Missive 4 September 2008

We are back from a wonderful week of travelling the country. Mercy runs an English language school in Sisiket in the south east of Thailand near the Cambodian border. Kerry, one of the teachers there who was spending time at Phetchabun, needed to go back and we had a standing invitation to visit, so off we went. On the way we dropped off Sand, one of the carers, with one of her boys who needed to visit the hospital in Khon Kaen. The trip to Sisiket from there, about 260km, was a delight. Millions of eucalypts have been planted in this area and there are forests of large old native trees so it was reminiscent of the country from Naracoorte to Keith in many ways. The rice fields were quite tall and looked like a good wheat crop.

The school is in a three storey building in the heart of Sisiket. It is owned by a Chinese Thai businessman who generously allows the school to operate free of rent. The top floor is the living quarters where the 3 Australians live as well as a lovely Thai lady called Gadt who does much of the administrative work. Four other English speaking Thais also teach. The day starts at 4.30pm and finishes at 7.30pm with 3 classes of 6 to 10 students in that time. Any teachers out there who would like to enjoy the Thai lifestyle and do a bit of English teaching?

Colleen took advantage of Thai prices by going to an optician and getting some new glasses, as well as going to a dentist and having two crowns on some back teeth. We go back there in October for the fitting of the crowns – about $350 for what would cost over $2000 in Australia. Anyone out there who would like to come and enjoy the Thai lifestyle and get their teeth done?

We had an interesting experience with the weather while in Sisiket. Colleen had spent a couple of hours in the dentist’s chair and I was due to pick her up at 6.30pm. During this time we had the mother of all thunderstorms and every street flooded up to the tops of the gutters and beyond and was just like a river. As I drove the water was lapping at the door sills of the car and the bow waves from other vehicles threatened to get in. I had to get out barefoot to wade in to the dentist.

We also had the opportunity to visit a reserve where there is a monkey colony and we were able to get up close and personal with them and get a few photos – particularly when a bloke drove in with a bunch of bananas and fed them. There are large numbers of water buffalo in this area and at the same place we saw a number of them being taken home via a large dam where they swam and dived very much like hippos. Water buffalo are invariably as fat as mud whereas the cows on the same country look skinny and underfed. We wonder why buffalo are not farmed to the extent cows are but the Thais have a very negative attitude toward them – you insult somebody by calling them a buffalo and there is much more prestige and social status in owning cows.

I may have mentioned in an earlier epistle that a similar attitude affects the value of a cow. For some reason or other Thais believe that a cow must have a black tip to its tail. If it doesn’t then it is practically worthless. Once the cow is on the plate I am sure you can’t tell but it nevertheless affects the value.

After Sisiket we returned to Khon Kaen where we were conducting a needs analysis for setting up the new financial system. Work didn’t stop us enjoying a visit to the big shopping centre affectionately known to us as “Fairyland” where we enjoyed a meal at the Pizza Hut followed by icecream at Swensons. A trip to Khon Kaen would not be complete without a night at the steakhouse where the price is now 109 baht ($3.75) for as many steaks as you can eat with salads and vegetables and icecream to finish off. Wendy wanted to take about 15 of the kids so we helped transport them around there. It was a wonderful night with little Sujaree (a girl seriously ill with HIV on some of our earlier trips) taking a shine to Colleen and keeping her on the hop all night.

We have enjoyed the company of a delightful young man called Damien. He works in a bank in Brisbane and is helping me work through the financial management issues. He is so good with the boys at Ban Meata and they just love him. The carers also think he is wonderful and when he helps out with Colleen’s English class attendance is guaranteed to be 100%. He came with us to Khon Kean and stayed at the hotel. On our last morning the waitress approached us at breakfast and asked if Damien had checked out. We said yes he was around at Ban Meata. She dashed off and brought back a note and said she finished work at 2pm. Damien was embarrassed to read that she was expressing a good deal of interest in cultivating a friendship. We thought that by 2.15pm she could be walking up the driveway so Damien resolved right away to help us be ready to leave by two o’clock! She was actually a lovely girl and trying really hard with her English but we couldn’t convince him to go back and say goodbye!

