Back from Chiang Mai and visa renewal trip. Chiang Mai is not a beautiful city, but it is what I had hoped Bangkok would be: cheap, not stinky, and it has good sidewalks for walking. It is a very low city because there is a ban on high-rise buildings, so it feels townish instead of cityish.

This was also where I said goodbye to Blaise, or tried to. There was a miscommunication and I said farewell over the phone while he was at the bus station. I am really sad about this. Blaise has been a very good friend for the last two months and things don’t’ seem the same around OPC without him.

On July 26 I boarded a bus to Mae Sot (pictured above). The only busses that go to Mae Sot are the luxurious Green Line busses that have reclining leather seats, air conditioning, leg room and large windows. I balked at the 237 baht price, but had no other choice. As it turns out, I really enjoy riding the Green Line. The bus was air conditioned to near freezing temperatures, so I shivered most of the way to Mae Sot…shivered while I slept. It had been days since I slept. The weather was lovely to behold from the large, clean windows. When not sleeping on the six hour bus ride I listened to This American Life episodes on my iPod and giggled to myself like an idiot in the nearly empty bus. Eventually the road took a downward town into some deep mountain ravines, and I felt a palpable change in the passengers on the bus and saw it in the landscape. Mountains and cliffs loomed close together, dark with foliage-heavy trees. A low ceiling of fat, gray clouds seemed to stick to the tops of the mountains and to the hillsides like gum. No more sun, no more heat. A persistent drizzle of rain slopped over the bus windows, and soon after we were in Mae Sot.

Although I was on the nearly empty bus by myself I took note of my few other travel companions. There was one old man who kept his hands folded patiently in his lap and stared silently out the windows. There were two girls near the front of the bus who also stared straight ahead. There was a sickeningly sweet Thai couple next to me. The woman dozed with her head on her husband’s chest, smiling. Occasionally she would sigh and open her eyes and smile at me. Last, there were two men who appeared to be Eastern European. They peeked at me from over the tops o their leather seats, but never spoke to me.

The bus pulled into a large, mostly deserted square that seemed to be actively in the business of falling down. Stains of mold spread over the three storey buildings and dripped into the littered, muddy streets. Rain wept from the dark gray sky, and not a soul was present in the square except some sodden and depressed looking tuk tuk drivers and motorbike taxis. The two men, Lithuanians, looked at me with wide eyes. The larger one asked “Do you know where we are?” “No”, I told him.

The three of us stepped, bewildered off the bus. The tuk tuk drivers started their ritual of clucking “tuktuktuktuk!” at us. The Lithuanians huddled under a tree. I considered setting out on my own to find a place to sleep, but thought better of it. Mae Sot did not have the easy, comfortable feel of Mae Hong Son, and was so deserted and dingy. So, I walked up to the Lithuanians and said “Shall we find a guest house together?” They nodded. They scoured their Lonely Planet guide and came up with Ban Thai guest house. By the time we arrived there the light (what little of it could be found) was failing and turning from dirty gray to dirty dark. Rain still leaked from the dirty sky. Two European young women, one elderly gentleman, and one Thai gentleman were sitting outside the guest house, and stared as I walked up, flanked by two hulking, hairy, 6’5 men. “We would like two rooms please”.

Ban Thai guest house felt like a clean, orderly island in a sea of muck. The building is made of teak, inside and out – polished rich reddish-brown wood on the floor, ceiling, walls, and furniture. It smelled pleasantly of teakish – somewhere between weathered lumber and barbeque sauce, I think. Nothing was dirty, nothing was out of place. My room was large, with a bed in one corner shrouded in clean, cotton sheets and a generous mattress. A low couch in the other corner next to a low table. Elegantly simple. Silk curtain rustled like paper in the three open windows. Outside the rain slipped down limp coconut palms.

