Travel Plans

It's Friday. I have class tomorrow. My foot is in much better shape than yesterday. We took a tuk-tuk to the Hospital for Joan's last rabies shot. Then walked the couple hundred meters to the Mall to check on email and to post. Email was fine, but couldn't post. The student who had us listen to the classical Thai music last week, invited us to visit a private Chinese-Thai school. He's president of the foundation that funds it along with the Thai government. I'm in his office now, above one of his gold shops, posting. Unfortunately, I didn't bring the cord to download the pictures from my camera or I could offer you some pics of the school.

Before we went to Khao Yai, we bought AirAsia tickets from Chiegmai to Bangkok for March 22. Low cost airlines have made it to Thailand like they have to India. The fare, one way, was B599 on line, but I couldn’t book from the internet store I was in. So we went to the AirAsia outlet where it turned out to be B1500 each (fees and taxes, plus a small commission.) So it’s about $45 one way for an hour flight. We have reservations at the Royal River Hotel in Bangkok for the Peace Corps reunion March 22, 23, and 24. My class is over on Sunday, March 11, and our visas expire on March 14. So we plan to leave Korat Monday, March 12, and go into Laos that day or the next. Then we’ll move on up to Luang Prabang, the old capital in the north, and slowly move our way back into Thailand through Chieng Rai and to Chieng Mai. It looks like bus from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, and then a two day boat ride up the Mekong River (I think) to where we cross into Thailand at Huay Xai.

Catching up

We visited Idiris' wife and three daughters on the way back from
Umphang. It was good to visit them, but we missed Idiris not being there with us. All these people I know because once upon a time I was a Peace Corps volunteer. Only in spirit. The girls are all now adults - two studied/study in the US and one in France. Then a wedding in KKP. Friday we went to the old school, visited Mook's parents, and Gersin's mother. Gersin was working in
Guangzhou when we were in HK and who vistied now and then and who we
visited in Guangzhou. He died of an aneurism in September. His mother is 95 and is still wokring in the market.

Then we got ready to drive back to Korat. Mook and Raksana took us.
But just as we were getting things into the car, their dog got loose
from the chain and bit Joan in the leg. We went to the clinic where
they cleaned it, gave her antibiotics, and gave her a rabies shot.
She will have two more. One Monday, then next Friday. They don't do
it in the stomach any more. The dog did have rabies shots last
August, but the doctor said it was better to be sure. They will also
watch the dog to see it doesn't get sick. Joan felt good yesterday morning - there was no pain and things are getting better. There were a couple of puncture
wounds. Joan and Mook and Raksana went to visit old Khmer ruins nearby yesterday while I was in class. Today one of the students picked us up at 7:15am to hear Thai classical music at his gold shop in downtown Korat. Maybe I'll find some time to download the pictures and video and post them. Despite the early hour, it was a very nice way to start the day. A group of men mostly over 50 I would guess, who get to make music together a couple times a week. I'm early for class today, so can post this quickly.

Back to Kamphaengphet

We got up in a very pleasantly cool Umphang. Had breakfast, then signed the school guest book. Mark and Noy (see earlier post for picture) joined us in the van to Maesot. Mook was extremely busy so he couldn't pick us up, but he arranged for someone else to get us in Maesot. We stopped in Tak to visit Idiris' wife and three daughters. It is hard to start talking to someone when someone has recently died, but we quickly were talking. His oldest daughter recently got back from several months in New York. The second daughter studied in France (like her father), and the third daughter is studying in Miami. We first met them when they were little girls and they got along great with our daughter. It was a sad occasion today, but it was good to see them all again. Then back in the car the rest of the way to Kamphaengphet where we met Mook at his office, washed up quickly, put on some cleaner clothes and went to the wedding of the son of a teacher in the school I used to teach at in the Peace Corps. Now we are pretty tired and ready to sleep. Tomorrow Mook and Aew are driving us back to Korat and will stay a night to have a mini-vacation.

