Hot Hot Hot!

For one week, I volunteered in the mountain villages north of Chiang Rai, Thailand. The volunteer organization is a volunteer run, non-profit medical social organization helping the poor, underprivileged and marginalized hill-tribe communities of Northern Thailand.

We stayed with the poorest family in the Akha village and brought food to share. The people were so generous and welcoming. We cooked our meals over the open fire inside the house (actually the teenagers did most of the cooking!). The food was so spicy I had to blow my nose after I ate.

We slept in a bamboo hut on the floor with blankets and pillows. We started our day at 7:30 AM, waking to the cackle of roosters. Across the road there was a squatting toilet/bath house built by a group of previous volunteers. In the morning, people from the village came over to see the doctor. My job was to count out the pills for prescriptions, which were mostly vitamins.

We packed up the truck and drove for about an hour, up a mountain and through a river to a new village. A teenage boy and two girls from the Akha villlage traveled with us in the truck (which was donated to the organization). We played a game called Co-co, where the kids piled their flip flops into a pyramid and started chasing me with the ball we made out of bamboo splinters.

The man living at one hut we stayed at took us into the forest to collect bamboo. When we got back, he chopped the bamboo trunks into thin strips lengthwise and dried them flat in the sun. Later we helped him build a side of his house with the dried bamboo slabs.

The next aftenoon we walked down the mountain to a swampy river where the kids fished for little sardines with their bare hands. I ended up knee deep in mud. We cooked the sardines in a piece of bamboo trunk on the fire for supper that night. It was an exhausting day, especially climbing up the hill in the intense heat.

Dr. David has written and published articles about Burma and is an activist for human rights. He will run the organization for three more years, until his students who have been sponsored to go to medical school can come back and take care of the sick people in the villages. He said that he is teaching them to fish for life instead of giving them a fish everyday.