In the evenings the guests congregated at the great table in the front of the building. The ceaseless rain pattered the leaves around us as we read, chatted, and played cards by the lamplight. I had to consciously remind myself that I was not an observer in some Agatha Christie short story. There were the two British nurses, who gossiped perpetually in the corner near the teapot. There was the older American gentleman who seemed to take a keen interest in the single, German thirty-something girl. There was the loud Australian, the quiet British man who rolled cigarettes pensively and smoked them while reading the newspaper. And there were the two Neolithic-looking Lithuanians who played dice and kept to themselves.

The next day I toured Mae Sot. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have done this. The only word that I can use to describe Mae Sot is “grimy”. Every surface seemed to be in a state of decay. Mold and mud, rust and holes. The air was chilly, nay, it was actually cold, and the rain never really stopped. Mae Sot is known for its activity in the jewel and gem trade, so on the main street there are many jewel malls, where a jewel seller has a small glass case in a large room with other jewel sellers. All the real jewel buying and selling, however, seemed to take place on the sidewalks, where men gather in tight knots of arms, legs, and short-sleeved button down shirts to haggle, inspect, and purchase jade, rubies, amethyst, and other stones. I thought about buying a stone or a bracelet, just as a keepsake of Mae Sot, but decided that I would rather just forget the place.

The Mae Sot market is large and more chaotic than the small, tidy Mae Hong Son market. The Mae Sot market sprawls across three city blocks and spills into the middle of the streets. Meat, vegetables, soap, clothing; everything is sold next to everything else, unlike MHS where the meat is sold in a screened off, room with stainless steel booths and is scrubbed every single evening by men with fire hoses. The Mae Sot market stank. Rubbish and meat scraps marinated together in puddles on the ground. People pushed and bustled around with a sharper edge than in MHS where shoppers mosey and giggle while they haggle with shopkeepers.
In Mae Sot I saw, for the first time since I arrived in Thailand, women and children begging in the streets for food and money. This is difficult for me. My time in Rome taught me that if I give so much as one baht to a child, seventeen others would come and mob me, so I had to tell every set of wide brown eyes “Mai dai”. I can’t.

I didn’t receive so many smiles. Maybe it is because there are many foreigners living here who work for the various NGOs – the IRC, the United nations. They like to drive around in their large, logoed trucks and talk loudly on their cell phones in restaurants. This is a massive generalization, but I felt that the inhabitants of this town carried a lot of sorrow and weariness with them. Oppressive clouds could be the culprit, but I think that the oppressive regime, mere kilometers away, is responsible.

An American expat cautioned me to get to the border as fast as I could and renew my visa straight away. The heavy rains have caused the Thailand-Myanmar Friendship bridge to crack and there was talk of closing it down. I headed straight for one of the blue Songtoews parked in front of the supermarket. These cheap pickup-truck taxis run a regular loop between Mae Sot and the Myanmar border. Once I arrived there I was unsure where to go, so I marched straight up to the bridge but was stopped by an unusually tall Thai guard who bore a startling resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson…or could that just be my overactive imagination? Silently he pointed to a small shack and motioned for me to stand in line. I chose the wrong line. No, No, he motioned with his hands, the other line. I chose the wrong other line. Frustrated, he grunted at me, put his hands on my shoulders and guided me to the proper line, and stomped back to his post.

When it was my turn to have my passport inspected there was a problem. My departure card had been destroyed during a wild dancing fiasco in front of the 7-11 in downtown Mae Hong Son during a torrential rain storm in a Buddhist lent parade. Calmly, I explained this to the soldier holding my passport, but he wasn’t buying it. “No, you cannot cross the bridge” was the answer. Blaise had taught me that when bargaining in the market always, always, always, smile, no matter what. Reluctantly I mustered my best grin, which really is not a pleasant sight at all, otherwise I would use it more often. As I expected, my horrific smile solidified his resolve not to let me cross the bridge. Then he started yelling at me “You GO! You go home now!”

“Go where?” I asked him, “I have no home.”

“Then you go to Bangkok, you not come here! GO!”

…Ok, smiling didn’t work, persuasion didn’t work, I decided to try yelling…

“NO! I will NOT go! You have to let me through!” To my right I could hear the Samuel L. Jackson guard giggling.