Umphang Entertainment

After dinner last night some of the students sang and danced. I tried out using the audio memo on a picture and I'm not sure it works as a video at Youtube. But the music was incredible.

Just checked. It didn't work. I'll have to figure this out. I did have a short video I can put up.

Umphang Day 2

Somprasong took us rafting, then to the highest waterfall in Thailand Thee Loh Su. Here are some pictures.

Happy Birthday Mom

[I tried posting this last night and something was wrong. Then the electricity went out. After it came back on the internet didn't work anymore. But I saved it all in word and it seems to work. And my mom did email that the card and email arrived on time. But the time zones are just too far apart. She wasn't home when I called, then we went rafting and had no satellite connection.]

Today's my Mom's birthday. She's 85 years old today and I'm thousands of miles away in Thailand. But she still is working in the same doctor's office (well, the original doctor is long departed, but his partner is still practicing) she's been working in since 1948! We visited before we left for Thailand and we'll stop by again on our way home. Happy Birthday Mom. Here are some pictures of our ride to Umphang.


Mook, who drove us to Maesod, gets a cold latte drink at a stand at the gas station.









Somprasong's wife trying on a Meo skirt in a shop on the way.
















Some international volunteers. A Dutch woman, Somprasong, a man from London, and a Canadian we met while stopping for lunch.










Refugee camp, UN I believe. I was told there are 25,000 people here, refugess from Burma










This is the house of the Karen twins in the Umphang Dinner Post.










Somprasong's pickup on the road to Umphang.

Umphang Dinner

We came over to the dining hall as the sun was setting. All the students were there waiting for us.



We met Mark, an Irishman and his partner Noy. He was on vacation in Thailand when he fell into a teaching job in the south of Thailand. He is on vacation now visiting the student he is sponsoring here in Umphang.
Joan and I were also called on to come up and talk to the students. Because Joan had said there were Hmong students in Alaska, he asked the Hmong students to stay and meet us afterward.







This is a brother and sister. Next are twin Karen students (on the right) with their sister.

Umphang

I'm at a school in Umphang, a small community on the Burmese border. The headmaster, Somprasong, was one of my Peace Corps students about 38 years ago. The picture is his office and above the office is a room with mats on the floor where we will sleep and downstairs is modern bathroom. The school has students that are mostly from Karen hill tribe families, but also Hmong. About 200 of the students live in dorms because their homes are too far away. I was in Umphang about 18 years ago, back when it the road wasn't all paved (it's about 150 km south of Maesod, in the mountains). Back then it was a very sleepy little village with no electricity. So I was very surprised by how beautiful the school grounds are. Probably the nicest public school I've seen in Thailand. When Somprasong took the exam to be a headmastger, he scored the highest and had his pick of school to work at. He picked this one to the surprise of most - including his boss who was at the dinner last night in Kamphaengphet. But this is a special school - and he seems to have a mission to help these hill tribe kids. I'll put up some more pics and then do a few more posts to catch up while I have good computer access here.

Here's Joan inside with some of the kids she was talking to in English.





Playing basketball, football in the background. And next they are playing takraw - like volley ball, but with a small rattan ball, and you can use your feet and head only. If you look close you can see the takraw in the air. Well, maybe not.

Kamphaengphet

Kamphaeng means wall. Phet means diamond. KPP was the southern town in the Sukhothai period. And I'm here, where I taught as a Peace Corps volunteer nearly 40 years ago. It was a long bus ride to Phitsanuloke (6.5 hours) then we were picked up there and brought to Mook's home, on the edge of the sugar cane fields. We had dinner at at Chinese restaurant in town, Mook invited some of my old students, a couple of old teacher friends, and some others. It is amazing seeing all these people again. I came back the first time about 20 years ago, then the following year, and then three years ago. What I've seen of the downtown is totally unrecognizable. This is just a quick post, got to get to bed, we leave tomorrow early for Maesod, where we get picked up by Somprasong and drive to Umphang.