So now it’s back to Phetchabun and our normal routine. While we were away the blokes prepared our house for a concrete pour. I ordered 17 cubic metres of concrete and we started in steady rain – fortunately we were on the bottom floor but we still had the paths to do and we were pleased to see the rain stop after the first truck load. The blokes did a really good job but didn’t put enough fill in the floors so my estimate was way out and I had to get 7 more cubic metres! We have enough concrete in the floor to put a couple more storeys on. We finished about 5pm and while I was having a shower the heavens opened and it bucketed down. I quickly dried off (for the life of me I can’t think why!) and rushed down to put plastic on the paths. Because the roof is mostly on and there are no gutters the water comes down in a torrent. I was a bit late so we will have the non-slip look on some of our paths.

Next week we have to go to a border and exit the country to get our visas stamped. This has to happen every 90 days although there doesn’t seem to be much logic in it. It does however put a few thousand baht into government coffers – presuming of course that it does get into the coffers and doesn’t detour into someone’s pocket. The Thais are generally very honest and you can leave your car unlocked with more confidence here than in Australia. The country does struggle though with corruption and it is a blight on the nation which is very difficult to eradicate.

When we were in Phuket one of the pastors at the missions conference came face to face with corruption to his financial detriment. During one of the free afternoons he went for a jet ski ride and went to a hire operator that he had used the day before for a paragliding experience. He hired a ski, inspected it, and after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing got on board. After his half hour he brought it in and the operator pointed out a bit of damage and demanded 30 000 baht ($1000). He was certain he hadn’t hit anything and presumed that his ski had been switched – and the amount was hugely excessive so he said he would go to the police. When he arrived at the police station, they knew he was coming, and told him that if he didn’t pay he could end up with a criminal record and wouldn’t be allowed back in the country. No prizes for guessing where some of the 30000 baht ended up in that little scam.

Interestingly, that same afternoon I had resolved to have a jet ski ride but Colleen decided to have a sleep at the hotel and it got a bit late to do anything about it. I had reason to repent of my agitation at Colleen oversleeping and my missing out on a ride!

Another aspect of the Thai character which can be frustrating is “saving face”. The House of Mercy Foundation is having a very difficult time assuming official ownership of land because a local bureaucrat has lost face and is blocking approval. When Pawinee and Rob presented all the papers for a land transfer he thought he had found a problem in the Foundation constitution, but Pawinee took him through the paperwork and corrected him. He therefore lost face by being proved wrong – and to make things worse, by a woman. We are now in a bind over this situation. His superiors in Bangkok have offered to come and give him a rocket about it, but Pawinee and Rob are reluctant to make an enemy of the man because future transactions may be jeopardised.

A minor irritation we are learning to live with in Thailand is the ants. They are absolutely everywhere, including in your house, and come in several varieties. There are large black ants which tend to be lone rangers, wandering through your place usually on their own. If they bite you know all about it and you can see the two puncture marks where they have got their mandibles into you. More common are the big red ants that make nests in trees but come down to hunt humans. They hunt in packs and would sooner have a fight than a feed. They are the cause of some fairly wild and creative dances which sometimes include disrobing in mixed company. Their bite is very discomfiting but fortunately it doesn’t seem to itch and burn for long afterwards. It’s amusing (if you’re game) to stamp on the ground next to a mob of them. To a man (ant?) they stop, face you and stand up on their hind legs. If you look closely you can see their fists up!

Numerically the most common is a tiny brown ant about a millimetre long. They are a fact of life in the house and get into everything. They are so small I think they can walk through plastic – certainly a screw top lid won’t keep them out. They don’t seem to bite – probably too small. They also seem to be too small to taste. They get into my muesli and one morning when I got down to the milk there were dozens of the little blighters floating belly up. I thought what the heck – and ate the rest anyway.

