I have spent almost 2 weeks with Anne-E. We spent just a couple of days in Bangkok and almost a full week in Phuket and we've been back in Mae Sai for four days. Anne-E has lived in San Fransisco for about 6 years now, so even when I was in the States, I've rarely had the chance to hang out with her outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's been so much fun! And I was sad when she left to go to Chiang Mai yesterday. I couldn't go with her because I'd already taken a full week off...even though evidently the organization shut down for three days when the coup started.

The border entrance into Myanmar shut down, which made me panic a little bit because I have to leave the country once a month on this tourist visa (my O type visa expired in May), but it just opened up again yesterday, so I'm in the clear.
While Anne-E and I were travelling in Phuket, there was a giant rainstorm in Mae Sai...and I mean it must have been bigger than a normal monsoon, because it's rained hard regularly for the last 5 months, and this last rain storm made the Mae Sai river overflow three feet deep into people's homes. I'm glad I don't live so close to the border anymore!

As far as the developments of the coup go, I have to say I haven't really noticed much change in daily life around here. Not to mention the fact that I've been in three major cities of the country since the coup started and haven't seen any military activity. At least none aside from the police check points into Mae Sai, where they've always been deployed. Our radio was shut down again because evidently all community radios have been shut down since the coup. We're not exactly sure why, but I have to say that quality of life has been about 5% more relaxed because "The Morning Show" and "Easy English" have both gone on hiaitus. But no, this doesn't mean that the community radio megaphone outside my house has stopped broadcasting. I'm still biding my time before I climb the telephone pole with wire clippers and a sludge hammer to destroy it. It'll probably take about 2 more broadcasts before 7am, then it'll be over.

I am going home! I finish working here before the 12th and my flight leaves on the 14th, arrives in New York on the 15th. It'll be a weird good-bye, but at the moment, I'm just very excited.

COUP!

So Anne-E made it in to Bangkok on Saturday and we had a couple of days to romp around the city and do some fun things. We went to a fusion puppet/dance/film show, we went to a couple of museums, markets and temples and the grand palace. We were going non stop and we escaped Bangkok just one day before the coup that's made the front page of a lot of international newspapers. The military's just fed up.

The country's a bit divided as to how they feel about their current prime minister. It's about 50/50 between people who think he's a good guy and those who apparantly think he needs to be replaced immediately. I remember a few months ago in Mae Sai when there were rallies on the main road to protest Thaksin's very existence. Some people don't just want him to leave office, they want him to die.

And so in Bangkok while there are tanks roaming the streets and soldiers with ak47s around their shoulders, there is nothing shocking or frightening to speak of down here in Phuket. We didn't even know anything was going on until we decided to check our email.

And while I don't think there is any cause for concern...it's a bit weird to be in a place where the government has just been...well, completely shut down. I really don't want to mischaracterize the situation. Check it out for yourself http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5362228.stm

Yesterday after work I hopped on a bus to get to Bangkok. It felt really weird to leave the centre after being there every single day for 2 weeks for a minimum of 10 hours a day including weekends. There was a mad panic to get work done, tests distributed and graded. On a side note, these kids are so unaccustomed to taking tests that they have no concept of cheating being right or wrong. In my level 5 class, 20/25 kids cheated and they cheated really obviously.

I'm meeting my sister here in Bangkok and going down south for the week. Unfortunately, an hour into the busride Anne-E called me to tell me she missed her flight. And while she'll still be coming, she'll be coming a day late. So I'm here. Just chillin by myself now. I'll probably giving a few of my friends in the area a call soon.

My cousin Clare had an accident just a couple of days ago, critically injuring her neck. i felt so relieved to hear that she had succesful surgery, though I know that the next many weeks and possibly months are going to be painful and a bit stressful. I'll be thinking of you.

There’s a lot to be said about volunteer positions that keep people involved in projects for long periods of time. For some people, the perks are a bit of a nebulous spiritual thing. For me, a big part of it is not feeling like a machine in a temp agency or someone’s pawn in retail. It feels nice to have a sense of purpose other than to make cash. And I’m lucky I’m working in one of the cheapest places in the world and that I don’t have any financial concerns to tend to at home. The community we service here, the kids and the undocumented minorities make everything totally worth it.

There are moments, however, where I want to pack up my bags and leave for good, and it has nothing to do with the kids or students here.

8 months ago I came into this organization with a really small teaching schedule and handful of administrative assignments that required going onto the internet. There was one computer in our office and back then, it took the homepage on average 5 minutes to download. Getting extensive research done took forever, so quite often, I’d leave the site during the day to go to an internet café where I’d get things done a lot faster. One hour costs about 40 baht ($1US), so I could never exactly break bank by doing this, even if I did it frequently. Nevertheless, it seemed weird that so much of my day was spent off site and it seemed weird that I should be paying an internet café to get research done for my volunteer work.

