Urban Light

I really have been doing more in Thailand than just eating, I can assure you. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of beginning to volunteer with an organization called Urban Light. Started by a woman from Maryland, the organization serves as a respite center for Thai boys who are forced to work in Thailand’s booming sex industry at night. I originally typed the work “prostitute” as an explanation for the boys work, but deleted it – as even seeing it on a screen feels a little too creepy. The boys range in age from the mid-teens to early twenties. They come from the Akha village in the north, but most have been here in Chiang Mai for years. For the most part, they seem as well-adjusted and stable as any, though their lives outside the center are anything but.

The center, originally started as a tutoring program in a local coffee shop, now does a whole lot more. Urban Light provides the boys with a place to shower, a hot lunch, a way to learn English and general life skills. When the boys are sick, the staff takes them to the clinic. When the boys are really sick, they visit them at the hospital, making sure they’re receiving the best care and sending hugs from the other well-wishers. The organization provides rent for the boys who are not of-age to get a legal job, and job opportunities for the older ones. Because none of the boys can afford a private school during the day, Urban Light also provides the fee and needed encouragement for the boys to enroll in a GED program.

If this seems like a shameless plug for the organization, it isn’t – but it should be. Never before have I seen a team of people more invested in what they do. While Alezandra, the founder, fundraises in the United States, two young women named Hazel and Aw act as case managers, coordinators, and house moms all in one. When one of the boys, Ado, had a motor bike accident, Aw was dressing his wounds the same day that Hazel had made a dentist appointment for him to replace his lost tooth. Of course, Urban Light took on the bill. A few nights ago, Hazel couldn’t sleep. With a one-year-old baby in the house her sleeping patterns have been off lately. At 2:30 am she took her motorbike out for a 20 minute drive, visiting the bars that many of our boys frequent. Like any good mother, she scolded the boys for being out so late and told them to go get some sleep. They’re characters, both of them. They also happen to be unbelievably gorgeous: reason enough for a 16-year-old boy to visit the center daily.

The boys themselves are in a league of their own. They’re polite, often exceedingly so, in their attempts to humor me while I try to contribute in some meaningful way.  When they let me make lunch, I burned myself and any bystanders with splattering oil. Charlito, our best cook, quickly took the wok from my hands. When I tried to buy the boys ice cream pops from a man who had stopped in front of the center, they had beaten me to the punch and had no problem explaining that no, the brown popsicle is not chocolate, it’s brown bean. Pink is not strawberry, it’s sticky rice. And white, well, it’s not vanilla, but it’s some sort of Thai leaf. I don’t know what I’d do without them. For the record, I ended up choosing sticky rice and it wasn’t half bad… if you ignored the floating bits of rice.

They treat me like I’m slightly incompetent when it comes to navigating day-to-day life in Thailand, and they’re kind of right to assume I am. What I can offer is a command of the English language. They’re great students and through my teaching I’m able to learn about their lives in the village before they came to Chiang Mai, and their lives now. It isn’t too often that when you ask a boy to write a sentence in the past-tense he chooses “I used to ride buffalo.” Isn’t it always the case that the students end up teaching the teacher in the end? This is no exception.

Currently the center is under two feet of water due to recent flooding in the area. If you’d like to make a donation to Urban Light, please visit: http://urban-light.org/about.html

Food frenzy

Genetics can be a wonderful thing. There are those traits we inherit that make us realize how fortunate we are. Thanks to my mother, I can carry a tune, for example. Plus, I’m not sure which side of the family I should thank about the fact that I never had to endure braces. Being 13 was awkward enough; at least my teeth were straight. However, there are those traits that we could live without. Namely, thanks to my mother, I have one serious flaw: I do not cope well when I’m hungry.

There was the time, working in Kentucky, that I began to get extremely snippy with a customer around lunch time and physically had to remove myself before I ended up saying something that I’d regret. I was actually being genuinely mean to a woman who was not only old enough to be my mother, but was doing absolutely nothing wrong. “One Subway sandwich, please,” and I was back to normal. There was also the time, more recently, that I completely snapped at Shira in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for no other reason than we hadn’t eaten a real lunch. I literally stopped walking in the middle of a busy intersection, threw down my arms, and snapped. I think my head might have spun around three times too, but that might just be my memory taking creative liberties. The point is: one quick stop at a noodle shop later and I was back to my cheerful self.

