It's been raining for the last few days and as one of Maggie's students said this morning, "the sky is crying because maggie is leaving." Maggie left Mae Sai this morning and is heading off to the States in about a week coz she's finished her term after being here for a year. She was often the voice of reason in the midst of conflict and she was a really cool to hang out with outside of work. It kindof sucks that she's gone. It's only recently struck me how much the other volunteers make staying here as comfortable as it is. There's only a few of them fulfilling a term at one time and they're the only people I interact with on a daily basis without hearing or saying "I don't understand" in English or Thai every third or forth sentence.

One of the older girls on site, Popeye, helped Judy walk down the hall and back yesterday. Her arm was clutched around Popeye's waist the entire time and her face was red and wet with drool and tears. She still can't eat without a tube, she sobs a lot and she can't speak or walk on her own, but at least she's making some sortof progress when the doctors in Chiang Rai were certain 4 months ago that she was going to die. She's a trooper.

*ja

It's a little bit of a rough month for the kids living on site because April's summer vacation, a month where most boarding school kids get to go home, but most of these guys just have to stay here. I keep hearing "I wanna go home I wanna go home I wanna go home." They must be bored out of their skulls because a group of them huddled around me while I had my "Thai for beginner's" text book in front of me during lunch and they were all pitching in to help me pronounce all the words correctly.

Judy, the girl who had an epileptic seizure on my first week here and who I visited in the hospital in Chiang Rai was released and is now staying in the first aid room on site. I just took a look at her and she's still connected to tubes and can't eat anything. Not convulsing and in pain perhaps, but she's not coherent and she's not resting. She's under 24 hour supervision. The kids that graduated from the program and still live here take shifts watching over her. It'd be nice to think she'll eventually be walking and talking again, but I guess we'll see.

A good chunk of the kids living on site speak to each other in a language that is not Thai and is not English. Not understanding a word of this language, I used to get really discouraged when I’d hear what I thought was Thai, but was actually Akha. Now when I hear them speaking to each other, I know what is Thai and what is Akha because Akha sounds kindof like, “Mebula mebula bula bula, acheepadtengya mebula.” And Thai sounds like a more conventional Asian language.

Akha is a language and hilltribe situated in this region. Hilltribes are not acknowledged by the Thai government, thus the Akha kids, as well as many other kids on site, do not have any kind of citizenship. This means they don’t have a lot of normal rights, and they can’t get passports; they can’t cross the border. According to one girl on site, the waiting list to acquire citizenship is something absurd like 20 years.

Yesterday I was playing games with some of these kids when I noticed a few of them had bruises around the necks and collar bones. They looked like whip marks, so out of concern, I asked one girl what happened and what I caught from her response was something like, “I haven’t been feeling well. I’ve had a fever and so I dtoong dtoong dtoong.” I didn’t understand this dtoong word and so I just knit my eyebrows and repeated, “dtoong…?” And she replied, “Yeah yeah yeah, dtoong,” and then she demonstrated and act of sadism on her friend sitting next to her.

With two fingers she plucked at the flesh of her friend’s neck; the same spot over and over for a good minute until it turned purple. In the midst of all of this, I asked her, ‘Um, that doesn’t hurt?” and she replied, “No really! It’s good for you, here let me show you.” And so she came over to me and started the same procedure on the side of my neck. With every pinch from her knuckles, I’d react saying, “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow, OW!” growing louder and louder as she progressed, forgetting that “Ow” in Thai means, “Want.” So to her this sounded something like, “Want, want, want, want/more more more!” and so of course she wouldn’t stop this nonsense of producing a bruise on my neck until I grabbed her hands and pleaded with her to stop.

I’d google Akha hilltribe remedies and figure out what exactly this whole rapid pinching treatment is supposed to accomplished, but frankly, I have a hard enough time writing emails and blog entries over the last couple of weeks. Besides, I enjoyed having other people discover Malayan Sun Bears for me when I couldn’t figure out what that monkey bear was supposed to be.

April 18th

I got back from Cambodia the other day and I have about a couple hundred pictures I have to upload onto ofoto. I just have to find two hours when I can go to the internet café and use the memory card reader I don’t have.

