Build (?) a bamboo classroom

Sometimes projects don't go quite like we think they will. We thought we would be going to a local migrant village to help extend the roof to a bamboo classroom that we were funding. We tore off the roof.. and watched as a team of way experienced bamboo technicians came out of no where and started digging holes, crafting slabs, measuring, and setting poles. We had hoped to be able to do more, but there really is no substitute for local knowledge. It was good to be involved in the project and spend some time with the people! Not what we expected, but hey, that's Thailand!

Demolition work 

These roofs are more waterproof than you'd expect! 

Best building material around 

 Bamboo can also be eaten! It's not exactly delicious though..

Meal from the locals. Hand full of sticky rice + oily meat and veggie mixture + spicy paste. No utensils.

Stephen and Justin obviously over-exerting themselves. 

Beautiful views on the way home. Rice fields are wonderful!

Blog Explosion

We've been SO busy lately, just getting back from Bangkok, and with a lot of our projects really taking off, that we haven't had time to post about all of it! Well, we just did! Make sure you check back to before Bangkok! There are 7 new posts to see!

Neung, Sorng, Sahm, Action!

After weeks of preparation we had our first day of shooting for the HIV/AIDS awareness video!

The purpose of the movie is the provide members of a local migrant community with correct information about HIV/AIDS: how and how it is not transmitted, where they can go for help, etc. We worked with a local NGO on this project, and while we as HELP volunteers supplied a lot of ideas, the local group had the insider cultural knowledge what was going to be most effective for them. HIV/AIDS is a problem in this community and there is a lot of misinformation, and it was decided the facts would be best conveyed through a story.

After weeks of planning and meetings to come up with a script that was both entertaining and informative, we put our funds together to buy a video camera and tripod, and the NGO found actors and a location. The only people available to give up so much time to film are teenagers.. so yes, fifteen and sixteen year old kids are acting as these presumably older characters! They were really excited about it and brought a lot of enthusiasm for acting, which was helpful. We met everyone on location for filming, and after showing doing some really basic how to on the camera, we were off!

The location was awesome! That's baby rice waiting to get big enough to be planted in rice paddies.

Beer bottles. A surprisingly easy prop to find! They're filled with water, of course.

These guys had never made any sort of movie before, and their excitement reminded us of the movies we used to make with our siblings when we were younger!  We were there to give little pointers, but they really took charge of this project.  It was so fun to see!

Because of the political turmoil in neighboring countries, we are not allowed to post any pictures or videos of the actors’ faces.

Lunch break! Noodles with plenty of mix ins. It was unlike any of the food we normally eat here because it was made by the migrant villagers. It tasted a little like spicy spaghetti!

We finished the scenes that need to be shot at this location and will continue filming at the health care facility next Saturday, and editing can begin during the coming week! We won’t be able to post the final video unfortunately, but we’ll definitely have more updates as the project progresses. The most amazing thing about all of this is that members of this NGO have wanted to do a video like this for a long time and just haven’t had the time or resources. Cue us coming to Thailand as volunteers looking for any kind of service possible who have time and resources, and something that started as just an idea can finally take hold. With the equipment and skills we have provided we hope that a mental health video will eventually be produced, too!

Even after six hours of shooting we still could not believe the scenery!

Mosquito nets, diabetes, and lice

On Wednesday we jumped right back into working and went with the group to a local housing facility for kids from hill tribes who live in town to go to school and learn Thai. They leave their families for the week and stay at a run down house with other children to help them assimilate better into Thai culture. We dropped off a load of mosquito nets to hang over their beds to keep them from getting bites during the night.

The girls snatched the pink mosquito net right up!

We’ve been working with the health clinic here in Thaton on several projects, but when we heard about their diabetes screenings we asked to go and observe. We woke up at 5:30 am to be there by 6 am, and rode with the clinic workers on their scooters to the screening at an outdoor community center. It was really exciting to see an actual public health program in action! Volunteers for the health clinic are assigned to 10 households each and were responsible for making sure everyone from their assigned group came to the clinic. Everyone who was to be tested had to come fasting to make sure their blood test would give an accurate reading. People were given numbers, weighed and measured, and asked to wait their turn. Two public health officers took blood samples that would be sent to the Mae Ai hospital for a cholesterol analysis, and finally their fingers were pricked to measure blood sugar levels. If anyone had high blood sugar, the clinic referred them to the hospital for follow-up testing and treatment. Awesome to watch! We were hoping to be able to come up with a project based on observing the screening procedures, but as far as we could tell the clinic was doing a great job.

