Tuesday 05 May 2009
See the gallery Chiang Rai : week 1 for photos from this post.
The first day of my new life in Thailand seemed best spent doing what is done best here - kick the day off with a fruit shake (mango today, just because it's the most obvious), a wander, late breakfast, more wandering, a fantastic massage for 180THB (about AU$7), then lunch with the Bangkok Post & a couple of large Singhas in a shady spot watching Bangkok go by... It's struck me that I live here now, at least for a while, & that is a fabulous & exciting idea. Despite the hippies, wannabe's & the wide-eyed travel virgins, it's a place where people can "just be", & that is a wonderous thing.
My trusty Nancy Chandler's map of Bangkok earned it's weight in gold when I took her advice & tried out the Lotash Seed restaurant on Rambutri (in Banglamphu where I stay - near Khao San Rd but it's amazing what a difference one street away can make...) - I had the most incredible banana flower salad - worth a trip to Bangkok in itself - & chatted to a couple from Hong Kong who were on their way south to attend a ceremony they'd been invited to by a monk they know. Then a visit to a little bar I know with super-cheap Grey Goose vodka & availed myself of a couple to celebrate. I made friends with an old Thai hippie called Jieb, who says he's from Samui (he has the letters tattooed onto the knuckles of his left hand) but is in Bangkok looking after his sick mama. He reckons he owns a bar on Samui, but when I tried to find out where, he kept telling me different directions, so I think that might be a little fantasy, or maybe an acid flashback .... His English is terrible & my Thai is worse, so I didn't understand half of what he was saying, but worked out that now he makes & sells jewellry for a living while he's in Bangkok, & insisted on showing me his bead belly chain....yikes! He gave me a gift of a toe ring which had definitely seen better days. He rolled a cigarette for me (no filter & wrapped in some sort of dried leaf... No adhesive, very fibrous & not anything I think I'll try again any time soon.
Wednesday 06 May 2009
After the fastest journey ever to Bangkok airport, the driver with a Michael Schumacher complex fanging down the highway at 140kph until I asked him to ease off the gas a little, I actually made it in one piece, checked in & waited for the rest of the day to happen.
As the plane begins its descent into Chiang Rai, the lush green of the rice paddies as they extend to the mountains in the nearby north isn’t the only thing I notice; my palms are sweaty & I’m trying to envisage the next couple of hours – meeting my greeter at the airport, and arriving at the orphanage – what will it be like? I’m expecting Juan, but it’s Caty who meets me, & I find out on the short drive that after arriving as a volunteer for a month, she’s now been at the IHF home here for a year and a half, now as co-director.
We turn into the gravel driveway at the end of the road & I still don’t know what to expect… The children are still on their summer holidays, so all 28 of them are there when we arrive. Caty tells them my name & there’s a big shout of “hello, Fiona!” before they’re far more interested in the fans & other supplies Caty has picked up on her trip to town, & rush off to install them in their rooms. After three years at this home, the kids are pretty used to volunteers coming & going, & a bit over the transience of it all.
It’s stinking hot, & while Caty was out, Juan has told the kids he’ll take them swimming when we get back. So after a super quick look around it’s all in to the truck (a covered long-wheel base ute) & down the road to the local pool. Not all of the kids have a swimming costume, so Caty hires some at the pool & while the boys are quick to jump into the water, the girls are are more modest & take a while to creep out of the change rooms in their very cute swimming dresses. The kids have mostly spent their first years living near rivers, so are all good swimmers.
Afterwards it’s back to the house for the nightly (non-school day) routine – dinner, showers, dvd, bed. Juan & I go to the Big C shopping centre so I can pick up a few things, and by the time I take a shower it’s still baking hot when I drop into my rock-hard bed at around 10 o’clock.
