Staircase Spirits

I left work after dark one night. A security guard saw that I’d come down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. As he approached me, at first I thought I had broken a rule or something. But instead he asked, “weren’t you scared?”

Lots of Thai people believe in spirits of one kind of another. You don’t have to look far to figure this out—movies and magazines on these topics are popular, amulets are everywhere. Spirit doctors are consulted for getting rid of ghosts or curses, or for helping with love troubles.

So I knew the guard wasn’t wondering if I was frightened by the low lighting in the staircase. When I told him I wasn’t worried about spirits, he answered something along the lines of “Oh, you’re the live-and-let-live type, huh?”

Not all spirits are evil. Big trees are often thought to house good spirits. Everyone who puts up a building in Thailand also builds a small house where the spirits of the land can live. The idea is that if the spirits don’t have a house of their own, they may not remain calm.

I decided to answer the security guard by pointing to the spirit house near the office. Somehow it didn’t seem right to tell him that I simply didn’t believe. I wondered later if that thought would even have occurred to him.

Burma’s Katrina

Remarkably, tragically, the news from Burma just gets more discouraging. A long-time friend of ours passed through Bangkok on a quick visit she was making to the Burmese border from Seattle in the wake of Cyclone Nargis.

She was of course furious at the Burmese government’s refusal to help its own people recover, and so had flown over on her own because she knows some back channel ways of getting help into the country.

Her sense is that the best disaster response work is being done by groups that have been operating in the country for some time, and thus have large Burmese staffs, who can distribute supplies without attracting unwanted attention from the military. Our friend was impressed with Thirst-Aid. Money contributed at my birthday fundraiser will go to them. I encourage you to send them a check as well.

She had learned that in some villages, outside medical personnel and aid dispensers had to work secretly, in order to avoid authorities who want the people to see only Burmese soldiers providing relief.

Yet the message that comes through loudest is that the government doesn’t care about anything but its own survival. Nobody is collecting the corpses. Homeless villagers who made their way to emergency shelters in nearby towns are being told that they must return “home” in order to vote in a referendum that would validate the military’s right to rule.

News coverage by the BBC remains quite good.

Joining the Middle Class

The women who take care of Jip generally are long on experience and common sense, but short on savings. They’re always from the countryside, usually supporting family back home.

If they end up working for us a while, the wages we pay allow them to put aside a little bit, enough to front the costs of a small business. The longer people stay, the greater the odds that one day they’ll show up toting Avon-style cosmetics catalogs. Two weeks ago we celebrated one woman’s first anniversary. She’s the third to have continued that long, and all three eventually discovered the makeup sideline.

They also make some cosmetic changes of their own. This week the newest caregiver (eight months and counting) giggled as she described to the others how she’d paid $100 to get permanent lip color, for the Angelina Jolie look.

Jip doesn’t care for such conversations, or for entrepreneurship involving fashion. But I think it’s fun to watch what people do when they find themselves in charge of some disposable income. Who am I to judge what they do with it?

Energy Heart

About fifty of Jip’s nursing school classmates gathered at a restaurant Sunday for a 25^th reunion. They cheered and rose to their feet when we rolled in. Jip’s grin got very wide.

She handled the attention well. When we first moved back to Thailand, connecting with people from her past was a low priority for Jip, maybe because she wasn’t sure how they’d react to seeing her in a wheelchair.

At this event, she never complained, even though it got noisy and she didn’t always know who was talking to her. It probably helped that everyone there was a nurse.

I got a little misty watching the parade of people line up to speak with her. But that was nothing compared to how I felt when we got ready to leave. The whole group sang to her, a great song that translates literally as “energy heart.” Thais use the phrase to talk about spirit, encouragement, or moral support. I just kept reaching for my hanky.

Vast Humanitarian Disaster In Burma

Here’s an update based on an email I received from a long-time Burma activist, Edith Mirante of Project Maje.

Cyclone Nargis inundated Burma's densely populated Irrawaddy Delta, destroying entire towns and villages. The storm killed tens of thousands of people, left homeless as many as a million, and destroyed infrastructure in the largest city, Rangoon.

Now the country is dealing with serious shortages of drinking water, food, and shelter. Diseases such as cholera are not far off. Compounding the disaster are the wacky regime's deliberate delay of international emergency assistance, and the past few decades of deforestation. Things won’t get better fast; the Delta area was Burma's primary rice growing region.

