Autopilot

When learning a new language, I stupidly am on autopilot to answer "yes" to every question before I really process what is being asked of me. This is great sometimes bc it gives people the illusion that I can understand them quickly instead of the truth which is I have to search my mental dictionary for words in each sentence. However it got me in annoying trouble yesterday.

I buy Thai Iced tea from this woman around the corner from work and yesterday I asked for some and she said something and I recognized all the words but couldn't attach meaning to them before my autopilot activated and I say "Ka". Just as she started to laugh awkwardly I decoded the sentence and realized that she had said "you are a beautiful lady" and sounding like an arrogant punk I replied "yes". You'd think that would have taught me but then she asked me a question and I knew it was about how I wanted my drink but couldn't remember my taste vocab so again just said "ka" and then she kept talking and said " i know foreigners don't like their tea sweet" so I had agreed to take my tea without sugar. Stupid autopilot!

This means I have to find a new Thai Iced tea woman because not only will this one think I'm arrogant but she will also continue to make me sugarless tea which is just awful.

Some signs of Singapore

The battle between my camera and computer has seen a ceasefire so I was able to upload almost half of my photos. The standoff between my computer and Blogspot has been less successful and only two of these would upload... more to come.















This is the special hybrid orchid named after Ricky Martin.















What does this mean?

Article: Stagnant but Hopeful

Thailand hosts over 150,000 refugees from neighboring Myanmar in nine camps along the border. In four such camps Planned Parenthood Association of Thailand (PPAT) takes charge of the reproductive health services. I was invited to attend a routine visit to the refugee camps and excitedly accepted. Non-refugees are not allowed to stay in the camps so all the staff of the reproductive health centers are refugees that have been trained to provide services. Nurses, like the ones I was traveling with, stop by to handle the larger problems once a month.

We passed heavily armed soldiers and fences to enter the camp. Ten years ago there had been some attacks on a camp so safety was a concern. They smiled and inspected my passport and special permission card and lifted the red and white bar so the car could pass. We drove down a dirt road lined with bamboo huts on either side packed tightly together. We were in a valley with steep hills on either side and as I looked up I saw houses upon houses until the jungle got too thick for more.

The PPAT center looked like any of the houses. It was raised on stilts with bamboo floors and a banana leaf roof. The walls were covered with pictures of genitalia with various infections and cartoons about safe sexual practices. Inside equipment was sparse with a manual blood pressure machine, a scale, and two small examination rooms. While the nurse did pelvic exams, I worked with the peer educators teaching them computer skills on the donated PC in the back room and chatting about our respective lives.

While shy at first the men and women in their early twenties began to warm up to me as I showed them pictures of my family (which I always keep in my bag as an ice breaker). My friends were so tall! How old was my grandfather? Was this your house? Eventually they also shared with me. It was astonishing to think that we were the same age but they had been married, had children, and had experienced some horrific events in their lives already. My twenty four years seemed incredibly easy in comparison but I suppose it’s unwise to compare.

They were able to joke with me, “If I go back to Myanmar, boom! Landmines, I’ll have no legs!” one said in fits of laughter. A young man explained to me that he was very lucky because his parents had been resettled in Norway. However he didn’t seem phased by the fact that this meant he would never see them again. One of the young men started the trip to the camp with his family of six but was the only one to make it. Another woman said she had been born in the camp and never knew any other life. I had to fight hard not to be overwhelmed with sadness for my new friends.

While clearly an improvement from the places they had escaped, life in the camp was stagnant. The farming lives they had once enjoyed were over as the camps were crowded and there was no land to farm. Instead people had to depend on the food and supplies given to them by the camp administration. There was little employment and thus no way to proactively better their situation. The peer educators were lucky in that PPAT employed them which brought in a little money and gave them something to do. For the most part everyone expressed a feeling of waiting. They were waiting for a third country to welcome them so they could start a new life.

I stupidly asked, “what third country do you want to go to?” to which the response was invariably “whoever accepts me first!” Norway, Canada, and Australia seemed to have been the countries who had been most generous to the refugees as each person knew someone who had managed to get there. For this reason people were excited to practice English with me so they’d be ready if an Anglophone country accepted their application for resettlement.

