I went to Myanmar for a coke and a chat in Japanese

Andrew on the Friendship Bridge where we are about to go for a visa run in Burma

People from Burma illegally crossing under the "Friendship Bridge" that connects Mae Sot, Thailand to Myawaddy, Burma on a large inner tube. And smuggling goods into Thailand, right underneath of where the Thai police are doing "visa" checks!

Solar Water Heater Part II

Attaching the hay, which is our insulation, with tarping on the back 

Our little coffins... I mean insulated collectors

A collector with the insulation on the bottom and the tubes all ready for the glass to be put on 

This is how the finished collector looks. Pretty nice once it has all the glass on it. Sadly, we were not able to finish insulating the tanks..... another weekend :(

Crazy last weekend in September

So last weekend was quite a weekend!

On Saturday Andrew, Tha wah and I, along with others, attempted to solve our house's hot water problem. We started to build some solar water heaters along with an NGO called BGET and Marcus. We started to build three water heaters: one for our house, one for Marcus' and one for BGET to have so that they can train others in the solar water heating making process.

To explain why we need a solar water heater: because we still don't get to take hot showers all of the time! The power that is needed to go to our electric water heater is too much for the fuse in our house to handle and after about 2 minutes of a hot shower we blow the fuse in our house! Sigh. Also we can't always take showers any ways because sometimes the water pressure isn't high enough so we have to take bucket showers. Which now that I am used to them aren't so bad. None-the-less I was determined to find away to heat our showers and a solar water heaters seemed like just the thing. It also just so happened that when I brought this up to Marcus he said "Oh ya I have built 5 solar water heaters in Thailand and know exactly what to do. And I was going to show BGET how to build one any ways. AND I want to build one for my house too."

So that is how last Saturday we started to build three solar water heaters and I must say I am pretty excited about it! It involved a lot of running around trying to find the right pieces in the right sizes for all of the compartments, but I think that we have pretty much got it all now and are ready to finish and install it this coming weekend!

We started by building the collectors, which were made from wood and corrogated iron, that we painted black. Then inside of the collectors we placed 5 sets of black tubes that we put permanately together with wire and cement tape. These tubes will be what will eventually pump in the cold water and heat it and dump it back out into a highly insulated garbage bucket to later be used by us for showering water. The collectors will be finished this weekend by adding a layer of aluminum foil, a layer of hay and a lay of plastic to the back to keep them super insulated and retain as much of the heat absorbed from the sun as possible. Also over top of the collectors we will be placing three sheets of glass so that it magnifies the rays of the sun on top of our black painted tubes that are holding our water. We also need to finalize it by insulating the garbage bucket with a layer of foil, a layer of hay, and a layer of linoium. I am hoping to have this installed by Sunday, so hopefully I will be able to post photos of the finished project soon!

Then after an exhausting Saturday that went from 9am to 7pm working on the heaters we went to pick up our three new kittens on Sunday morning! They were born to a semi-stray cat that lived at a small school in Mae Sot and the school wanted to give them away to a good home before they became street cats. So we are going to let them be indoor-outdoor cats so that they can learn to fight for themselves. But for right now they are only 5 weeks old and are keeping them inside with only minor outdoor excursions for their own safety. Luckily they are very smart and took to the litter box without any mess ups! They also love to be with one another and I am so glade that we took all three and didn't spit them up! Currently they are eatting, sleeping, pooping machines! - But cute ones! I am excited to see them grow up.

Our last edition to our house this weekend was a free papya tree! It is only a baby right now, being just 50 cm, but if we treat it right it should grow very quickly and hopefully product fruit before 2009!

Crazy last weekend in September Solar Water Heater

Cutting and putting the tubes together.



Andrew and Salinee, from BGET, with the first of three tubes we created to go in the collectors and heat the water for our showers.



Tha wah helping to build our collectors.



Me and a BGET intern painting the collectors and heaters black to trap as much heat and water as possible.

Crazy last weekend in September Cat Edition

Katio and Padu enjoying a clean litter box


Our black cat named Padu climbing all over me!


Our little kitty enjoying an ice cold Leo beer!



All sleepy... aren't they just so tiny?


Andrew quickly became the new bed for some tired kitties after they spent a crazy 30 minutes exploring our house.

Finished Product Photos

The new creation for this playground a tee-pee with the music cubby house sticking off of it and a sitting area for the teachers under the natural growing bamboo tree.



