I just ran across an article in the Bangkok Post that talks about an issue of interest to many farangs my age. Actually, it is nearly a year old, but these articles live on on the internet for some time, and this one is not out of date. The last six paragraphs talk about something that has all kinds of side effects, including some that impact our foundation’s work.
Farang men come to Thailand with a small to medium retirement and marry a Thai woman thirty years younger. I am in my early 60′s and see some other men my age or older even here in Nang Rong. Almost all have a young Thai wife who originally came from this area. She would have to come from here: otherwise how would the two of them ever find their way back?
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? The news article assumes the lifestyle upgrade that lifts the woman out of poverty is the only attraction. It states that “love is an unlikely reason because of the huge age difference.” I think it is not that simple. Among the farangs and young women you have people with different motives. Some of the men just want a sexy young woman and have not thought further than that. Some of the women can get a lump sum from the retirement spent on a house which due to Thai laws she ends up owning. Within a year she has divorced the guy and gone back to her Thai boyfriend. Men have committed suicide in Thailand over such things.
On the other hand, you have farang men who want and will cultivate a companion. They are old enough to know how to do it. Some farangs from the U.S. or Europe have been brought up to treat women differently than Thai men. A lot of Thai women appreciate that.
It also depends on the man and the woman. Did he come to Thailand because he could not handle relationships at home? Is she a bar girl he met a few months ago? Or are they from more similar backgrounds, education and cultural levels (even if the cultures are different).
In Asia women do look at marriage differently. The average less educated woman here works unbelievably hard whether it is on the farm, selling food on the street from 7 AM until 10 PM in the city, or in a factory. While some may take the farang for whatever they can get, others truly appreciate his support and return love as real as any good marriage can have. It may not seem ideal to us, but when both parties have their needs met, it can and does work.
Of course it would be better to meet a young Thai man with at least an adequate income who treats her well. How likely is that? I have seen several articles here in the last year that young educated Thai women are doing the same thing as their counterparts in Japan. They are just not getting married. If the lighter skinned educated girls in the city have this problem, how much worse it is for an Isaan girl with darker skin and less education?
While the man dying way before the woman is an issue, he can leave behind some of that retirement, small by our standards, so his wife will not have to work like a slave the rest of her life. In short, it may look bad, but it can work and seems to me to work as often as marriages in the West do.
This got pretty long. I’ll have to talk about how this affects our foundation in a subsequent post.
We finally fixed our opportunityfoundation.org website to accept credit card donations here. While doing this I noticed something new, at least to me. It is called “viral giving”, and I will try it right here.
You could click on the big yellow button to donate. That’s not such a new thing. The new to me thing is that you can click on “Add to site” and get some HTML code that can be placed in your own website. Any money given goes directly to Opportunity Foundation, Thailand as if it were given on the foundation’s website. Some one else sees it on your site and can copy it to his site. Soon it’s everywhere, right? Pretty cool.
It does remind me a bit of the pyramid selling companies where, instead of selling the product, the time is spent trying to recruit others to sell the product for you, taking a small cut of their take, and passing a smaller cut up the line to the person who recruited you. A bit like the police operate in some areas of southeast asia.
It is different, however. There are no “cuts” passed out to anyone. All the money does go to the foundation. Well, I spoke too soon. This is all done through PayPal, and they do get a cut, but no more so if it is given on some other website than if it were given on Opportunity Foundation’s own site.
On our website (near the bottom of the page) we say there are no chain restaurants in Nang Rong.
Well, that is no longer completely true, but maybe not completely false either. A new Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened there around the end of the dry season (March) this year. It is located within the Tewikit mall which is out on highway 24. Tewikit is a small department/discount/grocery store, part of a small chain whose two main stores are in Buriram city. KFC’s are located in each of those, so I guess Nang Rong was the next biggest store and the next place to try. It is really half a KFC with only about half their offerings available. The front counter area seems very small, hardly there. There was one employee that I could see and I don’t believe there were any customers present when I checked it out.
