Heaven

It seems appropriate that we celebrate International Women’s Day at a place that helps to empower women and girls to keep them from falling into the clutches of sex traffickers.

This morning we got up early to ride the elephants for their early morning walk. We sat on their heads with our legs tucked under their flappy ears, leaning down on their foreheads. A one-and-a-half year old calf accompanied mama on the walk. We went up and down, with ups easier than downs as the downhill required more shoulder action to keep from tipping head-over down their faces. We lumbered along the very uneven ground, amazed at the dexterity of these giant animals.

On the suggestion of a California couple that we saw riding by our hut the day before, we had put on long pants to keep from chafing our legs on their rough hides. Three young men from Manchester (UK) had shorts and T-shorts and were barefoot. They opted for going into the river where elephants and humans alike were sprayed by the elephant handlers. The baby elephant was frolicking in the water, diving under mama and coming out the other end, then running up the slope to roll around in the sand before taking another bath.

After breakfast we had ourselves dropped off at a meditation center with a temple that is in a cave or rather under an enormous overhang of a steep rock formation. Axel is getting quite good at meditating –he can sit still for 45 minutes in spite of all his body problems. I can hardly make it past 20 and used the remaining time to follow the bats that flitted above our heads.  Two other people were meditating, one monk in brown robes and one woman in white. The woman was like a statue. The monk sat in a position that neither one of us could stand very long, one leg tucked under and the other across in front. Once in a while he interrupted his meditation with a walking meditation. If only I could see inside their heads what this nothingness was all about.

We were gifted a book (in exchange for a donation) that turned out to be translated under the auspices of an associated meditation center in Boston. It is a little difficult for my busy brain to grasp the content but I will try.

On our return we met two doctors from a medical school on the US west coast getting ready to go out to far flung villages with medical supplies. They are scouting out possibilities for medical students to come out here to get some practical experience.

We tried out more of the wonderful dishes on the menu, green curry, Tom Yum, and iced Thai tea while exploring what to do on our last day. We quickly decided on cooking school, but which of the 10 or so that advertised their classes in booklets and online?

Soon the massage lady showed up and I had another hour long massage, then Axel an hour and a half. When I was done the four year old elephant was already frolicking in the river and, the lodge guests were invited into the river to participate in the fun. Armed with brushes and pails, we scrubbed her, she sprayed us with water and everyone got wet kisses from the snake-like elephant trunk. One by one we got to ride her in the river. As bamboo rafts came by, her handler instructed her to spray the people on the raft under loud squeaky screams from the young women who rafted down, sometimes in their finest clothes.

In the evening we sat at the big common tables overlooking the river and striking up conversations with our fellow lodgers, most a generation younger than us. Axel is very good at this and in no time we had a nice community of people, coming and going, and hearing from those who are not doing 9-5 jobs; who see the world while doing what they love to earn the little money one needs here to get on. The Four-Hour Workweek is one of the favorite books that everyone seems to know.

Chill time

We picked an eco-lodge (Chai Lai Orchid Lodge) about 55 kms southwest of Chiangmai, in the mountains, that was both reasonably priced, came highly recommended, and was a social enterprise to boot. The income from the lodge supports an organization called ‘Daughters Rising,’ which focuses on teaching uneducated ethnic Burmese girls the skills, and helping them to develop confidence so they can stand up against the traffickers that raid the communities of ethnic minorities for the Bangkok sex industry. I am glad we didn’t go to the red light district which is presented as family friendly entertainment for tourists. I am afraid that even such innocent visits feed the industry.

We arrived late in the dark and had to cross, by foot, a swinging rope bridge high over the river. We were fed two fabulous Thai meals (Pad Thai and Tom Kha) and then were led to our comfortable but not fancy huts where we slept until the first batch of roosters woke us at 4:30; a second alarm came at 6:30 followed by loud music (Thai? Burmese?) and then the trumpeting of the elephants that are living right next to us.

The mornings are cold and I had to dig deep into my duffle bag to find something warm but we quickly learned that the cold only lasts a very short time. Mid-day temperatures are in the high 20s.

From our little porch we watched fellow lodge guests ride two elephants to the river for their morning bath and then had breakfasts while more elephant activity was going on right under our noses.

After breakfast our first order of business was a Thai massage, a whole body one for me and a leg and foot massage for Axel, whose foot problems are responding well to the various massages he has had. The masseuse said a little prayer before starting the massage. It is a reverent business here.

In the afternoon we were trucked a few kilometers up the river and boarded a raft that was made from thick (4 inches) and long (18 feet) bamboo poles tied together with rubber tire strips. Although we could have punted ourselves, and Axel even considered it, we were happy with our local punter/guide who navigated us expertly down the stream. It is the dry season and the river is low, so one can get very stuck with the long slender rafts, especially through narrow rocky openings.

