Piggy Bank

Lots of people spend spring break on a beach in Thailand. Not me. Last spring break, I went to a Thai garbage dump. It’s not that garbage dumps are my thing. Quite the contrary. But a group of people in Chiang Mai, where I live, invited me to join them on a service trip to a medical clinic for Burmese refugees run by a remarkable woman named Dr. Cynthia, sometimes called the Mother Teresa of Thailand. I was eager to see her clinic and to meet her.

The clinic is located in the city of Mae Sot on the Thai/Burmese border. The trip to the garbage dump was a last minute add-on. One of the women in our group said she had heard there was a community of Burmese refugees, including many children, working and living in the Mae Sot municipal dump. She had been told the community was very poor and in need of everything.

We bought a bunch of children’s’ clothes and went to the dump. And that was where I met a little girl named Suu. Suu and her mom, along with 500,000 other Burmese, have fled their country to escape the war that has been waging there for sixty years. Suu and her mom had learned that there was work and a safe (compared to Burma) place to live in Mae Sot. The place was the Mae Sot municipal garbage dump. They decided it was better to live with trash than to be treated like trash in their native country. So they moved to the dump, constructed a shack to shelter from the rain, and now sift through the trash to make money from recycling bits of plastic.

Hundreds of other Burmese refugees also live at the dump even though there are no toilets, food is scarce, and the water is polluted. Often people get sick. The recycler does not pay much so everyone, including Suu and the other children, work long into the night. Despite working hard, people go hungry. Suu and her mom get by as best they can.

Suu and her mom invited me into their “house” and offered me-- by the way they handled it-- a precious cup of soda pop. We couldn’t speak the same language but we communicated anyway. I was touched by their generosity.

Many of the people who flee Burma have little but the clothes on their backs. They labor as illegal immigrants in Thailand and elsewhere and live as unwelcome guests wherever they can. They do the backbreaking labor no one else wants to do. The situation in Burma is changing but it is still not safe for many refugees, like Suu, to return home due to continued military action against them there.

Many people visit the dump when they come to Mae Sot. They take a lot of pictures as though they are in a zoo. “How can people live like this?” they ask with disgust. “Why don’t they go back to their own country?” Suu and her mom and the others at the dump are friendly to all the visitors even though they do not ask permission to take photos or understand why the refugees live at a dump. 

What I learned from Suu and her mom is that no one wants to live in a garbage dump, but it is safer and offers more opportunity to work than Burma. At the dump, Suu and her mom and the others can live with less fear. At the dump, they have community.

But what they do not have is clean water, sanitation, or much food.

The stench and flies overwhelmed the group of visitors I was with. In addition to the squalor, the fact that the people living at the dump were refugees made the situation seem too complicated to do anything long term to help. The group also knew that many well-meaning people in the past had seen this poverty and tried to assist but had failed.

Unfortunately, the well intentioned projects the people brought were not discussed with those who lived at the dump. Not being of or rooted in the community, the projects did not gain ground and withered.

After meeting Suu, her mom, and the others, it was impossible for me to walk away without trying to do something that would be effective and not repeat past mistakes. Through a process of trial and error and a lot of research, I met an expat here in Chiang Mai who had international development experience and an approach that made sense to me. It’s an approach that is deceptively simple: in order to do effective development in a community, it’s important to communicate with the people who live there. It’s vital to find out what kind of help the community thinks will be effective and then to partner with it to bring about change.

Raising pigs at the dump for extra income to help alleviate hunger is the community’s idea and goal. Pigletsforprogress.org is a grassroots group of progress minded people including Christina, the community leaders at the dump, and others like me who want to help the community reach its goal.

I think of pigletsforprogress.org  as a piggybank for Suu. 

Goat Story

When does a goat story become a ghost story? In Thailand, of course, where belief in ghosts and spirits is so widespread it influences most aspects of daily life.

Actually, to say that Thai people believe in ghosts is an understatement of monumental proportions. Belief in ghosts is such an integral part of the culture, it is as though the Thais themselves manifest spirits whether they exist in "objective" reality or not. Oddly, as a Westerner who does not share Thai ghost beliefs, I am not immune. Upon moving to Chiang Mai exactly one year ago, I sometimes sensed unseen presences or caught glimpses of shadowy figures out of the corner of my eye in my condo.   

But the ghosts have since moved. After becoming more acclimated to Thailand, my unwelcome guests and I had a polite but direct conversation. I asked them to relocate to the condo building's san phra phum (spirit house). They obliged. Because I was a farang (foreigner), the ghosts assumed that I didn't know Thai cultural rules so they had pushed the boundaries.

There are spirit houses near all Thai homes, temples, hotels, condominiums, car dealerships, fitness centers, shopping malls, etc., etc.. The spirit houses are usually elaborately painted wooden structures the size of large doll houses on big pedestals with miniature replicas of people, furniture, and animals inside and around them. A Buddhist monk typically advises about the optimum placement of the spirit house on a property.

Traditional spirit houses 

Spirit house figurines

Modern spirit house near trendy Bangkok hotel

I will get to the goat story. Promise. 

But first it's important to know about the most popular form of transport in Thailand. There are thousands of motor scooters here. It's not uncommon to see two or three people riding on a scooter while also juggling a baby or a ladder. 

But not to worry. There are helmet laws. They are enforced in a relaxed way but they exist nonetheless.

While eating dinner one evening with a group of Thai friends from my Rotary club, I told a story about my visit to a town in southern Spain where there had also been many scooters and helmet laws. Regarding the latter, however, frequently only the driver wore a helmet while the passengers did not.

One day in the Spanish town, I saw three people on a scooter--a man, a woman, and what appeared to be a child wedged between them. Only the child was wearing a helmet. Upon closer inspection, it became clear that the helmeted child wasn't a kid in the human sense. It was a goat. This I thought was pretty funny. "That goat must have been important to those people," I told my Thai friends, expecting laughter.

Instead there were incredulous stares and silence. Finally, Suparie, a woman who has spent a lot of time in New Zealand, America, and Europe and who is comfortable with the questioning ways of Westerners asked, "How did you know it was a goat?"

What a weird question, I thought. 

"Well, it had hooves and long spindly furry 'arms and legs'," I sputtered.

"How do you know that goats look like this?" she demanded.

"Well, what do goats look like in Thailand?" I had seen goats in the villages around Chiang Mai. They looked very similar to their Spanish counterparts.

There were more blank looks and silence as my dinner companions seemed to be wondering how I knew what goats looked like.

Then it dawned on me. Although my friends and I speak English, we pronounce many words  differently. They thought I was saying that I had seen a helmeted ghost on a motor scooter! "You know that I am talking about the animal that makes the 'baa baa' sound?" I started bleating. A waiter walking by the table looked dismayed. 

Suddenly, smiles flashed all around.

"Ah," said Suparie. "We thought you were saying that you had seen a ghost with a helmet on a motor scooter. Now we know that you saw a goat. You were trying to make a funny story!" She smiled. Everyone else smiled, too. No wonder they had reacted so coolly. Who ever heard of a helmeted ghost on a motor scooter? Clearly, a ghost wouldn't need a helmet!

And then it suddenly occurred to me that maybe some Thais, just like some Spaniards, put helmets on their goats when they take them for rides.

I made a mental note to self: do not tell any more goat stories in Thailand.

So far, this has worked well.