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Published: February 1st 2008
The usual view I have of volunteers
following them with a camera. Sometimes I run & take some from the front!14th - 27th Jan
A good start to the blog - I managed not to poison anyone....
Busy, busy, busy……I was the only one here to look after the volunteers for the elephant project, so I didn’t have the luxury of staying bed till 7…oh no, up at 6, get the breakfast ready, check emails. Then in the evening cook dinner, which I actually enjoyed doing - steamed fish with chilli sauce, stir fried veggies and spicy noodles one night, chicken massuman curry and tempura vegetables the next. Volunteers, with this food I am really spoiling you…
Breakfasts were my specialty…boiled eggs! I got a bit carried away with this cooking malarkey though when the shop-truck came around at the camp, I bought a pestle and mortar (which everyone at the camp found very funny - the farangs buying a pestle and mortar ha, ha) and some little glasses…..to use as egg cups for my boiled eggs!
N.B. I am staying with boiled eggs too. I tried to make an omelet one morning and burnt it! It was a disaster, I had to give them the baked beans I’d bought and been saving to have with a
jacket potato - which I was going to barbecue…
We had 3 new volunteers starting at the project so the first thing was to show them around - where the western toilets are, where to buy toilet tissue, ice cream and sausage on a stick - the important stuff. Then they had their Pa-Kam ceremony, asking for the protection of the mahout fathers whilst they worked with the elephants, and making the usual offerings - water, rice, fruit juice/pop and Thai whisky.
Incidentally I had a ‘light bulb’ realization about the Thai whisky - it took a while, you could hear the cogs turning, the penny drop AND the light switching on…… I’ve wondered for a long while what happens to all the ‘yam’ crops that grow all around the edges of the camp, and pretty much everywhere in the surrounding area. So much of it grows and it’s harvested regularly but it never seems to get eaten. A few times I’ve seen one of the mahouts eating one that had been baked/burnt in the fire and had been offered to try some but been warned not to as it was whisky and would get me very mao…drunk.
So that’s where they get the Thai whisky from and why it’s so plentiful and cheap. It works for Nin anyway; he never shuts up when he’s had some!
The new volunteers were working with Cam La, Sam Ruay and Duan which is great as they are all ‘parked’ close together so it was nice and easy to be sociable and I didn’t have too far to run to try and get pictures of each of them walking/riding/ climbing on/off their elephants. It was a bit of a struggle juggling 3 cameras though!
Health and safety look away now
We’ve been having some work done at the studios/hotel. We have a new floor in the kitchen and the building has been painted inside and out. To paint the outside the workers made their own scaffolding from a bamboo tree, which they tied together with string and then climbed all over……and not a hard hat in sight!
Return of one brother…
Ao came back from the Karen Hill-tribe Project in Umphang where he’s been with some volunteers for the past 2 weeks. They came with him as well (I don’t think, from their reaction, that they
had planned this to happen - Ao had just brought/coerced them along) and they came along to the camp to do the ½ day elephant care programme. Two volunteers were leaving so Ao looked after them and I stayed with the other volunteer…..and was EXTREMELY lazy. I actually don’t think my bottom left a hammock for a total of 3 days. The laziness continued back at the studios. I know I should have got up when my alarm went off but…… I’d got up at 4.30am to say goodbye to volunteers that were leaving….so I didn’t want to get up….and I kept thinking Ao would prepare breakfast….. but he didn’t! So getting up at 6.45 I had to get breakfast ready (violins please) and shower and get ready for camp AND pack my bag as we were staying at camp for 2 nights! We also left early as we were stopping at a temple to perform a ceremony for someone. It was very interesting and special, and I’m so glad that I was a part of it. I went along with the volunteer, Ao and his sister Eel. We took offerings for the monks, a quite random selection: a tray
with flowers, rice, water and soup and a bucket containing ‘everyday’ items: water. tea, incense, washing up liquid, salt, toilet tissue and a sarong…..
