Monday, June 26, 2006


This weekend Blaise had two friends visit from France - Jerome and Matilde (all three are pictured above). We decided to rent motorbikes and drive to Ban Rak Thai on Sunday. Ban Rak Thai sits uneasily at the northernmost tip of Thailand, in the heart of the Golden Triangle. It is a KMT village, which means that it is mostly populated by a band of ex-KMT soldiers who spent their lives dedicated to fighting communism in China. It is also a border town with Myanmar, which I just a few short meters outside the city limits. Ban Rak Thai is most well-known not only for is ties to the KMT but also for its tea, which is grown locally and sold in every restaurant and shop. When you sit down for a meal several teas are always provided in small teapots, served in small delicate cups, with the hope that the traveling tourist will chose to buy one of the air-tight parcels of tea-leaves along with his meal.

Driving to Ban Rak Thai was a stupid idea. I had spent the day before in the hospital with a badly infected foot, and although I received medication, the foot was still swollen and sore when I left on Sunday. We took a leisurely drive through mountains so green and lush that they make me angry. It is a privilege to see such beautiful land and people every day, but the knowledge that I am going home to an ugly city full of unattractive functional building, functional cement freeways, and functional public parks almost ruins the experience.

When we reached Ban Rak Thai we realized that we were not sure where to go (and I suspect that we actually didn’t know why we went there in the first place) and we found ourselves driving up a red, muddy trail, presumably towards the Myanmar border. Suddenly, and I don’t quite remember what happened, my motorbike spilled to the side, throwing me to the ground with my steadily swelling foot caught underneath the searing hot exhaust pipe. I don’t expect it to be my last motorbike accident, but I think it might be the only on that happens on the border of a country with an oppressive regime.

After that my foot doubled in size and burned and throbbed and my mood grew dark. At Blaise’s suggestion we ate lunch and then took a nap under a shelter next to the small lake in the center of the village. We drank coffee and smoked cigars with a jovial Chinese man who used to work as a trekking guide in Mae Hong Son. His father was a KMT soldier. We asked him if Myanmar looked different than Thailand. Yes, he said. In Myanmar there are many beautiful trees. In Thailand all of the trees have been cut down and replanted again.
It is now Monday and my foot still feels hot, sore and swollen.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Two days ago I experienced my first starry night in Mae Hong Son. Since there are so few street lights, the stars here are brighter and more clear than anywhere else I have seen. Fireflies bobbed and twinkled in the rice paddies, and if I half-closed my eyes just right I could almost believe that I was looking at a reflection in a lake: stars above, stars below. On the mountain, behind the wat, fat storm clouds gathered slowly. My neighbor, a depressed 40-something woman who speaks a little bit of English, came out of her door to greet me.

"Good evah-ning!"

"Good evening! It is very beautiful tonight!"

"Yes. Suay mak mak."

Suddenly the storm-clouds gave up two magnificent flashes of purple and orange lightening. My neighbor spread her arms up to the sky in the direction of the clouds. "Bicycle!" she shouted.

"Lightning" I said, pointing to the direction of the storm. "That is called lightning".

"Bicycle!"

"No, not bicycle. Lightning"

"Huh?"

Flash from above again, and this time several deep rolls of thunder.

"Nevermind. Bicycle is fine."

Wednesday, June 21, 2006


I was delighted to find when I arrived at the school (OPC) that the diet of the children seemed very romantic to me. Every day at lunch there is a bowl of warm rice and some sort of strange vegetable, usually in a broth. One day we might eat rice and steamed forest ferns, bamboo in a very watery broth, morning glory with some chilies, fried pumpkin, and a sauce of ground peanuts, salt, chili, and soya beans.

For some reason, just today, it suddenly occurred to me that the reason why they eat this food is beacuse the rice is donated to OPC through another organization, and the vegetables are gleaned by the cook from the small bit of land surrounding the OPC office and the school. In the mornings the cook and her mother take their large baskets and pick morning glory from behind the office, taro from the creek etc. These kids rarely get to eat meat or even fruit (fruit is expensive in the market and it is considered very bad form to pick it from someone else's tree). Blaise and I decided to go to the market on Sundays and buy oranges for all the kids so they can have fruit once a week, but meat is a bigger problem.

