In which I offer a short news flash...

The military government here in Thailand is about to rule this afternoon on whether the top political parties, including the one dethroned in last year's coup, will be permitted to run in the elections promised for December 2007. Anticipating a disbarment (which rather defeats the label democracy, doesn't it?) and ensuing civil unrest from those party's supporters, the whole country is rather on edge today.

The police forces are boasting loudly about how "effectively" they'll clamp down on any disorder, and the military has mobilized 13,000 soldiers and MPs to prevent the mass migration of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin's rural supporters into the cities for the next few days. Many schools have closed in case of street violence, we volunteers been warned away from politically sensitive areas of Bangkok (not a difficulty for me, being 800 km away in Chiang Mai), and we've been given explicit instructions to stay the hell away from any protests.

I don't really know what to make of it. There are signs that the potential for violence has been blown out of proportion by a jittery military, but only time will tell. I'll follow with more news as it happens.

In which I catch my breath...

Well, I'm finally back in Chiang Mai after nearly a month of constant motion. Getting up at 5 AM every day to move on to the next town is not my kind of vacation, but it was enlightening and gave me some new side projects to work on. (Anybody know a good place to find funding for an AIDS orphanage? I need about $40,000.) I saw bits of pretty landscape in my wanderings, but mainly I enjoyed talking to various folks in some startlingly difficult situations. I was variously mistaken (unintentionally) for a doctor, a missionary, a soldier, and an Australian. I ate things I would prefer never to eat again (Betel leaves are most unpleasant). I got very sick (by my rather fragile standards, not theirs) on three occasions, and even talked politics with far more people than I expected to. I caught wind of an unfortunate amount of raw sewage but also walked through beautifully terraced rice paddies and saw some manmade landmarks on par with the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.

I'll post more details when time permits, but in the meantime here's a photo of three Karen children, lifelong residents of the Mae La Oon refugee camp, a cheerful but unthinkably crowded patch of otherwise unusable land in east central Thailand. This is the first photo of processed from about 1100 that I've taken in the last three weeks.

In which I procrastinate for a good cause...

I know I owe you a post, but it's the last day of Songkram, and I'm not spending a big chunk of it typing. Instead I'm going out for lunch and then back into the fray.

In other news, I should find out about my New York trip within the next day, and I may yet go on another couple of international excursions before I wrap things up here in Thailand (probably Malaysia, Cambodia, and possibly Vietnam). There will also be another trip in May which will remain mysterious for now.

More to follow on Songkram, after I've gone out into the crazy.

In which I'm traumatized yet entertained...

The madness of Songkram continues. I would conservatively estimate that this massive water brawl involves a quarter of a million people at any one time, and stretches around the 6 or 7 kilometres of Chiang Mai's central moat. The moat, a rectangular canal 20 metres wide and god knows how deep, surrounds the core of the city. It's filled with a perplexing green fluid I hesitate to call water, which dyes clothes a sickly yellow. People fill their buckets from the moat and fling the odd contents on passersby, who retaliate with relentless streams from hoses and water guns. Pickup trucks whose beds typically host 8 or 10 bucket-wielding combatants and 2 massive garbage cans full of ice water circle the moat (at something less than walking speed), dispensing liquid fury at everyone within range. Riding around in such a vehicle of destruction was how I spent yesterday morning... and I think I'm going back out to do the same now. Toodles!

In which I briefly recount a day of trauma...

It's 5:15 PM, Friday afternoon. Since I've woken up I've had a plastic bucket shatter on contact with my forehead. My right foot was overrun by a pickup truck. My student group "accidentally" left me behind in the fray while they headed to a lake 20 kilometres away - and they took my wallet, keys, and phone with them, leaving me thoroughly stranded and defenseless while smiling nitwits dumped ice water on me. I'm sunburned and wrestling a touch of heatstroke.

OK, that's the bad stuff of Songkram, day 1. I'll tell you the good stuff after I've had a couple of hours of recuperative coma and maybe hit the streets again tonight.

In which civilization is collapsing...

I'm not exaggerating - I sincerely feel like I'm in a zombie movie. There are students pounding on the locked and barricaded door of my office, trying to terrorize me with squirt guns and vast buckets of a mysterious clear non-alcoholic liquid. The presence of pricey electronics has deterred them not at all. All pretense that they're preparing for their field work has been abandoned, and the compound has descended into a Hobbesian anarchy of flying ice water and piercing screams. Deranged cackles fill the air and the puppy is very confused. Confused and sleepy.