The Immigrations guards face turned red and he leaned closer to me “Go away! I do not want to see you any more! Go!”

“No!”

More yelling. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t berate a man holding a weapon. A new tactic was in order. I started crying. Real panic set in. I couldn’t afford to go all the way to Bangkok; it had already cost me so much to come to Mae Sot. My visa would expire soon and then I would be fined 500 baht for every day that I overstayed in Thailand. I sobbed as I told the guard this. The Samuel L. Jackson guard now began to look concerned. A different guard with a cul-de-sac bald patch replaced the angry guard. Solemnly he handed me a new departure card and told me to fill it out. “Ok?” He asked quietly. “Ok”, I sniffed. Then I walked up the bridge.

The bridge is very large and wide. Beneath it the brown river rushes past, full of silt and trash. Dirty grass grows on the banks of the Thai side, and steep muddy banks with men fishing are on the Myanmar side. Large trucks were parked on either end of the bridge, behind the border lines, and men were busy scurrying around unloading sacks of what appeared to be hay and also old, rusty canisters onto small carts with bicycles attached. Then the carts were peddled from one side of the bridge to the other. The men peddling the bicycle carts grinned red betel juice stained grins and yelled at me as I walked “Hello! Where do you go?” “Hello bay-beeee! I love yooooo!” Besides “where are you from” I think these are the only English words the men knew.
The Mywadi side of the river is in a more positive state of decay than the Mae Sot side. A mucky street leading away from the bridge lined with three storey buildings, most with gaping windows, rusting ironwork, and black lichen greeted me. In many of the doorways women sat with their children. People sat on the sidewalks, on cars, under trees, kids played with each other in muddy alleys. I knew that when I got to the Myanmar immigration office they would ask me if I wanted to stay in Mywadi for a day. I wanted to, desperately I wanted to explore, but the drippy rain was starting to concentrate on becoming torrential rain and my cheery red rain parka screamed “RICH TOURIST”. I would have to explore another time.

In the immigration office I was escorted to a chair by a man in a dirty t-shirt and longyi (sarong). He took my passport, took 505 baht from me, photocopied the passport and stamped it. A Myanmar soldier in an unmemorable uniform sat nearby at a decrepit desk and absently swung his bare feet and smiled at me. I walked back across the bridge, dreading my next encounter with the Thai guards. Samuel L. Jackson and the cul-de-sac hair guard were both standing outside to greet me. Samuel L. Jackson gave me a thumbs up and smiled. Cul-de-sac guard asked me if I paid the Myanmar guards, asked me if I was OK, stamped my passport, and sent me on my way.

I only had a 500 baht note left with me, and I needed this to get a ride home and a bus ticket back to Mae Hong Son. Knowing that a Songtoew driver would not have change for 500 baht, I walked to a small woodcarving shop nearby and bought a long wooden box with carved chopsticks inside. I call them my chopsticks of trauma.

Ok, this is the thank you blog entry, and I apologize, because it is long. I have not been faithful about thanking the people who have sent support to OPC in the form of money and in material donations.

First of all, thank you to Steve and Becky Andersen for their very generous donation which allowed us to pay for the truck transportation to school for the month of July. Their donation also paid for the remainder of the school uniforms for the children, bought several school desks, stationary, pens pencils and other school supplies. Now we no longer owe the public schools any more money to send our unrecognized (therefore not “public”) migrant children to school each month.

Thanks for Jon Schwegler for his donation which paid for the electricity bills for the generator at the OPC shelter. We can only afford to have electricity for a few hours in the evening but the kids enjoy it since we have one, barely working TV that they use to watch soap operas at night. Jon’s donation also will pay for food for the last half of July and the first half of August. Thanks also to Jon and for Megan Aemmer for collaborating on a box that contained more than 20 candy bars (we cut them into pieces and served them as dessert to the children one evening), God only knows how many packets of beef jerky for my little protein deprived angels, and packs of gum that I use to hand out as prizes when the kids do well in English class. They also provided much needed first aid supplies, and best of all, children multivitamins! Thanks also for the Dr. Pepper chapstick.