Links for information and disaster relief donations are below. The groups listed appreciate and will make good use of any contribution, even small amounts. As one way to deal personally with this tragedy, I recommend organizing a small benefit event such as a concert, reading, art sale, dinner, or film show. Invite your friends, family, co-workers, or community and send the proceeds to a relief aid group. Children often have excellent ideas for such events.

I plan to celebrate my fourth cycle birthday at the end of this month with a fundraiser for Burma. Two cycles ago, when I was 24, warfare along the Thai Cambodian border led to the creation of huge refugee camps where Jip and I eventually worked. So we’ve seen the difference that a concerted, well-organized, and well-funded ongoing relief effort can make. That kind of effort isn’t happening in Burma at the moment, but perhaps if enough of us act, we can make the situation there a teeny bit better.

I know that these are hard economic times everywhere, but I hope that you will consider making some contribution to the relief effort, either on your own or by making others aware of the effective donation options available.

DONATIONS for disaster relief can be made via these organizations:

** Medecins Sans Frontiers (already distributing emergency aid in affected areas)

** Medical Emergency Relief International (already bringing aid to the Delta)

** Thirst-Aid (water purification is an urgent priority)

** Avaaz.org (special fund via Burma's Buddhist monks)

** MercyCorps (experienced disaster relief experts with local partners)

For constantly updated INFORMATION, see these news sources:

BBC News

The Irrawaddy

Mizzima News

US Campaign for Burma (also accepting disaster relief donations)

Labor Day

Over here it really is a holiday for laborers, not mostly an excuse for an extra day of summer vacation for school kids, the way it is in the States. My office wasn’t closed, but it seemed right that Jip’s caregivers should have May 1st off, so I stayed home and took care of her for 24 hours.

She and I both had a fine time. We could hear picnickers and game players laughing in the nearby park. Jip cracked jokes all day, remaining patient despite my rustiness with the daytime routine (now I only do Sunday nights). From loudspeakers in the park nearby came a medley of festive songs (weirdly interrupted now and then by solo saxophone renditions of 500 Miles and Auld Lang Syne—maybe they were recordings made by the king, a noted sax player?) and the occasional official-sounding announcement.

I was struck again at how hard the work is. Jip’s wishes and routine are not complicated, but she does talk about them nearly nonstop. That means caregivers have to get good at making conversation, or at least at letting Jip know they’re paying attention. She seems to be hearing less well lately (I’m really hoping it’s ear wax rather than a rare symptom of this disease), so we also must remember to speak up when responding to her.

Massage has become part of the job, as Jip has begun to complain more frequently of shoulder stiffness. When she uses her standing frame, she now has trouble lifting her arm high enough to throw a ball.

And she still takes great comfort from her tooth brushing and mouth swishing, which she can make last longer than anyone else I know (2-3 hours when the morning and evening phases are added together). So while we’d both had a good day, we were really ready for bed when the time came.

Clear Eyes

Two amigos came to town. Stayed a week. Had a fine time.

These are A-list friends, college housemates. Each traveled with a 13-year-old son. For them it was spring break. For me it was Thai New Year. Taking the week off to travel around and get into water fights was no problem. The five of us did some river taxiing and some wet bike riding and some kayaking and some waterfall climbing and a few other soggy activities.

Hosting newcomers to Thailand made me realize how much newness I’ve absorbed since Jip and I arrived in July 2005. My friends stopped and stared at things that no longer strike me as strange. They asked questions I used to ask.

Brad marveled at what seemed to him a mindful pace of life. Several times he commented on the daily routines that included time for offering incense to spirits, or for refreshing flower garlands that hang from taxis’ rear-view mirrors. By the end of the week, he was trying to figure out how to explain to his wife when he got home that he had become a Buddhist.

Edie appreciated the sensory stuff—“This tastes so great! That smells so great! How have we lived this long without feeling anything like this?! How come America hasn’t figured that out yet?”

The two kids also asked sharp questions about the language. “Are you serious that I never have to conjugate any verbs? I’m moving here.” They also got wide eyed as we moved to successively wetter parts of town during the height of the annual Songkran festivities.

