abacus

2009-06-25T20:43:00.001-07:00

also. abacus has taken to peering over the side of her pushchair, watching the road or the pram wheels or something, it must look so strange to the other pedestrians, this baby just hanging over the side of her pram. When she isn't doing that she is sitting upright, refusing to recline back into the seat, she sits there as though some alert sentry, surveying everything around her, the only problem is when the pram stops suddenly and she bangs her head into her toys in front of her.

also. we went to get a dvd out on her library card, but weren't allowed to because the dvd was rated for adults. haha.

abacus the star

2009-06-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

yesterday abacus had her paediatrician appointment. After waiting around for a long time, because apparently we had been misplaced (we were waiting in the room where the nurse had measured and weighed her), we had a really good meeting with the doctor. It couldn't have gone better. Dr Richardson loves Abacus and we would love for him to be in her life forever. He was so impressed with her progress and gave us so much positivity that any doubts we had by michelles report a few days earlier were completely put out mind. He didn't want to bother taking bloods because she was so obvioulsy not affected by any of the things they would be testing for and deferred them for her next appointment in 6 months. Her growth is phenomenal, she is above the 100 precntile in height for downs kids and about midrange in weight, so tall and skinny, bucking the trends - as usual!

She has been giggling a lot lately and giggled a lot at the hospital while we were waiting. She has also taken to a very pained expression in the face of strangers (and potential babysitters), which the dr thought was good. He was impressed also with how she was social at creche, not feeling anxious around other kids or adults, smiling at those she knows, watching situations carefully. We can't wait to visit Dr. Richardson again, as we left he said he had a family of four kids to see next and smiled that he wasn't looking forward to it. He walked out with us and yelled playfully the family name of his next patients and they came running as he bit his finger nails in playful overacting, while yet another of the clan emerged from the play house and followed his siblings into the office behind the dr.

Such people as Dr. Richardson are indespensible in this world.

2009-06-22T02:43:00.001-07:00

I already knew the conclusion from the letter, as Danielle had told me. Even so, reading through it myself I think I had the same reaction as her. It was a letter from Abacus's neurodevelopmental therapist to her paediatrician. It went through all of the things Abacus can do and it reads like a proud list, but it's in the last paragraph where it is concluded that this list of accomplishments puts her at the average ability of someone her age with downs syndrome, that kind of takes one back a bit. I don't know why this makes me feel anxious, I shouldn't, but you want to know you're doing the best for her and you wonder what you can do to make things better, we can't know what that means at this point in her life, and maybe it is only because her progress is so meticulously scrutinised and documented that we're exposed to such grading. . .

2009-06-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

kia ora.

Abacus had a good day today. She still has a bit of a cough and her face is still pretty oozy around her eyes and nose, and she woke up this morning with a snotlock ( a dreadlock formed by snot), but she is very happy. She went to creche where she met with her neurodevelopmental therapist. She impressed her with all her sitting and vocalising and rolling around to get get things, she is very inqusitive and reaches everywhere for objects out of her reach, even to her own detriment as her scratched up nose will attest. She really likes baths again(in Thailand she had grown some aversion to the small baby bath we'd bought her and we had taken to washing her in the shower with us, which she didn't mind, except she got a bout as slippery as a bar of soap!), since we've been back and in our new flat with a big bath, she loves splashing around and playing with her sponges.

a message from abacus

2009-06-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

h, cxz
"".L;.PP

2009-06-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

Abacus has been a bit sick the last couple of days, which makes her quite cuddly, but also snotty which makes cuddling less fun. Her voice sounds like a cross between a rusty squeeking gate anda chalkboard, which occasionally, when said in sharp bursts sounds like a dolphin. While she is more cranky she is also manically happy, last night she cried so much when we put her to bed that we let her watch tv on our bed, she stayed up for another 2 hours happy and wide awake before slowly falling asleep i think she just wanted to be around us. Unfortunately though this morning, after waking up at 5 crying, she had to miss creche, and consequently her neurodevelopmental appointment who was to have a session with her there, but she'll meet her on monday instead.

back

2009-06-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

i have completely neglected this site and flickr for tooooooo long!

abacus had her annual heart appointment the other day, we took the bus out in the rain and found our way too quickly and easilly to the cardio rooms in the new hospital, which looks now like a real hospital and not like some menacing soviet era place of suffering, and so were stuck with half an hour between us and her appointment, which would stretch to 45 until we were seen. In the mean time Abacus brought smiles to all the other uneasy people waiting for their own exams in the waiting room, she chirped happily and smiled cheekily and snuck glances at everyone around her, and i read her a book and in the book it had p is for pants, and aside from the obvious joke, it was accompanied by an illustration of pete showing poly his new pants, and he was holding out the front of them and he and polly with broad grins were both looking down the front of petes new pants. hrmmm. in the same book it had tom tripping, and with an absence of any reference to ground, the illustration rendered tom floating through space with toys floating around him, tom trips indeed. i don't know what kind of book this was supposed to be.

Abacus' was about 15 minutes overdue for her nap when I carried her tiredly rubbing her eyes onto the hospital bed, the contact between the ultra sound wand and her impatiently tired scream were instant and so the sonographer went in search of toys while I quickly made her a bottle of milk in the hand washing sink. The bright flashing millipede only intensified her anguish but she sucked soothingly on the bottle and settled immediately without another peep, suspiciously pacifying herself with her milk while she watched with interest, her own heart in granular resolution, and listened to the mechanical beats accompanying it like some vj drum and bass show.

The sonographers of course are not allowed to tell you anything, but I heard in a quiet conversation between them, they mention "turbulance", Danielle later translated this to mean the murmor is still present. We have a pediatrician appointment soon, which is when we find the results of such tests, but we are still hopeful the ASD will heal itself within the next 4 years.

Aside from that Abacus is just going from strength to strength, she sits now like she could always do it, she plays with her toys, rolls around to get to them, she gorges herself on bread and loves marmite with avocado and loves peanut butter, she's happy to see us when we pick her up from creche or when we come home. She talks in her baby language almost non-stop and she seems to get cuter and cuter!

a new year

2009-05-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

so a year of life a year of parenting a. of course its all documented here. from the 1.5 kilo fetus that joined the world and lived for a month in a plastic box before venturing out onto foreign shores while all the while developing a personality that was all her own.

in some ways it seems it couldn't possibly have been a year and in others it seems as though all of this couldn't possibly have fit into a single year.

one feeling though, that is a little unusual is the idea that i feel as though a year has passed, that i stand with some sense of perspective, a point of reference to reflect upon. i've never before got to new years day or my birthday and felt as though a new year stood before me, an old one behind, it was an arbitrary date, but i feel now as though everything is meausered out from that day. We could almost make it a new years day, being 2 months premature it's not really a true marker of her progress as reflected by age (a point of relevence up until the age of 5 apparently), so maybe we could celebrate her birthday on June 26th and save this day as something extra, i think we all deserve it. hehe.

looking back

2009-05-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

It's been over a year since Danielle was admitted to hospital with the impending birth of our baby daughter. I had to force myself to read back over the blog from that time, I thought it might still be too difficult to face those feelings again, for while we are a happy family, it is still easy to tap into that frame of mind that I found myself in last year. The below was written exactly a year ago, a day before the birth:

"And so everything changed again. And now we know exactly what's happening we just have to wait for it. A little in limbo, like pausing time right before something is about to happen, while knowing that the time elapsing will do nothing to prepare you or educate you for what is going to happen when you unpause. I think in a couple of days from now, when everything has settled down into some sort of consistency, I'm going to sleep like a hibernating bear."

It's strange to have such omniscient knowledge over ones own past, a dramatic irony which can powerfully foretell the future yet do nothing to stop things from happening. How little we knew a year ago, of the things which lay ahead. In fact when I think about what I said, about getting into some sense of consitency, I don't think that person would have believed anyone who told him he would not find that feeling until many months from there, and many miles too, when he found himself in Mae Sot (especially seems he thought he was going to Panama at that point, he could not have known of the coming flood which would rip through Soloy, killing and uprooting so many, and nor would those in the village for that matter, such is the useless power we hold over those characters inhabiting that past world.) It was not until we found ourselves alone and as foreigners that we were able to understand things from our own perspective, I don't think I realised that, until reading that year old entry. We were until that time beset by situations and people and had little time to consider who we are as a family. That time alone was so important for us, as being able to determine our lives for ourselves still is.

weekend

2009-05-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

Abacus and I had a weekend to ourselves while Danielle went for a 3 day seminar in Kaikoura. I went to pick her up from creche at 2, having left work early to do so, only to find she'd gone to sleep at 1:50, and didn't wake up again until 3:40! cheeky girl. Fortunately I had a long book to pass the time with(McCarthy's Border Trilogy - it's hella good!). We had a great weekend, despite having to negotiate a bus to go to Karori, two things I vowed never to do again, but Abacus needed to go to the doctor. Doctors by the way can be waaaaaay nicer than their secretaries! We did a lot of walking around which Abacus seemed to enjoy. I noticed everyone giggling at her and looked down to find she was smiling at everyone with her cheeky grin.

She's started to roll around a lot to get to things, she rolled to a chair and lay there talking to it for a long time. She also loves rolling uner the clothes horse and playing with the drying clothes. Like all babies she's much more interested in such things than her toys. She's still balancing for a few seconds sitting up, she tries to push herself up into a sitting position and puts her arms in the right place, but they are just that bit too shortt that she can't get up all the way!

It's almost been a year since we met here face to face. Hard to believe, in many ways it seems like it wasn't long ago, and in many it seems like all this couldn't have fit into a year.

confronting obstacles

2009-04-26T16:47:00.001-07:00

Abacus has brought so much to our lives and others. She has forced me to challenge things which I was once somewhat passive to, forced me to consider things whether I'd like to or not.

I remember Danielle saying how when parents are asked about their children being born with normative impairments, whether they would wish them to be born differently, they reply, "No, because I love them how they are." But she raised the point that there is something more than that, more than just the child and loving them for who they are, it is something about a door which opens onto world from which you cannot come back, you see the world from a perspective you had never before imagined, it is an enlightening place that I would not choose to leave if I could. It has illuminated even the most careless shadows of ignorance.

I write this because of an incident that happened, where a comic was placed on a public noticeboard, I won't say where, but I knew who had done it. I wrote them the email below.

"I understand it was you who put the comic on the notice board about mentally handicapped people. My daughter as you know has Trisomy 21 and I found the comic to be offensive. The offense goes deeper than just a point of taste. It is difficult to see the future of my 10 month old daughter be mapped out in such crude portents. These little pieces of somewhat socially accepted ridicule add up to a wall that puts the subjects of those “jokes” on the outside of normative society. This division is through no fault of their own and the most hurtful part is that it is perpetrated by those who have the mental faculties to make better judgement.

Having Abacus has been the greatest and most rewarding challenge to any prejudice I have ever harboured. While you might not consider the comic you posted to have been prejudice, it is this misunderstanding of what prejudice is, which proliferates it, and those on the receiving end never miss it."

I wanted to share this with you because these things exist. And if I can impart any of the knowledge I have gained from knowing Abacus, that it can be proliferated in whatever way to cut a path along which her journey through life may be less impeded.

Just so you know, the person I wrote the email to is not a bad person at all. They were extremely apologetic for it, a gesture which choked me up with its sincerity. I'm sure that it will have a lasting effect on them and me too, to know that standing up for what I see as being wrong has positive outcomes. Abacus has such a profound effect on the world with which she has scarcely even begun to interact.

A strange coincidence

2009-04-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

yesterday morning I went to WINZ to apply for accommodation supplement, (for everyone living in less socialist countries, that's when the governement helps you pay for your rent/board/mortgage - provided you fit within certain requirements which are often arbitrary and let many people slip through the gaps) and so i was meeting with our case manager which isn't all that remarkable, except that Danielle was studying with a girl from her class that very day and found out the girls partner works at WINZ and it turned out that her partner was the very person who I was talking to. wierd.

teeth and sitting

2009-04-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

so much happened today. this morning danielle felt two sharp ridges growing out of abacuses bottom gum. What's funny is that she's really chill about it, after all the times we blamed her restless nights or grisliness on teething that never materialised, she now has teeth coming through with no fuss.

Then this afternoon she was practicing sitting, which she was doing on our knees and was happily screaming ever time she lost balance, then we put her on the floor and she sat for a good 15 seconds, I think she will be sitting up by her may 5th birthday! She's doing so well.

2009-04-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

Abacus is a pretty happy little baby, she smiles a lot. We have moved into our ideal flat, its perfect and we feel more settled now after 2 days, than we did in our last flat after 6 weeks.

We drove to Palmerston North for a easter and abacus slept for an hour, waking up halfway along the journey and going back to sleep for another hour after I guess being bored. She had a good time at her great grandmothers house, with her grandparents and aunty and uncle and cousin. On the way back abacus was awake the whole ride, talking quietly to herself and playing with her little sunflower soft toy. We finally went to Denny's for dinner, it's in a town a bit too far from Wellington to go to for a laugh. Abacus loved it, she was really happy, and fed herself a piece f breadcrust, holding on to it with a fist and ripping bits of it with her gummy mouth, she really enjoyed it. She finaly fell asleep just as we got home.

We've been giving her a bit of sitting practice with her little wooden chair as seen above. It might take a bit longer before she gets there on her own.

moving

2009-03-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

so what happened was we were in thailand and we needed a place to move into when we got back to new zealand, so Jonno happened to be leaving his flat at the same time we were getting back, so we were able to negotiate getting it, but the only thing was the flat was for sale, though they didn't think it would sell for a while, so we got back and moved in and then a week later it was sold! so we were given the standard 42 days to GET OUT! We looked and looked and looked for weekends and weeks, which is pretty taxing when you're taking busses and a baby, but finally we found a flat 3minutes from creche, 5 minutes from university and 15 minutes from work. Whoo! there were hella people checking it out, but the next day we got an email saying we were successful! Yay. because we were getting tired of walking 10-15 minutes to catch the bus so early in the morning to get Abacus to creche and to get to work and university, and investing so much in leaving the house, knowing there was no going back for anything forgotten, unless you wanted to spend so long getting back to the house. It was a nice flat though, a nice view, and nice sun and the layout was a good use of space and I'm really happy we had it, but we can't wait to settle into our new place.

Last night we were making Abacus giggle hysterically. It was so cute. And the neuro therapist brought her a chair thing to help her sit up, Danielle aptly said it was like some woodshop students project, a pretty severely made wooden device, but it has a little table for her to play with things and she seems to like it.

another blog ? yep!

2009-03-14T22:19:00.001-07:00

remember me? i was writing a regular blog there for a while. so we're back but have not completely adjusted to life on our weather beaten strip of land. abacus is going to creche 3 times a week. She seems to love it very much, there are a few other babies she hangs with and she seems very happy there. It seems it is also exhausting, she d been going there only a couple of days before she finally slept through the night, and not just through the night, she slept for 13 hours straight! She continued sleeping pretty well, she still wakes up sometimes but doesn't need feeding and can put herself back to sleep after a few minutes of crying, her thumb has become a replacement for her dummy when one is not around.

new zealand

2009-02-22T18:03:00.001-08:00

i ve written things, it all gets a bit this happened then this then that, so i've not posted them.

What happened was we got home and it was raining and cold.

On a bus a couple of days later the driver said, "You'll need to ask someone to vacate their seat to put the pushchair there, but it's not my responsibility, you'll have to ask yourself, it's not my job." "um, ok?"

A couple of people gratiously got up, one lady frowned at us, didn't budge, frowned the whole bus ride, got off frowning. People walked with push chairs covered in plastic, like little collectable dolls too afraid to take them out of the pack, wide footpaths everywhere, one or two people on them, everything looked sterile everyone looked cold, stoic, unwelcoming. A couple of people said hello and smiled at Abacus, went up to her and made faces, they were Asian. The people between us and our friends seemed like props, with whom it was impossible to become spontaneously friendly.

It was good to see people we knew again, but we missed Mae Sot as the setting.

Things left unsaid:

2009-02-07T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Burmese maids at our guest house do an amazing amount of work. We have watched them clean rooms, wash all the guests laundry by hand, maintain bicycles, concrete some steps and set tiles into them, dig huge holes to put log seats into, chase snakes out of the garden. They love Abacus to bits, they stop work and rush over to her when we arrive back, or leave our room. One has 6 or 7 children, we met the youngest who is about 10, the eldest is in their late 20's. I don't know what they are paid. One of our friends went to to leave after three months of staying here and the owner charged her a full nights rent to store her bags for half a day. She comes off friendly, but I imagine she doesn't hire Burmese to help their cause.

There's a lot of whitening products here, even under arm deodorant.

They bought a fish tank for the guest house, but to save on electricity they kept unplugging the pump, the first two died within a day, one of the next two suffered the same fate at which point I kept plugging the pump back in everytime I saw it out, this maintained the fourth ones life for almost a week, before we saw the fish tank sitting empty of water. It was too cold for them, the owner said.

Oneday I bought some chicken from the chicken lady, danielle laughed first of all because I'd been ripped me off for what I got, then we weren't quite sure what part of the chicken it was, (after I'd taken a bite), Danielle thought it was knuckles, "no it's not, it's worse" I said, just before spitting it out, it was a skewer of chicken butts.

There's another woman who sits crosslegged in front of a giant wok full of oil, cooking over a drum, she deep fries what looks like shredded potato or taro, they're like deep fried hashbrowns, but while she's cooking it, she's wearing a medical facemask, and I'm like, that's not really the sort of place I'm going to eat, where the chef has to wear a facemask to cook the stuff.

There's a thing called a taro basket. Its an awesome example of edible packaging and comes full of delicious chicken, cashew and vegetable curry, it's one of my favourite dishes - but if you order it to take away, your ecofriendly tarobasket comes inside a non-recyclable styrofoam package.

Burma still has music and movie industries, movie stars and pop stars. Burmese teens still aspire to be like them. They have hiphop and the Burmese rappers look not disimilar to their American gangsta counterparts, with girls dancing in the background of their videos.

last supper

2009-02-06T17:37:00.001-08:00

It feels like i've already left. Last night we had dinner with friends which only made leaving all the harder, even though I was eaten alive by mosquitos at the restaurant, with one bite causing my whole forearm to swell up.

