Lori Black Smith and her husband, Matt Smith, after their wedding in Myanmar.
(Photo submitted)
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You may remember my stories from the past about Lori Black. She is a 2003 graduate of Marysville High School and majored in Spanish in college. She has taught in several foreign countries. Over the years in this column, we saw those countries through her eyes and enjoyed her wonderful sense of adventure. We lost contact with her for a while (she has been in Myanmar, formerly Burma), but now we are able to rejoin her.
Lori began her adventures after college by joining the Peace Corps and teaching in Ecuador where she could use Spanish. She then moved to South Korea. Now she lives in Mandalay, Myanmar, known as the city of bicycles. She is no longer in the Peace Corps. There is no use for her Spanish there.
In the first two countries, she taught high school students, but in Myanmar she has been a first grade teacher for several years in a modern international school. She says it is terrifically hot there, often about 110 degrees.
Each classroom has Internet access and smart boards. The Internet is, however, intermittent.
It has been three years since we’ve heard from Lori, but now we can once again follow her adventures, this time in Myanmar. Some things have changed. She now has a husband, Matt Smith from South Carolina, who is also a teacher in the International school, and a little girl named Eileen.
Lori and Matt had two weddings, one a traditional Burmese wedding and the other a wedding in Columbus in the winter of 2015.
Lori began, “The Burmese wedding made us local celebrities. People from all over the country still recognize us. We had over 150,000 likes on Facebook. The wedding day began at 3 a.m. There were hair and make up artists in my house getting me ready in the wee hours of the morning. My husband got to get up at six, take a shower, run his fingers through his hair and be good to go.”
“They worked on me for hours. My dress had been tailored to fit my body perfectly, but still, I was literally pinned into my dress. I probably had about 100 pins holding something somewhere. The photographers came at 7 a.m. and took a million pictures at sunrise. My face felt like it was going to fall off. The wedding ceremony started at nine in the morning and ended around 1 p.m.”
“Weddings here are held in the morning to beat the heat. Remember it gets past 100 degrees pretty regularly. Attending our wedding were current and former students and their families as well as local and foreign friends. I think there were about 400 people and the ceremony is much like what we would consider a reception. We walked in on the red carpet behind a former student who tossed rose petals on the ground.”
“The room was full of guests. We sat on a stage in these giant oversized chairs fit for Royals! The owners of the school kindly paid for our wedding. I work for a private for-profit school. They each presented us with a necklace of jasmine flowers. People gave speeches, sang and performed. One of the most important parts of the wedding is getting photos with all the guests.”
“People don’t stay long. They drop off a gift, have some cake, eat some ice cream get a picture and go. At the end of the event, I had about 10 girls trying to get me out of my dress and put some food in my belly. This was a complete opposite from my wedding back home.”
“In Columbus we had a small wedding at Greystone Winery in German Village with close friends and families, less than 70 people at that one. Since we had two weddings, I guess we had to have two honeymoons. One was in Thailand where we stayed on a little island called Kohjum. It was perfect. We had a bungalow with a fan, no AC. We just sat around reading on the beach all day. This is my style, but then we spent our second week in a place called Tubkaek Beach in a resort overlooking some mountains. There we had AC, Jacuzzi, fancy restaurants all more Matt’s style.”
“Our second honeymoon was in the summer. We spent a month between Croatia, Serbia and Romania. Then I found out I was pregnant the day before I flew out. I just couldn’t figure out why I was so sick. Honestly, we were scared! We had planned on having a baby, but not here, not in this part of the world, not necessarily right now.”
“Myanmar has the worst public health care system in the world. So you can’t blame us for not wanting to go through all of that here. Luckily, we are a one-and-a-half-hour plane ride from Bangkok – some of the best health care in the world. So I went to Thailand for bi-monthly checkups. At seven months pregnant I moved to Thailand so I could have my baby there.”
We will have more from Lori about that in the coming weeks. (Melanie Behrens – melb@marysvillejt.com)