concrete and (mis)communication

Yesterday was another big day at my worksite. I spent the morning helping pour concrete. The house we were working on had its "sandboxes" laid out but not yet filled. Our job was to fill the partitions between the sandboxes with cement. I started the day by shoveling rocks for the cement mixer. Once the cement was ready, it was poured into wheelbarrows and taken over to the other side of the building, where it was poured into a big tub. Volunteers scooped buckets of concrete from the cement tub and handed them over the partitions, assembly-line style. Then the job was to pour the cement in the spaces between the walls and level it off. The day wasn't hot, and the work was both pretty fun and I was told our team worked surprisingly fast. By the time we broke for lunch, we'd filled 8 of the partitions and had 7 left to go.

It's really interesting to me to see these construction techniques. (John, are you reading this?) I have no idea what they equivalents would be in the US, but I have seen cement mixer trucks with long tubes that pour the concrete automatically. Instead, I got to learn the Thai word for "bucket' (tan nam) and "wheelbarow" (rot ken lek). The ribar in the walls is made of wire that the volunteers twist into long skinny cages.

One of the guys on the worksite is a Czech, Rajeek, who didn't know any English before he came here. While his vocabularly is limited, he makes himself understood very well and has a great sense of humor. They were calling him "Ahnold" because he can heft a whole wheelbarrow of cement into the tub by himself. The other day he told me that "after lunch, Thai baby" and made a rocking motion to indicate he'd been babysitting. One of the guys chimed in, "Rajeek, you have a Thai baby already? You move fast." Yesterday Rajeek disappeared for a while and came back to the worksite with a brand new boom-box. Someone started joshing him about it and he said "gift for Thai people." What a sweet guy.

After lunch I went swimming in the ocean. It was great for washing the cement off my now-filthy clothes, legs, arms, and face. The sea was warm and the tide was just going out. I was surprised to see some of the volunteers bring boogie boards out of the shed. I didn't have my suit along so I didn't join them, but on Monday I intend to. It was too bad too, because I could have given one of the guys a lesson in how to wait for the moment just before the wave crests to ride it in. Thank you, Scarborough. :) After a little washing up and swimming, the volunteers just ended up sitting on the beach and saying nothing, watching the coastline and listening to the hypnotic sound of the ocean. It's not hard for me to see why the Sea Gypsies want to rebuild their homes here. I don't think it's in them to be far from this water.


The most important part of the day came after lunch. A guy named Tommy showed up looking for his friend, who had gone to Malaysia unexpectedly. (This kind of stuff happens all the time around here...everything's very loose.) As it turned out, Tommy had found a camp of about 5 families living very nearby in the rubber planations. They are getting no aid whatsoever. He said that the conditions were absolutely squalid, and his friend was supposed to go and take photos with him today so that he could try to get some aid for these people. Thanks to Alane's many promptings, I was well-prepared, with two cameras and more film than I thought I'd need, so before I knew it I was on the back of his motorbike zooming down a bumpy dirt road.

The camp was a maze of narrow paths way back in the woods. The shacks are more like lean-tos. They are a jumble of mangled corrugated tin sheets that these people pulled off the beach after the tsunami. The tin used to be roofing; I even saw one wall made of a sign for someone's wiped-out business. The shacks looked like they'd fall over if you leaned on them. Inside, darkness, dirt floors, dirty beds and maybe a few clothes hangning from a clothesline.

The first couple we saw were a man and an old woman. The woman looked like she was starving to death. I could see her ribs when she greeted me and her arms were stick-thin. She had only a sarong wrapped around her midriff, and she was clasping her hands in front of me, bowing, and saying something in Thai that was to the effect of "we have nothing, no food, no clothes nothing" and "thank you, thank you." She stood about 4 1/2 feet tall and when she opened her mouth I saw that she had only two remaining incisors. In Thai culture for an old person to be in this state, and bowing to and thanking me so profusely, is absolutely shameful.

Before we left I gave her a little money I had on me, so that she could buy something to eat anyway, and she again came up bowing and bowing, saying "thank you, thank you" and many other things I couldn't understand. It was so uncomfortable that I accidentally did what you are never, never supposed to do in Thailand--I reached out and touched her head. Obviously in the West this would be a comforting gesture, but in Thailand it is a horrible insult. I immediately felt terrible--it was the exact opposite of what I'd intended to communicate. I asked Tommy to explain that I hadn't meant to do it and apologized to her in what little Thai I have, explaining that it was a very farang (Western, foreigner) thing to do and I was really sorry. While she didn't seem too bothered by it, I felt awful for delivering a further degradtion when what I'd meant to do was comfort.

There were similar stories in all of the other shacks we visited, though for the most part people other did not seem to be starving to death. The women would insist on convering their arms with a t-shirt before having their pictures taken, and all we very embarrassed. (Tommy told me that he had learned Thai by first teaching himself "chat-up lines," and as it turned out these came in very handy. He would ask if we could take a photo and then say to the women, "Don't be shy. You look beautiful.") All of these people were sleeping on the floor on on old mattresses. There was one old woman lying on a mattress under a dim florescent light. She had a croupy cough and looked very very sick. Another woman had a beautiful four-month old baby but no milk to give her. She showed us where the tsunami had crested within about 4 feet of her house. The wavy line of old tennis shoes, bottles, and splintered wood stretched as far as I couuld see through the trees.

On the whole, I was really really glad that I had brought my two cameras (the digital went on the fritz) and that I could do something as simple as taking photos to try to help these people. I was just thinking about the power of media and photography when I got back to the worksite and found that there were some reporters there from Thai TV. I ended up being interviewed, as only one other person wanted to do it, so I may have been on Thai tv last night. One of the Americans at the worksite has Thai parents, so she translated the questions and I answered them in English. It was all quite a shock. After seeing the shacks of these people on the rubber planations, Laem Pom looked pretty good.

After the interview, it was back to doing concrete for the rest of the day. By the time we had finished all the walls and were ready to break for the weekend, I was hot, tired, and utterly filthy. Again, though, I couldn't help but feel that the day was worthwhile. I'm struck by how little it sometimes takes to help someone--just compassion really, and a little effort. So, to all the people who would say I'm a bleeding heart, I say, use it or lose it.

At any rate, I had some dinner, called home and fell into bed. Today's been quiet, as I'm told it tends to be on the weekend. It's a good thing too, because the curry soup I had had wheat flour in it and I've been feeling pretty awful this afternoon. I'm pretty sure it's not food poisoning or anything water-borne. As far as feeling well goes, since that first day in Bangkok, I've been right as rain....knock on wood.