We waited around for half an hour for danielles "coordinator" to give her money to cover costs, she never showed, but we got a text two hours later asking if we were still waiting at the rendezvous point, because she was held up at work.

The NGO where Danielle teaches Thais, gave her a cake, which on the way home, we donated to the detention centre, written on the cake it said "Help without frontiers", I liked the idea of slipping a covert message to them inside a cake, not that they could probably decypher it, and not like the cake would deliver them the reality of its message. They took truckloads of detainees back to Myawaddy the other day, they smiled at me unfazed from behind the mesh covered open windows and gave me cheerfull hello's. Was it part of the game to them? I think a lot of western people impose their own feelings on such things, I think we look with tragedy and come away with an overall feeling of sadness which we then convey to others, which is not indicative of how people act here . The situation is tragic, and life can be a battle of course, but people still act happy, they find it difficult to suppress their smiles.

How to bully someone into a favour and make them feel bad about it.

2009-02-05T04:48:00.001-08:00

(A lesson in discourse analysis)

Every afternoon she teaches a boy under a gazeebo at a guest house. One day she arrived and some Farang was doing work there, so she set up the lesson on another table which was more public, but she didn't care, the Gazeebo was anyones. She began the lesson and after a few minutes, a man came over and said, (let's say John?) "John's just clearing off his stuff so you can have the gazeebo, because it's important to teach this little guy."

"Oh, ok? It's ok, we've already started."

"No, no, you usually do it there, he's already started packing up."

"I didn't ask him to." She thinks, as she packs up the lesson to move it.

While she's packing up her stuff he adds, "He usually does his work there in the afternoons, because he doesn't like being near the TV and all the guests coming and going, but he's going to move so you can use it."

Why did he feel he needed to add that? It feels like she's accepting a favour at gun point, as though she's burdoning someone without saying a word. Were they trying to participate in her good deed? Or did they feel shamed by some guilt that has nothing to do with her and are somehow blaming her for making them feel it?John is still packing up when they reach the gazeebo.

"I'm sorry I just get so absorbed in my work I completely lose track of time and become completely oblivious to everything around me. Just, when you see me on here, just come and tell me and I'll move.OK?"

"It's no big deal, I can teach him over there."

"No, no, this is a good spot to teach him. We're just going to the house over there, so when Pam turns up, tell her to go over there because I have the key, don't let her go down to the other house because she won't be able to get in. Ok?"

"Uh, OK." Which translates to, "I didn't ask for any of this, why are you making me do things? I don't even know you.

The next day John's working there again, and the little boy she teaches is asleep on the bench beside him. She sneaks up and taps the boy on the shoulder and with her finger to her lips, she whispers, "Let's go over there.", pointing to the table they had started at the day before. A few minutes into the lesson, John appears at the table saying, "You didn't do what I told you!" And for a moment, she gets a glimpse into the frustration which indigenous cultures feel towards white people, who seem to have this compulsion to help even when they're not needed, or especiallywhen they're not needed, which just goes further towards dominating and alienating and destroying. Just stop interfering!

And after this point of epiphany, a strange coincidence later converges on her, as she overhears John, and his plastic, Floridian tanned wife, talking loudly and obnoxiously to a Burmese monk, who had walked from Bangkok to Mae Sot to spread the message of Burma. They wanted their photo taken with him so they can tell everyone about him "back home". "We just think the Burmese cause is such a good one, we want to do everything we can to help."

"What about the Native Americans?" She asks. "What are you doing to help them? Do you even think about them? Did you realise they're still occupied? That they have no self governance? That they are still resisting like the monk is? Did you realise that they are resisting you?!" The words don't come out, they swarm in a maelstrom inside her head, because she knows they'll never understand.

Stupid white man.

darwin - leaving - retractsplanation

2009-02-04T05:03:00.000-08:00

One for the Darwin Awards

An adult student tells her teacher, "I'm sorry I wasn't at class yesterday, my uncle, he's 60 and he was eating chicken and he got up to do something and when he got back, a cat was eating his chicken, he got so angry that he chased the cat through the house and fell off the 2nd story of his house and died." The teacher has to fight the smile, suppress the laughter. I vote we just laugh when people die in funny ways. Later on, after killing about 15 mosquitos in the room I was about to climb on a chair to swat at one on the roof when the students story flashed into my head, the mosquito is not worth it, I reluctantly admitted.

Leaving.

We have just finalised a flat to move back to in Wellington (thanks Jonno!). It makes leaving a reality and I don't think I'm ready to go yet. I've learned so much here, but there' so much more to know and the opportunities disappear with each day. I really like Mae Sot, I like the people, I like how there's so much going on and so much to tap into. We've gotten to know so many locals and they've gotten to know Abacus (I would say us, but who am I kidding). We probably know more volunteers here than people in Wellington, we know almost every restaurant worker and everyone along our daily routes. I'm missing Mae Sot already.

Retractsplanation

I'm conscious of the fact that I may have inadvertantly made this place out to be hell (like when I said it's shit here - I meant the situation - sorry), that you imagine the people to be unhappy, but no, the people are happy and they no more want to leave here than most people want to leave their own homeland. Burma and Thailand are as nonsensicaly home to them as any country is to a native inhabitant, who refuses to reflect upon the possibility that the attachment they feel to it is culturally taught. The people of Burma don't want to get out, they want their story to get out, they wouldn't mind if the government got out, but Burma is their home.

Don't go out without a sweater, it's 30 degrees out there.

2009-02-03T02:07:00.000-08:00

The heat is well and truely back, it envelops you at night like an irremovable and unwanted blanket, and torments you in the afternoon, though the weather forecast in the paper calls it a chilly 21-33degrees celcius. Brrrrrr. However, there is a strong wool industry in mae Sot, woolen hats and sweaters, it makes me nauseous looking at them, but the locals are wrapped up in jackets and gloves and woolen hats, even in the hottest part of the Thai winter day. In the world forecast, Auckland at the height of summer was boasting 23 degrees max and I longed for that coolness.

In the absence of shrines people leave offerings to trees. They hang from the branches, the usual samplings of food and bottles or bags of sodas (with straws of course, what spirit or deity would drink fanta from the bottle?) and red ribbons with little white flowers attached to them. It looks really pretty to see trees adorned with gifts, if I worshipped anything, I think I'd worship trees.

shotgun!

2009-02-03T00:29:00.001-08:00

One thing I'll never tire of, is two cops to a motorbike, I'm yet to capture it on camera, but it cracks me up everytime. I also saw a cop riding an official police motorbike with "Rebel" written on the gas tank.

mermen and detained cows

2009-02-03T00:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a Burmese guy lead a cow into the detention center where it was tied up amongst the impounded rubbish carts. At the same time a guy rode passed on a scooter with a giant fish tail tied to the seat behind him, it was so big it looked like a continuation of his body, with its tail fin flopping neatly off the end of the scooter, he looked like a merman going for a ride.

2009-02-03T00:23:00.000-08:00

the racist dogs

hate

burmese people

one chased down

a young

rubbish collector

but didn't

bother

another

soul

last trip to burma

2009-02-03T00:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was our last visit to Burma. It was quick and painless, we handed them our passports, did a lap of the block, got our passports back and returned to Thailand over the friendship bridge. Beneath the bridge we saw an official sitting by the river, an M16 sat in his lap, with an extra large magazine attached, he talked to a friend, while behind him, the inner tubes took people illegaly back and forth between Thailand and Burma.

It was a lazy hot day in Mywaddy, the streets were more desolate than usual, we watched a group of five men, trying to lift a five foot stack of 7x3 foot thick iron plates onto the back of a truck, which a forklift would have done in no time. People washed their clothes down in the river amongst the floating plastic bottles and other refuse, at the base of the steps, which I realised now bear resemblance to Indian Ghats. On the Thai side of the bridge, I watched two Burmese men below, play chinese checkers with bottle caps and stones, on a crisscrossed board, scribed into the concrete footpath with rock. Beside them sat a shopping bag full of cigarette cartons, purchased in the blackmarket of rusted corrogated iron roofs, which stretched on and on.

In the Song Thau back to Mae Sot I talked to a Burmese man, a 66 year old bachelor he said, who was here because his friend was getting married. He was visiting for a day, with one of those green, disposable passports, which are made from a single folded piece of cardboard. His english was pretty good, he said when he was young, Burmese could speak and write english very well, "Now, not so good", with a hint of sadness in the corners of his mouth, its about as far as he would go on the subject.

Abacus was babysat by a friend while we went to a pool in a resort which was impossibly big for Mae Sot, we wondered who stayed there and how full it ever got. There was a baby at the pool, she cried and I looked up before realising that Abacus was miles away. We ordered a couple of drinks and some food, which looked kind of like deep fried folliage and when we came to pay, we found a lot more had been added to our bill, which took them a long time to figure out, despite the fact that on our table, sat the remains of all we'd ordered. It was reminiscent of our previous trip to Thailand, where our interactions with the citizens, were confined only to the currency of commerce, it had left a sour taste beneath our adventure. We felt fortunate for the time we'd spent in Mae Sot, where we'd got to interact on a more human level, with both Thais and Burmese.

faliz ano nuevo

2009-01-29T18:42:00.000-08:00

The drums started early, distant but loud. Soon it seemed as though they were surrounding us with what sounded like a steady mantra chanted over loudspeaker and the sound of crackers, like paper tearing amplified a million times, something ominous was moving through Mae Sot. It felt like some Beatles "Tomorrow never knows" scene and so early in the morning, such confusing realities are difficult to awaken into. I knew that we had to go, Danielle had already left for beakfast, so I packed Abacus into her pram, confused that I wasn't ignoring her morning loud talking. We followed the sound of the drums, like the lost children of Hamlein. We could see the trail of smoke of where they had already been and soon we were amongst the prosession of booming drums and crashing symbols and the spark pierced smoke of firecrackers, whose noise tore holes through everything else. Men in faint olive coloured Chairman Mao style suits with blue medical masks led the yellow t-shirted youth through the town, some who played on mobile drums, some who led and carried a giant dragon, snaking through the streets, some pasting up new gold on red Chinese scripts on the threshold of the stores, some setting off the crackers which hung from the shop awnings, almost to the ground, while a short buddha with a large mask danced through the stores, chasing away the evil spirits within, using his red fan and a lion faced dragon sidekick. As they moved down the street, the police stopped all the traffic at an intersection, while the Buddha and his dragon danced at the crossroads, in a playful game of submission. All the time the drums kept a steady rhythm and the mantra spoke out from a flatbed truck and the crackers boomed and ripped themselves to shreds, as well as the air around them. And about this time I looked down at abacus and saw she was screaming, I hadn't realised how loud it was until I noticed i couldn't hear her at all. I ran to take refuge down a side street and waited for the prosession to pass us, like frightened evil spirits. As they moved on, we came back out, but the crackers weren't done yet and Abacus face once again burst into silent scream, so we retreated again. A nice old Chinese man came up and put some cotton wool in her ears and we left through the residual smoke, through the shopowners sweeping up the red scraps of cracker paper, back to the guest house, with a feeling that we'd experienced something truely ceremonial. The people embracing their costumes in distorted movements which abandoned their semblance to human form, the totality of the towns involvement, it reminded me of some medieval village and I knew instantly that Chinese New year was my favourite holiday, it felt like something had happened, that we were prepared for a new year.

Later, after Abacus was calm, we went to the cafe to chillax, she was almost asleep, but the parrade was far from over, it was now coming back from the opposite way it had been moving when we had fled. We hid inside the cafe, but the giant dragon rested outside its doors and then the Buddha and his smaller dragon came inside to rid the evil spirits, we hoped they didn't notice us, the cowering spectres in human form. And then they let off crackers outside the door. The thin glass was not enough to keep the sound from unsettling Abacus, who might never get used to the sound.

broken spirit houses

2009-01-28T07:22:00.000-08:00

A quiet moment, as a women kneeled before a tree, one hand held open palmed in front of her nose to center herself, in a one handed prayer. With her other hand, she poured water from a bottle, onto the roots of the tree. The carboot salespeople chatted amongst themselves, not many customers today and later, they would all gather together to push start one of their mobile stores, it finally spluttering to a start, in a cloud of thick black smoke, "Kup Kun Kaaaaaaa", as she sped away. It dawned on me that there is only a week and a half left and I got those pangs of not having done enough here, even though we are looking forward to returning home, this has been a realy important journey for us.

This morning, on our usual shortcut through the police station, we saw a cop with his eyes closed and his head resting in his hands, while an M16 sat in front of him on the table. It reminded me of something a friend had said, about the banality of adventurous work in exotic places, it all turns to routine in the end. So too does the deadly weapon lose its power in the face of ubiquity, the job its importance to the human who only wants to sleep. Even though the examples of its tyranny populate the streets of Mae Sot, the beggar on crutches, pleading for food or money, with the burn marks crawling down his arm to your shiney pitifull coins. Oneday our friend was walking passed the police station and some cops pointed their guns at her for a laugh, hohoho the banality of power is the most dangerous of all.

There have been a few articles about Burma in the paper, mainly about the Rohingya boat people, how the Thai General said "the accusations of mistreatment are so baseless there's no need for an investigation". Did you know the U.N requested to speak to the 130 odd boat people who had just been detained by the Thai Navy? This was after the others they'd sent back to sea with no motors, food or water had washed up in other countries with their stories of abuse, less about 700. The goverenment could not get any information from it's millitary - because of course the millitary backed the governments appointment - when the U.N finally received an answer, it was this, "They've gone." Towed out to sea and left to die like the others perhaps? But yesterday I read the kind of article you want to read. It was not about any breaking story, no sensationalist expose. It was a new years article about the lumbering giant of a story that is Burma, nothing new to report, "So far, so bad", was the quote, an article printed so that no one would forget about Burma. And I looked at NewZealand news sites and saw the top stories were, Man dead after being caught in machine, Cricket players may not be fit to play, Australian model receives apology over sex slur, and on and on and on. As I walked home passed the detention centre today, and saw the families sitting along the outside of the cage, talking to those inside, accepting the normality of their situation, any veneer of romanticism fell away and all I could think was, "It's shit here." It is, but everyone smiles through it, it's just the banal workings of everyday life. A spirit house is a letterbox sized house, which sits on a post outside a Thai house, the idea being that the spirits would rather live in the elaborate miniature than haunt the persons home. On a piece of vacant land opposite the detention center, where a goatherd takes his goats everyday, there are a bunch of broken spirit houses lying amongst the rubbish and leaves and dirt, I think of the visitors of the inmates, who come here to leave offerings and prayers to these replica ruins, as tending to the broken spirits of the detention center.

progress

2009-01-28T07:08:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was a very productive one for Abacus. She's rolling over and over now and looking when you call to her, sometimes. I dropped a facecloth on her face, mainly as a joke and she removed it promptly with her hand, which I didn't even know she could do, I kept doing it and she used both hands until she became bored with the game and started sucking her thumb through the facecloth. She's pretty far from sitting up still but we're really happy with the progess she's made, particularly with her vocalisations, which she has a wide range of now. She's also outgrown most of her clothes and is pretty smiley and happy.

po po

2009-01-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

Imagine if a bus full of migrant school students were going on a field trip to a pagoda and along the way they were pulled over by the police for no reason, other than that they were Burmese. Imagine then that the police check their ID papers and ignore their pleas that they are students in Mae Sot and take them back to the police station. Then imagine that, while the class was sitting at the police station, waiting for their headmaster to come with the 10,000 baht bribe to have them released, their teacher walked passed with her 7 month old baby and partner, as they always use the police station as a shortcut. The trio were completely oblivious to the students situation and wouldn't find out until the teacher was told by her giggling excited students on monday, "We saw you yesterday from the police station! But we couldn't call out to you because of the police officer, hehehehe!"

Today at the station there was a mobile store selling police equipment. I'm wondering if anyone can buy it, or if you have to be an officer. They've got some cool looking stuff, I would get a helmet and a stab vest and some mirror shiney shoes. I also wonder whether the police have to buy their equipment out of their own pocket. Danielle attended a lecture by the former head of the UN Convention Against Corruption, where she learned that police in Mexico have to rent their equipment - their guns and cars - before entering a lottery to find out where they will patrol that night. Of course the only way they can make the money back, lost on their equipment, is to use the equpiment to extort money from civilians - a lot of the time these are westerners - who of course have more money, but Mexicans are of course the more numerous targets. I don't know if it is the same in Thailand, but the police store semed to suggest it. It's that environment which makes corruption inevitable. So a van load of Burmese students, from a well off school - byMae Sot standards, would be a windfall for the Mae Sot Pirates - I mean, police.

Not that the Thai Police ever extort money from westerers, that I've heard. Except, in the southern island of Kho Pan Ngan, where we stayed two years ago. Every full moon, stupid westerners flock there for the "Full Moon Party" (A western invention), and every month the police set up road blocks to search for drugs, collecting massive fines from the tourists. Which seems fair enough, drugs are illegal. Except that at the place where we stayed, marijuana was ubiquitous, we found out it was dealt by the owner of the resort. One time the chief of police turned up to the resort - he was the owners husband. So. Maybe, the stuff is dealt, with connection to the police, the police confiscate it, fine and deport the westerner who possessed it, and put it back into circulation. There's something in there, about moon cycles and weed circulation.

back log = blog

2009-01-25T04:54:00.001-08:00

On Friday night, coming home from dinner I saw what I thought was a giant bat fly in front of a street light, then I realised it was more like an owl. But then, eerily, a few meters later we found a tiny bat crawling on the road - an absolute coincidence, I'd never seen a bat nor an owl here before. It was though I had imagined it intp existence, or rather, mistakeningly identified it into existence. It seemed to be injured and I tried to get a photo, but it was too dark and then suddenly its boney body crawled along and it flew away into the night.

