What we are doing
  
   
 
First impressions of Bangkok
Mouth-watering street food. Clean sidewalks. Daily downpours. Inexpensive taxis. The sharp juxtaposition of the commercial and the spiritual. Care and attention in the midst of poverty. Motorbikes laden with 3 or 4 passengers, including toddlers. How do women riding side-saddle keep their slip-on sandals on? The blessed relief of air-conditioning. Beautiful smiles wherever you go; it’s true!

Ten days into our Thai experience, we have plenty to write home about. On the practical, material side, we half-wish our luggage had been lost by Etihad Airlines (which, in fact, took excellent care of us on our journey here), as we are overwhelmed by the beauty, appropriateness and cost of the clothing and other goods here and could happily re-outfit ourselves in colourful cottons and silks at Chatuchak Market - an open-air, weekend market which covers an area greater than several football fields (a great place to lose yourself in).

Thanks to the investigative efforts of Usanee (a senior administrator at the Mercy Centre who we hosted on an occasion when she visited Norway to be at the graduation ceremony of a HDF student), we are comfortably established at ‘Boss Mansion Apartments’ in a large room on the fifth floor with bathroom and small veranda. We have quickly grown accustomed to the never-ending sound of traffic outside - maybe we are city people after all! Certainly the adjustment has been much easier than we could have imagined. We feel at ease walking everywhere, and usually opt to walk if time allows as there’s just so much to see and smell and take in on the sidewalks. We’re making tentative forays into Thai street cuisine, unsure of what is really vegetarian, but so far the fresh fruit and papaya salad are fantastic, and once we get a handle on what’s veggie friendly we’ll dive right in. In October there’s a religious festival during which stalls which have a yellow flag serve no meat, use only vegetable or nut oils, etc., so while some fast, we’ll feast!

Every day we walk the twenty minutes to the Mercy Centre, sometimes picking up half a pineapple chopped into bite-sized pieces, and maybe half a papaya or melon, and wend our way through exciting traffic, along a stretch of klong (canal), where the waters sluggishly flow, full of rubbish and the occasional monitor lizard (which we mistook for a mini-Loch Ness Monster the first time we saw one - tongue flickering, 5-6 feet long), below rudimentary shanty-housing. Many of the houses have clothes hung carefully outside, splashes of colour above the murky channels and muddy banks. Although at one level we note the poverty that people live in and wish that things were different, at another level it’s just the way things are, the community we find ourselves in, the walk to work, something interesting to photograph…we have lots of mixed feelings that will take some time to percolate through our systems.

We’ve had two weekends here, and have taken the opportunity to play tourists to the hilt! Last weekend two of the young(er) volunteers, who helped us enormously when we first arrived, took us to the National Museum, the abovementioned market, and Lumpini Park - a relatively vast tract of green in the centre of the city. Today we took ourselves off to Wat Po, a huge temple complex, and wandered back via Chinatown, passing through a packed, heaving hardware market. The national monuments and complexes are richly decorated and well-laid out, very accessible and pleasant to walk around, although in today’s searing heat we recalled the line about, “....mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." The air-conditioned relief provided by the Sky Train (an overground railway) was absolute bliss. There are a number of ways to get around the city: bus, taxi, subway, Sky Train, tuk-tuk (three-wheeled motor rickshaw), motorbike, river taxis…next weekend we'll be going on an excursion to the floating market early Saturday morning to mark the end of a German volunteer’s stint. We’ll write about that in the next instalment, which, by the way, will be at the end of the month! If possible we will be aiming to add text and photos every 15 days or so. If you have any special requests, would like to hear about anything in particular or see anything in particular, just e-mail us and we’ll do our best to comply with requests that are likely to meet with broad approval!

First impressions of the Mercy Centre
We’ve been wonderfully received by the Mercy Centre from the moment we arrived. We were encouraged to spend some days looking around and trying to get an idea of where we could be most useful. Ultimately Fr. Joe told Edmund that the Art Room was to be his domain, assigned him a team of three women to help run things and interpret, and gave him virtually carte blanche to do as he wished! This weekend the action got underway: small groups of enthusiastic budding artists from different sections of the centre were allocated walls of the Art Room to paint, and they got right down to it. From what we’ve seen around the place, art as a therapeutic tool, as a means of self-expression, as an enjoyable pastime will be warmly welcomed by many! It should keep Edmund and his partners very busy. Angie’s English teaching starts in earnest tomorrow. She’ll be working with students from many different parts of the foundation: 16-year-old girls, 11 year old boys, young people who have come late to education and are now studying at the new school that’s been set up at the Mercy Centre, two of their teachers, members of the team who support people with AIDS in the community, and others. It’s a flexible feast here, to some degree; change is to be expected. When we next write we will have had time to get into a bit of a rhythm and will be able to elaborate on what we’re doing.
 

The last two weeks of September

At the Centre
A month into our stay here, we have had time to settle in, to feel our way into what we can do. Adaptability is a quality that is important here - volunteers are coming and going, schedules are changing, visitors and sponsors drop in and have to be attended to, and then there are the regular, daily crises that inevitably occur. Coming from a non-Asian culture, we've become aware of some of the differences that are characterising our experience at the Mercy Centre. Our early impressions - and because we're new to the place and the language we are still only talking surface impressions - are that things happen in their own time. There are periods of real busy-ness and periods of not much appearing to happen...and that's O.K. This is reflected in what Edmund is doing in the Art Room, where sometimes the place is bustling with activity and sometimes he's having to accept a certain lull. Similarly, Angie often has big blocks of free time in the mornings, which is lovely as it usually translates into time to prepare lessons, but it's unhurried and "soft". We're so accustomed to goal-oriented activity, to "being busy" all the time that it's become almost an expectation we place on ourselves. The more gentle approach we're finding here is good and fine, and we're adjusting to it.