One night we passed by a free outdoor concert. The performers were spraying spectators with big hoses from the stage. People at the back of the audience could choose to get soaked at their own pace under huge public showers.

As we used to say to each other back in college when our house would embark on similarly wacky adventures, “after this, reality is such a disappointment.”

Not Making This Up

Can your local cultural association top this offering?

The Thai Textile Society will present a lecture, “Lotus Stem Weaving from Shan State,” by Sylvia Fraser-Lu at The Siam Society on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 10:30 a.m. She will explain the development of lotus stem weaving for monk’s robes and its continued popularity today.

Lotus-fiber weaving takes place in the eastern quarter of Kyaing Kan village, the largest settlement at the southern extremity of Inle Lake. According to informants, this activity began around 1910 when a Daw Sa Oo (Madame Sparrow’s Egg) in the interest of gaining merit set out to produce a set of robes for the highly revered abbot of a nearby monastery, from the fibers of the local padonma-kya lotus plant, which grew wild in the shallows of the lake. The delighted abbot had the weaver’s name changed to Daw Kya Oo (Madame Lotus Egg) in honor of her pious achievement. Daw Kya Oo and her friends throughout their lives continued to weave with lotus yarn for meritorious rather than commercial purposes, producing one or two sets of robes a year for eminent local abbots. None of Daw Kya Oo’s progeny are currently involved in weaving, but the descendants of her friends have continued the tradition.

The obscure art of weaving monk’s robes from lotus stem fibers first came to national attention in Burma at the annual Shwedagon Maho-thingan Festival. In November 1981, a team of weavers from Kyaing Kan were invited to compete in a nation-wide weaving competition to honor a Buddhist legend that asserts that Maya, the mother of the Buddha, stayed up all night in the Tavatimsa heaven on the eve of her son’s Enlightenment, to weave him a suitable robe. Weaving in a rougher fiber than their competitors, who used milled cotton, they did not win, but their sturdy beautifully woven robe caused quite a sensation amongst the devoutly Buddhist on-lookers. Such an enthusiastic reaction was not unexpected, given the symbolic importance of the lotus in Hindu-Buddhist culture.

I didn’t make it to this lecture, but if you’re intrigued I can maybe scare up a lotus stem robe for you to honor the monk in your life.

Opening Day

Lots of people know that Thailand is famous for its elephants. Tourists often take in a show or a ride at some point during their stay in the land of smiles. Some visitors even schedule their visits around the various elephant festivals throughout the country, in order to watch elephants dance or race or play tug-of-war.

What’s not widely understood is how important baseball has become in elephant circles here. On Opening Day yesterday, the first-ever nine-inning game played only by elephants took place at a specially designed field outside of Chiang Mai.

Event organizers said that baseball was simply the next logical step in a sports evolution that began with polo-playing pachyderms. “We figured that if they could get good at swinging a mallet, there was no reason they couldn’t swing a bat as well. The ones with the sharpest eyes can even hit a curve ball,” noted Proboscidea Loxodanta, spokesperson for the group.

The baseball exhibition was part of a special once-a-year rollout of elephant talents. Alongside the display of pitching and catching, elephants were seen cooking pad thai, weaving silk pashminas, and demonstrating insight meditation. Plans for future years include elephant massage.

Hole in the Dictionary

I was joking around with one of the caregivers about how sometimes life with Jip can be just a little bit crazy—“but always interesting, never boring.” She replied with the word “headache,” which in Thai happens to rhyme with “boring.” At first I thought she had meant to continue the playful mood.

But when I thought about it later, I wondered if she really was beginning to feel frustrated by the job, and what I could do to help. I wanted to ask just how irksome she found some of the strange behaviors that come along with this disease, but I didn’t know the words for “frustrated,” or “irked,” or “it’s really getting to me.”

So I checked with some bilingual people at work, and with my Thai teacher. Nobody knew what I was asking about. The closest they came were words that meant “agitated,” or “oppressed,” or “uneasy,” which I didn’t think really captured the sense of annoyance or vexation that I connect with frustration.

Then it occurred to me that maybe that word doesn’t exist in Thai. Is it possible that an entire emotion is missing from this happy-go-lucky culture?

Burma Update

Life sucks just as much as ever in Burma. So what to say to China, which holds lots of the cards there?

