Yup, it’s been a while. I have to say that the blog has been the best way for me to relay this entire experience of living in Mae Sai; not just for people who read it, but for myself and I think it’s important to update it regularly. But sometimes it’s like going to the gym. Once you get into the habit of doing it every day, it’s great and easy, but once you stop doing it one day it’s so easy to slip out of that routine. And it’s also similar to the gym in the sense that when you finally come back to it after a hiatus, you just think to yourself, “Where do I even start?” And I’d like to say in my defense that a lot of things from work and visitors have been compacted into the last month. I haven’t had a weekend of just hanging out in Mae Sai since late May. And today, Saturday, I’m going to Chiang Rai to write another progress report on the vocational training centre there.

Two volunteers left a few weeks ago and 8 more hours have been thrown onto my teaching schedule every week. We just had a three day long bi annual meeting with every branch of our organization in Mae Salong. Every branch outside the Mae Sai centre said the same thing to me: They want English speaking volunteers to live at their site and they want to know why there aren’t even any lined up in the future. I assured them I’d keep looking, and they asked if the present volunteers could visit the centre in Mae Salong every week to teach staff there. All three of us sort of bit our cheeks and agreed. Finding new volunteers falls under my responsibilities because I’m the “volunteer and visitor coordinator” and I’m supposed to be recruiting long term volunteers, not just for the centre in Mae Sai but for all five branches in the Chiang Rai province. In the past, the organization subsisted off of volunteers from sending organizations, well endowed groups that funded long term volunteers; their plane tickets, food, accommodation and even some money for personal expenses. In the last year, in fact, before I even started working here, all of those sending organizations stopped sending volunteers to Thailand. The reason being that Thailand isn’t considered to be a developing country anymore. So the hunt has been slow going. I’ve read through about 30 applications since being here. And I’ve only passed on 4 applications to the directing team because every other application is less than ten sentences long. When I follow up with them via email and ask them to elaborate on their answers, they’ll respond with another whopping 3 sentences or just drop communication all together.

This volunteer and visitor coordinator position is like a thorn in my side. Coming back to the centre from an 8 hour meeting a few days ago, some random woman from Italy was on site photographing the kids on site. The organization’s got this pretty strict policy about two things with visitors. One: a visitor should never be permitted on the premises without confirmation from someone working on site. Two: visitors, confirmed or not, can not take pictures of the kids. We do, after all, deal with sensitive situations and children at high risk. And yet this sort of thing happens a whole lot. I hate being that person to inform oblivious visitors that they’re breaking important rules. Hate it hate it hate it.

Lastly, this week has been heavy and difficult because my dog back at home had to be put to sleep. Taking care of Cleo for the last 10 years has been anything but easy for anyone who ever had anything to do with her. Having been allergic to everything in our backyard in New Jersey, not to mention cats and humans, and this tumor in this very specific gland in her brain that made her have to pee every hour or so, she had a lot of things working against her general well being. Inconvenient and costly as this all might have been, this never was a reason to let her go. After all, all of these things could be treated somewhat and she wasn’t suffering, not to the extent that it warranted her being put to death. Amongst these problems with her allergies she became a fear biter years ago, always afraid that strangers might hurt her delicate ears.

She has bitten a few people in the face in her day while they have leaned down to pet her. And yes, we’ve tempted fate with this in the forms of other people’s safety and probably lawsuits, though we’ve always warned people about her before they approach her in our house. She finally bit my two year old nephew in the face last week and I guess this was the final straw….she wasn’t a vicious dog, but she was a public danger and with the cancer starting to mature, I think she was spared a lot of suffering. My brother and father took her to the vet to be euthanized in our home town in Englewood, New Jersey this Thursday. They walked her around our old block and then afterwards they took her to McDonalds, where they fed her a Quarter Pounder and Chicken Nuggets. Winston called me to tell me about this on the morning of the last day of meetings in Mae Salong. He said she was so excited to be able to eat chicken nuggets. She couldn’t believe it. I had to excuse myself to go to the restroom for a little bit so I could cry about it before sitting through eight hours of trying to pay attention to 8 hours of discussions in Thai. No one here would really get it. Dogs are rarely part of the family around these parts and besides, most of the staff are my age and have experienced the death of a sibling in the last 5 years. And that's the norm. I guess I haven't assimilated to Thai culture too much. I'm still pretty bummed about my dog.

July 14th. That would have been the day that I returned to the States had I not changed my contract to stay another three months. I'm glad I'm not going home yet. Not that I don't miss my family and friends like crazy, but I feel like I'm in the middle of something important and I only just started being useful here. In another three months it'll probably feel like a more appropriate stopping point, but for now, I think I'm supposed to be here. Since Lorna left, the three remaining volunteers have taken turns teaching the night class she used to teach. It's a night class for the entire community of Mae Sai. At one point it used to attract a whole array of people like monks, high school students, sex workers and refugees. At the moment it's mostly highschool students and a small handful of amazing bright aliens from Burma with four languages under their belts. Some of them work for 15 hours a day, 7 days a week and then they STILL have the motivation to come to an English class afterwards. I don't think I'll ever meet such incredible people in my life.
I came to Chiang Mai yesterday to meet my brother Winston, because he's in Thailand for the week! I am so lucky.

Last night was Nikaela and Lorna’s farewell shindig. For me, this is both intense and sad. In a few days, when they both leave Mae Sai, there will be no volunteers that were here 6 months ago when I first got here.

Two days ago, a staff member asked me if I could make salad dressing for this farewell dinner. No problem, I thought. I’ve watched my mom make enough amazing vinaigrette dressings to be able to whip something up for this dinner. He said, “Great! We’ll go to the market tomorrow and shop for ingredients.” So the next day I get into the car with him and two other Thai staff members. We get to the market and check out the vinegar section to see that they have none of the balsamic variety. For me, this was a dead end in the salad dressing making process and I wasn’t sure if I could make it without it.