Thursday 07 May
Caty had told the kids yesterday that she would take them fishing this morning, so when I got up at 6:30, some of them were already waiting in the back of the truck, ready to go…. It takes a while to get 28 kids organised though, so it’s about 9:00 by the time we head off & make a stop on the way to pick up a couple more fishing rods for some of the boys. The place we went to isn’t far – about 20 minutes drive, but it was pretty cool. There’s a large lagoon with lots of little bamboo huts dotted around the edge, a restaurant (we brought our own fried rice with us) & a covered swimming pool with a very fast water slide. There’s no entrance fee, but you have to pay about 35 baht (AU$1 = 25B) per kilo for any fish you catch & take away, depending on what sort of fish they are; some are a bit more expensive. The boys are into it straight away, & after a bit of a slow start begin reeling them in as quick as you like. They were unstoppable. The girls weren’t really into fishing, so spent most of their time either in the pool or just hanging. I’m really conscious of not trying to push myself onto the kids, & am just letting them get used to me, so I decided to start learning about 4 names a day, & so got my first few down while we were there. One of the little girls (small in size, but has a big personality) wanted to spend the whole time in the water & tried to convince me to get in too, but there were so many other kids (not ours) in the water, in it looked an uninviting darkish green, so I settled with cooling my ankles in a shallow bit around the edge & watching Nok enjoy herself. We wrapped it up at 2 o’clock & took the net full of fish to be weighed….there were about 30 in all weighing about 17 kilos. Not bad.
Back at the house I had a chance to have a bit more of a look around. There’s one building which has 2 bedrooms for the younger girls – about 4 girls in each one, the kitchen at the back & a Thai bathroom on the outside. There’re 2 other buildings which are attached to the first one by a roof, but are open at the sides. These have another bedroom, a western bathroom & a “classroom” (where they do homework & after school lessons) in one, & the storeroom & all other bedrooms are in the other. For the time being I’m sleeping in a shack with a tin roof at the far end of the boys’ bedrooms, and there’s another Thai bathroom but with a hand-held shower out near my room, which is much cooler to shower in than the inside Western bathroom. At the opposite end to where I am, there is a separate small house, which I will move into in a week or so when our oldest girl, Pern starts university & will live on campus. Pern's sponsor is paying for her first year's tuition fees, & she is the first of the IHF kids to go to uni. Outside this house is a pool which was built not that long ago, but has had a couple of false starts. It was originally going to be a swimming pool for the kids, but once it was finished they realised that they don’t have (& can’t afford) a pump and all the other bits & pieces you need to maintain a pool, so then it was going to become a pond to keep carp in so the kids could sell them (not sure where or who to) to make some pocket money. This too, seems to have been abandoned, & as far as I can tell it’s currently just a breeding ground for mosquitoes. There’s a chicken coop, but after feeding the chickens for some time with no egg reward they decided to eat them, so now it’s just empty. There’s a mushroom garden, but I’m not sure how that works, & out the back there’s another garden with a scarecrow & I’m not sure what else. The house backs onto a large open field where some cows live, & we keep a goat there, but I’m not sure what goes on with the goat yet either.
The after-dinner movie tonight wasn’t very popular, so they turned it off & put on some karaoke discs, which was hilarious. They love that stuff.
Friday 08 May
There is an army of ants in my room. There are ants everywhere, but nowhere more than what is marching across the outside wall, in through a corner supporting post of my room, across the floor in a thick black line & up & into the supporting post at the other end. My shack is under a big tree which grows some type of inedible fruit about the size of a lime. These drop off at random intervals onto my tin roof & sound like someone has lobbed a grenade through the door. I’m looking forward to moving house.
This morning Juan showed me where the local internet cafes are so I could get around to doing some of the IHF work I’m supposed to be doing for 4 hours a day. Checked out the caff across the road for some pad thai for lunch, which was fantastic (and at 25B - AU$1, you can’t really complain). When we got back to the house in the early afternoon we took the kids to Chiang Rai beach – which is actually a popular spot to hang out in the Mae Kok river. The rainy season hasn’t started yet, and once it does there’ll be no more swimming in the river because the current will be way too strong. The set-up there is pretty cool. Along the river bank on one side are loads of bamboo huts, where you can sit & order food (or just pay them to let you sit there, if you’ve got 20 or so kids with you), then when you’re ready for a dip (or to take your life into your own hands) you wander up the river a bit, then start walking across. The pull of the current even at knee height is surprisingly strong, & by the time you get to the middle & can’t quite touch the bottom anymore, it’s time to start swimming like crazy to get to the deceptively not-safe haven of some big rocks almost on the other side. They are mossy under water level & the current eddies around them pulling you off whatever tenuous hold you may have managed to get as you were swept into them in the first place. The water is brown & quite warm, so I’m guessing it’s an acquired enjoyment. Caty, Juan & most of the kids carried on a bit further down to the far bank, & I needed to get back upstream a bit, which meant doubling back over to the original side & doing it all again. Once I was brown & warm enough, I headed back to the bamboo hut where a couple of girls who weren’t swimming had been hanging out & waited for everyone else to come back.
