiring people to work for free.

You get a lot of schools that want free English teachers, but they already have paid ones. They don't think about the fact that this is going to be no end of headaches for them. Can you imagine being an English teaching volunteer and then finding out that two people are being paid to do the exact same job in the exact same place?

That's why I do the job that I do.

Part of my site vetting is to make sure that volunteer sites are legit. Some places just want money from the general public, some want free workers and don't actually need them, some places are actually just fronts for far more insidious business - this is particularly true in Cambodia.

One of the Rajabaht school principals took me to her elementary school. I think I am going to pass their information on to our people that work on Special Thai Project. Here's a picture: compare with the hilltribe stuff.