Read For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question for Free Online

you can eat with us (traditional food).
    And then one more asking what time someone should meet me at the airport. And apparently even that limited job description, written by someone in Bangkok, hadn’t made it to Mae Sot before my arrival.
    “I’m sorry,” The Blay was apologizing. “I thought before you were strategic planner.”
    “I don’t even know what that is,” I said, though it did explain why The Blay had, over stick soup my first night, told me he had some objectives or something for me to look over, to which I’d responded, though I’d had no idea what he was talking about, “Okay.” Ta Mla must have cleared up the confusion, relaying what he’d learned at breakfast yesterday about my profession. His vocabulary seemed so limited that I hadn’t tried clarifying the difference between an English teacher and an English teacher to him, either.
    So here was The Blay asking me if I could organize and teach two classes, one in basics to beginning students, like Ta Mla, who barely spoke English, and one in article/essay/memo/letter writing to advanced students, like The Blay, who spoke it pretty well. The advanced class would run from ten in the morning to noon, and the beginners’ from one to three, every day. The Blay was either not daunted by or not comprehending my explanation that I had approximately no qualifications for teaching English as a second language, particularly to students whose language I didn’t speak. I had two days to prepare.

    “I need to be at professional level,” The Blay said. He moved to the table against the front wall of the room, where his laptop was set up, and clicked on something that launched “Say You, Say Me” on loop, adjourning the conversation. As the rest of the group dispersed, Htan Dah ushered me into the adjoining narrow, cramped computer room, where three of the desks were occupied. He gestured at the lone available one and told me I was free to use it for my classwork.
    I sat down at the computer with a notebook and pen. Originally a Midwesterner and constitutionally a nerd, I was instantly energized by being handed an assignment that was potentially too big and too far outside my abilities to complete. And I’d been feeling much better. I’d been negotiating the squat toilet without incident. Also, the night before, I’d walked into the bathroom with my towel, shut the giant wooden door behind me, and stripped off my clothes. I’d stood next to the high trough holding a plastic bowl of icy water and taken just a few breaths before dumping the contents down my neck and chest. My body went rigid and my heart into hard beats with the shock of it, and it took a lot of goes before the wet became more refreshing than traumatizing, but I was clean. We’d had more from that bottomless pot of stick soup, but I was snacking on yogurt and nuts, so my stomach wasn’t so achingly empty. At night, the darkness in my room was so complete that I felt warmly, tightly wrapped in it, and I fell asleep listening to the lizards chirping on the ceiling, one of which had crapped on me. Now, my morale high, I started searching the Internet for do-it-yourself ESL courses while the same soothing Lionel Richie song played over and over in the background.
    After several hours, I took my notebook back into the living room and sat down to do some brainstorming on my lesson plan. Near me, in a chair in front of the TV, sat an unfamiliar face bearing a wicked scar. His hair was cut military close, and he was lean but well cut, like most of the other guys.
    “Very beautiful,” he said after a while, and I looked up to see him
nodding at Christina Aguilera dancing around the screen in bursting silver lamé.
    I smiled and agreed.
    “Where do you come from?”
    “The United States,” I said. “Do you live here?”
    “No. In camp.” Christina Aguilera went through three costume changes in her music video before he asked, “Do your parents have divorce?”
    “Are my parents