On April 12th, the Songkran festival (Thai New Year from April 12th-15th) started throughout Thailand but especially in Chiang Mai province. Celebration solely consists of throwing as much water as possible on any passerbys. It started as a Buddhist tradition for the kids to flick water on the elderly because it's the start of the hot season. It has now turned into a huge free-for-all, where all the citizens and tourists are in the streets with super-soakers, hoses, and water buckets (usually from the really dirty moat water). We participated all day on the 13th, and as hard as we tried to avoid water in our mouths, we both ended up stomach sick, just getting over it yesterday. We stayed in the city center at a guesthouse (hostel), and our street was intersecting one of the common prostituted streets. Eating out for dinner, we often saw transvestites, beautiful Thai women with older western tourists/expats, and many bars with scantily dressed women inviting men in.
There are three main types of sexual exploitation for Thai women. Many women are bar girls, where they are in charge of getting men to buy them drinks all night. This helps the bar owners' business, while also feeding the bar girls' addiction to alcohol. Men can buy the girls a 'break' from the bar and during the break the girls can make their own money by selling themselves to the customer. Another option are brothels, night shows, and 'happy-ending' massages. Single mothers can fall into this line of work, especially when they have debt or unexpected expenses. Lastly, westerners can hire 'girlfriends' to live with them full time. She gets paid a monthly wage, and he gets his needs met.
We left the city on the 14th, meeting up with Don Fox (head of Handclasp Ministries at Musikee center) having just arrived from California. The village we are now based in is located 4,500 feet up in the mountains, North of Chiang Mai city, a four hour drive up switchback roads. The Musikee center, sponsored by Handclasp and HRDC (Hill-tribes Resources & Development Center), we are at has 60 kids living here throughout the school year, but there are 400 kids in different centers throughout the Karen hill-tribe villages. Right now, the children are on school break because of the New Year. Some have families to go home to, so we made a trip to a drop them off at their village yesterday.
We drove only 24 km to Huay Pha village, but it took us over two hours to get there due to the lack of paved roads. If you think you've experienced back road driving, you haven't seen anything yet. We had a full car and 10 kids in the bed of the truck, driving through the jungle on rough terrain, that as Americans, we wouldn't even call this a dirt bike path. Props to Don's maneuvering around ditches and staying on the road with drops of sometimes 400 ft below.
Karis' camera has attracted not only children, but all the Huay Pha village people who want to get their portrait taken. The two of us walked around the village accompanied by an elderly Karen man (who spoke no English) but through motions we ended up entering many homes taking photos of Karen villagers. Karis showed them the picture after taking it and their reaction was either embarassment or excitement on seeing their photo perhaps for the first time. We stayed the night at a very hospitable family's home, who just had a baby. We have so many great photos that we have been trying hard to upload, but the internet connection is too slow for it to work. We will put some up as soon as we get a better connection.
We have internet at Musikee and our address is:
HANDCLASP PO BOX 381
CHIANGMAI, THAILAND 50000
Love J & K
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