Next we went with public health officers to the school that Justin and I teach English at for health checks. The clinic visits each school in the district once a year and checks the kids for lice, ear problems, eye abnormalities, dental caries, gum disease, iodine deficiency (which appears as a lump on the throat known as goiter), and skin diseases on the hands. The first graders were especially lucky and received two immunizations for protection against tetanus and other diseases, and also got drops taken by the mouth to prevent polio. Since none of us are certified to give shots, we helped by giving polio drops and doing the health checks for physical problems.  Doing the health checks reminded us that this area really is in great need of help! We found lice, skin diseases, gum disease, and TONS of gaping cavities.  And that was just for one small school!

Afterwards the 5th and 6th graders got booklets about how to stay healthy.

A taste of old Siam

When we first started thinking about how to spend our vacation days, we really wanted to make a trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, but the longer we’ve been here, and the more Baht we’ve spent, that dream has sort of fizzled out.  Luckily, our lonely planet Thailand book, provided us with a lot of tempting substitutes.  Siam has been around for hundreds of years, and hundreds of kings, until around fifty years ago when the name changed to Thailand.   Constantly at war with Burmese and Laotian armies, there are plenty of ancient strongholds, temples, ruins, and capitols.   One of the more recent capitols, Ayutthaya is conveniently one hour North of Bangkok, and when we started putting our itinerary together for the long weekend, this was at the top of our list!  Lucky for us, our hostel teamed up with a tour group and provided day-long tours to many of the surrounding tourist attractions, including Ayutthaya!  Tuesday morning we woke up at six, got ready, packed up our backpacks, ate a few pieces of toast, and loaded up in the tour van.  We were one of the first to be picked up, but over the next half hour we stopped be a lot of little guesthouses and boutique hotels, and our van filled up with Koreans and Europeans.  We’re still pretty sure we were the only ones on the trip who spoke English as our native language!  It was an amazing trip and a really meaningful cultural experience.  We made a bunch of stops at different ancient ruins, some original, some restored, and some still in use as Buddhist temples. 

First stop was Wat Phukhao Thong.  This temple was a little bit outside the city, and was built in 1357!  It had been restored at some point, but was still overgrown by plants, and looked like it was starting to lean to one side a bit.

Next stop was Wat Lokayasutha.  This temple had another giant reclining Buddha, but the rest of the structure was mostly destroyed.  Apparently the  architecture in this and a few of the other buildings in Ayutthaya shows the time period that Siam was a Hindu country, but then converted to Buddhism.

We don’t remember the name of the third stop…and we can’t exactly find it anywhere in our tour book, but it was also really cool! It’s still in use and we even saw some monks there being filmed by a film crew. The temple itself was wrapped in a HUGE piece of golden fabric, and every Buddha statue lining the outer wall around the temple was wore matching sashes. It was impressive to see so many Buddhas in one place! Our tour guide informed us that the hand position of these Buddhas represent victory.

Wat Phra Mahathat was a stark contrast from the stop before. The collection of buildings was located in front of the Grand Palace, which is interesting since we thought it reminded us of the temples at the Grand Palace in Bangkok! They were built in 1374 in the same Khmer style as the structures at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Urge to see ruins fulfilled! The most striking detail of this place was the Buddha images. When Burma invaded the city, they set fire to the buildings and cut the heads off all the Buddha statues—ironic because all of the Buddhas here are in the victory pose. We couldn’t get over how impressive the sight was even now, and wished we could go back in time and see it in its prime. It would have been enormous; the ruins stretched on forever!