Bangkok Day 1

Day 1 in Thailand (Bangkok)

Breakfast buffet in the Ibis Hotel in Huamark (near Ramkhamhaeng University who I’ll be teaching for) had this great drink that tasted like ginger. And it was NamKing – Ginger juice. It’s the tea colored one in the middle. Not many pictures to show.. We got up, surprised at the blue, blue sky with big, but not threatening clouds and reasonably clear air, and wandered around getting our bearings. We’re not at all in the tourist section, but right in the middle of many Thai malls and the main street – Ramkhamhaeng – is lined with little shops and street stalls. There’s a khlong (canal) down the soi (side street) we are on and you take a boat taxi into downtown Bangkok. But we slowly wondered down to the University, less than a mile away. The humidity wasn’t bad at all, though in the sun it did get pretty hot. I was nicely taken care of, getting my reimbursement for the plane trip, hotel, taxi, and payment for teaching. Met some of the other faculty – mostly retired male faculty, including Frank Gold from Fairbanks. And got access to the internet and made arrangements for getting to Korat on Friday morning. Thawisak, who was the van driver when we were here in 2003 will be the driver. We like him a lot, so that was nice. I’ve been reviewing my Thai for three or four months now, listening to tapes, working on my reading, and it’s paid off. My available vocabulary is much better than it was when we came in 2003, but I do still have trouble catching everything that people are saying to me. My Thai is good enough that they assume I can understand more than I can. And when they use English words and I’m thinking they are speaking Thai, it is really tough. And Sommai’s few Lao lessons really impressed them. In the Northeast of Thailand they speak a dialect that is more similar to Lao. Sommai taught me how to say ‘hello’ ‘delicious’ and ‘don’t worry.’ Someone commented that my Thai was good, but I would need to Isaan (the dialect) in Korat. So I showed off my couple of phrases. We bought a myytyy (hand carry) phone. The lady was great and very patient with all my questions. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer some people would keep talking to me because they thought my accent was so funny. I think that might have been the case here.

We ended up napping when we got back and eating in a fast food looking Thai restaurant in the mall. Food was good. Called Mook (my former student in Kamphaengphet) again, this time with the cell and 1-2 card he’d suggested. But then I got a message saying I needed to recharge the card. I guess will go back by the phone shop and ask what’s going on. I only called him twice and we didn’t speak long, even though they said I’d be charged per call, not per minute. I must add, that phone shops are everywhere. If anyone is interested, the used Nokia was about $34 and the card was about $8. And the lady said I could sell her back the phone when we leave. She even gave us a little pink phone sock for Valentine’s Day.

These are three different islands of phones for sale in this small section of this mall. We bought the phone at another mall.

American Soldiers Abducted by Group Disguised as Americans

Story of soldiers' slayings revealed slowly
Correspondent's tenacity helped unearth the truth
By RICHARD MAUER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: January 28, 2007
Last Modified: January 28, 2007 at 03:34 AM

BAGHDAD -- I was nearly done eating today when Hussam Ali, our stringer from Karbala, buzzed the gate to our floor and charged into the room.
Hussam is thin like a runner. His cheekbones look sculpted and his skin is darker than olive. He has a thin mustache. And he was excited like any reporter with a big, big story.
Hussam had been up well past 2 a.m., talking on the phone to bureau chief Leila Fadel about the events of a week ago Saturday in his town. That's when four American soldiers, most likely all from Fort Richardson, were abducted and executed, still handcuffed, following a brazen raid on a provincial government compound.
Army officials finally acknowledged the abductions last night in a press release e-mailed to media 11 p.m. Iraq time. Prior to that, the official story made it sound like the soldiers had died in battle, not murdered in, or just outside, the Chevy Suburbans abandoned by the attackers miles from the compound.
But Hussam began discovering the truth earlier this week, having heard from the police in the neighboring town of Hilla, where the Suburbans -- and the slain Americans -- were found. But the U.S. Army refused to confirm or deny the account until The Associated Press sent a report over its wire last night. . . .

