Saturday Afternoon Walk 5 - Signs

In case you needed anything while we're here, just let us know. .

(Exchange is about 32 Baht/$1US, so 500 Baht is about $13.)

Saturday Afternoon Walk 4 - Motorcycles, Song Thaews and Bus Stops

Transportation is an issue in Chiang Mai. I've already posted about the difficulties of walking. The basic form of transportation is the motorcycle as you can see by this video I took while we were eating our sticky rice. The AJWS handbook is very clear: No motorcycles. The Peace Corps has the same rule. When I was a volunteer at least there was no prohibition against riding on the back, you just couldn't have your own. Now, if you are caught on a motorcycle you are sent home.




But one of the AJWS volunteers we met last year had a motorcycle, so I was wondering how strictly it was enforced. One volunteer had heard a staff member say, you really need one in Chiang Mai. But she changed her mind when a young volunteer from another NGO was killed recently in a motorcycle accident. And last night we saw a sign in a shop asking for blood for a young foreigner who'd been in a motorcycle accident. So that is two foreigners we know of in the six weeks we've been here. And when Dorcus - the New York AJWS staff person who oversees Thailand - came by Friday (all four volunteers are meeting with her for dinner tonight) to the office, she reiterated - No Motorcycles.



Transportation is a problem. The easiest form of transportation is the Song Thaew. That literally means two rows and you can see one of the two rows in the picture of the Song Thaew at the bus stop, with the sign broken and hanging.





They are fairly cheap - 15-30 baht per person most places in Chiang Mai (about 32 B to the dollar). More if you book it private or at night. It seems the song thaew drivers who hang around tourist areas expect higher prices also. But there is also the bus. I know there's a bus because there's a website with a map. I've even seen the white buses pass now and again. But I've yet to see an actual bus stop near where we live. I have no idea what their schedule is. (The link above says 'schedule' but there is only a map.)





So as we walked I kept an eye out for bus stops. You can see two typical bus stops. (One with the back of the song thaew above.) Damaged and it seems that way for a long time. Someone gave me the best explanation the other day. The Song Thaew mafia doesn't want a good bus system. Sounds like a plausible explanation to me. But I did find a long range public transit plan that was written by Chiang Mai University faculty that essentially says buses are going to have to be used or traffic will become unbearable. I also found a plan

for a Chiang Mai subway system. Note that this is on a real estate website and all the lines go nicely out into the suburbs where western style subdivisions have been and are being built.

And as I was trying to find the mass transit plan website again, I found this two year long chat room discussion about mass transit in Chiang Mai. (only a few entries per year from 2004 to 2007) I also found the main transit website (the map above is linked from the website, but not back to the main transit website. Struggling through the Thai, I haven't found anything about how often they run, bus stops, or fares.)

So, in the end we use what I all the song thaw (sounds like the tow in towel) transportation system at lot. (Song means two, thaw means feet.) And when I go to work I use my bike. Last night, after some time in the night market we caught a song thaew back. (sounds a lot like foot - thaw - but with the (m)eow sound a cat makes.)

Saturday Afternoon Walk 3 - Grilled Sticky Rice and Temple Doors

We passed a couple of temples.

Variations on a temple door.

Grilled sticky rice.

First they make the sticky rice. Then they add sugar and coconut milk and the banana (it's in the middle of the rice.) Then they shape it and wrapped it in the banana leaves and grill it. Other times it has black or red bean instead of banana. I think I've seen banana leaf strips for sale at Sagaya's. Let's see if I can make these when we get home.

Saturday Afternoon Walk 2 - Weather Change

As we the through campus shortcut, I realized something was different. It just felt different, familiar. Some combination of temperature and humidity and smells was taking me back 40 years. I looked up. There were actual clouds in the sky, not haze. It was a strange deja vu, due clearly, to some atmospheric condition that took me back to how it felt in Thailand long ago.

Here are some seed pods on campus.

One thing on our list today was to see if I could get a connector so I can go directly from my MacBook to the projector. By chance we passed a Mac store we didn't know was there. 1000 Baht - about $30. We were headed for the giant discount computer place and I wanted to check the price online first. The computer place didn't have it, but got some dvd's to save some of the video and make more space on my Mac, and I got stickon Thai letters for the keyboard. I have checked on the connector and there are various issues mentioned on line so I'll wait til I get back home. Oh, it was $25 online, but not sure it was exactly the same connector.