On saturday a girl offered to babysit abacus for a couple of hours. The only problem was she lived a lot further away than we'd thought. We walked for almost half an hour under an exaustingly hot sun, which evaporated any energy we might have had to use for our time alone. By the time we got home again we fell asleep and woke up with just enough time to get back to pick her up. We hoped to find a tuk tuk but they were all full, so in desperation we managed to thumb a ride on the back of a pick up. Luckily we got a tuktuk back, there was no way we would have walked. Danielle was too exhausted to teach the little boy english, so - i guess ironically - we played badminton with him. He loves badminton and is really competitive.

We were awoken at about 4 or 5 this morning by fireworks, for chinese new year apparently. We heard it'll be even earlier tomorrow, at least it'll be the end of the drumming practice in the evenings - unless they start the next day for next years cellebration, which judging by their dedication and discipline, wouldn't surprise me. We had brunch this morning with a doctor who we've seen around a lot. She's probably the coolest person we've met here and we had lots to talk about. She works at the mallaria clinics and works around the poorer communities. We talked about the competitive nature of medicine and of how it ends up leaving you flat and unfullfilled, that the payoff from working to years training is not an equal exchange rate (she's happy though, now, doing this kind of work). She also solved a mystery from the night before, when we were walking hom we came across a burmese mother and her infant son, danielle held the son and noticed he had no nappy under his pants. But the doctor told us they don't use nappies and often in the clinics, the mothers will use their sarongs to catch the urine from the babies, or just hold them over the floor to pee. They don't see urine as dirty because it is ubiquitous.

The fireworks have continued all day, but they're not at all spectacular, just loud crackers, like tomthumbs, loud noises are used to ward of evil spirits for the new years.

2009-01-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

There's no pedestrian crossings, there's a couple of zebra crossings here and there but they're just meaningless stripes across the road, they may even be zebras, who made the death wish to get to the other side. So when you're waiting for the steady stream of traffic to end, the last thing you want is for the last car to go slowly because they're looking at Abacus and saying "Baby!" to you out the window, allowing the distant cars behind it to catch up. Gah!

Abacus, I think, has finally cracked the whole reaching and grabbing thing. I did a lot of practice with her today and she's pretty much mastered the left hand and is getting the hang of the right hand too.

Danielle's student, the one she found at a local restaurant, is making such awesome progress. He can read now, and put a jumbled sentence into order, and recognise words. He really loves it too, he's an eager student who never wants class to end. We really want for him to go to a school because he is so bright, but the cafe owner tells us he doesn't want to go to school, that he wants to work and make money. In a way though, what 12 year old wouldn't want to be grown up? Can the adults in his world really charge him with the responsibility of his future, it seems a little manipulative to me, to say "It's his choice, what can we do?". But that is just a cultural difference, there are a set of morals which are not wrong so much as part of a world completely removed for our own, and the cafe owners may very well be trying to do what's best for him. Today Danielle is going to ask him about it through an interpretor, who is a friend of ours.

Yesterday we went to watch the chinese drummers, which pound and crash through the evening air every night. I anticipated seeing about a hundred Chinese people with a hundred drums and cymbols, but we found only a single drummer, who was surrounded by four other people holding cymbols, they were all about 12. I can't believe the sound they produce.

Today we walked in search of the swimming pool. Such tasks are never as easy as you think. It was really hot today, the type of heat that makes you dizzy and drains your energy. The shade, if you could find it, seemed to reduce the temperature by 10 degrees. We knew the pool was somewhere off the main road, we asked directions, with Danielle pantomiming swimming by using freestyle arm movements. They pointed us down into the maze of suburbia, whose concrete walls only add to the ominous labyrinthine feel. We came across dogs which we chased off with sticks, we now have two sticks in the pram, after finding ourselves stickless when faced by a racist dog on our way to Burma, I want a long one, that I can keep sheathed on the side of the pram. One of the dogs charged us, but it was merely trying to get passed to bark at us from behind, in a calculated bullrushian move. We weaved through the meandering streets, where behind the gates of the suburban houses we saw the wooden dome baskets, which house prize roosters. But the maze spat us back out on the main street, with no sign of a pool so, defeated, we returned home.

What follows is about Burma and students and stuff, so if you're not into that sort of thing...also it is only what I've heard through various sources since arriving here, I don't have evidence, direct quotes or facts.

So listen, the Burma thing is not so clear cut, there isn't just a government against its people. Burma is a united country of states, each distinguished by its specific ethnicity. If you meet someone you suspect is from Burma, you shouldn't say, "Are you Burmese?", because the Burmese are just one ethnic group within Burma. The sad thing is, that the Government is ethnically Burmese, which creates tension between the Burmese and the other ethnicities. If you ask a Karen person if they're Burmese, they could be pretty offended.

You see the students in Mae Sot, they're here to better their lives, most want to go on to university and with their knowledge transition Burma toward democracy. But these tensions run between the ethnicities. And it goes both ways, a lot of Burmese feel guilt for what's happened, and a lot of students have an abyss of hatred for the Burmese, who's people may well have exterminated their loved ones. The most successful insurgency is the KNU (Karen National Union), the Karen, who have never identified as being part of Burma, were promised a separate Karen nation when the British ceded rule. Since the SPDC took control, that idea was quashed and they have faced systematic genocide. If they were succesful in ousting the current regime would they take retribution upon the Burmese? It may seem cynical, but the seeds are visible. But listen, there are both Christian and Buddhist Karen (and others). And as the government is Buddhist they formed an alliance with the Buddhist Karen fighters to get information on the Christian Karen fighters, in return for the Buddhist Karens saftey (which, like the Grand Mufti's alliance with the nazis, could only be a reprieve, until there are no christian Karen left).

And the students can be naive, but it's not their fault. They have been deprived of basic human rights, lived in fear of pogroms and had no freedom of speech nor exercise in critical thought. But when confronted with homosexuality, half a class laughed hysterically,while the other half wanted to kill them. And so where do human rights stand? And the kids, they have stories of child abuse at the hands of their fathers. Their fathers, who are mostly members of the democracy party, inflicted lessons on them, which sometimes took two dozen stitches to close, they smile or laugh and say "I'll never do that again." They talk fondly of it. They respect their elders through fear, "It's normal!", they smile cheerfully. While their imprisoned Prime Minister's primary message of "freedom from fear", is about as symbolic as Christs teachings to the warring Catholics and Protestants. If their idea of respect is fear, then why not respect their government? It is surely one of the most feared in the world. And what brand of democracy is in store for Burma, if their abusive fathers ever win power ? But this is just the state of everything, the world I mean, try and keep all the dimensions of the problem in your head, when you're trying to argue a point and your brain will implode. All I can say is that doing something here is better than doing nothing, the other concepts will hopefully follow, but isn't that just neocolonialism? I must have missed a dimension. The Burmese want external help to do things their way and the outside wants to help only if they can do it with western ideas. No liberal westerner would want to teach a class of westerners who hate gay people, or would stand by and listen to a student sanction their parents abuse, but here those ideas are tollerated as an essentially intricate part of the chaos. When you hear the stories they've written, of jailed parents, of people lost to the cyclone, or simply into the blackhole of Burma, how can any of your ideas make sense? And spare a thought too, for the teacher marking those stories who has to say "Well, actually, it should be 'My entire family was killed by Nargis', not 'My entire family is killed..." "Instead of, 'I hope I can seeing father again', try 'I hope I can see my father again'. Or, when going through names of occupations, when a child student asks "What job title is given to someone who steals people to sell them for money?" "A human traffiker.", "What is someone who asks for money on the street?" "A beggar." Such questions are banal to these children by the ubiquity of their exemplars.

But still, doing something is better than doing nothing. It has to be.

hot

2009-01-20T01:41:00.001-08:00

The heat has seeped back into the days. In fact, when we went to Myawaddy, which always seems hotter than Mae Sot, probably because of the large concentration of concrete and lack of awnings on the buildngs, and the fact that we usually arrive around lunch time when the sun shines at an angle perpendicular to the buildings, concentrating its full beam on us, like ants beneath a magnifying glass. We were baking, sweating, we had abacus dressed in just a onesy with her arms and legs bare. We got those condescending stares from the locals and then one smiled and pointed at Abacus, hugging himself in the universal pantomime for, "Freezing". Everyone around us was wearing thick jackets, some even had towels wrapped around their heads to keep the warmth from escaping.

Abacus is desperate to crawl, she digs her feet into what ever surface she's on, bringing them right up under her belly, kicking back and forth on the spot. She's also grown a bit more hair, I know it's "a lot" more hair, but it's still so sparse it's hard to justify using the words. It's still so fine it changes colour under different light, but we think it might be blonde with a hint of red, sorry Abacus, I take full responsibility for the red contribution.

Burma II

2009-01-18T18:57:00.000-08:00

We made our second trip to Burma yesterday. This time we tried to stay a bit longer than 10 minutes. We went down to a restaurant by the river that we'd seen from the bridge, along the way I helped some poor kid who was trying to push one of those garbage carts up onto a footpath, we both gave it a huge shove and it got up, I can't believe how heavy they are, then I watched him disappear beneath the bridge, bouncing the ton weight over the uneven surface. We changed some money along the way, on the street, the burmese currency is mainly traded on the blackmarket (which is essentially means on desks set up outside on the main street). We had no idea what the exchange rate was, but we got 3200 Kyat (pronounced Jah) for 100baht. Aparently the worst places to go to exchange money is a government bank, apparently they maintain the exchange rate to the dollar is 6kyat, if this were the case, I imagine it would be the most expensive standard of living in the world. When we got to the restaurant we didn't see much but an outside bar, all we wanted to do was sample some genuine Burmese tea, which is made with condensed milk (Carnation - the best known condensed milk brand - advertises in Thailand and Burma as being specifically for tea). They didn't seem to have tea on the menu, but they told us they did. A moment later they arrived with two cups of Burmese tea and a huge pot of green tea. The Burmese tea was like drinking caramel and it was nice to have the green tea as a cleanser. We sat for a while, watching the Burmese catch the tube, the inner tube that is, to and from Thailand, the river is so shallow that one tube driver just walked them accross, even the natural marker between the two countries is a facade, Abacus was off somewhere with a Burmese woman, she's had so many weird interactions here. When we left we noticed a cafe down the street with cups and pots suspiciously like the ones we'd just been served, they must have just gone down the road to get it. We still had a couple of thousand Kyat left so we bought some Burmese cakes, which tasted like deep fried donuts, one with strawberry filling tasted acidic, we ended up giving them to a homeless woman halfway along the friendship bridge on the way back, the second homeless person we gave a 1000 kyat, and same to the third just to get rid of it, they seemed pretty surprised. These last two beggars, this is not to be mean, but we couldn't tell if they were man or woman, so skinny, darkened and wizened from the sun, their eyes so sunken, sitting slumped beneath a pile of towels and rags, poverty stripping them of any semblance of themselves.

cool

2009-01-17T23:17:00.001-08:00

Today the manager of the NGO where Danielle teaches english (to the Thai workers), took us to see where they make lunches and uniforms for migrant schools around Mae Sot. The location was pretty secret and I wasn't allowed to take photos, but it is a legitimate NGO with logoed cars, so I am allowed to write about them.

Inside the building is where Burmese and Thais sew the school uniforms on industrial sewing machines. The uniforms are perfectly made, with the collared shirts monogrammed with the initials of the school on one side and the name of the NGO on the other. Abacus had just fallen asleep a minute before we were to leave and after all our wanting her to sleep, she found herself awakened to be handed around the burmese sewers (people who sew, not sewers where ninja turtles live), but she seemed really happy. They also sew backpacks for the students, which are waterproofed to accommodate the rainy season. At this point it seemed like a good little operation, but then we saw the whiteboard.

Written on the board were the names of the schools and then the amount of breakfasts, lunches and dinners required. For the 7 schools they provide for, there were over 1200 students, suddenly the operation seemed impossibly efficient. In one room of the kitchen, there were three giant rice cookers and sacks of rice stacked at the end of the room. In the next room were the pots, strainers and pestle and mortar, that looked as though giants used them. Outside were the gas cookers over which, cooked giant vats of curry. There was what looked like a silo that sat above a cooker, one of the chefs (there are 6 kitchen staff and six sewing staff), pulled a rope which hoisted up the 6 foot tall missile shaped casing, inside was where they inserted a shelf, which held 5 huge basins of rice, beneath it sat a vat of water which steams enough rice for 1200 hungry students. They'd also constructed a water purifying system, which meant they could provide all of the schools with clean drinking water. Out the back was a section of land where they were beginning to build houses to grow mushrooms, at the moment there were only the shelves on which the mushrooms would grow. We sampled some of the curry bubbling in the vat, breaking through the layer of oil on top to sample the broth beneath, it was filled with large bits of fish and vegetables and was almost restaurant quality, it would be poured into large bags, inside garbage cans and transported by vans to the schools around town. It was hard to believe how few people it took to feed 1200 people, 7 days a week. Eveything about the site was clean, the sewing room was meticulously organised as was the kitchen and the grounds outside. Everything was ingeniously designed and the staff seemed happy and relaxed, unlike restaurants where I've worked, trying to feed lunch to maybe 200 people max.

I started working on a new website, for one of the migrant schools, I have to design something that has already been built, which is a bit limiting, and the design is quite restrained by the way in which its been built, but I'll see what I can do.

Tomorrow we go to Burma. We're not looking forward to it. It's just annoying and boring - sounds a little ironic I know.

Tui sings Pizza Hutt song

2009-01-17T23:16:00.000-08:00

Abacus woke up at 3:30 and never really went to sleep, so I took her for a walk really early and as we passed the police station they were raising the flag while the national anthem played all the motorcycle cops wore their helmets and it reminded me of a scene from THX1138. Thai cops looks as though they've studied every cheesy American cop show, they all wear sunglasses and have this bad ass look about them. later in the afternoon I would see one of them outside the detenion center waving a wad of 100Baht notes in a burmese guys face while patting his back pocket. Abacus finally went to sleep at around 7:30 just as we arived at a coffee shop, the one where al the Americans and Christians hang out. When we went on the cafe computer, Danielle noticed the most visited sites on Crome were; CNN, CNN international and . . . FOX NEWS!!! It was pretty pathetic. So then we decided to look at TV3 news for a laugh and, true to form, found a whole bunch of animal stories on the front page, like "Cat reunited with owner thanks to microchipping" and "Tui sings Pizza Hutt song", it was a good to see New Zealand is still occupied with the pressing issues.

We went for a walk to breakfast and along the way stopped to look for pants for Abacus. We got two pairs and a pair of cute shoes for like $16 new zealand. While we painfully tried to ask "What age child would wear this size shoe" (such a simple sentence is painfully hard to describe without words), Abacus started to wake up. A young homeless burmese boy, who sniffed in vain at the thick snot in his nose, stood over her with concern, pointing at her hat, which had fallen over her eyes. We gave him five baht, In most countries it seems counterproductive to give money to homeless people, knowing it won't solve the problems within their country which lead to such destitution, especialy when they flock to westerners, knowing their own country people won't help them. But Burmese barely even have a country, how many people could even locate it on a map? It's a black hole that has swallowed its inhabitants and now sits ominously in covert silence. There are barefoot kids with sun darkened faces who pick up garbage, they're happy, they run and play with each other in the streets, excitedly looking for plastic bottles to fill their wooden carts. They'll come up to the window of the Starbuckian westerner patronised cafe and knock, miming eating with either broad smiles or contrived pitiful faces, the people inside ignore them, even though they're probably in Mae Sot to help refugees and even though most of them are uber christian. I like to get up and go to the door and give them what ever coins I have, while it won't change anything in their lives it'll make today a little easier. Later on we would see that little boy trailing behind his older sister who was holding their younger sibling, while their mother, walking ahead of them, held a new born. They would stay here collecting money until they're rounded up in a police pick up truck, like the one I would see later in the afternoon, which was watched from afar by another mother, who's son peeked out from beneath a blanket under which he hid, the mother watched as if to see anyone she knew amongst the newly collected illegal migrants, the boys eyes looked filled with fear. How are the lives of so many, so completely destroyed by so few and for what ?

Abacus had a crazy sleepless day with a lot of loud scream talking.

Danielle had a good day, finally having her contributions recognised positively by a superior, putting to rest the uneasieness she's felt since the personal attack in her first week, even finding out her assailant is not regarded in the best light around town. They really like what Danielle's been doing, it's so good for her to hear.

Just so you know what Thailand thinks of migrants - news article

2009-01-15T07:19:00.000-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7830710.stm

a weird ad in a newspaper

2009-01-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

The country of the NGO

2009-01-15T04:16:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of blog. I've been trying to get a couple of websites up to date, I really want to have accomplished something before I leave here. I went to a cafe this morning to work and when I arrived there were two guys talking about a documentary they were working on, from what I eavesdropped - which isn't hard with film people because they talk so loud so that everyone knows they are film people - the film was about the migrant schools, they were looking for some "new angle" on the story. After they left another even louder film maker came in, he oozed LA all over the cafe, he was making a film about a "shoe drop", where shoes donated from around the world are "dropped" on the refugee camps and he wanted to film the shoes journey, he too was looking for a "new angle". And I got this idea that had been gestating for sometime without me knowing, that there is something artificial, something constructed about Mae Sot.

Mae Sot is nothing. It's a tiny agricultural border town with no attractions. A spanish couple we talked to, told us that 20 years ago when they were last here, there was nothing. You could hire a motorbike and in 5 minutes be in the country, you could ride out to the camps and talk to the refugees. Now the city has three 7/11's and 5 or 6 western restaraunts a Tescos and a Dunkin' Donuts and entrance to the Refugee Camps is strictly limited. What was the catalyst for change in Mae Sot ? NGO's.

Mae Sot is like an island of the NGO, but not quite an island, its more like an annexed colony. I kind of think of it as being like a war fought between two countries in a country neutral to the war. The problem is in Burma, the NGO's are mainly western and they meet in a backwater town in Thailand, which reeps the benefits; they get cheap Burmese labour to work in their restaurants and Guest Houses, whose major customers are NGO's.