It was surprising to see how much more impoverished Siem Riep was compared to any part of Thailand I've seen so far. And yet, those people were sooo charming. No joke, I half wanted to take a picture of this one woman holding her hands out begging for money because something about her, despite her age and raggedy clothes, was so gentle and warm, one can only help but at least smile back at her. The children pulling the sleeves of tourists, insisting that everyone buy books or post cards from them spoke English so well. I don’t get how they learned it! And they’re clever; they’ll ask you. “Where do you come from?” and you could respond, “Egypt,” and they’d say back to you “Egypt. Capital: Cairo.” I know this because I tested a small group of them at lunch after they said, “Capital: Washington,” when I told them I was from America.

There are people missing limbs everywhere, evidently from the landmines, some of which are still planted on Cambodia’s soil today. There are NGOs to train blind people how to administer massages. There were three parlors on the block of my guesthouse, all staffed by the blind.

For three days we explored the temples of Angkor Wat and I’d like to say I remembered everything we were told about each temple (the people involved and the centuries they were built in, etc) but the fact is, I’d forget about one temple by the time we’d arrive at the next one. And now, the only thing I remember, aside from what those temples look like, is that Tomb Raider was filmed there.

April 20th

A while ago….maybe two months ago at this point? I’m not really sure when, but Cindy showed me her cell phone which was a little bit damaged. It looked like someone had taken a razor and sliced off the top half of the buttons on the dial pad. Then she explained to me that a mouse had chewed it all off during the night. Sure enough, I looked a little closer and there were tiny teeth marks all over the thing: that cell phone must have been tasty. In that same week, Cindy had mildly complained about that mouse eating through three pairs of her pants. There stopped being mention of this said mouse within the last month or so AT LEAST, so I figured this problem was taken care of LONG before I moved in there. I was wrong. I hadn’t even spent a night in my new house yet, I had moved in one day last week and gone to Cambodia. Then I came back home, went through the door and walked to the refrigerator to pour myself some water. Then I saw the mouse dart to the wall and through a hole I had never noticed leading to the outdoors. One by one, I found each of the following items had been eaten by the mouse:

An unopened box of cornflakes.
A jar of peanut butter: the mouse managed to eat THROUGH the lid.
A plastic bag full of overpriced vitamins I bought in the states. I don’t wanna talk about it.
I should also mention that I had bought a nice looking cheap blue rug a while ago, and since moving it into the house, along with the damaged food supply, I’ve found pieces of dark blue fabric everywhere, including inside the jar of peanut butter where the mouse looked like it was making a nest.

After discovering all of these things one by one, I started getting nervous about the other things I left on the floor: my laundry bag, my suitcases, a stack of papers with lesson plans. I was about to throw my suitcases ontop of this tall wardrobe in my room when I stood on a chair and looked on top and saw the entire surface covered in mouse crap. MEGH!

So there’s the start of my problems with the house. Problem number 2: My bathroom.

Two days before I left for Cambodia (when the house was not yet “my” house) the sink’s faucet started to leak. Cindy had called the landlady to tell them about this and a repairman was scheduled to come and look at it the next day, but he never showed up. This is actually typical of appointments and rendez-vous of any nature in this town. I didn’t think this was that big of a deal, thinking I’d just deal with it when I came back. But not only had I forgotten about the leak entirely in my absence, I failed to realize this would somehow attract an entire swarm of mosquitoes to live and breed in my bathroom.

This is my first house and home of my own. I barely moved in and I already have to go to my landlord and plead with her to fix these things. Not in English, in Thai. MAH!!

Cindy finished her term after working here for 2 years. She is going to be greatly missed. I'll miss her because she was the volunteer in charge of making my adjustment more comfortable. She taught me how to ride a motorbike and then when I got hit by a car, she chaufered me to and from work and other venues. She's bailed me out of situations with the locals with her proficiency in Thai and frankly, I'm worried about not having her to bridge the Thai staff with the foreign volunteers at work.

Cindy leaving also means I'm taking on some of her responsibilities. One of them was volunteer coordination, which I actually took on a while ago, but I didn't have to welcome any new coming volunteers until last week.