After sitting in the main part of the temple with lots of other people, listening to the monks chanting prayers (and witnessing a bizarre dash to receive coloured scarves) we were lucky to have a private ‘sitting’ with the chief monk/father of monks - as they called him, I guess the Abbott. He said a prayer as Ao poured sacred water into a vessel. The monk then prayed some more whilst he flicked the water over us - he flicked a lot, I was soaked! - and then the rest of the water was poured under a sacred tree.
Cooking update: we stayed at camp so I’d taken food to prepare there. Received well, with lots of ‘aroi’s’ (delicious) being said - even though I did cook an elastic band from one of the bags into the chicken!
Question: what does an elephant do when it wants more food?
Answer: it comes over to you in your hammock and points at its pineapple leaf pile with its trunk
Another question: what does
mmmm yum yum
look at the plates!! an elephant do when it wants a drink of water?
answer: it pulls the pipe out of the ground and helps itself, and if it’s Cam La it does this many, many times a day….
Amazingly we had more lazy days in hammocks, I don’t know what I’m doing to make me feel so tired (?) but that seems to be all I have been doing during the day. I wrote in my diary: what the elephants did - pulled water pipe out of ground, went on different ride through fields rather than forest (I thought the volunteer might be getting bored by the same routes every day so managed to get across to Pun, her mahout, the different route - it was good to get some different perspective photographs too) and came into house and pointed at food. On the side with ‘what I did’ I have written one word: hammock!
Being Bimmed
I case you don’t know Bim is the 6year old girl at camp who has become my shadow. She is Mr. Duan’s granddaughter and Tia’s niece. Her mother and father apparently abandoned her when they split up (she was first described to me
as an orphan) and she’s been brought up by her grandparents since. She is always smiling and happy but is becoming very spoilt by the volunteers, unsurprisingly as she’s so gorgeous, funny and cheeky. Because I’m here all the time though I’m conscious of her not thinking she can always get her own way with me as well. This weeks ‘Bimmed’ action is raiding the fridge at the volunteer house: disappearing into it and emerging with a yogurt, an apple, a bottle of coke or whatever takes her fancy. This week it was finishing off the volunteers bar of chocolate! The problem I have is that I only know how to say ‘don’t do that’ in Thai and I can’t follow it up with anything. My Thai speaking has become an odd hybrid of Thai with an English word said really quickly when I don’t know the Thai one, hoping that they won’t notice and think that I said the whole sentence in Thai! We’re trying to arrange for Bim to start school, and some volunteers have offered to sponsor her, but it’s a bit of an uphill struggle. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, and without one she can’t
get an ID card, can’t go to school, won’t be able to get a legitimate job…… she’s such a bright girl and I really don’t want her to end up working as a bar girl, but both her parents are needed to sign her birth certificate. O-one seems to know where the father is and the mother hasn’t been very responsive. Mrs. Noi’s theory is that she has remarried and doesn’t want her husband to know that she already has a child. I find it hard to believe that someone could do that. I’ll keep trying for her.
A western fix….
Of the food and TV variety! I had to do a visa run to Cambodia. Even though my visa is for 12 months, every 90 days I have to leave the country and come back again. Literally, just go and come back again. A four hour ride there in a mini-bus, queue and walk through passport control into Cambodia, have something to eat whilst they fill out their paperwork, queue and walk through passport control back into Thailand, then four hour ride back again. At least this journey wasn’t quite so bad, the last time there were
men sat behind me (in Thailand, and particularly Pattaya, like the majority of western men traveling here alone for the sole purpose of buying women to have ‘a relationship’ with - it’s not prostitution they try to convince me/themselves) discussing the virtues of various countries in relation to the ease of buying women - Brazil came out best if you’re interested! I ate lots of crisps and sweets on the journey and had spaghetti Bolognese for lunch. I felt a bit sick actually. Oh yes: note to self: don’t drink 4 bottles of beer the night before an 8 hour road trip….. I finished the night off watching ‘I’m a Celebrity’ that my mum had recorded me on DVD!
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