The Grinch Who Stole Songkran

The Thai New Year startes tomorrow. Though the festivities leading up to it have been going on for the last week. The festivities are simple. They involve, for the most part water. Water in various containers: glasses, water guns...buckets, hoses.

And the festivities involve getting people wet. It can be fun! I had a great water fight with the kids on site just last week after a religious holiday involving showering the Buddha. You're not supposed to discriminate. If there's a person passing by on a motorbike, it's an easy and unsuspecting target!! And it's even better yet to block the path with a posse of people and their guns, buckets and hoses. There's no way out and the victim must be hazed before reaching his destination!!

Last year, in Chiang Mai, someone told me there were 11 water-related deaths during the week of Songkran. They mostly involved ambushes from the sides of the road to people coasting by on their motorkbikes. Some might say it's time to find a new ritual. But apparently, the vast majority of the country's population is having far too much fun observe these kind of overly paranoid safety precautions.

I think I noticed it starting last Saturday. I came into the office to do what was supposed to be a 20 minute task....but then eventually turned into a 7 hour task. It cut into the time that I was supposed to be teaching novice monks in the evening. Couldn't get to them by phone, so I took a 20 minute break to go to their temple and let them know in person.

Turning arond the corner before reaching the village temple, I spotted a group of teenagers blocking the streets with the appropriate equipment for the upcoming celebrations. They started to prepare themselves and I called to them from about 15 yards away, "Hey guys, I have to work in the office with these clothes. Can you let me pass without getting me wet?" and they graciously cleared the path, inviting me to cross. Until I was at arms reach of them and they tossed a three gallon bucket of water onto my head. Total loss of face. And it meant coming back to the office at desk and in front of an Excel document for the next 3 hours with a puddle forming underneath my chair. Then upon coming home, I felt the sensation of being slapped across the face and being pummelled while I lost control of my bike because of a 13 year old hiding over and behind a fence, dumping water on me overhead. Tis the season for revenge.

I decided I wouldn't put up with it. At least not until the new year actually started...which it won't until tomorrow.

The front of my motorkbike is now stocked with jam, ketchup and fishsauce. In the last 2 days of riding my motorbike, every kid I have passed that has ignored my request to spare me as I'd be going to work, or that has right out caught me off gaurd, I have counter-attacked with the condiments from my fridge. Sometimes, this requires stopping my bike, removing my helmet, getting off and chasing after small children, literally running into their houses; handfuls of fish sauce and jam landing into the hair and clothes of screaming, unsuspecting children...one time a handful of jam ending up on a slamming door. These cowardly types: I have confiscated and stolen their buckets and water guns they dropped while running away and have dumped them off into a gutter a kilomter away from where I found them. One little boy of about 12, forlorn to have jam running down his face and to have his hair smell like fish sauce said to me, "but I don't want to smell like fish." maybe it was mean spirited, but I didn't feel bad. I just responded "And I didn't want to go to work wet. Happy New Year, kid." and then rode off my bike.

This has earned me so much satisfaction, I can't even begin to tell you. I'm a mean mean mean one. I know.

NOTE TO ALL: This is the final entry of my blog and I will be saving it onto a hard drive and deleting it off of the internet. If you want updates from me or if you want to be put onto a mailing list about recent events and ongoings of life for me here in Thailand, email me jameswood924@yahoo.com.

And YOU'RE the lucky winner

I was given 12 hours notice to attend a meeting in Chiang Mai a few days ago. It was with a funding group that had raised money from a gala for school supplies and equipment for the elementary school on site. I was so ready for this to be a somewhat long and complicated meeting, with talk about finances and report writing. As it turns out, they just wanted someone from the organization to pose for a picture with a presentation check and the charity group. Those same kindof presentation checks that are 2x5 feet, given to lottery winners at their front door. It was so hokey and awkard. I can't believe I spent 8 hours on buses for that. But it was nice to have the opportunity to meet them and thank them all in person.

On another note, if you haven't read or seen this book, it's time: Two If By Sea
http://www.amazon.com/Two-if-Sea-Anne-E-Wood/dp/1889292125/ref=pd_ys_qtk_rvi/002-9825026-5973642?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0EF8J7XFPKZV3TTF4NYA&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_p=186412001&pf_rd_i=home

This is a picture of the cook's son and the centre's two puppies



Yesterday afternoon was a traumatic day for the kids who had to witness the centre's small black 1 month old puppy get run over by a pick up truck. She was so little and happy all the time and this poor kid Udai came to another volunteer shooken up and crying, saying the puppy suffered. It wasn't quick. I wish he didn't have to see that. I so wish it just didn't happen at all.

