Blame It On the Rain/Epic Journey to the Border Market

On Saturday I planned to accompany some friends to the border market to buy some furniture for their new place. The border market is about a 20 minute bike ride from MaeSot, but since there was the chance we might have large items to bring back we decided to take a songtao (pickup truck with a covered back). On Friday it rained. A lot. Definitely way more than usual even for the rainy season! This continued all night and into the next day. Heavy, heavy rain. While it is a bit challenging to deal with this kind of weather when one's primary mode of transportation is a bike, I did manage to find a few positive aspects of all this rain...
1. It got cooler!
2. Creative rain attire. Most people either wore ponchos or gave in completely and didn't wear anything. Several folks had umbrella hats. One little boy walked alongside his father wearing absolutely nothing and seemed quite pleased with himself. But the guy who took the cake was wearing a full body poncho (a jumpsuit in poncho material). I need to get me one of those before the next big rain...

Our group of five met up and consolidated bikes at my friends' house around 10am and waited for the weather to clear. Happily it did...but in the time it took us to walk down the stairs to the outside the rain was at it again! We all either poncho-ed or umbrella-ed up (I did both) and started our walk toward the Burmese market where it was rumored we could find a songtao. Water was starting to collect around the roads and we found the entire area in front of the hospital a pool of shin deep water. Thus we detoured down a side street where we found shelter in a Burmese tea shop, a nice halfway point in our 15 minute walk to the market. Again, we hoped the rain would subside and were happy to people watch and eat samosas for a bit. Finally after an hour it was time to make a decision. In the end we decided to buck up and go...but had to cross through this to get to the songtao...

 
If you think that water looks blacker than it should be, you are spot on. This was a black river about ankle deep running through the food market. The locals are real troopers for continuing to sell in this weather! About halfway through this walk my friend Jo hitched us a ride on a passing pickup truck. Not all of us got a ride....

Sorry boys...so we made it to the end of the black river. At this point the boys went off in search of a songtao and as I understand it got on one going the wrong way before they jumped off and found where another would get us. Somewhere between 20-23 people and numerous large containers of commerce fit on this songtao. Here we are all piled in...

After all 23 people were in we set off! While we made a few stops along the way we were sure this songtao was actually going to the border market. Turns out, while it made most of the journey, it wasn't. Just before the market we turned left down a looooong road leading to some residential areas and ended up having to hop off. Thanks again to Jo's quick thinking we caught a ride back up the road (and hill) to the highway on a pickup truck, just as it began to rain hard. Again.

Things at the market were interesting but relatively uneventful. No furniture was purchased but we did manage to find a really neat-oh Burmese antique store with some crazy old items. Alarm clocks, lots of hand-painted pottery, and really old rusting toy cars. We finally headed back about 3ish and found food in a delicious Burmese tea shop. Yogurt Lassi, tomato salad, and chicken dumplings...yummy. To get there some of us did have to walk through the black river again, but it was worth it.

After a third black river crossing my friends did purchase some desks and we all slopped back to their house to get bikes, passing through a final river that was overflowing from a saturated field. There was a bit of current in this river, and as my friend and I waited hopefully for another nice pickup truck (that never came) we noticed tad poles swimming out of the drain into the field, locals fishing for either fish or frogs with nets in the flooded field, and a team of four men cutting a path for the water to flow into another field so it wouldn't flood the entire road. I wish I had a picture of this scene but don't...

When I finally biked across town to my house I found many major roads flooded (ankle-shin deep) with muddy water. Just when I thought the worst was over I found the road that T's my street had turned into a muddy river with a medium strength current. I managed to bike through this and got home where I stayed until the next day!

The rain turned out to be caused by the remains of a typhoon and the flooding in the city was actually caused when the authorities opened the city reservoir because not doing so would have caused more damage. While a lot of 'lakes' we around Monday and Tuesday I must say that the public works folks did a great job of getting rid of most standing water and clearing out the drains of debris.

Now that you know everything you ever wanted to about flooding in MaeSot, I'll sing off...

What I’ve Been Up to...

For the past month I’ve been thinking up great blogs to share with you. There is just so much to say and I am not even sure I can do justice to the complicated issues on the Thai-Burma border. Besides that, life here is just so…unexpected in many ways. It took me a bit to fully embrace it but now I am there. In the next few posts I will attempt to explain things here from my perspective/understanding. But I encourage you to check out the resources I mention. 

Things have gotten pretty interesting since I stepped off that bus at 6:30am into the border town of Mae Sot. While MaeSot can be described as a sleepy border town, just below the surface there is a cast of unique characters, organizations, and businesses with various agendas who speak a multitude of languages and make you question whether or not you are still in Thailand. MaeSot is a melting pot of culture, language, politics, religion and…well to repeat myself…characters! Living here sucks you in, as it is hard to remain untouched by the issues going on around you.

Since living here I’ve occupied 2 guesthouses, and one actual house (where I was lucky enough to score a house sitting gig for 3 weeks- thanks  Maggie!). Most of my friends here were once random strangers who happened to be sitting next to me in a restaurant or tea shop…or should I say lucky enough to be sitting next to me?:) This experience has probably allowed me the most opportunity to practice my people skills, because not knowing anyone the first week (thus hanging out a lot by myself) was not so much fun. I arrived here hoping to find an apartment and volunteer position in the first week. I did get the volunteer position but the house part was a little more complicated. However, everywhere I have lived has been safe, secure, and social (the 3 S’s?).

Tea Shop where  I hang out a lot (there right now!)

Another view of tea shop.

A friend recommended that I try to volunteer with Social Action for Women (SAW) so I spent the first few days trying to get in touch with them. I was hoping that, just as the main drag is loaded with guesthouses and hostels, it would be just as packed with NGOs and easy to locate SAW. This is not the case and for good reason. The legal status of the population served by said NGOs is precarious. Some NGOs are also not registered by the Thai government so risk being shut down if found. As long as beneficiaries can access the services they need in a relatively confidential manner, it is in the interest of these organizations to remain a bit elusive to passersby. By Wednesday I did finally make contact with SAW and started teaching English to elementary kids the next week (3-4 classes per day). 

SAW serves the Burmese migrant population (Burmese meaning from Burma but not necessarily of Burmese ethnicity) in Mae Sot and surrounding communities. Many migrants are here illegally, and even if they do have a work permit have limited mobility and cannot leave Mae Sot. These two issues present problems in terms of getting access to medical care and education in Thailand. Thus, SAW’s programs target the most vulnerable migrants (women at-risk or victims of trafficking, abuse, and the sex trade as well as single mothers, orphans, and women fired from their jobs at the factories who have nowhere else to go.) Check out their website (www.sawburma.org) for more details.  The English courses were for the children of the migrant workers.

I taught English for about a week and a half before I got pulled into writing a grant to fund some activities for the Women’s Crisis Center. I have taken a million classes and workshops on grant writing but have never done it, so was pretty psyched to be involved. The process lasted about a week and was a combo of writing the grant and developing the project- very intense but extremely fulfilling! Between developing and writing we ate lots of Burmese food at the local tea shop…more about the food in a later post…

I have now been in MaeSot for a month and just returned from a short trip to Chiang Mai…stay tuned for more soon!