On the road again!

After 5 days away from news, I came back to the world falling apart. Crazy violent student protests in Guinea, air strikes in Sri Lanka, and a tourist being randomly stabbed on a subway (one of my subways, nonetheless). Maybe it's better not to be in the know.

We came back from our MAP Staff retreat today (more on that in a moment), tomorrow I have a couple of meetings, then tomorrow night two colleagues and I take off for Bangkok where we will spend a day visiting some domestic workers and some German woman who may also be a domestic worker (this part was linguistically challenging to understand... I think the German woman is not a domestic worker in Bangkok, but it continued to be repeated, so maybe I'm wrong). Then on Sunday night (lots of sleeping on buses), off to Pang-gna where I will be living for the duration of my time here. It's in the south about an hour from Phuket (yeah, yeah, yeah... It's pronounced Poo - ket... San Francisco folks, take note) where the tsunami hit. When I first get to Pang-gna, I will be coordinating a lot of HIV focus group discussions with migrants (as an anglophone, I will be coordinating in the sense that I tell people what time things start, buy snacks, record things, etc.... then analyse the data at the end... that's the "whoo-whoo I've gained a new skill at public health school" fun part of it all. After that's over, things are a bit up in the air. I'm doing some mobilising (note my British way of spelling things... I get a lot of amusing slack for being an American and saying things like "gas" instead of petrol) work around sexual and reproductive health rights. And helping with the new HIV program which has no structure. I keep trying to politely mention that a little structure is a good thing. I think I will be making a lot of flow-charts, as loosey-goosey HIV programs make me nervous, though flow charts are generally stupid as well. There are only 4 staff in the south. Two of the others and I will be living in the same building and are only 3 kilometers from the beach. I see a little triathlon practice in my future. Hurray. On that note, I ran every day of the retreat, which was nice me time. Though me-time is a little frantic when being chased by dogs who are angry because you've stumbled onto their cattle ranch. I also saw elephant tracks and lots of elephant excrement, but no elephants. We were near an elephant farm where the elephants draw pictures and take people's hats off their heads. Some weird tourists passing through the hotel where we were retreating (PS- I have never been anywhere with so many flies. It was disgusting. We took pictures) were telling me about it. I was eating lunch with work people and they interrupted because they got the sense I was American and were wondering how I knew so many Thai people. I now think that Americans should be forced to take classes on appropriate behaviour before they are permitted visas. It's really dreadful. So the retreat- not too unlike a corporate meeting in the states, but with a lot less bells and whistles. Nice little resort (except for the flies... if you left your plate for 5 seconds it would be covered with 50 plus flies). We slept in rooms of about 10 people each. A long room with mattresses. Bathroom time in the morning was something else. It was a whole lot of languages and there were only two of us who needed english translation, but it worked out. It was really nice to get a sense of the organisation, the history, and what people are working on. We culminated last night with a party which I thought would be silly, but was a whole lot of fun. There was karaoke and dancing (of the wedding variety: more than the beer in one hand, at a bar bob / shake, but not at all refined- lots of uncontrolled, flailing limbs... in my opinion, this is the best kind of dancing). I sang "I will survive", which was a hit... apparently a karaoke favourite across the world... Africa by Toto, on the other hand was a flop). People went from being their normal serious selves to drunken messes in about 10 minutes. This was surprising to me considering my own friends and their (in many cases astoundingly) high tolerance. But in their state of inebriation, everyone was speaking loads of English. It was hysterical. All week I have been trying to speak to people in English and then using my crappy Thai. Turns out everyone was just nervous and needed a good old gin and tonic to get going. Unfortunately, neither my Thai nor my Burmese improved with a couple of beers.

All in all an interesting experience. Looking forward to some sunshine and quiet time, but am a little sad to leave a lot of my colleagues who work in Chiang Mai.