CW: This piece contains descriptions of gastrointestinal distress, including vomiting.
Moving from my first area on my mission was shockingly difficult for me. I had grown to love Bang Kapi (บางกะปิ) even though the last five weeks in that area were incredibly grueling. I had a difficult companion. We had very few investigators. We had a visiting General Authority chew us out for not being more like Taiwan. But I was a dutiful missionary! I was saying my prayers and developing empathy, even in midst of difficult circumstances.
When my mission president told me that I would be going to Nong Khai (หนองคาย) near the Thai-Laotian border, I was shocked. I had hoped to stay in Bangkok to more fully master Standard Thai (the variety of Thai spoken by educated Thais in Bangkok). But I was about to enter the Northeast of Thailand: the Isan (อีสาน) with somtum (ส้มตำ) and definitely not Standard Thai. In the Isan, many still speak Isan but schools, public functions, church services, and other events are almost always held in Standard Thai.
There’s a little bit of tension between Latter-day Saints in Bangkok and those in the Isan. Many Isan folks are very proud of their cultural heritage. I would hear members make small talk in Isan and barely understand a word that they were saying, but I knew that they were sometimes more comfortable in Isan than they were in Standard Thai. Being fluent in Standard Thai was a must to hold any major calling in the LDS Church in Thailand. I didn’t know a single LDS Church leader in Thailand who didn’t read, write, and speak Standard Thai fluently. The LDS Church was inaccessible to many segments of society in Thailand as a result of this unwritten rule.
Joining a religion based out of Salt Lake City, Utah and then speaking exclusively Standard Thai at Church was hard for many and even classist in some cases. It was also a barrier for some to convert. While many of the younger inhabitants The Isan, over its long, illustrious history, had undergone a process known as Thaification starting in the 1930s. Thailand centered its identity as a nation state in the idea that Bangkok elites, not those in places like Nong Khai, were the “Standard” and that the nation needed to heel to a centralized identity rooted in Bangkok ideals. Multiculturalism is beginning to flourish more in Thailand (at least from my colonizer perspective), and even when I was there in 2009 to 2011, I saw efforts to promote a diverse Thai identity with various cross-sections of society, like this music video.
Nong Khai was also a major culture shift in terms of companions for me. Sometimes our Elder’s Quorum meetings would descend into Isan discussions about religion. But the Branch President, my third companion, always managed to calm the tension. He had to be the branch president because we couldn’t find a local Melchizedek Priesthood holder who could manage the affairs of the branch. I spent hours in the the tiny rented building that the LDS Church had repurposed into a chapel. I studied the scriptures, honed my Thai, and wondered why I had been assigned to be the branch president’s companion. I sat as he spent hours with members, including young women (with the door open and me within earshot). He provided for the spiritual and temporal affairs of the branch. I was stuck in the makeshift library with dozens of LDS publications in Thai. I repeated this phrase a lot during those months: At least I’m getting better at reading and writing Thai!
But we had some investigators who were eager to learn about the LDS Church! My Thai was slowly getting better. I was feeling more comfortable with the cultural nuances in the country. The days were hot, long, and tiring, but we had a lot of fun in that house with another set of missionaries. I was pretty chipper in my email home to my family the week after I had the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had:
This week was really good despite a rougher start. My companion and I were both sick at the beginning of the week. We didn't sleep very well because of it but now I am feeling back to my chipper old self. Lots of bed rest coupled with fluids and good mild food helped me to get over it pretty quickly.
I saw my first elephant this last week! It was at the place we ate dinner on Monday night. There was a man going around with his elephant selling sugar cane to feed it. It was a pretty small one and it was playing a harmonica. That was pretty exciting if I do say so myself.
It was Preparation Day and our day started off well. We tried to get our weekly chores done in a few short hours before a night of teaching. We had two appointments but one went short and the other cancelled on us. After the cancellation, my companion (the branch president) and I decided to get dinner. We weren’t technically supposed to take time for ourselves on Preparation Day, but I really wanted that delicious Isan place that was out in the open air and next to a giant tree with probably hundreds of birds in it. We had a delicious Isan meal. And then we went home to plan our day. But both of us expressed that we didn’t quite feel like ourselves, so we went to bed early.
My companion got the large King bed. I climbed up to the top of the bunk bed. As the least senior person in the house, I got the top bunk: the worst spot if you needed to get up in the middle of the night. The other elders went to bed, and I fell asleep pretty quickly for about an hour.
I woke up an hour later and thought to myself, “Oh, crap.”
After my brief moment of panic and indecision, I finally threw up. All over myself. On the top bunk. I groaned and thought to myself, “I’ve got to get to the downstairs bathroom.”
I ran downstairs, only to throw up again and again over the next few minutes. It was clearly food poisoning from the best Isan restaurant in Nong Khai. As I was throwing up, I could hear my companion running down the hall. He didn’t make it to the upstairs bathroom. At this point, the other two elders were a little bit concerned, so they got up to try and see what they could do. I couldn’t even go back to my bed, covered in vomit, so I tried to sleep on this couch while the elders who weren’t throwing up all night could wash the sheets and clean up the bed.
It took a few days to get back to normal. I felt a lot of pressure to get back to work, and we definitely shouldn’t have gotten a delicious dinner on Preparation Day. Maybe Heavenly Father was upset and was like… Let’s be more like Taiwan! like that visiting general authority told us. But at the end of the day, I was more upset about not feeling like I could go back to that delicious Isan place by the giant tree with a lot of birds.