Sunday 24 May
See the gallery The rain arrives... for photos from this post.
The kids love playing the games on our mobile phones. They don’t have any Gameboys or anything like that, but are pretty happy playing a few rounds of Golf Tour on my little flip phone. It’s amazing how quickly they work out how to find the games on a volunteer’s phone, or how to use our cameras, even though they can’t read English… I can’t even work out how to use my little happy snap camera properly, & the youngest kids here get hold of an SLR camera that they’ve never seen before & are clicking away like David Bailey before you can say “cheese!”
Last Saturday one of our youngest girls fell out of a mango tree & split her head open, which necessitated a trip to hospital for stitches. Hospital or doctor visits are quite a regular occurrence here, as you would expect with 29 children in the house. Two of 12/13 year old boys have recurring ear infections that need operations, & someone is always getting some kind of injury or malady.
We don’t get TV reception at the house, & even if we did we couldn’t afford satellite TV, and the TV is right outside the kids’ rooms, so we can’t use it after they’ve gone to bed, and they’re not allowed to turn it on on school nights at all, so our viewing entertainment comes in the form of DVD’s watched on a laptop while squished onto beds in our rooms. The alternative to watching DVDs on a laptop is the polar extreme of going to a place called Barry’s, owned by an American guy called Barry, who I’m told makes the best burgers around, and has a giant screen TV. Barry lets us come down at night & bring DVD’s, eat & drink not very much, & even drives us back to the house sometimes. Barry is a legend, loved by all volunteers who come here, & has a 3 month old son called Barry Jnr.
Last Sunday we had the mother of all storms. There’s been a storm most afternoons around 5:00 o’clock, with plenty of thunder & sheet lightening, and I thought the storm we had last Saturday night was wild, but it was nothing compared to what hit us the next night. Thunder that rolled for minutes non-stop, punctuated with the occasional huge crack, but this was hours after it had passed right over the top of us. At the peak of the storm, the roof over the common room was leaking so I was walking over to the laundry area to get some mats to put on the floor, when there was a massive crack of thunder right overhead with a simultaneous flash of lightening. The ear-splitting volume of the thunder made me jump, but because there aren’t any walls on the common parts of the house, & therefore open to the weather, the lightening seemed like it was inside, & Kate, who was watching me walk across the room, thought that I had been struck. Our hearts were all beating at slightly accelerated levels for a while after that. The rain doesn’t seem to affect the ants or geckos – they just carry on, business as usual.
Anyway, this was all following a very intense experience I had at dinner that night. Because the food budget is quite small, and because Nabee’s cooking for so many people every day, the meals aren’t really what you would describe as culinary masterpieces. She does what she can, but the food isn’t that exciting – boiled cauliflower with a few bits of pork on rice is a fairly standard meal for breakfast, lunch or dinner. To spice things up a bit, there is usually a course paste made each day from small green chilies & a few other bits & pieces. I’m a big fan of chili, & have been adding it liberally to most of my meals. On this particular night there was the side of green chili paste, a stringy/viney green vegetable of some sort, also with loads of ground green chilies, and a bland pad Thai onto which I sprinkled some dried red chili. Dinner is early – usually around 5:00 o’clock, & it either hadn’t rained yet that day, or not for a few hours when it was time to eat, so it was really hot. I sat down to eat my extravagantly spiced dinner & by the time I was half way through it, even my elbows & tops of my feet were sweating; partly because of the air temperature & partly because of the ridiculous amount of chili I was consuming. By the time I was nearly finished I started having head spins & an almost out-of-body experience that I can only describe as a chili high. I don’t know if this is a real thing that exists, but there was definitely something very unusual happening; not altogether unpleasant….. Then the boys found another scorpion to kill & chase us around with. Because of all the rain, our back field & the bushland in our neighbourhood has become like a Glastonbury for frogs. I have never heard such a racket. Walking back from the internet café one day, this one particularly low-lying spot must have been absolutely teeming with frogs (sorry, Ricki) – the noise was unbelievable. The night of the mother of all storms didn’t end with the scorpion…. The noise from the back field which must have been full of frogs was deafening. It was a pretty eventful Sunday night….
A few of the primary school children have been wagging school. They only went back from their summer holidays just over a week ago, but they were sneaking home after only a couple of days. They leave around 7:00am but classes don’t start until 8:30, so as long as they leave before their teacher knows they’re there, no one knows the difference. Except that they come back to the house & try to sneak into their rooms without any of us seeing them. The second time this happened in less than a week, they were in big trouble with Caty & had private discussions with her so she could make sure they understood the seriousness of what they were doing, but this didn’t deter them from doing the same thing the very next day. After a very long talk they were asked if they want to live here & they all said no. So the next morning they packed up & were taken back to their villages. It was heartbreaking, especially for Caty who has been part of their lives for a year & a half, but it’s clear that they physically can’t be made to stay here; they’re not prisoners, so we had to let them go.
It had been a terrible day and we really needed a drink, so a few of us ventured into town in the pouring rain to an IHF volunteer favourite – Coconuts Bar – a very cool little place owned by an English bloke called Kevin, & frequented by all sorts of eccentric folk. Kevin had just started a Coconuts membership program that day – free to join & immediate benefits of 10% discount your bill, so of course we all signed up, so I am now a card-carrying Coconuts member.
The next day (Wednesday), I had my first opportunity to go into town to have a wander about, check things out properly & get my bearings. Chiang Rai is a great town, although the air pollution is quite bad.
On Thursday, the day after taking the truants back to their villages, one of the girls came back with her mother. Not all of the children here are orphans; like this one who has a mother, brothers & sisters, but her mother literally cannot afford to feed or clothe her. I don’t know what would happen to her if she didn’t have the opportunity to live her, but one of the main reasons this centre was set up was to help to alleviate the massive problem of children who come from terrible poverty, being sold into sex slavery. The house feels a bit empty with 5 kids gone, but it’s a great start to have one of our wayward wards back.