There seems something almost unhealthy about a culture of NGOism, when it is isolated from the rest of society. As Danielle put it, when we arrive back in New Zealand and people ask what we did last summer, they would probably find it kind of honourable (not that that's why we did it), but, when it becomes normative to be a volunteer, it breeds ungratefulness amongst the community. When everyone is volunteering, it becomes not a question of whether you volunteer, but how MUCH much you volunteer - and if it isn't enough, you're treated as though you don't volunteer at all. Or even worse, in that people who are here only on holiday (of any dubious nature) are treated completey indifferently,where as if you don't volunteer enough, you are treated rudely and almost pariahed. The thing about a lot of NGO workers is that, a lot of them are here because they never really figured out what to do in life and are here, in some capacity, to define themselves. Maybe this is why they become so totalitarian about it, they're defending their one definition of self against the great void of being ordinary, of not counting. But the saddest part is that it is the people they are trying to help who are missing out. They love pretty much anyone who gives up there time to come and help them. And the film makers come and make their ready made films, on the wrong side of the border, with hardly anyone making the death defying journey across the Moei river to film beneath the fog, where we really need them. And everyone lives in this strange artificial environment. I think there is a story about our time here and for me it's about the NGO community.

The drum rehearsals for chinese new year have been going every evening since we moved in. They crash and bang in perfect unison - PERFECT unison - i have no idea why they rehearse so often they could not possibly improve.

cyber-catan

2009-01-13T06:11:00.000-08:00

Something happened the other day that changed our lives here, we found online settlers! And coupled with skype, it's not only like our settler gaming in new zealand never ended - we now play more than we ever did. I think Abacus might grow up to hate the game which she was named after and computers and probably coffee for that matter. Especially after last night, a couple in their 60's who we met at our last guest house offered to babysit her. They're waiting on their own kids to give them grandchildren - in fact Tom threatened his kids with the anectdote told by a favourite musician of his, he said "I was so sick of waiting for my kids to have children, I married a girl in her 20's and had grandchildren of my own". I think they lavished attention on princess Abacus, reciprocally entertaining each other for just under 2 hours, Abacus was so happy when we came to pick her up, that we knew we had to cut back on computer time.

Sometimes I wish I had a sound camera, some device which takes snap shots of sound. Last night as I lay going to sleep I heard the chaos of the dogs that had gathered for some full moon choir, the cold night air was filled with yelping and barking and even wolf howling, and all of it was echoing off the concrete walled streets and corrogated fences, like some horror movie soundtrack.

The temperature has dropped significantly over the last few days, it actually feels like Wellington, I'd forgotten what cold felt like, what goosebumps were. Also, there's something a little unnerving about a cop holding an automatic assault rifle, smiling and cooing to your 6 month old daughter.

2009-01-11T06:31:00.000-08:00

Last night we were going to dinner, when out of the twilight came a galloping horse and rider. It ran at full speed down the road through the traffic, quickly disappearing into the distance.

This afternoon we visited a Wat, which is what Thai temples are called, when this Burmese guy came up to me holding a glass of bright green liquid, it looked like dishwashing liquid or antifreeze, he offered it to me in that respectful way of the Burmese, supporting the offering hand with their other hand, how could I refuse. He and Danielle both looked on, in amusement of different sorts, as I smiled my way through the entire cool syrupy beverage, which tasted of bubblegum, I thanked him gratiously of course, jesudembaiday, supporting my extended hand below the elbow with my left hand. Then left with my head swimming in sugar overdose.

2009-01-10T01:19:00.000-08:00

when the fog lifts from Burma and the world is finally able to see inside, if we'll ever see that day, they will be horrified not only of the atrocities that have occured, but by the fact that they didn't know, that while other stories filled the headlines, Burma was no where to be found. When foreign journalists are finally allowed free access to the myriad ethnicities - which ever ones survive the genocide -and bring back the stories of this forgotten country, the world will be disgusted to hear that the Burmese doctors didn't differentiation between HIV and AIDs and that when a person was diagnosed as having it, they were administered an injection and that life was over.

But for now, the fog remains, and the injections continue.

a divine fusion

2009-01-07T00:52:00.000-08:00

As I lay awake in the dark this morning, holding abacus' dummy in her mouth to keep her asleep, i heard the simultaneous prayers of buddhism and islam, overlayed in a seamless fusion. The deep chanting of the buddhists created a baseline, with the chime of the morning bell keeping rhythm, while the muslim prayer, sung like a heart broken wail, created the melody, their voices blown together by the wind and carried accross the darkness.

Abacus never did really go back to sleep, it was about 5:45 when she awoke, and she would go on to stay awake until 11:30! Danielle got up early and took her for a walk before breakfast, and I took her for another walk afterwards. I walked down town to where the lady who barbarques chicken all day, stood like a ghostly apparition behind the thick cloud of smoke, which billowed from her fire filled drum, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, just for good measure - it seemed about as useless as trying to drink from a glass while swimming underwater. I went into a magazine store, which sells magazines that deceptively have english covers, but are filled with thai on the inside - while maintaining the english titles for the articles. There were no english covers however, on the large assortment of cock fighting magazines. I looked through some Thai childrens books, I found a beautifully illustrated one about two bulls, I had no idea what was going on, but on the second to last page both bulls were running at each other, while on the last page, both lay dead, with broken bloody horns scattered on the ground, so I don't think I'll get it for abacus.

Tonight we're going to see Danielles "friends", who have south korean visitors this week, which I'll write about later.

some delicious thai delicacies

2009-01-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

water bugs

cut open toads with flies on

live bewlidered toads

some wierd live baby cat fish things

snakes ?

the incident

2009-01-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

So earlier on in the trip Danielle had a terrible incident, but today something happened that at least meant she was not alone.

So we're a single income family, who spent a huge amount of our savings to volunteer overseas to help refugees. But soon after some initial training, Danielle was given three separate placements, all at different points around the town, which collectively totaled a lot of hours of work a day, not to mention her own paperwork at night. Though she had already committed to all three, she soon felt it was going to be too much. She decided to drop the one place that hadn't started yet and did so amicably, explaining via email that when she said she would do all three, she was not in a position to make an informed decision about the amount of work she could do, as she'd never done that type of thing before. After a week of lesson plans and marking homework she knew three places would be too much. The head of the program was disappointed and felt a bit sick when he read her email, as the place she had dropped was his favourite and its understaffed and underfunded. He felt like he'd promised them something he couldn't deliver and didn't know whether he could work with them again, but ultimately he understood and accepted her position. However, he told her all of this after he'd already informed the place of her turning them down, he didn't even offer to assist her in developing a schedule which might have been accommodating for three places, didn't give her help with lesson plans or how to plan more efficiently - she with no experience. He said he also felt bad because someone else had already pulled out of a school earlier in the week and he thought it was the beginning of things going wrong. The situation then seemed resolved and everyone seemed somewhat happy with the outcome.

But the next day, Danielle was going to the photocopy store to make copies of a test she had written for her students, it was only minutes before her class. Outside the photocopy shop was a fellow NGO worker who was really cold with her, she grudgingly replied hello when greeted but as she was getting on her bike, she turned and unloaded on danielle about dropping the school and went even further to make personal attacks about her character, she went on and on, screaming a tirade of seething, shaking with anger as she delivered each potent personal word. She even compared her to a former NGO who quit after two weeks, spending the rest of their time in a drunken stupor, someone who led the media to a school, jeopardising its very existence, before going rambo in the jungles of Burma. But Danielle was worse, her assailant said, because he'd had a drinking problem, an excuse. In Thailand it is extremely poor form to lose your temper, especially in public and the locals looked upon the situation with embarassment. What was also bad, is that the NGO attacking her was about to take over as acting head of the program, in the leaders absence. She was the person who Danielle had to report to. All this just minutes before Danielle had to teach a class. She managed to compose herself and work on professionally, though a part of her wanted to leave the country.

Danielle is a junior in the organisation. She didn't understand the gravity of her decision, nor the implications for the program. No one explained this, they just accepted her email without trying to inform or coerce her decision, did not even tell her the decision she made would incite disappointment at all, as far as she knew she had come to volunteer, had saved a long time to do it, knew her limitations and wanted to offer the best that she could. She had no idea the school she chose was one of the most fortunate nor the one she declined one of the poorest - no one told her, they just said they were disappointed, a little sick and then this diatribe of loathing. What hope then, for society, when those who give up their time and money to help people, fight amongst themselves and are so disorganised to not even lead their own. She had a meeting with the program leader that night to discuss her concerns as he was leaving the next day (for holiday in Australia). He confessed that there was a dinner that night, confirming her suspicions, but that she is not invited only because of her family situation and she was definitely not hated by everyone in the program as she feared. But there was nothing really apologetic in his acceptance of her information about the NGO worker, he even said he'd seen her act like that once before, there was no real sense that she would be stepped down or even really reprimanded for her conduct.

The next day Danielle received an appologetic email from her assailant. It was a complete 180 from her screaming marathon the day before, saying that she respected danielle, knew she was committed to the program and she sited stress as the cause for her hostility. We put her down as just being completely unhinged. Later in the day we went to a coffeeshop, it was the first time we'd been there, it was down the far end of town, it seemed like the most unlikely place we would meet her, not that she had even been a factor in our desicion to go there, but there she was. We all smiled awkwardly at each other at first, then, just before we left, Danielle went to her to acknowledge atleast that she had received her email, she told her she didn't know yet how to respond to it or how she felt about it. The girl said "I'm sorry", shaking her head with a nervous smile, as though apologising for taking a coke out of the fridge that didn't belong to her, or some other minor intrusion into someones personal sphere. Since then things have been amicable when we've met, it's a small town, you run into the same people everywhere, because of course everyone eats out, she's even asked if she could sit at our table one time, how could we refuse ?

Today however, we ran into this australian girl who danielle trained with, she's a really lovely person who we run into often. Danielle asked "How are you?", "Not so good" came the reply. She was leaving on a bus to Bangkok, she had "problems" with the program, trying to remain as diplomatically aloof as she could, but after a bit of mutual digging, they found they shared the same problem. The organisation had booked her at three separate schools, one with an age group she was not qualified to teach, one that was 10km out of town and then, when she pulled out of a school for obvious reasons, a certain worker screamed insults at her down the phone, and not only did she scream at her too, she also made the same 180 degree apology - she's completely toys in the attic crazy. This girl too had no real income, she too had come this great distance at great cost to herself, only to be treated as though she were the most selfish, dispicable person in the world. And suddenly, Danielle wasn't alone, and neither was the other girl, they both found solidarity and were united in knowing it was not their fault - not they ever thought it was. The girl is going to return again, to teach on her own, going directly through the school, without the inept programme interferring, turning what should be a rewarding experience into a drama. The worst part is, Danielle and this other girl are really good teachers, with friendly personalities that would be an asset to this kind of work and this terrible person, who is obviously completely socially retarded, is driving them away.

If you're thinking of volunteering I would suggest doing an ESL course at home and then coming on your own, don't go through organisations, its very easy to find places in need once you get here.

20 minutes in burma

2009-01-03T22:20:00.000-08:00

This morning we made the trip to burma to have our visas extended by 2 weeks. We walked to the outskirts of town to catch a saung thau ( a roofed pick up truck, which serves as a bus ), abacus was asleep by the time one came along that would take us to the border, it only cost 15baht, which is less than a dollar. It dropped us near the immigration booths at the entrance to the friendship bridge, which connects the two countries over the Moei river. The wierdest part of the bridge is that in Thailand they drive on the left, while in Burma they drive on the right and I'm not sure at which point they cross over, I wanted it to be the middle of the bridge. Leaving wasn't hard, we just filled out a departure card and walked over the pedestrian part of the bridge. Below the bridge, on the Thai side, we saw two shacks made from sacks and tarpaulin draped over some sticks. A mother held her naked baby outside, while the father used a red plastic bucket to pour water over it, the baby screamed the same way abacus does taking a bath lately. Along the river, people use giant innertubes to cross from one side of the river to the other, to illegally leave and enter each country, but there is no one to stop them, no one really cares, in fact it seemed like the concrete footpath on the thai side of the river was designed specifically for them. The bridge descended into the bustling streets of Myawaddy. We were ushered towards an arrivals office and while the Thais and Burmese lined up outside to talk through the familiar little windows, we were taken inside, to the insidiously smiling immigration guards, who all smelled of stale tobacco and whose teeth were stained with beetle nut, so familiar amongst the burmese population. And were they as creepy as I thought ? Had i coloured them in with my previously learned knowledge of Burma ? They charged 500 baht each for our passport "processing", about $25 each, which was expected. Then they retained our passports to be returned on our departure.

Burma is surprisingly distinctly different from Thailand, even this border town, which is about as representative of greater Burma as Tiajuana is of mexico, but even the smell, of possibly cardamon mixed with some other familiar scent, was so reminiscent of India. Then a bicycle taxi driver who cycled beside us, refusing to accept our nothankyou's, was an almost carbon copy of a guy in Agra, but not quite as annoying. The heat was baking by now, and a dog whose furless skin clung to its shaking bones, looked as though it had crawled its way out of the pet cemetary, the walking dead. The streets were busy and full of people, the one thing separating it from being a complete facsimilie of India being the presence of women on the street. We walked to find a tea shop, though we were still overly-full from breakfast. We walked passed tables stacked tall with Burmese currency, organised into large bricks. There was nothing really to do, nothing much to see, we abandoned finding the tea shop and decided to go back, our time in Burma equating to about 20 minutes. We went to retrieve our passports. The immigration officers smiled and thanked us, they knew why we'd come and why we'd left so soon, there was no questioning, all truth exposed and unspoken. We returned over the bridge, filled in arrival cards, which I realised we didn't need for Burma, nor departure cards, just cash.

We found a saung thau, there were two people waiting inside, by the time we left it was full to capacity, with three guys hanging off the back. We tried to have Abacus become friends with the burmese 10 month old boy beside her, they held hands and abacus squeezed his hand and wouldn't let it go. We were dropped at the central bus station, our first point of arrival in Mae Sot, but now we knew our way out of it. We walked through the huge market area of town, which we'd never been to before. Meat was left sitting outside for sale, pigs snouts and skin, baskets of shrimp buzzing with flies, a huge basket of water beetles, net bags of huge live toads, stacked on top of each other, tubs of water snakes and eels slithering over each other. The warm air smelled of meat and the maze of stalls seemed endless, but finally it led us back to the main street.

left overs

2009-01-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

not a lot happened yesterday. we were exhausted from the lack of sleep. and when night came i was so exhausted i couldn't sleep, while abacus slept soundly.

Danielles tutoring session went well, she wants to bring the kid back to new zealand to study, but Burma doesn't issue passports to its citizens, except for ones with expirey dates as long as the persons applied for time. And these are only issued in special circumstances and they don't come cheap. But maybe there are other ways to help.

It's been a while since the racist dogs have bothered us, but a couple of days ago, one called the others to attention and they grouped to form their menacing racist gang, barking at us from accross the street, but fortunately I still had my trusty stick in Abacus pram, which I held at my side, it kept them at bay.

Also the elephant is still around, maybe it's always been around. We see it in odd places with its three human companions, it hangs out as though it is one of the guys. They more i see it the worse I feel for it.

Burmese seem obsessed with nose bridges, when ever they see Abacus, they tell us to pinch her nose bridge - or lack of one - so that she will have a good nose, another tip is to push on the soft pallette, which somehow pops out the nose bridge. We've tried to explain her trisomy to people, danielles friends understand, as she had them read an article on it, but even when we've shown others online photos of asian kids with trisomy 21, they still don't understand and just pantomime once more, pinching the nose bridge.

So I didn't think abacus needed milk in the night, that she was just waking up, so when she woke up at midnight, on cue for her feed, I gave her the dummy and after about 20 minutes or so she was asleep again, then she woke up about 3 hours later. So I tried to do the same again, but she wouldn't go to sleep - though she wasn't crying either, so I decided to just give her a bottle to put her to sleep. This however, didn't put her to sleep, in fact (as danielle put it) it only seemed to give her more energy, so that she was wide awake and talking loudly. The rest of the night was spent trying to keep her quiet until we finally decided to get up at 7:30. We are exhausted. And I feel bad because don't have the energy to play with her when she's smiley and full of energy, if only she could understand the paradox of her actions.

a knock at the door

2009-01-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

There's a young migrant kid who works in a cafe we frequent, waiting tables. They seem so grown up even though they're only a child, it seems more like they're a childish adult, than the other way around, as though their personality has already reached it's maturity. Yesterday morning Danielle offered the Thai owners to teach him english for free. This can sometimes be a sore point for employers we've read, but this morning as we were paying for breakfast they excitedly told us the kid wants to do it and where would be the best place to hold the tutorials?Danielle decided our old guest house was the closest location, so they agreed on that and then we went to ask permission of the guest house manager.

When the manager saw us, he told us he'd not slept the night before because he was worrying about our motorcycle and that he had sent a tuk tuk driver around to check that it was locked properly, as many things go missing around there. So it was him! We'd thought it was the guy who'd rented it to us who had come to check up on us. He would have paid the tuktuk driver to do it too, which was really nice of him but a little strange too. He said we didn't even have to ask about holding the tutoring sessions there. So it's sorted.

We were supposed to go swimming but the day was overcast, which we didn't mind, it was a nice change. The temperature only drops to one that is more bearable anyway. We got a burger and spicey thai fries from Daves for lunch, the fries are cooked with chillis and onion, they were ok, and the burger was kind of like a giant meatball in a bun. We slept for a lot of the afternoon. Abacus has been wearing us out still, even though she somewhat better at sleeping than earlier on, she still wakes up really early, and there are still two feeds in the night. We haven't slept properly in 8 months.

