Nakhom Pathom

I can talk briefly about Natkon Pathom, a district to the west of Bangkok, but what I really want to talk about is our new "reader" for those following this blog. I saw her reading the newspaper in the office and I asked the manager, who is bilingual, to ask her how she feels about her new reading abilities. The manager asked her and she said: “it was as if I was blind all my life and now I can see”

Enough said. I decided to go to the Rose Garden today in Nakon Pathom because I have not been yet and Sylvia said it was quite nice when she went with the Harris’ last year. As usual, I never got there. Since this is the 2,500 anniversary of Buddhism, the Thais have really done a nice a nice job with commemorations. The taxi driver took me, he said, to the most beautiful street in Thailand and it may well have been. About an hour west of Bangkok we went past Uttayan where I took the picture of the bronze Buddha while soaking my feet in mud, I might add. (They even water the grass here!). There were beautiful ponds, scriptures on stones written in Thai and lovely art work as you can see from the pictures. Mandalay has something similar in what they call the biggest book in the world, but it is written in Sanskrit I believe. Here, these huge slabs were written in Thai so at least people, who are literate, can read Buddhist teachings, I assume.

On the way to the gardens, we naturally had to sample the best restaurant around ( why not, I was paying) and then visit two wats. The wats, interestingly enough, both had markets all around them ( as they all do) as well as schools attached to the premises. As I have said in earlier blogs, I am sure it is similar to Biblical days where Jesus took such exception to trading near a religious site the Temple) but Buddhism seems to have a different understanding of spirituality anyway. I do not want to try to explain it, because I can’t, but the hordes of people that visit specific Temples take the whole “package” and visit specific Wats if they want to pray for good health, or wealth, or love or whatever it is they are looking for. There is a wat for everything. Once they are there, why not pick up the week’s shopping and have a good lunch. They spend the whole day at the Wat anyway, sitting on the floor, meditating, attending lectures or adorning the Buddhas with gold leaf. Quite a different concept then the Judeao-Christian service.

Tomorrow, I have to play golf. Enough of siteseeing. I need a rest!

Sawadee Pie Mie Jin

And Happy Chinese New Year to you too! The clacking sound of my keyboard, magnified about a million times is what I hear every morning now starting at about 5 am and continuing long into the night. The firecrackers seem to be on a string and they light them from the bottom up creating a hell of a racket and lots of smoke!

Chinese New Year has seemed to go on forever, even though it does not start officially until tomorrow. The epicenter is obviously in China Town or Yaowarat where I went yesterday. It seems like a combination of New Year, New York style, combined with Chinese superstition and Thai culture. It certainly makes for interesting people watching and/or anthropological study if you are so inclined.

Everything is decked out in red as you can see from the pictures and of course there is lot of smoke from the firecrackers. In addition, people are very conscience of auspicious events for the New Year and are having their fortune’s told ( even though I did not witness that),but I did see lots of scribes writing good fortune messages in calligraphy which I assume they will put up in their homes. They also buy lots of gifts. The gold shops seem to be having a field day, even though I do not really understand how they survive since they all look exactly the same, have the same merchandise and seem to have the same price depending on the price of gold that day (even though they obviously bought the gold long before)

As you can see, the wats are jammed with people lighting incense, holding it up high, and parading through the various buildings of the temple area and then leaving their incense in front of the Buddha. It is sort of reminiscent of the lulav and etrog ceremony.At every street corner people are pouring money into firey canisters to ease the path for their ancestors. It is surprising the whole street does not go up in flames as you can see the fire gets quite high in some of the cans.

Yesterday was just the prelude to the main festivities of the lunar New year so I may go back today to see the streets closed off, food stalls everywhere and of course the racket. Mai Mi ben ha. No sweat. I will just bring a good pair of walking shoes and ear plugs.

I actually work

However hard it is to believe, I do actually work… sometimes. I have spent the last two weeks in “radio silence” for two reasons. One, it is incredibly difficult to communicate from Myanmar and secondly I have been too busy working. It is actually kind of fun. In week one I was in Mandalay giving full day workshops on assessment and evaluation as well as cooperative learning. I remember I used to be in awe of presenters with their powerpoint presentations, their management of large groups and their expertise. Now, it seems, I am one of those guys. If I can do it believe me, it can’t be that hard. The trick is, don’t try to accomplish too much in one session and only focus on a little bit at a time. It is easy to be an expert in one little area, sort of, depending on what you consider an expert.