At dusk on Saturday, Jan. 20, Hussam was in his house, a few hundred yards from the compound, when he heard a huge explosion. He raced out the door and headed toward the sound of gunfire. Early-arriving pilgrims in the streets were scattering. Hussam thought a mortar had landed in their midst. Then he saw smoke rising from the compound. Was it a car bomb, he wondered?
With snipers on the roofs, he didn't want to get too close to the walls. He took cover beside a police car abandoned in the middle of the street. He was on the opposite site of the compound from the gate. He could see military vehicles burning inside but not the Suburbans roaring off with their captives.
Women and children were racing out of a small door in the wall to his left. They had been visiting their men in jail. Hussam asked what they had seen, but they wouldn't talk to him.
It grew very dark. The power was cut. The gunfire had stopped. Hussam made his way to the gate. The guards were still jumpy and excited. He asked them who the attackers were.
"Americans! It was the Americans!" they shouted.
As surreal as Iraq can be, that still made no sense to Hussam. But the attackers came up in a half-dozen or more Suburbans, just like Americans travel. They had U.S. documents and wore U.S. uniforms. At least one was very light-skinned and spoke in English. {Get the whole Anchorage Daily News story clicking here.]

Think about what this means. Iraqi insurgents or maybe Al-Qaida, or Iranians got US vehicles, or US looking vehicles, dressed in US uniforms, with US papers, breeze past the checkpoint, attack, and kidnap four American soldiers. One of the reasons I thought our invasion of Iraq was a mistake from the beginning was that I knew we were sending young American troops into a culture they knew nothing about, where people speak a language they don't understand. As a former Peace Corps volunteer who lived as the only American in a small Northern Thai provincial capital for a year (a second volunteer showed up the second year) I understand a little bit about living in a foreign culture. And we had enough intensive Thai language training before we left that I could get by in Thai (emphasis on 'get by') when I arrived. That was good because my Thai was better than the English of most of the people I met. I know how totally ignorant I was - despite our language and cultural training - when I arrived. And the more language and culture I learned, the more I realized how much more there was that I would never comprehend.

So our troops were going to be dependent on Arabic speaking interpreters. But how do you know which interpreters are on 'our' side? So we are in a country, where, for the most part, we are dependent on bi-lingual Iraqis for communication. Yes, I know there are some American soldiers trained in Arabic, just like I was trained in Thai. I could get by, but I certainly didn't understand everything they were saying, or the nuances, or even the irony.

And the war is in their home territory. Where they know when things feel abnormal. Where they have relatives and friends. Where they know the shortcuts between the houses, between the towns. Where they had secret hiding places as kids. US soldiers know none of this.

And many of them speak English. Certainly far more Iraqis speak pretty good English than American troops speak even the most basic Arabic. I know about translators, because a person in my town took English lessons from me because she wanted to deal directly with the foreigners building the road in our area when she negotiated with them to lease the dump trucks she owned. The Thai translator the foreigners had was shaking down all the would-be contractors for kickbacks. In the end, she woke me up one morning at 6am insisting I had to come as her translator because her English wasn't good enough yet. And afterward the foreigners offered me the job as translator, because they knew theirs wasn't conveying everything honestly. (I didn't take the job, I had my classes to teach.) And I know about translators because of a research trip to Beijing with my Hong Kong college students. My students quietly told me what was actually being said as opposed to what the translator had conveyed. This wasn't about bribes, but about Chinese ideas of what is appropriate and inappropriate to say. So that my questions sometimes were rephrased, which explained why the answers made little sense sometimes. Also, because direct translations from one language to another are very difficult to make. The translations are literally accurate, but the words in English don't mean what they mean in the original language.

So already, just the problems of going into a different country, without knowing the culture, without having historical links and personal connections, put us in a real disadvantage. In this newsreport, it is the Iraqi reporter who lives in the neighborhood, was there when the kidnapping took place, and could go around and ask the soldiers and others what happened, who got the story. Not the American journalists trapped in the green zone. [after reading the blog I need to correct this, he isn't in the Green Zone, but he has been, so far, trapped in his hotel.] So even the journalists are relying on the word of Iraqis who may well be accurate reporters of what happened, or could even be plants for the opposition. It takes a while to develop the kind of relationship and cultural sensitivity to know the difference.