Our newest volunteer comes from Finland and she'll actually be working at a different site for our organization in Chiang Kong. I feel kindof bad for her because she was having a hard enough time understanding my English, nevermind everyone else's Thai. Trying to have a conversation with her was almost like pulling teeth, not just because of language barriers, but she's also just a shy person. I sat with her at dinner this one night and I basically had a monologue in front of her for about 45 minutes because she had very few responses to anything I said. She finally explained to me, "Scandanavians are very shy people. If I don't talk a lot, it's not because I'm mad at you." Short and to the point, fine. I accepted it. Then later on that evening I walked her to her guest house and said to her,"Ok! I'm gonna get ready for bed now if you need anything just give me a ca-" then the door slammed in my face. Ok, different culture, different behavior, whatever. I still think she hates me.

Another responsibilty of Cindy's that now belongs to me is dealing with visitors. In the job descpription, it basically suggests that I'm in charge of reserving guest houses for visitors and then giving them a tour of the site and a description of our mission as an NGO. This week, the day after I posted a blog entry about the plethora of swastikas around Mae Sai, three universities students from Germany came to visit the site for three days. Every request from these guys was a demand, not a question. After I gave them a tour of the site, one of them said very firmly and assertively, "Great! Now if you could take us to a remote hill tribe village for maybe just 3 hours." Ya know. Just three hours, like a small errand. It's a work day! Besides, I'm a tour guide for the site, not Northern Thailand.

These guys were so intensely pushy, they managed to get an interview with the founder and director of the organization the second day they were here. Maybe this doesn't sound that amazing but let's put things into perspective for a moment: I didn't get to talk to the director until I had been here for three weeks already and I was walking around the site with crutches. And I work here.


The only plus of Cindy leaving is that I'm moving into her house. It's quite cheaper than the guest house I was living in....and it's a HOUSE. Sure, there's no kitchen at all, but I have my own space to park my bike and there even a porchy-type of thing to sit on when I'm not working. Pictures to come soon.

I'm going to Bangkok and then Cambodia for a week for Song Kran (The New Year)! I leave tomorrow. No blog entries for a while probably.

The other day I posted up my pictures and waited for people's reaction to one photograph of one of my students' garb: a blue swastika with Adolf Hitler's name on it. If you didn't see it or if I neglected to send you my photo album, let me know. The kid wearing a swastika with Hitler's name on it isn't a Nazi. He's a really good kid, in fact, and he's Buddhist. He doesn't know who Hitler is and he's not even familiar with the Jewish religion. He can't even pronounce the name "Adolf Hitler," he just thinks the swastika looks cool. I chalked it up to a crappy education system and for a combination of reasons, mainly because the kid owns about 3 t-shirts, I've never pressured him to stop wearing it (though truly, every day i see him wearing it my heart sinks into my stomach). Swastikas are actually pretty popular around these parts,: You'll see them on flags waving on the back of people's motorbikes and in the market places they appear on t shirts and jackets. Funny thing is, no Thai person I've spoken to, adult or child, can explain what the swasitka represents. Where do you even start to explain something so complicated? Out of curiosity, I just drew a swastika on a sheet of paper and wrote Hitler's name on top of it. Then I passed it around to the Thai staff, asking, "What's this?" 15 adults: Nothing, they don't have a clue. I thought maybe they might have explained what the alternative symbolic reference was, but no.

That's not all though.

I started tutoring the woman who designs the website for the organization. She actually has a rather firm grasp of the English language (compared to most of the students I teach). I gave her an assignment to read a short story and she asked me what the word, “dictator,” meant. There was a rumor that this woman had a year long internship in Germany. I asked her if she knew who Adolf Hitler was, just to give an example. She said rather nonchalantly, “no”. I was taken aback and I asked her, “really?” And I googled a few Hitler images on the computer and he didn’t look familiar to her at all. And she is, in fact, educated.

I'd judge them really quickly as a populace if I didn't remind myself that I knew nothing about Burma issues before coming here. I still know nothing about the bloodshed and atrocities in Angor Wat from only recent years past. And really, is it all that different from the trend of white people getting tatoos of chinese characters when they have no way of knowing that what they're wearing actually says, "strength" or "love" or "harmony."

I bought my first T shirt with Thai writing on it the other week, but I know how to read it now and I've had enough people confirm for me that it actually reads, "Grateeng Deng" (Red Bull, the soda or Thai boxing, as it's interpreted here) and not "Fascist," "Dumbass," or a "Satan."

When I walk into a public restroom and see that there's just a hole in the floor and a hose to substitute toilet paper, I don't react anymore. Still, there are some things that don't get old: the swastika gets me every time I see it around here. Suggestions anyone?