“Bah ram ewe, bah ram ewe, to your breed your fleece your clan be true! Sheep be true! Bah ram ewe.”
Coming to Thailand 20 years ago, I was sort of like Babe the Pig. I was a farang (westerner) in the far east. I really thought I had to become Thai in order to be effective. Problem was… just like Babe would never be a sheep, I could never become Thai. I didn’t even have the slightest clue about how exactly to ‘be Thai’. I thought that if I learned the language I could at least get started. I went to language school 4 hours a day for a year and a half. I learned all the consonants….
And I learned all the vowels…
And I learned how to put them together with the 5 tones so that I could read and write…
Oink.
I still didn’t know how to be Thai.
I ate the food (reluctantly at first, and always with a glass of iced water). I would attempt nonchalance as I ate some really weird foods, hoping to blend in with the locals. Sometimes I knew what I was eating. Sometimes I didn’t. Once a guy gave me a bowl of soup at church, and as I started to swish my spoon around I found little tiny heads… of pig foetuses. I didn’t eat that soup.
I could be a Canadian trying to be Thai, but I couldn’t be Thai.
Oink.
Then I swung the other direction and that’s where Babe and I differed. He persevered patiently, just being his own pig self among the sheep. Me on the other hand, I felt that if these people were going to keep laughing at my best efforts to be Thai, and if this culture was so impenetrable, then I would stubbornly dig my pig-headed Canadian heels in and all you Thai people, well, you could just fuggeddaboudit.
What did digging Canadian heels look like? Well… I started to make comparisons.
Canadian police
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, thank-you very much!
And Thai police…
Whenever I could I made a point to tell everybody how it was done in Canada… in Canada we sit on toilets, not squat. In Canada you don’t drive your motorbike on the sidewalk. You don’t drive down the wrong side of the street. In Canada we this and we that and blah blah blah.
But again, this was a futile exercise. We weren’t in Canada. We were in Thailand.
Oink.
Then, a shamefully long time later, and with a little help from my friends, I learned the Bah Ram Ewe effect; it’s a very good idea to be true to myself. It’s not photoshop or cutting certain parts of Thai culture pasting them onto me.
Photoshopped & cut-and-pasted
It’s being myself within Thai culture.
Who was I? I was a (slightly angry -okay, very angry, and cinical) Canadian-born, tri-lingual, kartwheeler, who happened to live in Thailand.
Bah.
Living in any foreign city will contribute to the fabric of who you are. I’ve often described a cross-cultural experience like a French kiss; you can’t wipe it off, you can’t spit it out and you can’t pretend it never happened.
I guess I’ve tried to apply the Bah Ram Ewe to everything I do here too. I can share core values and principles of an organization, and I can follow certain people I respect, learn from mentors and leadership, however, if I mimic their methods then maybe it’s just cut-and-pasting. As I write it all out it sounds so simple and I feel embarrassed that it took me so long to learn this. But this is what I learned. What I do needs to come from who I am, not trying to do it like someone else. Just like my trying to be Thai, I found that trying methods of other successful leaders takes so much energy; you have to think about it all the time, like, is this what a sheep would do? is this what a sheep would say? and you have to keep going back to the book. It doesn’t come from within.
For the couple of years I got to hang out with Dave and Rebecca Gibbons in NewSong Bangkok I learned a lot. I watched the movies they had watched. I read the books they had read. I didn’t want to miss a single gathering.
Hanging out with Dave and Beka Gibbons
When they left I knew I couldn’t do things like Dave did. But I did work at allowing the core values of NewSong to be expressed from my own Bah Ram Ewe, from my own DNA.
Bah!
My Bah Ram Ewe is maternal, it’s urban, it comes from the French kiss of cross-cultural experiences in Bangkok, Paris, London, Toronto and Montreal. And the anger, well it’s still a part of it too only now I am consciously trying to direct it at injustice (and sometimes, in weak moments, my patient husband).
I’m still learning, humbly, and I don’t have all the answers down pat… tee hee… and that’s the part where I wrap this up with a clever conclusion that brings us back around to the top.
Bah Ram Ewe! To your DNA be true!
Patricia DeWit
ZZDeWit Photos
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