Number 14

Today was supposed to be a quiet laid back day with the staff gone and several of the house people off to Burma on a Visa run. Due to the airport closure in Bangkok and the problems that brings us, Bruce had all of the staff who were available come in. We have problems getting people home this coming week (Kim, Justin and Mark). Problems getting people to the GAJE conference in the Philippines (Bruce and Wendy on Wednesday, Don, me and the Law School people on Sunday) and problems getting the new volunteer from Australia and her "partner" in here on the following week if things are still bad. It's a mess...

Three BABSEA affiliated professors are presenting papers at GAJE on the work they do with the Community Legal Education Clinics that Bruce and his co-founder helped set up. They won't be reading them, rather they will be distributed at the conference. None of the Professors are native English speakers and their papers were to be edited (quite extensively) by someone in the US who didn't do it. This morning it became my project. So I spent a good part of the day changing spelling, grammar, context and syntax for papers written by Professors from Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines. My aunt would be proud, unless she read what I wrote.

The next project was doing the same thing for the teaching manual that the Laos had been working on. That was almost comical and required me to try to figure out what they meant before I could fix it. It didn't help that they cut and pasted their hypothetical exam question and had a question about one thing and the proposed answer about something completely different. I couldn't get any help from the Laos to figure out what they meant. Sam and Dave Goldstein (Dave's last name in Lao means gold so he is now Dave Goldstein) were off on a hike and the lady Professors were at the University because some of their students from Vientiane were at our University performing native Laotian dances.

Next I helped Aom design a poster that will be displayed at the conference telling people how they can help BABSEA. Since I had a little time left Bruce asked me to read a 50 page proposal for funding the Laos Clinic and write a Letter of Inquiry to a foundation requesting funding. There's a deadline on the letter of Monday so he needed to get something sent by email. It's revisable so I just needed to get the basics in. The funny part was that it was a letter to the McKnight Foundation (Cargill) at an address about 4-5 blocks from my office in Minneapolis.

Bruce, Mark and I went to the Jerusalem Restaurant for fallafal, hummus, baba ganoosh etc. The food was really good. Chiang Mai has an "old city" surrounded by a moat and what's left of a wall. It seemed appropriate to eat Israeli food in the "old city". We had driven in the house car but I decided to walk back to the house. Bruce figured it at about 3 miles and it took me a little over an hour. I love walking at night in Chiang Mai. The sidewalks are dangerous and you have to duck for signs and wires but the weather cools off at night and its perfectly safe. There's so much to see plus I think you get the real pulse of a city at street level.

By the way, Burger King and McDonalds are open 24 hours and McDonalds delivers!!! What a great country.

So there it is. As repetitious as it may sound. Another good day in Chiang Mai.