Opportunity Blog

Sue has always been economical. When we were first married it was by necessity. I was a poor graduate student and she taught at a small private school making half the salary of a public school teacher. She shopped garage sales and thrift stores. Our circumstances are better these days and she buys designer clothes, only the very top labels, from Goodwill. She claims the Goodwill stores in the wealthier metropolitan areas, in our case Austin, TX, have the greatest clothes that are in great shape.

When describing his mother and myself to others, my 30 year old son Nathan often tells of an incident that occurred in a department store 18 years ago. I was returning a defective item and was told that store policy was such that it could not be returned and no refund could be issued. As Nathan watched I went back and forth with the man with no results. When all other options had failed I finally told the man that the only thing left for me was to take the item back to my wife and let her handle it.

I told him that he had indeed exhausted me and it was just not worth my while to continue any further. My wife, however was different. “Sue will be here to see you a number of times. She will talk to your supervisor, his supervisor, and so on. She will call and write to the company president. She will do other things that don’t come to mind right now. She won’t stop. When this is over, you are going to give her the refund.”

At this the man changed his mind and gave me the refund on the spot. Nathan never forgot that.

I do wonder some times, though. While Sue makes her own coffee in the U.S. we do sometimes stop at Starbucks in Bangkok. Normally Sue and I will get a large latté and share it. The problem with this is that Sue likes an artificial sweetener while I prefer the hazelnut syrup. Sue decided we could easily fix things by having the barista split the large Venti size, into two mugs (don’t try this at home, kids). I tried to explain to her a how the coffee shop expected to make money. That was pretty ridiculous on my part. If there is one thing Sue knows about, from making the best coffee you will ever get, to where in the world the beans are grown, etc., it is coffee. She was not ready to hear me explain about Starbucks’ business model.

I really did not want to see this, and found that I needed to use the restroom, which was upstairs. They did go for it. Thai’s do like to be agreeable, and like to help you out when they can. When I got back she had two big mugs with mine fixed just as I like it. We had some of our imported German chocolate covered gingerbread (previous post) with it. It was great. Sue definitely does know more about coffee than I do.

Sue and I have just returned from Lanta Island, which I’ll talk about later. We arrived in Bangkok on the 27th for a few days to enjoy Christmas. Christmas has always been a big thing for Sue, and she cannot complete the holidays without hearing Christmas carols and seeing the decorations. Bangkok is a great place for that. All the stores are decorated, some extensively. Even a coffee shop or small restaurant will have a tree and tinsel draped along the ceiling.

We spent some time at the Paragon shopping center. The walkway decorated with the arches of lights with the luminous Christmas tree at the end is in front of that.

– Click here to view Bangkok Christmas Pictures –

We also went over to Central World Plaza. It and Paragon are the two largest shopping centers in Thailand. The plaza out in front here is very large and had an artificial tree maybe 100 feet tall. There was an outdoor ice rink somewhere on the plaza but I was unable to find it that night. Something the size of an ice rink could easily be lost here. Apparently the beer companies are working hard to capture Thai customers. There were five or six “beer gardens” set up on the plaza each with nearly a thousand patrons.

We did only a small amount of after Christmas shopping. The ground floor of the Paragon shopping center has more specialty food sellers of all types than I have ever seen in one place. Sue bought a large chocolate covered gingerbread cookie imported from Germany. She got a special after Christmas price.

Just as we are getting ready for a southern Thailand trip, Derek Tonkin sent this about vacation travel in Myanmar. I think the tide is turning on tourism to Myanmar. In the recent past you might have been viewed anywhere from politically incorrect to a supporter of a brutal military government if you decided to take a vacation there. Derek refers to a quote from a recent Times Online article about whether you should travel to Myanmar:

“No, said Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s courageous opposition leader, in the 1990s when the junta began admitting tourists because it was so desperate for foreign currency.
Yes, with certain provisos, said every diplomat, aid worker, opposition politician, monk and Burmese citizen that we questioned. Circumstances have changed, they argued.”

Note that Aung San Suu Kyi made her statement in the 90’s. It is less certain what her opinion would be at this time.

