Number 4

Today was a pretty good day. I’m tired but I want to get it down while my thoughts are fresh. I was wrong about the community service project at Wildflower. To begin with they’re not battered women (although some have been). This is a small community of women from Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam who got pregnant and were kicked out of their villages either for shaming their families, or because they can't work when they're pregnant so no one will feed them. They live in a complex out in the country that has several homes on stilts and a few communal building. The woman who runs it is an American who looks like she came right out of movie about this exact situation. There is a small school room where the children were singing songs and doing their lessons. Outside of it is a little playground.

When we arrived there were several pregnant women with shovels and shovel-like tools on a hill of dirt breaking it up. It turns out the hill was dirt/loam that already had mushrooms spores in it. Our job was to haul it to the long boxes (about 100 feet long) that they had prepared about ¼ mile from the pile. The problem was that there is a canal about 30 feet from the hill which had three boards laid across it. There was no way to go but over the bridge so no motorized equipment could be used. There were about 12 of us in the morning and we split into twos and threes. There was one rolling cart that took at least three people to push across the canal and along the dirt path to the fields. Then there were 2-3 “litters” which consisted of two bamboo poles with a heavy plastic gunny sack attached between the poles. It looked like the kind of thing they used to take injured soldiers off the battlefield in WW I. Dirt was shoveled onto the litter and one person at each end would grab the poles and walk across the boards and on to the field. I was teamed up with one of the Lao professors on a litter. There was an old rickety wheel barrel and a few saucer like hard plastic “plates” that one person could carry. It was hot and humid and hard work but I’ve never felt more useful (outside of a family setting) in my life. These pregnant and recently pregnant women shoveled while we hauled and they smiled the whole time. The children sang and a baby water buffalo and a young cow watched along with Lucky, their dog and Emily, a tiny puppy who couldn’t have been cuter or sweeter. It was surreal. We sweated and grunted and never felt sorry we had come.

After a couple hours they brought some cold water and a fruit juice squeezed from a fruit that looked more like a red flower. It was really tasty. At noon we stopped for lunch. We went to their dining building and, after a Buddhist prayer, had brown rice, sticky rice, drum sticks, two soups and a salad. For desert there was a “porridge” of sticky rice, sweet corn, coconut and sugar. It was different and not bad. After lunch we were joined by 4 more people and continued until about 4. We put away the “tools” and were asked to come back to their dining building. All the women came in with big smiles and presented each of us with a bracelet they had made. Their were a lot of weis (Thai way of bowing) and then we went outside and took a picture of all of us with all of them. It was worth coming all the way here just for this experience.

Afterwords several people went back to the house and the rest of us went to Sankampaeng Hot Springs. It’s a large beautiful park with a few geysers and a long series of pools with varying degrees of heat. It’s beautifully landscaped with the mountains in the background. Lots of shade trees and low key, out of the main area vendors. The water source, which is a large pool, is over 105 Celsius (sorry can’t convert that but 100 is boiling). After soaking our feet for awhile, in the cooler pools, several of our group bought quail eggs in little straw baskets. There were about a dozen eggs in each basket and a packet of seasoned soy sauce. There were metal hooks over the 105 degree pool and the idea is to hang the eggs in the hot water. After about 5 minutes you have hard boiled quail eggs. I had never had a quail egg but was determined to try new things and it wasn’t bad. We wandered and talked and soaked until dark and then headed back to the house. I got a chance to spend time with and talk with the Lao professors who, up until today, had been painfully shy. I hung out with and talked with the “teachers” from Singapore who are 18-19 and came here to teach English before going to University (as they say). It was a truly good day. It made me appreciate what I have. As I told the Singapore kids, it was really nice to help people who really needed help, who appreciated it and let you know. Not like being a Public Defender…