Unlike us, the urbanites from Chiang Mai who go into the mountains for weekend fun, punted themselves. Rafting here is like canoeing on the Ipswich River on a weekend in the summer but without restrictions on alcohol. The rafts were loaded with cases and coolers full of beer. Drinking beer in a canoe is one thing, but drinking and rafting here requires more skill. This kind of rafting requires one to stand up on the slippery bamboo poles and becomes increasingly difficulty as the beer supply dwindles. By the end of the rafting trip many of the boys were hardly coherent (they practiced their little English on us: goodbye, I love you) and some had given up and sprawled down on the raft with the, more sober, girls, having taken over the punting. It was quite amusing. Counting the empties I calculated that on some rafts the average consumption was about 10 cans a person.

By the end of the trip one glides past countless little decks built in and on the river out of bamboo and palm leaves where families picnic. Spraying the people who glide past is part of the entertainment, especially for the kids who are everywhere in the ankle or knee deep water. It was all good and (mostly) innocent fun and unlikely to cause accidents. But when the rainy season starts and the water is 5 feet higher and moves with great speed down the mountain I can imagine that not all rafting trips end well.

Work and play

Axel came to pick me up at the end of Wednesday and whisked me off to a restaurant by the Chao Phrah Ya river that bisects Bangkok. When we arrived we discovered that the restaurant also offered dinner cruises and we rushed on board as staff indicated that departure was imminent. We didn’t quite know what we had signed up. It was a two hour dinner cruise through Bangkok, one half hour upstream and one half hour downstream from the restaurant.

I had barely been in Bangkok and only knew the airport, the hotel and a few places in the neighborhood of the hotel which is in the middle of the commercial district, and might as well have been Los Angeles.

Axel had been exploring other neighborhoods and was now able to show me the places (main temple, palace) he had visited.  It was a national Buddhist holiday and the temples were full and festive. It was the best way for me to see the number and variety of Bangkok’s many temples, as all were lit up to see in their full glory while we were sliding by and eating yet another spicy Thai dinner.

On Thursday the expert presentations and powerpoints were done and it was time to funnel all the inputs into a limited set of critical and actionable ideas that would not overwhelm the participants when they’d get home.

The shift meant that my role changed: until then I had played the role of traffic police and ensured that slides were loaded on the right computer and formatted correctly. On Thursday my task became more intense and demanding. I created various structures and processes that would allow the distilling, checking, and focusing of the content presented thus far and making sure people applied their best possible thinking.  I also slipped in a thing or two about leadership, something that is taken for granted and misunderstood at the same time. There was a great thirst for more about this but this was not my conference.

In the evening the talent show took place as I had envisioned it. To everyone’s surprise, four days after I asked for talent show contributions we had 14 acts and quite a few displays of talent.

I opened with a poem that chronicled the conference from start to end, followed by the partners (GDF, TBA, WHO, GFATM, with a solidarity song accompanied by guitar played on an iPad. The conference organizing committee composed new TB lyrics on a South African song. We had a fashion show where all those in national dress were called on the stage. My dress, a facilitator uniform, was made out of paper and held together by blue artist tape and staples, and was decorated with hotel mints and markers. We watched samba dancing that included the Zimbabweans who surprised us with their fearlessness.  Also fearless were the Burmese with a dance and song and the always giggling team of Filipinos (the youngest participants). They pulled me in to dance the cha-cha-cha. For once everyone found me stumbling and unprepared.

The SADC countries sang and danced in a way that made it hard to sit still, bringing the Pakistanis right onto the stage. There was a slide show of the modeling clay products produced by various participants who had understood what these colored ‘sticks’ were for and some storytelling and jokes. We finished with a slideshow put together by a representative and expert photographer from WHO-Geneva who inserted call-outs in his slides that got everyone in stitches. What we saw was a demonstration of the the Pygmalion effect (remember My Fair lady?): people live up to the expectations you have of them.

On Friday at noon the conference came to a high energy end with the usual concerns about how to keep this up. It won’t of course and we all know it. Still, the participants expressed intentions and proposed mechanisms to encourage the partners and our own staff in the field and at HQ to help stay in touch, follow up and provide support and encouragement to the country teams. We produced a Bangkok Commitments document that took 90  minutes to be drafted (not bad, considering we had 53 people doing the drafting) and then another hour edit the product.  We pasted it on a large board with the conference title and sponsor logos and then everyone signed. We said our goodbyes over lunch and everyone fanned out over Bangkok while we headed out to airport for our flight to Chiangmai in the north where we are now enjoying the first of 3 days of R&R.

Energy and tired feet

The TB conference is going as I hoped it would be. It makes for long days for all of us in the organizing team but the pieces are falling nicely into place and producing the hoped for energy and engagement. I even got some people to agree to perform an act on talent night (Thursday), something that my colleagues unanimously told me would not work. I like to prove people wrong. I also think that people rise to the challenge when they are presented with one, especially one as enjoyable as showing one’s talents (even though everyone denies having talents) or showing something from one’s country that is a source of pride (poetry, songs, dances).

