Home Sweet Home

I had just barely unpacked my bags from my trip to Canada when I began packing boxes. Actually, I had started to pack up my house into boxes before leaving for home, and as a result, my house was in a state of total disarray, festooned with spider webs spun in my absence and littered with gecko droppings.

I didn’t even have time to clean, really. A day after getting back to Mae Sot, I had a job interview and was offered the position. I let myself get swept along in their desperation and need and accepted, telling myself that I needed a job. Really, what I felt like I needed was at least another two weeks of vacation.

Instead, I packed my boxes and within a week, found myself driving a truck through the rain back and forth between my old neighborhood, centrally located within minutes of the market, to my new neighborhood, which is two kilometers from town, surrounded by rice fields.

It took until 10pm to finish moving, not because we got a late start (we didn’t) or because we have that much stuff (I certainly don’t), but because of life and the way it is so good at throwing up delays, problems and petty distractions in one’s path. It was a long day, and by the end of it all my muscles were vibrating from the strain of constantly lifting and carrying, as well as from a slight adrenaline rush gained by driving a large truck in Thailand for the first time, shifting with my left hand instead of my right and navigating tiny roads full of almost invisible bicycles, unpredictable motorcycles and all manner of craziness.

The next morning I was up at 6am to make coffee and breakfast and get on my bicycle for the 10kilometre ride to my new job. It’s about two kilometers into town, the length of the city, and then out of the city, past the bus station, past the airport and another few kilometers down the road to the school. The worst part is getting to the airport. I get that far and my brain can’t help but think that this is as far as any reasonable person can be expected to bicycle. At the same time, there is a slight uphill incline to battle and to make matters worse, the pedestrian overpass which marks my turn off the highway isn’t even visible along the straight flat road, it’s still so far away.

The bike ride has the benefit of waking me up in the morning more effectively than any cup of coffee. The fields near my new house are unbelievably beautiful, even in the morning’s early hours, particularly at this time of the year when the paddy is young and unbearably green. If it’s not raining, the sky is usually a deep purple that contrasts brilliantly with the green.

The other benefit is that I am getting regular exercise. In fact, this week I was told by a nun that I was looking “slim and sexy.”

The nun, incidentally, is my co-worker because the job I took is teaching at the Catholic school just outside of town. I teach four mornings a week, to boisterous classes of grade four, five and six children. On Tuesdays, after the flag has been raised, the national anthem sung, and prayers recited, I lead morning assembly for the whole English Program (Kindergarten to grade 6), which generally involves singing a song, or playing a simple game.

I was on the job for all of two days before I had to call in sick. I had a new house, a new job and a new cold which knocked me off my feet and kept me there for the rest of the week. While I should have been unpacking and learning the ropes at school, I was stuck in bed napping and blowing my nose.

The new house is mostly unpacked now, and looks absolutely beautiful. It’s quite large and spacious, with a huge kitchen, two bedrooms and an enormous yard and garden. Behind us there is nothing but rice paddies, ponds and fields, all the way to the mountains. In the afternoons, when I sit on the balcony and read my book, I can hear the wind in the bamboo chimes, the croaking of frogs and the calling of birds.

For the first time since leaving my family and going to University, I feel that I am living at home. There is art hanging on the walls, comfortable furniture, shelves lined with books, a fridge full of food, and someone to welcome me home at the end of a long day.

Missing something... something missing?

Today, just briefly, I find myself missing my middle class naïveté. The way I used to be able to so easily tell the difference between wrong and right and see clearly the line that divides the two.

It started with landmines, interestingly enough. I remember sitting in a classroom in university studying the various makes, models and deployment; taking notes of their effects and knowing definitively that the use of such items is plainly wrong. It’s not a moral certainty anymore.

This week, I found myself listening to a story on my balcony, sharing a meal with friends, sharing stories and talking about our work and the people we know. We were talking about children, and those who are unable to have their own, and adoption.

There are all kinds of conversation topics, but especially those one has at social dinners, which are entirely predictable. There are a range of acceptable responses and one selects from them and voices some variation of the words and everyone nods and we all go away satisfied, or at least reasonably sure that we’ve done our social duties as best we can.

Instead of the range of responses I was familiar with on the subject of adoption, somehow, I was hearing about this woman who got pregnant for the sixth time. Within a month of giving birth she was back on the streets again, where she pushes a metal cart, picking through trash in garbage cans. She can’t afford another baby and you don’t know what a tough life is until you have glimpsed where the street people live.

So she sold her sixth baby, because she didn’t have enough money to feed the other five, even working as hard as she did every day.

I had to ask.

“How much was she paid?”

Three thousand baht. About one hundred Canadian dollars.

When I heard the price, my heart dropped.

If the baby was bought by a Thai person, a woman could take it to the hospital within seven days of its birth and have it registered as her own child, provided that the doctor at the hospital isn’t someone who knows her personally and hasn’t witnessed her un-pregnant at some point in the past few months. With a Thai citizenship and a family ready to bring it up as its own, the baby is at leas guaranteed food to eat, a safe shelter to live in and access to a health and educational system.

It was strange because after I stopped thinking about the price and the economics of child birth, I started to see how the situation might just turn out happily for everyone. This idea I have in my head, this romantic notion of motherhood, is what makes strong and loving families in some cases, but not in all cases. In other situations I can suddenly see how it is just that, romantic. If five children get fed, and another gets a well off family to feed and love it, instead of six children crying while their bellies bloat, while they experience illnesses born of malnutrition and while some watch others starve, how can that be wrong?

Of course, children get sold every day into terrible situations and believe me, it’s something I fight against firmly. But no one buys a baby to raise it into a whorehouse, it’s just not economical.

I like this ideal I have where children get raised by their families, where families love all their children and where all the children get fed and I’m clinging to it but I cant help but wonder, if it isn’t just an ideal, and if in the real world where only practical people can survive, alternative arrangements should not be judged so harshly?