The University of Wisconsin Stevens Point is providing a scholarship opportunity for possibly 4 students from our organization to study as undergraduate students next fall. This opportunity is extended even for those here without citizenship. In fact, it is intended for those without citizenship because an education abroad would hopefully make one more eligible for status. I remember when this project was proposed to me last year over a dinner. It was by a university student in his late twenties and frankly, I brushed the whole idea off as preposterous, thinking this guy’s idea demonstrated a real superficial understanding of immigration law and fund raising.

Apparently however, I was wrong and I was the one with the superficial understanding of how to get around the red tape in migration. It actually looks like this is going to happen, if enough money comes in for it. Strings were pulled and now it seems like permission and maybe sufficient funds will be granted to a couple of our graduate daughters who lack citizenship to study abroad in the States. The tricky part would now be, picking who those girls are who are confident, motivated and goal oriented enough to benefit from a scholarship opportunity like this. In other words, some are going to be selected from an application process and some are going to be flat out rejected from this opportunity.

I would have loved to disassociate myself from this process entirely. In fact, I was pretty much sure I would have nothing to do with it until the director of the organization told me I would be administrating the English interview with the new foreign volunteers just yesterday morning. “It won’t be a problem,” She said, “none of them are your students” obviously, seeing how my oldest student would have been 14 years old. Our assessment on their performance will weigh heavily upon their being accepted or rejected from this scholarship opportunity to study in the states. This sucked. At the same time, we were told their proficiency in English would only be 10% of the overall evaluation. The first year of their stay in the States would include exclusively ESL classes for the students and they could begin their college level courses after a year. So I pretty much figured, it’s not that big a deal if they simply couldn’t give some of their answers in English.

The interview process went like this: Three volunteers sat on one side of a table while one by one, young women would come to interview for 10 minutes. The new volunteer would administer the questions because he doesn’t speak Thai yet and he couldn’t even pretend to understand anything other than English. Communication difficulties were supposed to be remedied by having a quasi proficient Thai speakers to assist with linguistic difficulties. They’d be able to answer the question “What is your name” but then once “How do you spell that?” came about, their faces would panic and turn to me for guidance. Then the meat of the questions would come like, “Why do you want to go to America?” and “Out of the following three, what is the most important and what is the least: money, love, work?” Sometimes they would understand these questions but almost every one of them turned to me and said at one point, “Can I speak in Thai now?” and then we’d have to respond “Try giving an answer in English first and then if you want to add more and feel that you can’t do so in Thai, you can use Thai.”

So take, for example, the answer to “Why do you want to study English?” Most students had approximately one sentence answers that took more than 2 minutes to spit out. One girl would say, “…..Beekaw…..I wans too learn spik goot Engliss.” Translation English to English, “Because I want to speak English well.” Then, after saying that, she turned to me and gave a 2 minute tangent about her real reasons for wanting to study in the states, but in Thai. I can’t remember verbatim what she said, but here’s the gist of it, “I want to study at University in the United States because I want to master a proficiency in English to come back here and use that skill to give back to this organization. I need to give back to this organization because it has done so much for me and it has saved me from much hardship and it has given me a childhood. As an organization that deals in cross border trafficking, we need more English speakers to communicate with international organizations and to participate in conferences.” But then the director of the organization overheard this part of the non English tangent and interrupted the interview, “Just a reminder, this is supposed to be an English interview" she said. The director looked mad at me because all I was supposed to allow each interviewee to do was ask me for vocabulary words. I wasn’t supposed to interpret for the non Thai speaker in the room and I was supposed to stop the interviewees from answering their questions in Thai. The first girl that was interviewed just looked so paralyzed by not being able to express herself in English, she even started tearing up a little bit. How could we possibly tell her we wouldn’t accept her response in any way she could give it to us?

If I never mentioned this in any entry before, very few people in this part of Thailand actually speak a word of English. Sure, they might have had English in school for 10 years, but they still might not understand you when you ask them, “How are you?” A lot of it has to do with lack of colonization. A lot of it has to do with the fact that in this part of the country there simply are not westerners breaking down the doors to get here. A lot of it has to do with the fact that for so many people, hill tribe languages are the native language and Thai is a second language and then English is a distant third. I have never thought of anyone in this program as unintelligent and yes, I always kick myself for not finding ways of making members of this community more comfortable using English. Mostly, the stinging feeling of the week was having to hand in a set of documents to the director and deliver my own assessment of who was “the most worthy and most qualified” to go to the United States over anyone else. I don’t want any of them to get rejected. I’m sure in some way shape or form, their hearts are set on this opportunity and it's not like any of them are not "worthy" of an experience like this.