Aferwards, we went on a long walk along the highway and out into the Mae Sot suburbs. The entrance to the suburban street was flanked first by cheap accomodation and then the familiar makeshift wooden shacks with rusted roofs (weird, I thought rooves was a word, like hooves). The shacks were haphazardly scattered over greens grass amongst trees, through which a creek ran. And amongst the fallen tree branches was rubbish that stray dogs picked at, while a woman sat out on her porch, an old woman, cooking something over an open fire, there was something strangey appalachian about the whole scene. The shacks gave way first to abandoned housing and then to the well kept properties of the middle classes. Around the corner there were men working out. There was out door gym equipment, which was housed last time danielle was out this way, but now the housing had gone, leaving the contents exposed, not that people weren't using it, they were doing exercises using their vehicles and a low fence or just running, as though the area itself embodied some power and the gym was merely a shrine to its energy. Our business in the suburbs didn't last long but it was getting late so we walked all the way out to the other end of town for dinner. On the way to the suburbs we'd seen a neglected puppy, shaking feebly by itself, while it's healthy siblings played near their mother. So on the way back Danielle wanted to find it, to maybe help it, but when we got near, the "protective" mother wouldn't let us near it, so we had to abandon any idea of intervention.

Along the way, we ran into a whole lot of people at various points who we'd gotten to know during our short stay in Mae Sot, probably more people than I would run into in Wellington, after living there 4 years. By the time we got home, we'd been out for four hours, of which Abacus had slept about 2. She's been sleeping in our bed lately, as it's easier to keep her asleep, but we trialed her cot again. Soon after we'd gone to sleep, there was a knock at the door, I opened it to an unshaven backpacker who was looking for the reception. Abacus however, woke up after two hours of sleeping, at 3 in the morning, so we decided we would let her cry, as all she wants is to suck on her dummy - which puts her to sleep - which causes her to drop the dummy - which wakes her up. She cried for ages, but we were confident - as everyone incorrectly refers to her as a quiet baby - that no one would be able to hear her, but then came a loud knock on the door. After the owner had told us about the scooter, and closing the door too hard the night before, we really didn't want to be told off about our crying baby, so we ignored the knock and ceded to abacus demands, putting her in bed with us, for one of the worst nights sleeps we'd had in a long time. The next morning though, when i went out, I saw a tent pitched right outside our door, no doubt the backpacker from the night before, and as the knock had been so similar to the one earlier in the night, I figured it was him who had knocked to complain - which was pretty annoying - I wished I had answered the door, what could have happened ? Would he have liked to tell Abacus not to cry ?

sleaze

2009-01-01T21:36:00.001-08:00

There's a guy with a big magnum PI mostache and inseperable baseball cap at the guest house, with a deep american truck driver accent, who laughs with a sleazy, croaky deep "heh heh heh". It was late afternoon on new years day and he was drunk with a thai local who wanted to enthusiastically wish us happy new year, stumbling up from his seat as though he wanted to hug us all. We told him "It's ok", and he sat down. Later the american came over to where I was sitting with Abacus and asked why we were here and rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for money, or more correctly, sleazy money, I was confused and answered that we were here on holiday. "Oh yeah, family holiday? Got some business on the side." Rubbing his fingers together once more. It wasn't even a question, more an expectation. I kind of blew him off, though gave up too much when, offended by his remark, I said we were trying to help refugees, remaining as vague as possible, but knowing as soon I said it I shouldn't have. He pushed me further but I evaded the questions, I'm sure he'd be too drunk to remember anyway. But now I kind of wish I'd pushed him further on this business he was talking of, like I could have played along and found out what he was up to. I don't like him at all, he takes young thai women up to his room, there's nothing feminist in Thai prostitution, only a loss of power exploited. He started saying how he remembered when his daughter was abacus age, and how happy abacus seems, and I felt sorry for this girl I had never met.

Later he was sitting drinking again as we were leaving and he offered by way of apology "All I was trying to say was, you gotta nice family there".

2009-01-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

A stray dog patched with hair between raw scabs of skin, wanders into the detention center compound and sniffs around. It walks along the front of the cage of humans and wanders back out again, free to roam where it pleases.

we farang

2009-01-01T19:18:00.001-08:00

We heard tale of things to do around mae sot and decided to rent a scooter to go 16kms out of town to some thermal hot pools. We went back to Ban Thai, our old guest house to hire the scooter and ran into a friend we'd made while staying there, she had her arm in a sling. Apparently she was riding her bike and a car drove to close to her wedging her between it and a parked car until she had no room and clipped her front wheel, sending her flying onto the pavement. To her surprise the car didn't stop, nor did the passersby really even acknowledge her lying in the mddle of the road, huddled, braced for a following car to hit her, fortunately there were none. It was her second accident on her year long journey, the last being a motorcycle one in uganda, which she still bears the scars of on her other arm. This time it was a hairline fracture, which she had examined, xrayed and given painkillers for, at a cost of $20 in under 30 minutes including waiting time. HAHAHA travel insurance is full of shit - DON'T GET IT! Anyway, there were no motorcycles left for hire and after the accident story we thought it might be some auspicious portent, but we've never been supersticious, so the manager gave us the address of another hire place.

This time we brought the front pack to strap abacus into, which worked way better, she was calm while we followed the vague directions of locals that sent us to every cardinal point and then fell asleep as we finally hit the highway, which took us out through the beautiful country side. The green farmed land stretched all the way to the wall of hills, which cut Thailand off from Burma. The wind was fierce in our faces, but abacus was untouched, snuggled between us. The roads were unexpectedly rough in parts, sometimes disappearing into gravel, forcing traffic to share a single lane. After following the signs onto a dirt road, where some confused locals pointed us back to the main road, we found the ornate entrance brandishing the kings face, typical of thailand.

We'd expected the sort of thermal parks typical of new zealand or america, where magical hot water gushes out from yellowed mineral stained rocks and flows down forming pools of varying temperature that you can sit in and soak. But what we found was a concrete pad and fountainhead that flowed into a landscaped stream, weaving its way around a huge grass park of shady trees, where thai families picnicked like a thai version of Seurat's Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jette. All around the periphery were food stalls serving chicken barbarqued whole over charcoal, smoke from it drifted throughout the restaurant area we sat in, where rips in the giant faux linoleum sticker stuck to the floor, revealed the precarious platform supporting the weight of the customers over the stream below. At one point there was a loud creaking sound accompaniedby a chorus of whoaaaa, by customers who sounded as though they were on some fun park ride for the 100th time, but nothing came of it. We ate a quarter of a chicken and some rice, our corn never came and our blindly chosen salad was unappetising, so we went to join everyone under the shady trees for a while. There were absolutely no westerners to be seen, so we were the object of interest for many, especially because of abacus. A very interested chubby thai toddler was interested in her and kept walking over on his clumsy trainer legs, but his parents or grandparents kept coming to pull him away. When he finally got to come for a closer inspection, he lifted up abacus skirt, so she kicked him and yelled loudly. Everyone laughed.

We noticed that the people gathered around the concreted thermal fountain were poking sticks into it, so we went for a closer look and found the sticks had baskets on the end full of hens and quail eggs, that were cooking in the water. Then I relealised the shape of the whole thing was not unlike those cookers in japanese restaurant where you cook your own food.

There was supposed to be a cave in the area also, but it wasn't sign posted well. We went for a walk around and found a beautiful green lake with a suspension foot bridge that led to a small buddhist temple on the otherside. I was holding abacus as we walked across and continually lost my balance as the bridge seemed to lurch sideways beneath me and then by some wierd illusion continue to travel impossibly on that path.

We couldn't find the cave - or at least we don't think so - we found some buddha in a human made cave, but surely that wasn't it. We got the scooter and drove further down a dirt road to see if we could find it, but there was nothing out there and no signs anywhere and then abacus was tired, so we decided to head back. She soon fell asleep in the front pack after a bit of initial protest as we drove back through the fresh smelling country side and the quaint little towns.

Later that night there was a knock on our door so soft it sounded like two doors away. The owner had come to tell us that a guy had come around to inspect our scooter and said that we hadn't locked it properly, then when danielle closed the door to get the key and come outside the owner told Danielle she closed the door too hard. Gah. Sometimes Thai people can make you feel like a child, but it's just a cultural difference and we shouldn't be offended.

happy 2552!

2009-01-01T05:51:00.000-08:00

The elephant was still being led through the streets in the morning as we went to breakfast, squealing it's little squeaks as it crossed through the traffic. Danielle had to get to a seamstress by 8, who was going to make her a sarrong to wear at the temple herbal sauna, she charged her all of $2 for the work. The workshop was a cute family shop, with aged and trusty black and gold singer sewing machines.

We went to Daves Canadian for breakfast. Danielle likes how he is so friendly but completely indifferent to his customers, there's a real feel of a Canadian cabin to the place. We also went back for lunch and this time Dave told us his life story, of how he came to Mae Sot after buying his way out of a contract in a factory firm, which had moved its offices to Singapore. He hated Singapore because of how expensive it was. A clause in his leaving the company meant that he couldn't work for anyone else for three years, so after coming to Mae Sot to see his brother in law, he decided to run a restaurant for those three years because he liked the place, and now, 11 years later he is still here, becoming a celebrity of travel guide books and the restaurant of choice of NGO's, even serving the police as interpreter for the foreigners who get into drunken fights. "With thais or amongst themselves" we asked, noticing how there seems to be an absence of drinking culture among the Thais, and of blood on the streets on saturday mornings, which is so familiar at home. "Sometimes just by themselves", Dave replied, as some of them just ended up breaking furniture and refuse to pay, so Dave has to go visit them and ask "So do you want me to bring you some macaroni or are we going to see how we're going to pay for this table?" He said the town was a lot rougher three years ago, but things are much better now.

We had a new years party at the european run Thai organisation, Danielle had to bring a gift, as on new years you give gifts. She got one from a store around the corner from us which has year round free gift wrapping outside, so when ever you feel like giving a gift you can just go to the store, danielle got me a toast towel and I got her a hello kitty handbag. At the party there was barbarque food and a noodles stand and a whole bunch of soda, it was very family oriented. When we arrived Danielle had to hand in her gift to which she was given a number, 77, which in Thai is jet sip jet - of the little Thai we know we fortunately know numbers, because when gift time came around they read the numbers out only in Thai (as apart from one other westerner, everyone was Thai or Burmese). When the number was called out, by the enthusiastic MC who somehow brought the crowd to fits of laughter over the most mundane thing, she had to go up on the stage. Then they called out another number and someone else came on the stage, so the two could exchange gifts. Danielle got a tea cup and saucer set, while the old man got Danielles pink love heart photo frame with clock.

Danielle also got some other gifts as well as a soft toy for Abacus, but as we left the severly G rated event, we saw an old burmese lady pushing her cart of possesions down the street and Danielle gave her the extra gifts, she seemed really appreciative.

Danielle was going to another new years party at her friends, we didn't want to push it with abacus, so I was to take her home. We walked to get a motorcycle taxi for danielle, they're the guys on the main street wearing purple vests. The guy we found didn't speak a word of english and had an open can of beer in the carry basket on the front of his bike, with a straw in it. But she got to the party safely, where there was plenty of traditional food and a bon fire that they dowsed in petrol and lit with sky rockets. It sounded fun.

It wasn't Thai new year, but they still celebrate it as though it is, which gives them two new years eves in one year. Their new years is in april and it is currently the year 2552, marked by the birth of buddha.

Our New Years wish was as it is every night, to get a good nights sleep, so we turned down the offers of guest house room parties for the hope of some good sleep. But it wasn't abacus who woke us up, it was the warzone sound of megaton strength fireworks, that seemed to be exploding right over head, lighting the windows in explosions of light. They were relentless - but of all ironies - abacus slept through it. She slept for two four hour sessions, which was awesome. But she still woke up at 6, yelling at us to get up.

elinphant

2008-12-30T19:14:00.000-08:00

This morning a guy was leading a baby elephant through the town selling sugar cane to feed it with. I bought some and gave it to it's rubbery trunk which dexteriously wrapped around it and shoved it in its mouth, bringing its trunk back for more and more, but when I screwed up the empty bag, it knew there was none left. Then it was led away to find more customers, it let out a squeal like screeching tyres. It was so cute. Of course you can't help but feel sorry for a creature so intelligent and family oriented, especially that hook they use to guide them by the ear. Later that night we saw the elephant again at the night markets, it was making its tyre screech sounds as it was led among the people and scooters and cars. We'd been to night markets in other towns, which had lots of fun food and stalls of clothes, gifts etc, but this one was lame and we didn't find anything worthwhile to eat. So we left. We went to a little street food restaurant that made really good roti, they made it right in front of you, stretching a small circle of dough so thin it was almost transparent, before folding it up to make layered puffy roti which he cooked on a hot plate over an open fire. It was so good we decided to get some more stuff. This chicken and potato filled roti was delicious for the first couple of bites before quickly losing its appeal in the indulgent amounts of oil and the chicken tom yam soup we ordered, came in the form of a pile of rice with a chicken drumstick stuffed in the middle of it, which we took away with us and gave to some homeless burmese children further down the street. We needed a pallatte cleanser and the only thing we could think of was getting out of the reality of Mae Sot and into the western refuge of Taste Hazel, a cafe, where we had green tea and chocolate cake. How cultureless.

I'm confused. Though I shouldn't be, knowing how much humans suck. I wrote the other day about people exploiting the burmese in the gem trade in Mae Sot, but the burmese buy them too - that is not to say the trade is any less exploitative - it just means there are some burmese who have escaped that persecution to use it to their advantage, and of course there are examples of this throughout history, the preoccupation of self interest.

I am confused though, by the criteria for arrest of those detained at the detention center. I don't understand why those who come to visit during visiting hours, are not also arrested, not that I want them to be of course. Those who beg all day are completely exposed as being illegal, do they have some skill at evading authorities or are they tollerated for a while before being sent back? I need to investigate.

more stuff

2008-12-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

So the internet has been a ee bit temperamental the last couple of days. We moved to our new guest house because a wedding had booked out our last one, an Irish girl is marrying someone in a refugee camp, but its worked out better for us, cheaper rent and bicycles, and the internet - while a bit temperamental isn't down for days on end.

On our second night here we had a mosquito net put up, but apparently there was a mosquito inside it, I could hear it whining passed my ears in the night and then in the morning could see its handy work, and poor abacus - just as her bites were clearing up, now has one on her cheek and one on her chin.

In the morning Abacus was rolling over onto her stomach on her mat, but then she seemed determined to get over onto her back again and she did it! So now she can roll over completely, the circle is complete.

There are goats that roam around the neighbourhood, there's a field opposite the guest house but they also venture across the bridge, maybe to scavenge for rubbish in the town, though there's plenty of rubbish dumped in the field too.

Danielle went to see her friends for a while, they're on holiday at the moment for another week.

There's not a lot happeneing really. The website I was hoping to make has stagnated - i think I'm going to pursue it on my own and just give them the template, I'll make it really easy to update, it'll be a good project for myself and one that should be quite applicable to other causes. The idea is pretty much like a blog, but with a front page template that is like a newspaper - or news website that can be updated using external word files. There are also playground building projects which have been put on hold for a couple of weeks, so my experiences are a little vicariously imbibed through danielle, it's hard to get involved hile caring for abacus - but there is no shortage of interactions and learning to be found in the town itself.

Nights are cold and I think of those detained around the corner from us. The detention center is completely exposed, I can't imagine what it's like for them, though I know they have suffered worse. They huddle on the floor watching the TV over the guards shoulder while babies and children cry in the background.

catch up

2008-12-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

A quick recap of our days without internet.

Abacus has been sleeping better with her new feeding schedule, I think the cereal is key. She certainly isn't sleeping through the night, but is sleeping for at least three hours at a time and sometimes four. I think it'll keep improving and she has settled into the new feed schedule well, cutting her feeds down to 6 a day. But she continues to cry quite a bit, and even her talking can often resemble a piercing scream, though when she's happy, she's really happy.

Our new guest house is nice and a lot cheaper, which is good because we'd underbudgeted the trip by quite a bit. We have our own detached little room which is good for Abacus' loud voice, somehow though, the room looks like its the outside and the door should lead to the inside - it's hard to explain.

It rained hard for a couple of nights, the locals were suspicious and a little supersticious, saying "It never rains in december", with the ominiously grave expressions of the jedi council. I'd forgotten about rain, and it was refreshing to have some, it's cooled everything off a lot.

I may have confused people when I took down my blog, people weren't after us and the order didn't come from any authorityarian rule, they are simply precautions which are made to limit information about certain operations, which could lead authorities to people who really don't want to be found. It is frustrating to leave out half the story - the main story really - on the blog, but I can tell you about it in person one day.

Also, we heard tale of a dunkin donuts in town, so we went to investigate. We found it in a giant supermarket where everyone was only buying shopping baskets full of cooking oil, the checkouts seemed to radiate a golden glow from the sheer quantity of the stuff. We later found out - as we'd suspected, that there was a speacial on oil, it was mainly though, store owners who were buying it to sell. PS the donuts were delicious.

When we left our guest house, we took a photo of the maid who'd been so good with Abacus and then we had it printed and went back and gave it to her, she really loved it, but more so, she loved that we brought the real abacus back with us. She wants to see more photos of Abacus as she grows older. Abacus is equally as loved at our new guest house (A guest house by the way is like a motel but made up of little houses rather than a big concrete block building). There's a ten year old girl , whose mother works here, who is very interested in abacus.

Across from the guest house is a detention center full of people; men, women and children, who are to be deported back to Burma. They are not hidden from site, it is just a huge concrete room with a wall of bars on the front, on which those captive hang their clothes, while they sit or lay on the concrete floor, waiting for the inevitable. The Thai guards are plain clothed, they watch TV as though it is nothing more than an impound lot, but there's also strong police presence. It's a hard image to walk passed everyday, there are so many angry feelings of helplessness and the hopelessness of humans here.

Further fueling this hopelessness is the healthy gem trade on the main street. Danielle pointed out how on the streets there's a lot of people buying gems, little rings and things, which they hold up to the sun outside, scrutinising their worth. The jewels though come from Burma, and the conditions in which they're mined are as you'd expect of a country under totalitarian rule. People buy Nike shoes made in sweatshops and diamonds mined in horrifying conditions all around the world, and that too is unforgivable, I know (in fact, ironically, nike seems to be the shoe of choice for most NGO's), but this crisis is so close, so visible, there are the desperate examples of the means by which their trinkets are got, walking among them, even haunting the very markets which sell the gems, they're collecting rubbish for money, or have one frail hand outstretched while the other holds a malnourished infant. This is the borderline of exploitation, where the two worlds physically impact upon each other, and yet it becomes as invisible a factor to their transactions, as it is when the border is an ocean wide, between the malls of the west and the factory floor of the third world.