So I had pressed this issue at the centre where I presented all of the reasons why we should invest in a more modern form of internet access. And they were reluctant to do so, seeing how they managed to exist all these years without any sophisticated internet, why would they need to start now? And after all, they’re non-profit and they can’t spend on anything that might be considered frivolous. But I had been given assignments to find names and contact information of 40 international organizations in south east Asia. I knew they wanted this information sooner rather than later, so I offered to pay for internet service out of pocket for the 6 month term that I was meant to be here. It would only be about $25 per month, and it would facilitate a lot of other people’s work in the office.

Once the offer was given to them, they were quick to install better internet access. In the same month, an incredibly generous donation of 30 new computers came in from a combination of sponsors from America and Spain. This was meant for the community learning centre, for people who have never had the chance to even turn on a computer in their life time. Internet Access was also installed in that room so they could learn to do searches as well. For whatever reason, I was never presented a bill for this upgrade. Until last Friday.

In a very smiley, Thai way, Chulai found me from the accounting office while I was sitting with a few of my students giving extra help and she said right in front of them, “This month’s phone bill is 1,200 baht, do you have the money for it?” I stared at her blankly because I had no idea what she was talking about and then she reminded me, “I have this memo here saying you’d take care of the internet bills during your term here.” This felt like a slap in the face.

A lot has happened since January. I’ve helped raised public awareness on the issues of human trafficking and migration issues of this region. I’ve inspired a good number people to donate upwards of thousands of dollars to support our programs through correspondences in emails and by hosting the foreign visitors we have. They depend on the foreign volunteers to represent the organization because none of the staff feels comfortable enough with their English to talk about what we do. I’ve also learned enough Thai that they’ve felt comfortable with me writing reports for our sponsors on activities on workshops that were conducted without a word of English. These are just a few of the things that have happened between now and then. And that was a really long time ago.

It took me a few seconds to say to her, “You know, I had made that offer 8 months ago, not yesterday….and I when I made that offer, I was supposed to have left in June.” And she said, “I know, I’m sorry, I forgot but now I’ve remembered.” And she just sortof waited for me to fork over the cash in front of my students. It apparently had been dealt with all this time without anyone asking any questions and without anyone wondering where we would get the funds for it. That phone bill, by the way, while it’s still only a bit more than $25, is about as much as any of my students’ families make in three weeks and I was embarrassed to have been asked for the money in front of them.

It’s not an enormous amount of money, but that’s not really the point. I never wanted anyone to tell me thank you for volunteering for so long. And if I ever felt like I was doing bad work, I would have left already. It would have been different if they had asked me to pay the first bill in February and then again in March and so on. But after all this time? For whatever reason, justified or not, I went home that day feeling bitter and wanting to quit. It made me forget why I was here at all.

I am perpetually mind boggled with how unbelievably fast time is moving here. The days have started blending in together and I'm getting burnt out. I haven't even had the opportunity to implement any projects of my own, I'm just caught up teaching, doing administrative work, visitors, the radio and the activity room for the kids. The Half Day School's term is supposed to finish pretty soon.

We've got this new volunteer named Carole and she's awesome. She's an American born from Laos parents, so she speaks Laos fluently which is really similar to Thai, the way that Spanish and Portuguese are similar to each other. She studied Chinese in college and studied abroad in Beijing, so she's basically proficient in 4 languages. And they're all used on this site. She'll be working with our program that works to educate women from all of the countries of the region in issues in trafficking. We've got these women from China, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, and after a year of studying about human trafficking and social sciences, they'll go back to their homes to initiate programs intended to educate their own communities; the dangers that exist with traffickers and the information to secure their protection. I watched Carole jump from Thai to English to Mandarin to English again and then Laos during this own seminar yesterday, it was crazy. All these women study English, some of them still on a really basic level, and some of them really struggle because they're also still learning Thai. So we now have this teacher that can jump between three different languages to explain how English works and it's GREAT.

My sister Anne-E's coming over in a little more than a week and I'm travelling with her for a week somewhere South. I can't believe how little I've seen of this country given how long I've been here. I honestly don't even know where to take her! Despite me being across the planet, I'm really bad with geography and important landmarks that you're supposed to visit when you're within its proximity. It's like when my cousins came over to visit New York and I had to call my Dad to find the exact intersection of the Empire State Building. I'm so unbelieveably geographically inept I was almost too embarassed to relay that anecdote.