This year, I have been much better about spending money in Mae Sai than I was last year. I haggle, I know exactly when I'm being ripped off and my rent is about 1/3 of what it was in my old house. And ya know what? It doesn't change a thing:

http://www.x-rates.com/d/THB/USD/graph120.html

What is going on with the dollar? Can someone please explain this to me?

Once, about 5 years ago, I was Christmas shopping with Linda finding dim sum and imitation watches in China town. I think it was on our way to the car that we witnessed a traffic officer being hit by an SUV. There were only a few seconds between the impact and Linda running over to the scene to offer the victim her jacket. She was fast. And I always wondered to myself why my own reaction time wasn’t faster. Because after the impact, and after Linda had run 10 yards ahead, kneeled down and taken off her jacket to cover the officer, I was still staring from the sidewalk with my mouth open.

Late last night, I was driving Kelly, a co-volunteer back to the center after a late dinner. It wasn’t until we were about 3 blocks away from the center that we spotted a body lying on the side of the road with some blood splattered around him. With my motorbike I careened to the other side of around him, but didn’t stop. My right hand was still gripping the accelerator and my left hand moved to cover my eyes for a second while I recollected my thoughts. “What are you doing?!?!” Kelly asked me on the back of my bike, “Stop the bike! We can’t just leave him there, go back!” I would like to think that that exact sentiment would have crossed my mind just as quickly, but I was too busy dropping my jaw in shock to do anything about it. So we stopped and started to turn the bike around, but then for some reason, the following thoughts crossed my mind, “What if he was shot? What if he was mugged and beaten and hooligans were waiting to spot their next victim, i.e. me and Kelly? Even worse, what if he was dead but then came back to life as a zombie to attack?” (note: I have an irrational but very real fear of dead people coming back to life as zombies. Especially at night time. I never even get close to open caskets of deceased loved ones because of this phobia). Luckily, Pi Nik, one of the newer arts teachers also happened to be coming back to the center at the same time to negotiate the incident and bring help bring this guy to the hospital, if necessary.

Because there are no street lights on this road, Kelly volunteered to steer the motorbike and keep the engine running so we could shine some light on this man. I inched my way forward and with the light, could see the man’s face, covered with blood and his eyes closed. Inching forward ever so slowly still, I got a little closer and then, I guess because of the bike’s lights, his eyes started to squint open. “Oh good,” I thought, “at least he’s not dead. And he doesn’t look like a zombie either.” He started muttering something and he started to prop himself up. He looked directly at me and started waving his hand, which was also kindof covered in blood. He tried to prop himself up, but we insisted he stay down. He started rambling on about something and I couldn’t understand him. But neither could Pi Nik, who is a native Thai. The old man on the street was drunk beyond recognition and probably wasn’t hit by any vehicle. He probably just fell face first into the concrete.

Of course, we entertained the idea of getting an ambulance to pick him up, but apparently, according to Nik, an ambulance isn’t commonplace unless you have a broken limb or you’re unconscious or dead. Of course, when I went to the hospital a year ago, I only had a sprained ankle and I definitely felt that the visit was warranted. The old man propped himself up, against our advice and started walking, but then stumbled. We jumped in place and caught him before he fell down. Nik took one arm around his shoulder and I took the other. That’s when I felt a cold and damp sensation against my own leg and got a whoof of this man’s breath. He had pissed himself and he would have failed an alcohol test. He started shouting “I wanna go home!!” it was the first thing I understood out of his mouth, accompanied by spit flying into my face with an ungodly odor permeating a three foot radius of his mouth. “Ok,” Nik said, “We can take you home, but you have to tell us where that is.” And for a few seconds, the old man looked around, confused, eyes unfocused and head bobbing around, he desperately shouted, “WHERE AM I??!” I felt so bad for him. Nik called the police to get some help but he then he seemed to remember which way his home was.

In the last year of working on this site, I never noticed this small path on the side of its entrance that apparently led to this man’s house. We waited for the police to come and give us a hand. They were pretty quick, to my surprise, but unfortunately not the nicest or most effective police officers in the world. Once it was established that the old man’s house was in fact down the narrow path behind the centre, they told us to lead the way. In the meantime, Nik and I were still holding him up by our shoulders. One officer was nice enough to poke him from behind with a night stick if he felt like he wasn’t moving fast enough. The other police officers held flashlights to open the path for us. The old man pointed up a small steep hill and said something like, “My house, it’s right up there.” He felt twice as heavy going up hill and I lost a flip flop on course.