Two of the peer educators had just been accepted by Canada for resettlement and were full of questions like “How many seasons are there?” and “will I be close to the water?” It was so heartening to hear their excitement for their future prospects.

I also got a glimpse of a source of joy in camp life when I toured a music school set up by a Dutch NGO. It was bursting with adolescent boys playing old guitars. I sang a song with them and practiced the four sentences I had learned in the Karen language which is spoken by the majority of the refugees.

Unfortunately the sun began to set and I had to leave in accordance with the camp regulations. I had so much stimulation to process and so many emotions to work through. I left behind all the business cards I had hoping that someday some of these people might contact me with a story of success or a way I can help.

Article: Girl Scout Camp Didn’t Prepare Me For This

I have been on a lot of crappy dirt roads before. I have also been on a lot of roads that are too narrow and on cliffs. However, just last week I finally experienced the incredible combination of these two, with a strong dose of downpour to make things worse. I’m not generally afraid of heights but I am afraid of sliding in the mud off of a cliff. This occurrence nearly happened several times on my way out to a village near the border of Myanmar.

Apparently at random parts of the road some villagers get together and decide to pave a ten by ten square. I guess this is like the concept of an add-a-pearl necklace where you buy what you can afford and string it together for a final product. It will be lovely when there are enough of these concrete squares to warrant the use of the word “road” (I currently consider what we drove on to be ‘a place that happened to not have trees’). I would have welcomed some concrete around the sharp muddy curves on the cliffs-- the one place I didn’t welcome it was about a mile from the village we were staying in because it meant that we couldn’t drive and instead had to walk. What’s best is that the concrete was wet so we couldn’t walk on it and there was a maximum of five inches of earth between the end of the concrete and the beginning of the cliff. Thankfully I had always been good at the balance beam in Phys Ed but it is quite a bit more difficult when carrying gear because the closest store is three hours down the mountain.

A long trek that included walking on a log across a stream (I’ve always wanted to do that, just not while carrying two backpacks) brought us to a steep hill atop which lay the house where we were staying. It was entirely wood and on stilts and looked comfortable enough. However, the shower on stilts should not be entered by anyone with a fear of heights. There were inch wide spaces between the boards and if you looked down while showering it could make you woozy. You were never really sure where the ground was as the jungle growth was thick.

People are pretty meticulous about their bathing so despite my predilection for the ‘antibacterial lotion’ bath in situations like these, I needed to actually get myself wet. The water was freezing and not always particularly clean-looking. It required significant psyching myself up to actually stick my head under the cold water. There was certainly no ‘wash rinse repeat’. I guess I should have appreciated the fact that this was the first time I was actually cold in this country.

After the shower, when it was dark out and I’d washed off my insect repellant, was a perilous time as I ran back to the house frantically slapping away mosquitoes. The malaria threat is high so mosquito nets are essential and require a little getting used to. Hanging the nets from cords on the ceiling you create a little space just big enough to sleep under if you don’t roll around. But getting in and out of that space without letting any of the blood sucking vectors inside your safe-zone can be challenging. It involves lots of swatting and inspecting every inch of you and then quickly diving under and tucking the nets beneath you. As a coworker who used to work in malaria epidemiology explained “if there’s a space or a hole in your net, the mosquitoes will find it and not because they’re smart, but because they’re too dumb to ever give up.”

I spent the entire night awake listening to the rain and dreading what it was doing to the roads we’d have to travel the next day.

Throughout my stay in the village I did a pretty good job being “Rugged Laura”. I didn’t jump when I saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my life (zoos included) in the bathroom. I didn’t have qualms with the fact that there was no refrigeration yet we seemed to eat pork every day. I didn’t even mind soaking in caustic insect repellant and boiling water in order to brush my teeth. I was pretty proud of myself. Then, on my last day on the way out of the village, my ‘tough girl’ image was shattered.

