Ending 2010 in style... or not.

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Whilst waiting for the kids to arrive, Gale showed me round the home a bit. They have a boy's house, girl's house, office, schoolroom/library, dining room/kitchen and music room/hall. A 5 minute walk away is the volunteer house, where we were staying, and the place has lots of outdoors stuff as well - climbing frames, a volleyball court and a football/basketball area. Our house is fairly basic, with a 1 out of the 4 toilets having a flushing mechanism, and 1 hot and 1 cold shower. The beds are basically a metal frame with a board across it, or simply a yoga mat on the floor. There are a few thin mattresses (about 1 inch thick) - I ended up folding one in half so it's not very wide but at least I can't feel the floor - and some pillows stuffed with bricks. Then we chilled for a bit, until the kids came home, had a typical Baan Dada meal of rice with various Thai dishes to go with, did some studying with an 8-9 year old kids called Wahlowitz, who has learning difficulties, but loves studying and has pretty good English. To finish of the evening we all (Emily, V and Nory had got back) played Uno until about 10pm.

Breakfast the next day was more rice and curry-type dishes (the food here is all vegetarian, and mostly vegan as dairy is expensive), but we didn't have any as we'd decided to go on a fruit detox, where you just eat fruit for 3 days. To this end, we went into Sangkhla with Dada 2 in the truck - luckily there were no kids so we could sit in proper seats in the front rather than being tossed about in the back. Once in town, we stocked up on exotic fruits, such as Dragon Fruit - which is delicious - and paint for the volunteer house, which previous volunteers hadn't got around to finishing. When we got back we spent the afternoon painting the house, and chilling with the kids - I spent about an hour throwing a ball back and forth with Ehdudu and Yada. Then, as we were bored of Uno, Gale taught us how to play Gin Rummy, and then thrashed us all.

The fruit diet was made ever harder the next day as we took the kids to the markets in Huay Ma Lai to sell their crafts, and although some smells put you off food entirely e.g. the stall with a pigs head as the main display, and pieces of flesh arranged nicely around it, some, such as the stall selling pancakes drenched in condensed milk, were very tempting. I ended up just buying a proper towel for the expensive price of 100B (2GBP), but the 10 or so kids clinging on to me and V, and following us everywhere made it hard to bargain. Then I spent the last of the money I brought on a 25B jumper for Nietteh who had spent the entire morning clinging to me shivering. After we'd all finished, Dada drove us back in the truck, which hopefully had all the kids in, but noone seemed that bothered, or stopped to check. Back at the home, Gale and Emily tried to teach me and V yoga, which was fun, if not quite your classic yoga class. Then I piled in the trailor attached to the back of Dada's tractor along with about 15 kids to go to a nearby field to pick up some bags of compost. It was a very bumpy ride, particularly when we got off the road as Dada surrendered the controls to one of the boys - who looked about 15 - and he stalled it several times, and accidentally drove the trailor into a ditch so it was at a 30 degree angle for a while. Once there we chucked all the bags in the back, pausing briefly for the younger boys to kill a massive red centipede, that was literally longer than my hand and probably venomous. Then we chilled with the kids until dinner - I ended up playing catch with Ehdudu for about an hour, using old plastic piping due to lack of a ball.

The final day of 2010, New Year's Eve (or Old Year's Day and V keeps calling it), started off by the kids huddling around campfires, as it was very cold. Once it had warmed up a bit we got on with painting the house again, as well as putting enamel paint on the doors. Finally the desired hour of 2pm arrived, and we went up to the kitchens to break the fruit diet. It turned out that simply starting to eat real food again wasn't good enough, and we had to drink a litre of a disgusting drink that Dada 2 showed us how to make. It was basically a litre of water, a tablespoon of salt, and some lime "to take the taste away". Needless to say, the lime did not help, and all of us apart from Gale only managed about half a bottle before deciding that overall health and wellbeing was not worth drinking any more. Then we waited a while for the drink to take effect, and headed back to the kitchen for an awesome lunch of rice and some sort of potato and tofu stew.

Then we all crammed in the back of the larger truck, which meant that for once there was actually space for everyone to fit inside, though the older boys still seemed to prefer to cling to the back, and whilst we were going fairly slowly offroad, play some sort of game that involved pushing one person off and then trying to stop him getting back on. Ehdudu in particular seemed to benefit from this, as it meant there was space for her to put a blown up innertube on one of the benches and lie down - an interesting car seat! Finally we got to the river where we were taking the kids swimming, and whilst I thought it was clean enough to go swimming in, it would require a shower afterwards, the kids seemed to think differently, with most of them putting shampoo in their hair before jumping in the water! We stayed for about an hour, before piling back in the truck to go back to Baan Dada, eat and go to P Guesthouse where the kids were performing.

We ended up being about an hour late, and the had to wait for another hour whilst Dada 1 went back to the home to get the mixer that the boys forgot. We spent the time pretending to supervise the kids, who are incredibly well behaved and didn't need us at all, and chatting with a British guy and his mail order bride. By the time Dada got back, it turned out to be too late to play, and we had to pack up again to go to Baan Umrak, the other main orphanage in Sangkhla. There, in theory, we were going to celebrate the new year. It turned out "Celebrate" was a rather optimistic word, as we arrived at 9, to find everyone up in a massive circular treehouse, built around a big tree. There, Emily assured us that they had been walking circles around the tree since 8 o clock, and would continue until half eleven. Just to make it more exciting, they were chanting some kindof meditation mantra song that changed every half hour - to make it more interesting for the kids - but invariably contained the word Baba, followed by either Dum, Ka, Wa, Na or Da. Apparently it meant something to do with love and life and general spiritual enlightenment. Personally I think boredom would've been a more appropriate description. Finally, after spending an hour walking in circles, an hour being used as a pillow by several bored children, and a final half hour of walking and chanting, the ritual came to and end and everyone gathered in a circle to sing the final verses, and then sat and meditated for 15 minutes, a feat made slightly difficult by the pop music blaring from a nearby house, the child asleep on my lap, and Nory's incessant photography - it's a bit hard to concentrate on spiritual peace when you have a Japanese guy creep up on you when your eyes are shut and take a picture. Then the acting Didi of Baan Umrak (who was very weird and looked as if she was part of a cult), made some speech about a Dada who didn't turn a fan off, and how we could all learn from him and his Baba. This was followed by Dada 2 (Dada 1 was asleep), who made a more comprehensible speech about welcoming a new year, and looking on the positive side of things, and finally it was midnight, and we, and the various children attached to us, went to the edge of the treehouse to look over the town and watch the fireworks.

Then we started the new year by driving back to Baan Dada in the truck - all the kids piled in and prompty went to sleep on top of each other - after a very strange but unique evening!

P.s. Happy New Year to all you people who spent it partying in England 😊

Katie x

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Photos

And just when the night couldn't get any more boring...
We go and walk around in circles for 3 hours :D