Friends, Frustration, Folding Chairs and 44th Birthdays

I have not posted anything for a little while. Simply put, I have not been terribly inspired. After our experience in Tanzania, perhaps it was hard to avoid a bit of a let down. Certainly, Bangkok was fun and interesting, but being a tourist in a huge, relatively modern, and very frenetic metropolis was not wildly inspiring. That said, we were all looking forward to the next phase of our volunteering. With the same organization through which we had volunteered in Tanzania, Cross Cultural Solutions, we were going to volunteer in Trang, a town on the southwest coast of Thailand. Even more than the volunteering, we were looking forward to seeing our friends, Ed and Wendy Levine, and their kids Jessica and Corey. We and the Levines had been discussing doing some serious travel for quite some time now and they decided to join us for our 4 weeks in Thailand. Melissa and I were both looking forward to hanging out with our old friends from Connecticut. As great as it has been meeting wonderful and interesting people along the way, we were both hungry for the warmth and easy comradery that comes from old friends. Ed and Wendy are both doctors. So, as an aside, I have been able to indulge all of my hypochondriacal concerns. After two months, without an outlet for that particular bundle of neuroses (Melissa has no patience), it has been quite a relief to unload on Ed and Wendy. So we arrived in Trang on March 2, the Levine family arrived the next day and the reunion was terrific, as anticipated.

Starting that Saturday (March 3), we had orientation and learned a bit of Thai. We all have found Thai to be largely indecipherable. Not only is the language in a different alphabet, but it’s tonal, meaning that the same word can have multiple meanings depending on the tone. To the untrained ear, these tonal distinctions seem nebulous, at best. Melissa has for years, unfairly, claimed that I’m tone deaf. However, in this instance, I’m more than willing to rely on my alleged tone deafness as a defense to my inability to speak more than two words of Thai. On a positive note, as a male, essentially every Thai sentence needs to end with the word “krap.” Therefore, I finally have the justification that I have been long been seeking to end every sentence with “crap.”

Tuesday rolls around and we’re all scheduled to start our next phase of volunteering. We were all really looking forward to beginning and have seen these volunteer portions of our travels as the anchors for the trip. All I can say is that the first week was very frustrating. All eight of us (with the Levines) were put at the local Nursing College. The kids are volunteering at the day care center and are happy there. However, as wonderful as our kids are, it’s not clear that they’re absolutely necessary as the ratio of the child care providers to children is absurdly high and the facility would give Maya and Emma’s pre schools a run for their money. This is no Kigongoni pre-school. However, since the kids are reasonably happy, we're going to let it go. On the other hand, for the four adults, there was simply nothing for us to do. There was some thought that Melissa and I would be teaching English to Thai nursing students (a somewhat appealing thought to me, for a myriad of reasons (ok, maybe only one reason)) and Ed and Wendy we’re going to be doing something that would employ their medical backgrounds. However, the nurses all seem to be on vacation or about ready to graduate so there was simply nothing for any of us to do. This is all the more frustrating in that we paid a significant amount of money to CCS (yes, we paid to volunteer) to make all of these arrangements. While, we expect to face challenges in volunteering, we did not expect to face the challenge and boredom of nothing to do. Basically, the four of us spent hours checking email. It was quite maddening. We were promised that everything would be in order next week. We’ll see. While this was frustrating enough, that same week our PC died and my watch stopped.

As a side note, Thailand is much more advanced than we anticipated. Certainly, we expected Bangkok to be somewhat advanced, but we thought that as we left Bangkok, we would see greater need. While undoubtedly, there is significant poverty and problems in Thailand, relative to Tanzania, Thailand is a veritable super power. However, you would think that there would be many valuable things that volunteers can do here if the right opportunities are found.

In the Trang program you work longer hours but have Fridays off. So we decided to plan a weekend excursion. Trang, is a great starting off point for the many beautiful islands off the west coast of Thailand. This time we decided to go to Koh Ngai (aka Koh Hai), a relatively undeveloped (other than the various resorts) island about a 40 minute car ride and a 45 minute boat ride from our home base. The boat ride to the island was interesting. We decided to opt for the less expensive long boat to the island (as opposed to the bigger (and quicker) motor boats). We got in a charmingly simple boat (there were no chairs) and started on what looked to be a placid jaunt through the Andaman Sea. We were wrong. We had not been advised that we were leaving at the time of the roughest seas. The swells bounced us all over the place and we got soaking wet. We enjoyed the ride, in this kind of so-long-as-we-don’t-die-this-will-have-been-lots-of-fun way. I kept considering whether we were in swimming distance from one coast or the other.

However, when we arrived, the beach was beautiful. Our rooms were a bit smelly and bit far away from the beach, but were fine. We then proceeded to sit down in folding chairs on the beach prior to dinner. My buddy, Ed, sat down and his chair immediately collapsed with his pinkies (yes, both of them) stuck in the folds. Initially, Melissa and I did not realize what was going on and then Ed, politely and calmly asked, if I could help him remove his crushed fingers from the folds. If it were me, I would have been screaming like a stuck pig and then would have passed out. Indeed, when I saw his right pinky, it was gruesome, looking as if it had been amputated. It was really quite traumatizing for me. But, of course, Ed received all of the attention as my emotional injuries were given short shrift next to his “real” injuries. To Ed’s extraordinary credit and given the joint medical attentions of him and his wife, he treated and dressed his pinkies and was prepared to continue with the weekend activities. Again, I would have called Medi-Jet and had myself evacuated to Cedars Sinai.

The rest of the weekend was really quite nice. Saturday was Wendy’s 44th birthday and we had a great day. We went on this wonderful, if touristy, boat excursion, where we went through this water cave. All of us tourists, dressed in blue life vests, were in the water in a congo line of sorts, as we went through the cave, which at times, was pitch black. Very exciting. The cave then opened up to this beautiful beach surrounded on all sides by severe cliffs of vegetation. It was a magical place. It seemed like the kind of place where the Lord of the Flies may have been set. We then went snorkeling and saw some beautiful reefs. Finally, we ended the day with a great dinner. I think Wendy would say that she had a pretty special 44th birthday. I will note, for the record, that the Levines timed this trip so that it included both Wendy’s birthday and their anniversary. Need, I say more.

We returned to our homebase and learned that Melissa and my placements are now all set. However, Ed and Wendy’s are still up in the air. Melissa and I have been moved to a detention center, where we’ll be teaching English to 16 to 18 year old boys, who have had some scrapes with the law. Now. . .having hours to check our email doesn’t seem so bad.

That’s it for now.