All this madness simply because we're on the eve of Songkram. The bloody holiday hasn't even started yet, and somehow I absorbed three buckets of water from roadside children merely on the ride back to the office from lunch at the nearby hole-in-the-wall. Daily I ride past what I infer is a brothel on my way home - yesterday the ladies made sure to drench my nether regions with a tub and hose as I bicycled by. This all par for the course, I'm told, and though Songkram doesn't officially start until tomorrow I'd bet my frontal lobe that Chiang Mai itself will be a roiling cauldron of sheer pandemonium by the time I leave work tonight. I am on the precipice of Ragnarok, and the savage hordes thronging at my door are legion.

Fortunately, they're expecting me to emerge unarmed, and yet I have three empty plastic bottles, a good-size bowl, and an adjacent bathroom with a functioning faucet. I'm going out to play.

In which I'm grumpy...

CUSO has officially witheld permission for me to go to Burma and help my students with their fieldwork, on the grounds that the Burmese secret police might have been following our activities - and possibly this blog - and could be waiting for me with open handcuffs. Argh. I was really looking forward to that trip.

Maybe the adorable 7-week-old puppy that has adopted our school will cheer me up. More to follow.

In which I regret my impulsiveness...

My attempt to fix/supercharge the lesser of my two hydrocannons was ill-advised, to understate grotesquely. I have done incalculable property damage so far in excess of the $10 value of the water gun that the entire venture seems a cruel self-parody. My apartment is a splish-splosh swamp, littered with the tragic remains of supermarket-bought dishes and cracked Chinese plastic. The gun itself, once merely broken, is now far too volatile to touch. It sits on the floor of my shower stall, hissing angrily at me and occasionaly belching great ugly gouts of water without asking permission.

I don't think I should be allowed to own a screwdriver.

In which I prepare for the worst...

One of the interesting quirks of Thai life is that there's no greater loss of face than that of losing your temper, particularly in public. Actually getting pissed off is a social shame on par with being dumped by your girlfriend while being pantsed on national television. No doubt this helps to maintain social cohesion in a densely populated country with a history of blah blah blah... The relevant aspect, really, is that this reservedness allows people to pull off acts of startling buffoonery - like hurling buckets of icewater at passing cyclists - without fear of getting slugged in (highly justified) retribution. In any other country on Earth, the life expectancy of such a miscreant would be measured in femtoseconds.

But if you can't beat em...

All this is a maddeningly loquacious way of saying that the buildup to Songkram continues apace. I got nuked again on the way home today by an unseen assailant in a passing SUV. For reasons unknown to me, work crews are constructing a fiberglass submarine in the parking lot of the mall next door, and the populace is arming itself with a Mississippian fervour. I thought it wise to do likewise, but what started out merely as prudent planning morphed into a fine opportunity to take my inner adolescent out for a rampage. I am now the proud owner of two lovely and even matching water cannons, each of approximately the same mass and atavistic ferocity of Tsar Bomba. Should I encounter God in my travels, God himself will be soaked.

In which I'm horrified beyond all comprehension...

My students and coworkers have begun to play Celine Dion songs, and it's not a welcome accompaniment to my daily efforts to facilitate change in Burma. It rather reminds me of the saccharine soft rock that's always the very worst part of visiting my dentist - yes, much much worse than the searing dental pain. Pain passes, wounds heals, and teeth are rebuilt, but a long day of Celine songs leaves a black mark on my soul that may as well have been burned in by an arc welder.

I think it's my cue to go home for the day.

In other news, prompted by a conversation with my friend Raf (who's currently in Darfur), I'm beginning to wonder neurotically where my next job's coming from. Something always comes up, but the UN's webwork of personal connections and patronage is a hard thing to break into. Once you're in, you're in, but getting one foot in the door is a daunting task. A few of my friends (like Raf and Natalie) have made that much-coveted transition to well-paid development work, so I know there's a way in... I just have to find it.

In which Songkram comes early...

