flights

I finally posted my pictures from the Khao Lak trip. Enjoy.

My last post from Thailand was somewhat cynical, and I owe this blog a more balanced account, now that the trip is over. While my cynicism didn’t really go away, I ended the experience with an overall good feeling about it. It helped that in the middle of week two, I finally got to see the destroyed homes we were replacing.

In the end, it didn’t really matter to me whether the net benefit of the experience was to me or the people I was ostensibly helping. The fact is, I had a good travel experience, and I helped build a couple of houses for people who needed them.

I enjoyed making simple jokes with the villagers I worked closely with – simple enough to be communicated via sign language. I enjoyed eating delicious thai food with cold Singha beer for a fraction of what it costs me to park for a day at my office. I enjoyed hard physical work in the hot thai sun, away from my desk and computer screen.

Toward the end of week one, I was moved from my job site to two other sites to help a group of guys transport 18 tall concrete columns a hundred meters or so and position them in 1.4 meter deep footings. The columns were heavy – the tallest of them probably close to 1000 pounds. We moved them by hand, using bicycle tires, wooden poles and muscle power. Either two or three wooden poles, four people per wooden pole – two on each side of the column. I was taller than the others, and they put me on the heavy end of the column, on the inside – shoulder to shoulder with a guy named Mai.

Since I was taller than Mai, he didn’t end up carrying any weight when we moved the columns. This cracked him up to no end. The sun was beating down on us, there was no shade to be found, and none of us really wanted to work. To him, I was a crazy farang who traveled halfway around the world to schlep heavy objects in the hot sun, and he was certainly going to let me go ahead and do that.

After we moved the eighth column, we had a bit of a break. I went to our cooler (we foreigners had a cooler), grabbed a handful of ice cubes and walked back to the guys I was working with. I handed out the ice cubes til I had none. They said “kap kun krab”, held the ice to the backs of their necks and we idled for a while. Mai offered me a smoke. I declined, and we both laughed.

When we got around to moving the next few columns, he stood on his toes in order to give me as much help as he could.

Today I started to question this whole gig. It feels more than a little strange in a country where labor is cheap to have paid money to come here to build houses with a team of twelve other people who have little or no construction experience, when the same money could have paid for more than twice the number of experienced builders. I don’t want to be cynical, but feels just slightly artificial, designed to make some well-to-do foreigners feel better about ourselves.

We were split into two groups today, and I worked with four other team members and a dozen or so local construction guys to transport and raise eighteen concrete columns and set them into the footing holes of two houses. It was hard work, and it felt good to have done it. But there were a few local guys just hanging around, and it made me scratch my head a little.

Meanwhile, the folks I’m with are so eager to lend a hand it’s comical sometimes. If a guy turns and reaches for, say, a shovel to scoop sand into a basket, my habitat compadres leap into action. One goes for a shovel, another a basket. Without really knowing what the guy wants to do with them. Or knowing only perhaps that the sand is for mixing into mortar. So the sign language ensues.

Shoulder shrug, hands in the “huh?” position [how many baskets?].

Wrinkled brow, some words in Thai [I don't know what you're asking me].

Or, maybe no wrinkled brow and some other words in Thai [add six baskets of sand].

???

And so it goes. Eventually, the baskets get filled with sand and tossed into the mortar mix, and all is good.

I think I’m just cranky. Having someone who’s never done a thing in her life tell me how I should do that thing is something that apparently rubs me the wrong way.

I’m also feeling pretty done with traveling alone, after almost a year in Singapore and weeks of travel in the region, here I am again. If I didn’t have to use this two weeks before the end of the year, I’d have saved it.

But what a thing to complain about. My Singapore stint was an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything, and I’m sure this will be too.

My eyes are puffy and sore.

Tonight I went to see some sort of celebration. It was no big production, and it wasn’t all that interesting, but the vibe was good.

Some people in a village 30 minutes south of here set up a small stage by a big blue boat that washed into their village during the tsunami. A band was playing. People were selling silk flowers, woven handbags and other crafts. A group of women had set up a booth offering free foot massages. All of it was to raise money to rebuild the waterfont there, and also to support the burmese community. Legal and illegal aliens from Myanmar who make up a significant percentage of the population in this part of Thailand, and who perform most of the construction and labor jobs around here.

They’re leaving the boat there, in the middle of their town, as a tourist attraction. Makes sense. It would cost money to take it away, but if they work it right, people will pay to see it, buy postcards of it, etc. They’ve nicknamed it the ‘blue angel’ because as it drifted through the village, it didn’t hurt anyone or damage a single house. In fact, a number of people were able to cling to it for support and buoyancy before it finally came to rest.