Two years ago at this time Sue and I spent nearly a month there on two separate trips. One of these lasted 14 days and cost us $910 each. Ordinarily from the U.S. you would pay an additional $1200 + $250 for round trip flights to Bangkok and from there round trip flights to Yangon. It would have been $720 if we could have gotten our group of seven up to ten people. This included our guide, tour bus all the time, one in country flight, boat transport on the river, various horse carriages, etc. It also included breakfast. The other meals were great and did not cost much.

In include a few pictures from that trip out of thousands. I just could not stop. Here is a video of a wedding we crashed south of Yangon. Our guide just happened to see it in a village square as our bus was passing by. They had no problem with us except that we had to stay for pictures with the bride and groom and their families.

The Ultimate trip? Sue and I have traveled to many places and had some great times. I cannot place any of those trips above that one. It’s easy to go. You can get a round trip to Bangkok on any of the internet ticket sites. If you cannot get the Bangkok to Yangon flights easily from the U.S. you can try through the Bangkok agency that I use. Ask for Bill. Finally, to arrange the travel in Myanmar I recommend Exotissimo in Yangon. I would not be surprised if the agency mentioned in the Times article uses Exotissimo for their Myanmar arrangements’.

While you will not need to get a visa to get into Thailand you do need one for Myanmar. Ask Exotissimo about their visa on arrival service. At fifteen dollars it is the only way to fly.

I encourage you to go. I do think the tide is turning. At present, in tourist terms, Myanmar is “unspoiled”. Translation: the economy is so bad and the people so poor that there has been little new construction since the British left after WWII and the people still live like they did hundreds of years ago. Enough tourism and engagement with the West will probably raise the economic level and allow for a bit more of a modern life style. Like maybe some medicine when their children get sick.

It is a great time to come to Myanmar. Help us spoil it.

Planning the upcoming trip to Ko Lanta required a more effort than I had originally thought. Instead of calling a travel agent in Bangkok to set up the type of trip they think is best for me, or most profitable for them, I did it myself.

The first thing was to think of a place unlike Phuket, Samui or Krabi, one that I did not hear about all the time. I used Google maps to show various coastal areas and then entered “hotel” in the “Search Maps” box. The red markers show the hotels and resorts known to Google. In some mainland areas below Ko Lanta I saw just one or two markers. That is too remote for us. The older areas such as Phuket and Krabi have markers everywhere. That is too built up.

Ko Lanta seemed about right, and its being an island should probably contribute a bit of remoteness. The ferry boats still allow my car, which I want since the two islands are 16 km long.

View Larger Map

I checked out several hotels that appeared to be in a good location. Google maps with the satellite view on, or Google Earth could tell me if there was a beach in front of the hotel. I settled on the Blue Bayou hotel near the southern tip of the island. The location was perfect and it was amazingly inexpensive. The few reviews I found were good. I zoomed in with Google Earth to see what the immediate area looked like but could see no buildings anywhere around there. I thought it was probably under the trees.

You can check out the Blue Bayou for yourself, just put your cursor over the red dot at the southern tip of the island.

Later, when trying to get a hotel along the way in Suratthani city I was clicking on hotel markers in the center of the city and getting places that were a beachfront hotels, or places whose text said they were way over on Koh Samui island. I checked out marker after marker that clearly was not where the map indicated. It took several hours of searching and checking to find a few hotels that were actually in that city.

That made me check on the Blue Bayou. I called up and asked if they were on Ko Lanta island. They were not. They were in Krabi city and not at the beach. That explained the great price. I canceled that reservation, started looking again and found and checked the Moonlight Bay resort. Interestingly, the most complete map I found of hotels on Ko Lanta was at their site, a scan of a paper map (click the map symbol at the lower left of their home page).

Google maps still can give you a good overall view of things, and in some cases is accurate. It did get Moonlight Bay resort at the right location, but you need to use one or more independent sites to check these locations. I used agoda, not necessarily the best site, but it had its own map. These maps are based on Google maps, but the independent web sites mark the hotel locations themselves, just as I did on the map in the previous post.

Using the internet is frustrating. Google maps is the only general mapping tool that has any information at all about hotels and other things in this part of the world, so you have to use it. I think many of its locations are derived from people simply entering numeric coordinates incorrectly and not checking their work afterwards. For example the Sevenseas hotel is in the ocean about 20 km southeast of Ko Lanta.

I am relying less on reviews of hotels, especially on sites that sell reservations. Agoda, mentioned above, is an example. Having read their reviews, and then experienced the hotels, it seems they are removing many of the negative reviews, leaving only a token negative reivew or two.

