Well it’s been a while since our last confession. Does that mean we have to eat lots of kit kats?
Anyway… it has been work as well as fun. We’ve said goodbye to several of the volunteers, and welcomed some new ones. Rosie has put together a bunch of resource boxes for the primary schools, and I’ve met Uwe to talk about coffee. One of my ex-students (who was in my group in Africa) has come out to volunteer for 10 weeks, which is cool. I feel all responsible again. Scary.
Mmmm, don’t know where to start.
The volunteers helped put in a water system in March, with a little help from us. I didn’t get to spend as much time on it myself as I would have liked, but at least I saw enough to know how most of it is done. There’s no magic to what Salahae does, but he does it very very carefully, and he plans it well too (something most Thais, for all their strengths, find damn near impossible.) The volunteers had a really good time and got on very well with all the villagers, who supplied lots of ossi (moonshine) and lots of rice, bananas and vegetables.
(editors note – generally, there isn’t a lack of food up here. Meat is expensive, yes, but veg and fruit grows easily. There are two main problems, which are actually probably only one when I think about it. Firstly, the space and water required to grow rice, the only carb the Karen and Thais really eat. (Noodles are mainly rice too…) If you don’t have enough water or enough arable land, you’re in trouble. This impacts on the second problem, that protein is relatively expensive (other than eggs) so if you don’t have rice to sell, you can’t buy it. It’s one of those viscosse circly things. And, apparently, rice is the most inefficient of all the world’s staple diets in terms of energy in versus energy out.)
We had some visitors to see the project in the shape of 11 Canadian students and their two teachers. Very switched on people they were too, and it was really good to remind ourselves that not all students are horrible, like we sometimes remember. They managed the 4km hike straight up in 35 degrees without too many complaints, stayed a night in the jungle (and survived the bugs) and even ate some of my green curry a-la-bits-of-ash-from-the-fire. And they donated 6000 dollars too (3000 quid) which will pay nicely for another water project in the near future….
Then me and the wife went on holiday. We saw more of Bangkok, Ayuttaya, Kanchanaburi (home of the bridge over the river kwai), Ko Phi Phi (tsunami zone), and Ko Chang (where I ended up on a drip due to some dodgy prawns.) It was a brilliant holiday and we saw a bunch of friends who had come out to visit. I learned to dive (Nemo gets around, doesn’t he?) and we got a tan. Rosie saw an octopus, which apparently was really really cool and unusual. I assumed they were ten a penny and swam on like a muppet. Oh well.
Since then we’ve been all over the place. Rosie organized and ran a 3 day training course for 65 primary teachers in Mae Hong Son. There were 5 of us farangs and some typically horrendous Thai bureaucracy, but on the whole it was a great success. The level of English amongst the teachers varied dramatically, as some of them had studied English to degree level and some hadn’t seen it since they were 15! (I was asked to explain how to use play, do and go with certain sports – are there rules??) (Rosie had to explain that it wasn’t polite to say “I need to go poo….) We even taught some more reeling, and the girls all ate deep fried crickets. Olly and I realized it was all a test to see if the silly farangs would fall for it…. Or I’m a wimp, one or the other.
Rosie’s cousin Jess and three friends came to visit too, having raised a couple of grand for resource boxes for schools. We took them on a few wee tours and walks, and managed to show them a decent amount of the work the charity does. Currently, a new dorm is being built at Ban Pantong, which is brilliant as the students were sleeping on desks in old classrooms with no mossie-proofing, water-proofing or heat-proofing. Now they’re going to have real rooms with play spaces and concrete walkways to the toilets instead of mud paths. And, hopefully, 500 coffee bushes to look after to make a bit of money from (free from Uwe, the coffee man.)
We are supposed to be painting the English space today but the whole school’s water supply is out. And the internet is down. The uncalm before the storm I guess – the rainy season is fast approaching. Must buy an umbrella – it keeps the 40 degree sun off and the torrential rain too. Just like home, if home was hotter and the food fresher.
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