Sylvia's Journal

The last day of our vacation raced by. We said goodbye to the elephants, the Burmese serving staff and drove into Chiangmai, some 55 kilometers to the northeast in a fancy van. The driver dropped us off at the cooking school where we offloaded our luggage and went to the market to check out the local produce. We had a guide who was just learning English but except for one item, knew all the English names of the things we would be cooking with. He bought us a sugary snack with banana paste and coconut to tie us over until we had cooked the first part of our lunch.

We were the only students in the class and thus had a semi private lesson. We picked our dishes: Axel was going to cook Massaman curry, a coconut chicken soup (Tom Kha), and Pad Thai. I picked a green curry, a spicy prawn soup (Tom Yum) and spring rolls. The cooking school threw in sticky mango rice as a bonus. We first made the most labor-intensive dish, the curries, then cut up the ingredients for the soups. Halfway through the class we ate what we produced then went back to work on the remaining dishes. When we were done we had about one hour to spare before going to the airport to catch our flight to Bangkok. We found a pedicure place and had our legs and feet massaged and my nails colored.

The planes to and from Chiangmai are jumbo jets that are completely filled and fly about 4 to 5 times a day (Thai Airways); there are other carriers as well, doing the same. It is quite astounding how many people go between those to cities. Some of the passengers are tourists but many are not. The flights are cheap, 40 to 60 dollars each way and going by road or train takes a whole day.

In Bangkok we were shuttled to our hotel for a short night. We had to be at the airport at 4 AM for our flight home, first to Narita and then via Minneapolis to Boston. This time I lucked out and got the upgrade I had requested, leaving Axel behind in his mildly comfortable Economy Comfort seat. Despite the availability of a seat that could turn into a flatbed I did not sleep at all; between the painful shoulder and the noise of the plane I could only doze. Our friend Edward who has a limo service picked us up and drove us home – we were practically comatose.

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.

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.

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.