Canada in June

It’s Friday afternoon and the air is cool and filled with the energy of a pending thunderstorm. Outside my window, the banana leaves bend in the breeze but memories of Canada are still very fresh in my mind.

I returned to Canada for three weeks in June just in time to enjoy a Canadian summer and celebrate my brother’s birthday and graduation. I also went home in order to learn more about and acquire a new insulin pump, which is a machine which helps me regulate my diabetes.

I haven’t had much luck with insulin pumps in the past. Perhaps it is the life I live, which admittedly, is not the average lifestyle. Who knows if the pumps were designed for tropical living, trekking through monsoons and slogs through the jungle? I started pumping with a company called Diesetronic. When I had problems with that pump I was told by one of the company executives that “mechanical machines can and will fail.” To illustrate the point, I was told about this time the man’s Mercedes had broken down, stranding him beside the road.

For non-pumpers out there, when an insulin pump fails, things can go wrong with your health very quickly, like within hours, quickly. It’s not like driving a Mercedes at all, except that when the car crashes you could die and that’s true with pumps, in a way, too.

Diestronic never admitted my pump had a problem but they later issued a general recall of the model I wore, which is frightening really.

I wore a Medtronic pump for several years. The pump I bought was waterproof, only the company later sent out letters informing customers that it wasn’t in fact, accounting for several pump failures I had experienced. For some reason, the company, in producing a $6500 machine responsible for medical functions, failed to safeguard the pump against the static electricity generated by the average human body. So basically, my DVD player is better equipped to deal with static electricity than the machine I wore on my body daily. Weird, huh?

When the Medtronic pump’s screen went blank and no alarm went off, I was seriously alarmed and even more so that customer service was calm about the whole affair. I decided it was time to give pumping a break and go back to needles.

At first, I kind of enjoyed the physical freedom of going without my pump. An insulin pump is the size of a pager and connects, through a tube, to a needle which delivers insulin continuously into a person’s body.

Unfortunately, needles are all but free. Not only does one have to eat meals at regular intervals, but the meals should consist of certain types of food. Routines are really good for people on needle therapy and I have always been anything but routine.

So after six months, I decided to investigate and try a new company, so back to Canada I went to invest in a new insulin pump. The Deltec representative was incredibly friendly and accommodating, fitting easily into the busy home schedule of meeting people, seeing old friends and spending as much time as possible with family.

Only a few days after hooking up to my new pump and going through all its buttons and programs, I was in the mountains of British Colombia with my parents happily hiking away.

My parents had just bought a new canoe while on a road trip in the States and they were dying to get out in it. I hadn’t been fishing in years, so I was eager to get on the lake as well.

For years, my family has gone fishing at Blackwater Lake. We never get very big trout, but we always get some of an edible size and we always have fun. One memorable trip included my brother and a friend on an inflatable raft that we discovered all too late wasn’t so inflatable. My friend jumped overboard and swam across the lake in her lifejacket while my brother and I paddled like crazy to get across, arriving almost in the lake ourselves.

I took the front of the boat, Dad the back and Mum crouched in the middle. It was an amazing three hours of fishing, with the afternoon sunlight staying forever in the sky and fish jumping, even skipping across the water. We saw a muskrat in the rushes by the shore and wallowed in the tranquility of floating on water surrounded by nothing but forests and mountains.

I caught the first fish but Mum soon caught up with me. Dad didn’t have much time to fish since he was baiting Mum’s hook and taking her fish off for her. But the three of us were having a good time. Every time Mum got a fish on her line, Dad had a tendency to get very excited and Mum would get nervous, feeling like she didn’t know what to do.

“Bring it in! Bring it in!” Dad would should, and Mum would do her best to bring it in, whatever that means.

I was slowly reeling in my line when I felt the tug of a bite. I heard Mum say excitedly behind me, “I’ve got one!”

And Dad: “Bring it in! Bring it in!”

The next thing I know, the boat was rocking wildly.

What happened was this: There was Mum bringing it in, when suddenly the fish was out of the water and flying towards her face. Startled, she fell backwards, losing her balance.

Mum and Dad hit the water first but I wasn’t long after them. One moment I was there enjoying the mountains spread out majestically before me, the next thing, I’m hitting the glacial water with a splash.

It takes a moment to adjust to the new environment. The water is so cold, it squeezes your lungs, making it hard to breathe and you panic a bit, until you remember that you have a life jacket on.

When we’ve all calmed down, Dad says: “Where are the fishing rods?” I have no recollection of what happened to mine. The last thing I knew there was a fish on the end of it somewhere. How Dad put his in the boat before tipping out, I have no idea, but Mum and I had totally lost ours.

Then Mum looks at me with wide eyes: “Where’s your pump?”

My hand darts down to my stomach to feel if the needle is still there. In the shock of tipping, the tube could have caught on something, the pump could have fallen out of my pocket, it could be drifting, as we spoke, down to the muddy depths of that cold cold lake.

But no, there it was, still firmly attached to my body. Waterproof, and happily pumping away no worse for wear.

We, on the other hand, couldn’t say the same. My tropical body was shivering madly and we weren’t able to get sorted out and back in the boat for almost half an hour. We were a rather bedraggled crew when we struggled up onto the shore but we still somehow still had our catch of fish, a sunburn and an amazing story to tell.

Escape from disaster

Somehow I didn’t get to the embassy until the day before my flight to the north. On the day I arrived, it was too late to drop off my application, then it was the weekend, then we had things scheduled during the day. It was my last chance. We flew the next day up north and would come back the day before our flights out of the country.

I took a taxi to the embassy. It was on a side street with guards stationed at the entrance and at the gates. There was a crowd of people waiting outside with numbers. I got an application and realized I had forgotten to bring photos. Why they need photos for a tourist visa, I still don’t understand. I got a new taxi and went to a photo store. My taxi driver waited while they started the generator to turn on the lights and the printer. Thirty minutes and several dollars later I was back, application filled in, waiting in line.