When I look for a specific travel destination or hotel, I often find many general websites that seek to deal with all destinations or hotels have struggled to be higher in the search rankings appear first, obscuring websites actually written for the specific destination or hotel. Some times I must wade through several pages of search results to find a page that contains real information. The unwritten rule for nearly all these sites is not to show the phone number. If they did, I could call and find out information directly, reserve without their unwanted services and perhaps find out the name of the hotel’s own website.

At first appearance these sites seem authoritative. Clicking on them often gets a general page with no reference to the desired information, but instead a request to “enter a description of this destination” or “find a hotel in Thailand” or “be the first to review this hotel” or a sales pitch for their own reservation services. A great example of this is the Virtual Tourist site I hit when looking for Nang Rong information. At this time I see it finally does have one hotel, but the rest is devoid of any content. How they get so high in the rankings (I entered “nang rong, Thailand”) I don’t know.

For as many times as we have been in Thailand, Sue and I have not taken many vacations. There was our first time in Thailand when we came with a group in 1995. We spent a week and saw major attractions in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. The next was just last year with a week trip to Pattaya where we stayed in a very large resort hotel that had seen better days. The guests were all Russian except for us. The resort had over 1000 rooms, not all full, and Sue and I were the only English speakers there. We did have a good time.

View Ko Lanta, Thailand in a larger map

This year we will go to the fabled south of Thailand and stay at a beach hotel near an underwater reef national park on the west coast of Ko Lanta island. Ko Lanta is a large island off the Thai west coast just southeast of Phuket. We’ll take three days for a leisurely drive down. There will be two inexpensive trips on public car ferries (20 min and 5 min) to get our car to the large southern island. We have never been south along the “elephant trunk” of Thailand before.

We are booked into the Moonlight Bay Resort which, at nearly $150 per night is a bit pricey by our standards, but gets us a room on the beach with a beach view in a resort that appears to get uniformly top marks in many internet reviews. And it also pays breakfast and for being there during “peak” season. (note entered later: We only stayed one night at Moonlight Bay Resort – I cannot recommend it)
Sue wanted to spend Christmas at a resort, and at many of these southern Thai resorts prices can nearly double just for the week before Christmas. I saw one (not ours) whose price doubled again for the 24th and 25th.

There is an underwater reef park just south of our hotel, and the list of dive shops and dive tour operators operating on the southern island is very long. We hope to do a lot of looking around in the water there.

It is getting harder to find an “undiscovered” resort area in southern Thailand. First it was Phuket, then Koi Samui. Less than ten years ago Krabi was the new relatively unspoiled place. Each of these places started out with bungalows on the beach, then resort hotels. Now there are high rise condominiums, shopping centers and six lane highways to get you there. Ko Lanta does have resorts, a number of which are still under $50 per night if you are not there during Christmas week. There are still a few bungalow places, but no high rises or big shopping centers that I have heard of.

It should be great, although I won’t know until I get there and see for myself. I’ll tell you more when we come back.

I just returned to Nang Rong yesterday from Bangkok. There were some NGO meetings Walai had to attend and I went along. Since I was returning Saturday morning there would be no traffic jam problem, so I took a taxi all the from my hotel to the northern bus terminal at Mo Chit. On the way the driver reminded me that this is the weekend of the King’s birthday, which is also Father’s day, one of the biggest holidays in Thailand. Everyone would be on the road going home.

Sure enough, when we got near the station there was a small traffic jam of cabs trying to get in to both levels. I hate having to push through crowds and feared the worst. Even the bus terminal in a smaller town like Nang Rong has easily twenty times the activity of a city bus terminal in the U.S. The bus terminals in Bangkok are more on the scale of an airport. I stopped and took the first picture just as I came through the door from the ramp onto the second floor.

It appeared there would be long lines all the way through, but it was really just for the ticket booths for a couple of popular destinations. There was only one person ahead of me when I got to booth #25 for Nang Rong and points east. I checked the upper right of my ticket that I was not in row 1, which has no leg room, and went on outside since the weather was pleasant. I took the second picture from the pedestrian bridge on my way to my bus. That is just one aisle along which buses park, not the only one. The bus was more full than usual but I still had the two seats on my side of the aisle, as I usually do when riding alone.