This leads us to think about sweeping our apartment. We bought a small hand brush with very soft bristles, and a couple of times a week we sweep the floor, which is made of white tiles. It quickly became clear that vigorous sweeping would be counterproductive: the feathery dust motes just flew everywhere, defying any efforts to be captured. So another approach had to be adopted, a gentler one, and it's more effective, if not perfect. This is something we are both learning to do as the days pass at the Mercy Centre: keep it simple, be patient and gentle, be there.

We've walked through and past many market stalls and shops where there are bustling crowds of eager shoppers, but the shopkeepers seem almost oblivious to their potential customers. They're sitting on the floor enjoying a meal with friends or sleeping in a chair or a hammock. When a customer indicates they're interested in purchasing something, they become attentive and do their best to sell, but they aren't aggressive about it: they don't waste energy. The same sort of attitude seems to prevail amongst the staff we've had contact with at the Centre. When they need to have their nose to the grindstone, it is, but when there are moments when there is no urgency, they are at ease with it. A little voice in us westerners whispers, "DO something!", while another little voice responds, "Why?" We're learning...to enjoy the moments of quiet, to take the time to have a gentle conversation with someone instead of looking for ways to keep busy.

Angie's lessons are varied and challenging, especially as many of the younger students or those new to education at the Janusz Korczak school are not English readers. This school was opened to serve academically promising students from the slum, preparing them for possible scholarships at UWC's and other educational institutions. It's also for young people who are coming late to education, offering them literacy and through that an opportunity to broaden their choice of occupations. Many of them have been in prison. Most of them are in their teens, though some of the children from the AIDS section of the Mercy Centre attend when they can. The population in the two classes at the school is very mixed. Kindergarten teachers have been hired to work with the students, who also learn carpentry, Thai music, cooking, and other vocational skills. For the 20+ years that she's been teaching, Ange has assumed a grasp of the written word. This won't get you very far here. She's having to go "back to basics", to find creative and interesting ways of presenting and practicing language with students whose only exposure to English is likely to be the 2-3 hours a week that they have an English lesson structured into their programme. So far this has been both fun and intriguing. She's been doing lots of glueing and cutting, making picture/word cards for games, among other things. "Success" is when a child actually participates in a lesson and comes back for more. If these students can have positive associations with English lessons, then it will leave them wanting to learn, and, as we've been told again and again, having a mastery of English gives you a huge advantage when looking for jobs.

Other individuals and small groups are joining Angie for some English each week. Two of the teachers from the Korczak school meet her 3 times a week, a group of 5 16-year old girls have sessions 2 evenings a week, and on Saturdays there's talk of bringing in students from outside the Centre whose education is sponsored by HDF.

Life in the Art Room is proving to be interesting for Edmund. He and his team (two very nice Thai women - there were three for a while) have been trying to generate fun ideas to get the children away from copying comic book characters. He has been in email contact with friends and family who have experience of working with young children and their suggestions have been very helpful (please, if anybody reading this has ideas that might prove useful .... Edmund would love to hear from you!). We aren't working to a curriculum, wea re just wanting to make art-centred activities stimulating and interesting. Anything goes! The Art Room and it's various resources have been underused for a long time, and there's a lot we can do once we've blown the figurative cobwebs away.
We decided to work on Saturdays as that is the day when the kids have most free time. We've only done one Saturday so far, but it seemed to go really well. One of the challenges involves the inability to communicate beyond the basics in Thai. While much can be 'show' rather than 'tell' there is a real incentive to learn some art activity-appropriate Thai! But that's OK. We are getting there. Father Joe tells us that it takes a couple of months for volunteers to really start to get a feel for what they are doing, which is one of the reasons they don't accept one-off volunteers who can't put in a six-month stint.
We have some regular visitors to the Art Room, chief among them Note and Galong (please read their story). They are in daily - Galong to draw and colour the same picture he draws and colours every day; Note to draw, paint a bit of wall and just hang out. These two are the still-centre around which much of the Art Room's day revolves.

Around Bangkok
On our new schedule we have Sunday and Wednesday as 'days off'. We've been trying to get out and around the city - there's so much to see. For two country bumpkins we've taken with great enthusiasm to Bangkok! So what have we done in the last two weeks? We've visited glorious temples, most recently Wat Sakhet, or the Golden Mount. This is a monastery complex built around a great stupa (monumental reliquary) which has itself been built on top of a great manmade mound. The sign said that the King of the time (can't remember which or when but within the last 150 years) had asked all the villages of Thailand to contribute logs to provide the foundation for the mound. The effort and expense was put in because the stupa houses relics of the Buddha. So it is a very important Buddhist site. In the days before concrete this stupa would easily have been the highest point in the whole city. So we climbed hundreds of steps to earn an astounding view over the city. Even today there aren't that many skyscrapers and, in the old city near the Great Palace nothing can be built that will eclipse it in height. We climbed onto the platform and the sun beat down on us. It was almost impossible to look for long at the stupa itself as the sunlight on the gold was dazzling. And it was quiet, and peaceful.
We have browsed in markets day and night, sampled all sorts of delicious food at roadside stalls, the floating market, in Soi Arab (Arab street - hummous and felafel for us, sitting at an outdoor restaurant surrounded by massage parlours and other establishments where all sorts of "services" are available for a price!), and at various other haunts we've found, to many of which we shall return. Perhaps we'll do a special food segment one of these days! We have walked many miles on pavement, diving into secondhand bookshops, meandering through sidewalk markets, enjoying the beautifully prepared and displayed goods for sale. Today we're hoping to head back into Chinatown for more browsing, more let-our-eyes-take-us-where-they-will wandering. This satisfies our thirst for entertainment!