All the kids are great, but carry a deep sense of abandonment, so don't like getting too close to volunteers who will ultimately leave them... Some of them, especially the younger ones, have an almost tangible anger bubbling just beneath the surface, but I'm yet to see it erupt from any of them. The girls are particularly stand-offish (the younger teenagers), but that's teenage girls for you....
Saturday 09 May
Juan & I have been talking about an event that we are planning for late Feb or early March next year. Caty is a photographer & this April just past they held an exhibition on Koh Samui to raise money for IHF. Being that this sort of thing is right up my street, I’ve been commandeered to assist with next year’s event. This year’s was a bit disorganised & not promoted very well, so they didn’t make anywhere near enough money, in fact just less than break-even. Yikes. So Juan & I are getting stuck into the planning & hopefully the 2010 exhibition will be a big success.
The little sister of one of our older girls arrived today, so now we have 29 kids here. It turns out that there is also a 16 year old boy who IHF cares for, who's living in a boarding house not too far away.
When the kids aren't in school, an ice cream guy comes by the house so anyone who's got some money can buy a treat. I shouted all the kids this afternoon & it was hilarious to watch Pratya (the oldest boy who is 18) make them all line up to get their ice cream one at a time (not their usual method for doing anything...) $12 for 29 ice creams is a pretty good deal.
Sunday 10 May
There was a big storm last night, & the big, fat & heavy raindrops sounded like hail on my tin roof. Not to mention the little balls of gunshot from the tree above that were hammering away when the wind came to get in on the act. I commented to some of the girls at breakfast about the big storm, & one of them looked around at the dry ground around us (we were outside) & shook her head, no…. I’m told that when the monsoon comes, it will rain all day & night, every day. Good thing I got those Crocs!
Anyway, I think a striped brown frog is stalking me. Every night when I have a shower it sticks its head out of the drain & checks me out until I throw a bucket of water on it to chase it back into the drain. Last night I got up in the night to go to the loo, & it (or one that looked exactly like it) was sitting inside my shack, on a bit of timber at the bottom of the door….
None of the kids, except for Pern & Pratya, speak any English. They have lessons at school, but apparently they’re not really interested, so there’s not much communicating going on between me & them at the moment. Caty’s Thai is pretty good after being here for a year & a half, so she’s really the only westerner they talk to. I’m slowly getting there with their names – I think I’ve got about 15 or so.
Monday 11 May 2009
I think the rain might be on its way….clouds are starting to gather in the distance & even the kids are saying how hot it is….
I went with Nabee, the house mother to the market this morning to do the food shopping for the week. She does all the cooking, cleaning & laundry (one washing machine, but quite a big one), none of which ever stops. I don’t think she gets much thanks, & as a result hasn’t been too interested in keeping the meals that interesting. I think she’s adopted me, seeing as I’ve been taking an interest in what she’s making & telling her when I like something she's cooked, so at the market whenever I was looking closely at something she would ask me if I like it, & if I said yes, she would buy some. We had a budget of 3000 Baht for the week’s shopping (about AU$75) to feed 33 people. It goes quite a long way when pineapples & oranges cost 25B/kg, bananas 10B for a large hand & eggs about $1.50/doz. But, with so many people to feed you can really only get enough for 1 piece of each kind of fruit for each person...for the week! It's no surprise that Thai food markets don’t have shopping trolleys, so we leave our huge piles of stuff bought from each vendor at the stall, then move on to the next one until we’re finished, then collect it all in one spot near the door, then lug it all into the truck.
While we were at the market, Juan was on hair cutting duty for the boys. School starts tomorrow, & the boys have to have hair no longer than about a number 2 blade, the youngest girls have to have an ear-length bob, & older girls can have longer hair. A few of the 12-14 year old boys were wanting to express their individuality early into the holidays, & gave each other tattoos using battery acid & ink. When Caty found out she told them that if they wanted to change something about the way they look, hair would be a better place to start…. So she dyed their hair blonde, & now that they’ve had their heads shaved it’s almost back to square one for me remembering who’s who.
