A Little Advertisement for Someone Else's Blog

Ok, so we all like the limelight, but I think I can share. Just this once. If you get bored reading this blog, want a change, or just the chance to look at someone else's really unphotogenic photos, the following is a link to my friend Jessica Shortall's blog http://www.catfund.com/thailand/

This blog links to Jessica's company website. Talk about a really cool idea - Jessica is a consultant for social entrepreneurs. She does a little corporate social responsibility consulting (if they ask really, really nicely), but mostly what she does is help socially responsible businesses and the business arms of charities meet their bottom lines. She has first hand experience at this from her work starting and franchising the Campus Kitchens Project (Anna, if you're reading this, she started your Campus Kitchen! Who would have guessed that Wake has cool alumni?). She recently refined her skills with an MBA from Oxford with a focus in social entrepreneurship.

So yeah, read her blog - it's good! And it will give me more time to write posts of my own.

Thanks Guys and Gals!

Photos from Ban Ta Maprao

This one is for all of you who complain that I don't post enough photos. Oh and for any of you who ask how I manage to be so constantly unphotogenic, it's an art.

Some short background info: Ban Ta Maprao is one of PDA's longest standing village partners in the south of Thailand. Before the tsunami struck, Ban Ta Maprao had established a Village Development Bank. Using relief money, Ban Ta Maprao expanded its VDB and used it to give loans to villagers seeking to recover their livelihoods after the tsunami. Today, Ban Ta Maprao, as a community, has been one of the most successful villages I've seen at proposing and receiving aid for development projects. One secret to their success is their amazing hospitality. The villagers host visitors to PDA's Krabi CBIRD Center so often they've taken to calling themselves 'PDA's unofficial caterers.'

The second weekend I was in Krabi, I went with Khun Kuan and Khun Tha to stay in Ban Ta Maprao. It was without a doubt the most amazing weekend I've had in Thailand. Here are some of the pictures:

Look I caught a fish!!! From the fish farm, but . . .


Well, actually, Khun Kuan's dad caught the fish. I just reeled it in.



Left to Right: Khun Kuan, Khun Wit, and Khun Tha


So yeah, the lovely jackets we are wearing are not to protect against the cold. They're to protect against the the sun. This picture was taken outside of a Youth Government fish farm. Actually, so far, all the pictures in this post have been taken outside of fish farms . . .


Guess where this was taken?? You got it - on the fish farm!! These guys are members of the youth government. To get out onto the farm, we had to climb down from the houses in the background and then jump from wooden boats onto the bamboo frame. It wasn't very hard until Khun Cheu grabbed me to, er, 'help my balance.'


Guess where this photo was taken?? Not a fish farm!! This is a rain catchment tank built with PDA support. The tall guy on the right is the leader of his village youth government. For some reason, he really looks like a tennis player to me. The girl on my left in the photo (to the right if you look at it) is Khun Cheu. Don't stand next to her on boats, ladders, or fish farms. Next to rain catchment tanks is ok though.


This is a bird cage being hand carved. It was incredibly intricate.

This is a picture of one of the fishing villages. The village headmaster was really nice and gave us cockles to take home and cook for dinner.

A Day in the Life of a Donor

June 1, 2007 (PS: At the bottom of this entry is the cutest picture ever.)

Two days ago, a woman from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) came to stay at the Krabi CBIRD Center. A partner with PDA in a number of projects, the JDC was not in town to check on any of the projects it has with PDA. Instead, Jacqui was here to check on a new project the JDC is funding in partnership with one of the king’s charities.

I found out that the JDC was in town after getting back from a two day excursion to Phang Nga. Tired, thoroughly gross, and ready for a shower, I walked into the canteen intent on another exciting evening watching ants or the sunset or something (the Krabi Center is a bit of a ghost town at night, Khun Nim recommends watching soaps, but I haven’t sunk quite that low, yet.). Instead of being deserted, the canteen held a small crowd of people focused on a tall woman with chic spiky black hair. Jacqui, as she quickly introduced herself, spoke with a light British accent and graciously invited me to join the small crowd that was on its way to dinner. Ant watching couldn’t really compete.

