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Published: July 16th 2017
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Geo: 16.392, 103.924
Pad arrives early this morning to get the papers for Jai's farm as apparently the government are offering payments to help the poor farmers out. This crops up alomst every year. Jai takes copies of papers to meetings about 6 times, jumps through hoops, waits expectantly for a few months and still nothing ever comes of it. With another new government this year will things be different ... ?
On a similar subject Jai's sister Begat is now 62 and should have been in receipt of a pension since the age of 60 but she has never had 1bht. Each month she turns up to collect and is told that no money has come for her again. She is not ther only one this affects but nobody ever does anything about it, they just laugh it off. Anyway, she has just been told that today she can collect her first pension pay out and she comes to tell us about it this morning all excited. She is due to get 600bht - about 12GBP.
After finally getting our bathroom drain sorted out and with the promise of nice hot showers again they shut off the mains water yesterday lunchtime and it
still hasnt come back - fate ?!
We want to have small retaining wall built in the back garden mand the floor in the rice shed raised a little to stop water seeping in and the 'builder' we usually use comes to see us afer lunch. He can do the job tomorrow with his son and wants about 6GBP each for the labour - things really are expensive around here.
Neighbours Deu and Ang are off to seel the fruit from their palm trees that they have been picking and ask if I want to go with them to see the process through to a conclusion. We give them a head start as they are going in their dak-dak then follow on the motorbike to a farm in Pak Chong. They unload the dak-dak and a pick-up truck. They have to fill small baskets with exactly 60kg which are weighed on a small scale. It takes ages loading in the last couple of kilos to get the exact measurement. I ask why they cant simply record that one basket was 56kg, the next 58kg, etc, etc but am told that this is too difficult. It is easier to count the baskets rather than have to do the maths of adding up a total in kilos !! They end up with 30 x 60kg baskets and 15kg left over. The price has come down again to 2.4bht per kilo and although this doesnt seem to be a very good return to me, they are happy to have the cash in hand. Remembering that they have about 500 trees and we have 64 it doesnt bode well for us when we come to start selling in a couple of years time.
We call in at the village shop and order the supplies our 'builder' told us we will need for the wall etc and they can deliver first thing in the morning.
I feel a bit restless tonight and cant settle on the bed. I sit out the back in the dark for a while then go for a ride around the village without seeing a soul then return and sit in the garden again for a while. It is still before 21:00 when I finally turn in for the night, still not really ready for bed.
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