I slid on my backside all the way down a muddy hill. My flip-flops died an immediate death. Flip-flops are the only practical thing to wear in most situations in Thailand since it rains without notice and shoes are taken off frequently to be polite. However, I found the situation where they are not appropriate-- muddy, hilly, rural villages. Cleats would have been a better choice of footwear. Ultimately my flip’s inadequacy sent them to the grave as their lack of traction caused the fall that did them in. My pants died a slower death. The fall left a solid mud stain on my rear so that everyone in the village who hadn’t gotten to witness my fall could see the evidence as I walked by. Once I was home, I maintained hope that the pants could be resurrected and washed them four times. It was not to be. Sine I didn’t take any pictures on this trip, I guess my permanently muddy-assed jeans are my souvenir.

I Am Stupid

I just realized that every time someone asks me how long I'll be in Thailand I always say, "just for the summer". It dawned on me yesterday that this was stupid. It's not summer here, there is no such thing as summer here... people must be really polite when they nod and pretend to understand. I should say "for the first half of the rainy season".

In other news, I am constantly tempted to ask questions that I know are stupid but pique my curiosity anyway. For instance, I want to ask people, "how often do toddlers fall off of motorcycles? How do you teach them to hold on? Do they have better balance than other children? Is there a trick?" because to me it seems really dangerous to ride motorcycles with infants, toddlers, and little kids. But that's the main source of transportation so I'm wondering if there's some secret, like "we feed them this nutritional supplement that enhances their balance" or "we have a practice motorcycle at home where we train them". In the US we keep our kids belted in to a special seat in vehicles that are enclosed already! How do these children stay safe straddling an open vehicle gripping mom's shirt?

I've suppressed the urge to inquire because I think it will be a question in the same realm as "how do you know which goats are yours?" in Morocco or "do the kids get hurt on all the barbed wire around your house?" in El Salvador. It would invoke that classic look that says 'silly foreigners... stop worrying, we've got this all figured out'.

I can talk!

Does anyone remember that scene in the animated version of Charlotte's Web when Wilbur finally learns how to talk to the other animals? He sings this song called "I can talk!" Well anyway, I skipped down my street singing that song the other day bc I had this conversation with my cleaning lady entirely in Thai that involved no miscommunication and I managed to convey complex (in my mind) information about where I had been and where I was going in a language that doesn't have tenses. I was so proud of myself!

" Isn't it great
That I articulate?
Isn't it grand
That you can understand?

I don't grunt, I don't oink
I don't even squeak or squawk
When I wanna say a something
I open up and talk"

Laura’s Vastly Insufficient and Uninformed Guide to Singapore

• Hit the Botanical Gardens in the AM and there are huge bunches of elderly people doing Tai Chi which seems so graceful and natural in the setting… walk further and find the one bunch who does country line dancing instead of Tai Chi- no laughing out loud.

• Watch out for the Mall traps in Singapore. Every time you get off a subway, you will magically be in a mall, every time you use and underpass or an overpass, you will end up in a mall. Beware.

• There’s really no reason to ride the subway most of the time. The entire city can be walked on foot. The exception to this is if you are riding the subway as a source of amusement, which I highly suggest. There are some fantastic public service movies and posters that are worth checking out and surreptitiously photographing.

• Like most cities Chinatown is the most interesting place. However Little India on a Sunday night gets a little Bolly…

• Hawker stalls are the only place you should eat.
  

• If you are a young professional man you must have a slight faux-hawk

• Eat “black carrot cake”. It is neither a cake, nor black, nor contains any form of carrots that I am familiar with, but it tastes delightful.

• If you are so so lucky you might come across a COSPLAY competition in which people dress up as anime or video game characters (hey, we have trekkies…)

• Eat blocks of ice cream between wafers. You can even get them between slices of white bread. Try the corn flavor. Why don’t we have corn flavored ice cream? Everyone likes corn! Plus then you feel good bc it’s like your getting your daily vegetable supply while eating ice cream.

• If you are so lucky to visit while the “infectious diseases past and present” exhibit is still up in the National Library, go play the “bioterrorists attack!” videogame. As time ticks down you have to answer one bioterrorism quiz question at each terrorist hot spot (mall, airport…) to save Singapore! Pretty exciting.

• Take advantage of the fact that people here speak English and talk talk talk. Eat lunch near a nursing home and talk to the old people, they are delightful.

• Leave after 3 days, there’s really not that much to do (unless you’re a shopper)