Living in the Moment in Thailand

Thailand is backpacker central. I was initially hesitant to include this country on my itinerary because I don't really like tourists or the tourist scene, let alone the whole backpacker-on-spring-break mentality. But make no mistakes about it, the word is out: Thailand is a great travel destination. It was quite a shock arriving in Bangkok to see more white people in five minutes than I had seen the whole time I was in the Philippines. But just like in Alaska, it doesn't take too much effort to step out of the artificially constructed tourist bubble.

I only spent one day in Bangkok, just enough time to visit the Royal Palace and take a Thai cooking class. After that I headed to Chiang Mai, the second most visited city in Thailand which is an overnight train ride away. Given the amount of tourists, it's pretty easy to get by without knowing Thai, but I find it frustrating that I can't strike up a conversation with locals the way I could when I was in South America. I also find myself at the mercy of others.

When trying to find the right truck to get to the organic farm (where I spent the last week) I relied on a note written in Thai by a worker at my hostel. After ten minutes of showing the note and being pointed to different trucks, I finally found the right one. Unfortunately there was a misunderstanding and the driver tried to drop me off at the wrong place. When he finally figured out where I wanted to go he explained (through hand gestures) that I needed to be on a different truck and proceeded to drop me off on the side of the road to wait. I sat on my backpack for an hour reading, praying the right truck would come along, and sure enough it did.

Thus I ended up at Second Home, an organic farm and retreat run by a monk named Chinnaworn. I called ahead of time to say I was coming, but I didn't realize that the retreat is technically closed at the moment while the monk focuses on meditating. In the past, Second Home was bustling with visitors learning to cook, farm, speak Thai, meditate, etc. But now there were only about five of us, all friends of people who had been there before. Luckily, there was still a lot to do. Although Chinnaworn spent the day alone meditating, the rest of us cooked and picked vegetables and did various tasks that needed attention.

The first day I was there we were recruited by Chinnaworn's brother to help cut rice. I will never again take rice for granted. We cut the stalks with sickles at a downward angle and piled them in little bunches, working our way through the fields. All of the Thai workers thought our contribution pretty hilarious and constantly gave us tips on how to be more efficient. Even so, I still managed to hit myself in the arm, bleeding on the rice stalks and amusing the Thais even more. But everyone was very good-natured and I was proud to have helped. Thankfully it was overcast that day; I cannot imagine working in the heat. As it was I left covered in sweat and grime.

For the week while I was at Second Home I shelled peanuts, cut bamboo, picked vegetables, weeded, hoed, cooked, read and meditated. Everything we ate was organic and either came from the farm itself or from Chinnaworn's mother who lived across the field. It was some of the most delicious food I've ever eaten and it delighted me that our grocery shopping consisted of wondering through the fields picking leaves and fruit or digging up potatoes. We even sucked the nectar out of flowers.

Second Home was extremely relaxing and left me feeling healthy and content. While at Second Home I read a lot, including some very inspiring books on meditation, life & death, selflessness and impermanence. We meditated every day for a half an hour, a task I find extremely challenging but very fulfilling. In fact, I have been so inspired by Second Home and some of the Buddhist philosophies that I've been getting into that I am getting ready to attend a ten day silent meditation retreat on the first of December at Suan Mokkh.

I get on a train this evening to make the journey South to Surat Thani from which I will go to the retreat. At the moment I am couchsurfing with a Zen Buddhist and professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Chiang Mai University. He was previously a monk for ten years and also a trauma doctor. He and his family have been wonderful and we have had many thought provoking conversations. I feel that I have learned so much in the past few weeks and I'm thinking about life in ways I never have before. Mainly I am learning to live in the moment and let go of attachments, which is much harder than you might think.

I expect I will have much more to say on such matters after this retreat, an experience which I find very intimidating. Lauren, not talking for ten days? But I expect it will be a good challenge and life experience. My thoughts will invariably turn to home while I'm there, as they have this whole trip, but I can safely say that I will return to Juneau energized and enlightened by all of my experiences here. This trip has again proved to be less of a sampling of all the places I could visit, but instead a study of locations that really move me.