Saturday Afternoon Walk 1 - Night Market Setup

After spending a hot, lazy day reading, studying Thai, blogging at home, we took off for a walk about 4pm. As we got down to Thanon (road) Suthep, the main road south of the University and near our apartment, we walked along where they were setting up for the night market. The tables were still empty as they were getting things ready.











All the spoons and forks and chopsticks and the dishes washed and ready for the evening crowds.






And the spice racks.














All I could get from the person there is that this ancient machine is for ice. Shaving it? Crush it? Not sure. Didn't seem like it was worth bothering them further to find out exactly.

Fitna

The bug post was a way for me to avoid posting about Fitna, but I realize I can't avoid it. This is a post that I probably shouldn't post at this stage. I don't thnk I've gotten my ideas straight. But I also don't think I have the emotional energy to work on it much more for now. Plus, the Engaging Muslim series in Wendy Williamson Auditorium will have another speaker on Sunday March 30, at 2pm so it seems timely to get this out now.

I got an email this morning. It began:

Dear Volunteer Corps Southeast
Asia,

We are writing to inform you of a controversial anti-Koran short film that has just been posted to the internet and the security risks associated with it. Given that there is increased risk we ask that you monitor the internet to keep abreast of developments around this story. If you do not have access to the internet, please make sure that we can reach you by phone in case there is a flare-up connected to the film.

So I, of course, had to find the film on the internet and watch it. Then I read more posts about it, including an interview with Geertz Wilders the Dutch member of parliament who produced the film.



Do I feel threatened? No, not at all. I'm in Northern Thailand. I'm more worried about getting hit by a car or motorcycle as I walk home up the dark, narrow street we live on. Maybe if I were in Southern Thailand where there is a Muslim anti-Thai government movement (and has been since I was here 40 years ago, but then they called it Communist). But I also realize that I got this email because I'm a volunteer for the American Jewish World Service.

And then there are the ironies of modern technology. On this website that features this anti-Muslim film that was predicted to cause mass riots and violence, we find Google Ads for How to How to Convert to Islam and Muslim Marriage Bureau.

But all this chatter on my part is me avoiding the main issue. The movie itself takes a few quotes from the Koran and then has clips of Muslim speakers telling their followers to kill non-believers, which Wilders thinks proves that the Koran promotes a "Fascist" ideology.

I'm not an Islamic scholar and I simply do not have enough information to come to a valid conclusion. Radical Catholic Mom had a link the other day to an article about a Coptic Priest who broadcasts to the Arabic speaking world in Arabic about the Koran and challenges Islamic clerics to refute his claims that the Koran advocates some hateful ideas and practices. That seems a better approach to me. (Though I'm assuming the writers of this piece want their subject to look good and I don't know what others say about him.) In contrast Wilders' movie is aimed at the Western world, warning that Muslims intend to take over the world and destroy democracy. And that now is the time to take action. I can't help but note that the website also says with no apparent irony,

As self-proclaimed “defender of free speech” and critic of Islam, he has sought to ban the Koran in the Netherlands because he believes it to be in conflict with Dutch law.

I'm stalling here, because I still haven't distilled out the key issues. Forget Fitna the film, but watch the Fox News Interviews - with a skeptical ear. I don't agree with Wilders conclusions, but as he goes along, he raises issues that must be addressed. The fears of people are what take us to war. I think the fears of the Dutch people, which have made Wilders one of the most popular Dutch politicians, must be considered, because that is what they act on. But I would also argue that the fears and despair of many Muslims are what causes them to act with hate as well.

While Wilders begins talking about the Koran as the source of problems, he eventually starts talking about the Dutch system as the problem. While he claims that the Dutch have done everything reasonable to assimilate Muslims, the Muslims have refused to go along. (If you had fled your homeland, say because you couldn't find work or support your family, and your new homeland happened to be Islamic, would you just switch to using Arabic at home and start your Islam conversion classes?)

Like Americans were taught about the melting pot for years in school, Wilders' idea is that the immigrants should become thoroughly Dutch citizens. Even if this was what they wanted, even it they could just do that, I suspect (and I have had discussions with European 'ethnic' students who were studying in Anchorage the past two summers) that many Dutch Muslims would say the Dutch don't accept them. I believe Wilders believes what he says about the Dutch making efforts to integrate the Muslims. The problem is that it is from a "the Dutch way is right and yours is wrong" perspective. After all, if yours was right, why are you here? Not an unreasonable question. Except the reasons people are there are complex, as were the reasons so many Dutch left Holland for the North America since the 18th Century.

