Catch-As-Catch-Can

Whenever there is an event away from our school, we have to figure out how to get the teachers and/or students there and back again.  With the notable exception of the class fieldtrips, which involved chartering busses and traveling en masse, the primary means of organizing transportation can only be described as “catch-as-catch-can,” and as I think about it, this is as good a phrase as any to capture what seems to me to be a central feature of Thai culture.  One could probably extend this transportation metaphor to any culture and how one gets from point A to point B, whether it be in material or conceptual, physical or metaphysical terms, but for now I’ll limit myself to just Thailand.

A fairly recent example of this was the municipality level academic competition, which was being held at a school about a 15 minute drive away.  Up until the morning of, people would ask one another whom the other person was going with, and various students who were competing were told to go with this or that teacher or in this or that song taew.  I was judging a morning event (or so I thought), so I could either try to catch a ride back with someone who was returning at noon or wait until my co-teacher, who was staying the whole day, came back.  I opted for the former and talked with various colleagues until I found someone who was going back at lunch and had room for me, but even then, she said I should call her when I was ready to leave to be sure.  Not yet having ingrained in me the fact that things can and generally will change at the last minute, I wondered why she would suggest this when we both knew we were going back.  As it turned out, this was in fact the way to proceed for when I got to the morning round of the speech competition (for grades 4-6), I was told that I would also be judging the afternoon round (for grades 7-9).  At the end of the day, the teachers and students who were still at the competition repeated the cycle of questions and instructions about who was going back with whom.

This catch-as-catch-can method seems to prevail here for many if not most things: preparing for events at school, monk ordinations, elections.  There have been various other events, sports camps, academic competitions, etc. where people seem to always be asking “Who are you going with?”; “Who’s taking care of that?”; “Where is so-and-so”; etc. etc.  In the transportation arena, other than the little fiasco with Ek’s send off (see the previous post, “Are We on the Same Page”), I’ve somehow always managed to get to and from these events, and in general everyone does and the events in question come off perfectly fine.  Maybe not always according to plan (if there was in fact a plan of any kind, which is often very debatable) but with reasonable success measured in terms of enjoyment and accomplishment of goals. It seems to me that there are two primary reasons for this.  The first is that even if there is no set plan, everyone is accustomed to helping out wherever is needed, so the collective effort fills in any gaps that more structured organization might have obviated.  And the second is that the prevailing Thai attitude towards most things could be summed up in the phrase “Mai bpen rai” (it’s fine; it’s o.k.; no big deal).  So if things go a little “wrong,” for example, if an event starts 30 minutes or an hour later than “scheduled” because things aren’t quite ready, no big deal.  If a teacher has to teach two or even three classes together because another teacher gets called into a meeting, it’s fine.  If you start out from point A and along the way point B gets moved a few times, well, you get the idea.