My Journal - Oct 26, 1993

October 26, 1993

David Hanks and Ajaan Utai announced our sites this morning. I am happy! I am going to Nakon Sawan, which means city of heaven and is 237 km north of Bangkok. I will be in the village of Tak-fa, right in the middle of the country, great for travel! Jeff and Lee are way over in Eson; Juli and Dave are north of me; and Lisa is in Roy-et, about 5 hours east of me but I think it made Steph happy. Dan is way in the south in Krabi.

Jeff said, “I am closer to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Bay of Tonkin, than I am to any of you. Except for Lee, why do I always get stuck near him”.

The week before swear in is all a blur, we were all excited and mixed with apprehension, couldn’t wait to go and didn’t want to leave our friends or the security of the SD hotel. (I have heard that the Peace Corps wont be allowed back to the SD because we were a little too noisy.

We only had one Peace Corps session; the rest of the week was spent in formal meetings and language exams. The Peace Corps session was on our schedule as: 3 hours with Dr. Somsak, you can imagine how much we were looking forward to that. It turned out to be a Psychiatrist from CSB, Community Services of Bangkok. He was a cool guy, very funny and said exactly what we needed to hear. He talked about stress and how to cope with all the things we were going to have to do without, and to cope with all the new influences. When the three hours were up, we wanted to keep going.

Swearing in was very formal. The Ambassador’s #2 guy was there, Matt Daily, the Charges de Affairs. He was very personable and invited us all to stay at his house whenever we were in Bangkok, plus he has a pool! I understand there is a list of names from the American Embassy of people that will put us up, peace corps volunteers.  Jeff and Rebecca both gave speeches in Thai, we were all so proud of them. Darcy gave a “brief” speech, and then a special thank you to all the staff. We (the PCV’s) all stood up and applauded, it was very touching, in fact David Hanks had a tear in his eye (probably ate a pepper!)

After we swore an oath, the same oath the President, the armed forces, and the boy scouts all swear to. They formally handed us over to the Royal Thai Government, it was a book with our names in it. Some big shot Minister was there and a couple of big shot Deputies, one of which I have seen on the news and in the news papers, I think he was the Deputy Minister for DPW or DTEC, which ever is over the other. We then had a very nice lunch and the rest of the day off.

That night we all went to a blues club called “Saxaphones”, next to the Victory Monument. It was so fun, we danced and sang along for hours. It is also very expensive, so hardly anyone drank (except the Volunteers not from our group!) Everyone was there, all the used to be Trainers, a bunch of current volunteers, (mostly our Trainers) and most of the Ajaans and Peace Corps staff. The ones I missed that I thought would be there were Ajaan Mongkol (he was filling out reports), Ajaan Patra (was sick) and Kuhn Sawarote (I am not sure why). Shelly, her hubby, and Uthai too.

Now, everyone is ready to go. David Hanks told us our offices probably want to take us back right away. He said we didn’t have to go with them, but it was a good idea to go to the Amphur Muang and start getting familiar with your new home. Personally, I wanted to go with mine, because my language skills are not the greatest. I have a fear of trying to get there on my own with all my luggage. Fortunately mine wanted to take me, except he has a house in Bangkok and wanted to stay the weekend.

The language exam was not hard, I felt really good about it, at least I did my best, so whatever my score, I wouldn’t be disappointed. I scored intermediately low, I hope I can take the test again after living here two years.

I am going to start my second journal when I get to Tak-faI so I will leave these last pages blank, I have a feeling that when I re-read this I’ll have some stuff to add!