Changing to a different part of this topic, radical Islam is about power and powerlessness.

Young men everywhere want to identify with the strong hero who saves the world.

Young Muslim men in the Middle East and elsewhere have seen themselves as powerless. The West has the power. The ideas and cultures of Islam are portrayed in the world media and in the global distribution of wealth as powerless and backward. It wasn't long ago that Muslims had respect in the world. I would note that it was only after I graduated from college - it was never in my history classes - that I learned that the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922)

[a]t the height of its power (16th–17th century)... spanned three continents, controlling much of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar (and, in 1553, the Atlantic coast of Morocco beyond Gibraltar) in the west to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf in the east, from the edge of Austria, Slovakia and parts of Ukraine in the north to Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen in the south. The Ottoman Empire contained 29 provinces, in addition to the tributary principalities of Moldavia, Transylvania, and Wallachia.

The empire was at the centre of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. The Ottoman Empire was, in many respects, an Islamic successor to earlier Mediterranean empires — namely the Roman and Byzantine empires. (more a Wikipedia)

But today's world has been thoroughly dominated by non-Muslims and the Muslim world, despite its oil and some very rich elite, lives in relative physical poverty compared to the West. This contrast gets exacerbated when people immigrate to Western Europe.

And remember, much of this immigration was instigated by governments who needed laborers in post WW II Europe, and in the case of Germany they invited Gastarbeiter (Guest Workers), first from Italy and Greece, and then from Turkey. But, until recently, their grandchildren, born in Germany to parents who were born in Germany, could not get German citizenship. I can't go into all of this because I don't have time and I don't know all of it. My point is simply that this is not the black and white (Dutch have been wonderful hosts and the Muslims have abused our hospitality) story Wilders portrays.

When I was a student in Europe in the mid 60s, you almost never saw a non-white face. If you did they were either students or guest workers. In those days Europeans could smugly criticize the US for its handling of American blacks. But now the face of Europe has radically changed. If immigration is an issue in the US, it is a much more potent issue in Europe where the influx of people with very different world views has been swift and threatening to what had been far more homogeneously populated countries than the US. The fear that their way of life is being taken away is quite understandable. But globalization works both ways, not simply bringing European ideas to Africa, Asia, and South America, but African, Asian, and South American people, as well as resources, to Europe. Europe and the US cannot change the lives of others without having our lives changed as well.

The questions I'm trying to articulate revolve around the different world views, the different stories people have. But so many things are intertwined. Here are some of the factors that seem to be involved:

• The heritage of colonialism. The extent to which the European empires - the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Belgian, the French, and the German - play in all this is difficult to quantify factor. The Muslim immigrant population in UK, for instance, is hugely made up of people from former colonies. I think this is true of France and Spain as well. See the film Days of Glory/Indigenes to get a sense of the betrayal that North Africans felt in France

• Economic dominance of the West. While the political controls of the colonial empires were mostly dissolved in the 1960s, the economic control of the former colonies continued. Shell is a Dutch oil company, for example.

• Feelings of powerlessness. How much of the problem stems from the feelings of powerlessness and resentment of peoples subject to Euro-American economic, political, and military control of much of the world?
  

• Factors of Islam? What is it about Islam that it produces a violent reaction, whereas Buddhist and Hindu reaction are different? Is this a feature of Islam as Wilder claims, or is it a feature of people taking advantage of of the despair, who offer a native solution - Islam - to the powerless young men of the Islamic world?
  
  Or is it something about Arabic cultures? Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims seem to operate differently. Certainly Americans would respond with violence if their nation were invaded. We celebrate the violence of the Boston Tea Party in our history books. And Christianity used violence in the Crusades, in the conquering of the Amricas. And the Old Testemant, the holy book of Jews and one of two books of Christians, holds its share of violence and the destruction of people who do not worship the Jews' god.
  

• Dutch treatment of immigrants. Wilders himself has strong words about how the Dutch system exacerbates the problem. How much of the problem (in Holland) is the Dutch response to immigration and welfare? It appears that their approach was to treat the immigrants as though they had Dutch values and now they are resentful that the immigrants didn't respond as Dutch citizens would have.

I don't know the answers. As you can see, I'm still struggling to figure out the questions.

