Let me just start out by saying that I'm very sorry. I've let this blog languish for a lot longer than I intended. July and early August were pretty insane, with travel, friends visiting, and a bout of food poisoning that left me in bed for the better part of a week (luckily, I have friends in Chiang Mai who will rock up with rehydration salts and an Xbox and play Soul Caliber with me when I'm too weak to get up). Still, I meant to get back to it after a few weeks -
- and then there was a sudden death in my family. And work started going nuts (every company and international financial institution in existence is trying to get its claws into Burma right now). And it was suddenly Very Important that I go to all the border towns and teach training sessions on sustainable development - usually with only one or two days' notice.
So by the time I lifted my head, it had been more than two months since I'd posted. I promise to do better from now on.
Time to get back to posting about the train of crazy that is my life.
In no particular order. Much like my life.
And speaking of which, I never realised that the thematic phrase that would crop up again and again in this particular plot arc of my life would be “Nice Soap”.
The
other day, I met a work associate’s wife and daughter, a friend of
theirs, and the friend’s dead husband. They were all pretty awesome,
although I think the dead guy probably came off the coolest. (No pun
intended.)
About
a week ago, you see, I was asked to go down to Mae Sot - a town right
on the Thai-Burma border - and run a two-day training on sustainable
development for a group of youth leaders. After the second day, the
head of the organisation running the training took me out to dinner,
saying he wanted to introduce me to his wife (which is unusual, but when
I found out she was a Westerner it made sense – “Hey, you, honky, meet
my honky spouse,” is a lot more common than, “Meet my Burmese spouse,
with whom you may or may not share a language”). She was a lovely,
extravagantly warm South African woman with her three-year-old in tow – a
plump, sleepy bundle of pink and curls. We went to one of Mae Sot’s
roughly four Western restaurants (for the second time during this trip –
the very sweet young American volunteer who picked me up from the bus
station took me there the first night, as well). Mae Sot, while it
isn’t tiny, still feels like a ridiculously small town to me. I mean,
comparatively, it is: on top of the four Western restaurants, they have
one supermarket, a couple of large street markets, and really just one
main street. I don’t think I’ve driven/been driven anywhere here that
took longer than ten minutes, as opposed to the minimum half hour it
takes to get from my house to anywhere in central Chiang Mai.
At
the restaurant, we met up with a friend of the couple’s – a
force-of-nature older American who works with groups of Burmese women to
help them develop traditional weaving into viable livelihoods. We were
chatting idly, and I asked what had brought her to Thailand in the
first place.
She
sat back a little, and her sharp blue eyes softened and blurred, but
her voice was steady as she told me, “Well, my husband was diagnosed
with terminal cancer.”
Apparently,
the doctors kept giving him different prognoses – he had one year left,
no, maybe three, no – until, one day, in the middle of a discussion
about something else completely, he turned to his wife and said, “Why
don’t we just go to Thailand?” They both had strong ties here from
previous NGO work, but no real plans for what they would do when they
arrived; connections to a good grassroots charity helped them land on
their feet, though. And that was the beginning of what this woman
described as the best part of their forty-plus-year marriage. And damn,
the way she talked about her husband made me wish I could have known
him. He apparently had a deliciously evil sense of humour, and took
great delight in basically trolling reality: he once tried to convince a
local Burmese group of the advantages of growing a new kind of cash
crop by enthusing about how well it worked, then whispering
conspiratorially, “Don’t tell anyone this, but my [seventy-odd-year-old]
wife has been eating them, and now she’s pregnant!” And when he
sprained his knee and was asked to lie on a gurney in the hospital
corridor for a few minutes before it could be examined, he passed the
time gasping to strangers, “Help me! I don’t know what’s wrong with
me! I’ve been here for three days!” :)
His
great project – one that he’d started on a trip to Thailand many years
before – was nice soap. That is, he wanted to help train Burmese
communities in the manufacture of fancy soaps to sell. The project kept
running into problems – difficulty packaging and marketing the stuff,
difficulty finding markets, and the number of tries it took to work the
kinks out of the process didn’t help. He ended up with a lot of
bog-standard, not-so-nice soap along the way. But the thing was, while
the nice soap had trouble getting off the ground, the bog-standard soap
was a hit – it was cheap for rural communities to manufacture for their
own use. They could buy the inexpensive oils nearby and mix the soap
inside bamboo, slicing the soap-filled bamboo stalk into round cakes
once it hardened. For remote villages struggling with health and
hygiene, it was brilliant.
Eventually, his wife said to him, “Are you sure that this isn’t what you’re supposed to do?”
The
man passed away two years ago, at the age of seventy-four, thirteen
years after his diagnosis. His loved ones still talk and laugh about
him as if he were alive, which I think is a great tribute.
We
had a really nice meal, actually – all ridiculous stories instead of
Very Serious Conversations About Burma, which puts it way ahead of other
work functions in my book. Not that Very Serious Conversations About
Burma don’t have their place, but that place is when you’re making very
serious decisions, not trying to impress people (and yes, I fall into
that trap sometimes). And the American friend actually works in Chiang
Mai, so we swapped numbers. Which reminds me that I really need to get
some business cards printed. Even getting the two sets I’d need
(personal and professional) would be cheap enough; I’m just being lazy
about it. But seriously, the time in my life when torn-off scraps of
paper with my number on them were acceptable ended when I graduated from
university.
I’m beginning to think that they should read: “Catherine Martin, Researcher, Writer, Soap Enthusiast”.
(Speaking
of soap, I got some lovely stuff for 10 baht this past weekend at a
brilliant market I didn't even know existed. Behind the big Western
supermarket on the Superhighway, it turns out that there's a
WAREHOUSE-SIZED market full of food - vats of delicious curries, loads
of fruit, a huge variety of sweets (many of which I'd never seen
before), buckets with live eels, spit-roasted frogs, it's awesome. It's
hard to believe that I've been living a ten-minute drive away for
almost a year without even knowing it was there. Then again, it's
possible that this market is new. A while back, I was stuck for the
entire drive into town behind one of the many trucks with loudspeakers
that drive slowly around, blaring advertisements - this one was yelling
about a new "Organic CommuniTEE Market Talaad!" (yes, with exactly that
inflection, over and over) at this particular supermarket
plaza. Which, for those of you who aren't up on your Thai, is an
organic community market... market. If this was the market (the market
market?) in question, then that slow, torturous drive was well worth
it. And, as I said, they also had some beautiful soaps - I picked up a
bar of honey and lime, and one of jasmine and almond milk. They're
supposedly whitening, as well, but occasionally I just need to surrender
to Thailand's conspiracy to make me whiter than I already am.)