Today, Kham Chuen drove us outside the town of Mae Hong Son and showed us his solution to the food problem(pictured above). On a large portion of donated land he has built a fish farm with two small ponds squirming with whiskered catfish, a clean, covered pen for ducks and chickens, and land that he recently planted with pumpkins, bananas, chilies, eggplants, and lemongrass. On some days the kids go with him to the farm and learn how to cultivate the fish and grow vegetables. "It is good for the kids to know English and math and computers" he explained "But when they go back to Burma those things will not help them. They also need to know farming".

Sunday, June 18, 2006


This weekend Blaise and I hopped on bus for a four hour stomach-turning trip to the small mountain town of Pai, which is a sort of Disneyland for hippies. So far I see more white people than asians, many of the restaurants say "we serve Thai food" on their doors, but most of the cuisine is western. There are stores that sell wine and restaurants that serve cheese, beautiful European women who dress in fashion jeans and sunglasses, dreadlocks, psychadelic knick nacks, beards, armpit hair, piercings, and old, overweight, ugly white men with beautiful young Thai girlfriends. Blaise and I are a little disgusted and quite anxious to leave, but alas we missed the bus to go home so we will be spending another night here.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006


I think I finally have compiled a list of essentails that every woman should have in her purse at all times if living in a small town in Thailand:

- Flash light
- Bug repellant
- Flash disk
- Pen and notebook
- Waterless hand sanitizer
- Iodine and bandaids
- Kleenex or toilet paper
- Chewing gum
- Sunglasses
- King paraphenalia (in my case it is my yellow Long Live the King bracelet)
- Small comb
- Chapstick
- Eye drops
- Bandana
- Piece of paper with the following phases in Thai: "No, I will not teach you English", "No, I do not want to teach your son English", "No, I do not want to buy skin whitening powder", "Why has the water in my apartment been shut off for an entire week?" and "I don't understand" (last one is also a great way to get out of teaching someone English).



Last night OPC threw a going away party for Ruby, the outgoing OPC teacher. Kham Chuen donned a sea-foam green apron and a white shower cap and cooked a feast of traditional Shan food for over 40 children and the office staff. This was by far the best foor I have ever tried in Thailand, and if Kham Chuen ever finds himself out of a job I am certain that he could be very successful as a professional chef. There were curries, noodle soups, a salad made of marinated ti leaves, spicy and salty meat balls, pumpkin, green beans and chicken, fried rice, and that is all I remember before I collapsed from over eating. Kham Chuen proudly stalked among the rows of children as they ate yelling “Eat eat! Eat more!” And they did. Those kids ate three times as much as I could. We also served soda, cookies, and ice cream, which is extremely rare for them, and consequently, the kids became extremely hyper, especially after we handed them two packages of balloons. The blew them up and tied them onto rubber bands, which they put around their heads so the balloons stuck out like ears or flower petals.

After that was Shan dancing, which was very beautiful, performed with wooden swords and 20 baht notes, among other things. It’s difficult to explain. The children’s dance instructor was at the party, and started to teach me. Later that night in my apartment I hopped around my room in a clumsy attempt to practice.



At OPC the electricity only runs from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., so after the sun set we lit candles and placed them on the walls around the school. With the torrential rain outside, the warm glow of candles, and the stoic Shan band of drummers and cymbalists I began to feel that the evening was so magical that it was all a dream and it would disappear in an instant, leaving me standing by myself in the jungle in the rain. As it turned out, that did happen. The rain did not let up, my flash light did not work, and the candle I took to light my way back home quickly snuffed out from the wind. It was a damp, dark walk to get to my bed.

Friday, June 09, 2006



This will be a long post since so much has happened and I have not written in several days.

Mae Hong Son is delightfully different than Bangkok. The market here is cleaner than the Pike Place market in Seattle, and they even keep the flies off of the meat that they sell and hose everthing down at the end of the day. It is possible to walk through the Mae Hong Son day market and not retch because it hardly smells at all.