The embassy charges $30 for the visa and only accepts US Dollars. I had a hundred dollar bill with me. I waited in the paltry shade of the only tree on the street until my number was called and proceeded through the lines to the payment counter.

“Do you have another bill?” the cashier asked, carefully scrutinizing the minute crinkle in the bill where it had, just once, been folded.

I shook my head.

“I’m sorry. I can’t accept this bill.”

People love US money, but in this country, they only love it if it is as pristine as if it had just come from the mint. God forbid it had ever changed hands or been put in a pocket. Folding is definitely forbidden and the tiniest of tears renders a bill, no matter what it’s worth, completely unusable. It’s only one of the many ridiculous things happening in the country and not even in the running for one of the most strange.

It was 11am. The counter closed at 11:30. I was directed to a nearby hotel which would change the bill for me.

I walked quickly to the end of the street, bolted across the mad rush of traffic and stumbled over uneven pavement stones until I got to the hotel. I paused a moment at the entrance, catching my breath and trying to look cool, collected and richer than I was, then went in.

I had no problem changing the bill, and successfully insisted on getting crisp, new-like American bills for the embassy. I stumbled down the street, sweating profusely, darted through the traffic, rushed past the guards and paid for my visa application.

I noticed, while the cashier carefully examined every inch of my new bills for a tear, a sign posted in the embassy that read: “Closed: March 27^th”.

The cashier handed me a receipt for my passport and said I could come back tomorrow afternoon after 1pm.

“I’m leaving the city tomorrow for about a week. Is it ok if I pick it up on March 28^th?” I asked.

“Of course, no problem,” the cashier replied.

I left, congratulating myself on noticing the important sign. How awful, I thought, not to have noticed and to have made travel plans involving picking up my passport on the 27^th, only to find the embassy closed.

I flew out the next day and spent the week travelling. All went well. I rolled back into the capital off a highly uncomfortable night bus on the morning of the 28^th. I would spent the day in the capital, exploring a famous temple I had not yet seen but which was conveniently located near the embassy. I would pick up my passport and get on my plane the next day.

I spent the morning wandering through the city and caught a bus up to the embassy. The rush of traffic was the same, but something was different. There were more guards stationed at the entry to the street and less people waiting around the gate. No people, in fact.

I arrived at the gate and found everything shut and not a hint of a person anywhere. The guard behind the bars of the entryway saw me and came over.

“It’s a holiday today,” he explained. “Please come back on Monday.”

I shook my head wordlessly. “Yesterday was a holiday,” I said, senselessly.

“Look at the sign,” he said, shrugging and walking away.

I looked at the sign. It now read: “Closed: March 27^th & March 28^th.”

“Wait!” I called in to him. “Surely there’s a mistake. Last week I was told I could pick up my passport today.”

The guard was firm and clear. The embassy was closed. Absolutely no one was inside, he said. Someone important had flown in and everyone, every single person from the embassy, had left to meet this important person at the airport.

“But that’s not fair,” I said. “You can’t just decide to close the embassy suddenly like that. Last week I was told I could pick up my passport today. My flight is tomorrow!” My voice was starting to rise. My heart was starting to race. I felt events slipping terribly out of control.

The guard just looked at me and sighed. “Can’t you just come back on Monday?” he asked.

The problem was that I couldn’t come back on Monday and not just because of my flight. Flights can, of course, be changed, however inconvenient that may be. The problem was that I had been on a very tight budget. I had planned every day very carefully and was standing in front of the embassy, on what I had assumed was my last day in a country with no ATMs or credit card facilities or foreign banks, and I had $5 in my pocket and no hope of getting more.

There was no conceivable way I could survive as a tourist in the country with that much money. I would have to pick up the passport on Monday afternoon and wouldn’t be able to get a flight until Tuesday morning, which meant five more days than planned in the country on $5. It was a disaster.

“Please,” I begged. “There must be someone you can call.”

But the guard was deadpan and steadfast. “No,” he said. And to every question, every plea, every idea I had of how I could get my passport from behind the counter just meters away beyond those bars, “No. No. No.”

So I did what any person who is helpless in the face of disaster would do. I cried. I couldn’t help it. I was tired from the long uncomfortable bus ride the night before and helpless and had no ideas of how to move forward from those embassy gates. So I didn’t. I collapsed on the ground right there in a fit of tears which also quickly went beyond my control.

I admit, I got a bit hysterical. I just didn’t know what to do.

The guard put up with it for a short time then approached again. “Excuse me,” he said tentatively. “Could you please move away from the gate?”

“No,” I said, echoing him and getting back to crying again.

After a few attempts at getting me to move, a man approached me from my side of the gate. He was well dressed in a crisp white buttoned shirt. “What is the problem?” he asked. “I am a police officer. I would like to help you.”

I explained the problem.

“Can’t you just come back on Monday?” he asked.

I explained the problem with that.

Even in my hysterical state (to my great embarrassment, I couldn’t stop crying, even when I was explaining the situation to the man), I noted the very ironic nature of the situation. Many people are afraid of undercover police officers in this country. They are generally keeping a low profile and keeping their eyes open, or in other words, spying, and one can only imagine why this one is stationed outside the embassy of a neighboring country where many people are trying to obtain visas so that they can leave this one.

I don’t know what happened next. The man had a radio and spoke with the guard and the radio. The guard was speaking to someone on the phone. But a few minutes later, the man gently asked me to step away from the gates because someone was on their way.

It was really only a few minutes before two women in crisp black business suits angrily took my receipt and handed over my passports. I thanked them profusely but they only looked at me with total disgust. I thanked the guard profusely but he turned away in embarrassed disgust. I turned to thank the undercover police officer but he was already gone.