An orange boat down the road, on the other hand, has been dubbed “the demon” because of the death and destruction it left in its wake.

The angel and the demon. Blue and orange – opposite colors on the color wheel.

Today I learned to lay cinderblock. Something I’d never done before. All fourteen of us worked on one house. A few of the villagers helped too. They don’t speak any English, but we have a translater whom we keep plenty busy. In any case, the language of smiles and hard work is enough to get us through most interchanges. We dug holes together, hauled blocks, mixed concrete.

There are two guys in our group named Hal. Hal Schmitz and Hal Taylor. Both white-haired retirees. Hal the greater and Hal the lesser as they like to say. Hal the greater because he’s the team leader. Hal the lesser because he’s not. I like to think of them as Hal the serious and Hal the funny. Hal the funny is a rocket scientist. He actually worked on the Apollo project that sent men to the moon. Now he runs his own consulting business, working with firms – mostly in Russia – that mine titanium for aviation and aerospace applications. Hal’s got plenty of opinions and likes to talk about himself a lot, but in an amiable way that somehow doesn’t offend or annoy.

Hal the serious is a war veteran. Not exactly sure which war, but I’m thinking Korean. He’s the right age. He’s responsible for us, and the success of this project, so it makes sense that he’s a little more serious than the rest of us. But he’s starting to loosen up a little.

It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon here, relatively cool. I woke up very early this morning, tossed and turned in the pitch darkness for a while, then watched the interior of my room gradually take shape as the sun rose. The air conditioner hummed along and cooled the room nicely, but filled it with a faint mildewy smell.

I have a roomate. Tom. He’s from L.A., a nice guy but the kind of nice you want to hate. He sold his company a few months ago, and he’s been traveling ever since. He’s got some money. He’s smart, good looking, in good shape.

At 7am, Tom’s alarm went off. He got up and showered, and I stepped outside to feel the air of the new day. Not a leaf was stirring, and there wasn’t so much as a ripple on the pool. Warm and humid, but not hot. I just stood there and enjoyed the silence for a while.

Today was not a work day.

We toured a few tsunami-impacted sites, taking pictures. It’s an amazing thing to see the exploded remnants of steel-reinforced concrete walls once belonging to a five-star resort. Even more amazing to see a 100 foot military police boat sitting in a farmer’s field, two kilometers from the sea’s edge (and to know it was two kilometers offshore when the waves hit). So, it was carried four kilometers from where it had been steadfastly guarding the king’s grandson, who was jetskiiing at the time and died that day.

On the much brighter side, we also saw some of the houses Habitat built in June. Met the happy homeowners and their grinning children, who proudly took us inside and toured us around.

We had a delicious family style lunch of cashew chicken, grilled salted fish, deep fried prawns and shrimp, tom yum soup, stir-fried greens with garlic and of course lots of steamed rice. After lunch, the group split. Some went back to the hotel, while the rest of us took a short 1km hike to a nice beach with a view.

We sat and chatted for a while, and then from there, we went to an elephant orphanage, where we were treated to a steep muddy ride. I kept thinking I was going to take a header over the front of the thing, but it was a lot of fun, and the elephants definitely deserved the bananas and pineapple we fed them at the end of the trail.

I’m in the Bangkok airport right now, with a couple hours to kill. Friends have asked me whether this trip is for business or pleasure, and the answer is a little more complicated than that.

It’s definitely not business. Let’s call it pleasure with a purpose.

I had a couple of weeks of time-off I needed to use before the end of the year, and I signed up for a trip with Habitat for Humanity to work in the tsunami-impacted town of Khao Lak for a couple of weeks. As far as I know, we’ll be working on a single house for one family, but I’ll post the details here after I get to Khao Lak and get the scoop.

Anyway, assuming I can find Internet access there, look for a bunch of new posts.

Have I really not written anything here in over 40 days?

Work has been busy, but that didn’t hamper my blogging productivity much before. And anyway, work hasn’t been anything like it was in Singapore.

Lack of material? Not really. My life in San Francisco provides ample inspiration and plenty of material. I have a number of posts in “draft” state – notes, half-formed thoughts.

Lack of motivation? Perhaps. Lately, I don’t feel much like sitting in front of a computer when I don’t have to.

New distractions? Probably. At home I have satellite television and a DVR. When my brain is tired, the box does have a tendency to suck me in.

Lack of solitude? Definitely. Writing is a solo pursuit, and I haven’t spent much time alone over the last few months. I’m enjoying the process of reconnecting with my SF friends, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with one person in particular.

:-)

Happiness? Hmmm. Happiness is the writer’s enemy in some ways, but again, it hasn’t hampered my own productivity much in the past. I am happy these days. Really happy. Life feels good. Sorry I haven’t been sharing much.