Lost on Earth

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!