First Arriving at the New CCS

When we arrived at the new CCS, we were expecting something open, a lot like what we had in Kilimanjaro. It is much different from Tanzania because it is more like a house then a compound. There are two doors; both doors go into the kitchenette/dining room area. One door goes into a little yard area, and one door goes to the restrooms (there aren’t restrooms in your individual rooms). There is a little table in the middle which is where they put all of the food. The dining room is just a table and a bunch of chairs. There is a living room area after you go up a couple of stairs. In the living room they have chairs and pillows, a phone, any books that you might need, and a TV with a DVD player and cable. There is one room there. When you go up a flight of stairs, there are three more rooms. The downstairs room is A4 and it has two sets of bunk beds, and upstairs there are three rooms (A1, A2, and A3) each with three sets of bunk beds. We are in room A3.
When I first got here I was full of mixed emotions. I didn’t know if would be as good as Tanzania or better or worse. I had such a wonderful experience in Tanzania, that I really didn’t know what to expect. The first person that we met was Maia (She spells her name wrong-it should be MaYa). I asked her what they did after placement and if there was anything like Matumaini. Since you get home anytime between 2 or 4pm, there isn’t really much time, and she didn’t seem to know of anything, and that made me a little bit upset. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t find anything that I connected to as much as I connected to Matumaini, but I thought that there might be something a little bit like it. Hopefully I’ll find SOMETHING.
So it was the first day at our new CCS that everyone (except for the two people that missed their flights) would be here. First we had a talk about Trang, the city that we are in, where things are and how to get there. After that we all got into groups went into Trang and we had to complete a task; in a way it was like a scavenger hunt. I was with my dad and two other girls, their names were Deborah and Corey. Everyone seems really nice. I am always up for meeting new people, but these people just seem so different. I will try to become friends with them. Our task was to go to a Batik place called Anda Batik, get two Thai dishes (take-out), and take a tuk-tuk home. We spent most of our time looking for Anda Batik. We looked everywhere for it and we asked everyone, but we just couldn’t find it. After almost an hour and a half, we gave up and we went to get the food that we needed. We were told that we needed one chicken dish and one egg dish. We bought the food really easily and then we grabbed a tuk-tuk. A tuk-tuk is a three-wheel car that is like a mini taxi. The tuk-tuk’s in Bangkok have one row of seats facing forward and a driver’s seat in front, and the tuk-tuk’s here in Trang, have two rows of seats facing each other and a driver’s seats in front. When we came back we were all a little bit disappointed, but we weren’t too upset about having not found the store. The other two girls went to sleep for a nap before dinner, and those of us who were pretty much used to the time difference, hung out and played cards. It was a fun day to start off our new CCS experience.
After attempting to learn how to speak Thai today, (March 4, 2007) which is extremely hard because one word can mean five different things if it is pronounced in different tones. The word khaaw (cow) can mean rice, white, very white, fishy, and news. It is extremely confusing and I think that Swahili was hard enough, even though it has the same alphabet. We danced and played games in our Thai class. Then we ate lunch. After lunch we went on a 45-minute drive to a pier where we got on boars and then we got off in this mud that was extremely thick. We just kept sinking in. When we got to the shore, we climbed up a rock and headed into a cave that was discovered just a year ago. We went all through it and we played on all of the rocks and climbed them. They told us not to bring shoes, so our feet hurt a bit. It was a lot of fun. When we got out of the cave, we got back on our boats and we went back to the dock. From there we were on our way to a little beach. The water felt glorious because it was really warm, but not too warm. We were having a lot of fun and we also found more caves to explore. My dad and Ed Levine were joking that they were going to buy a piece of land for a summer house. We were relaxing in the water while Emma and Jessica Levine were giving us mud treatments, luckily we didn’t have to pay, but we were told that it makes skin softer. I personally thought that it hurt. We saw tons of little crabs and their holes in the sand.
Overall, it was a good way to get introduced to Trang and get more acquainted with the other members of the group. I went in the van with all of the people that aren’t in families and everyone seems very nice. All of the Thai people are extremely kind. Everyone who works here and all of the people that we meet outside of CCS are always really welcoming and warm. So far, it seems like this will be just as good as Tanzania was. We will get to visit our placements for the first time tomorrow, I am very excited to see what it will be like.