Perhaps people going to hear Dr. Ingrid Mattson, President of the Islamic Society of North America, speak at Wendy Williamson Auditorium Sunday, March 30, as part of APU's Engaging Muslims program can raise these questions and have a real candid, yet respectful discussion.

Bug Intruder

It was evening a few days ago. A large insect was attached to the outside of our living room screen. The problem with not having manual control of the focus shows up in situations like this. The camera kept focusing on the screen, not what was lurking behind it.

From outside, it was too dark to get the bug clearly. The flash was too bright. So, I decided to have fun with the pictures. My limited technical resources here include iphoto and keynote.

My guess is that this critter had not completed his metamorphosis from the larval to adult stage.

The Intruder Scoping out its Prey

Yam (rhymes with Tom) for Sale

These Karen shoulder bags were brought into the office just now. They are for sale for between 120 Baht and 150 Baht. I thought I'd put them up here and see if there was anyone who wanted to buy one - I hope for a little more.

They were made by children in the village as a way to raise money for school fees. If someone wants to buy one or more of them - there are three in the office now - let me kow and we can figure out how to work out the payment somehow.

If you can wait, I can get them to you when I get back to the US in May. Or we can could mail them from here, we'll just add shipping charges.

My boss understands the potential power of having a blog - in fact we set one up experimentally. You can see it in my profile. There is only one post. But Bing asked me to help him set one up too. He's put up a poem he wrote for his grandmother who died when I first got here. I'm hoping that as he gets good at it and will be able to write for the organization's post. Go to his blog and leave a comment. Tell him you'd like him to translate the poems into English.

So let's see if there is power here to sell some shoulder bags. Any bidders?






Here are some pictures of village kids. These are not the kids who made the bags, but you get the idea. These are poor kids who live in a fairly traditional hill tribe culture. The bags were made by similar kids.

Traini's Back In

It seems my mid town vote matters after all. According to an ADN story by Kyle Hopkins, the Supreme Court has decided that Traini is eligible to run.

I've already written on this extensively. It's unfortunate that the only way, apparently, to clarify the ambiguity in the law, was to legally challenge someone running for office for an 'extra' term. I've looked at the Municipal Charter and at the Muni's hired attorney's opinion, and think that he shouldn't have been eligible. But the reasoning Kyle reports the SC used - when there is a doubt in the law, interpret for the candidate - does make some sense too.

The decision clarifies this for future races, which is good and was clearly necessary. Unless the charter is changed again, 'term' does not mean 'partial term.'

I'm sure all this put a damper on Traini's campaign - as Kyle's post says - and Traini may challenge the election if he loses. I still think it is contrary to the spirit of the term limits. He will have served, if he wins and completes his term, more than nine years.

Voting - Thanks to Persistence of Lupe Marroquin,

People are quick to complain and slow to praise public servants. I want to thank Lupe Marroquin of the Municipal Clerk's office for her persistence in getting us our absentee ballots here in Thailand. Here's a picture of me voting long distance.



It wasn't easy. First, I didn't know what fax machine to use. At our apartment building they said I couldn't fax out of Thailand. (To send in the applications) When I asked at the office though, Ew smiled and pointed at a box. She'd just bought a new fax machine. We set it up and managed to send in the applications. But I wasn't so sure about getting a fax back. It would be night here when they faxed. Would the electricity to the fax be on? Would the paper jam?

I emailed to check they got the applications. They had, but they were getting busy signals. At the apartment the fax at the main desk was out of toner and they had to order from Bangkok. Then, there was a knock on the apartment door, and someone from the front desk had brought up an old fax machine to use in our apartment.

Lupe checked the internet and figured out that she needed to drop the zero in our phone number when calling from overseas. She got through to the Thai recording I warned her about, but then there was a second recording and she hung up. I faxed from the office to the fax in the apartment the next day. It worked. I emailed Lupe that the second recording just said, "Wait a sec."

That night about 11pm, the phone rang, and the fax began to spit out a long scroll of paper with our ballots printed on it. So, today I took them to the office and faxed them back. People were a little amazed that I could vote by fax.

It does say on the form, "I am voluntarily waiving a portion of my right to a secret ballot..." But when I saw that in the picture you could see how I voted, I redacted the photo. I don't have to give up that much of my right to a secret ballot.

So, thanks again Lupe for being so persistent in getting our ballots to us. I know you were working from home at 6am when you emailed me you'd try again. That's the kind of service that you aren't paid for, but which is great to get.

Now, the rest of you Anchorage readers, go vote in the Municipal elections.