On the way to the restaurant, I learned more about Jackie and how she had spent her day. Although she doesn’t look a day older than thirty and could even pass for younger, Jacqui moved to Israel 26 years ago as an 18 year old to work on a kibbutz. By the time her year at the kibbutz was over, Jacqui’s family had moved to Israel and she found herself permanently relocated. Having worked for the JDC before in Kosovo where she discovered the organization on a trip to visit friends with her now ex-Norwegian-boyfriend, she has worked on the post-tsunami project in Thailand for three years. Her job as she described it at dinner sounded as glamorous as her life. Now that the JDC’s project in Thailand is wrapping up, most of what she does is visit remote areas to make sure that JDC-funded projects are on progress – a big indicator is if the JDC’s logo is properly displayed. Since this is Thailand, she also gets to take the occasional breaks on the beach sipping drinks and enjoying massages with other farang. When I first met her, she had just gotten back from a day at the beach and a massage. Thailand, no doubt, is a couple of steps up from Kosovo.
Woman Making Dried Shell Fish Snack
as Part of an Income Generating Project

I was invited to tag along with Khun Giap and Jacqui the next day. The way Khun Giap explained it, we would go with her to one meeting in Ban Ta Maprao and then go watch a Thai motor cross race. My uncle used to race motorcycles when he was in high school, but I’ve never seen a race. I figured it would be a good opportunity to see something new and take some photos for my uncle. Jacqui mentioned she should probably see a couple of JDC’s projects in the area, but when promised to be sent pictures, she signed on to the idea.

Checking on Things in the Field (a School Field to be Exact)

I will never know if Khun Giap changed her plans to make sure Jacqui was able to see JDC projects or if she had intended the trip all along as a chance to raise more money for her region (Khun Giap’s region is one of the most well funded with over $2 million donated for community projects). All I can say is that instead of one meeting and a motor cross race, we visited five schools, taught English in two of them, witnessed a meeting run by the Women’s Committee of Ban Ta Maprao, and toured an income generating project that dried shellfish for sale as candy. We did get to take some pictures at the end of the motor cross track after Jacqui insisted. It was a great day, but not quite as advertised.

As the day wore on, my admiration for Jacqui increased. At each school or project we visited, after a short welcome, Jacqui would be asked how soon the JDC could provide more funding. Each time a school asked for more medicine or money for a computer, Jacqui was forced to explain that not only was she not in charge of approving grants, the JDC’s budget in Thailand, meant to provide temporary relief after the 2004 tsunami, was mostly spent. At one very small village school of less than 100 students, asked if there was anything she would like to have for her students, a young PE teacher lit up at the possibility of a ping pong table or a basket ball goal for her classes. Although, as she explained, her students did have a patch of concrete to play basketball on, what looked like the remnants fo what was meant to be a road or a parking lot but was never finished; they had no goals or nets. It was heartbreaking to watch Jacqui promise she would mention Ban Than to her boss at the JDC and then explain that because of Ban Than’s small size, it was unlikely they would receive a grant. The teacher's eyes and smile fell even as she thanked Jaqui for her promise. The life of a donor may have its perks, but it is a lot harder than I thought it was.

The Cutest Kids Ever

The Forgotten Face

In the 1980’s, when AIDS first took the world by surprise, it spread quickly, in part, because it was unknown. Today, in many corners of the world, sometimes even where it is most prevalent, AIDS remains a mysterious and therefore, doubly terrifying disease. However, in the US, the danger now is not that we fear AIDS so much as that we have forgotten it – or at least, forgotten its grim realities. Today, I met a man whose plight was only partially masked by a course of treatment one tenth as effective as what conceals the disease in the West. His story is a shock to anyone who thinks of HIV as a treatable condition.

Once the most successful businessman in his village, the owner of a bustling grocery store, he now raises pigs and ducks for sale in the market. He recently sold thirteen three-month-old ducks for 1,000 Baht, approximately $20. Although he blames the loss of his grocery store on the 1997 crisis, it is readily understood in conversation that either a recovery of his old or an expansion of his new enterprise are prohibited by his weakness. It was four years ago that he discovered he has the disease. Too sick to drive himself to the hospital, his sister had to take him. Had they waited three days longer to get him there, the doctor told him, he would have died. It wasn’t at the hospital that he found out he had AIDS. No, there they only informed him that he had TB – the doctors felt that the full truth would be too much for a sick man. It was only when they transferred him to the regional hospital that he was told he has the virus.

Back then he didn’t know much about the disease. Neither did his wife. She wanted to leave, but was persuaded by the doctors to have herself and their kids tested. Having met his children before learning their status, I was deeply relieved that they and their mother are negative. That, despite having lived with him during the early stages of his illness, she and her children were not infected must have changed his wife’s mind about leaving. Joking with us about his current sex life and the wonders of the condom, he could not hide how serious it would have been had she left. With heavily damaged lungs and signs of AIDS related wasting, he depends on her help to raise the animals that feed him and his family.

