Changing My Itinerary

I haven't really wanted to get bogged down in all the sordid details of trying to get things done here, but a little bit of an update is in order. As of last Tuesday I pretty much gave up on building the school. It isn't that they aren't building something -- they are -- but I'm not entirely sure why. Both the schedule and the way (administrative/procedural, not construction) that they are building it is flawed, but I think that is just symptomatic of a clearly questionable need for the building.

I'm having trouble sorting out everyone's personal motivations, and I think that there is a lot at play here I haven't quite figured out yet. The long and the short of it is that the one and only thing they really don't need is additional structures. More refined and better maintained structures for sure, but they have plenty of them. To call where I am a village is extremely misleading, although they call it one. (I believe some of the error is in translation -- the connotations of village aren't, perhaps, present in its definition, and in some ways the error is, I believe, intentional.) I am staying in Nong Khai. My book gives it a population of 62,000, although I believe it is a bit more, and the city is certainly growing in leaps. There is construction -- large concrete structures ill suited to the climate -- on the edges of town, especially on the highway leading to Bangkok, a 12 hour bus or train ride away. Twenty five kilometers down that road is my village. Ludicrously enough, I'm still unable to understand the name of it well enough to even give you a good phonetic version, but it is something like "San Du Nong Khai." A very narrow strip of ramshackle buildings interspersed with huge concrete buildings of government and industry trails both sides of the highway from the village to the city. Third world urban sprawl.

The problems I'm greeted with are that the many needs here aren't all that disimilar to needing better education in the worst neighborhoods of the U.S. They certainly won't be met by building anything, so I'm trying to focus elsewhere. And the education problem for the kids in this environment is one I'm ill-suited to meet, as would any temporary visitor. I made small inroads with the main leader of the "village" yesterday, who invited me, and 4 other western volunteers, to the opening of a temple.

[That, by the way, was amazing. Huge crowds circled it three times holding gifts and striking gongs before entering and placing the gifts inside a huge unfinished hole in the foundation at the center of the temple. And the entire temple, inside and out, was under a huge mesh of string, many miles of it, that had been woven into a grid ceiling from the wall surrounding the compound all the way into the high ceilinged interior. White strings running every four inches over ever bit of space.]

So I've decided to adjust my plans here. I spent most of last week and will be spending this next week working on the orphanage. It is in horrible disrepair and I'm doing what I can to improve that. I've learned that the term orphanage is not entirely accurate. While most of the children, and there are about 80 of them (I think?), have no parents, there are quite a few who have families that can't provide for them and so they have to live here. They live in 4 buildings. The upper floor of each building is a long dormitory with just the beds. The lower floor has the open bathroom, at the other end a small kitchen, and in between a big open area with some tables. There are lockers on the main floor where they can keep their belongings. And that is about it. The floor and walls of the building are concrete, and there are plenty of windows. I'm told the kids are up to 18 years old, but I've only seen one that could be that old and no more than 6 that could possibly be older than 12. Most of them look like they are between 6 and 9. The most striking thing is that the orphans live at the orphanage, and only the orphans. There is one adult assigned to each building, but they live elsewhere and are only at the orphanage during the day, most days of the week. The kids do a pretty amazing job of cooking and caring for themselves, but there is definitely a "Lord of the Flies" feel to the whole thing.



That is Ed, holding Som (I think). He is a british college student here that is helping out, and I took this photo after Ed and I and Christina and Catherine (both Danish and 20 years old) and Reike (German and also 20) had already spent a day scrubbing the walls as best we could. We were still working on cleaning the ceiling beams at this point....

We are going in tomorrow to repaint this building to try and make the space a little better, and I'm going to try and paint letters on the walls as well, because the kids are all trying to learn English. And after the German and Danish girls leave I'll finish the little bits of construction repair I am trying to do, mostly to their water system to keep the wash water separate from the sewage water. (I'm waiting until the girls leave so I can take advantage of their help with painting.) And Ed is going to be hear another week after me, so hopefully he'll be able to paint another of the buildings.

At the end of next week is the Songkran festival of the Thai new year. I am told I can't possibly get anything done during that, so I'm going to leave Nong Khai at that point and go down to Bangkok and then on to one of the islands. Ko Tau I think, although I haven't decided. And then after a bit of rest I'm going to try and explore a bit more. I am evolving a theory of how best to volunteer and help, but the troubles I had sorting things out over the internet make perfect sense now that I'm here, so I'm going to try and explore while I'm here in order to figure out how I can achieve more in the future.

That is already far too much detail, I'm sure! But I'm getting things sorted out. It is very clear that the people that need help the most have no access to the internet or international channels in any way at all. So when you go through those channels, you find yourself mostly stymied by the people that were the middlemen. The motivations, as I said earlier, and suspect and hard to pin down. Not money, in most cases, but still suspect. So I think to really help you would need to do all of your research on the ground, requiring longer volunteer times or multiple trips. But I'll let you know what I discover....

I just realized that I haven't seen any kind of English language news source since I arrived. Somebody will let me know if anything big happens, right?