Then the gates were closed and I was out on the street, brushing away my tears, trying to catch my breath and feeling like I was emerging from behind a cloud of cotton wool into a remarkable day. You cannot escape disaster without feeling blessed and the sun sparkled on the temple’s golden walls and the wind blew through the temple bells and it all happened with such clarity and beauty that I felt alive and free and wonderful.

There is an important lesson here and I learned it and that is to always, always, always carry and have access to extra money when travelling anywhere. One never knows what is going to happen, whether it is a medical emergency or missing a plane, so it’s best to be financially prepared for any eventuality.

I caught my flight the next day at the airport, clutching my passport happily and stamping into the neighboring country with my new visa and a huge smile upon my face.

Recent Travels

It’s an amazing country, the one I recently visited at the end of March. For two weeks I lived in a kind of 1984 world, where DoubleSpeak is an important element to every day life, propaganda is rife and cars with steering wheels on the left side share the road with cars with steering wheels on the right side.

In two weeks I filled an entire journal with my thoughts, observations and feelings, with detailed descriptions and a thousand words trying to capture a fraction of the million things happening all around me. I wrote more than I would normally write in two months and yet was unable to put to the page most of the things that made the deepest impression on me for security’s sake: conversations with people, meetings, chance encounters even, names, dates, anything too specific.

The picture of apartment buildings in the capital sums up the majority of the experience for me. Every inch of space is packed with detail. You can walk as slowly as possible down the streets and still be unable to take it all in. In addition to the imagery, there are the noises: inevitably traffic, horns, screeching tires, but also people talking, shouting hello, chatting over tea tables on the sidewalk, a baby crying, someone yelling down from an apartment above, the tinkle of a bell on the wheel that crushes sugar cane to make juice.

The country is full of things crumbling: roads that were never built properly, buildings that were never maintained. Colonial ruins stand beside ancient rubble and Chinese concrete constructions tower above them all.

The scenery everywhere is spectacular, enchanting, almost magical, but it is nothing compared to the people there. I can’t speak highly enough of those I was fortunate enough to encounter. Waiting for a bus on the streets of another city, I practice my local language skills with a woman selling betel nut. We talk about our homes, our families, simple things, big smiles. Everywhere the taxi drivers, the fruit sellers, people on the street, teachers, parents, young people and old people are dealing with some of the worst economic conditions on earth and getting through each day with a smile.

I saw simple acts of kindness which are committed with a kind of routine nonchalance that inspired me. I found all kinds of examples of people with very little sharing with they had with others who had less. I’m under no idyllic impression that the humanity residing in this one particular country are somehow ideal or blessed, but I saw in my short experience there echoes of what I see in many people here in my work: a charity which truly comes from the heart.

It was amazing to explore ancient temples, to walk sun soaked stones amidst the ruins, to stroll the streets and explore the pagodas of the capital, but it was a blessing to meet and speak with the people I did, to find inspiration in their lives and words and most of all in their smiles.

Room to Grow Foundation

Despite making it my goal to blog more this year, the days keep slipping by without me writing anything. One reason is that I have been quite busy: travels and work and having fun on hot afternoons.

The other reason is that I have been blogging for the new organization I helped set up and now work for: Room to Grow Foundation. So if anyone is interested in what I'm doing with my time, they should check out our blog.

And anyone interested in learning more about our work can check out our website, which is still a work in progress but which is happily up and running and online.

As for Buddhist new year celebrations and travels abroad, I promise to post more pictures and adventures soon... really!!

Rat babies, rats and corpse disposal

On the first day of this week, the cat I rescued from starvation in a refugee camp gave to me:

One tiny rat baby...

On the second day of this week, the cat I rescued from starvation in a refugee camp gave to me:

Two mice a meesing,

and one tiny rat baby...

On the third day of this week, the cat I rescued from starvation in a refugee camp gave to me:

A BIG ASS RAT!!

Seriously. My cat, Frankie, is always bringing in geckos and leaving lizard parts all over the floor. She eats cockroaches and even once brought a live snake into the house. But this week was the first time she caught a mouse. I was all proud of her but a little worried because unless she ate the whole thing, I can't find the body and she's always leaving bodies around in gross places...

I spoke with my brother on the weekend and he teased me.

"Seen any rat babies lately?" he asked, referring to a story I told him recently about my friend and her strangely numerous encounters with baby rats.

I hadn't ever seen a rat baby myself, actually. Not until Frankie brought one in the next day. She left the body near the kitchen door so I scooped it up and threw it out the back window.

But last night I'm sitting in my indoor hammock reading a book and Frankie walks in with this thing in her mouth that's half her size. She starts playing with it on the floor near my computer, which is her favorite place to play with the animals she brings in and all I could think of is how I need to get this thing out of my house, now!

It was so big I couldn't' even sweep it or scoop it. This, my friends, is a task for a loving boyfriend to handle, as much as I'd like to say otherwise. But the loving boyfriend is in Bangkok all week at some conference at the four seasons, having cocktails while I dispose of rat bodies.

And all the while that I'm thinking "what the hell do i do?" Frankie is having the time of her life and I can hear the rat body thumping on the ground as she throws it up in the air and it hits the floor and rat blood is getting everywhere.

Finally I pluck up my courage and grab a plastic thing and the broom and i make it work, carrying the body out to the balcony. Frankie goes crazy manic "Wheresmyrat?wheresmyrat?wheresmyrat?" running around in circles meowing. I take her out to the balcony and close the door so she can't get back in with the rat. But i can still hear the thumping. Then I can hear the cat fight as some other cat tries to come over and steal the juicy prize.

About an hour later, I open the door to let the cat in, hoping she disposed of the copse. Nope. She's sitting there with it in her mouth, looking so happy and she starts trying to drag it back in again. I close the door for another hour.