2008-12-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

so um. the internet was down for two days or so.

now we have moved guest houses.

more later.

something

2008-12-23T23:33:00.000-08:00

So it didn't really work so well. She slept for almost four hours, then she woke up every two hours again, so I had to keep her quiet for an hour until it was time to feed her, but she wasn't really all that into eating, so by morning time I was exhausted, while she was of course ready to go. But today she has been really good today, eating every four hours just like we wanted. So we'll just keep at it.

Today the ants got all through her cereal and our peanut butter, so I had to go get more, being sure to choose banana, milk and wheat over the fish, milk and wheat option. They were working on the roads today, there are a lot of female road workers. The truck laying the diesel looked as though it were from 30's america, but it did the job, they had finished half the road in no time at all, a job which would probably have taken a week at home. They also didn't have road signs or stop go signs even though the the two lane road was reduced to two, but everyone worked it out, they just drove head on towards each other, and like a well rehearsed game of chicken, avoided each other at the last minute. And this too reminded me of something in India, and hopefully I can make this less confusing than yesterdays india reference. In india they don't use signs either when they're doing road works, but they don't even use road cones, they just lay rocks along the middle of the closed lane. We saw the rocks on the road beside us, through the bus window, like a Hansel and Gretel trail, which led to an unfinished bridge over a huge cliff. No signs, nothing but rocks to warn of the danger.

Abacus seems to stay awake longer with her new schedule and I tried a few grabbing exercises with her, she still needs a lot of practice, she does grab her feet, but reaching for stuff is a bit more challenging for her.

The maid cleans out her Abacus' pram too. We saw her beating it down with a duster and then finding her cardigan and hat in the undercarriage took them to be washed, putting them back in the pram in the plastic bags the use for laundry as a present. She loves her so much, it'll be sad to leave here on saturday for our new guest house.

We had a bit of red wine with some friends in the evening, about the only wine you'll find in Thailand, Dave, of Dave's Canadian fame imports it from south africa in huge vats and they sell it by the box.

a funeral

2008-12-23T05:21:00.000-08:00

The freezing morning, which abacus has made us well aquainted with, had transitioned seemlessly into a stifling heat by the time we heard the distant bell nearing. We first thought it was a procession of monks, though as the parade came closer into view, we could see the first group of people walking behind the police officer, were plain clothed in ragged t-shirts. The first person was carrying a small clay pot of fire, followed by a man carrying a pole, to which was tied a large paper doll, that danced playfully with the breeze. The next two men carried a bell suspended from a wooden beam between them, which a third man hit rhythmically with a hammer, in time to the monotonous chimes of the music, which radiated from the procession. Following the shaven headed monks in saffron robes, was a woman holding the painting of a young girl, whose body followed in the heartbreakingly small coffin, sat high on top of a small truck, followed by the remaining mourners, though there were no tears amongst them. It reminded me of a similar procession we saw in India. They all stared at us, even the men holding the body wrapped in a shroud above their heads, the funeral seemed to disappear in our presence. But this was Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, it's not like they hadn't seen westerners before, but maybe death was more common.

The night before had been no better than the others. Abacus stirred and squawked every hour or half hour, to sleep drink a few mls of milk, until deeply unconscious again. We had tried to have her sleep in our bed, but it had made no difference, except that her mosquito bites had multiplied by morning, until one arm was red with a heartless cluster of bumps, and her head and legs too had fresh bites. We sreached on line for feeding habits of babys her age and found that she was eating too smaller portions, way to frequently, so we plotted a regime change, and decided to stretch her fast time to four hours. However, abacus had some things to say about that and she had a convincing argument, which had me cede at two and three quarter hours. The next one stretched to three hours and the next three and a half, with her intake increasing each time also. It's probably been the most strict we've been on her, but what ever it takes to get her to sleep through the night, because we're going to age very quickly otherwise. We gave her three meals of cereal too, which is really tasty.

We bought some calamine lotion so that now her face and arms are polka dotted with white blotches. The woman at the store for some reason had to touch her bites, which made abacus cry, to which the lady responded with the familiar "clap to the crying baby" technique, which everyone in Thailand and Burma knows, to which Abacus responds by accelerating her crying, which usually attracts a crowd of people all clapping and laughing and being in her face, which usually accelerates her crying to a throaty scream. Already, at 6 months, the cultural divide is forged. Just as it is with dogs.

Later in the night we sought out the waffle lady, who has a stand amongst the street vendors, they looked delicious and the first bite was, but, was that a raisin? and was that, um, a corn kernel?? It was ok because we went to a bakery to get bread and they sold the best looking donuts there for so cheap and they were so good, the likes of which you could not find in New Zealand.

dogs of war

2008-12-22T04:43:00.000-08:00

There are locals working for NGO's who are being taught english so that they may converse more effectively with their western counterparts. On the surface it would seem more respectful to teach the foreigners the local language, however the transitional nature of the western volunteers and the permenancy of the locals, makes the equation the best fitting. When asked if they enjoy having a job that helps people, they uninhibitedly reply that it is "just a job" and in fact they view the migrants as untrustworthy, or thieves, with fragile states of sanity which they don't want in their country. They charged the NGO's founder as being "too nice" and that, as he lives in europe, is to far removed from the reality of the situation to know what is really going on. And in a sense, the charge is true. He has failed to appreciate the lack of understanding among the very people he has employed, of the very issues they are employed to help overcome. His failure to educate on the facets of the situation could only cause friction at the very point of contact, requiring the greatest freedom of movement.

I have little to say today. We barely slept with abacus waking every 2 hours, sometimes for no apparent reason. We've decided to just let her sleep in the bed with us tonight, even though she gets bitten by mosquitos, who so cruely go for her head and our faces and feet. She's harder to get back to sleep now, constantly trying to turn on to her stomach, and when succeeding crying because she can't get back off it and can't sleep that way. So getting her to sleep is a process of restraining her from turning, while holding a dummy in her mouth while whispering shhhhhh shhhhh shhhhhhh. Which is more exhausting than it sounds.

There's a mini gang of toy dogs which live next door, little fury ewoks who wear little vests, today they were wearing camo vests, but they are so ellusive when ever I take out my camera. I'll upload a blurry photo I have of one. Often when a huge pick up truck comes barreling down the driveway they'll come yapping out to swarm it's tyres, causing the truck to screech to a halt in a cloud of gravel dust.

Today we bought abacus some banana cereal. She has been eating the bananas we've bought, but not as much as she should. They're a lot sweeter and more pungent than bananas she's used to. Everything is so different here. We wonder how hard it is on her. We've tried to maintain some rituals of routine, but it's her most familiar environment, the bed in which she slept for two months before she left, which is causing the most visible sign of being unsettled.

an early morning excursion

2008-12-20T20:26:00.000-08:00

This morning, like many other mornings, abacus was awake and talking loudly, the way a fire alarm talks, at 6am. So we decided, instead of our usual ritual of trying in vain to shut her up, we that we would take her for another motorcycle ride, to a giant buddha 3kms out of town, as there's no where we can go to keep her penetrating screams from the other guests. The early morning is freezing so we had her bundled up and wedged once more between us as we rode along the dawn highway. The road was quiet with only trucks transporting workers to where ever they were going. Just out of town, one of the lanes disappeared into gravel, which no one drove on, creating a single lane highway, but so commonplace are such things, that it was approached with the banality of routine, and no sense of risk at all. Abacus began crying again part way along, though we were the ones bearing the brunt of the chilled morning air. The wat complex was huge, with ornate buildings everywhere and some workers chopped at a tree which lost large parts of its body with resounding cracks. As we walked through the quiet morning attendence, we were looking for a giant reclining Buddah and then suddenly you see it, a giant face between a couple of the buildings, which danielle likened to seeing Tane Mahuta for the first time, the giant amongst giants, its presence startling your expectations. Buddhas face looks with that feminine serenity of south east asian design, laying in contentment before the tiny people and their offerings. Across the way were about 20 identical buddha, all lined up behind a cage, with the look of a carnival sideshow, where someone might try to aim ping pong balls into their mouths. On our way back to our scooter we saw a little monk boy with a friend who had a bb gun shaped like an AK-47 shooting birds, I tried to get a photo but the boy with the gun didn't want to be photographed, I would have thought the buddhist monk would have shied away from being photographed with someone killing creatures more than the guy with the gun. We rode back screaming once more through the early morning chill, our rent had run out on the bike, much to Abacus' relief, she had a much more enjoyable time in the pram on the way to get Pancakes and bacon and a crap huge coffee at Daves Canadian and then a real coffee on the way home, she fell asleep along the way.

As we don't have baby food here, we bought some bananas and mashed them up with a pestle and mortar, but when she tried the banana she started to freak out, shaking her hands with wide eyes before she started crying, then when we tasted it we realised that there must have been some chilli residue left in the mortar from some grining up chillis and so the bananas were spicey. So that was her introduction to spicey food i guess. It wasn't really, really spicey, just a mild tingling.

Abacus slept a lot of the afternoon. Maybe we should just get up with her every morning. I went for a walk to get some supplies and spent a bit extra on my way home, doling out coins to all the starving mothers along the way, it's pretty hard to know someone could go starving for no good reason, i wish i could do more to help them.

We went to the borderline shop for dinner again, they have such good burmese food for really cheap. We also found out that they no longer issue 30 day visas after visiting Burma, it's now only 15, so we'll have to cross the border three times before we leave. It's a shame we can't see much of Burma on the otherside, I've heard it likened to going to Tiajuana and saying you've been to Mexico, it's just another border town.

We walked back as the wild dogs were crawling out from their shady hiding places from the afternoon heat, finding now their warm spots in the middle of the road beneath the setting sun, grudgingly moving for scooters sounding their horns with courteous little "excuse me please"es.

the screaming scooter

2008-12-20T19:37:00.000-08:00

There's some tragic looking westerners in thailand, a guy with a hawaiin shirt, unbuttoned to show his chest, tucked into his jeans, with his greying hair slicked back just walked passed.

But anyway.

We hired a motorcycle today to go visit some friends. Danielle drove with me holding abacus on the back. When abacus had previously riden a motorcycle she seemed to enjoy it, but this time, after about a kilometer, she began screaming uncontrollably, and there was little i could do but hold her squashed between the two of us. The important thing to remember in thailand is, that when you make a right hand turn, you stay on the right side of the road, and then weave your way to the left once you are around the corner - that's the rule not just cutting corners, you'll find it hard to get around on the left as cars turning right are all lined up on the left of the road.

So our little scooter apparently screamed through Mae Sot village attracting odd looks from the road side.

Abacus cried from all of the attention again so we lay her down on some blankets, where a mother dog watched attentively over her until she calmed - but refused to sleep. Our friends made us lunch, and offered us palm sugar for desert, and for some reason a whole nut and tea leaf salad, even though I couldn't eat another thing. But then Abacus began to scream inconsolably, so we had to leave our half eaten food and scream through the village and get her to bed. Later we went for coffee at this place, which seems to attract hella westerners with laptops giving it the distinct feeling of being a starbucks somewhere, we'd taken the scooter to get there, as it was a long walk away but only a short drive, but Abacus was screaming by the time we got back home again. She just seems to hate motorbikes.

the unstaffed coffee shop - abridged

2008-12-20T19:34:00.000-08:00

I went for coffee today but there was no staff in the store and no bell, so I waited for 20 minutes, but no one came, even though I could have helped myself to anything in the fridge, or if I'd been inclined to investigate - possibly even the till. I got bored and left and came back on my way home, but still no one.

All I'll say is that NGO's will not help their causes by starting conflicts among themselves, especially with those who volunteer and pay to help.

Danielle feels much better today, illness wise.

Abacus has been a bit difficult the last couple of days and it's not helping that to respect the silence of other guests we cannot parent how we normally would, meaning she's getting quite spoilt. Especially being able to sleep in the bed with us. She's taking a lot longer to get to sleep at times and waking up a lot more in the night and talking loudly.

Later in the night, the three new zealand idiots would become so drunk they would let off bottlerockets out of their hands outside the guest house, welcoming the scorn of all of the other guests. the old night watchman, an elderly Burmese asylum seeker would be shaking his head, powerless to stop them, the other old man was a drunk who the boys would coerce, it sounded, into holding a bottle rocket in his hand, then laughing hysterically in disbelief that he would comply, they would call him "sky rocketman", they'd filled the coke fridge with beer and cheap whiskey, but the firdge is locked after 8, so they would be yelling "hey skyrocketman! kinoi 'av th key". They looked the type advertised in drunk driving commercials, and they would drive off drunk, on motorcycles, but unfortunately they would return unscathed after "blowing some shit up", mouthing back at the other guests, all of whom are here on voluntary basis for humanitarian work. It makes no sense for them to even be here. There is nothing here for them to do, it's not a tourist destination and it's so far out of the way I don't know how they ended up here. I don't know why they're not in the islands where they would be inconspicuous with the other tourists, who travel only to indulge in their own culture in another land, a century earlier they would have been the worst of the colonizers.

they hand wash our laundry!

2008-12-17T22:48:00.000-08:00

In the early hours of the morning you can hear the buddhist monks chanting in the distance, so faint and organic does it sound it is like an auditory hallucination, the mind forming shapes from the wind. About half an hour later the loud speakers around town broadcast the morning muslim prayer, crackling in the cool dry air, splitting the sky open, as light begins to flow into the predawn and birds begin their voyage through the prayer filled sky. Then Abacus cracks all the ceremony with her loud mouth talking as she wants nothing but to be awake.

I bought a new pair of jeans before I left New Zealand and since my illness, they are too big for me, when I weighed myself in Singapore I was over 70, probably the heaviest I've been in years, who knows what I am now. I should start eating more of the delicious looking cakes around town, they are like 25c each. The other day we had Burmese tea cakes and saved some to take home, wrapped in a napkin. But the next day when I unwrapped the tissue, the cakes were covered in tiny dust sized ants, yet there was no sign of ants anywhere else in the room. It's as though they materialised from within the cakes themselves, as though they were some kind of Trojan Burmese tea cakes. Later that night when I went to microwave a burger, I saw the same type of ants all through the inside of the microwave,I heated the burger expecting all the ants would perish, but when I opened the door they were running around as though nothing had happened. So obviously they must be some form of alien ants, from some sort of alien ant farm perhaps ? What would have been worse is if I'd opened the microwave to find super giant radioactive ants.

So today I had the simple task of buying some new nappies. But there are no quick easy errands in Thailand, at least not as we would know it, not without extreme patience. I can't emphasise enough how much of an obstacle course it is pushing a pram though the town, it's difficult enough on foot, it's hard to know when the footpath is going to just disappear into a shop or a hole or turn into road, or step up to a higher footpath for which there is no ramp. None of the stores have ramps but their doorways are always one or two steps off the ground. And food takes forever, in an empty restaurant it took someone forty minutes to make me a sandwich, it just takes a shift in expectations,to know you can't "just pop out" for a "quick" something.

Some other new zealanders are staying at the guest house. I don't even know why they came to Mae Sot of all places, they just do things like buy fireworks and let them off at night, and walk around in open robes with little else on, offending the female staff. They're just dicks. I was thinking of making up some elaborate plot that they're involved in and telling some informers and having them disappeared.

Danielle is a bit fluey now. One of us is always sick! We got some spicey soup for dinner to help clear her head and a brownie. hehe. After dinner some carollers came around. They were all dressed in santa hats, the girls had fake white braids coming out of theirs. There was a lot of english for them to know to sing the songs. It was so cute.

History deleted.

2008-12-17T22:29:00.001-08:00

So I've taken most of the blog down for security reasons, I might get around to putting a severely edited version up if I have time. Ironic that to protect freedom one must self impose the same extreme censorship that was the cause for escape. There are informants everywhere around here and people go missing. They search websites, blog sites, hang out at guest houses, not that we have any worries because we're only here on holiday, but I've heard of westerners being involved in things and so there is suspicion of westerner activities in Mae Sot. (Funny that bloggers spell check doesn't recognise the word blog). So from now on I will be writing differently.

Burma

2008-12-16T17:36:00.000-08:00

Some people have asked me to explain the situation in Burma. It's difficult to summarise the brutality and oppression of the military dictatorship there and also the eloquent words of those who have written about it, but I'll try. The best book I have read about it, aside the many reports scattered around the guest house, is "Finding George Orwell in a Burmese tea shop". George Orwell worked in Burma as part of the Imperial Police Force when he was just the 17-22 year old Eric Blair. The British ruled Burma after ousting the Burmese king and annexing it into the Indian part of their empire, which stretched from modern day Pakistan to Burma (they never conquered Afghanistan as no one ever has or will). George Orwells first book was Burmese Days, but some say he wrote a trilogy about Burma, including 1984 and Animal Farm, so chillingly similar are these dystopias to present day Burma that he is known to the Burmese as the Prophet, though his books are banned in Burma - I wouldn't be surprised, however, if the books themselves serve as instruction manuals, in the back pockets of the piggish Generals who rule Burma.

The short lived democratic rule in Burma was founded by a resistance group led by one Aung San. During world war 2, he led his group to Japan where they were trained to oust the British. However, when they returned to Burma they saw the Japanese as a bigger threat to their freedom and culture and instead defected to join the British in driving out the invading Japanese, an operation which was successful and led to the granting of independence from the British. Soon after Aung San began leading a transitional government in 1948, he and his cabinet were assassinated by a rival party. In 1962 democracy was completely destroyed by a military coup, led by General Ne Win, who would rule Burma for the next 26 years with overreaching authority, violently suppressing any protest, no matter how peaceful with overwhelming force under the guise of transitioning the country towards socialism. Over the years Burma would amass an army the size of the current American one, though with no external enemies, their force would be instead turned inwards, to control their own population.

