Happy New Year. 15 hours ahead of the time in Seattle – and in a sleeper car in transit from Ubon to Bangkok.
In search of Thai sign language books, I’m bicycling through traffic in the mega-city of development, light-years away from Savannakhet. Gliding silently over asphalt in what must be the closest experience to being in a hovercraft. I can marvel at everything curious and miraculous, awakened to a new eon, and still stay safely detached.
Even the biggest book store in the biggest shopping mall with the biggest aquarium in SE Asia doesn’t have the books I’m looking for, but the employees are well trained in the service industry and print out directions to the place where I will find them.
I’m tired from walking in this shopping universe without my hovercraft and when looking for the exit, I’m made aware that if I wanted to, I could buy chandeliers, rococo furniture, Hugo Boss suits and even a few cars if I wanted to, but if I really wanted a box of Krispi Donuts, I’d have to wait for at least an hour in a line that looks longer than immigration. What are these people doing? Poor people must be hungry from empty stomaches, but why is it that rich people never feel full? And why does it seem like all roads to development end in a shopping mall?
I will not spend more than five minutes thinking about this. What is more impressive about development in this country is the advances made for the non-hearing. I’ve heard about several award-winning projects done by students which include things like signing robots, speech recognition translation to signing systems and what will be more manageable for me, software to visually digitize signs.
The reason for my anticipation and urgency is that signing will be a part of an elementary school level English language education program in Laos, a mouthful with an acronym that looks like ELELEPL, but in simpler language, I think it’s going to happen. In 2011.