Axel traipsed all over town using various forms of transports, including a river taxi, to get to the largest temple in Bangkok for a three hour meditation lesson/session. For this he got up at 5 AM to catch the 7 AM session. But the assigned monk had wandered off and he was entertained by the monk in charge of ‘foreign meditation’ who told him in broken English about his trials and tribulations with the US customs department for somewhat unBuddhist actions. Since the assigned monk for the foreigners didn’t come back till 1 PM Axel had time on his hands and visited the nearby Royal Palace (no longer occupied). He did this in the company of some 10 thousand Chinese and Japanese visitors, all lining up behind flags on sticks and taking selfies at every corner, holding their fingers in V formation in back of each others’ heads.

And so this is how, through Axel’s discoveries, I am experiencing Bangkok (and previously Cambodia) vicariously, from stories and photos.

We dined in an English pub because it served oysters and tapas and good beer. Tomorrow is a Buddhist holiday and alcohol will not be available in public places, so people appeared to be drinking for two days.

Our feet were aching, mine from thinking on my feet most of the day and Axel’s from walking in the city. Conveniently, there was a massage place right next to the pub. Massages parlors (the proper ones) are as ubiquitous as ATMs (maybe the improper ones are too but I wouldn’t know). We walked in and asked for a half hour foot massage. We got our feet washed and then expertly massaged for 30 minutes, for the price of 7 dollars each and a 70 cent tip. I can imagine going there every day, even late at night.

We sat side by side, trying to stay awake, sometimes mumbling to each other while our masseuses also mumbled, smiled and tried to communicate. I wasn’t sure if she asked whether I was pregnant (I had just eaten and may have looked that way). One of the masseuses was pregnant, which got this ‘conversation’ started. I tried to communicate that I was not, as I already had two grown up daughters (hand indicating big) and a small grandchild (hand indicating small). I am not sure whether she thought the small child was mine also and that I was awaiting my fourth. So we laughed and smiled and made hand movements with the hope of understanding but no way of ever finding out.

Endless journey

Even though we escaped ‘the weather’ in Boston, we didn’t entirely escape later. In Japan Delta decided to wait for the very delayed connecting flight from Detroit. As a result we left Narita 3 hours later than scheduled. By the time we approached Bangkok the weather was so bad and the air so choppy that the captain decided to cancel our last meal on the plane.

We arrived tired and hungry at the enormous Suvamabhumi International airport amidst thousands of holiday makers, mostly from China and Japan at 2 AM in the morning.  It took us a while to figure out that our hotel, although of the same chain, was not the one at the airport but rather 45 minutes away. The seemingly endless lines at the public taxi stand, with taxis trickling in at a snail’s pace, pushed us to return to the terminal and rent a limo, something we had at first thumbed our noses at because it was three times the cost of a public taxi. The Thai currency is the Baht. Like any other unknown local currency which relates unfavorably to the dollar, it presents itself with intimidating zero’s. In the end our ‘expensive’ limo-taxi ride was less than half the price we paid for the same distance from our home to Logan airport.

By the time we had made up for our missed meal through the hotel’s night menu service, it was 4:30 AM. This was only 3 hours away from our wake up call to return to the airport for the last leg of our journey to Cambodia. Once again, we joined a cast of thousands: pale Japanese and tanned Northern Europeans snaked their way through this and that line to get to their respective planes. As a mantra I kept repeating Mark Twain’s words: if you are patient you can wait much faster.

By the gates we said our goodbyes for the week: Axel boarded the Siem Reap flight and I boarded the Phnom Penh flight. I arrived at the lovely Plantation Hotel, sipped from a fresh coconut while waiting for my room and then fell into a deep sleep from which it took me at least 30 minutes to recover.  I had, after all, missed 3 nights.

A little groggy I joined my colleagues for dinner in a shopping mall where all of Phnom Penh seemed to hang out for Sunday fun. There we met one of our counterparts who had been so kind to sacrifice his Sunday evening to give us the lay of the wheelchair land in Cambodia. I had a hard time keeping up with the long list of acronyms and the cast of characters that make up a complex web of interactions, agendas, needs, priorities and habits. It was a French restaurant with a buffet that was essentially French with some light Italian and Cambodian influences.

I had booked a massage, the last slot at 9 PM, to help me resume my sleep without difficulty. Our informant had offered to drop us off at the hotel after our meal. I soon regretted that we had accepted his offer as he had forgotten where he had parked his car in the large mall garage. For about 15 minutes we searched for a car that we would not recognize even if we stood in front of it – with a color shared that is rather ubiquitous here. Although I arrived a little at the hotel I got my full hour of expert massage after which I sank into a long and deep sleep.