This week I spent every day evaluating teachers in Yangon to get some baseline data on next steps for growth. I created a four page rubric and one page of open text where I could write what their strengths were and their next steps for growth. I spent at least 8 hours with each teacher seeing all of their classes during the day and then generally had supper with them each night to discuss my findings. They were incredibly open and forthcoming. I do realize that change takes a lot of time and just measuring something does not make it better. For example, one teacher spoke to a class of ten kids as if there was a hundred people in the room his voice was so loud, which he acknowledged when I pointed it out to him. When I went into the class the next day, guess what, no change whatsoever which should have been relatively easy to correct one would think. Their paradigm of teaching, of course, is far more difficult to change and that takes time and continual renewal and discussion. In fact, I probably could never get them to change their style of teaching from what they experienced as a student.

I have also been working on an online component of my work with teachers. I now have compiled courses in fundamentals of pedagogy, cooperative learning and mentoring. I intend to create courses in assessment and evaluation, action research, leadership, and a number of other courses but at the moment, I just have to take teachers where they are and believe me, they are not there yet .What is interesting is that the Myanmar programmer promised me that the site would be up about two months ago and I will be lucky if it gets up today. By the time you read this hopefully you can have a look if you want. Let me know if you want to get into the bits and pieces and I will get you a guest user name and password. The site is http://www.rvi-institute.com/



As an aside, maybe the most important thing I have ever done in my life is help someone learn to read. I discovered that the lady that cleans my apartment could not read in English or Thai. Imagine going through life not be able to read? Before I left for Myanmar, I paid the manager of the building to give her one hour of lessons every day and when I pass edby the office, I can’t believe how hard they were working. Both were getting great pleasure out of the exercise, for sure and little do they know that I am getting the most pleasure, especially when I offered to buy something for them the day I left from the corner stand and asked the cleaning woman to write it down for me so I would bring back the right food. Wow…it took her about ten minutes with her book of letters to write one word, but what a word!!!! She did it, the corner lady could read it and she got her som tam.. I jumped for joy.



I remember Temi teaching some illiterates how to read years ago and now I know the pleasure she must have derived from this. What a different life for this woman as she takes the subway home and can read the stations as opposed to counting her stops, or understand the headlines in a newspaper or reads a note from a customer asking her to do something in the apartment. I think I gave her the greatest gift of all. In fact, I can’t wait to get home today to see what progress she made and find out if she studied diligently the last few weeks.

Chachoengsao

Today I felt like Judah Macabee as I was dipping a spoon into a bowl of oil to keep the eternal flame going outside the Bangpli Wat. That was just after I drank some water from a huge tank where everyone dipped the one cup available into the bin to drink some holy water, I assume! Water played a huge role today as I also got sprinkled with ‘cold’ holy water by a monk going crazy spraying everyone. Needless to say, I lit many candles and incense as I visited Chachonengsao and later Wat Banglpli. If I was a Buddhist, it would have been a very spiritual and peaceful day, but since I am not, it certainly was fascinating from the anthropological point of view.

Since I am shortly leaving for Myanmar for two weeks, I thought I should play the tourist again for the last time before I go. Since reading about day trips in "Bangkok 101" last year, I always wanted to visit Chachonengsao. I know I am spelling it ‘wrong’ but the spelling was not in English, believe me. It is a transliteration and mine is a good as the next person’s, as long as I am saying it correctly( which I realize is debatable).

I was going to take a regular bus but since I woke up late I decided to take a taxi for $35, not even enough money to get me to the airport in Toronto. I went about 70 kilometers each way and visited two wats, rice fields, restaurants and a school. How can you beat it?

The Thais are obviously very superstitious from what I observed. Praying at all religious sites is just a matter of course, whether it is Buddhist temple or not. From what I observed, you start by getting a group to dance for you, then you make a donation and buy some gold leaf and add it to your Buddhas, depending on your birth date ( mine is a Thursday as it turns out), and in case you want to hedge your bets you throw or place coins on all the Buddhas for luck. Each Buddha represents a different day of the week. If that is not enough, you buy a horoscope sort of thing which wishes you good fortune, which is always interpreted as money. I guess when you don’t have any it is very important.

I also witnessed people shaking a jar filled with sticks. When one stick eventually fell out, you looked at the number of the stick and that apparently tells you your fortune for the next little while. From what I observed, it was all a question of hedging your bets for a prosperous and good life. By the way, a monk made me shake a jar of sticks and told me my fortune or something. My Thai is simply not that good but that is what I assume was happening. He was an extremely nice man and insisted on taking me through the rituals and explaining things to me.

At the end of this month it is the Chinese New Year and since I work for Chinese people , it should prove to be as interesting as today!