Ada Cole sent a box with adorable children’s clothes that were NOT made in Asia, which means that they won’t fall apart within weeks of being worn! Thanks for the antibacterial soap, the first aid supplies, and the encouraging note. She also sent more children’s vitamins, so I think that I have enough to hold us over until I leave in November.

Professor Hans Boersma and Professor Mark Charlton made a donation that will pay for our school transportation for August and the rest will go towards paying the salary of the Learning Center cook, a delightful woman who works from sun-rise until sun-down. We were not able to pay her in June, and we are very grateful to her for being understanding and not walking out on us.

Thanks to my mother and father for their donation which was designated specifically to buy underpants for all the kids. Our properly underclothed children smell better, although I still can’t get the little boys to stop peeing on the Learning Center fence. I’ll leave that job up to Blaise. Thanks to Meme for her donation, which will be used for our orphans (we have seven real orphans at the moment) to buy lunch at school every day. Only the kids who have relatives living in Thailand get spending money, and our little orphans don't have any support, thus they don't eat lunch during the week – until now.

Now that all the thanks are out of the way, here is what we still need:
A used truck. This is our most urgent need because the man who drives the kids to school charges us a grossly inflated price for transportation and has threatened to spread bad rumors about OPC if we try to hire someone else for less money. A used truck (a good one) would cost about 200,000 THB or ~ $5000 dollars.

Bedding. With the recently increased violence across the border Thailand has been swamped with many more refugees, which also means many more children who have been orphaned, displaced, or abandoned. OPC had an unexpected 20 children show who needed emergency assistance and we do not have enough mattresses, pillows and blankets.

Day five of the rice diet. I decided to cut from 7 to 5 days because I noticed that when walking down the street in the heat I would become lightheaded and wobbly. I think that the refugees are better able to cope with eating almost no protein because their bodies have learned better how to store proteins and fats, where as mine just rebels and lashes out against all of these sly starches that are securing themselves to my thighs, my waist, and my upper arms.

I also though it would be good to cut it short on behalf of Blaise, who in the last five days has gone from a happy, smiling, perpetually singing Frenchman to a wrecked empty husk of a man, who pokes forlornly at his rice and lets out long sighs at every meal.

In any case, I had to cut it short because on Friday Kham Chuen and three other OPC staff members (Usa the Thai language teacher, Dao, the other teacher, and Seng Murng our new intern) asked to take us out to lunch to celebrate the first victory in one of the projects we are working on with the IRC. We were first given a light vegetable broth with tofu, mushrooms, cabbage, and bean noodles, and then a heavier, tangy seafood broth with a different kind of mushroom, oysters, squid, and fish-balls. After that they placed two plates of sizzling pork with basil leaves in front of us, heavily seasoned with fish sauce, soyu, and chili peppers. While everyone else talked around the table Blaise and I quietly focused on tasting things again for the first time. We hardly said a word. After everyone had left the two of us let out a cheer outside the restaurant, spent some minutes jumping up and down and talking about how absurdly excited we were, and immediately went to a different restaurant to eat something else!

This morning, despite the fact that this has happened to me before, I put on my orange t-shirt without checking it first. After pulling the fabric over my head and turning to find my shoes I felt the familiar burning, pricking sensation under the folds of shirt on my stomach, back, shoulders, arms. ANTS! Believe me; I am not kidding about this, the ants only live in my orange colored clothes. How do I know this is true? How can I prove it? Last month I sent some clothes off to the laundry, including my yellow shirt – and I expected to receive a yellow shirt in return, but by some misfortune when it came back, clean, it was also a lovely shade of tangerine. Ants, who had never given my yellow shirt a second glance took up residence in my newly died “orange shirt”. Now, I not only have three orange shirts instead of two, but I have unwittingly given free housing to my insect nemeses. They lurk in my closet despite the number of times I have sprayed clouds of insect poison into their orange homes. The happy color that I once sought out on department store clothing racks is now becoming my least favorite.
Every bad circumstance is only a circuitous pathway towards something positive; if you look hard enough at your own problems you can see how they cause you to become a better person. I never had any sympathy for my poor Meme living in Westport, Washington, who for years went out into battle against the ants every morning and scolded us grandchildren for leaving crumbs on the kitchen counter. The only safe haven from ants in her kitchen was the oven and the refrigerator, neither of which I have in my apartment. Maybe it is not the color orange that the ants are really interested in but in fact they are most excited to plague the spawn of the Cloutier family. In any case, Meme, I salute you!

