“My name is Somchai,” he wrote in my gray notebook, its cover blistered with sweat from my shirt pocket. “I like yellow,” he said, fingering his saffron robe.

Somchai, age 23, was the school principal at Wat Sirikanchanaram, a mountain temple outside of Kanchanaburi, half a day’s drive west of Bangkok. Six monks were responsible for the education of 150 novices in a new monastery built to perpetuate Theravada, the most ancient branch of Buddhism.

For most of the novices, Thai was a second language to their native tongue of Lao. They also needed to learn English and Pali, in its way the Latin of the original scriptures, plus math and science taught by community teachers. I was there with Carolyn to teach conversational English, one of a series of native speakers brought in by my volunteer group.  

“See you at three o’clock,” Somchai said as he dropped me off at the classroom with 30 junior high students at 1PM the first afternoon. Two hours and not much of a lesson plan, but I was the teacher.

I showed them pictures from home, sources of teaching words.

Daughter. Son. Wife. Son-in-law. House. Snow. Say again. Watch my tongue.

OK, let’s hear you describe your own families. Brother. Sister.  Father.  Mother.    

On my Michelin world map, unfolded with them crowding around the desk, we found Thailand and Kanchanaburi.

Washington DC. New York. L.A. They were elsewhere on the map, looking for places they knew from other classes, from the computer in the office, from talking with volunteers who had preceded me.

The tallest teen, in the middle of a voice change, challenged me. 

“How much you know about Buddhism?”

“Not much,” I said. “Some.”

It seemed that’s what he wanted to hear: another teacher going at English alone with them despite ignorance of their main subject, devoid of real control.

During class the third day we went birding, because I was out of gas teaching English by rote, done with holding up and describing pictures from home, exhausted of thoughts collected into stories written on the slate blackboard for them to recite back, finished with cheap chalk that broke under the slightest pressure and dusted over the desk, the floor and me.   

They looked through my binoculars, some crouching down to see better into the trees, some waiting a turn to write their names in my notebook, some drifting slowly into the periphery of novicehood, not long for the monastic life. Most were from villages in Laos, given the opportunity as early as seven to live in and be schooled by the monastery. Twenty was the age of decision: choose a monk’s life or return to lay society.

Sunee, our housing host with whom Carolyn taught English to a thousand middle schoolers elsewhere in Kanchanaburi, brought us into the street fronting her home one morning.

“We give food to the monks,” she said.

We knelt in the street with fruits and vegetables, offering them when the monks from their neighborhood arrived. We felt drawn in and yet distant, dropping food into the brass begging bowl of a monk about our age, saffron-robed, with thin-rimmed glasses, going about his rounds for his community.

“They cannot store up food for the next day,” she said. “Their food for today is what they receive. They eat early in the morning and at noon.”

Back at Wat Sirikanchanaram, the cars from the community arrived each midmorning. People carried food to an outside table and left it there, as if bringing potluck dishes and not staying for the meal.

And so I took lunch with the monks, or rather alongside them, sitting outside the refectory at a stone table beneath a tree, brought fruit and vegetables and some cakes as their teacher of the moment. I was to learn their way by watching, temporarily immersed in their community.

The chant before eating was startling, a blend of children’s, changing and adult voices, its clarity spilling from the two-sided hall beneath the newly leafed pho trees of a February spring. They ate in silence, only the clink of metal spoon on metal plate. Nothing but their clothing and what they ate each day was their own except what they learned of the practice, and even that was a received tradition in which they participated.

My last day there, I picked up a piece of the mountain and put it in my pocket for the way home. It is a small red stone, like all the others on the hillside I walked up every day on my way from the street. I took it along to remember the experience of being among them. And I left some of my heart.