Students and monks have been instrumental in leading opposition protests. A key moment in Burmese history came on the auspicious date, 8.8.88, when students lead a huge protest for democracy. This protest, to the rest of the worlds horror, was met with a live military response in which over 3000 unarmed protestors were shot dead, with many more injured. It was after this 8888 uprising that the country's name was changed to Myanmar and it's capital also moved, cities and street names were renamed, as if in changing these names, they could rid Burma of its memory and history, in chilling similarity to Orwels 1984.

Aung San Su Kyi, Daughter of the revolutionary founder of democratic Burma returned to Burma at this point with a mission to lead the country towards democracy, in 1990 elections were held for the first time in 30 years, during which Hung San was detained and held under house arrest. Despite her incarceration, her party still won an overwhelming 82% of the vote, this though meant nothing, as Slorc (State Law and Order Restoration Council) had no intention of ceding power and instead instated a new general as the new ruler of Burma. Since then Aung San has been held under house arrest on several occasions for periods of years at a time.

Under the guise of socialism Slorc, which is now renamed SPDC (State peace and development council), uses its civilians in unpaid hard labour to build projects in "the benefit of the state". During the time they work on these projects, they are unable to work to support themselves, which means, many begin working after sometimes 12 hours of forced labour, with little sleep, in order to maintain a livelihood, or at least to eat. There are reports of people being worked to death in these situations.

Opposition to the government is fiercely monitored by under cover officials who eavesdrop on cafe conversations. They have an eloquent name for these informers, "the handle of the axe" as the axe handle is made of the same wood that it's head is designed to destroy. Those deemed to be talking about questionable topics are carried away to be interrogated in prison, where many are held for years, enduring torture and extreme psychological trauma for which there is no treatment when they are released. Some political prisoners die in custody, however their bodies are cremated and sometimes buried before families are told, to hide any signs of culpability, others just disappear. Publications within Burma are heavily edited to omit every last word which might possibly allude to, or connatate a current event the SPDC might want censored, for what ever reason. Burmese learn to read what isn't there, the sudden absence becoming the headline for the current biggest news story. And in true Animal Farm fashion, the parties three slogans are written on walls and everyday in the "news"paper.

None of the governments heavy handed tactics have any benefits for the country, which was once earmarked as the most promising economy in south east asia, it is now economically crippled, with 75% of the population living below the poverty line. However, despite western scorn for the regime, in the mid ninties Burma was welcomed into asean, the Asian economic group, giving access to, not wealth per se, but a strong support, a metal rod in the spine of a dead country - Burma is Bernie, and the rest of Asia are the guys trying to walk the corpse around. Therefore, western sanctions, which have been in place in Burma - have no real effect ( not that sanctions ever have a helpful effect). However the dead country has many organs for harvesting; oil and rubies which, countries such as China, are drilling without conscience (and let me just add for the seemingly popular and sanctioned racism towards China, that before it was held to ransom by the entire western world and forced to continue dealing in opium, which it had wanted to outlaw, was one of the leading thinkers in human rights). The French oil company Total is one of the few western companies remaining, but it is these western companies which Ian proposes could be the saviour of Burma. Western companies are scrutinised by and heed the advice of human rights groups. They bring with them conduits of activism, development and if nothing else a foreign presence, a link for the oppressed to the outside world that they crave and witness to the crimes of the regime, who want nothing more than impunity. Total has constructed schools in the area and is doing good work in Burma.

Military action is not possible because of the size of the Burmese army and it's alliance with China, sanctions (if they ever work) cannot work because of its inclusion in ASEAN. Therefore, foreign investment is a viable penetrating force, so long as they are held accountable for their actions by their own countries of origin, whether through government, UN, human rights watchdogs or activist groups. Western countries are wary of human rights abuse scandals.

Foreign investment is not the popular view of most activist groups who push for total exclusion of Burma, a view held by imprisoned democratic leader Aung San Su Kyi. This however is simply not feasible and as she has been under house arrest for so long, her wishes are outdated, so we do not know what views she might now hold. Aung San incidently was awarded the nobel peace prize and is the only laureate to be imprisoned. She will no doubt not live to see democracy in Burma, she is separate from her family in England where she is free to go to and never return from. We discussed this last week and reached the conclusion that she can't leave now, she like Ghandi or Martin Luther King jr is an activist for nonviolent protest, who gave their lives to their cause. She will probably die a symbol of hope for democracy and human rights, which she could not become with her freedom. And while her predecessors were assassinated, her death will be seen as no less of a blot on Burma's history, the wasted life of a political genius, the wasted years of oppression.

Burmese flee and bribe their way into Thailand where they find themselves in a different kind of hell. They are about as wanted here as migrants are wanted anywhere. They are blamed of course for all the countries problems, while fuelling the economy with their low wages. They have no rights here, those who come to work as migrant workers are exploited maltreated and indentured. They work in dangerous, demeaning dirty jobs for a couple of dollars a day. They are extorted by Thai authorities, rounded up and deported whenever the Burmese government asks the Thai government to do so. And those deemed to be fleeing fighting are granted stay in what should be refugee camps, though the Thais do not recognise refugee status, they have supplied land for the camps and tolerate the NGO operations within them, but no one may leave the camps. Those who are migrant workers are allowed to stay so long as they can keep paying the bribes, they have no Thai rights, no right to go to school, they are not protected by Thai laws and some employers push these facts to the extreme.

There is a book here about female migrant workers, who have it worse than anyone, entitled "Between two hells". Which I think is the most apt assessment of the situation.

In 2007 further protests took place, instigated by the monks, it was called the saffron revolution indicative of the colour of their robes. Accurate reports are difficult to get out of Burma, however it is pretty widely accepted that this uprising was brutally suppressed. In the same year a devastating cyclone, cyclone Nargis, hit the irawaddy delta, the amount of lives lost was estimated to be about 146,000, what is more tragic though is the amount of these lives that might have been saved, had the regime allowed foreign aid through. What aid was accepted was used to construct a facade. What may as well have been a film set of medical tents in a crude display for foreign cameras.

About the only thing that Thailand offers (not to paint all thais with the same brush of course - most of the population is compassionate) is access to hard working volunteering NGO's, who offer those fleeing destitution and violent oppression with health care, education, compassion and if nothing else, the ability to tell their stories, think critically and be heard.

I hope I have explained this well enough, if I have got things wrong (and I'm sure the SPDC would think so and would like to send me one of the fact books they send Ian to "help" with his articles), I apologise but my intentions are good.

Disney is watching you

2008-12-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

In singapore they are huge on Disney. You see Disney character sculptures everywhere. In the departure lounge they have thiis huge happy display off all the disney characters with a sign in the middle of it saying "this area is under surveilance".

halloWEEn

2008-10-31T17:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was halloween so danielle died dyed abacus' pink stretch and grow and sewed a tail on it black and we painted her face up as a black cat hehe. see the flickr site for a cute photo or two.

2008-10-29T05:18:00.000-07:00

whoa Abacus was wired tonight. I have no idea why, she was awake and charged up for like 5 hours, we were tired before she was, it was like "abacus, shouldn't you be putting us to bed?"

rolling over

2008-10-27T22:19:00.001-07:00

We're yet to see it yet, but Abacus can rollover, we came in to find her on her belly the other day and at about 2 this morning, while danielle was making her milk abacus was kicking around on her little pillow, then the next thing i here a slight thud and she's rolled off and is face down on the floor. hehe. But it's not surprising as her tummy time has yet again accelerated, these things just seem to happen over night with no gradual improvement, all of a sudden she's 20 times better than she was the day before. The pediatrician told us we weren't allowed to support her head any more when we walk around, that may have contributed too. I've been taking her in the front pack facing outwards now, and she really enjoys it, she makes little kicking movements as though she's walking. hehe.

Mahia

2008-10-27T21:24:00.001-07:00

Abacus went to the pediatrician last week and he said she was doing above average for her age which is awesome, that's for any child of her age. She's growing really tall, and has pretty much quadrupled in weight since she was born.

This weekend, seems our car is about to expire we decided to take it on one last road trip up to Mahia, or Morere more specifically, just south of Gisborne. Abacus woke us up nice and early on sunday morning and we were on the road by 6. She travelled really well, sleeping a lot of the way. We got to Waipukerau in time for coffee, for which Danielle had two vouchers for free coffee that were slipped into her wallet when it was sent back to us after we forgot it at the same cafe a year ago. We made it by mid afternoon, we were given this cute as one bedroom cabin situated on some farm land with sheep running around. The owners were really friendly farmer types and they had a cute wee dog named socks. Did I mention it rained the whole way ? It was a really gloomy rainy day, but monday was meant to be good. We all took a quick nap before heading over to the thermal pools, which boasted "fosilized water", as the water takes thousands of years of travelling through the earth before resurfacing again, all toasty warm at these little pools, it's supposed to have therautic qualities from in it's mineal richness. It was a realy nice little bush walk to get to them. I was a bit skeptical of Abacus enjoying herself in the pools but she was really calm and loved it heaps, for way longer than I had expected, but then she was suddenly hella tired and began screaming! So we had to dash back to the cabin and try and get her to sleep, if she msses her sleep window she can be really pissed, and she was, but after maybe 10 minutes or so she was all of a sudden happy and cute before finally drifting off to sleep. The bed was so comfortable that we just crashed out, and being in the country, the darkness was impenetrable and the heavy rain on the thin roof made our little warm cabin all the more cosy.

The next morning was as blue and perfect as the weather mystics had predicted, they must have slaughtered the right amount of chickens. And we drove off to explore the beaches around mahia. It was a beautiful area of the country, we had not been there before, the coast line was long and sraight and lay at the bottom of where the green hills ended at a neatly hewn precipice. There were also perfectly still estuaries that were perfect mirror pools of the sky and hills. We drove to Napier for lunch, to see if a cafe where we'd had lunch 4 years before was till there (sadly it wasn't - but its a mongolian barbarque now - oddly a couple of years ago danielle and i became obsessed with mongolia so it wasn't so sad after all (however, it should be noted that mongolian barbarque is not really a native mongolian practice, it's actually only found outside of mongolia)) Anyway, on the way to Napier the car began to overheat, so we had to drive with the heater on, and it was already a realy hot day, so it was tough going. It continued to overheat leaving napier (a town that seemed just a little too kid friendly - and really, who cares about art deco? If it was that good wouldn't they still be designing in that style ? It should be renamed the kitsch capital of the world) and so we were really really hot, I stopped to check the water again - which had already filled up and the bonnet (hood) wouldn't close properly, so I had to pound it shut with my fist in the forecourt of the petrol station but it got us back to Wellington.

Just as we got to the hutt however we hit a massive traffic jam, and crawled along for a good 15 minutes and found the cause of the hold up was some hunting day, there were all these possum and deer carcasses strung up, hahaha, only in the hutt.

a curious incident 2

2008-10-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

oh and a funny incident. Danielle met her friend at a cafe at university and while they were talking a stranger came up and was like "oh, a baby! I love babies" and she held abacus and stuff. But then, a couple of days ago, danielle was metting the same friend, at a different cafe, all the way accross the other side of town, and they were just returning to the car and putting abacus in and she must have mentioned abacus' name because the same lady from the other cafe appeared and was like "Did I hear someone say Abacus?" hehe

it's not the only time either that abacus has overshadowed us, we went to t he same restaurant two fridays in a row and i paid the same waitress, but it wasn't until she saw abacus that she recognised us, "she saw her in her pushchair and was like "I remember you" and then recognised us.

up till now

2008-10-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

hrm. well what's happened.

well we're nearing I think 6 months of interrupted sleep cycles, which has left me feeling a little like a CIA interrogation victim, ask me anything and I'll tell you.

but abacus is so worth it. a few weeks ago her hands found each other and now she's constantly clutching them together as though she has some plan she is hatching. And she gets a huge gummy smile, especially when you dance her around, she talks a lot, mainly in the mornings, but she also quietly talks herself to sleep, you hear her in the darkness making soft noises and then suddenly silence.

She is 5.5kg's so has gained a really really good amount of weight since she was born, and she is growing long too, she's so baby sized now, i feel as though we were given an extra amount of time with her, we got to know her as a fetus, and now as a baby, but I can already see she will not be a baby for long.

Danielle got her a bouncenette, it's a strap in chair one, and she seems to really enjoy sitting up, she always has, really, almost as much as she likes being walked around. I think she will be quite determined to get mobile as soon as she can.

She loves eating too. We've given her pears and apples and mangos and avacado and she loves it all, she's getting much better at opening her mouth for the spoon and biting down on it.

more later

2008-10-16T19:58:00.001-07:00

i have the chessiest most unoriginal way to put abacus to sleep. you just say shhhhhhh shhhhhh over and over and watch her eyelids slowly drop, it's like hypnosis, suspense that ends with falling asleep. how oxymoronic. she just gets more and more animated, she loves being on the move all the time and doesn't care to much for being still. she's getting better at eating her pears and apples, though i think she likes pears more. she's been eating lot s of milk too and has outgrown her crib so now we've made up a makeshift bed which will have to do until we get a bigger place on our return from thailand.

for thailand we have a travel playcrib thing, which folds up like a tent - complete with mosquito net. it's going to be sooooo hot there and humid so we'll have to watch her fluids and see how she reacts.

2008-10-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

last week abacus and I accompanied danielle to her award ceremony at university where she was awarded an outstanding volunteer certificate, yay! that was a day after she was accepted into the masters program for international relations, it was a pretty awesome week. We then decided that because we couldn't go to panama this summer that we would take the opportunity offered by danielle's victoria international leadership program to help burmese refugees on the border of Thailand and Burma. It sounds like an amazing experience and as we are already familiar with Thailand we think it'll be a really good introduction to traveling with Abacus.

Then on saturday Abacus had her sleep over which had been deferred from last week. She had a really good time, and slept really well. She spent all morning there too, hanging out with Zen and Reiden and Kaysey, while we slept, waking up once in the middle of the night with a minor hit of disorientation, before realising I could just go back to sleep. It was really good to see her again the next day and we had both missed her.

2008-10-07T03:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Abacus had more shots. Danielle said she's never heard her scream so loud or for so long ! it was so bad one of the nurses had to leave the room. poor bubba. she's all good now though, she slept it off.

the apples and pears to heaven

2008-10-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

Abacus is eating pears now and she likes it way more than rice cereal. She was supposed to go for her first sleep over on saturday night with a baby named Zen, but she was acting a bit strange, crying a lot, sleeping an hour here and there, and needing a lot of cuddles so we weren't sure what was going on, if she were teething or if she had caught something, so we had to call it off, but something fun came out of it, because we found out that Zen had had the same problem with rice cereal as Abacus did, and that he preferred vanilla custard instead - hehe. we hapened to have some pear babyfood in the pantry (which actually wasn't bought for Abacus) and so we tried it out on her and she seemed to enjoy it, she ate every last bit, well you know tongued it and swallowed and didn't cry about it which means - good! and so now we bought a bunch of apples and pears and have been giving her them as an accompaniment to her milk. Also on sunday - she's probably been able to do this a while but Danielle just gave it her on sunday - she was holding a rattle and shaking it round, with the occasional bop on the head, but no tears. It was pretty cute. (see photos)

growth

2008-10-02T01:56:00.001-07:00

abacus really wants to suck her thumb, she s getting pretty good at it but it's still to small to replace her beloved dummy, usually she just shoves as many fingers as she can in there. We think she's been having a growth spurt lately which has disrupted her sleeping at night, and her getting to sleep, she gets over tired and cries a lot and ends up smacking herself in the face which makes her cry more, all we can do is try to soothe and comfort her. But she makes up for it by being super cute the rest of the time. Oh yeah, she also love getting up at 6am, she's not hungry or anything, she just wants to be up, and t's not enough just to lay in the bed with us, despite the fact she can only lay down whereever she is, she knows the difference between laying on our bed and laying out in the living room, where she kicks excitedly and gurgles happilly knowing that she's succeeded in dragging us from our cosy slumber (this is usually after waking up at about 3am to eat tee hee) - no that's not exactly true, i can lay her down with her baby gym next to our bed and go back to sleep while she gets on to the business of pulling and grabbing and sucking her baby toys, quite contentedly.

sorry ?

2008-09-28T02:25:00.000-07:00

WHOA!. so sorry for the grand time canyon which runs between this and the last blog. So what s Abacus been up to ? well, she got her passport! she looks chubba as in it, now we have to fill it with stamps from far off places. She continues to grow, and make subtle advances on her skills, she sort of gurgles a laugh now which is so cute, but what s not so cute is the few times when she's screamed for ages and we don't know how to calm her, today Danielle had about an hour of it before she finally exhausted herself and fell asleep.

The other day she went for an 8 hour stay with our babysitter (Jenna), whose son Leo kept kissing her, before jenna realised it was because he heard kiss, whenever jenna said abacus. Unfortunately Abacus has stopped eating rice cereal, the first couple of nights she kind of ate it as though it bottle, but she has since wised up to that trojan spoon and closes her mouth until we give her a bottle, we try again every now and then, she'll be ready soon.

What we've been up to is assignments and work and applications, hence the sparce amount of news i've posted, we're just a little short on time.

2008-09-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

this week abacus' tummy time improved ten fold, almost over night. She's suddenly grunting in great effort to hoist herself up really far, she's really determined to do it.