Day two of this irrational diet: I am hungry! This morning I had an orange and some coffee for breakfast (no sugar) and had rice in some vegetable broth for lunch at OPC.

Somehow I became involved in a parade to celebrate the beginning of the Buddhist season of lent. Blaise and I accompanied our fabulously attired children through the sloppy rice paddies and knee-deep brown water of the river to their wat (temple) and ended up walking with them across town with a parade of hundreds of other Thais who were beating drums, singing, dancing, dressed in wildly bright shades of pink, yellow, green, and blue. The sun was shining with relentless heat and the kids, who had by now been standing for over an hour, were starting to wilt. Suddenly a sharp breeze blew and over the hills came massive gray clouds that within ten minutes of their appearance began to sprinkle and then send torrents of rain on our heads. Still, the parade marched on. We tore leaves from some nearby trees and the kids made hats to keep the water off their heads. The rain fell harder. My bright yellow “God Save the King” shirt was completely saturated. My long purple skirt wept large purple tears and dyed my legs a ravishing shade of bluish-pink. The water in the streets rose higher and faster, but still the parade marched on – drums beating and people cheering. The harder it rained the more excited the Thais became, until the once dignified march became a whooping and hollering party of wet people dressed in their best clothes, flinging water at each other and dancing. The women near me grabbed my wrists and flung me into the midst of their dancing crowd, so I pranced with them…past the 7-11 store…down the main street of Mae Hong Son…in front of a crowd of camera clutching tourists.

It is now 9:30 p.m., one hot shower, and two bowls of rice with fish sauce later.

After spending some days of thinking about it I have decided to spend this week living on the same ascetic diet of most illegal migrant workers that live here in Thailand. That is, eating only rice and chili paste for seven days - I also decided to allow a little bit of fruit. Blaise agreed that if France lost the world cup he would join me. For obvious reasons, Blaise is a bit grouchy today, a condition which is aggravated by the fact that the only thing he has eaten in the last 24 hours is rice, fish sauce, and one banana. Today is the conclusion of day one and I feel satisfied with my two bowls of rice and my banana, but I don't think I'll last long. So far, the most amusing thing about this diet is the look on the faces of the restaurant owners when I tell them the only thing I want to eat is rice.

Teaching English at the local Thai public school is by far the biggest challenge for me. The children are less responsive than the OPC kids, and seem to have less interest in studying and more interest in shooting rubber bands at each other across the classroom. To console ourselves after rainy a day of public school teaching Blaise and I stopped at a small book/gift shop that had a sign out front: Cappuccino! Brownies!

Naturally I was intrigued by this mention of brownies and I thought that it would be good in investigate further. I ordered, the waitress grinned, the brownie arrived – a massive brick of brownish gray. It was frozen…and I think it is safe to say that it was a flourless brownie. As I sawed through its dense, cold chocolate carcass I recalled that I have never seen a single kitchen in Thailand with an oven. First bite…holy cow this brownie is not made of chocolate!
Well, it was a little bit chocolate. Ovaltine, to be exact. Ovaltine and raisins, to be taste-buds-in-agony correct. It tasted more like sugar water and chalk than chocolate, with small, hard raisins liberally dispersed to add texture or perhaps to warn the unsuspecting consumer to turn back before it is to late.

Now I have a stomach ache and I feel a bit in shock, almost the same as when I fell off the motorbike last week.

This morning Kham Chuen and I drove 25 kilometers outside of Mae Hong Son to oversee the project that we have been working on with the IRC. Two of our staff members are conducting a training session (for four days) to members of the community to teach them about child nutrition, development, and health. The training is going well...better than planned, actually, since there was a span of about four days when I thought that the whole thing wouldn't get off the ground.

