A monk, a speech, and some Thinglish on my porch

A couple of days ago, my neighbor came over to tell me something. She's great, but sometimes I can't understand a single word that comes out of her mouth. The only thing I sort of understood were the words "tonight" "write in English" "at the temple." I just smiled and said "I don't understand" becauseI just couldn't connect the dots of those 3 things. She laughed and left. I figured I would just let it play out. Eventually it would make sense, and if not, I would just file it away into the growing category of confusing conversations. Another unsolved mystery, if you will.

About an hour later, I was on my porch playing Uno with the neighborhood kids and sure enough, up walks the friendly monk with a high school boy. I talked about him earlier - he's the monk who speaks a little English and always asks how I'm doing and how long I will be here. He's a funny fellow. Anyway, apparently this boy was giving a speech in English the next day at school to some group. I'm not sure why it needed to be in English, it didn't seem worth it to ask. So the monk wanted me to write the English version. He read the speech in Thai and I did my best to write it in English.

Here's the catch, there are very important cultural customs when interacting with a monk, particuarly for a female. We are all expected to bow extremely politely when we greet him. Additionally, we all have to sit lower than him, so he sat on a bench, and the rest of us all sat on the ground. Females are not allowed to touch monks or even hand anything directly to a monk. For example, he was holding the Thai version of the speech and he could not hand it to me. Instead he set it on the bench and then I could pick it up. Otherwise, he could have handed it to the boy (because they are both males) and then the boy could hand it to me. There's a lot to keep track of when speaking with a monk.

I was so nervous that I was going to mess up one of these very important monk rules. I managed to translate the speech with relative ease, I'm sure it wasn't quite right, but it's not like anyone could understand the English anyway. Then the monk wanted to sit and chat, but I wanted him off my porch. He's a very nice old man, but I was just so consumed by all the monk rules, it was hard to keep speaking Thinglish with him (a confusing mixture of Thai and English). Eventually he left and I went inside to make dinner. Just a typical day of translating a speech for a monk on my porch at my now newly painted sea foam green house. I never ever thought I would type that sentence, but I moved to Thailand and this is apparently what happens.