When I go back out, Frankie has decapitated the giant rat, leaving it in two pieces on the balcony and she's happy to leave it there and come in for the night. But i am not happy to leave a rat corpse on my balcony so i have to screw up my courage again and push it into the plastic thing and fling it off the balcony. Unfortunately, I didn't fling it too far, but hopefully some dog smelled it, came and took it off to his lair.

I'm through with rat bodies! ...I hope

Singapore

Photographs from my recent weekend birthday adventure in Singapore. One of these days I'll write something again but for now, I spent my birthday wandering the city streets in large sunglasses made in the 70's and the evening dining on a feast of food at Newton Circus.





Yes, I am now 26 years old.

Paw Yu Lee & Mickey Goggin

Photos from the wedding of good friends Paw Yu Lee and Mickey Goggin

Burma's Waiting Game

I began planning my trip into Burma sometime in April this year. At first I thought I would take a month off writing and go in mid-September. I found a monastic school in Mandalay where I could stay and made contact. I planned to teach for July and August, spend a few weeks getting ready, then take off.

For a number of reasons, I ended up pushing back my travel date to October 22nd and now it seems like I may not go at all. I haven’t heard any word from the monastery where I had planned to stay but the monasteries in Rangoon are emptying. Monks are disappearing and being arrested. Bodies of robed men float in rivers and photographs come out of empty monk’s quarters where nothing is left of the monks save the pools of their blood.

We sit in front of our computers, just 6 kilometers from the border crossing into a country that is exploding, hoping for news. For anyone doing the same, some of the best news is coming from amazing people blogging from Burma and getting news out of a country which is increasingly tightening controls on internet and phone lines.

MizzimaNews has some of the best breaking news but Ko-Htike, Moemaka, and Niknayman have information directly from the inside with disturbing pictures and videos to match.

I am currently in Chiang Mai living at a school for women and teaching there for a few days. Yesterday we practiced reading strategies while looking at the news. I stood beside a woman who cried silently looking at pictures of the dead bodies of monks.

After that, I couldn’t stand the soft, cultured voice on the BBC anymore. We listened to a reporter from Singapore who was in Rangoon for a few days and delivered richly descriptive reports missing several key facts.

“The key difference,” say the BBC voices, “is that, unlike the demonstrations in 1988 when an estimated 3,000 lost their lives, the Burmese protesters today have access to the internet, to blogs, to digital cameras and the media.”

It seems to be doing very little good. Just how many dead bodies do they have to document before someone does anything? Does anyone have any idea what the death toll of this government is since it first slaughtered those 3,000 in the streets of Rangoon in 1988?

So we sit here, on the border waiting for a massacre, wondering just how many bodies have to pile up.

The waiting is driving me crazy.

Update

It’s late Tuesday night and I am on dorm duty at a migrant school in Mae Sot. The students are busy participating in a special ceremony for someone’s daughter’s birthday so things are quiet. One student has remained behind, noisily chatting with her brother in Burmese on a cell phone. Otherwise, the only sounds I can hear are of the crickets and other night creatures humming happily away in the dark, and the occasional murmur of discontent from the ginger cat who has taken to following me around.

I’m not sure how it got to be the end of July but suddenly a month has passed and it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything or even updated anyone about what I’m doing.

This month and next month I am teaching at the Wide Horizons migrant educational project in Mae Sot. I teach every afternoon for three hours from Monday to Friday and I live at the dorm two nights a week helping students with homework and being on call if any emergencies arise. Emergencies occur when students get arrested outside the school compound (which happens a few times a year), when word comes of a police raid (which is rare) or when someone lobs a bomb at a building next door (which happened once last year).

Mostly dorm nights are quiet and are spend in the same way I spent so many nights in the refugee camp, living on a different time frame almost in a different world. So much of my evenings here are spent in conversation, just talking to people, eating together, washing dishes together, chatting about homework, hopes and whatever else people care to share.

Usually sometime after dinner I have a shower but not tonight because our water has been cut off for two day and soon there won’t even be enough to flush the toilets. Showers can be taken in one of two ways. The first way is to get a big bucket, fill it with water from the cistern, go into the bathroom, strip down and use a scoop to wash. The second is to scoop directly from the cistern outside, wearing a sarong the entire time. Although showering outside in public can be quite refreshing and is always very social, I prefer the more private method, personally.

When it gets dark and people get tired, they go to sleep (if their teachers haven’t burdened them with piles of homework) and they get up early to go to the morning market, to light cooking fires or to finish that last minute homework.

I get out of bed at the last possible moment, climb into clothes and find some hot water for a cup of coffee but I wake up fairly early myself. The compound where the school is located is also the home of several families and their various animals which include a large flock of ducks. Ducks, for anyone who doesn’t know this, are loud animals. Much louder than chickens, or even roosters. Every morning, it is the sound of the ducks under the house that wakes me up and I lie in bed drifting in and out of duck influenced dreams.

In the morning I sit at a little desk in the wooden house that is our office and type out the assignments I have for my writing job. Every week I rewrite ten articles about news relating to Iceland. If that seems a little random, it is. But in this fashion I have learned several interesting facts:

• Icelandair flies from Canada and the US to Europe and offers free stops in Iceland. Their prices are right and their business plan is brilliant.
• The government of Iceland recently opened up commercial whaling which is mostly supported by the local population but which draws huge international protests
• A lot of cool music and art comes from Iceland including strange woolen hats with knitted mustaches attached
• Iceland has glaciers as well as huge black sand deserts. It wasn’t always this way. Once it was green. People blame it on the sheep.

I also write a number of travel related articles every week, post a number of comments on my own travel related articles and post a number of articles about travel to various regions in Thailand.

Occasionally, I also plan lessons and correct homework, of course.

I was hired to teach two things: tools for critical thinking and teaching skills. This week marks the end of the first phase and today we started the unit on teaching. For the last two weeks of August I won’t be teaching at all, but rather observing my students as they take up two-week teaching positions in migrant schools around town and offering them feedback.

