Community Vists and Celebrations

So my last post was along the bad mood vein. I had come back from a community visit during which my colleague who CAN translate for me chose to wander off for long bouts. When he was around, he'd only translate if I asked a question. Then, at the end of it all, he asked me to provide my opinion on what had been discussed for everyone there. If I had any clue what had been discussed, I'm sure my comments would be much more releveant for everyone listening to them. Certainly not the biggest crisis :)

It's been an interesting past few days. I've been doing site visits with a team that includes a guy from a Thai animation company who will be creating the animated cartoon based on the focus groups I’ve been working on for IOM. We drove around to different areas so that he could take pictures of typical living situations for Burmese migrants in this area. I had been to most of the places already, but it was kind of fun to go back and show the folks how my Burmese has progressed over the past two weeks (besides hello, I can now say ‘what is that?’ ‘what?’ ‘thank you’ ‘come’ ‘eat’ ‘come eat.’ We also went to this fishing town I’d never visited and saw people painting ships and hauling in fish. It was very “Downeaster Alexa.”

After a looong day of visiting, my colleagues and a few other friends were meeting up for a goodbye shindig for my friend Ayaka, who is leaving our office in the South to work at the Chiang Mai office. I’m quite sad she’s going, as we really hit it off, but I’ll see her in a couple of weeks in Bangkok and again in Chiang Mai at the end.

Some of my co-workers and the Italians from down the road













Thomas (our office radio expert)






So the goodbye party… we go to this cute little bar in a very cute little touristy beach town about 10 k from where we all live. Everyone was having a nice time chatting. There are a good number of tsunami volunteers from America and Europe who live in the area and come to volunteer for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. As the evening progressed, I started to feel like we were at a frat party. Loud drinking games, cursing, crude comments made about women. Thailand is always such a strange place of contrasts. Last night, I went to a birthday celebration for one of my Burmese neighbors who works with a nearby NGO. They were doing a July birthday celebration for the office (kind of like the corporate one-cake-a-month thing). It was hysterical. I wish I had brought my camera to document the hours upon hours of some of the most heartfelt karaoke, guitar-playing, and dancing I have seen recently. Funny thing about alot of popular Burmese songs is that they are set to familiar American classic rock / alternative rock songs, but the words are completely different (hence 'Shot through the heart' is about buying a bowl in the market).