It’s a very, very good thing, then, that in Thailand I am rarely (read: never) hungry. The question I get most from family and friends is “how is the food?” so let me tell you: I am living a foodie’s dream. If you are under the impression that Thailand is a country where the air smells consistently like mouth-watering Pad Thai, you can’t walk two blocks without being offered a fresh fruit shake, mango sticky rice, or a homemade spicy papaya salad – I want to set the record straight: you are absolutely right. That is an entirely accurate depiction of this country. The other night, I went out to hit the ATM at a nearby road and ended up sampling stir-fried morning glory, made insanely spicy and insanely wonderful. I’d been down that street a few times, but apparently never around dinner time – when small stalls pop up and everyone is stir-frying, blending, or deep-frying something delicious. In a way, I guess, it’s a bit like the food trucks at lunch time in downtown D.C., but a thousand times less pretentious and cheaper. I wonder if I could get them to Tweet their locations…. Either way: I’ve “mmed” my way through colorful curries, eaten my body weight in Tom Yum Soup, and tried something wrapped in a banana leaf that was delicious, and still has yet to be identified. Oh, and the prices. How can you turn down the made-on-the-spot roti when it’s about 50 cents and filled with bananas and chocolate? You can’t, you wouldn’t, I promise.

So even though there are, of course, pizza places every once in a while, even falafel to appeal to the Israeli crowd, I’d rather overdose on Thai food for now. In fact, I went to trivia at an Irish pub the other night with friends (that’s right: friends. I threw that word in just to brag a bit) and came to the realization that fish ‘n chips will always be just fish ‘n chips. I’d choose a spicy curry any day and be content with the fact that overpriced, bland, food will still be there in a couple of months.

Settle down

My job last year taught me a lot. I can turn 100 + e-mails into an organized to-do list with next steps and follow up dates within an hour. I’m an amazingly relaxed flyer, and I can get through a security line at the airport faster than the character in the movie “Up In the Air.” Sorry, Clooney. I am also, great at living out of a suitcase. It’s an art form really: the skill of being able to unpack enough for a convenient, easy stay but not enough to become so comfortable you forget where you put everything. I have to say, Shira was not as skilled. Hour one in a new hostel and it would look like she purposely shook her bag upside-down, like an animal marking its territory. She got better though – and pretty much had to with all the moving around we did. Over the course of four weeks we stayed in 10 different places, never staying at any one more than three nights. Thrown into the mix were also a few too many overnight buses and one overnight train ride that I’m still not ready to re-live yet. Even if the plastic seats had been nailed properly to the ground, and even if it hadn’t been a steady 40 degrees, it wouldn’t have mattered because I spent the night with aggressive food poisoning, making best friends with the squat toilet.  

            Even this past week, spending time on the beautiful southern islands of Koh Phangan and Koh Payam wasn’t necessarily a “settled” existence, as we were doing things each day that we’d never done before. Scuba diving through schools of electric-colored fish, navigating the circus that was the Full Moon Beach Party, even unabashedly skinny dipping on a beach, on an island, with nobody else around. These aren’t things you do when you’re “settled down.”

            But now, I’ve seen Shira off, and the next few weeks I’ll be living, actually unpacking, and volunteering in Chiang Mai. I guess living at a backpackers isn’t settled, really, but I envision myself getting to know the area, making friends and even having a favorite place to get spicy papaya salad. And that’s as settled down as I’d like to get.

Other People

Other people are a lot cooler than I am.

My self confidence is fine, thanks, that’s just a fact. They’re probably cooler than you are too.

During this trip I’ve been lucky enough to have opportunities to have this statement enforced multiple times. Take this, for example: non-Americans have better health-care coverage, take longer vacations and have startlingly better retirement plans than we do. Whether it’s the Dutch couple that essentially said it is nearly impossible for them to be fired, or the New-Zealander who is retired and sitting pretty in his mid-seventies, their countries just offer them much sweeter deals. We also seldom find another traveler who has plans to go back within the next week or two. They’ve always just run out their visa in one country and are on their next border run shortly to extend their stay. Never mind their jobs; they’ll be there when they get back.

