starting a blog

Bangkok

It's a humid day in Bangkok.

The internet is connected and I have a land line, 4 weeks of perseverance by Noc, a colleague /friend has paid off and I am sitting in my apartment writing tests and marking essays.

The troubles in Thailand that have lead to long distance trains being cut and 3 airports being closed seem a world a way from down town Bangkapi. At school the level of interest in the ructions seem to go only as far as wishing that any escalation will lead to a day off school as it did last time there was a coup.

I haven't really been following things - unlike Japan there seems to be no bilingual news - though it would be a stretch to say I am missing NHK. The Bangkok Post seems pro government, though I haven't even been paying much attention to it. (woeful really as I am supposed to be teaching SE Asian history and Journalism in my teaching load).

School life is going well and I am happy to be back teaching History which is infinitely more interesting than teaching English as a Second Language. The school is pretty light on resources - especially anything that is interesting - and I think I will be basing the topics I teach around the documentaries / or relevant movies I can manage to get access to.

Yesterday the school had a trip to an AIDS hospice /monastery in Lopburi, north of Bangkok, which I went on as an attending teacher. The monastery is peaceful and green and very radical when it was established in 1992 as a refuge for HIV AIDS suffers. It probably remains so. Thailand reportedly has the dubious claim to having the 4th highest HIV infection rate (not sure when the statistics date from and it may well have fallen down the list.) Discrimination and ignorance seem to be entrenched here - one of my students told me she didn't want to go because she feared breathing the same air as infected people would give her the virus.... hmmm.... no wonder infection rates are starting to climb again.

I had very mixed feelings about the place. On the one hand it is undeniable that they provide a place for people to die, where the alternative would most likely be on the streets. They also provide a place for people who are HIV positive, but otherwise healthy, to live removed from social discrimination. But the place is so macabre, like a gruesome freak show. They have many many tour groups parading through the place looking at displays, gawking at the patients. Part of Buddhism is that the self is nothing. They have a collection of mummified (salted and dried?) corpses of ex-patients on display in the front section. Next is a garden of 'bone statues' - artwork made with bones of ex patients.....

Further inside they have a body parts museum where they have dismembered someone and put all the bits in buckets of formaldehyde. I couldn't see the point - I know what a foot looks like without needing to see it in a perspex box of bloodied water.... To be fair though, I was also extremely taken aback to see the cameras come out at Japanese cremations...

The hospice itself was quite distressing. Perhaps 50 mostly emaciated patients in a huge open dormitory. There was no room for a chair by any of the beds, and the beds were at a guess less than 80cm apart. there was no room for decoration or anything cheerful in the room. There were no nursing staff on hand and several patients that were in obvious need of attention. Tourist visitors file in and out, there just to look. Quite a few of the patients were non compos mentis - though having people file in and out all day to gawk, would be enough incentive to lose ones mind...

The monastery had a video presentation which was basically a string of images of the dead and dying, very little about the plight of people who are healthy but social outcasts. To the credit of the place they did have healthy looking HIV positive people talking to the kids and doing a show (I think they were /had been entertainers previously) and the students did come back with a sense that education for prevention and to reduce discrimination are necessary.

If the school takes a trip again, I will suggest that they take something for the patients... it would at least take the edge off the 'there to gawk' factor.

This is the website of the temple.

http://www.aidstemple.th.org/Historytemple.html

This is a website with a report from a doctor who worked there

http://www.stylite.net/MMB/telech-chronicles.htm

And an article from the Sunday Times that shares the dilemmas I felt and as well as a few others.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3721675.ece?token=null&offset=0

I have yet to work out how to put pictures where I want them...