Another amazing sight was this Buddha head wrapped in the roots of a bodhi tree. No one really knows why this head was left when the Burmese invaded—perhaps it was abandoned or simply too heavy for the invaders to haul away. It’s a highly photographed monument in Thailand, and is commonly seen on postcards, partially because of the mystery surrounding it but also because Buddhism began after Buddha was enlightened under a bodhi tree. Pretty amazing how fitting it is! When photographing the Buddha head  you are not allowed to stand, because it is disrespectful for your head to be higher than Buddha’s. You’ll get yelled at if you try!

We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant. We don’t have pictures because we were too hungry to document it..but it was amusing to see how differently we ate as compared to the other tourists with us who have probably only been in Thailand for two weeks at most. Most people didn’t even attempt to use the spoon, they were dousing their food in sweet chili sauce, and the girl across the table from us took two bites of rice and nothing else. We, on the other hand, ate like it was our last meal, enjoying the more mild version of these dishes that are more suited for tourist. So much for trying to dispel the myth that Americans eat a ton..

Wat Phra Si Sanphet served as the ancient palace for 117 years. Most of it was rubble, but three main chedi have been reconstructed to give a taste of what the whole collection of buildings would have looked like. The Viharn Phra Mongkol Bopi Buddha was in a nearby hall, and it’s one of the biggest bronze Buddhas in Thailand. For hundreds of years it was exposed to the elements after its temple was burnt down by the Burmese army, and it was further damaged by lightning after that. In 1955 the Burmese prime minister donated 200,000 baht to reconcile what his country did 200 years earlier.

We were quite exhausted after this historical view of Siam, so when we got back to Bangkok we wandered around a nearby market. 

We were doing pretty well at avoiding the vendors until we saw a sign for a foot fish massage. We paused for just long enough that their employee caught us and offered us a deal we couldn’t pass up. Next thing we knew our feet were washed and we were sticking our feet into GIANT tanks full of hundreds of little fishes waiting to nibble at our feet. It..was the tickliest thing in the world. The fish were supposedly eating the dead skin off our feet, and with so many of them chowing down it was as much as we could do to not laugh our heads off. They were thorough, getting in between our toes, around our heels, and even up our calves a little bit. Fifteen hilarious minutes later, our feet were admittedly smoother!

Needing to catch our bus soon, we checked out of the hostel, explored the market a little more, ate some red curry and mango sticky rice, and headed to the bus station. We took one last look at the city and went on our way!

Saying goodbye to our awesome hostel

Party bus on the ride home

After a weekend full of new sights, our familiar Northern Thailand mountains were a welcome sight! We had an awesome view from the front seats on the second story of our bus!!

One day in Bangkok

We woke up early to Skype our families for Father’s Day! We use the internet a lot out here and it does an amazing job at helping us feel connected, but this was one of those times that it really seemed like a miracle. We used Google + to do a giant Graf video chat from Thailand, New York, Arizona, Lindon, and even a car ride to Vail, Colorado! We’d seen the Google + ads featuring the group chat, but honestly, it was the coolest thing and really made us feel like we were all sitting around chatting on Father’s Day—a huge accomplishment considering we were eating breakfast at a hostel in Bangkok! We called the Lamb home, where every other member of the family just happened to have gathered earlier that day, and we felt like it was as good as it could be to get to video chat and be apart of it!

We started out with a plan to do a walking tour as set out by our Lonely Planet Discover Thailand book, so we walked to the historical sights from our hostel. Here we met our first overly helpful Thai stranger who offered to get us a tuk tuk, or motorized taxi cart, for really cheap to take us down to the harbor for a 900 baht boat tour (about $30). We somehow wiggled our way out of that one, but man, these guys are pretty good! It was the first of many “wily strangers” as the signs call them, and we got good at not letting them ask their questions and pull us in to whatever they want us to spend money on. Such a joke!

Where we intended to start our walking tour--the Grand Palace

The forementioned wily stranger told us that the Grand Palace was closed to non-Thai people until 1 pm, and although we weren’t sure if he was lying or not, we were on the opposite block from the entrance so we decided to start  with the temple structure of Wat Pho, most well-known for the reclining Buddha. Wat Pho is also the birthplace of Thai massage!

He's huge!

