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Published: September 26th 2007
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Ban Rotary Sai Village
This blog is for Mike. Joo is the masseuse I told you about in an earlier blog. She trained at Wat Po courtesy of a friendly German couple who agreed to sponsor her short term training after the Tsunami. She had a business in Ban Bang Niang but it was destroyed by the wave.
Her brother is still alive, but otherwise her only family is the close friends she has who also survived the wave.
Joo is not the docile, quiet Thai woman characteristic of the South Thailand villages. She is plump with bright eyes, boisterous, loud and brash. I swear if she offers to call her 71 year old patron to be my boyfriend one more time I’ll lose it!
Every time I see her she threatens to call him and then follows with a screeching “Joking! Joking!” This woman is a powerhouse of noise and amusement.
Her massage shop is bare bones basic but it is clean and comfortable. The one key thing that Joo has going for her that puts her above others I have met is her understanding and command of the English language.
She learned
during her massage training at a private college in Bangkok that was sponsored by the same couple that provided her with donated funds to lease the land in the Rotary village.
Her two story cinderblock home was built by the Rotary Club of France along with 200 identical row houses in her village (next door to the Phru Teow village in which I live).
The land was leased for five years and she has two years left on the lease. Her shop offers basic traditional Thai massage, foot massage and every imaginably type of Thai food your could conceive of. She is a wonderful cook and a visit to her tiny abode usually takes four to five hours; two for a full massage and three to visit with all her neighbors clambering for some English phrase or word and time to eat.
This whole experience (because it really is an experience!) costs me 200 baht for the massage. ($6.00 CDN)
Joo has agreed to let me spread the word of her massage shop in the form of emails and this blog. Anyone who manages to make it down here to visit or on your own travels. Go
see Joo in the Rotary village next to Ban Phru Teow. She is well worth the time invested in finding her! In the meantime, donations of oils and a full manicure set of tools would be well worth any sponsors involvement!
I asked Joo what her dreams were and she told me she wanted to open a shop in Khao Lak that offered real massage, spa treatments and the atmosphere to go along with it. She could do it for sure…one day with enough savings.
I asked her about her teaching English as she could surely offer the basics to the village woman that wanted to learn enough to find employment in the big resorts (the sort-of Golden Gate of employment in this region).
She simply responded that she didn’t know how to teach. Brittany and I talked about it afterwards and agreed that it wouldn’t take much for us to encourage and set her up with some basic tools to set up a school. We asked Joo and she nearly lept at us in excitement…she really just needs to believe she can do it. Even if, in the end, all we accomplish is library if accessible
English books and a little positive attitude, it’s worth it.
A few seating mats, a whiteboard, some flashcards and elementary school language texts is about all we need really. She can easily use her massage space just curtained off. There are probably 12 women who would be interested in attending, so we have a ready set of students. So, our next venture awaits……
We might open Joo’s School of English! I’ll keep you posted on our progress….
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Speaking of English training, Miles got roped into being the poster child for language class this afternoon. A lazy Sunday turned into the perfect opportunity for him to a) practice his Thai lettering skills, b) teach the kids to sing “head and shoulders knees and toes,” c) learn some of the Thai version of the same song and d) meditate!
All the kids have a period during their studies when they meditate for about 15 minutes. Miles resisted at first, but once
he got the pose right he was okay. He had great fun shouting out the names of body parts in English as Pee Bom tapped them with her teaching cane, the kids copied him with the same enthusiasm and soon after everyone could (mostly) recite the English words for numerous appendages…especially “bum”.
Pee Nok (also MY name!) made Miles recite the 44 consonants in the Thai alphabet and the vowel sounds after he completed his writing pages, he picks it up exceptionally well. I wish Marrin was with us, but expressly requested the day AWAY from Miles today and I relented as she spent it drawing.
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