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Published: October 10th 2007
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“The very waters which the locals relied on for their living, in a cruel move, snatched away their most prized possessions - their family, friends, and home.
The aftermath was devastating. Debris and bodies littered the beaches, rivers and inlets, some reaching as far inland as the Takua Pa estuary.
The result was too many deaths and too few survivors. Of the survivors most were children and unable to care for themselves.”-from the marketing pamphlet we created.
The reality includes children with a future only if one is sponsored for them, a life of being behind a glass wall for tourists and reams of volunteers coming to “build up their karma status”.
I am growing increasingly discontent with the life here. It is a head banging repeat scenario of offering, helping and having nothing change as a result of it. Culture shock at it’s best. I am sure I could pull an anthropology paper out of this somewhere.
Sometimes the best medicine is the one that has to be fought for. Another four children have the mumps. Rotjana is also suffering from the sickness.
Only two of the children have medical coverage. Two of the
kids are new ones and don’t have the coverage. I offered to pay for the other two, one child Pa is 12 and little Sa, who is three and is also suffering from chicken pox and massive skin infections.
The staff wouldn’t here of it. The plan was to share the medicine that the kids with coverage have.
I am not sure what to do about this. I can’t process that being okay in my western, singular perceptions, but there is now way I will disrespect the staff by arguing my point.
I can’t do anything for Pa except offer her Paracetamol. I did and after I showed her the Thai bottle, she understood what it was and accepted it gladly. Here fever was raging and her whole body was hot. She was crying from the pain of the mumps and no one seemed to be able to do anything to help her.
Sa is a different story. I understand the staff’s resistance to giving her antibiotics as everyone has been conditioned to think they are evil here in an effort to curb overuse of them. But the child has a low grade fever that has lasted for a week, she is covered in infected chicken pox and has one so badly infected it is a twoonie sized hard lump on her forearm and weeps all the time.
I took Sa aside and gave her children’s Tylenol, bathed her with antibacterial soap, cleaned and lanced all her infected wounds and treated them all with Bactacin.
I went about it with such a directed attitude that no one questioned what I was doing. I don’t know if I can get the infection under control, but I’m trying. If they won’t take her to the hospital, or let me do it…first aid is the best I can do.
I got her powdered and dressed and put her to sleep on my lap with her bottle (yes, three is still normal for that).
As for the rest of it, with the new volunteers here, there is too much help and not enough work. It’s a ridiculous schedule of not really knowing what to be doing and then being anxious about doing nothing at all…or going off to find something to do and stressing about thinking we should be hanging around.
It’s really gotten to the point that it’s useless to be here. As much work as I COULD be doing, it’s not happening. There is no movement on the sponsorship project and I can’t push it anymore without being rude. It’s Thai time on that one and I move at a different pace.
The kid’s school is another issue. The kids do three hours a day of school, Monday to Saturday, but Miles if fighting every second of it. I can see now, why the public system took the stance they did. He will immediately give up when he opens his book. Slump in his seat and start whining. He has to go through at least an hour of crying, working himself into a frenzy and sit in time out before he can begin his work. Today’s episode began because he refused to write his numbers from 20 back down to one. He refused and threw a fit in front of Rotjana.
Fabulous. I was mortified. The staff kept trying to look away so as not to embarrass me further, but he just howled louder when I got up to pull him into standing and freaked as though I had torn his arm off. In the end, I just left him there to freak out on his own and walked away. He took a good 15 minutes to calm down after that.
It’s been this much of a struggle since the beginning with him this time. Even though he is getting three hours daily of one to one attention and schoolwork, he is fighting every second. I am now fully convinced that Military school is in his future.
The visitors are starting to come more regularly these days. Every Saturday and Sunday, we have at least two groups come by. They leave gifts of clothing and food and occasionally money. The kids are used to the routine and the volunteers know their role now.
The job of cooking kind of went belly up too. Because the restaurant staff start cooking at 4am, by the time any of us get there at 7am…there isn’t much to do but garnish things.
I ended up staying back this morning afterall and it was a good thing as I had the time to put Miles through his torture of school. (Malie is doing fine by the way, a little unfocused on her writing, but still doing really well in math and science and reading every day.)
I cleaned the orphanage instead. It’s a good thing I like cleaning and cockroaches don’t bother me. Ick…it takes about two hours to do a real solid job, but at least there is some satisfaction to it.
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