In this project, we interviewed one of our friend, Sofiyah Tayongpakor from Thailand and we would like to know further about her regarding her culture and belief in her own country. Through this we can acknowledge every culture in Thailand as mentioned by her. Even though we may not explore it deeper, but at least we are sure through this we can get so many information about our neighbour country, Thailand, which is strongly influenced by traditional beliefs regarding ancestral and natural spirits.
The goals that we want to achieve in this activity is:
- to understand deeper the culture of Thailand, a country of Buddhism
- to make comparison between the uniqueness of the culture in Thailand and our own country, Malaysia
- to apply our knowledge and understanding when we deal with Thailand people
Our roomate, Sofiyah Tayongpakor is from Thailand and she is solely our roomate that is international student. According to her who is from Narathuwat, her culture is not totally different with ours but since her official religion in her country is Buddhism, she told us that sometimes her culture will a little bit influenced by Buddhism culture.
According to her, during Ramadhan, Muslim people will normally break their fast at mosques. They will collect money from the villagers for the iftar. After celebrating Eid Fitri, they will do fasting for six days and at 8th day, they will celebrate 6th Raya. It seems like this kind of culture is not quite different with our Malay culture.So do with Raya hajj at her place where at that time the parents will do circumcision to their sons and the daughters will wear earring and be given the beautiful dress.
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| Thai earring that mostly woman wear in their occasion |
When there are people who die at that place, the neighbor will make some festivity to the family's person who die and normally the festivity will occur on 7th day, 20th day and 100th day.
Generally, people in Thailand will worship the idols that they made to show their humbleness to their God. Buddhists believe that life does not begin with birth and end with death, but rather that every person has several lives based upon the lessons of life not yet learned and acts committed (karma) in previous lives. On 13-15th April, there will be Buddha Festival and they will celebrate together happily with their neighborhood. One of their norms that they have is when they meet with other people, they will greet them, 'sawadee khab/sawadee krab''. Every November 11th there will be a festival where people will release 'krathong' in the air as a symbolic to cleanse their sin to God.
*“Krathong” is a lotus-shaped vessel made of banana leaves. The Krathong usually contains a candle, three joss-sticks, some flowers and coins.
Every 12th August, according to Sofiyah, people in her country will celebrate Mother day, based on their princess birthday and on 5th December, Father day will be celebrated by them as a symbolic of prince birthday.
The main language in Thailand is Thai language. Other languages spoken in Thailand are Chinese, Lao, Malay and Mon-Khmer, while English use is becoming more prevalent in government and commerce. The wai is the traditional form of greeting, given by the person of lower status to the person of higher status. Raising both hands, palms joined with the fingers pointing upwards as if in prayer, lightly touching the body somewhere between the chest and the forehead, is the standard form.
After interviewing her, we finally got several information that we think are useful for us to understand Thailand people. Although it is just a brief explanation that Sofiyah told us, we found that all of the information are quite enough for us to comprehend their culture. At first when she talked about her culture, we are quite shock because it looks similar with ours but after going deeper, we realize that her culture is mostly influenced by Buddhism .
Our feeling regarding this? Of course we feel glad and excited. Previously we only have little information about this but after this interview, we know that as counselors we need to know everything about culture around us. This is because not all our clients are from same country and religion with us. So we need to prepare ourselves about this and learn better to provide better solution in resolving some issues that occur currently.
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