            I have also determined that it is possible to find some common ground, and to start a conversation, with every other person. This is not to say that we are all the same by any stretch of the imagination. I think we are in fact the opposite: products of our environment. So while I may never be able to balance a plate of boiled bananas (that’s right, boiled. Imagine my surprise as a bit into a steaming-hot, starchy banana!) I can use a squat toilet with ease. Why? I’ve been squatting to pee since we threw bonfire parties in the woods during high school. See? A commonality. Or take the Brit, who was curious about what we, Americans, liked to eat. We started talking Thanksgiving and asked if he’d ever heard of Tur-duck-en, explaining that it was a chicken, stuffed in a duck, stuffed in a turkey. “We have something like that in the UK!” He enthusiastically replied. “Although it’s with a quail and a guinea-fowl.” Happy to find a common ground, Shira replies “exactly! Only in America, we only eat animals that exist.”

            So whether it’s laughing with our Thai friend God (yes, that is his real name. How can you not like the guy?) about how his childhood in a hillside village just prepared him to be on the reality show “Survivor” – he’d be grilling fish from the comfort of his two-story bamboo home while the other contestants were still shaking hands – or it’s having a few too many drinks with the couple that left the U.S. after college and never looked back, there’s always something to talk about. Other people: just like me and you, but cooler.

Being naive

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit naïve. It’s hard not to be when you’re traveling in a place that’s completely new to you. There have been times, I can be sure, that we’ve been played, ripped off, taken for fools. Generally, we laugh it off. Should I have tried to bargain more  at the night market in Siem Reap? Probably, but three dollars for a scarf is three dollars and haggling makes me feel like an asshole. Have the extra dollar and the laugh at my expense. In another example, we probably shouldn’t have paid as much as we did for our minibus across the Cambodian border, but after turning down a dozen tuk-tuks, buses and taxi offers we were forced with either putting our faith in someone, sometime, or walking the 150 + kilometers to the city center with our hands folded across our chest. So fine, have my ten dollars extra, but can you at least make me think I’m getting a good deal?

As a traveler, my naivety is often the most obvious when I put blind faith in the others that I meet along the way. I have told our Thai and Cambodian friends, time and again, that they could give me any answer and I would absolutely, without a doubt, believe it. “What’s that you say? Thai people are naturally immune to mosquito bites? Makes sense to me!”  “You have actually tried elephant meat? What does it taste like?” And so on.

There are, of course, some things that are impossible to be ignorant to. Thailand’s sex industry is perhaps the most striking example of this. When I started this trip, I was ready to write it all off as hype. Shira and I would have sworn to the fact that we never one saw a prostitute in Bangkok, despite scouting in an attempt to find the red-light district. A few short days later, in a hot spring in northern Thailand, we met an elderly man who spoke about his Thai wife and kids. Upon meeting the family, and realizing that they spoke absolutely no English, he spoke no Thai, and they seemed to want to have little to do with him, I raised an eyebrow. After that point it seemed like the more we looked, the more we saw. I’m pretty sure those young women aren’t actually laughing at your jokes, sir, as you sit resting a beer on your gut and stroking their cheeks. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think these creepy dinner dates I often see or mis-matched couples at the bar are completely innocent. Something tells me that beautiful, young, Thai women just don’t normally go for the balding look. Last Thursday our gut feeling was verified, as we spent the night doing outreach for a local non-profit that specializes in providing a respite for young, male prostitutes. We had spent that day with the boys, cooking with them and teaching them a bit of English before we met them and the center’s lead volunteer at a bar downtown. The scene was just about as stomach-turning as you’d imagine, and although we didn’t stay long we sat front row to the flirting between overweight, white men and the teenagers they planned on bringing home. So now, yes, we are a little less naïve. In fact, I can’t seem to pass any white man above a certain age without scowling in his direction. “Came here for the Pad Thai? You’re sick.” Of course, many of these men are completely innocent of the crimes my eyes accuse them of, but I’d rather not give them the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I can’t stand being naïve.