Aside from my own overseas experience, the film, Battle of Algiers, about the uprising in Algiers that eventually got the French out and gained Algeria's independence, taught me long ago how difficult it is to fight an urban war in a foreign land against a united people. I was glad to see the film was on the must-see list in Washington, DC a couple of years ago. Apparently the right people didn't see it, or if they did, thought like the French, that they knew better. Given our involvement in Iraq and Afganistan, I think all Americans ought to slip down to their video rental store and check it out. Even if they have to read the subtitles.

But all of those comments are just background for the real importance of this story. First, note that in the story "At least one was very light-skinned and spoke in English." There is an assumption that Americans are 'very light skinned." Or that Iraqis are not. Of course, we know that the US military is made up of soldiers of every shade of skin.

Second, whoever conducted this raid, understood the Americans far better than the Americans understand them. They were able to disguise themselves as Americans. These are people every bit as smart as the smartest Americans over there, but they have the advantage of knowing the home culture and language, as well as knowing enough of the American culture and language to pull pretending to be Americans.

This report suggests that up to now soldiers riding in US looking vehicles and wearing US uniforms and carrying US papers and speaking at least some English, have been assumed to be Americans and they pretty much get waved through the checkpoints. If that is true, and this news story is true, then American soldiers are no longer going to be able to trust American soldiers. Not only will they be fighting the 'enemy,' they now have to be very careful of their own troops, who may actually be the enemy.

And given that many of our troops are brown skinned and have accents, what is going to happen to the morale in our troops? Are American soldiers who look like they could be 'them' and don't speak accent-free American English going to be suspect? I would guess that might have been one of the objectives of the raid - to sow doubt among American soldiers about who is actually American.

After I wrote this, I went back to the Anchorage Daily News website and began reading Rich Mauer's blog. I know Rich and talked to him a couple weeks ago because he'd written such a good piece on the FBI investigation of Alaskan politicians. That's when I learned he was headed for Iraq. Reading his blog reinforces all the stuff I've said above about knowing the language and the culture. So far Rich is locked up in a dark hotel room getting news from Iraqi reporters and news wires. You can read his blog yourself. But reporting is different from running a military campaign. We need lots of eyes and ears. As someone who's just been plucked off the streets of Anchorage (he's got good reporting skills, but his experience in Iraq is not much different from most others in Anchorage) he will see and hear things that are different from what more experienced Iraq hands will see. All is new and different and his eye is more like the average Alaskan's, so perhaps his reporting will connect to them more. His blog reports are certainly interesting. In addition to checking out Rich's blog, you might also want to check out the website and blog of Dahr Jamail, another person from Anchorage who has been covering Iraq as an independent reporter for several years now. When wandering around the streets of Bagdad got too dangerous, he pulled out of Iraq, and is now reporting about the mideast more generally.

Borat and post Borat

I think we were preparing for or gone to India when Borat first opened here. This week it's at the Bear Tooth, our favorite movie theater where you can have dinner while you eat and movies are only $3.

So after all the hype it seemed to me that Borat was Everything is Illuminated plus Candid Camera with no boundaries. It would have been hard to take all the Jew jokes if Cohen weren't Jewish. Making that a running theme, sort of gave him permission to hit on everyone else.


[Hey, I know the pics are fuzzy, but it was dark and I don't like using the flash, and here especially it would have been tacky. Anyway, you get the point of how the Bear Tooth works.]

I got to talk about it afterward at a returned peace corps volunteer party - with people who hadn't seen the film, but had heard about it. In Germany it is illegal to publicly deny the holocaust. For an American, that grates badly against my First Amendment sensitivities. Our ideology is that if your ideas are good, through open discussion they will win out. Suppressing people's thought only drives it underground. I say ideology there because I'm sure the Founding Fathers did little or no empirical study on this and we know that those who can control access to information or to dissemination media can screw up that assumption, at least in the short run. But it seems to me that neo-Nazis are alive and well in Germany despite the prohibition.