Healthwise we are keeping pretty well. Thank you for praying for us. Colleen has had one bout of an upset stomach and has endured a couple of migraines for which we have not had to resort to an injection. Recently she has suffered some hive-like irritation which she thinks may be caused by eating pineapple. I have enjoyed amazingly good health, and an amazingly good appetite – I can eat chilli with the best of the Thais (maybe a slight exaggeration!) and perhaps this helps keep the bugs away. A good dose of chilli brings the sweat out so much that a hot day doesn’t feel so bad!

So, as Peter Cundall would say, that’s your blooming lot for the week, but tune in next time because it will be a fantastic missive.

God bless
Ron

Missive 3 August 2008

After the flurry of the first few weeks things have settled down to more or less routine. My day starts at 6.30am when I head out for my morning run which I have reinstituted to keep up a bit of fitness and to keep the sugar levels down. For those who have been here, I run past the new school building to the road behind the school, around to the road at the front of Ban Meata, up to the farm past the new tank stand, past the dams and around the top fish dam and then back home – about 4kms all up. The minimum temperature each night is about 27 degrees, absolutely no wind, and very high humidity so when I get back I am dripping wet just like stepping out of a shower. This is really doing me some good – isn’t it?!

An interesting sidelight to this is my encounter with the swimming chooks. The chooks here are rangy looking birds with the biggest drumsticks in the world and nothing much else except a beak. They can run like hares and fly pretty well too. The farm caretaker has a batch of them near the top dam and when I run up there they all panic and flee around the dam. About half way round they reckon they are cornered so they fly into the middle of dam and then flap and paddle furiously to get out. The first morning this happened I thought I had drowned all this bloke’s chooks, but they must all make it back to shore because they are all there ready to try again the next time.

After my cornflakes and muesli and a cup of tea I head over to the office in the visitors’ centre where I sit in a corner with my computer next to Nhoom the accountant. We have an urgent need for new office space and this may involve moving the dining room and converting the present one into offices. At 9 o’clock we meet for prayer where a priority is finance, needed not only to support the many projects but also to pay for normal running costs. Every Tuesday they shop for food at the markets and they have to take 30 000 baht ($1000). For the last few weeks Pawinee has not had enough money to hand to the shoppers.

Our Executive meeting last week has kept me busy helping to prepare the agenda and afterwards sitting with big Whun helping her translate the meeting summary into Thai. In the midst of this I take several trips down to our house to check on the workers who at the time of writing are putting in the plumbing before pouring the slab. Our friends Peter and Liz King are contributing to the top storey as are another long-term volunteer couple, Wolfgang and Dianne. Hopefully in a couple of months it will be ready.

Colleen’s day starts with some administrative work to do with sponsorship. Straight after lunch she has a class of 3 or 4 staff and she teaches them conversational English - under a tree outside the visitors’ centre. Later in the afternoon she has another group of 2 or 3. She has recently been asked by Pawinee, who saw her working with another volunteer’s child, to teach the Thai staff how to use books and read stories to children. The Thais are not great readers and certainly not used to making reading exciting for kids. Colleen had immediate success when a carer came to her in great excitement after reading her children a story, saying they had started sitting on the floor but were soon crowding around her they were so involved and wanting to see the pictures.

Usually late in the afternoon when the kids are home from school Colleen sends out a list of kids and carers who are to meet her to receive sponsors’ birthday presents and other gifts and have their photo taken. With 90 kids at Ban Meata there is a fairly constant stream of them and each one is given a card for the carer to help them write a thank you note. These all then need to be posted and that is one of Colleen’s most frustrating tasks. The postal system in Thailand doesn’t have a simple postage rate for letters and parcels, but a different rate for many different weights. Every letter has to be weighed at the post office and the appropriate stamp put on it. We take buying a book of stamps for granted in Australia – not so here. We hope it keeps lots of people employed because it sure takes a long time to post a bundle of letters.