One grassroots group is calling for people to turn off their TVs rather than watch the Beijing Olympics this summer, in protest of the Chinese government’s support of the Burmese rulers. Instead of tuning in, they say, people can plan events to help end the human rights abuses.

I’m not so sure about the impact of that specific protest, but to me it makes sense to take some kind of action to sustain the story of how much the people there suffer under their weird government.

The generals there have said they’ll hold elections within two years, but almost nobody takes that promise seriously. Even if the country gets a chance to vote, Aung San Suu Kyi wouldn’t be allowed to run, because of a provision in a newly drafted constitution that seems written particularly for her. Her party won the last election, 18 years ago, but the results were never honored.

A couple weekends ago, the UN special envoy again saw his proposals rejected, including the suggestion that the government negotiate with Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma knows China will veto any harmful UN Security Council resolutions, and will continue to provide aid and weapons.

Here’s another scheme: “arrest yourself” for 24 hours around the time of Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday in mid-June. The idea is to bring attention to the dozen years she has spent under house arrest, organize some education and/or fundraising, and generally keep the pressure applied.

Change from within is unlikely in Burma, considering how quickly last September’s uprisings were squashed. The country’s neighbors, including the new Thai government, find that maintaining the status quo is in their economic interest. The prospect of swaying a giant like China feels pretty daunting, especially when you consider that things haven’t been going too great in Tibet either this past week.

Behind the Wheel in Bangkok

Word has it that Bangkok has a tenth of this country’s people, but a third of its cars. That lopsided statistic leads to lots of consequences. Tedious traffic is the most obvious, but several other odd adaptations result from the Big Mango’s auto addiction.

One is that people here park behind and perpendicular to one another, in order to fit more cars into a small space. In the States you see this kind of arrangement only at sporting events and county fairs, when for two or three hours it’s necessary to use every square inch of ground within walking distance of the stadium.

But at those events you often leave your keys with an attendant, who takes care of moving the vehicles around if somebody has to leave early. Here, the practice is to lock the car but leave it in neutral. If another car is blocking your exit, you just push it gently out of the way and carry on.

Another peculiarity of getting around in this town is the u-turn. Often the only way to turn right when merging with a major road here is to first turn left, then go quite a distance before using a horseshoe-shaped bridge built especially to allow drivers to go back the way they came.

One stretch of Sukhumvit Rd. is often so busy that it can take as long as 40 minutes in a car to get back to where you started…unless you manage to cut across traffic and enter the Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through. That daring maneuver can shave about 30 minutes off the u-turn process, but of course there’s a catch.

You have to either buy something at the restaurant, or pay $1.50 for the privilege of using their driveway. People who need to do this frequently can buy a sticker for their window identifying them as members of the “KFC Turnaround Club.” Only in Bangkok.

Good Hours

Summer break starts around now for most Thai public schools. Kids are off for the next ten weeks. Everyone comments on how much better the traffic situation is in on the main roads. For me, the most noticeable result of the school holiday happens on the back streets.

I went for a run about 6:00 tonight. Right away I wondered if I was still in Bangkok. As I ran from side street to side street, it felt like I was jogging from one village to the next. Badminton games fluttered back and forth, night markets pulsed, boomboxes pounded out a steady beat on impromptu jazzercise corners. Families seemed together in a way I don’t generally see. Lots of kids were wearing pajamas, but bedtime looked like it was a long way off.

Scary Movies

OK, call me a wimp. I can’t handle movies like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.” It just doesn’t work for me when the bad guy spends most of the movie murdering, and we spend most of the movie shivering.

I saw both flicks in a futile attempt to stay current with American culture. (Somebody in my book group, which mostly consists of people from the U.S., suggested that we should all subscribe to People magazine). The movies didn’t help. Afterward I felt more out of touch than ever.

I could see why they were nominated for awards—they were put together by people who know what they’re doing. But when you strip down the plots to their essentials, they seemed to me no better than your basic horror movie. If that’s what resonates with the American moviegoer, then maybe I’m better off being out of touch.

Ironically, the week before “No Country” won several awards, the Thai equivalent of the Oscar-granting academy announced the winner of the best movie of the year in this country. Its name in translation is “Love of Siam.” The plot centers on two teenage boys exploring whether or not they’re in love with each other.