Well, Borat made me realize how much we self censor in the US. Given what I see in the movies and on tv it's hard to believe that we self censor at all. But Borat really was over the top - especially in putting down lots of different types of people. And in exposing people who agreed with his racist, sexist, and other prejudiced ranting. (Though someone said they'd seen a tv interview of the car salesman - who told him how fast he needed to drive to kill Gypsies - who said he'd actually questioned his goal of killing gypsies and finally said 30 miles an hour to shut him up after constantly being asked the question. So we don't know what people really said and what was edited. But this wasn't supposed to be a documentary, it's a made up story, so I'll allow him that much.)

The point I'm trying to get to is that it is probably better to have people say this out loud where everyone can hear it, rebut it, etc. than to repress it and send it underground. Especially in the age of Google where anyone can get to anything anyway. The key is that children get the care, attention, and education they need so they don't feel so alienated in the first place, and so their crap detectors are working well.

I know I caught myself a couple of times thinking, "I shouldn't be laughing at this," and I suspect others felt the same. And if this starts a trend of similar movies we're in serious trouble. Actually, I don't think too many people could pull something like this off. Ideally, people who watched the movie started talking about why it was both terrible for him to say all those things and also ok. Life isn't simple.



And at the party I ran into Jack Dalton.. I knew him years ago when he was a student at UAA and a waiter at the Golden Pond restaurant, a Chinese restaurant run by Charlie, who now owns Charlie's Bakery. A long article in the Anchorage Daily News recently focused on how in college he began exploring his birth parents' Alaska Native culture and how he has a flourishing business now as a Story Teller using Alaska Native themes with modern twists. He gets contracts at school districts, museums, and other venues - including private homes - all over the country.

And thanks Sunny, for hosting the party



- it was a State of the Union party and I'd thought I missed it yesterday. But she emailed me today strongly suggesting I show up. I didn't catch the hint. It turned out I'd won the grand prize by guessing how many standing ovations the president got. (That's why it was today, so she could count that as well as use of different words such as democracy, terrorist, math (Sunny teaches math)). Anyway, by her count there were 3.5 standing ovations which I guessed exactly. And the prize is pretty neat - two tickets to the Pamyua concert next Thursday.

[Hey I know these pictures aren't that sharp either, but it was fairly dark, don't like flash, etc. Sunny is the sunny one in the middle. And I figured it was ok to cut off Jack's head since you can see it in the other picture. You probably didn't even think to complain about cutting off his body from that one.]

Henry Giroux and the Market's Encroachment into Everything

I've been bothered a while about our local University having sold the name of the sports center to Wells Fargo. You call up and hear, "Wells Fargo Sports Center." The name isn't just in normal lettering on the building, it's in the red Wells Fargo corporate lettering. Inside are logos from many different companies. Listening to an interview with Henry Giroux Monday helped clarify why this bothers me. He argued, among other things, that the market has oozed into totally inappropriate parts of American life. The University, for instance, is supposed to be a neutral space where issues can be debated, but universities are completely marked by corporate presence. How can one have an open debate about the problems of modern banking in a building named after Wells Fargo? Even if you have the debate in another building, the shadow of the Wells Fargo money will inevitably chill the discussion.

Later Monday I got another good example of the invasion of the market. The National Peace Corps Association is highlighting returned Peace Corps volunteers who are "social entrpreneurs." The term was coined to suggest the application of good business techniques to non-profits. However well-intentioned the coiners of the term may have been, this is part of the takeover of English by the market view of the world. We can only think in market terms - where efficiency and profit are the highest values. There's no question non-profit organizations need to manage themselves to make the best use of their resources, and successful non-profit leaders have done this. This isn't a skill that is owned by the private sector. And do we want to be like the entrepreneurs at Enron? So I hope you listen to the interview with Henry Giroux and start paying attention to how the market has encroached into your world and your language. As they say, the bottom line is...