Mariel Bo - Not just a photo anymore

You know those ads on television which feature forlorn children in faraway countries, dressed in rags and looking at you with pleading eyes? "For less than a dollar a day your contribution can make all the difference in this child's life." For years I would see those ads and think, how sad, I should be sponsor, and yet I never did anything about it. Then in San Francisco, about six years ago, I was stopped on the street by someone working for Children International. A perky girl who had been doing handstands on the sidewalk to get people's attention zoomed in on me when I laughed at her routine. Photos of starving children in hand, she gave me a very convincing pitch and I walked away committed to sponsoring a child in the Philippines for $22 a month.

At the tail end of my trip to the Philippines I finally got a chance to meet this now twelve year-old girl who I have been helping to support since she was six. I never really thought much about the money that I automatically contributed every month (with extras for birthdays and holidays). Occasionally I would fill out the pre-fab holiday wish cards or write her a letter. Every few months I got a lovely handwritten letter from Mariel, thanking me for my help and updating me on how she was doing in school. But it is quite a different thing to donate abstractly than to see the direct results of one's contribution.

A staff member of Children International picked me up at the Legaspi airport with Mariel and her mother in the car. Mariel was quite shy and didn't actually say much of anything the whole day we spent together, despite prompting by staff and her mother. But her mother said that's just how she is, and she grinned at me shyly when I talked to her and asked her questions. She was wearing an outfit that apparently the money I had given her for her birthday had purchased. I was quite surprised when her mother said she had prayed that her sponsor would come and visit a few months ago. Her hope was based on the fact that a few years ago I casually mentioned in a letter that someday I might visit the Philippines. Mariel was so excited to meet me that the night before that she didn't sleep at all.

The day was extremely fulfilling. We went to the mall and I spent $50 to buy Mariel some new clothes and sneakers and a radio for her family. I have never known a child's eyes to go so wide - she couldn't believe that she was getting all this stuff and couldn't stop smiling. "Thank you miss!" Her mother said thank you to me many times for supporting her daughter all these years. To put things into perspective, the income of Mariel's family is less than $100 a month and she has five brothers and sisters. I also saw the facilities where thousands of sponsored children in the region go to get medical checkups and receive other services funded by sponsors. Damn - I thought - how legit is this! It was unbelievable to see the realtime product of sponsorship.

At the end of the day I had a chance to see where Mariel and her family live. I was shocked. The whole family live in a very small cement building with dirt floors consisting of two bedrooms and a kitchen area. In fact, this building belongs to Mariel's grandmother and the family just recently located there keep her company in her old age. The home they normally live in didn't have four walls and was one room with a thatched roof. All of Mariel's brothers and sisters were super excited to see what she had brought home. Thanks again for everything - said her mother, and I told her it was a pleasure to finally get to meet them. I promised to be in touch more often. When I left, all the people in the village crowded around the van, smiling and waving, curious to see what this random white lady was doing there.

Suffice to say, I am more than pleased with where my money has been going for the last six years and will continue to sponsor Mariel until she is nineteen. I feel lucky to have met her and happy that I can contribute to such a good cause. There are so many children (and adults) with so little in the world and it's so easy to forget that in the consumer-driven society of the United States. I love that traveling constantly reminds me to be grateful for what I have.

I have even more cause to be grateful after receiving the news that my Grandmother's cousin's daughter would like me to be Godmother to one of her twins (who she is pregnant with now). We met briefly during the family reunion I discussed in my last entry. They have decided that they went to keep the family connection alive. Being a ninong in the Philippines is a huge honor and I am expected to have a lifetime connection with the child. I now have another opportunity to be supportive, but this time for family. I am thrilled, and I don't think I've seen the last of the Philippines.

The Philippines (North Luzon)

Walking off the plane into the Manila airport is like opening a closet in the fall that you haven’t opened since putting some damp winter coats into it last spring. The smell of musty humidity is overpowering, quite in contrast to the sterile environment of the Tokyo airport, the previous stop on my twenty-hour flight to the Philippines. Most the Japanese workers wore doctor’s masks, but so far, the only masks I’ve seen in the Philippines were worn by Asian tourists while riding horses up a volcano ridge. I did the same trek, but unfortunately sans horse, sans mask and sans my little brother, who gave up a 1/3 of the way from the top. I’ve learned that attempting to keep pace with a practiced local is unadvisable, especially in the noontime sun. But that was yesterday. What, you might ask, have I been doing since I arrived here more than a week ago?

Not partaking in the typical backpacker lifestyle, that’s for sure. This part of my journey being a family trip, I’ve given up adventure for relaxation and luxury. Falling back into my status as daughter and dependent, I have resigned myself to seeing the Philippines in somewhat of an air-conditioned family-filled bubble. For once, my schedule is not dictated by my own whims and limitations, but by those of others. Although this has taken some getting used to, it’s probably good for me.