We never see American flags here! We had begun to feel unappreciated, so we were super excited to see this one.

Free water! And boy do tourists need it in Bangkok. We managed to go our entire trip without buying any--a huge accomplishment!

At this point we realized we were hungry, so we sat down on a bench to consult our tourist book, when all of the sudden another helpful stranger latched onto us and started asking the same questions. Where are you going? Where are you from? Have you been to the Grand Palace? Do you need a tour? These people are relentless! We told him we were looking for a place to eat and he pointed around the corner. We managed to shake him down the street, and what do you know, he was actually right about finding food around the corner! One rule we try to follow in any situation is to not eat at restaurants who don’t have customers, but here in Thailand we try not to eat at restaurants who don’t have any Thai customers. It’s a way to spot and avoid the really touristy, overpriced food! We passed up a restaurant with plenty of white people for a restaurant where the tables and chairs were literally on the sidewalk. We had delicious Chinese style noodles and Pad Thai, and were content with the fact that we had found ourselves food so quickly for so cheap, and had to give the wily stranger some credit for helping us.

Eating on the sidewalk

Delicious!

After lunch we set off to find Wat Arun, a temple that was built when the capitol of Siam was moved to Bangkok. We knew we had to take a ferry across a river to get there, but we hadn’t found any more details than that. We walked down an alley way full of hilarious sights--boxes of dried fish and squid, cartoon massages, and ESL at its finest--to get to the ferry entrance.

Turns out the ferry cost a whopping 3 baht (10 cents) to go across. We get charged that much for the bathroom sometimes! The ride across the river took all of a whole minute, and we were soon on our way.

Waiting to board

Riding across the river

Sometimes, you just can’t help but be a tourist. Sometimes you have to completely be aware of what you are doing and how over-the-top or showy it is, but you just smile and go along with it. And then you pay money to have someone dress you up in Siamese royalty outfits and take pictures of you. And you never regret a second of it!

Finally we made it to the Grand Palace, where lucky Justin got to rent some pants to cover past his knees. The history of this place is awesome.  Everything is so incredibly ornate and detailed, they just put their best in for the royalty! Nat told us that the best of everything in Thailand is found in the Grand Palace, and we could see what he meant! In one of the temples, we saw an artist touching up the gold paint on one of thousands of murals on the wall.  Another cool thing about this place: a lot of the Gold really was gold, not just the colored paint you see on most of the temples around here.  The palace is where the Royal family lived until the former king was assassinated there.  The temples on ground were the most stunning things we saw on our trip, and they house the Emerald Buddha- the symbol of Thai Buddhism.

We've been wanting a good picture of Thai Buddhist monks since we got here.  This one was perfect!

You're not supposed to take a picture of the Emerald Buddha, but we sneakily tried to get this one. Too bad  Asians are professional photo-bombers.

After the grand palace, we caught a tuk tuk from a persistant driver who offered us a deal we couldn’t pass up, and we went on what felt like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride through the city to the mall, darting in and out of traffic, changing lanes, and accelerating towards red lights. It was exciting, to say the least.

The Siam Paragon mall is HUGE, with seven floors, a movie theater, an aquarium, and a supermarket. We explored a bit and then saw Madagascar 3 (loved it!! Laughed our heads off, we highly recommend it), which was really fun since we haven’t seen a movie in the theater since the Hunger Games, I think. It felt so normal to buy movie tickets and popcorn! We settled into our seats and laughed at the over-dramatized previews for orange-flavored milk and collagen drink for your skin. One preview in particular started and before we knew it, everyone in the theater stood up so we hurried and followed suit. It was a tribute to the king! There were many pictures and videos showing his goodness and the service he has rendered for Thailand, with a children’s choir playing in the background. It was quite touching to see that the reverence and respect they have for their king even permeates non-political things like seeing a movie! The movie started, and I know what you’re thinking: no the movie was not in Thai! It was in English and there were Thai subtitles. We saw it in 3D and the subtitles even stood out a little..it was a nice touch haha.

We were too exhausted to fight our taxi driver about using the meter to calculate the price on the way home, so we over-paid but it was worth it to get home and hit the sack again!