Now, his entire family belongs to Ban Mae Ru Roy (Village of Flowers), a mandatory support group for patients who wish to receive AIDS medication from the local hospital. Asked how his friends who did not join the group have fared, he told us they were dead – because they did not join, they did not receive medication. Others of his friends who were diagnosed around the same time he was, believing their symptoms to be signs of the final stages of the disease, chose quiet deaths in their home villages away from the stigma of treatment. One friend whose partner had died of the disease relocated to a new village where her status was unknown and began life anew with a new boyfriend and a new job. Within a year, she also was dead.

The meetings of Ban Mae Ru Roy, mandatory as they are, provide him with the information and support that his monthly trips to the hospital for medication and his twice yearly t-cell counts do not. They also provide a small salary for those who attend meetings and in the event of his demise, a pension for his family. The funds for this come from small businesses the club has started and shares it has bought in a sports company that runs a local factory. In addition to the animals he bought with a Positive Partnerships loan (a PDA program that grants loans to pairs of infected and non-infected partners), this money helps him afford the added transportation and medical costs of his disease.

A Postive Partnership Pig

When told that he only receives a t-cell check every six months, Freaia, the medical expert on our trip, looked aghast, but not surprised. As we drove away in the van, she told us that his lean cheeks and slender form are most likely signs of wasting, itself an indication that he may not be responding to treatment. A more frequent t-cell count would have helped doctors adapt his medicine to the changing resistance of his virus. However, with many aids patients and few resources, frequent testing just isn’t available.

Sitting in the tropical heat, with the sound of pigs, ducks, and children in the background, his lean face serious but smiling, he told us that with his business he is ok now. The other villagers have been able to see that he can still contribute to the village. Indeed, he is contributing more than they can know. To educate others about his illness, he has visited scores of schools. Just recently, he shared the same intimate details he so generously shared with us with a documentary film crew from the Gates Foundation. He has even participated in the famous, or at least at PDA, infamous drinking demonstration with Khun Mechai. A favorite of Khun Mechai’s and of the crowds, we have all seen this performed where, after drinking from the same spot on the same glass as several AIDS patients, Khun Mechai smacks his lips and tells the crowd ‘you see!’

As with Khun Mechai, you can tell this was a favorite demonstration of his, too. Although he never went so far as to say they accepted him, he did say that now, thanks to the loan, the villagers have to respect him. Even though he trembled slightly as he said this, you could tell that this fact helps him as much, or if Freaia is right, perhaps more than his medicines do. When it was time for us to leave, I did not know what to say. Good luck seemed out of place with a man whose good fortune – his support network, his wife’s presence, and his loan – could only be defined in the shadow of his misfortune. In the end, I only said thank you and gave him the deepest wai I know how to give. Fighting AIDS, respect, not even dignity, is the only triumph he can win.

The Bamboo Ladder

The Bamboo Ladder is more than just a nifty, semi-new age phrase here at the Population and Community Development Association (PDA). It’s a useful tool in PDA’s arsenal of participative development strategies. During the Bamboo Ladder exercise, villagers brainstorm about what programs their village needs, how they can get these programs, and, most importantly, who is going to pay for them. Contrary to how it is done with other organizations, PDA’s programming, the Bamboo Ladder included, encourages villagers to first consider what they can do themselves; then, what they can do with local government funds; and, only finally, what they can do with outside assistance from third-party donors like PDA. By organizing as communities, villages in Thailand have been able to build everything from clean water supplies and village latrines to fish farms and better schools.

The Bamboo Ladder is also a nifty conceit for economic development as a whole. Built with local materials and hard work, bamboo ladders are sturdy, but also, as I have occasion to know, somewhat easy to fall off. Many of the communities in the southern region of Thailand, where I will be working first, fell off the ladder, so to speak, when the giant tsunami a few years ago swept away livelihoods and destroyed infrastructure. In other areas, such as the northeast portion of Thailand near the Cambodian border where I will work toward the end of my stay in Thailand, HIV, malaria, dengue fever, and other preventable diseases have knocked communities back a few rungs. When these communities fall, they often fall hard forcing villagers to struggle to meet their basic needs.

It is easy to see why, faced with images of extreme poverty, the international community has been so tempted to slap a quick fix on problems in developing communities. But simply giving donations to communities will not necessarily help them recreate livelihoods. You can give a person a ladder and you can even hold the ladder for her, but you can’t climb for her. The desire for development must come from within the communities themselves for development efforts to be sustainable. This is the theory behind PDA’s efforts to bring together international donor support and community-driven development programs in Thailand. I’m here to learn how they do it.