I know very little (shockingly little, considering how Type A I am) about what’s in store for this year. I’ll give a run down, so that we can all experience this process together.

It’s a Friday night, and I left Madison on Wednesday morning. Luckily for me, the third airport of my trip is famous for its Sleep Box system, where you rent a bed and a shower for a couple of hours, clean up for your final destination, and lay down for the first time in your 36-hour sitting spree. It was glorious! Not that I arrived at my final destination in any way fresh, given the 90-degree heat and blazing sun. I did arrive to the friendliest faces, though, of my fellow WorlTeach volunteers and Thai people alike. As my plane coasted down over the expansive greenery that is the outskirts of Nakhon Phanom Province, I knew that I was exactly where I am supposed to be.

Here is all that I know about the coming week, and, in all honestly, the only information I have about the coming year: I will be training in NKP until next Sunday. At that point, the teachers of my school (Ban Paeng, an hour north of the city and as close to Laos as you can get without accidentally crossing the border) will come to pick me up. I’ll be in a village separate from the other volunteers, but we will meet up regularly on the weekends to discuss lesson plans and to travel together. I start teaching that Monday – Halloween (and my mom’s birthday!). There are thirty students in each class, and I will have several classes throughout the week, all secondary school students. What my schedule will look like, I do not know. How many kids in total I will teach, I do not know. What the extent of their knowledge in English is, I do not know. How far my house is from my school, I do not know. There’s a lot that is still to be determined, and my impression is that in Thai culture, that’s exactly as it should be.

One of the first things my Field Director taught me upon my arrival is the omnipresent Thai phrase, jai yen. The translation – jai, meaning, “heart” and yen, meaning, “cool” – is fairly direct. To put up with all of the unknowns in travel, in work, in school, in life, one must have a cool, calm heart. There are many more unknowns than knowns in my life at the moment, so I could not be any place more fitting than a country where jai yen is the panacea of choice. Here’s to a year of taking things as they come.