Project Rakchuay (Love Help) - Thailand, Chiang Mai (10-20 July 2005)

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Day 4 - Day 8 (13th - 17 July 2005)

For the next five days, the sun rose early. After a hearty breakfast, Uncle Sam continued to explain the significance of building the dams. He wanted to make sure that everybody in the team understood and believed in it before proceeding to issue the equipment for the expedition.

After a brief photo taking, the group of us together with the local villagers set off to our “Destination”. We didn’t take notice how long it took until D took out the timer and showed it to us.

“49 minutes and 17 seconds for us to trek and reach the worksite!” Of course, returning back to the village after work took much longer than that. So 2 hrs were spent everyday traveling from the village to the job site. I’m glad that we were young.

After a makeshift tent was erected in the middle of the jungle, we proceeded on with what we had to do for this expedition.

For the next few days, we were split into different work groups helping the villagers with the check-dams construction - from moving the heavy rocks, to filling up the sacks with sands and clearing up the area. I had cleaned forgotten how many dams we built over the 5 days. Progress was satisfactory given the occasional downpour that crippled the whole operation. But it was sheer fun getting wet in the rain too in the jungle running for cover.

Every one of us worked hard for it really…

During the debriefing, G told us that when she saw everybody starting to use their bare hands to dig the soils and fill the sand bags, she also joined in the fun. It didn’t matter how dirty it could be ....

This was really a project to get our hands truly dirty and laugh it off after that.


"Thanks D for the photos contained in this entry!"

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Photos

Rice fields
Pass by on our way to our worksite

Serious Work Ok.....
Wait till mum sees it....

A typical day after work
Gloves hung up for dry.....

Comments

[HP]

hey hey, we ARE young,, not "WERE young"! Still remembered that u said u preferred proj lawat. but still hope that proj rakchuay did bring memorial memories to u, n shape ur life in a certain way.