One of the weekly routines we are learning to appreciate is the Saturday trip into the town of Phetchabun where we do our weekly shopping. There are 2 large new shopping complexes that have sprung up next to each other – Tescos and BigC – where the shopping experience is as far removed from that in a market as east is from west (get the double entendre?!). We conclude our shopping trip with a visit to Swensons, a heavenly icecream parlour (another reason for taking up running). The 3 scoop chocolate “Ring-a-ding” takes a bit of beating I reckon. We have taken a succession of other volunteers there and it has become a bit of a Saturday institution. We took our Whun there for her birthday and although she loved it she shivered through the whole experience because the air-conditioning and the icecream together were a bit much. Then again, giving a kid icecream and at the same time lots of hugs to warm her up has got to be good for her.

To change the subject completely I must tell you about the toilets in Thailand. Those at big new shopping centres are really good although they have unique design features. The one at Tescos is beautifully clean, mainly because there are women in there cleaning them all the time. If you prefer a little privacy at the urinals, too bad! They also have glass windows in the doors so you are in full view of anyone walking past. From one of the toilets in Tescos you can stand where one normally has to stand and see the laundry detergent in aisle 8. Quite good for a bit of early planning for your trip down aisle 8.

The toilets at the service stations aren’t quite up to that standard. The urinals are never inside – they are all at the back of the building, often with good views over a rice paddy and of course the obligatory cleaning lady keeping her eyes firmly fixed on her mop. Usually they are OK but on our way to Chiang Mai we stopped at one that had to be seen to be believed. That famous quote from the movie “Kenny” came to mind – “There is a smell in here that will outlast religion”. The taps all spun around (they nearly all do in Thailand) and we couldn’t turn them on to wash our hands. There was a hose lying on the ground outside so we used that.

The ablutionary coup de grace though belongs to the toilets at most outdoor restaurants, and service stations not accompanied by a 7Eleven. They are usually concrete structures, squat toilets (which way do you face on one of those things?) and a concrete cistern with a saucepan floating in it. The saucepan is for flushing the toilet. There are never lights inside so it’s pretty dark and you can’t see what you are doing(!). There is never any paper in there so you never drive your car anywhere without a roll of toilet paper in the glovebox. If you are not eating a doughnut with a cup of coffee while reading this you may be interested to know that the other dish that may be there is to put the used toilet paper in because the septic can’t handle paper. And the good news? There is never a cleaning lady in there that I’ve noticed. Most of the homes of poorer people in a village have toilets like this as well.

The preceding descriptions are all from a male perspective. The women have it worse because the squat toilets are fairly universal – a distinct disadvantage as the years creep up on you. Western style toilets are becoming more common in new places and in more recent brick constructed homes. Colleen tells me that a sign on the back of a toilet door shows a picture of a person sitting conventionally on a toilet. One can only presume that this is for those who are confused by this new-fangled technology and perch up on the rim.

Enough about toilets. Let me finish with a delightful story of the miraculous healing of one of our kids at Khon Kaen. 7 year old Orm was very sick and Wendy took him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with active TB. He was hospitalised for 10 days of intravenous treatment and then faced 2 months of daily injections followed by 6 months of oral medication. There is also the huge risk of cross-infection in an HIV facility such as Khon Kaen. I’ll let Wendy’s words complete the story for you.

“As I sat with 7 year old Orm in hospital this morning - the pediatrician on duty came to me scratching his head and stammering "I don't understand, all the tests (chest x-rays and scratch tests) we completed last Wednesday provided a positive TB result but today's pathology results and x-rays show no sign of TB or in fact any lung scarring, infection or damage". My response of, "Praise God for He has healed Orm," brought more stammering and attempted explanations.

I was able to bring Orm home today with a promise to return on Tuesday so they can repeat the tests again to ensure there is no mistake. But I know there is no mistake, like so many times before when God has bought healing upon our kids’ physical complications.

As I left the Home this evening Orm was outside trying to fly a kite under the gentle guidance of our new gardener. It was at this site that I wept, overwhelmed by the blessings and mercy God pours on our lives, as it is in obedience to Him that we try and be His instruments in this hurting nation.

Our God is so great!
Lovingly, Wendy”

What better way to finish. That’s why we are here – to help make a difference in the life of a child – and we see every day God blessing the children here at Ban Meata. Please continue to pray for us and all the work here.

Till next time.
God bless
Ron