I have spent the last several days watching Ruby teach classes, getting to the know the children, and settleing my living situation. The children are energetic little angels with big smiles. They are extremely affectionate with everyone they meet, and quite precocious. They relentlessly ask questions in whatever language happens to be on their lips at the time (Shan, Thai, English, Burmese...and all of the other languages they speak...). They have a very difficult time saying my name (sounds like "Header") so instead they just call me teacher, or "Teechuh", but they have the most difficult time saying the name of the other volutneer, Blaise (sounds like"PraySH").

These kids have been learning English for 8 months now and their proficiency is better than I thought it would be. I, on the other hand, am not learning Thai as fast as I would like. Ruby's command of the language is so good that it is downright embarassing to be around her sometimes. Blaise and I are going to sit through the children's Thai language classes in the mornings (The kids mostly speak only Shan, so here in Thailand they can't really communicate with anyone very well except each other).

The children have so much energy that someimtes it feels like electricity is in the air when they are all in one room together. When asked to repeat a sentance in English they all yell at the top of their lungs "AYE AM A CAHPENTER! WHAT EE YOUR NAME?! HOW OL AAAHH YOU!" etc. They are so cute that I have a hard time leaving them alone to play or to study. They are so eager to learn that I think I will hate all American children when get back. These kids are so grateful for their education, and American (or European, for that matter) kids slack in school, skip class, and don't do their homework. I think that if I let them these kids would take English class even on the weekends.

My living situation has improved greatly. After a day of shivering, terrified in the thick darkness of the room under my mosquito net fortress that I built I was a jumpy and nervous ball of sashimi raw nerves the next day. Everything came to a head when a small black crab crawled out of the rice paddy and sidled through the front door. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and first thinking it was a spider, I jumped up, screamed, and immediately started crying. Ruby packed me up on the motor bike and dropped me off at a guest house for the night. The next day Kham Chuen helped me negotiate rent on an apartment that is just down the street from the office. I pay 1800 baht a month, which is less than $50. Yeah, I could get used to living here...

Monday, June 05, 2006


Today, after my first ride in a propeller plane through a thunderstorm, I arrived in Mae Hong Son. What can I say, I was unprepared for how primitive this place is. The house that I will be living in has a thatched roof, no shower at the moment (I have to bathe with a bucket and cloth), there are beetles in my bed, chickens that come through the front door, and no hot water. Also, there are apparently very large spiders that like to live in the bathroom, and there is some sort of cricket outside that sounds like a loud electric drill.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

I am typing this entry on a Dutch computer with a Thai keyboard. Please excuse mistakes.

Last night I went to see a Thai Ska concert on the beach. There were thousands of people packed so tight onto the beach that it was impossible to walk anywhere. These are wealthy Thai at Hua Hin, and the ones on the bea h were every bit as pretentious as wealthy Americans. They drank cheap red wine out of champagne flutes (wine is VERY expensive here, so even a bottle of nasty Gato Negro, which sells at Trader Joes for $3.99 can be priced over $10 here, which is REALLY expensive in Thailand) and ate Jell-O (American “imported” food) with as much nose-in-the-air haughtiness as any American swirling brandy and chewing on a cigar in a mahogany-lined bar. Eventually the entire crowd erupted into dancing and spilling their beer into the sand.

I met two Economics professors who teach at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok – an American man and a Thai woman who have been married for 10 years. They were friendly and talkative, shared their food with me, and then gave me their contact information should I ever need any help with anything. That is how I spent my Saturday night. Sweating, covered in sand, and dancing with two 40-something economics professors at a beach music festival. Stranger things have happened before I guess.
New pictures posted to my Flickr site. I have already found some great Engrish...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flickvan
Well, I landed at Bangkok International Airport an hour and a half late, and when Joey picked me up at the gate the first thing he did was read me a passage from Chekov - when I remember what it is I'll post it...something about a goat and some flowers...

These are my first three impressions of Bangkok:
- Bangkok smells like a bile churning combination of fart gas, putrid meat, rotten lychees, and diesel fuel.
- It is so hot and damp that my skin is constantly a little slick and oily, and I love it.
- It doesn't matter how dilapidated the building, or how slimy the pile of garbage, someone will put a shrine in front of it, with an offering of bananas, incense, and a shot of whiskey, and call it home.

We traveled to Hua Hin the same day - a three-hour bus ride with a man who is jonesing for nicotine and food seems like a 5-hour bus ride.