Out of forest fires grow new trees

On a grey, overcast and relatively cool morning here in Khrungthep it is possible to feel depressed about the state of world affairs:  Killer tornadoes have ravaged the American midwest; a 7.9-magnatiude earthquake in China has killed thousands has trapped 900 students in a collapsed secondary school; tens of thousands have died and hundreds of thousands more continue to suffer after the cyclone in Myanmar a week ago. 

Each new tragedy brings with it fresh tears and worries.  But each tragedy also provides another opportunity to demonstrate the resilience of humanity.  We rally together to support our fellows, we provide aid, we give generously and we make sacrifices.  And out of these tragedies new lives are built, lessons are learned and sometimes life even improves.

Greensburg, Kansas was wiped off the map last year by a tornado, right.  Today the once-dying town is rebuilding in an economically and environmentally sustainable way with a new optimism and new opportunities that didn't exist before.  

Aceh Province in Indonesia, the hardest-hit area in the December 2004 tsunami, had suffered from twenty-nine years of war between the central government and rebels of the Free Aceh Movement before the waves devastated the province, killing nearly a quarter of a million people.  While the physical reconstruction has been painful and sometimes slow, the tsunami helped bring about a peace agreement between the Indonesian government and the rebels and the first free elections in December 2006.

Hopefully, from the tragedies of this past week will bloom similar opportunities, change and rebirth.

Monk Sponsorship

Tawn's employer is celebrating the tenth anniversary of their office here in Thailand.  As part of their anniversary celebrations, Saturday morning they held a tam boon ceremony, literally "make merit."  Tam boon ceremonies are a large part of what Buddhist monks do.  You call up the temple, arrange for a certain number of monks to come over on a certain morning and then they do the ceremony.  In return, you make a donation to the temple.

Tawn was in charge of arranging for the monks.  Saturday morning we arrived at the temple next to Ekkamai BTS station,  Wat Tat Tong at nine and met the monks.  The senior monk was a kindly man in his fifties, with a friendly disposition and eager to ask me questions to see how much Thai I know.  As we were waiting for the van, he grabbed my arm and, repeating "come take a picture, come take a picture", led me to one of the main chanting halls to show me one of the Buddha images.  He gave me a lecture about how the main image was from Sukkothai and was several hundred years old, made around the same time as an image at another temple down near the Hualomphong train station.  It was difficult to keep up.  So I took some pictures (below), agreed that it was a very pretty image, and then we went back to the van.  You'll notice that this wat is decidedly more modest than the Grand Palace and other Thai temples you're used to seeing pictures of.

The monks each had a prominent characteristic, reminding me a little (and I mean this in a respectful way) of the Seven Dwarves.  The head monk was like Doc since he was in charge.  A second monk was a jolly, large fellow who upon learning I was from San Francisco was trying to remember the lyrics to a song about the city and then started singing, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco".  I complimented his memory and asked him whether he liked to sing karaoke, until he explained that "no singing" is one of the 256 precepts that Buddhist monks have to obey.

Whoops!  Faux pas.

As we sat in the van waiting for a third monk who wasn't answering his phone, he came hustling over to the van still wiping his wet head with his robe.  "Sorry, I just got out of the shower." he explained.  I'm not sure which dwarf he would be.  Tardy?

The other two monks were junior, "Summer Monks" on break from school.  They don't get nicknames because other than one's relatively small ears, they didn't say or do anything that particularly distinguished them.

We headed to Tawn's office where about the staff was waiting having already set up the mats, chairs and other necessities for the ceremony.  The monks were seated and then started about twenty minutes of chanting in Pali, the Sanskrit-derived language that is the Buddhist Latin.  (Or maybe Latin is the Catholic Pali?)

Afterwards the monks were fed.  They have to take their last meal of day by "mid-day" which is usually described as somewhere between 11:00 am and noon.  While it is usual for the monks to be served seated on the floor, in this case they were set up at the conference room, an image that I thought was very funny, below.  Maybe I've just seen so many corporate meetings where all the participants were dressed in the same charcoal gray suits that it tickled me to see a conference table filled with people tressed truly identically. 

Here's a short video of the first two steps of the ceremony:

While the monks were eating, several of the employees went downstairs to the back of the building and presented offerings at the spirit house.  This isn't part of the Buddhist ritual as the spirit houses comes from more of an animist / Brahmanist / Hindu background.  The spirit house literally houses the spirit (spirits?) of the land that were displaced when the building was constructed.  Offerings included little portions of food and beverage as well as a single stick of incense per person, below. 

