3'rd week check-up

First off, I want to thank everyone for all the birthday wishes, ya’ll are the best! And I seriously had an awesome time, most Thai bday yet! Since my cousin was here all week, we carried on the celebrations long after I officially turned 25, so I def can’t complain.

Work has been going pretty well. It sort of varies dramatically from having a ton to do, to spending all my time gchatting and playing with the new office puppy. For reals, I am not a dog person, but this puppy is ador. Anyways, still working on the final write up reports, but I anticipate doing more “real” work this week, which I’m pumped about. Although apparently along with running on Thai time, Thai people like to keep things up in the air and change their plans all kinds, which is clearly super convenient. Like, work is taking me to another province, and first they said we would leave Monday, then Sunday, then Tuesday, and now it’s Wednesday; though I’m actually ok with that. The reason we are waiting is because there is apparently an NGO forum held in both Thai and English on the last Tuesday of every month here in Chiang Mai. Tomorrow’s forum is going to be related to the psychology of helping people cope with living with HIV, so I think that should be interesting. And then I guess on Wednesday we head to Lamphun province, which is just about an hour east of here. We are going to meet up with the OVC (Orphan and Vulnerable Children) team and help them in conducting their situation analysis. So for you non MPH’ers, a situation analysis is when you gather baseline data in order to tailor your project appropriately so you can best meet the needs of the communities/people you are helping. In our case, I can only assume we will be getting data on the general health of the target populations, how big of a problem HIV and HIV related discrimination is, what services are currently being offered and by whom, what the population knows about transmission, stuff like that. I’ll check back in next week after we’ve actually done it.

Other than that, I’ve just been hanging out with the roomies, getting to know Chiang Mai. I seriously do feel so lucky that we all get along so well and have such a good time together. On Saturday we decided to finally do some of the cultural/touristy things we had been meaning to do. We checked out some the more famous Wats in our city, and they were pretty awesome. One of my fave’s was made entirely of teak wood, and another one had these gorg giant paintings on the inside. All of them had a bunch of donation bowls with the names of the week by them. One of my Thai co-workers explained to me that for good luck, you are meant to give a donation to the one correlating to the day you were born. Yeah…he seemed pretty shocked I didn’t know…(it’s a Wed.) We also went to the “Lucky Fish Spa”, which was more disconcerting than I imagined it would be. Basically, you stick your feet in this big pool and these fish bite off the dead skin. Yeah, I thought it would tickle a little, but it was honestly just kinda whack and uncomfortable.

Ok, that’s about it for now. We get a fourth roomie in a few weeks. While I’m excited about fresh meat, I’m also clearly not looking forward to having to share the gigantic master bedroom, but oh well. I’ve had awesome luck in the past of becoming absolute besties with my randomly assigned roomies, so here’s to hoping for another Jenny!

Xoxo
Rae

Starting early...

So every Thursday night all the CCT employees come over to the volunteer house for "family dinner", which is super prec. And last night, I got an awesome surprise when Wad (the in-country director) made me a birthday cake! For those of you who know me, you know that I'm a firm believer in celebrating birthdays for a minimum of three days, so starting the celebration Thursday night was totally fun. And it was espescially nice since Eve is a lactard, he said he had to try hella times to get the consistency right of a banana cake with NO sugar or milk. And it was surpisingly good! Heavy as all hell, but tasty nonetheless.

Today I actually had to work ALL DAY, a first for me in...well, maybe ever. It's super time-consuming and at times really difficult changing this whole report from Thai to broken english to something a native English speaker can actually comprehend. But it is cool to learn so much about the project and the ways TLSDF works. I think the next few weeks will be hard, as I will just be writing final reports for the project that just ended. But after that, we will start doing a situation analysis for a new project, which I'm excited about it. It will include travelling to project sites, and helping with the design of the new project. A lot of the work they do is HIV/AIDS education in schools, which is totally right up my ally. Eve and I are gonna look into designing one part of the project related to that, so I have high hopes I will leave here having accomplished more than just typing up reports.

In the meantime, my English cousin David gets into Chiang Mai in the next hour or so, so I can't wait to meet up with him. And the other American intern has some other friends in the city, so we are going tonight which should be fun. Even though my actual birthday isn't until Sunday and I'm having people go out to celebrate it on Saturday night, we all know that in my mind, the birthday weekend has begun.

xoxo
Rae

weekend update

So on Friday night my 2 houemates and I met up with Auy from work, and his geek (=lover, not to be confused with his fean, which means boyfriend. Appar. we will never get to the meet bf b/c he doesn't like to go out, which is just funny since Auy is so social.) I guess lots of young Thai people just rent a room in an apartment, and it doesn't have a kitchen or living room. So instead of pre-gaming at people's houses, they just get together early and get a table at the bar with the bottle of liquor they bring in. So we met up at Warm Up at 9pm, and the place was already packed. As in, had to get a talbe outside, which was fine cause there was this really pretty koi fish pond in the middle of the patio. And lucky for me, Thai people totally heart taking cheesy pics, so for once I didn't have to beg to do some played out cliche pose.

