Number 2

While in Chiang Mai I’m living in the BABSEA house. BABSEA stands for Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia which is why it’s referred to as BABSEA. It’s in a pleasant residential neighborhood and also houses their offices. In fact, if I get out of bed in the morning and walk out my door and through the kitchen, I’m in the office. I have my own room with a bathroom. Well, sort of a bathroom. It has a toilet and a sink and a shower. The shower nozzle is on the wall and there’s a drain on the floor. It has one of those flexible hose handle things that you can set in the holder or hold and spray where you want. The only thing my shower doesn’t have is walls. The whole bathroom is the shower and makes aiming the nozzle a lot more critical then normal. In my room I have a wall fan. That’s like a ceiling fan but it’s mounted on the wall. I also have an air conditioner unit which is mounted on the wall and is nowhere near a window. I’m not sure how it works but it has a remote control so I’m down with it.

In reality the BABSEA house is like one of those clown cars at the circus where it looks big enough for a few clowns but about 20 or so get out of it. I’m not sure how many people are living here but every couple of hours I’m introduced to someone new. As far as I can tell there are four “kids” from Singapore who are here for 3 months to teach English at an Elementary School before they start college, there are four Lao Law School Professors who are not lawyers, there are two of us who are Senior Lawyer Consultants and then there’s a few other people who I’ve seen who I can’t identify. When I ask someone who those people are they can’t tell me because I can’t describe them beyond saying they are male or female and Asian. Everyone is very nice or very shy. There are a similar unknown number of people who show up during the day to work in the office. Most of them seem to have the same title; Volunteer Coordinator. There are also an indeterminate number of people who clean and do work around the house. The key word here seems to be happy. So far the Thai people seem to be an extremely happy bunch.

Today I sat in on a meeting of the Volunteer staff. (they aren’t volunteers but they coordinate for us) It was a most amusing meeting where they talked about, among other things, making a sign to announce the new policy of a 50 baht fine for anyone who uses the motor scooter but doesn’t wear a helmet. It will go with the other signs in the “garage” area that look like they came from a 5th grade poster contest. There are about 10 bikes, a motor scooter and a car we can use. They drive on the “wrong” side of the road and I’m definitely looking forward to giving that a whirl. The meeting attendees were Corn, Moon, Nut, Don and my personal favorite; Porn. Porn is a woman in her 50’s. Bruce, the head of BABSEA and Wendy, the person in charge when he travels (which is quite often) were “leading” the meeting but have a policy of letting a different Thai employee lead the meeting each time. It helps them learn about organization and responsibility etc. Today’s meeting was led by Don. It went OK but would have been a little more productive if Don spoke English. He’s learning and was quite proud of himself. Whenever he hit a snag the other Thai participants would encourage him in Thai and point out his errors. Whenever that happened there was a lot of laughing suggesting they were also having a little fun with him. The people who work here seem genuinely caring and couldn’t be more helpful or eager to learn. Bruce assigned the creation of a form to request time off to Moon and told her I would help her. She is very shy but warmed up at my self deprecating humor and did a fine job. Clearly the formula at the house is the same as for the clinic law students which is for them to "learn by doing", with some supervision.

During the meeting, a discussion took place as to why there was no TV in my room. There is cable TV in the house and apparently the other Senior volunteer "took” my TV when the guy who was in my room before me, left. It was discussed, that every volunteer had been promised a TV so Porn is getting me a new one today. Gives new meaning to Porn and TV. I told them I didn’t need a TV and besides there’s one in the living room but Bruce said it wasn’t about me it was about keeping the commitment made to the volunteers. Since he doesn’t know me very well I had to explain to him that EVERYTHING is about me. When Bruce asked what had happened to the other guy’s TV so that he needed to take mine Corn reminded him that it was in his bedroom.

Bruce and Wendy live 4 houses away with Bob, Wendy’s father, who is in a coma in the living room (there’s an old Thai woman who sits with him when Wendy is gone) and Wendy’s husband, when he’s in town. I met Bob last night on our way to dinner but he didn’t have much to say. We went to a local outdoor, covered restaurant. I had Pad Thai, which I always order back home when we have Thai food and it was good.

Today I also began working on policies and logistics for the Community Law Clinic I’ll be helping set up at the Vietnam National University Law School in Hanoi. Both Bruce and Wendy expressed genuine regret that they weren’t available for that project. Apparently between the project, the professor I’ll be staying with and the City of Hanoi, I lucked into a really great opportunity. For the next two weeks I’ll be doing the prep work here as well as helping with the Clinic at Chiang Mai University Law School, working on improving health care access at the local women’s prison and giving some basic presentations to some law school classes on representing indigent clients in criminal cases.

Enough for now. I have a meeting with several people working on the Chiang Mai University Clinic. I have no idea what I’ll do there but that never stopped me…