This week is Peace Corps Week and in honor of 54 years of Peace Corps, the Office of Third Goal put out a call for current and returned volunteers to make a video highlighting their “Host Country Hero.” Being my last month in Thailand, I knew I had to participate, if only to make something to show my appreciation of my co-teacher and best friend in Thailand, Kruu Ning. The videos were relegated to two minutes, which is not actually a lot of time, and so I wanted to tell the full story here.
About Kruu Ning
Kruu Ning is 27 years old and has been teaching at Ban Nonravieng School for 4 years. She is from the nearby district of Bua Yai, where she lives with her maternal grandmother, mother and father. Her grandfather passed away last year. She graduated from Nakhon Ratchasima Rajabhat University with a Bachelor’s in English and recently finished her Master’s degree in Education Administration. Now she is studying law, in addition to teaching.
“When I was young, I wanted to be many things and wanted to study many things. I love English, but I wanted to learn about the other things too, so now I study the law and maybe after this I will study counseling,” she told me. I love her commitment to life-long learning.
But, watching her in the classroom and interact with the students is where she truly became my host country hero.
For Context, Showing Respect in Thailand
Thailand, like many Asian cultures, is extremely hierarchical. Some of it comes from the Indian influences and the caste system there. Some of it comes from being a collectivist society and needing some social norms to keep life smooth and functioning.
What it means in day to day life is that for certain occupations, those people are addressed with a different honorific.
When you meet someone, and you cannot tell their age, it is appropriate to ask so that you can be sure of who is to show respect to whom. Small children I see out and about with their parents are commanded to wai (hands placed palm to palm and a bow, the traditional greeting) to me, especially when I divulge that I am a teacher. I am expected to initiate the greetings with my co-workers who are older than me, and to bow lower. If I greet someone with a much higher status than me, I may not have the wai returned, or it usually is just a placing of the palms together quickly at chest level. When students walk in front of me, they bend at the waist to lower their heads in front of me.
This is to say that respect, particularly the Thai concept of respect, is generally a one-way street: from younger to older.
However, Kruu Ning bucks this trend with our students.
Kruu Ning’s Thoughts on Corporal Punishment
One of our first meetings together, going over ground rules for the classroom, I came prepared to discuss positive reinforcement techniques and ways to avoid corporal punishment, because I had heard about how prevalent it is in rural schools, in spite of being illegal.
“I do not hit the students,” she told me. “One time, they were doing their work, and I told to them, if you do not finish the work, I will hit you. I do not hit them. I just say this to them, but I would not hit them. One of the boys, he bring me his homework, and it was not done. I said to him, ‘Why do you not finish the work?’ and made him go back and sit down to finish it.
He came back again, with it still not finish, and I asked to him again, ‘Why are you not done?’ and he said, ‘It’s OK, you can just hit me.'” At this point in her story, her face contorts into a look of amused frustration at the whole situation. “So I said to him, ‘I’m not going to hit you. What part do you need help with?'”
That was just the beginning of how I knew she was a special person.
Give Respect to Get Respect
As the school year went on, I noticed that she would address the students as khun along with their nickname. This goes back to the fact that different social and occupational positions have different honorifics. Khun is the equivalent of “Ms.” or “Mr.” Khun is typically reserved for someone in a similar social position as you that you do no know very well. Just as most teachers in the States do not call each of their students “Ms.” or “Mr.”, it is virtually unheard of for teachers in Thailand to call their students khun.
“In our village, many people call each other ai or ee which is the rude word. It’s not polite. I want to teach the students to say khun to people. It is the way to showing the respect to other people, and I talk to them that if you respect others, the others will respect you too.”
And it’s clear that the students feel the respect that she gives them, as she has cultivated lasting relationships with many of her students. Students come back on Teacher’s Day and Wan Wai Kruu from the secondary school to honor her. She regularly hosts dinners at her teacher housing on school grounds with students, both former and current. She’s friends with them on Facebook and has their phone numbers. They tell her that they love her.
When I watch these interactions, and compare them to the way that other teachers interact with their students – lording their superiority over them both psychologically and physically with a bamboo sword – I know that she is a one woman revolution in these students’ lives, and that to me is nothing short of heroic.
Thank you for everything, Kruu Ning!