Are the other chains watching, ready to move in should the KFC prove successful? I wouldn’t mind a Pizza Company or a Dairy Queen here. They sell food that I cannot get without traveling to Buriram city or to Korat. I sometimes eat at KFC when in Bangkok or other cities, but in Nang Rong I know places to go for good chicken. The very best chicken I’ve had in the area is barbequed at a roadside place across from the Chalearm Pragaid regional hospital just a few miles east of Nang Rong. With their low overhead the cost is about a sixth of KFC and the view is great. I was standing with my back to a lake when I took the picture.
Some of the more knowledgeable Thais in the area give a low probability for success for this new KFC venture, and I think the franchisers of the fast food places in Thailand are quick to close down outlets that don’t meet their sale minimums.
Anita Horton has resigned as managing director for health reasons and has taken a leave of absence from the foundation for six to twelve months. She remains on the board of directors. Before she left she fortunately was active in the search for and hiring of those who will be replacing her.
Anita has lived in Thailand for twenty years. She first came to Nang Rong about ten years ago and worked in village development and education. Shortly after she started there my youngest son came from the U.S. with several others on a mission trip to help out in the village. He liked it so much that he had to go back the next year. Sue and I met Anita shortly after that and have been good friends since. Much of what the foundation is comes from Anita’s vision. This has grown from her experiences here in what has been one of the more forgotten parts of Thailand.
While she has degrees from MIT, has worked for the Sloan Institute and been chief advisor to and consultant for various educational and governmental councils in Thailand and Southeast Asia, what has always impressed me about Anita was something else. She knows everybody. She knows and is on friendly terms with the mayor, the governor, his wife, and so on. Do you need to speak to the minister of education for Thailand? For Cambodia? How about the director for disease surveillance for the Mekong sub region? She has worked with so many governments in this area at so many levels that it’s tough to figure out who she does not know. If you walk with her down the street in Nang Rong she stops and asks the woman recycling the garbage how her children have been. She has known her for years.
One person, even Anita, cannot start a foundation like this. On the other hand, if you get Anita together with a few of her friends, it really was not so hard.
As I mentioned, Anita remains on the board of directors and still advises the foundation management via phone and email. If I’m lucky, I may get her to contribute to this blog as well:)
A brief article about both Opportunity Foundation Thailand and a sister organization, Opportunity Foundation India, appeared in the July issue of Costco Connections. This magazine is published monthly and mailed to many of the members of the Costco discount store chain in the United States. Other members pick up the magazine when shopping at Costco.
The magazine described a little about my wife Sue’s and my work with both foundations and included a picture of each of us. They made the pictures monochrome for some reason. I reproduce the one of Sue reading to kindergarteners here. This has created some interest and a number of emails to our Opportunity Foundation Thailand website. Some have expressed interest in donating to our work and we are talking to others about volunteering.
In the article six people/families had their work profiled, among them Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea” and famous for his courageous work opening schools to educate girls in Pakistan and Afganistan. Appearing with someone like that was quite an honor.
Welcome to the new Opportunity Foundation Thailand blog! I’m Jack Simpson and along with a few others will be writing about what is new in Opportunity Foundation Thailand as well as about life in small town (Nang Rong) Thailand.
If things slow down here a bit I might talk areas of Thailand and neighboring countries that are convenent to travel to from here.
There is a great deal that is interesting happening at the foundation and I will try to inform you as much as I can.
Because of the importance of privacy and a normal life for our girls there are things I will not be talking about. I suppose this is unfortunate in some aspects, since the worth of what we do is seen primarily in the progression of one of our girls to someone who is happy and doing well. Where identities can be protected we will let you see into some lives in Cases under WHAT WE DO on our website.
There is one way you can see our girls. That is if they can see you also. Come as a volunteer, teaching English or whatever, and you can get to know many of us better!