I’m living in the same house I’ve lived in since October 2005, a Thai style house made of wood with lots of windows high up on stilts. The house is shared with a beautiful cat named Frankie Baby who recently developed hereby unprecedented abilities to cuddle, a development which I am rather enjoying. Around the corner lives my boyfriend, a charming Australian whose wit, insight and general company I also enjoy.

Frankie Baby’s three kittens live at the school and one of them is currently curled up at my feet, mother of four newborn kittens herself. She follows me around everywhere meowing loudly whether she is fed or not. When I’m teaching, she often curls up at the edge of the classroom, if the dogs don’t chase her away. Chickens wander through the class as well and, of course, the ducks make up a lovely symphony in the background.

I have a ticket home to Calgary, Canada on December 18th 2007 and I plan to return from those cold climes sometime in January. Beyond that, plans for the future are rather thin on the ground, but when has it been otherwise?

Just another day... in paradise.

Some days you wake up and it’s just another ordinary day. And then, sometimes, there are these mornings when you wake up and it’s like the first day you ever lived. As if your eyes had opened for the first time, as if you were wearing a new skin that could feel everything, as if you were a child again, suffused with wonder and drinking it all in.

The other day I took an overnight bus back to Mae Sot from Bangkok. It arrived around 4:30am and I hopped on the back of a motorcycle taxi to go back home. The sky was still dark, but I could see stars in the sky and there was enough moonlight to show my surroundings. We went through fields of green, with palm trees silhouetted against the sky. Perhaps more than anything it was the texture of the air that stirred my soul: the cool freshness that comes after a rain, the pre-dawn stillness that is full of the excitement of a whole blank day still to come, the heaviness of the tropical moisture in the air…

Flying through the night, with the wind in my hair, it wasn’t long before I had a broad smile on my face. I have been here for so long, but it just suddenly occurred to me with a wonderful thrill: Oh my God! I’m in South East Asia!

And I laughed out loud under the stars at the remarkable joy in it. How on earth did I end up here? It’s still a mystery to me, but on that wonderful morning, I was reveling in the mystery instead of sunk in it, skipping along the surface of the glorious waves that bear us places in life so that we wake up one morning and finally open our eyes and notice that where we are is truly remarkable.

I just wanted to share that with you. It’s a cool, wet day here in Thailand and I am spending a quiet Saturday morning with my coffee on the balcony, listening to the sound of the rain falling on the roof, watching the water slide down the sides of the green banana leaves in the garden and I am so happy to be here. So happy to be here.

Misadventures in Malaysia

I flew out of the new airport in Bangkok on an Air Asia budget flight that cost me around $60 and took no-frill flying to a whole new level. You pay for everything on the flight from water to a pillow.



It's always struck me as odd how people line up to board their flights at the first opportunity. I've even seen pushing and shoving. Why bother when you have an assigned seat? I've always wondered. I'm not in a hurry to get packed onto a small space for a few hours, so I hang back and consequentially end up sandwiched in between two guys who chat over me the whole flight. Air Asia doesn't have assigned seats. It's a free for all. Delightful.



I arrived in the early hours of the morning. The airport was smaller than I had expected and there was only one ATM machine. It was out of order. I gave up on travellers cheques and changing money when I was about 18 and rely on airport ATMs for my in country cash entirely. I had Thai baht as a back up, but it seemed like I was stuck. Woops.



I convinced a bus company heading for "Sentral KL" to take the Thai money and give me a ticket. My guidebook told me that the buses heading for downtown will drop you pretty much anywhere and certainly at the guesthouses in China Town, which is where I wanted to stay. Had I been just a little more attentive, I would have realised that Sentral is not a synonym for downtown, but rather the name of the main train station, just north of the city centre. I was dropped there at 1:30am with no local currency on me.



Luckily, the station was open and I wandered past the security guards into the dark hall. I was in luck. I quickly located a bank of three ATMs. One had a large sign proclaiming no international service. The other had an out-of-service message blinking on the screen and the third, although initially promising, spat out my card with a message that the international banking link was down. So sorry.



It was 2am. I contemplated my options. I realised I hadn't eaten in a long time. I had no money for food. Finally I found a cab and asked the driver to take me to a big bank with ATM machines. It took me about ten minutes of wrestling with the machine to get it to give me a pitiful amount. I don't know why I was having so many problems. The taxi driver dropped me at the hotel and I handed him the cash. In my mind I was trying to convert to Thai money. The driver looked at me strangely.



"Is it ok?" I asked him, thinking perhaps I had messed it up.



He smiled and nodded and drove off. I checked into the hotel and fell onto the bed, sweaty and tired, just wanting to sleep. That's when it hit me. I had just given the taxi driver 10 times the amount I was supposed to. I thought about it further. If my banking troubles continued, I wouldn't be able to withdraw enough to pay for the visa I had come there for.


It took me a long time to get to sleep. I just lay there feeling stupid and embarrassed and stupid again. I swore a lot, tossed and turned and swore some more.



The next morning, determined to shake my bad mood, I wandered the streets of China Town, looking for breakfast. I settled on a small Malay restaurant with a menu that I could point to and ordered something. I ended up with a plate of fried rice and breathed in relief. Safe food. What can go wrong eating fried rice? The rice was yellow, spiced and delicious. Big chunks of vegetables littered the plate along with tender morsels of chicken, but suddenly I paused. It didn't taste good, it didn't taste very good at all.



Malaysian food is famous for satay and it seems I was not safe, even eating fried rice. The chicken chunks I had been enjoying were going to be the death of me, if I wasn't careful. I swallowed some pills quickly and left, trying to ignore to man at the counter glaring at the plate full of food I had left behind.



I have to admit, the two incidents weakened my sense of adventure considerably. As did my ongoing problems applying for the visa I had come for. I spent the rest of my time in Kuala Lumpur trying to salvage the trip.