We had a bit of bad news this week too. We had been planning to leave in November to volunteer in a village in panama for a few months, but unfortunately a huge disaster struck the remote village. Two dams failed during heavy rains and the river flooded and swept away a lot of the village ausig a lot of death and destruction. The brother of guy who we were communicating with, was also killed, he was to attend a university in US next year with sponsorship. It's a real tragedy, but we will be very eager to go and help in April, which is when they said it will be possible for us to go.

solids

2008-09-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

that was the other thing, how she ate a whole feed while still asleep. hehe.

abacus had a pretty huge sunday, we both needed to get some assignments done so she went and hung out with her babysitters, apparently she ate one and a half bottles when she woke up and then went straight back to sleep! then we went to my cousins house so they could meet her, she stayed awake the whole time and seemed really excited and interested in everyone, especially alexa (sorry if my spelling is wrong) their youngest daughter, who seemed equally as excited and interested in abacus.

then, because abacus was sleeping through the night a week ago and now she wakes up at 3 again, "someone" told us that they started their baby on solids when that happened and the baby went back to sleeping through the night, DON'T TELL PLUNKET! but tell as many doctors as you like because they're chillaxed as about it. So, we got her some rice cereal just a real small amount to start with. She was so cute eating it, she kind of sucked at the spoon like it was a bottle, then after she ate all that, she had her bottle and went to sleep for . . . 8 hours!

crying like a grown up

2008-09-09T21:53:00.000-07:00

I may have told you this already but the other day danielle made this low groan noise, kind of like a scary monster and abacus' eyes opened really wide and then she had this huge pout before starting to cry, as though she were scared, but she had no reference or association between the noise and anything bad happening, it's so wierd, we want to try it again, but also don't want to scare her so we probably won't.

last night, i'm talking about crying a lot here for some reason, but last night she cried like a real cry, not just an automatic response cry, but an actual emotional sounding cry.

there was one other thing i was going to write - i forget now, i ll tell you when i remember.

2008-09-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

Abacus is getting really vocal now, making lots of little baby sounds, she's also getting a lot better at putting her hands in her mouth which is really good but she s also getting good at pulling her dummy out and then crying about it. right now she's very excited to be playing with her toys and is kicking her legs and flayling her arms to show it.

a perfect day

2008-09-07T22:52:00.000-07:00

on sunday the weather was beautiful so we went to take abacus on her first swimming adventure at the kilbernie pools, what s awesome about taking her is that we get in for free and her entry fee is cheaper than it would for either of us to go by ourselves. the pools are awesome with water cannons and lots of fun things going on. Abacus donned her cute red stripey bathing suit and danielle took her in. She was very still, a little wierded out by the whole thing but she seemed to enjoy herself for a short time. We'll definately take her out there again. On the way back we drove around the bays and saw the snow capped ranges around wellington and across the strait to the south island, we stopped at the maranui cafe and abacus slept peacefully while we ate our awesome lunch with perfectly cooked fries and probably the best shake ever, then she continued to sleep while i picked some stuff up from the office, she was so good.

2008-09-05T19:29:00.001-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7597761.stm

2008-09-01T01:18:00.001-07:00

it's amazing how much progress abacus has made in the three weeks since her last neurodevelopmental (N.D) therapy visit. Her neck control has continued to improve, being able to track us as we walk passed her, holding her head centered, how she stares at us and pulls objects to her mouth, how she's started smiling and cooing. The ND therapist (michelle) was really impressed with it all. I'd had to rouse abacus from her sleep for the visit, she slept well, 8 hours or so. The cutest moment came when michelle put te wheke (maori for octopus) on top of her little gym so as not to distract abacus while she was shown a smiley face rattle, but it had the opposite effect, you see abacus LOVES te wheke, she's always staring at it and bashing it round, so when she saw it suddenly looking down on her instead of dangling for her to bash, she was completely captivated by the novelty and stared at it excitedly, kicking and thrashing her arms with wide eyes and making noises. It was really cute!

2008-08-29T18:34:00.000-07:00

The other night during a bath abacus was really active and kicking and splashing and having fun, but then she got a bit too excited and kind of started thrashing around and freaked herself out! I hope she's not scared of the bath now. But today we went to get her passport photo taken, she d fallen asleep in the stroller by the time we walked there and the photographer was skeptical of her being able to stay awake or be happy during it, he said maybe we should come back when she's woken up, but we were like let's just try and she was calm as, proving yet another person wrong! hehe. she had to have her eyes open and be facing the front ( while she lay on a mat on the floor ) and one photo was really cute but her heads a little off center which we'll try to submit, but we have a back up one where she facing the front but looks a little freaked out. hehe

developing

2008-08-25T15:30:00.000-07:00

Not a whole bunch to report. Abacus is just subtely growing more and more cognizant all the time. She woke up this morning because we had gotten up and I guess the noise roused her, and she was just happy and chill and pleased to see us and to see the world some more. She did a bit of tummy time with little fuss, we need to keep that up, she's made so much progress and is so strong we just have to keep her developing at the same rate. She slept a good 8 or so hours again last night - though that meant waking up at 430am still, but she's definately eating enough to maintain her through such long sleeps.

She visited a neighbour yesterday and danielle set up her bank account, she get's a disability allowance - which i guess is supposed to help us with looking after her, but we'd rather she had it for later on, danielle had even joked about adopting a child using abacus' money, so that abacus could hold that over them, "You better be nice to me because I paid for you!" hehe.

smile!

2008-08-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

So Abacus started smiling now. It's so cute! She's also started chugging a whole bottle of milk. She's grown so much, she's 60cm long and no longer fits snuggly in our lap. She stares at us a lot now too, making eye contact even when we're quite far away from her. Yesterday she was eating and I got the push chair out because we were going on a walk and he got all excited when she saw it and started drinking really fast. hehe.

bloggity blog

2008-08-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

yesterday we went to the downs society coffee morning. it was a good experience. There were only three mums there and three downs kids, who were all about 3 years old. The mum was there that danielle met earlier at the beach and her little boy Fletcher, the other boys were Jesse and Jack. Abacus slept through most of it when she woke up she looked around and had a feed and was pretty good with it all. They have developmental classes there, like speech therapy and music therapy they have a long waiting list. A lot of it is comparing, which we openly admit, it's good to have some sort of idea of what to expect at different ages, and we heard a lot of stories about their differences in progress.

It's funny, danielle was asked a lot of questions by a curious neighbour, well meaning and nice, asking about abacus' future, her development etc. It's strange how a child with a disability focuses your attention so far ahead, where as children without any innate inabilities are kind of left to be kids. But anyone at any time could have limited potential, not necessarily an accident, they could just make dumb choices, they could become addicts, drunkards, make poor relationship choices - anything, why are kids without disabilities exempt from that worry? Or more diplomatically, why can't children with disabilities take it day by day like other kids, enjoy being a child and leave adulthood until we get to it. I'm not going to map out her future anymore than any other child, people seem to freak out a lot more than us about her disability, we're completely at ease with it, we've long since made our peace with existence, Abacus made it easy.

rock a bye baby rockin out

2008-08-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

yesterday was pretty chill, wait no it wasn't, we went to bed quite late and then abacus kept waking up and then we had to wake up to take evan to the airport, and i didn't go because i thought abacus should sleep, but then just after they left she woke up and stayed awake until danielle got home. hehe. and then we finally slept - till like 12 or something.

THEN, the day was pretty chill. We just put abacus in her sleeper-hold front pack and did the groceries. Then when we got back the neighbours invited us to go sit in their garden, which danielle and abacus did while I got in some outstanding recording time, they had a fun time, so did i. Later in the evening we went to my friends birthday, there were these loud kind of latinish drummers there, a drumming duo, and I was thinking that Abacus was going to hate it and cry but . . . she fell asleep ! maybe we should get a drum kit and just play really loudly when she won't sleep?

she only woke once in the night, after about 6.5 hours sleep ? that was good.

abacus ultra mega multi update (or the abacus omnibus)

2008-08-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

so on friday abacus went to have her echo done,which is a heart test where two nurses who seem to have no heart between them prod deeply into her stomach up under her rib cage with a sonagram device to search for any holes there may be in her heart, while they talk banally about personal and social things amongst themselves, like what each other is going to do this weekend, completely negating our presence who might have liked to have known what they were actually doing and what any of it meant for us. I think Abacus acted way more grown up, she was very patient considering the test coincided with her feed and she was starving. We amused her with gadgets that played electronic nursery rhymes that sounded like videogame theme songs, and flashed bright lights, as the room was kept dark the whole time. I don't know when we'll get the results, apparently we were all just props in the procedure.
Later that day Abacus came to work drinks with us and had a royally fun time, chugging her milk along with us. Then after returning home for a quick change she came out with us to a japanese restaurant where she slept in my arms while i ate, and realised how awesome an invention chopsticks actually are, you can eat with one hand!! i'd never even considered that before. Not much happened on saturday, except that she loves to sleep in the front pack, it's instant, something to do with the position of being stuck amongst the straps?
Sunday she went on her biggest drive ever, as we escaped on our first trip away since having her, to wanganui. And we quickly realised what it's like packing for a baby, and how small our car suddenly seemed. She slept pretty much the whole way, through the sun and through the driving rain, through the incident on the bridge where a gigantic truck was coming towards us spraying a wall of water about 10 feet high whose inevitable impact we had to brace ourselves for and just continue driving blindly through, slept through all the rain and wind in the horowhenua, which looks as though it has been cast under the spell of some permanent storm for months, where giant trees, pulled out by the roots, lay in the fields like plucked weeds. And slept through evans "Orsum" burger, which he bought in turakina, when he asked, what's the difference between the orsum burger and the works burger, he got the reply, they're exactly the same, except the works burger doesn't have steak. hahahaha. this thing had steak, bacon, a meat patty, an egg, beetroot, pineapple . . . after devouring it, he was able to wash his hands in the rain passing by at 100km/h outside the car window. Abacus was a bit unsettled after arriving in Wanganui, we took her for a walk and fed her and changed her, in the end we just lay her down on the floor and realised she just wanted to be left alone - easy fix. She slept well through our merriment and rabble, Danielle and Evan were supposed to go skiing on monday, but the roads had been closed up there due to 3 days of heavy snow, but they were supposed to be open again in the afternoon. Mum text and said she wouldn't mind coming to wanganui to see abacus and I was like, well if you're coming here, maybe you could take her with you and I'll go skiing too. And so that what happened. Abacus went away to hang out at mums creche and with her cousins and aunty and great grandmother, and we hit the paraparas, a little jaded but not too bad, we saw baby goats on the side of the road aparently by themselves, but when we stopped, they ran back behind the fence to where their mother was waiting. We listened to a cooking show on the radio which made us starving but we were soon in ohakune and eating a burger and fries and corn fritters and coffees . Then we went to venture up the mountain, but an electronic sign said - road closed everything on hold, and we're like um? let's just keep going. There was snow down lower than I've ever seen it before, all over the trees, it made them look like some alien Dr. Seuss world, and then there was a sign that said chains required which was bad, but then there was a sign that said chains for hire, and that was good! So we asked if there was anything open and they said it just opened!!!!! there was so few people up there and three days of untouched fresh snow, which was still powder come 4pm. The weather cleared up with a bit of snow in between, but it was an awesome day. When we picked up Abacus in Palmerston North a few hours later she was at her great grandmothers kicking around on the floor, she had had a great day too. We left in the rain and once more she fell asleep quickly, slept right through the insane hail storm that turned the road white with black tyre marks cutting paths through it, it continued for miles turning the small towns white like the mountain we'd left behind us. We listened to some moron on national radio with no idea of history trying to interview someone about china and soon we were home again.

2008-08-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure Abacus is getting way better at tracking objects, i've been doing the exercises with her flash cards. Yesterday she met her uncle who came over from Burlingame for a week.

We're thinking of discontinuing the Plunket service. The plunket (nurse?) visited yesterday and cemented all the stereotypes of the service, even our pediatrician had stated that Plunket had dumbed down its service to the point of irrelavancy. I thought Danielle should have dismissed her by saying I have to go turn in the assignment I just wrote on the over medicalisation of societies - which she had just written, an interesting account of colonisation and the Pima Indians. It's like Plunket just expects women to be home all day so they can come and talk to you in accusing tones, as though we are merely minding a child owned by society, surrogate parents to a cog in the machine - sorry this is starting to sound like my other blog. She came to visit me at work which is always nice, then we had to beat the rain home and outrun the wind which blew icy gusts in her face. We had an early night watching the lightning explode in sharp light like burning magnesium outside. She slept 6 hours her first stint.

no news is no news

2008-08-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry to disappoint you all, but nothing news worthy happened today, except that danielle and I both went on marrathon efforts to finish our respective essays and lab assignments, abacus watched patiently from the wings. though i did continue her tracking exercises and she's definately getting better at that. but now i'm really tired, and still have essay left, but you don't care, you only care about how great abacus is. which is fair enough, because she's really great.

don't try the formula

2008-08-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

so we tried some of her formula, and it's nasty, i don't know how she drinks that stuff. I did some eye and head tracking exercises with her high contrast flash cards and she did really well, even holding her head centered for a while. You just have to catch her when she's all chillaxed, we also noticed that she seems to favour looking to one side when she's laying down, so I've tried a few things like orienting her play mat so that she practices looking other places.

That's about all that happened. Her hair's getting a we bit darker and she looks cuter and cuter with her face getting round and plump.

moving madness

2008-08-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

This morning the visiting neurodevelopmental therapist, well, visited. This time Abacus was awake so she could actually do some assessments. She did a lot of tracking exercises, where she had Abacus try to focus on something and move either her eyes or head as she moved it across her field of view. She was really impressed with Abacus' physical development and wants us to continue on and do a bit more with her concentrating and focusing. and have her practice holding her head centered. She's really nice with a laugh which sustained the awkwardness it filled just a little too long. Just now Abacus and I watched someone win a gold medal in judo for running away from her opponent hrm. Abacus had a bath tonight, after helping us in a dubious mission to return furniture which had me pressed between a huge pane of glass and an open car door as a held a couch on top of the car - we weren't going far, Abacus pateiently watched all the madness from her car-seat. She always loves her bath, i'm sure her first smile will come while taking one, she always looks so close when she's in there splashing about. Ok so now it's fencing on TV ? and people are actually cheering ? I think it's time for bed.

a nice day

2008-08-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

I was just a bit too tired last night tio live up to my daily 4am promise. Abacus had a really good day, it was a beautiful day for walking and so she went walking. Danielle took her to the beach in the morning where she saw a mother with a 3 year old son with down syndrome, so she bowled on up and introduced herself by saying "your son is beautiful, I have a daughter with downs syndrome!" it turns out the mother is in charge of the coffee mornings for the downs society. The little boy was an awesome little kid, with grazes all over his face, further proof of his awesomeness! Then Abacus started to getting a bit cryee, the pacifier I had bought to get her through the night, was just a bit to fat for her mouth and she couldn't hold it in, so we went in search of a replacement. We ended up buying 3, hoping one would work - and one did! So she was much happier after that. We went home, but with this rare perfect day slotted amongst the wintry rain lately, we decided to go back out. I took her in the front pack, which we'd not really used yet, she fell asleep almost as soon as I started walking and stayed asleep through our whole walk over the mountain and down to the beach for an iced coffee. Then her "god"mother came for dinner (Danielle made beef wellington - it was awesome!) she is going back to Vanuatu to complete her documentation and research of a language there, Abacus will be so different when she returns.

2008-08-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

Poor little Abacus braved the icy antarctic winds today wrapped in blankets in her sling to get to the supermarket and home again. Without her dummy it's been hard to get her settled and so she spent a lot of the day unsettled and awake. At one point, I thought her crying may have been because of hunger and so I gave her a bottle, which she greedily downed, then when I stopped to burp her she projectile vomited all over me! It was the first time she had done that. So it was time to clean her up and put her in a caterpiller suit - a dress thing which ties up at the bottom - that danielle found after reorganising all of abacus' millions of clothes she's acquired, i think none of which we have bought! During the big clean out she came across a couple of things, like this little pink vest, which I couldn't believe she used to fit, if we thought she looks doll sized now, this thing looked like it dressed a dolls doll. I finally braved the icy rain which had barricaded us in all day to go in search of a new dummy, but of course while I was out getting it she had finally fallen asleep. She seems to like it now though.

the shutupmaker shriveled up

2008-08-08T03:39:00.000-07:00

Oh no! Abacus' dummy/pacifier/shutupmaker thing, has somehow melted ? hehe. It's shriveled up and deflated, I'm not sure how, click here for photo. It has "Happy" written on it but everything about it says sad. She had a weirdo day today, demanding a lot of attention ALL the time and stayed awake from midday to about 8 or something ? She also almost doubled her feeds. She's so greedy now, hopefully she's going to start packing on the pounds. She still hasn't smiled yet, but we're pretty sure she's happy.

blue

2008-08-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

So the other day a nurse, when talking about Abacus, asked "how is he" um she, we correct her, "oh, you're trying to trick me with her blue sweater" "um no you tricked yourself with your narrow idiotic nonsensical ideas" we didn't really reply with that, but we both thought it, it's pretty amazing that the world still colour codes gender, and besides Abacus looks hella hot in blue.

We're really hoping she will be smiling soon, it should be happening around now, she's always done goofy burp smiles but never a real smile.

Also, she sleeps with her arms stretched through the bars of her crib or sometimes holding on to them which is pretty cute.

We're going back to bed now. See you tomorrow.

i'm updating sheehs

2008-08-06T07:50:00.001-07:00

ok so i apologise for my slack updating lately and have decided that I will update it every 4am feed (take that mahmoud ahmadinejad and your measly 15 minutes a week click here for reference), i've just been a bit overloaded with a billion things.

So first of all we've found it amazing how you can't wash coffee stains and stuff out of clothes, but with the exact same washing powder can wash actual shit out of cloth nappies(diapers) which are pretty much just towels and they came out pristine white, without a trace of their dirty secret.

Next, Abacus' neck control has gotten freakishly awesome, not only can she hold her head up for ages, but she can also gently lower it down without headbutting your chest which, coupled with her bald head, had earned her the nickname zinedine zidane (click here for reference) and just to further distance herself from that association, she's started growing hair! Though I like her bald head because it's such a good shape, she now has a slight, but definite soft coating of hair, and her eye brows are darkening too. She's drinking more and doing good 5-6 her sleeping stints at night which is easing up our day time exhaustion. Her grip is getting better too and she occasionally drags objects to her mouth. She is much more aware now making eye contact as she checks everyone out.

She hung out with me in the office the other day which was fun and she cried a lot less than some of my coworkers. But for now we are going to go back to bed, the olympics will be starting soon which will take away bbc world as my midnight companion, it was gone this morning replaced by beijing tests, boring.