Ban Thammapakorn Center for Older Persons.

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Wednesday January 17th:

Today we focused again on Thai community and ventured to Ban Thammapakorn Social Welfare Development Center for Older Persons. This would be the closest thing to a nursing home like we have in the United States. The target population is people over the age of 60 who are either homeless, neglected, or poor. The services provided are free of charge. They do accept people with disabilities but they have specific housing separate from the non-disabled population. Currently they do have 10 dementia patients, but not enough workers to place them 1:1. We asked what the center does for these patients if they do not have someone watching over them. The director told us that they have shirts that not only label them as having dementia, but also have the center's phone number on the back.

Normal housing is divided by gender with 62 being women and 64 male. We went on a tour of the place which was fairly nice for being government funded. Instead of individual rooms, they stay in large rooms similar to the wards in Nakornping. In each building, there was a large room with at least 10 beds on each side lined up next to each other. The older people that we met did not say much but wanted to hold our hands (and stared at us quite a bit) as I'm sure they don't see Americans that often. I almost forgot to mention that as we were leaving one of the rooms we noticed a group of white people walking around. My teacher stopped one of the men and asked where they were from and he said that they came all the way from the University of Montana! This man was a professor and the students were physical therapists in training. He told us that they were living and studying in Thailand for a year! Pretty cool meeting people from the states while in a clinical setting.

After spending around two hours at Ban Thammapakorn, it was time to leave and go to lunch. We stopped at a restaurant that was part of a larger market. I had fried chicken over white rice with sweet and sour sauce. I was still hungry afterwards so we decided to explore the soft-serve ice-cream place we noticed while pulling into the market. I miss normal ice-cream so much and although it tasted more like Rita's it was SO GOOD. I got chocolate oreo ice-cream in a waffle cone. Yeah I died a little (in the best way possible).

The next plan for the day was a Thai massage. Half of our group would go at 1 pm while the other half at 3. I was apart of the 3:00 group so I went back to BCNC and watched some Netflix. When 3:00 rolled around we drove to Donkeaw Community Hospital for a massage. We changed into robes and went into separate rooms. It was a 1.5 hour full body massage. She started with the legs and probably pushed/squeezed so hard she reached my bone but somehow I resisted saying the word 'pain' in Thai, either that or my facial expressions do not reflect my actual feelings. I made the mistake of telling her my shoulders were sore so she didn't hold back. The most interesting part about Thai massage is the stretching portion. I say 'interesting' because flexibility is not my strong suit so she struggled hard to pull my leg back to my face. The face massage was the most mild and the part that I enjoyed the most. Ironically, for as stressed as I thought I was throughout the massage, I almost fell asleep a few times. And afterwards, I felt like I had just taken a two hour nap.

When our group got back on campus we walked to BCNC's coffee shop and I bought an iced cappuccino while others got Thai tea. Dinner consisted of rice, fried eggs, ground beef, and spicy soup. Because nothing else was planned for the night we decided to spend time playing games. We played a few games of Signs and ended with Mafia. Now, I am blogging but will soon be showering and heading to bed. Tomorrow we will spend more time at a nursing home and will have Sport Day with our buddies in the afternoon.

Goodnight.

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