On our drive back from the training we stopped at a very small community of huts which was accessible only by a narrow, slippery trail that snaked innocently off the highway. Three of the children at the shelter came from this "village", and after seeing where they used to live I feel that I understand them a little better, and also Kham Chuen's relentless desire to give these kids proper food and education.

The first hut we saw belongs to OPC. When Sa Zeng's mother was dying of AIDS she stayed in the OPC hut which is a bit larger and newer. That is where she died, and where six year old Sa Zeng, also infected with HIV, stayed while the members of the community refused to touch him for fear of getting infected as well.

Next to it is the hut where LaTeng's family lives. It is about the size of two dining room tables pushed next to each other. Two blackened tin cans are what they use to cook food over an open fire. Laundry hangs across the ceiling. Five people sleep in there.

Across from LaTeng's hut is the hut where the brothers Zawone and TuVing's lived. It is a little larger than the rest, but beer cans are stashed in the corners - physical reminders of the presence of their alcoholic and abusive step-father.

The village was deserted except for one old woman who looked as creased and ancient as a banyan tree, and one young woman with her small child. The child's (boy? girl?) head was too large for its tiny body. Although it could walk it's hair was thin and fair, instead of dark. "Malnutrition" Kham Chuen told me. Then he asked the mother how many times she had eated today. Once. What did she eat? Rice and some chili paste. How often does she have meat? Once a week.

Most of the people in the village work from 7 in the morning until dark in the rice fields. They earn 50 baht a day. To give some perspective, this evening I had one bowl of soup at a restaurant (50 baht) and a pot of tea at a different restaurant to scare away the cold weather (40 baht).

I have something to say about idealism and the “holy fire of justice”. There is an overabundance of soap-smelling, wide-eyed new NGO workers who come armed with the flame of justice and rightness in their bellies who know that they will change the world very shortly, as soon as they can start healing the sick and handing out food to poor refugees. Well, when I was at the UN in 2002 I remembered noticing something strange about the UN workers – they had a different kind of fire; the dying fire of defeat. I think they all were once just like the small-time NGO workers who come here to the border, excited to do something and “make a difference”, curse the day that phrase was coined and also the blithering idiot who first let it pass his lips. Working at an NGO in Thailand is not about handing out food and healing the sick, counseling prostitutes and rallying financial support from other foundations, it is about negotiating bribes and tiptoeing around extortion.

I thought that I had gone to Europe to study non-profit management so I could learn how to support people, and that those skills would come into play more than my degree in Communications. As it turns out, working here is like living in a PR scheme. Every day the local people of Mae Hong Son make attempts to threaten and extort money out of these kids and out of this organization, from the greedy man living on the corner who charges us a severely inflated rate to drive the children to school because we don’t have the money to buy a truck, to the OPC kindergarten teacher who stole the gift of 1000 baht that was given to one of our kids by a distant family member.

The head man of the village refuses to help us pay to installing solar panel at the shelter so we can have cheap, efficient electricity 24 hours a day instead of the few hours of generated fluorescent light that we get every evening at 7 P.M. Even though he has put up solar panels elsewhere for free. Just today the man who owns the corner store (corner stores here are also responsible for collecting money for people's electricity bills) claims that we never paid him for the electricity bill, and every week it seems various community members threaten to spread bad rumors about OPC if we do not comply with their demands (always demands of money).
Last week one of our boys – Zawone – contracted a staph infection at the base of his eye and was in pain for several days until we took him to the hospital. I had to accompany him, not because he needed moral support, but because I couldn't be sure that the doctors and nurses would treat him fairly since he is not Thai. The sight of a massive farang (Westerner) woman with arms crossed, deep frown, notebook in one hand, standing behind him seemed to get the job done.

My fire of idealism is snuffed out and it gets depressing here, but at least, if I don't know how to communicate to the people here through words “Be nice! Don't discriminate against these children just because of where they were born!” at least I can say it with my 5 foot 9 stature!