The big slide with the low maze infront of it


My beautiful hamburglar creation!


Music cubby house




Myself, Tha wah and Marcus on the big slide



A photo with all of the UK students that raised the money for this playground and helped to build it.


The biggest cubby house we have built yet. It houses all of the musical instruments that we built for this playground.


Lots of anxious kids waiting to test out the new playground

Enjoying the Playground

Ribbon cutting!

Marcus looking cheeky with the flowers that were given to him after the ribbon cutting



Looks like we just graduated from playground building school huh?


Waiting to go down the big slide.



On the spinner. We often take for granted, especially those born in the USA, that people are use to being on fast moving objects that spin and drop quickly. Forgetting that not all countries have such luxuries we put the Burmese hired worker on the spinner so we could show him how it worked and made him completely sick by spinning him too fast! He probably had never felt centrifugal force before let alone so quickly! Needless to say he was sick for the rest of the day....

Enjoying the Playground 2

On this weird octagonal tire thing that we made.


A traffic jam on the bridge


An adorable little girl taking it easy on the small tire swings we installed.


Here are some of the older kids enjoying the music cubby house that we built. It had a wood and metal xylophone, hanging chimes made out of rebar and a drum made out of an old gas can.

Finished Product!

So, last Wednesday we finished the Lebe playground that Tha wah and I were working on with the 18 British Students and I am pretty thankful to have it all done with! It was exhausting - and I am not talking about the building!- by the end I was so sick and tired that I was barely up for enjoying the opening ceremony. The students were pretty hard to manage. They would drink all night and then come to the playground hung over and not ready to work. Getting some of them to work was really like herding turtles and by the end I was glad to have to playground finished on time.

But here are some photos of the opening ceremony and all of the kids enjoying the finished product! I am really proud of all of the work and management skills that went into making this one. It really looks good and actually has a color theme to most of it! We also went in with an actual plan this time, which made it soooo much easier!

Lebe Playground and disappointing British Women

I felt that maybe I should give everyone and update on how the new playground is looking. Our deadline is Wednesday and these photos were taken Sunday. We are pretty much on track and I definitely think that we will finish on time! 

For this playground Marcus had to go back to Australia to do some things, so it was all Tha wah and myself building this one. We had to build, redesign and manage the 18 unrulely British University students that came to "help" us. In reality most of them were more of a hinderance than a help... but what can you do? Half of them didn't really want to be here helping in the first place; they just came for the later trip to the beaches down south. 

I must say though that out of all of the students I was most disappointed in the girls. I really hope that all British women do not act half as vapid as these girls do. Not only that but they actually play into the stereotype that women are not good at building or doing physical labor. I am going to be so glad when they finally leave on Friday. I have not enjoyed their company nor all of  their attitudes towards building this playground. I just can not understand why if you sign up for a 2 week trip that includes building a playground why you can't just build the damn playground for the refugee children. It's only 2 weeks out of your life- but I guess that is what happens when spoiled British kids go on a trip where the main point is for it to look good on their CVs.

Any who, enjoy the photos and more photos to come of the finished product later!

In progress Lebe Playground

Our local gas station

So this is Tha wah and his motorbike getting gas at our local gas station... yes that lady is using a hand crank pump to get gas out of a metal drum. And yes, that is just a normal nose and nozzle that is being used to put the gas into Tha wah's motorbike. And all of those plants are the gas station lady's plants... she has cultivated quite the garden at her station huh?

Just thought people at home might like to see this one!

A man, is a man, is a... woman?

I have never so successfully cross dressed before.

For someone to believe that after working with me for an entire day that I was a boy is quite a feat! Granted I am not the girliest of girls when I work on site; I usually wear a short sleeved baggy t-shirt, long shorts to my knees or long pants and a baseball cap - none of which however in the USA would be considered "guy clothes". But in the end it really has nothing to do with what I am wearing on site and everything to do with what I am doing- hard labor. And not only THAT but also directing other men - other white men. All of this together with the baseball cap, the physical building and the management skills was just too much for our new Burmese hired worker to comprehend and he spent the WHOLE day thinking I was a Thai boy until I took off my baseball cap!

