Becoming Normal

Doing the job we do sort of tells you… we aren’t normal! Even though we put into practice, in a literal sense, Luke 14:26, which ought to be a normal Christian life, this path continues to be unusual. I can count on one hand the number of my peers who chose a similar career path. Even fewer on Michelle’s side! Nevertheless, even amongst us crazies there is a standard, a normal level. I’ll write a book one day about it, but suffice to say, we’ve even avoided living on this other plane of normal in one major way: We’ve never bought a car overseas. Granted, in some eras and places, it was difficult for foreigners to buy vehicles so that was fine. But for the most part, especially in this modern era, everyone buys a car! Well… we finally did. We did it. We are becoming normies! We had some extra finances from my parents’ estate, so we used it to buy a Nissan Tiida. It’s old, but it runs well, can fit 5 people, and most importantly, allows the Cooke family to go places physically together. Don’t get me wrong. We still have our rental motorbikes, and it’s still super cool to roll out together on our own bikes when we go out. But on two wheels (or, I suppose, 6 or 8 wheels) we can’t talk to each other. We can’t point things out to each other. We can’t catch up with small talk, or get into more serious topics, while we are on our separate bikes. Since it’s been a full year here without a car, some of the people we know are quite (happily) surprised that we did it.

It’s amazing we did it all. There are two things that are crazy expensive here. One is furniture. Yes, furniture. We have the least furnished and most undecorated house amongst all the expats we know here, simply because the price for any item is just soooo expensive. (We moved here, in part, due to lowered income which was a result of us serving in Germany; an amount which made staying in Europe impossible, but possible in Asia, but it is still a “live day by day by faith situation.) The other item which is beyond our income are vehicles. You can buy used cars here, but they cost almost as much as new ones sometimes! Forget about buying new! 99% of the time we are content in our agency, but then we meet people with a 700,000 THB vehicle which their agency paid for… and we experience a bit of yearning for more. Anyway, forget I wrote that! We’ve also avoided having a car overseas due to all the various hassles it brings into life, as well as to live in a manner comparative to the people we are living amongst. So, in addition to caving in and buying a car for family reasons, we also had to face the fact that the “people we are living amongst” are generally international Christian school families and staff.

So, we are thankful my parents left me enough to get a car for my family (it was around CAD 5000). We are thankful to God for opening doors to help us buy and register a car (expat autos was terrific!) And we are, uncomfortably, feeling “normal”.

OK, so while Michelle and I are becoming normal, our son has gone the other direction! I’ll explain. When we were in Canada this past summer, 2025, he managed to find some work, and some work which paid very well. By the end of his time in Canada he had earned enough money to put towards a motorcycle. You may know Southeast Asia is renowned for the number of motorbikes (this includes, and is composed of mostly by, 90cc, 110cc, and 125cc scooters). Sadly, it is also known for the high percentage of accidents. Yet, for some reason, our family feels fine renting motorbikes to get around.

The traffic volume is actually very very high, and traffic jams can turn what could be a 10 minute drive into a 2 hour sojourn. This is one reason we didn’t buy a car when we first came here. It was simply quicker and easier to navigate the traffic on a motorbike. But at the school, very few families allow their kids to ride motorbikes. Some reasons why that might be (if you are such a parent, don’t take any of this personally!) includes the fear and concern that their child will have an accident, and worse, a serious accident. We can understand that. And yet, every week someone gets hurt some other way! So, avoiding injury is simply not reason enough. Another reason, closely related to the fear of accidents, is the fear of the traffic itself. If this were your first overseas experience, and you came from a country with lots and lots of rules, traffic flow can appear lawless. That is intimidating. Some people didn’t even like driving back home (Canada, US, Europe), so facing the flow here is beyond imaginable. The thing is, driving here is actually better than back home, if you can adapt to the flow. There IS a flow, and my explanation is that there are two “rules”. The first is if there is hole or gap in the traffic, someone is going fill it. So, be ready to either be the one sliding into that gap, or yield to the one who is sneaking into it. Easy. The second is, obviously, don’t hit anyone. Even though the same rule, or principle, exists in Canada, the way I see it working out here is that people yield more often, and don’t get as visibly upset either if someone else slips in front. Why? Well, you don’t want to be the one to hit anyone. In Canada I think the mindset is more, “no one better hit ME”, stemming from our perspective of rules, and a sense of “our rights”. Everyone ELSE better follow the rules, for that is how they won’t hit ME. This is different from thinking “I don’t want to be the one hitting someone else”. How this works out when I’m driving, either the car or the motorbike, is that I’m reading the traffic flow ahead, and to the side, and even behind to some degree. I find the flow… and then everyone together is just flowing ahead. The flow is the rule, the principle. You can always tell though when a foreigner is driving because they do things like signal, stay religiously in their lane, honk, take forever to merge, and just generally go slower and disrupt the flow. Sometimes they disrupt the flow the other way, by going too fast and driving like a maniac like the road belongs to them, like there are no rules (which is a gross misunderstanding of how culture works, thinking that since things don’t look the same as at home, then this particular thing must not exist here. In this case, the rules of the road)! All this to say, when our son shows up at school on his Kawasaki Ninja 400, he is one of the few who do so. His classmates envy him. They’d like to ride too, but their parents forbid it; they also fear the traffic and haven’t ever really seen “the flow”. There is a bunch more I could include, related to TCK and MK issues, as to why we allow Van to ride, but suffice to say, it’s not the norm amongst the student body.