Returning upstairs, the monks were still eating so Tawn and his colleagues messed around and took photos of each other, being playful as Thais do so well, above. 

Finally, when the monks were finished, we did the second part of the ceremony which is the blessing with the holy water.  There was further chanting and then the head monk used a bamboo whisk to splash water on everyone.  Seeing me near the back of the group, he flicked a very experienced wrist and a large amount of water sailed over the heads of Tawn and his colleagues and gave me quite a splash, right.

With the air conditioning on high, I nearly caught a cold afterwards!

Something to notice, if you will: in the picture below the monks are chanting behind ceremonial prayer fans.  The purple one on the left used by the head monk was presented to him by the Crown Princess.  The one to the right, used by the happy monk, is interesting because I wasn't aware that corporate sponsorship was a common practice in Buddhism.  "This merit-making ceremony brought to you by Accenture.  Accenture: High performance.  Delivered."  Kind of like public radio, I guess.

The head monk then proceeded around the office, splashing holy water in each room, along the hallways, on the equipment (taking care of the computers and the photocopiers), driving away the bad fortune in much the same way that our exterminator sprayed along windows, doors, and the floor to drive away pests.

Chalk up another interesting cultural experience.

Face by Big Pharma, Body by DuPont

(Yeah, I know you never expected to see a bunch of celebrity photos on my blog, but there's a first time for everything.)

Do you remember the scene in the movie LA Story where Rick Moranis, playing a grave digger in an uncredited cameo, riffs on the Bard's Hamlet?   As he talks with Steve Martin's character, he explains how it takes the bodies of Beverly Hills women so long to decompose because their skin has been tan for so long that it resists the water.  That and all those unnatural implants help preserve them.

MSNBC Senior Health Editor Julia Sommerfeld has something to say about the artificial changes people make to their bodies, particularly their faces, in the online article Pursuit of Youth Isn't Always Pretty.  The title continues, "Reality check on the war on wrinkles: Looking younger or just weirder?"  Which pretty much says it all.

I'm skeptical about cosmetic surgery.  "To each his own," my grandmother would say, and I fundamentally agree.  I'm not about to march out and protest in front of plastic surgery clinics in the same way that anti-choice activists do.  But I'm concerned when people tie their self-esteem so much to their looks.  Yeah, I know that society (easy target, let's blame "Society" for everything) bombards us with images and messages that equate looks with happiness, but aren't we all heading to the same end?  What if we spent the time, money, and mental energy on something more satisfying and more impactful?

Above: Clint Eastwood, left, and Wayne Newton, right.

This article illustrates my point rather nicely.  In a slide show, Dr. Tony Youn, a Michigan-based certified plastic surgeon, reviewed before and after photos of twenty-one celebrities to evaluate who has had what done to them (or not) and with what results.  Interesting and instructive.  The people who haven't had anything done really have aged nicely, wrinkles and all.  No doubt they've followed a regimen of skincare, but no signs of any implants, injections, lifts, nips or tucks.  The people who have had some work done look okay at best, frightening at worst, and oddly unnatural for the most part.

I know the pressure on women in Hollywood is greater than on men.  Men get "handsome" and "dignified" as they age whereas women are perceived to just look "old".  But looking at Susan Sarandon (above left) and Joan Van Ark (above right), I think that by just about any measure, Susan has aged much more beautifully au naturel than Joan has at the hands of her doctors.  And I don't mean any disrespect to Joan or Wayne.  We all make our choices and I respect your right to do that. 

Makeup artist Bobbi Brown really makes the point when she says, near the conclusion of the article, that we're confusing the issues of youth and beauty.  I fully agree.

Of course should there be any doubt, we can always use Michael Jackson as the perfect example of why cosmetic surgery is a slippery and downwards slope at the bottom of which neither youth nor beauty lies.

Learning Thai Online

When you live in a country for any length of time, I feel you are obligated both by good manners and cultural consideration to try and learn some of that country's language.  Even if you are just going to visit another country for more than two or three days, I still feel you are again obligated by good manners and cultural consideration to try and learn at least a few key phrases.  "Please", "Thank you", "Excuse me", "Hello" and "Goodbye" are good phrases with which to start.

My experience traveling is that I've enjoyed the places I've visited much more and received much friendlier, warmer interactions with locals when I've made some attempt to speak their language.  This was true in Italy, France and even Australia.  It has also held true when I lived in Hong Kong as well as now that I'm in Thailand.