The Caddy

I went to play golf with my caddy yesterday and she cleaned my clock. Let me back up and explain. When I was playing golf Sunday night, as we were waiting for the group ahead, I saw my caddy swinging my club as she was waiting to hand it to me. Her swing was picture perfect….normal you say for someone who works on a golf course everyday. Wrong. These caddies never play.

Let me tell you about the life of a caddy. They live in a shack near the course with no running water, electricity or any of the other conveniences we have come to enjoy in the west.They make about $5 a day from the golf course if they get a chance to caddy…unlikely since there are more caddies than there are golfers, and whatever tips they are able to make when they do work. The tips are traditionally $7 a round so the most they can make in a week is $84 and that is working every day which most of them do not get a chance to do.

Because my caddy works at night ( my golf course is open at night), I asked her if she wanted to play golf the next morning, thinking it would be quite a treat for her. She agreed after much cajoling on my part since she said she never played before. I picked a small little 9 hole course around the corner from her golf course and said I would meet her there at 9 am.

The first thing I noticed was how she covered herself was with long sleeves, hat, umbrella and the works. White Thais can’t stand the thought of themselves getting dark. After renting golf clubs we began. Her first shot was on the green but she took two puts from there to put in the hole. The first one just lipped out. It went on similarly from there and I did not win one hole on this course with holes between 100-150 yards and lots of water on all sides of the green.

The point of my story is that in Canada, she would be getting a golf scholarship to an American university somewhere and she would be the next Tigress Woods. We are so lucky to be living in Canada where there is truly lots of opportunities. If she was in Canada, who know? She would probably be married, hopefully, and have lots of opportunities to play if she wanted to.

Instead, she is living in a shack, watching hacks like me play, and I would imagine leading a rather dismal existence. Of course, it is not for me to judge the quality of her life, but I know as a marshall at Clublink, I found it deadly dull. Just another small example of why I think we are so lucky to have had western opportunities. This lady was a truly remarkable athlete who would be rewarded in any western society in which she lived. In Thailand, she is lucky have a job working as a caddy!

By the way, you can be sure I will never play with her again. Can you imagine getting cleaned by a person who never played before? It either tells you about my abilities or her remarkable skill. I prefer the latter interpretation Walter.

Koh Chang

As an Italian guy told Josh and me on the plane from Yangon to Bangkok, Koh Chang was like an island in the tropics and Koh Samet ( which I adore) was like an island in Italy! The problem was that because of the New Year break, there were no rooms to be had on Koh Chang and when Josh changed his flight it sort of screwed up any chance for reservations.

About ten minutes before we left, I asked the superintendent at my building in Bangkok if she knew of any place in Koh Chang ( which means elephant island) that was good and available. She immediately phoned her friend who in turn made a reservation for us at someone’s home. I thought this was absolutely great as we would be on this wonderful island in a Thai home just a bit back somewhere from the beach. After our neat experience in Bago, I thought how could we lose?

However, the older you get in life you realize that sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some. The first indication that this was a "lose one" occurred when I noticed all of the taxis lined up at the pier going the opposite direction from the one we were going. Our host met us, did not smile, put us in the back of the truck and took off on the west side of the island where all of the beaches, I knew, were on the east side. I never assumed that she would put me in the jungle!

When we got to the house, if I told you there was no running water you would assume there were no toilet. You would be right…but when I say there was no running water I mean there was literally no running water. There were some taps Josh and I found, but no water came out of them. Josh immediately said let’s get out of here, but I was foolishly too embarrassed to leave because my friend in Bangkok set it up for us so I decided to endure for the night. The only good thing was that our room was on stilts overlooking the water and when you get to be my age, you have to urinate every few hours…which I did…out the window! What choice did I have? I did have the choice of one of three windows you can see in the pictures.

At 7 the next morning Josh and I were out of there and went all the way around to the other side of the island on the most southern beach where the backpackers hang out. We are both staying in our own cabin, right on the ocean and we are both thrilled. We think we have reached nirvana, even though there is no sink, no hot water, sort of a shower and a sit down toilet, even if there is no handle to flush it. If we came here first we might have been appalled, hard to say, but for $10 a night we just love it and besides, there are no other locations available.

To-night, once I stop writing, we are going to have dinner and join other revelers on the beach to say good-bye to 2008, a little earlier than you in the west but should be good. I associate New Year’s Eve skating at City Hall with Irving and freezing my bum off. This will be a little different. I will try to take some pictures but probably won’t be too successful.

Josh is amazing in the way he talks to people and in five minutes we will have a group of friends around us. Happy New Year to all and have a great 2009. Hard to believe eh?