The decorations were out and Christmas starting while I was in Bangkok. I did not hit any major shopping areas at night so the only picture I got was our in front of the Silom center in front of my hotel. When it comes to commercializing Christmas, the Thais do a great job. Being a Buddhist society means they do not think of a balance between the sacred and secular parts of the holiday. They can go for the gold, and they do a great job of it!

Overall, insects really are not a problem here in Thailand, and I’ll always contend there are fewer problems here than anywhere else I have lived. There are some, however. There are these small ants, as small as any I have seen (thus no pictures). They will find food anywhere you put it within fifteen minutes. They are amazing. The smallest bit of candy or banana and they are on it in the hundreds. They get into boxed goods like the cake mix and soup mix.

You can protect your food by putting it in the refrigerator. If an ant does get past the seal it will die in the cold. You can use sealing plastic containers, but the seal better be perfect and a temperature change better not pop the lid, like when you take one out of the refrigerator, or closed it in the cool of night. Ziploc bags are unreliable. The ants seem to chew through them much of the time. Some product bags may work. The basic rule is, if you cannot open it yourself without tools, they ants may not be able to get into it either. It is hard to rely on even this rule, however.

The answer seemed to be to put everything into the refrigerator. That is really inconvenient. It’s not possible when Sue is here stocking up in Korat every two weeks. The ant invasion solutions on the internet involve chemicals, sealing everything adequately, being able to seal off your house better than I can here, and maybe an assumption that the ants are not quite so ready or numerous as they are here.

All I needed to do was ask a Thai. I bought six small bowls for the six legs on my cheap aluminum kitchen cabinet. The legs sit in the bowls which are filled with water. The fifty cent blue pipe is needed to fill the back center bowl. It should take more than a month for the water to evaporate, and we can move everything into the refrigerator when we leave for the U.S.

I tested it by leaving the knife out on the counter top after spreading jam on toast. It was there for 24 hours and I did see one ant. It was not eating jam. It must have been looking for a way back to the nest. I theorize it fell from the ceiling. Now if they could learn to do that, and then go to the cabinet bottom and fall to the floor when they want to get off, I could be in trouble. They’ll have to evolve more before they can do that.

So now I have a big cabinet I can store any kind of food in or on. I’ll try to keep the doors closed in case something larger wants to munch, but I have seen no signs of anything like that yet.

Insect problems are surprisingly absent from this part of Thailand, contrary to my years ago image of what Southeast Asia was like. There is nothing to correspond to the yellow jacket plague in various parts of the U.S. when you try to eat outdoors. Everyone eats outside here nearly all the time. The kitchens and eating areas for the new houses we are building in Opportunity village will be outside.

Something did happen last night. There is some kind of small beetle, dark brown and shaped like a ladybird beetle but a quarter or less the size, that is mating, breeding or otherwise celebrating some part of their life cycle. This part appears to be to find a light and fly around within a foot of it until you die. This is a picture of my front porch. I had the porch light on for movie night and forgot to turn it off until later. They look like coarse brown dirt. This is the second and probably last die off I have seen this year. The first time I had five or more times as many insects. I should have taken a picture of my porch then. It was quite impressive. I did not realize what the “dirt” was and just started sweeping it away. They sweep up easily.

Few came in last night because there was no inside light to draw them (movie night, remember?). Thai houses don’t seal that well, and the night of the first time I did not understand what was happening. My inside, as well as outside, lights were on and a few got in. I was reading directly under a light and five or six times a little beetle just fell onto me. It could be dead or still crawling a bit. They don’t bite and you can’t feel them except when they first fall and hit you. When I was cleaning up next morning I noticed they were only on the dining and coffee tables in the house, nowhere else. The two lights were directly over these tables.

So if you are eating your evening meal at an outdoor restaurant (about the only kind we have) in Nang Rong and start getting bombed by tiny beetles, just move to a table between two lights, and you should not have any problem.

You can see the two finger salute in this picture of four of our girls. The little one is also doing it below the bottom of the picture. Every Thai girl under the age of 30 has to do that in every picture. I suppose I should find out what it means.

I took that picture last night at movie night. We farangs must have our big screen TV, and Friday at six all the kids, along with Moms and Dads as available, come over for a movie. Last night the kids all chose Peter Pan, the live action version, with Thai voice and English subtitles. I really like that version and the kids did as well.

