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