On Saturday, we just lurked around Chaing Mai in all afternoon. Found some cool little markets off the main streets, and an awesome second hand English bookstore where I convinced Ive (my Aussie friend) that both The Great Gatsby and Siddhartha are ultimate life changers. Then that night we went for a "quiet night out" at the tourist bars. According to the Aussies, it's completely acceptable to use this term when referring to any night where you aren't in a "club". So even though we bar-hopped to 3 separate bars, and ended up heading to Rasta Bar at 1 am to go dancing to some sweet live reggae, it was still a "relaxing quiet night".

Sunday was...an experience to say the least. Our boss had asked all us interns in the previous week if we were interested in going to what we thought was some sort of festival. I heard "NGO volunteer" festival, Ive heard "floral festival", all we knew for sure was that there "four tickets" and that we should bring our baithing suits. In the morning we went out with Mairi (the Scot) to this cool flea market on the outskirts of town. Then, we were picked up by a fellow co-worker and we went and picked up Kirsten, the other American intern. We stopped at this really cool wad (temple) way up in mountains which had some awesome views of the city. Then, it becomes clear that we are in fact going to spend the afternoon at our boss's house. He lives in this nice gated community, which they call a village. The tickets he spoke of were actually pool passes, go figure. So I spent the afternoon swimming with his adorable 3 year old in this nice country club pool. Then for dinner our boss's wife had prepared this really nice dinner for us all, including her best efforts at a vegetarian potato salad for me, which was super sweet even if mildly grody. When we got home, Mairi was feeling a lil homesick for something familiar, so we all went to the movies. We saw Body of Lies, which actually wasn't bad. It was just kinda funny cause our tickets said 8:50, but they wouldn't even let us into the theater til just after 9. I guess even movies here run on Thai time....

Today I had my first bit of real work, which was a pleasant change. I met with the OVC (Orphan and Vulnerable Children) Project Head to start work on the 3'rd year write up of their projects in Lamphun district. We spent most of the morning going over a list of the accomplished activities, as she tried to translate everything into English for me. It's interesting work, and a good experience, but clearly the language barrier is a lil frustrating at times. I have faith that communication between us will get easier as we get used to each other's accents, but since today was the first day it took a while. It's just annoying because for this first part, they just need anyone with a command of the English language to type up this part of the report. But I feel like I have the public health background, and I would love to be putting it to good use, but at this step in the process it's just too time consuming and difficult to get all the details I feel are relevant. But I know it's a learning experience, and she seems to have the same ability I do to laugh at any situation, so we have fun time. (yeah, my Thai is vaguely improving, but my skills at broken english are shooting through the roof.) Ok, that's all for now, keep me updated on what all y'all are up to. And thanks for all the nice comments, they help me to keep on keepin on.

xoxo
Rae

Popping my blogging cherry

OK, this is my first time, so be gentle. I've now been here in Chaing Mai for one week, and I'm seriously loving it. I'm interning at this Thai org. called The Life Skills Development Foundation (TLSDF), and I found out about it through this American NGO called Cultural Canvas Thailand (CCT). So I live at the CCT volunteer house, currently with 2 other girls. This awesome Aussie who is also getting her MPH and is interning at TLSDF with me for 6 months, and this super sweet/funny Scottish girl who is an art therapist working at CCT for 2 months. We have a maid who cleans and cooks super delic. Thai food, and a driver who takes us to work everyday, aka, we are rolling in style. We all have our own rooms for now, but I'm told that may change in a few months depending on how many volunteers appply to CCT. I also have the master bedroom, which is sweet for now, but means I will probby be the first to have to share my room. Seriously though, I could do at least 5 cartwheels in there, it's massive.

The org. I'm working at is all about enhancing life skills for underpriveleged children in Northern Thailand, through 2 different types of projects. One focus is on early childhood development, and the other has to do with improving the quality of life for orphaned and vulnerable children. Considering my background, I'll be working on the OVC projects. Between the language barrier and the fact that everyone here runs on Thai Time (read: slower than slow), I'm not 100% clear on what I'll be doing. But I'll be working in the Lamphun province, which is just about 30 km's (see how quickly I'm adapting?) southeast of Chaing Mai. I think they just finished up one project, so I will help them with writing thier final analysis in the next few weeks after we get the reports back from the independent evaluators. After that, we will be starting a new project so I will be going on site to help write the situation analysis, I'm pretty excited to check it out.

I'm def starting to learn my way around Chiang Mai, which is awesome. The old city is kept in by a moat, and it's a perfect square. It's about 8 km along the border, so it's a pretty sweet run. Have only really been out twice so far, and nothing crazy yet. There is one part of town along the West side of the moat where all the touristy bars are, and another part of town outside the moat on the east near the University that is more popular among the Thais. The farang (foreign) bars are fun, but I'll probby go to the Thai places more often. At the Thai bars, you can bring in your own liquor, which I still can't fathom. The one time we went out there, it was serioulsy hilarious. Thai people are so friendly, and seemingly love farang's, as they would just come up and cheers with you and give you a thumbs up as if you were a mute 5 year old. And from what I saw, NO ONE dances up on tables, stages, pool tables, et al, even though the dance floor is so ridiculously packed, so for those of you who know me, you know what a challenge this will prove...But it's cool, I'm a "grown-up" now. Or something...

Anyways, this awesome dude we work with is taking us out dancing tonight, and our plan is to go out on Saturday and visit some temples/do some touristy stuff, so I'll make sure to take some pix and post them up. In the meantime, hit me up and let me know you haven't forgotten about me <3

xoxo
Rae