One of our girls brought her gold medal to show. Her team won in its group in the citywide volleyball games earlier that day. She is the power server for the team. You can see her in action at the left in the above picture. Everyone was happy about that, and we celebrated by passing out some snacks bought from Seven Eleven. The clerk there assured me that kids like what I bought, and she was right. There were also various marching groups at the all day sports celebration. You see one of our younger girls in one of those in the picture below.

As you can see, our girls live in a family, go to school, play sports and win and lose just like their friends. Their moms go food shopping, fix their girl’s clothes, cook (with the girls sometimes helping) and volunteer at their kid’s schools. In several cases there have already been definite changes for the better. Some are not so visible, some we notice right away when Sue and I come back from our stay in the U.S.

The last two pictures in this post were taken by Ho, one of our fathers.

by Walai Jantawiboon

Today (Nov 26th) is Sila’s birthday. (Sila means “Rock”) and I went to see him and his two grandmothers as I do once a week. I went one day late to make it on his birthday and went alone because my partner is out for a Children’s Council meeting in another province. As soon as I got in the house, his grandmother Yai told me that she was expecting my visit yesterday because her grandson cried so much. The boy has two caregivers, one is 78 years old and has leprosy and the other one is 80 years old. The latter currently has a cataract problem needing surgery. I was frustrated to hear of the boy’s illness. Then the old lady with leprosy asked if I could take him to the hospital. Well, that was not what I had expected for his birthday celebration. His birthday turns “bed” day instead.

Neither old woman was healthy enough to hold the boy and sit on the motorbike I ride. Eventually we got help from the neighbor who is a good friend of them. She is also of advanced age but seems more capable of handling any situation. She found proper clothes for Sila and rode with me to the hospital. As soon as we got to there, her arms were weary, so I carried him. The boy cried so much from his illness. We finally came out with a bottle of abdominal pain relief medicine from a private clinic for 30 baht. The public hospital we first tried was having a lunch break!

Who in the world would expect that he would get illness and medicine as a gift for his birthday? I was saddened by the fact that he could not have fun on his birthday. On the other hand, I was glad that when he is sick he still has his two old grandmothers and neighbor who care so much for him.

After Sila returned home with us, I gave him a green frog doll and prepared milk which he drank happily. I turned to his grand mom who has cataracts and asked her if she was ready to come with me for eye treatment. Lately, I have asked her repeatedly to go to the hospital for an optical check-up which she always refuses. This time was different. She consented and came with me. I was so glad I had not given up! Self-determination is one of our social worker core values. I fully agree with this value and try my best follow it. I don’t want to abuse my position by forcing her to treatment. For this time, I felt rewarded for not giving up easily. We had to wait at the hospital for two hours but it was worth it. We came back with some eye drops and advice from the doctor that the woman needs to have her cataract removed. I cannot and will not force her to do that. I asked her to talk this through with anyone she trusts and let me know her decision.

Sila’s mother had him when she was a little older than 15. She herself is also an orphan losing her father from a car accident when she was too young to remember. Her mom ran away after that. I was with her once when we took Sila to the hospital. She appeared very young and immature. I have no doubt that she does not care what happens to her baby boy. I suppose I could blame her for this mess, but how does that help? It is a time for healing instead of blaming. I need to focus on the issues and try to overcome them one by one. I hear Sila’s mom is hanging out with a new guy. I hope one day she will grow up and get back to a more healthy life.

I thank Opportunity Foundation for its vision and commitment to help people at every age. That enables me to not only help the girls having been abused and neglected but also become a helping hand to many people in the community that are in need. I believe that we as human beings are mostly kind, gentle, compassionate, and willing to help. What prevents us from doing so is the obligation of the lives we have to follow. This includes our precious time taken away by the work we have to do to earn a living. As someone has said: “We have money to buy a house but have no time to live in a home.”

I hope the Foundation will help more people feel that they are at home through our commitment and service of love and caring in action. Tonight, I ended my day with mixed feelings…I’m sad that there are many more people who need help…however, my joy came when I realized that at least one young boy and one old women have been helped today.

This is an actual case from our work. We may change a few details, insignificant to the case, its meaning or is impact on the child and society, in order to protect the identity of the children involved.