So the obvious next step in this situation for a cuisine-challenged moron is to call Mom. Now, my mom is in France right now. And my cell phone doesn’t let me call France….or I just don’t know the right code combination to dial out of Thailand and into France. I called my brother and my Dad in New York to call my mom to call me….and I completely forgot about the time difference and in New York it was 2:00 am….and I wanted to talk about salad dressing.

My brother was nice enough to not hang up on me. In fact, he helped me out and called my Mom in France so that she could call me….

Let me take the opportunity to acknowledge the fact that this story is already long and ridiculous and testament to my being a dumbass. It only gets worse though, so if you’re sick of this now, stop reading.

So after a conversation with my mom, where she reassured me that making a vinaigrette without balsamic vinegar is doable, I put regular distilled vinegar into the shopping basket along with oil, mustard and a few different herbs. We get into the check out line and the staff asked me, “…are you going to buy any sugar or cream?” I told them I didn’t really know how to make a cream dressing and they looked a little taken aback….but they trusted me, which in retrospect, was a mistake.

Getting back to the centre and into the kitchen, I started pouring and whisking together the different ingredients…and then I sampled it and thought to myself how I really miss good ole’ vinaigrette on a mixed green salad. I thought the dressing was decent, but to be sure, I asked a kitchen staff member to sample it to see what it needed. She dipped her finger into the bowl and sampled it, then shook her head violently while grimacing and saying, “SOUR! SOUR! HOW CAN YOU EAT THIS?!?”

This was a little disconcerting for a first sample, and I tried to get other people in the kitchen to try it to. Most people were too freaked by the color and the first woman’s reaction, and then everyone that actually tried it went into momentary spasms as the tastes wore off.

Note: Up until this point, I thought of Thailand as a country that enjoys extreeeeme tastes. Everything is either spicy till you sweat and cry or so sweet that you feel cavities form in your teeth. I couldn’t believe these guys couldn’t handle a little bit of sour.
In any case, they were freaked. And I felt like an idiot. I felt like the Amelia Badelia of Northern Thailand.

And I offered to bottle it, pay for those ingredients myself while they made a new dressing that was more up to par with what they were hoping for. But no. They insisted this concoction could be transformed into something they would eat. Saik went back to the market and came back with cans of condensed milk. And I just watched as he poured three cans into the bowl and mixed it up with a whisk. It was intense. So he sampled it after the new addition and he said, “I think that’s better.” Then I tasted it…and I felt differently, but whatever, he’s a better judge of what’s conventionally tasty in Thailand than I am. Three hours later, the party started and they brought out the giant bowl of salad dressing….which they had heated up under a stove unit. And worse yet, the salad they had made, was a fruit salad. It had pineapples, rambutan, watermelon, sweet corn, kidney beans and a little lettuce. And they served every bowl drenched with the hot salad dressing which consisted of: Yellow mustard, vinager, oil, herbs and condensed milk.

At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we had a formal farewell shindig for two volunteers that are leaving. And Dayk, one of the kids that lives on site, wrote a song and played it on the guitar for everyone. It was about people always coming into these kids lives and then leaving. It goes into how that really sucks, but he knows that we’ll meet together in “the dream world”. No one was really thinking about the fruit salad or at least everyone was nice enough to curb their comments about it until the end of the night. And the bright side is, no one in Mae Sai will ever ask me to help them in the kitchen ever again.

I've been out of the habbit of posting on my blog this last week because my friend Katie came to visit. Katie was my second visitor from home, my mom being the first. Seeing my mom off at the airport in Bangkok and seeing Katie off at the airport in Chiang Rai were the only two times I've felt a dire need to go back home. It's been a good 6 months since I left home now.
I wish I had taken a picture of the activity room the day Katie came to help supervise and maintain order. On that day, there were 50 kids in the room the size of my bedroom, screaming, fighting, pointing scissors at each other's eyes and demanding to be carried in the 95 degree heat. Katie was a trooper and didn't complain a single time in those two hours. Not even for the half hour clean up that went after
On Thursday, Aing's head felt like a lightbulb that had been lit for hours. Nikaela and Lorna tried telling staff members that he should probably go to the hospital, but everyone seemed convinced he'd be fine if he just ate some lunch. An hour later, we found a thermometer and took his temperature. Not the most accurate read, because he wouldn't let me put the thing in his mouth, so I read it from his armpit, but it came to a fever of 105 degrees F. This freaked me out. I remember hearing at some point from someone that a fever of 106 equals brain damage or death. The previous suggestion of just feeding him lunch seemed a little bit....it seemed like there was obviously more that needed to be done. With enough harassing and nagging, we got two staff members to take him to the hospital.
The thing is with Aing, is that while we've never heard that he has HIV/AIDS, we speculate that he does. His mother died of it and his body occasionally blisters with lesions.
I came and sat with them in the waiting room while Aing lay down on my lap. Noticing the lesions on his legs had become larger and more dispersed, and feeling his body heat against my arms, I started blowing light air onto his head. I was scared that he might throw up, pass out or die any second.
Aing lifted up his hand and looked at his fingers. His eyebrows knit like he was deeply concerned and he looked at me said, "Jamie, look." then he lifted the nail right off of his index finger.
He was checked into the hospital that night and for the rest of the weekend. A saline drip was put into his veins and his fever went down significantly.
He came back to the site today smiling and laughing. Though sometimes, I can't imagine what he must be thinking. He's four years old and there's no way he can understand what's happening or why he's the way he is. When I finally do go home a few months from now, he'll be one of those kids I'll think back to and wonder how the rest of his life will pan out.