What Ryan's Doing

1. Dig a hole.

2. Start a fire. Poke it.

3. Heat large rocks up by setting them in the fire.

4. Stand far back as the large rocks explode and send shards whizzing by your head.

5. Remove the burning part of the fire leaving only the unexploded rocks in the hole.

6. Poke.

7. Lay banana leaves over the red hot rock bombs.

8. Lay a large hunk of meat (wrapped in banana leaves) and veggies on the banana leaves.

9. Document.

10. Exchange sarcastic comments about how "this is never going to work."

11. Cover with more banana leaves, a wet hessian sack, and a plastic tarp, and a golden retriever.

12. Cover with dirt.

13. Wait patiently. Drink. Rub your disgusting beard in a contemplative manner.

14. Ballpark guestimate when the meat will be done. Ours took about an hour.

15. Uncover without getting dirt on your food. Sift through remnants to find edible bits.

16. Don ridiculous hats and carve the meat with a pocketknife.

17. Drool a little.

18. Eat and be proud you didn't have to use a fancy grill to cook your meat and veg.

This was done in 2007 in Salasaca, Ecuador at while volunteering at Katitawa School.  Cheers to Adam and Wendy for being my models and putting up with all of my “ground” beef jokes.

I had bought a laptop in Thailand because I needed one for school.  Now school is over, and I decided to sell it on Craigslist Bangkok.  Well, some very nice lady from Nigeria offered to buy AND give me an extra $100 for shipping to Africa!  What a dream come true.  Here is our conversation (she is in red, I am in blue, and my hilarious commentary is in black):

Hello
I saw your posted item and am ready to make instant payment via PayPal online or Bank
Transfer…kindly get back to me if the item is still available for sale and your PayPal
account or Bank Details
Thanks
Thats wonderful! Yes the item is still for sale.  Are you in Bangkok?  Do you want to come see it?  It would be great to be able to transfer to my bank account.  Let me know what you want me to do.

Ryan

thanks i will like to know if you can ship this item to my son in west africa and am ready to pay for the shipment…kindly get back to me with your shipment cost via EMS to africa
and the total cost so i can make the payment aspas
Thanks

Mary has great grammar and sentence structure, doesn’t she?  And I am also very reassured that she will make the payment “aspas.”

Sure I can ship it to West Africa.  I will need an address in order to find out the shipping costs.  What is your son doing in West Africa?  I have always wanted to go to Africa.  I am more interested in East Africa, but I am sure West Africa is nice too.

Thanks, Mary!

This is the shipment Address
Name: ONIT DAVID
ADDRESS: FEDERAL COOPERATIVE COLLEGE IBADAN
CITY: IBADAN
STATE: OYO
COUNTRY:NIGERIA
ZIP CODE 23402

When I tried to go to the website of the college mentioned, Google warned me that the site contains pages that install malicious software without the user’s consent.

I’ve just looked up how much it will cost to ship to that address.  It turns out it will cost about 2500 baht.  Which would bring the total to 10000 baht.  I can ship it whenever I receive the payment.  How do you want to pay?  I don’t have a paypal account.  So a bank transfer would probably be better.  How do we do that?  I don’t want to sound paranoid, but do I have to worry about a scammer or anything?  Let me know what I should do.

Hey Mary.

BANK OF CHINA
SHAOXING BRANCH,
WUYANG PIANMENWAI SHAOXING ZHENJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA.
ACCOUNT NAME: SHAOXING WUYANG INDUSTRIAL CO. LTD
ACCOUNT NUMBER: 018100723002
SWIFT CODE: BKCHCNBJ92D

Seriously, can I have a picture?

Love,

Ryan

The bank information was from another scam where victims were told to deposit a “transfer fee” into the account. It was posted on a forum of these types of scams.

I later received an email from “Bank of America” saying that Mary had transferred the funds.  The email had numerous spelling and grammatical errors.   Nothing else happened after that.  While this was pretty entertaining to me, its not quite as funny as what this guy did to a scammer.

The 2009 school year is over at Satit Bangna School in Samut Prakan, Thailand. I only taught for the second half of the year. Most of my time was spent teaching English Conversation to grades one through six. Each grade has 3 classes, or sections. Each section has on average 15 kids. I saw each section once a week.

If you add all of this up, I had roughly 300 students. Many of these students had names that I never learned. All of them knew my name, though few pronounced it correctly.

Throughout the year, a few children really stood out. Some stand out for their excellent English ability, or their eagerness to do well and to please the teacher. Others stand out for constantly trying to punch teacher’s butthole every time I bend down to pick something up. If I knew a student’s name, you could bet that student was really good, or a nightmare.

One student stood out from the beginning. She wasn’t particularly bad or good but as my mom would say “that child is something else.” Her name was Jar. Here is a picture of me and Jar (she is on the right):

Before anyone starts to worry, that shirt IS my school uniform on Wednesdays

If I had three words to describe Jar, they would be: stubbern, goofy and cute. In one word: stubgoofute.