The police officer graciously poked him more aggressively to encourage him to move faster on his own. Finally, on top of the hill, we arrived at a small shack made of cinderblocks. We made it to his house. The police officers told us to let him go, but I could feel his weight collapsing underneath me. One of the officers pulled me away while the old man started fishing for his house key. “I don’t want him to hurt himself,” I tried to say, and they replied, “He’s fine.” And then, once I was about 6 feet away, like in slow motion I watched him fall fast first into the cinder block wall. Again, slow reaction timing on my part I just winced my eyes shut and grimaced before I could do anything. He started falling again, leaving a small smear of blood on the wall of his house, and I jumped back over to pick him up and the cops just stood there holding their flashlights. There was no sense of urgency. While holding the guy from under his arms, I found his key in his front shirt pocket and passed it over to Nik to open the door. That’s when a squishing sound came from the old man’s pants. I looked down at his ankles and sure enough, he had shat himself. Everyone started gagging and covering their faces. When Nik opened the door, the officers announced, “Good. Sir, you’re home and now, the rest of us can go home too.”

And without a second’s delay everyone stormed back through the trail to get back to the main road. One officer lectured me for not letting the old drunk help himself. Maybe he was drunk, but he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He was pretty scared and confused. That poor old man, almost left for dead on the street to have the rotten care of Mae Sai’s finest to just dump him off at home in his pitiful shack in the middle of nowhere. Then again, maybe the alternative of going to prison wouldn’t have been so hot either. I hear prison cells in Thailand are awful.

In the last year, art and professional artists have eluded me, much to my own surprise. I was reminded myself of this yesterday when I was asked to assist a documentary team from the United States to interpret and translate an interview of one of our kindergartener’s families. For me, this is funny for a few reasons.

First and foremost, I am not fluent in Thai. This makes me rather unqualified for this position of relaying potentially important information between the interviewers and the interviewees. For me, translating Thai into English into a microphone is like playing a live and oral version of that game, Madlibs…except you have to try to fill in the blanks with the words that would make sense in context…and you have to at least pretend that you know exactly what you’re doing and that you understand every last word out of the interviewees mouth. After all, you’re on camera. People might start to question your credibility if you start biting your fingernails, cock your head to the side or scratch your head with blaringly obvious uncertainty.

To make this even better, these questions didn’t just need to be translated from English to Thai. The family’s grandmother and grandfather don’t speak Thai. They speak the Tai Yai hilltribe language. All of these questions and answers needed to be filtered through two different translators; the head of the education department and myself.

When we arrived outside little KhemNewan’s house, the camera man started filming a chicken running around a basket. He spent 3 minutes chasing around that stupid chicken. KhemNewan innocently asked, “Did they come here to interview my family or the chicken?” “Exactly,” was my response to her.

The camera man wanted to film her walking through the narrow alley leading to her home. Khemnewan was ready to do this while the cameraman was filming the chicken, but by the time he was finished, two little cherubic 4 year olds appeared out of the small shop next door to play with Khemnewan. The shot was suddenly obstructed. “Tell them to get out of the way.” They said to me. I was paralyzed. I opened my mouth but nothing would come out. “Come on, tell them. We don’t have all day ya know.” and I needed to explain to them, “This is the front of their house. They don’t even go to the organization’s school. I don’t feel comfortable giving them orders.” Eyes rolled and an indignant “ugh” fell out of the director’s mouth. Finally they decided it was ok if she walked down the alley with her friends from next door. But they made her walk down the alley four times so they could get every angle.

We then walked into the house where the grandfather was making brooms. It occurred to the director then, not before hand, that she should probably give him an offering of fruit before starting off this interview. She put 100 baht into Pi Sak’s hand (the Thai –Tai Yai translator) and sent him off to buy fruit from the market down the street. She didn’t exactly realize that by sending him off, we lost our ability to communicate with the interviewee, unless we wanted his 6 year old granddaughter to act as our translator. There was some awkward silence as we waited for Pi Sak to come back and I was very relieved when he did come back a few minutes later.