The first day, I just walked. I walked to the old train station and admired the white minarets and architecture. I wandered under the palms past gorgeous mosques, listening to the call to prayer. I felt the heat of the streets and sat in the shade to watch all the people pass. If I could show you the map of the city and where I walked, I walked clear across the place in a day, getting sore and sunburned.



I walked past the famous KL Towers, the largest in the world (sorry Toronto) and out to the Thai embassy.



I walked around the bourgeois refurbished Central Market crammed with its tourist goods and all the way out to Chow Kit where people really buy things. No matter where I am in the world, I have yet to find a market I haven't liked. I love the crowded rows between stalls, the shout of vendors touting their wares, the smells that sneak up on you unaware, wafts of dried ginger and chili and pungent dried fish.



The next day was just more problems at the embassy, so I spent the afternoon getting out of the city. I took a bus to the Bantu Caves, a Hindu sacred site in some picturesque limestone mountains. It was nice just to get out of the city for a while.



There are almost three hundred steps leading up to the main cave, watched over by a large golden statue. Each step is numbered and I intended to make a thoughtful climb, aware of each step as I made it.


I was quickly distracted by the monkeys, however. I hope I am never in such a black pit of despair that monkeys and their antics can't make me smile. I know they are pests and they bring endless annoyance to people, but I'm a tourist and monkeys never cease to make me laugh and bring me joy.


In addition, the caves were spectacular. Particularly when I lay on my back on the marble floor of one of the Hindu shrines in the back and stared up the shapes hanging from the ceiling, getting the tacky paintings and litter on the floor out of my field of view. In the very back, the roof opened up to the sky and there were monkeys up there too, swinging from vines in the jungle far above, and petals drifting down in the breeze.

I got out of the city the next day and headed North to an island near the border with Thailand. I went to a number of guesthouses looking for a nice one and on the way seeing some very dodgy establishments. In one little house tucked in the back of a lovely garden courtyard, a very large man sat behind a counter, looking exactly like Jabba the Hut, the younger version. Not only did the man have a round shiny belly which could not be confined by his shirt, he also had this strange triangular tongue which continually flicked around outside his mouth as he talked with me. I didn't stay there.

Actually the island of Penang doesn't have much to recommend it. It's a quiet little town whose main attraction is the ease in getting visas into Thailand. I enjoyed it though. The cultural influences are more Chinese and Indian than Malay. There are Chinese temples and clan houses and a whole section of town with Indian tea and clothes and music. On my own, I loved exploring the book shops and cafes. But the main draw is, of course, the food.

My partner joined me the next day and we proceeded to gorge ourselves silly. He had recently been to India, and I Sri Lanka, so we both fell upon the Indian food with a vengeance. The tandoori chicken was especially fantastic but another night we ate at a small place with big vats of chicken masala, honey chicken, fragrant rice and roasting nan bread.

Then there was the Chinese cuisine. We settled into a round table at a busy dim sum restaurant, drinking pot after pot of green tea and grabbing treats off the cart every time it went by. I don't even know the names of all the things we ate there.

One day we took a bus out to the beach. The bus was slow and the trip to the Northern part of the island seemed to take forever. We ended up in a fishing village, walking along a grey beach lined with little boats and nets and restaurants serving seafood. We walked out along a long pier to look at the boats and stared down at the jellyfish in the water.

The beach was far from spectacular. The sand was somewhat grey and the water not at all enticing. Despite the incredible heat and our constant sweating, there was no question of going for a swim. A few families hid in the shade by no one approached the water.

The way back to Thailand was long. We caught the ferry back to the Malaysian mainland and then caught a train. The train ride was perhaps 20 hours to Bangkok. The seats and sleeping berths were very comfortable and the hours passed comfortably, rubber trees flying by outside the window, drinking beer, reading the newspaper, playing cards.

For a while, after coming back, Thailand seemed less hot. Unfortunately it didn't take long to catch up, and we are now in the middle of hot season. I'm writing from my wooden house, under the fan, sweating like crazy. It'll be a while before I get another beach vacation, but I think it's the perfect time for myself to go jump in the reservoir.

Map of Happiness

In looking for a map today to show some Canadians where the country of Burma, sometimes known as Myanmar, is located, I came across the Map of Happiness.





The map was made by Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at Leicester University's School of Psychology in the UK and it attempts, according to him, to measure "subjective well-being."


It is unclear, and somewhat doubtful to me if he actually talked to anyone in any location in the world. But the map is apparently derived from data from the following sources: UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the World Health Organisation, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer and the UNHDR. Supposedly this information comes from 100 some studies interviewing over 80,000 people worldwide.

So, how does one statistically measure happiness? Well this guy proposes that the national level of joy is related to health predominately, followed by indicators of wealth and education. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that Denmark and Switzerland come out on top of the rankings. Or that beloved Burma is almost at the bottom.

Alternatively, this study could just be telling us that Denmark and Sweeden are rich and have great social services, whereas people in Burma are poor, with little access to health and education. But wait, we knew that already.

Its kind of crude, by my thought is to look at suicide rates to see who's happy. It's not an exact measure. A great many people live with unhappiness who would never kill themselves for a great many reasons. Anyways, the Map of Happiness tells us that Canada and the US are pretty happy. Yet I'm noticing that for countries where World Heath Organization statistics about suicide are available, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States are pulling in at positions 26, 27, 28 and 29 respectively in list of the top 81 countries where people comit sucide. (Australia:21.5 per 100,000 people; Canada: 21.5 per 100,000 people; New Zealand: 20.5 per 100,000 people; Sweden: 20 per 100,000 people; United States: 19.8 per 100,000 people)


It seems like although people may be less happy (according to the map) in Tajikistan (#63/81), they tend to kill themselves a lot less often there.

