I am off later today to spend almost 4 weeks living at Sisa Asoke in Srisaket Province. This is an intentional Buddhist community of people who have come together to work on their spiritual lives and live in community together leading simple lives. They grow all of their own food, they wear simple clothes and no shoes. They have chosen to be poor and donate their lives to community - the one they live in and the wider society as a whole. Each moment I spend with people from the Asoke community is a time of learning and appreciation. A month with them may change me though being the stodgy old bat I am, that is a tall order!

I have not heard from the man who said he would be my benefactor. I have chosen to trust that everything will work out and this group we are building here will have its opportunity to work in Uganda.

Yesterday was a nightmare for me. When I came to Ubon, I asked the department to set up a wiki for me to work with the students on. This past term, I had my students develop a project using the wiki. I went to grade the work after their final on Friday and the wiki was down. No one was communicating with me or answering mails or phone calls. Finally on Wed evening, the wiki came online. I went into the office yesterday morning to finish my grading and get my final grades submitted. I arrived in my office to find the wiki in the form it had been at the beginning of July. 10% of the students' grades, gone. It turns out that that was the last time the server had been backed up! I was appalled but went on. I had a print out of each students work that was about a week old and worked from there. The grades got submitted.

Then I set to work to finish the work for my Economics class for next semester. PANIC! All of the work had been done on the wiki! The course has 4 text books (about 1600 pages of reading) and all of the reading assignments, and daily homework assignments and the whole schedule was on the wiki and the university hadn't backed it up in 3 months. I wanted to have that wiki entry done before I left for Srisaket because I wanted the students in that course to start working on the readings and homework during the term break. So much for that planning.

My time at Srisaket was to be divided:

• Learning about all of the daily working aspects of the community.
• Teaching the students about community building, deep listening and loving speech.
• Teaching the students about research, interviewing and surveying (and improving their English in the process)
• Polishing a metric tool that I have developed for the Uganda community and testing the students and the tool on the Sisa Asoke community.
• Teaching half a dozen graduate students English in preparation for their qualifying exam.
• Teaching the students in the community school English
• Working on the paper I need to give to the UNESCO conference in December.
• Working on the final presentation of my research proposal and the literature review and proposed methodology in preparation to defend the proposal in January.
• And finally working on my lectures and power point presentations for the Economics class.

All of those things still need to be done, but I have to move rebuilding my syllabus and schedule for the economics class to the top of the list. I have to go back through the texts and redefine the reading assignments, rebuild the homework assignments (converting US examples problems to Thai problems.) I am sick. I have no idea how to get all of this work done and no idea how to prioritize the work and no idea how to deal with the stress I am feeling. Building that Economics page on the wiki was months of work done an hour or two or three each day. I am truly overwhelmed.

And I say this when I was overwhelmed enough last week.

Contributions of Mylanta or alternative medications for peptic ulcer are gratefully accepted!

Carry on. Thanks for allowing me to whine.