He told my friend and roommate, Tha wah, how shocked he was to find out that I was a girl. In Mae Sot, unlike Bangkok and busier cities in Thailand, there are lots of Burmese and Karen refugees here and the community is very small and slightly more conservative. Women almost never wear shorts that are higher than their knees and you will never see a girl wearing a spaghetti strap shirt. Most women continue to wear the traditional long skirts with a loose short sleeved or long sleeved shirt. And while Mae Sot is not repressive towards women it is still traditional about what are women's jobs and what are men's jobs. And one job that is not a woman's job is building playgrounds with power tools out in the sun!

While I do get stared at ALOT while biking around town in work clothes, being all sweaty and unlady like and going into hardware stores to buy new drill bits and the such it does come with an interesting sense of responsibility. At the first school that I worked at, Morning Glory, there was a young teacher around my age from Burma. The first few days that I showed up to work she would sit outside and watch us work and after the 4th day she told me that she was worried that my hands were getting calloused and would hurt from all of the digging I was doing. After I showed her that my hands were neither calloused nor did they hurt she just looked at me, said “but you are so pretty” and went back into the school. Since that day whenever I showed up on site she would follow me around and I would often notice her watching me as I drilled or used the machines. Come the following week she started to help out with the work and soon she was carrying dirt and gravel, painting and all sorts of other jobs. It was quite interesting to see her working because all of the other teachers at the school were older women and while glad to have us building a play ground not in the least interested in helping us build it.

At this new playground I am constantly being watched by all of the little girls and they are often very interested in participating. People in Mae Sot are used to Farangs (white foreigners) coming and doing charity work; some of which I am sure includes women getting dirty and doing building. But to them Farang women doing work is different; it is a cultural difference that white cultures do this and that is okay, but Burmese and Thai cultures do not. So it is very strange for them to see me, a non-Farang and someone many assume to actually be Thai or Burmese, doing "man's work". On top off all of that the culture here is to humbly do and respect what the Farangs tell you to do. I feel that for me to be in a managerial position and often be consulted with about designs or building decisions by Marcus, my Australian boss, must be the weirdest of all and I know the hardest to adjust to for some of the Burmese hired workers that help us.

I must say that even though it is strange for a woman to be giving them directions on a building site they do not be grudge it. All of the Burmese workers that help us have take my role very seriously and often come up and want me to check and make sure they are doing the right thing. I feel that in the USA the same would not be so. A woman at a building site would probably be met with scorn, resentment and even hostility.

I never thought that I would be coming to Mae Sot to question what this small town thinks about it's set gender roles, but it is definitely gratifying to see all of the school girls, teachers and Burmese workers' reaction to me working with Marcus and Tha wah daily.

Morning Glory School Photos

This are the photos of our lovely playground. We have a sandbox, a see-saw, a tree house, a bridge, a slide and around back where you can't see in the photos a swing set. The round structure where the slide comes from is made out of unused sewage pipes. The tires are keeping in the sand in the sandbox and used to keep a lot of the other structures together.

It was actually pretty interesting to have the slide made by a welder because he had never seen a slide before and was not really clear about what it was going to be used for so it was quite interesting describing what we wanted to him. Needless to say he did not get it right on the first try!

Also all of the sand in the play ground needed to be imported from the beaches down south and shoved in. That was quite a project!

But as you can see the kids really loved it and took to playing on it very quickly. Hopefully the school will be able to keep up the maintenance of it, because the weather out here is pretty brutal and even with all of the hard work and extra though put into it, it could easily fall apart in 6 months! But it isn't too bad. This one cost 40,000 baht to make the maintenance is only 2,000 baht a year.

Morning Glory School

Today I helped finish Hands On Learning’s 4th playground in the Mae Sot area. I must say that the first time that I looked at it I thought that it was pretty ugly looking, but the more time that I spent with it and the more finishing touches we put on it the better it started to look.

The whole point behind them is creating playgrounds for free for migrant children, usually from Burma, out of recycled materials. So we use lots of old tires and logs. We also use concrete pipe barrels for the round play houses. And lots of bamboo. It is pretty inventive if I do say so myself.
I came in at the very end of this one so I mainly did a lot of the painting, which is fine by me because doing work out here is killer! It is so hot and humid that even sitting around outside you break into a sweat let alone digging a hole or cutting tires (which is really hard, because evidently they have steel right in the middle of the rubber going all the way around- who knew?). I am so tan right now, even though I wear a hat and lots of sunscreen. It is pretty neat because I get to do a lot, and I mean A LOT, of hands on work. I get to use concrete cutting drills, diamond edge hand saws, all sorts of drill bits, and of course the regular hammer, nails and screws. After this whole thing I over I think that I will be super handy, and probably really quite buff!