For the most part, the translation actually went ok. I think it was approximately 90% accurate. The questions were unobtrusive until the very end when the final question came about, “Are you worried about the threat of your granddaughter entering the sex trade, willingly or unwillingly?” I looked at them blankly for a few seconds, “um….I don’t really feel comfortable asking that. His granddaughter’s right in front of him and it’s also way too direct.” And the interviewer insisted, “Well, if there’s a way you can get this question answered without asking it directly, it would be really great. This is really what we want to know most about and this is the most compelling part of the documentary” And so the question came out phrased in some way through Pi Sak. I don’t how, because I don’t understand Tai Yai, but the grandfather was taken aback. He answered anyway though and conveyed that he had strict rules for his granddaughter and so long as he was alive, he’d watch out for her and make sure her safety was tended to.

When the interview was over, the camera man started filming the layout of the house. He had the grandfather and grandmother move all over the place, pretending to do various chores over and over again. And of course, all of this direction needed to be translated through me. At the end of the day, it’s not them that ended up looking like jerks. It was me. After he made the grandmother move up and down the stairs, from one wing of the bamboo tree house to the other, I finally said “You know, she’s really struggling with all of this moving.” She moved approximately 0.1 mph and had a hunch in her back. Her face was folded in layers and layers of wrinkles and her hands looked like they had not seen a day’s rest in her entire life.

The camera man then wanted me to tell little Newan to watch television and to pretend to start flipping through the channels. The “angle” this team was going for in their documentary on prostitution is that the media plays a large role in convincing people to be materialistic. Through this materialism, people make concessions in their value systems and will willingly enter the sex trade if it is a quick and easy means of obtaining the best clothes, cell phones, knick knacks, etc, etc… The words “angle” and “compelling” fell out of these peoples’ mouths approximately 300 times in 4 hours. Every time they used one of the two, I wanted to punch them in the face.

We had outworn our welcome waaaay before we had actually left. Pi Sak was poking and prodding at me to get them to finish and I kept trying to bring it to their attention delicately. Finally, as they were making Khemnewan pretend to fold laundry, making her shift into the correct lighting for the camera, it took my refusing to translate for them to stop and leave. Maybe it was a little too frank and maybe I had hurt their feelings but it wasn’t any worse than what they had been doing to the family for the previous 4 hours.

What makes me mad about this is that while the point of making the documentary might have been to educate western society about human trafficking and prevention methods, they also exploited the generosity of that family. They also turned real people into actors and actresses; set them up to look like victims of media when they weren’t. When asked “What kind of television shows do you like to watch?” Khemnewan responded, “The news." The filmmakers could not have looked more disappointed.

And that is my frustrated and long-winded tangent on art.

Here, finally, are pictures of my house.



And these are my roommates, Carole and Dtii.




Unless Dtii is sleeping or playing a sport, he is generally stuffing his face with food. I’m sure, one of the reasons why we ended up roommates.




Sorry these pictures are mostly going to end up sideways. I'll edit this later so that this is presentable.






And this is my room. I strategically shot this one so that you can only see 1/3 of it. The other 2/3 is covered with piles of my dirty clothes and piles of my clean clothes...not necessarily in two different piles. You might notice that I have no furniture. It's true, no bed, just a mat and blankets. I've been thinking about getting a dresser, but then I second guess myself as to whether or not I will actually USE it. Maybe I'll just have this stack of empty drawers in the midst of my piles of clothing, and really, what's the point of having that? And I kind of like that everything's really easy to rearrange. At least for the moment.


Today the running team and I ran a 5K race. It was fun! I'd never competed in a real race before. A little weird at first because there are about 700 people at the starting line...and the race was in Chiang Rai. None of the streets are particularly wide, so it was kindof a chaotic stampede for the first kilometer. It reminded me a little bit of a scene in that stupid movie, war of the worlds, where civilians are fleeing from the underground aliens, vaporizing them one by one. I'd never been in an environment surrounded by herds of people running really hard and really competitively. It was really good, it made me raise the bar a bit for myself. I have to wait to post a picture of one of our kids, Tom, with his trophy, winning 3rd place in his age category. It's on Carol's camera. We were so proud of him and he was so excited to have gotten third place, despite the fact that he apparently placed first in his age range at the last race. He’s 12, not quite 5 feet tall yet feet and he still ran the 5K in about 20 minutes. I ran it in a little over 21 minutes, to give you an idea. Not that I'm an athlete, but I'm a lot taller than he is and in better shape than I've been in a while. And I am sore. It hurt my legs to take of my sneakers when I got home. I used to be a rubber band when I was a kid and I've never really perfected the art of stretching.