The majority of our trip has been centralized around the beautiful home and delicious meals of our hosts, family friends William and Robert, one local Filipino and one retired American. They live in a gated community a few hours outside of Manila called, of all things, Lakeshore. What I didn’t realize before coming to the Philippines is that ninety percent of all signs are in English and most everyone here also knows how to speak English. My expectations of this faraway country certainly didn’t include billboards for Oreos, skin whitening products and Nike outlets. Not surprisingly, there is also an excessive amount of McDonalds, but in the Philippines, they also deliver. Even in this island country there’s no escaping globalization.

While visiting Manila we did not visit the area hit by the typhoons, sticking to sights like churches and the famous Manila Hotel. It’s a bustling Asian city, and the traffic becomes so slow that even on freeways people bravely stand and peddle things in the middle of the road with seemingly no fear. But I have never really been a fan of big cities and Manila is no exception, overwhelming me with its overload of people and pollution. I prefer our drives through the countryside, with water buffalos and rice paddies as scenery. To dry out the rice from the fields, everyone spreads it out on the hot pavement of the public road. Vehicles sway in and out of their lanes every quarter mile or so to avoid the fruit of this labor.

The contrast between where we have been staying and eating versus the daily realities for the locals is stark. The Philippines are home to immense poverty and wealth juxtaposed side by side with tin roof shacks right next door to multi-million dollar developments. Most everything here is extremely cheap, but you can also go to the mall and buy American brands for top dollar. As some of the seemingly few white people around, people often mill about us begging for money. It’s hard to say no when what’s small change for us could buy a local person three meals.

Speaking of locals, I had the chance to meet some long lost Filipino relatives. With the help of our Filipino host my grandmother was able to find and reconnect with a cousin she hasn’t seen in over sixty years. My grandmother knew the town she was from, but that was all. After three hours of visiting various offices and talking to a lot of locals, we located her cousin. It was an emotional reunion. How unbelievable it was to be at the home of our distant counterparts. The children played in the dirt outside the modest cement home, taking turns roughhousing with a tiny kitten, testing its durability by poking it with rocks and swinging it by its front paws.

I wish I had taken more pictures of things here, but I always feel weird whipping out my camera to take pictures of what is a novelty for me, but daily life for someone else. I have not seen as much of the Philippines as I would’ve liked, but as I have said, this is a different kind of trip. These last few days we’ve spent in a beautiful hotel in an area called Tagaytay, but tomorrow I am flying solo to a different part of the Philippines (Legaspi) to meet a child I’ve sponsored through Children’s International for the last seven years. The following day I will leave for Thailand.

And so you have it, some major impressions of my time here so far. I should also note that the scenery of the Philippines is quite impressive, as well as the heat. Thanks for reading, feel free to comment, and I’ll post pictures and another entry soon. 

On the road again...

Except this time I don't speak the language. Those of you who followed my blog the last time I was traveling know that I went to Peru, Ecuador, The Galapagos and Colombia. As a Spanish major, I found backpacking by myself in South America to be relatively easy since I was able to communicate with the locals. Traveling in the The Philippines and SE Asia is sure to be a whole different kind of adventure.

Tomorrow I leave for Manila to meet up with my grandmother, mother, stepfather and brother, all of whom left Juneau today. Believe it or not, my grandmother was born and raised in the Philippines, but hasn't been back in 60 years. I think my great-great-grandmother was 100% Filipino, thus making me...well...mostly pretty pasty white. But in some small way, this is my heritage, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to travel there with my grandmother. We will be in the Philippines until Nov. 18th, at which time I will be flying solo to Thailand. I arrive home on Christmas Eve, taking of from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

Now you know as much about my travel plans as I do. Once again, and to my parents' dismay, I am journeying without much of a flight plan. I must get from point A to point B and there are some stops I'd like to make along the way, but how it will all come together I'm not really sure. I have my dirty backpack, my passport, my trusty laser-water-filter-wand thing and not much else. I hope to update this blog as often as I can, but only if I have interesting stories to tell. Feel free to comment on the posts, that always makes me smile.

One day in Juneau left, lots of stuff to do to get ready. Will I be fully prepared by the time I go? Doubtful. But hey, this is trial by fire baby, trial by fire.