Hopefully in the next play ground I will have a larger role in the creation aspects; we start that one on Monday! I am pretty excited to start a play ground from start to finish even although right now I am pretty exhausted about this whole working out in the deadly sun from 9 to 6 pm!
Below I am posting lots of photos with the kids enjoying our finished product. It is really rewarding to see them so happy about something that is really so simple!

On a totally other note, the bathroom tiling is almost done! yay!!! I am giving the guy the final amount or money tomorrow and it should be all done by 9 am! I am so excited to not have to deal with this tile guy any more. He is a really good tiler, but it is just little things that a tile guy might automatically do in the States, he needs to ask me first about so that means setting up a meeting time with him after work, taking Thawa (my roommate and translator) with me and chatting with him through Thawa every time! I gets really tedious after a while! We are still trying to find a mosquito netting guy, hopefully that will get pulled together by the end of this week! But the house is starting to look good and we are going to buy furniture this weekend and do lots of room painting!

House Photos!

So here are some photos of my house. This is the initial state that we got it in - unrented for months and home to SO many spiders it was scary. We are planning lots of renovations. The main ones are tiling the bathrooms and putting up full mosquito nets. We also have to buy a sink, stove and electric shower, which sound expensive and like a lots of work but aren't. Here shower, stoves and sinks aren't quite like what they are back in the States. I will plan to show you all when we are done. I hope to post a photo of the out side, next time I go there.

I am pretty excited about the whole thing. Since Saturday we have tiled the bathrooms and are now working (cross your fingers!) and that means buying furniture! YAY.

Luckily the guy that I am working for and building playgrounds is also an expat from Australia. So he has all these great tips on getting a house in order here and where to go for labor, furniture and the like!

The first photo is of our entery way and the staircase up to my room with Andrew. The second is our totally empty kitchen. The third is our upstairs common space and the last is a photo from Andrew and mine's room on to our balcony and the view that we have of our neighbors and the road.

A New York Minute?

People talk about all the things that can happen in a New York Minute, but is nothing compared to what can happen in a Thai Day!

In one Thai Day I accomplished:
A. finding an organization to work with
B. find two new roommates
C. find a house to live in
D. putting the money down for the house
E. getting a mosquito netter, tiler and gardener to come and fix the house
F. buying a bike

All in one day!

So it all started early in the morning (thank you jet lag) when I sat down next to this guy, Rob, in our hostel’s common space, we start chatting and it turns out he is here using sustainable and recycled materials to build playgrounds for local schools. And it just so happens that they are looking for people to help out. Not only that but Marcus, the guy who heads up the project, is very keen on the idea of having an architect help them out! So not only will it get to build structures using eco friendly methods, but I will also be able to design some of them my self! Very cool! I never envisioned that I would be telling people that I build playgrounds in Thailand!

After Rob leaves to go off to work Andrew and I start looking for apartments to hopefully move into in the next couple of weeks. The hostel is supernice, but we want to be able o cook for ourselves and have a little bit of privacy. Than, the Ban Thai Guesthouse manager, takes us to view a few of the ones that are also owned by Ban Thai. The first one is like living in an apartment in the States- only nicer! Some of the perks I wouldn’t be able to afford back home. It had full wireless, a maid, someone to do your laundry, mosquito nets every where, air conditioning (which is almost unheard of here) all western furniture and amenities – but it just wasn’t like we were living in Thailand. It was too weird to have a maid come and clean up after us and to do our laundry. Plus it was a bit expensive, 6,000 Baht a month (which I know translates to like 200 dollars a month, nothing in comparison to what I used to pay!). I guess that I wanted a bit more realistic of an experience, I didn’t come here to be pampered! The next place he showed us was the complete opposite, a total dump. No stove, no sink in the kitchen, no mosquito nets and NO privacy. We are starting to worry- Rob had already told me how he had been looking for a place to rent for the past two months!