Learning Thai can be intimidating for foreigners (especially those from Western countries), both because of the non-Roman script as well as the tonal nature of the language.  There are no shortage of tools to help people learn Thai.  If you are in the country, you have many schools as well as private tutors available.  These can be pretty effective resources, as I've shown. 

Outside of Thailand, there are books, CDs, and several websites to use.  These are less effective, as nearly everyone who has used them can testify.  Over the past year, my friend Stuart has been designing a website that takes a very different and, in my opinion, much more effective approach to teaching Thai.  The website, ITS4Thai.com, has been running for a few weeks now and is getting a lot of traffic from around the world.

Not to make this sound like an advertisement, but there are a few things that I think are really effective about the website:

Its highly interactive website uses a variety of games and activities to engage the learner.  As a professional trainer, I know that different people learn in different ways.  Some are visual learners, some are aural learners, some are tactile learners, etc.  ITS4Thai incorporates all those learning styles into the lessons.  Plus each lesson is just a "bite" of learning - only about ten vocabulary words and three or four sentence patterns.  By the time you've done the various activities, you'll find it easy to remember because it is an easy to digest portion.

The format provides a lot of flexibility and real-life applicability.  You can conduct the lessons in whatever order makes the most sense for you.  It is easy to track your progress and choose the direction you want to take.  If you are going to be here on holiday, then choose the lessons that are most applicable to your interests.  If you are going to be here on business, make the appropriate choices.  If you're going to live here... well, you get the idea.  Unlike a lot of other learning resources, that are laid out in a linear A-Z fashion, ITS4Thai gives you much more flexibility.

Finally, ITS4Thai is inexpensive.  All packages are less than US$20, so you can get a lot of learning without putting down a lot of money.  I truly wish that this option had been available to me in the year and a half before I moved to Thailand.  Had it been, I would have arrived much better prepared.

Tawn and I have both been helping out Stuart.  Tawn has been providing PR, doing his first freelance job, and I've been helping with the editing of more than 100 additional lesson which will build upon the 60 that are currently on the site.  Needless to say, Tawn and I are both closely involved and enthusiastic about the site.

The results of the PR efforts have started to pay off.  After crafting a press release in both Thai and English, Tawn pitched a story to the education reporter for the English language newspaper Daily Express.  This past Friday, Stuart, Tawn and the reporter met at Starbucks Ari, above.  I tagged along and wound up being used as a model in one of the photo shoots.  Thankfully, those pictures were not used in the story!

Yesterday morning the story ran on page 3, a half page above the fold.  This was very good coverage and a success for Tawn's freelancing efforts.  It was also, of course, a success for Stuart and ITS4Thai.  In addition to other press coverage and additional PR events, I'm hoping that many people will be drawn to this resource.

And as for you, dear reader, if you are considering a trip to Thailand, I hope you'll take a look at ITS4Thai.com.  Stuart is offering ten free lessons at the site, so you can visit it, learn a little Thai, and evaluate the effectiveness of the website for yourself without having to commit any money.

Come over for breakfast, won't you?

The second half of our weekend was more relaxing and less do-it-yourself than the first.  We had ten friends over for Sunday breakfast - a real breakfast, starting at 10:00, instead of one of those brunches.  Homemade buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy; oven roasted potatoes and bell peppers; soft scrambled eggs with salsa; and assorted fruits.  Mimosas and fresh-brewed coffee and tea for those who were thirsty.

What an interesting mix of guests we had.  Brian made it to our house for the first time as he had been out of town on occassions when we had previously invited him.  Stuart and Piyawat were both able to make it as were Ken and Chai.  Of course, no party is a party without Vic there, and Doug brought two guests:  One of them, Gaye, is a native of Istanbul who has been studying massage in Chiang Mai for the past several months before returning home this Wednesday. The other, Orn, works for the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand in membership and outreach.  Needless to say, they both had such interesting stories to share.

Sometimes after we throw parties the question arises, "Was it worth the effort?"  While I did choose to do a little extra cooking Saturday evening to prepare (I rendered the drippings from some fresh pork belly to make my own lard, which is the best fat to use when making roasted breakfast potatoes.  Dinner potatoes with rosemary are better with olive oil, though.), the dishes were all very easy to make, so this time both Tawn and I were relaxed enough to really enjoy the party and the answer to the question is definitely, "Yes!"