There And Back Again

(Mmmh literary cliches...)

I'm going back. Back to Thailand and Thai and the most beautiful host family and rain and mosquitos and dengue (but hopefully not) and bucket showers and confusion and tukes and sticky rice and capsaicin and stupid moments and rice fields and mountains and feral dogs and cities and lights and noise and nonsense and and friends and regular people going about their everyday lives and mistakes and recoveries and adventures and being lost and new questions to answer and new answers to question.

I leave in the morning and AND I AM SO FREAKING EXCITED OHMYGOD. And nervous and scared and other things but if we don't think about them they go away, right? (Wrong, on so many levels, but we're going to ignore that for now.)

I'm heading back this summer on numerous grants to do research for my SIP, which is fancy Kollege-speak for a big senior-year paper that's supposed to be cool or something. I will be researching and interviewing and derping around with the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP), which you may remember from a previous post as the place where we killed and ate a pig. Basically, it's this super cool organization that works with a bunch of different hill tribe villages to promote sustainable development.

Here's a photo the view from UHDP during said pig harvest.
Ohh baby that sky.

I will be working with them to research the barriers that hill tribe peoples face in gaining citizenship. Citizenship is really important because it affects things like the right to vote, land holdings, travel, education, and access to health care. Unfortunately, many hill tribe communities lack access to this basic right. I'll be looking at why this is and what can be done to change it. Basically, roughly, something like that.

It MAY sound to you like I have absolutely NO idea what I'm doing this summer, and if you thought that, BRAVA! 10 points to Gryffindor! You're be pretty much spot on. But that's ok because at some point, sometime in the future I might, possibly, maybe have some idea and AND I'll have loads of fun trying to figure it all out and that could be what's important, maybe.

Now, on to 20+ hours of flights and wat lies beyond. (What puns? Wat puns. So good.)

Wish me luck!