And then there are those poor people trapped in the distant north. They are always committing suicide. Why? Because they are unhappy? They tend to be unhappy because they don't get enough sunlight in their brains. I wonder if the Map of Happiness took that into account. What kind of equation is balancing out all these correllations: the relationship between happiness, health, wealth, education and access to sunlight?

What kind of person funded this research anyways? I can think of ways to make a lot of people happy that wouldn't take nearly so much money, I bet. Sheesh!

Muay Thai: Boxing on the Border

Someone very close to my heart, with whom I spent a great deal of my time during my first weeks back in Mae Sot, read my blog, Back in the Saddle and indignantly demanded to know just what was so dull about it all.
It’s true. I can’t believe I could have forgotten about the highlight of my first week back, of which my friend so kindly reminded me.

I had only been back in town a few days with my friend and former neighbor, an Australian journalist, gave me a call early one morning. "Jen," he said, sounding desperate. "I need your help."

Actually, he didn’t really need me that badly. He needed my Australian neighbor and wanted my help in convincing him to go along with his crazy escapade. When I heard the plan, I was highly enthusiastic. Given that I hadn’t even had a coffee and it wasn’t even 8am yet, that’s quite a feat.

When I lived next door to the Australian journalist, I often tagged along after him, like he was my big brother, or like I was some kind of caped side-kick. We had a lot of fun together, often sharing one last beer in the early hours of the morning as the monks in the monastery across from our house were beginning their day and we were ending ours.

I don’t remember how it was that he first got interested in Muay Thai, or Thai kickboxing, but there are lots of events in our area. Kickboxing on the border takes on a particular flavor, as there are often highly emotive fights between Thai fighters and fighters from across the border (in which, more often than not the Thais win) and also between Muslim and Buddhist fighters. I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed going to the fights. For one thing, it was a chance to see some of the Thai soul laid bare. It’s like looking into an animal’s mouth while it’s roaring, staring at the crowd at a fight. There are housewives in middle-class attire, with their children propped up against the ropes sweating in the heat and screaming their hearts out for one man to beat another man. It’s easy to lose yourself in the press of the crowd, let your sweat become your neighbor’s sweat, your voice become the voice of the crowd. It’s dark and the only light are the fluorescent lights strung up around the ring, all the people in the crowd like moths to the flame. As my neighbor went off to photograph, I never felt alone. It was too easy to get lost in the experience.

The more I went, the more I learned. My friend was following the story of certain boxers affiliated with a local school. At first we didn’t know their names. We called one "Pink Shorts," and another, "Ali." Sometimes we got right up close next to the ropes, other times we hung back on the fringe, betting beers on the fights and taking in the big picture. I got to recognize not only the fighters, but also the muscians who play the traditional music before the fight, and the announcers who wore huge aviator glasses and never hesitated to say annoying, embarrassing things about the white foreigners attending the match. One night, with a female friend, the announcer, who sounded quite drunk, made a point of calling the audience’s attention to the fact that I had left my seat and was proceeding to the bathroom. That’s right folks, the white girl is going to pee. "Good luck with that!" he called to me in Thai while I gritted my teeth and made my way through the seated crowd.

Someone from the boxing school called my journalist friend up early on my first Tuesday morning back in Mae Sot. What he understood from the conversation in Thai was that there was a big fight coming to Mae Sot and it was going to involve some foreign fighters from Canada and the Phillipines. There was some kind of press event going on and the white fighter wasn’t going to be able to make it, did he know anyone who could possibly put on a kit and stand it? He made it sound like some kind of photo shoot with my neighbour taking the photos. The problem was that he couldn’t think of anyone to do it. Apparently all the boys we know in town are terribly scrawny. So he called me, to enlist my help in convincing my new Aussie neighbour to be the poster boy for some white kickboxer from Canada.

The photo shoot was in the afternoon and since I was still unemployed, I joined them, hopping in the back of a pick up truck with some Burmese fighters and flying down the highway with the wind in my hair. The truck took us, to of all incomprehensible places, the Mae Sot Central Hill Hotel, a luxury resort at the end of town. "Perhaps it’s a pool side photo shoot," I thought to myself smiling. "Maybe all these muscled boys are going to get all oiled up and we can all jump in the water afterwards…"

But we were taken inside and lead downstairs to the conference room. The room was filled with long tables covered in white and staff were filling up water glasses with iced water. We were given chairs in the back corner and left to wonder what was going on. At the front of the room, behind to podium was a large poster in Thai and we worked out it was advertising the fights, which were to be telecast on the World Boxing Channel. This is rather a big deal, especially for a small town like Mae Sot.

Several other clues soon led us to believe that this press event was not some private photo shoot, but rather a somewhat large-scale press conference. And before anyone could have any second thoughts, the boxing coach was giving my friend a pair of tiny satin boxing shorts and taping up his hands.

He came out of the changing room wearing nothing but the little boxing shorts and looking a little shy. To make things worse, one of the boxers decided he wasn’t wearing the shorts properly and proceeded to hike them up even further, revealing more leg and looking decidedly uncomfortable. By that time, though, they had already put boxing gloves on him, so he was unable to adjust and I’m afraid I was too busy hiding behind a pillar laughing to be much help. I think you can see in the picture just how much fun I was having.

Before things got rolling, he posed with one of the fighters and one of the biggest boxing promoters in Thailand. Then he got up on stage with the rest of the boys and with the panel of delegates slated to speak at the conference, including the governor of the province. For the next hour, while they all made comments about the upcoming fight, he had to stand there, holding his hands up, trying to look fierce.

I took some pictures and tried not to giggle too loudly during the entire event, but it was somewhat difficult, particularly when the speeches were finished and the journalists swamped the stage with their cameras, microphones and video cameras.

And it’s true, it was the highlight of my week. That’s one of the great things about life in Mae Sot. So often dull, but now and again so wildly, weirdly unexpected.