She yanked one of her many missing teeth out during my class.   I am seriously doubting that it was actually loose.

Jar shows off her self-dentistry

I am still not sure what to think of Jar, except that maybe, sometime down the road, I just might miss her.   But probably not.

They are just handles for rope, aren’t they?

Christmas, as I understand it, is a relatively new concept in Thailand.  But Thai people are always ready to celebrate something.  And Christmas is no exception.  It seems they’ve picked up a lot of their ideas about Christmas from old American Christmas movies because nobody really understands the holiday here.  And to give them credit, it is pretty weird when one takes a step back and thinks about Christmas objectively.  But who cares right?  The big fat white guy with a beard is throwing candy at me… and I like candy.

At my school, I was designated to be Santa.  This is actually my second attempt as Father Christmas.  My first was at my Aunt Karen and Uncle Greg’s house for their family’s children.  It is quite the responsibility when you think about it.  When done right, you have the opportunity to create a Christmas full of magic and wonder for a child.  But you also run the risk of crushing spirits and making children cry.  Imagine you see Santa let out a string of swear words as he trips on some wrapping paper and his fake beard falls of and you realize he has had your bed pillow up against his sweaty stomach for the past hour.  Its a lot of pressure to ensure that the parents don’t have car ride home full of long and awkward explanations and tears.

I didn’t feel the same pressure this Christmas.  Nobody really knows what Santa is supposed to do, so he does whatever he wants.  If his beard (made out of cotton balls) gets hot, he takes it off.  If kids start looting his bag of candy, he tells them to “piss off”  and later explains to the administrators that “piss off” is another way to say “Ho ho ho”  in English.

So during the daily morning assembly, Santa appeared dressed head to toe in red felt, bearing a bag of candy.  A microphone was thrust in his face.  You could pick up a little reluctance on his face as he accepted the microphone.  You see, he was unaware he had to prepare a speech.  But even had he known,  he doesn’t speak the language.  So after about 16 awkward Ho Ho Ho’s and looking around unsuccessfully for advice from the other American teachers, Santa started to throw candy to the 500+ children, grade k-6 neatly seated in rows in front of him.

The neat rows lasted until the Santa’s hand first thrust into the candy bag.  The children brutally fought one another for the candy.  The candy was the Thai equivalent of individually wrapped Life-Savers.  His cotton beard fell off after the 4th handful of candy was launched.  Only about a quarter of the children received candy from Santa this Christmas, because Santa had forgot to ration, and ran out of candy before he got to grade 3.

So if anyone asks, it is an American tradition that only one out of 4 children get candy on Christmas.

When you move to a new country, you should do a little research.  The problem is most research is boring.  I cannot read for hours on a country’s history, its industries, its government, etc.  I just want to know if I will be able to find a job and an apartment easily, and how much money I will need.

The one thing I never thought to look into, was how the residents in the prospective country wipe their ass.  I don’t know how it had slipped my mind.

Its one of those things you live your live your life thinking that you are doing it correctly.  Its not the sort of thing that you compare notes on with other people until you find yourself in a country that doesn’t have toilet paper in their restrooms.  Its not that they never have toilet paper, but they don’t have a spot where toilet paper should be.  Instead there is what can only be described as a kitchen sink sprayer.  The ones that are situated right next to the faucet which are attached to a hose that is usually recessed into the sink basin.  That thing that is hilarious to put a rubber band around as you linger around waiting for someone to turn on the sink.

This sprayer has a much more concentrated stream.  As you can imagine, the successfulness of the butt sprayer depends highly on the water pressure of the pipe supplying the sprayer.  With the water pressure in my apartment, I could easily power-wash the paint off my walls.  So I get a very successful cleaning, albeit a little painful at times.

With the water pressure of the school (3rd floor office), I couldn’t water a small plant.  I’m never too sure of what to do in these situations.  I am not going to tell you my solution, because I have not yet compared notes with the other American teachers on how they solve this issue.  However, I will say that there were a few days when a couple of students did not get their tests back from Teacher Ryan.

Its always the hardest.

So its going to be short.  Technically, this is my second blog.  The first was created about 2 years ago with the intention of documenting my trip to South America.  I had spent countless hours building, tweaking, debugging, ruining, re-installing it.  I wanted it perfect.  It had a map that would tell the reader where I was at any given time, and where I had been. It had big fancy photo galleries that corresponded to  each place on the map.  It was impressive.

And I didn’t make one post on it.

It became apparent that I got more joy out of creating the blog, than I did writing on it.  So this one will hopefully be different.  No elaborate maps or complicated photo galleries.  I will just tell you where I am, and post pictures like a normal person.   I will have to promise myself to be satisfied with the blog being unduly simple, and restrain myself from tweaking the life out of it.  Because after all, this blog is for you to keep up with what I am doing.  Something, sadly, I needed to create because I am so bad at writing emails and making phone calls.  Hopefully this will, by some measure, make up for that.

As long as my inner computer nerd doesn’t get the better of me.