May brings life

So the blog has slowed down a bit. Hopefully this has not caused you lack of sleep and caused us lost readership by leaving our dedicated readers in limbo. Seriously though, it has not been a busy second month at site, but there were a lot of things going on that dragged our thought patterns in new and erratic directions. That is sort of the point of this whole excursion, yet as always, life at any point is more textured than what you imagined it to be.

We came out of April with a newfound understanding of hot weather. As I have long suspected of of tobacco products, extended periods of weather above 36 degrees C (about 97 F) have serious psychological effects. Our hottest day last month was 44 degrees C which broke a one hundred year record even during the hottest month for a country at 17 degrees latitude. I will leave the conversion to degrees Fahrenheit to you on that one. The physical I think we expected; increased fatigue, decreased appetite, longer sleeping hours. But the brain too gets worn down by the heat. It’s sort of like being overworked for a long period of time. Even if you sleep a lot, and eat enough, you still feel like you are lacking somewhere, and this drives you a little crazy. Although the weeklong Sonkran water festival was a spectacle, to say the least, I can say now that I really did not enjoy it very much, and the reason why is because it was so damned hot. Now that the hottest month of the year is over, and a few decent rains have helped to cool the sauna conditions of rice paddy living, I can see an overall improvement in my feelings toward everything about life. Toward the beginning , the life of many PC volunteers in Thailand is one of waiting, one of confusion, and one of desperately seeking to be useful, somehow. My personality is better suited to the “sabai, sabai” (think “manana” with people that don’t use calendars) attitude of Thailand than Erin’s, but even I was struggling with nothing to do but read this last month. That was compounded a disturbedness brought on by the heat.

A few decent breakthroughs have been made on the order of community development in Sukhothai this month. Erin and I met the medical practitioner at the dtambon clinic earlier this month. Our new friend is 28 years old and married to a woman just slightly older than him who as well is a medical practitioner at the clinic. Assisted by two nurses, they administer government sponsored healthcare to all of the Thais in our village for free. Interestingly, the only people who are required to pay something for healthcare, medication included, are government workers (who later get reimbursed). The clinic is supported by some 140 volunteers in the dtambon who perform house visits, mostly to elderly in the community. All together the dtambon has about 5000 people divided about 10 villages. When I asked the doctor (all medical professionals are called doctor in Thailand) about how many of those volunteers were really active, he said about 20. Since my background consists primarily of working with environmental issues, working with the clinic seems like a great opportunity to learn about health and environment interactions in this area and identify projects that address both. In fact, PC encourages CBOD volunteers to make contacts at the clinics early in their service. I feel lucky to have found such a young and approachable counterpart there.

Since we met the folks at the clinic, I have altered my schedule to spend two full days per week with them. On Wednesdays and Fridays I have been going to the clinic and observing what I can about how they operate as well as discussing local health issues. They are extremely hospitable and up until this point have insisted on feeding me for free every day I come over, as well as taking me to the market after work or along to run errands in the city during the day. Both the head clinician and his wife are Master’s of Public Health students and work five days a week at the clinic while doing 8 hour days at a Sukhothai university on Saturdays, and half days on Sundays. The man speaks some English, while his wife seems to understand more than him but can speak less. Both are a great help for improving my Thai.

Although we identified 5 excellent projects we could work on together on during only our second meeting, it is difficult to formalize any sort of agreement to pursue these projects. We have been trained not to be too pushy, but since I am still scraping around for things to submit to the PC and Thai government, that has been challenging. It seems when your voice takes on any sort of a serious business tone here, Thai people become uncomfortable. Maybe that’s because it’s hard to know what they are agreeing to through the butchered Thai leaving this farang’s mouth. Most of the volunteers we have met from the previous two groups of PC Thailand insisted they did not begin work any actual projects until they were in their community for a full year. Some days that makes you feel better about things, and others it does not.

Related, and often somewhat infuriating, is when some Thais talk right in front of your face about how you never do any work, and how your coming to Thailand is essentially a two year vacation. Our Thai now, is better than I would have imagined after 4 months, and beyond that, bad-mouthing has a special way of traversing the language barrier. Without getting too deep into the controversial topic of the value of work done by organizations such as the PC, I will, in one of my should be famous analogies, state that work like this is like going to help clean up an island. It is not that difficult until you realize you have to build a boat to get there. I have started work on that boat and often find myself thinking back to something a mentor from Sandia told me about development work: “if it were easy, it would be done already”.

Erin and I need to submit our two year plans to PC by the end of this month. Erin met with her counterparts a few weeks ago to get hers done. It’s a bit easier for a TCCO volunteer I think, because people in Thailand have a better idea of what you came here for. So far, projects with the clinic, and my two day per week English class at the abotaw are the extent of what I have lined up for my plan. Before coming to site, my Nayoke mentioned he would like me to assist in water resource and waste management, as well as teaching information technology among other things, but so far there is not much going on in any of those areas. In America, three months to come up with a two year plan for one person’s work might be reasonable, but here it seems like at bit of a stretch. I have 8 more days to make that stretch.

We are still looking for a house, though prospects are improving. Last week, after passing one vacant house on my way home from the abotaw many times, I decided to inquire about it with the neighbors. It turns out the owner lives in Bangkok and the house has been sitting vacant for over two years. Seems like the perfect place for us with proximity to the abotaw and our host family’s house.  From the outside, I really liked the design. One hitch though, is that the house is not finished. I was able to have a look inside the place last Saturday evening, and found that the flooring and ceiling have yet to be installed. The plumbing in the kitchen is still lacking some work and of course the outside, as I already knew, needs painting.  With two bedrooms, a nice kitchen, a western toilet, and even two bathrooms though, this is the best looking option we have seen so far. I met with the owner’s father on Sunday and indicated to him we would be interested in renting the place. It sounds like following my inquiry, after sitting vacant for at least two years, the owner now has plans to finish construction within the next few months. In what I believe is possibly a direct contradiction of Thai subtlety, I plan to prepare an offer for the man this week and see how he responds. His father said that the house would be finished in the next few months whether or not we wanted to rent it, but I am afraid that if they do not think we are serious about renting, they may not finish the work. Hopefully we are settled in by the time some of you would be Thai tourists get to buying some tickets. And that’s over 1500 words folks.

Red