Being a bit disheartened by our lack of apartments we decided to go look for a bike to buy. We first tried the Chinese bike store, which was like being back in downtown Chinatown. Her store was filled with completely new bikes that looked like they had just come from the factory. I am still not quite sure who buys her bikes because no one in Mae Sot rides new bikes, they are all old 1950’s cruiser bikes, but none the less we are going to try and give some a go. But even the tallest one was way to small for even me, let a lone Andrew! (Have I mentioned yet that we are on the tall side here?) So we decide to go and try the other more expensive bike shop. There the bikes were ridiculously priced. Once again we were completely defeated in finding what we were looking for.

Andrew eventually had to run off to work and I decided to go around town a bit a see what things were like at the heart of Mae Sot. I was still on the hunt for a bike, since you really needed one to get around town on, and I was stopping at random stores that had a few used ones out front for sale. None of them were nice and too expensive- everyone just wanted to take advantage of the farang (read foreigner). When on the very last block I notice a little wheel poking out of the side of a shop. I stop in and somehow explain to the owner (no one really speaks any English here) that I want to look at her bike and once she realizes what I am talking about she opens up the whole side of her shop and there are about 20 perfect 1950’s cruisers sitting there. So that was where all of the locals bought their bikes! And at great prices, I end up getting a really cute red one –with a bell- for only 1,900 baht ($55). In New York this bike could have cost me like 200 bucks! I was so happy with my bike that I later took Andrew back there for him to buy one too!

After riding back to the guest house on my new bike, Andrew comes back after a few hours saying that one of his coworkers, Jade, had found a house to move into that she really liked but her old roommate didn’t want to move there and if she wanted to see it. She prepped us by saying that it hadn’t been lived in in a very long time and needed to have a bit of work done to it, but all in all it was a great house. So off we go to see it… and it is totally amazing! A 5 bedroom house with a huge kitchen, 2 bathrooms, 2 balconies and 2 large common areas! This is a home improvement-doers dream (i.e. MY dream). So excited that Andrew and I have finally found a place to live we put half of the money down right then.

Later back at the hostel I am telling this story to Rob and he says “oh ya I have a Thai friend who is looking for a place to stay for really cheap” and it just so happens that this “Thai guy” that Rob know Jade also knows and now he is our new roommate. And because he speaks 5 languages he was able to broker all of the deals for the construction that we needed to have done on the house. Which is pretty considerable. Right now our kitchen is all concrete. So we need to have the two bathrooms tiled, the weeds all around the house dug up and the whole house needs mosquito netting! But hopefully we will be moved in by the end of this week! So currently I am running back and forth to the house trying to make sure that everything gets done, cause I am sort of in charge of that. Also next weekend we’ll be able to hopefully furnish the place- yay for furniture buying!

All of that happened in one day! Amazing huh? Craziness sure can ensue here.

An A Type Lost in the Jungle

It is definitely hard telling people why I quit my job in Manhattan and left my apartment in Brooklyn to move to Thailand; without a plan or idea about what it will be like when I finally arrive. It is not really in my nature to make such a change – but I guess that at the core that is the real reason why I chose to leave. Because it is just something that I naturally wouldn’t do.

After graduating NYU and working full time in a lucrative art gallery in Manhattan I still wasn’t completely fulfilled, and if anything more neurotic. Manhattan has a unique ability of turning each persons’ little flaws into huge neurotic tendencies. I worried about the future, worried about my clothes, worried about working out – just about anything I could worry about I did. But most obsessively of all I worried about money. Did I have enough of it, was I spend little enough of it, did I have enough of it for the future, was I investing what I had properly…. on and on and on. Towards the end of 2007 it got so bad that I was having money anxiety dreams where I would wake up and my arms would be numb from stress. To cut to the chase it was stupid; I was saving and making more than enough of it. So then why was I so god damn stressed about it? Like I said, Manhattan is just a greedy little monster that feeds off of your anxieties, making them worse for its own benefit. So what I needed was a reality check and a change in scenery. If money, relative success for my age and living in “the greatest city in the world” wasn’t going to do it I needed to go some where that would. And for the most part that’s how I ended up in Thailand.
Sadly, I guess that my motives are no different than any American that goes to Thailand to “find themselves” – if it is even possible to do that! But while my motives might not be original I am really hoping that in the mean while I end up doing something meaningful for the people that live here and contributing to the community.

We’ll see how it goes. I just finally got to Mae Sot after 2 long days of traveling and tomorrow is a new day. Hopefully I’ll find A. an apartment to rent and B. an NGO to work with. This should be a whole new exciting adventure!