Though Easter passes unnoticed here in Thailand, we have a four-day weekend of our own coming up: Songkram, the Thai New Year's festival. In Chiang Mai, girdled as the city is by a kilometres-long moat, Songkram takes the form of a massive four-day water fight. All civility and reserve are quickly jettisoned and the entire city transmogrifies into a vast arena of dueling buckets, hoses, water balloons and super soakers. It will be unphotographeable - you'll have to rely on my terrified first-person retellings. During Songkram, there's no stigma against soaking the defenseless or the unaware, and those in moving vehicles are considered particularly luscious targets. Songkram will begin next Friday, and the drenched buffoonery will continue through the following Sunday.

At least that's the official schedule. As I enjoyed a pleasant open-air tuk-tuk ride across the river to a friend's confirmation party, a random shorts-wearing farang appeared from nowhere took sociopathic aim at me with a water cannon the size of a bazooka. One impeccably precise burst left me drenched as I passed by, unarmed and anyways too stunned to retaliate. Thankfully, I had to stop and pick up new shirts en route anyway (yay for having a personal tailor!). It may seem obnoxious and malicious (and maybe it is) - but it's just the way of Thailand during Songkram. Whether you're ready and willing or tremulous and fleeing, you're going to get soaked. If this happened today, I dread what next weekend holds... and I'm buying an arsenal of my own first thing tomorrow morning. May as well go down fighting.

In which I'm beginning to get annoyed...

As Corinne noted in her comment on the last post, other bits of gross nationalism are popping up all over Thailand at the moment. An exceedingly stupid 57-year-old Swiss man has been sentenced to ten years in prison for insulting the king. Outraged over restricted alcohol sales on the King's birthday last December, the drunken fool spray-painted over four posters of the monarch in full view of security cameras, and was promptly arrested. Thailand's draconian lese-majeste laws, enshrined in the bleeping Constitution, forbid any criticism, however benign, of the King. The King himself doesn't seem to want such insulation, but they're part and parcel of Thai nationalism - which, by the way, is really starting to get on my nerves.

Bottom line: if you're not Thai, you'll just never get it - or so we're told. Hence, foreigners are socially proscribed from criticizing the government for handing down a 10-year sentence for petty vandalism, or when all of Youtube is blocked because someone showed a video of feet touching a picture of the King. I grasp that these acts are monumentally disrespectful and show a disgraceful contempt for the standards of a society that has kindly welcomed we foreigners. But there's something far more vile about a decade's incarceration for a crime that robbed and injured no one. The government should have deported that asinine fool and been done with it.

As usual, I reserved my real frustration for the foreigners who defend the government's actions on the grounds of cultural sensitivity and the like. I've talked to more than a few of these folks, and they're driving me batty. There's cultural tolerance, which I'm all for, but defending such a foul move goes far beyond that. These people have let cultural relativity erode their core personal principles, and that's pretty reprehensible.

Myself, I'm disgusted. I really enjoy life in Thailand - it's not a difficult place to carve out a pleasant existence. But it's not a free country here, in some very important ways. I'll surely be glad to see the last of ugly Thai nationalism when my term here is up.

In which dark clouds continue to gather...

Today I encountered a day-old Bangkok Post which informed me that the leader of last year's military coup, General Sonthi, is considering becoming Deputy Prime Minister in order to help keep the government on track. This, despite his insistence that the government would be run by civilians. Last week he fired all military officials who were considered to be loyal to the ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and replaced them with Sonthi devotees. Last month the main pro-Thaksin TV station was shut down, ostensibly for non-payment of licence fees, and replaced with a more coup-friendly broadcaster. And I've read, increasingly, that "unnamed figures" high within the military bureaucracy are pressing the "civilian" government to use its expanding powers to crack down on the feeble pro-democracy protests that spring up from time to time in Bangkok.

Nearly seven months ago, when the coup happened, we were told that by now Thailand would be putting the finishing touches on its renovated democracy and preparing for shiny new elections. But there's not a whole lot in the above paragraph that sounds like the actions of a military government in the process of giving up its power - despite all promises to the contrary. I'm going to park myself in front of a stack of newspapers and see if I can make sense of all this. In the meantime, I promise that when I leave in August and the military government is still firmly clenched to the reins, I'm going to have a romping great round of I Told You So. I will start, with no small amount of dripping contempt, with the half-dozen Western aid workers who've schmuckishly told me that they actually cheered the coup. Idiots.

In which I attempt to plan travels...

One of the lesser qualities of a life on the road is the lack of certainty. When each job lasts a year or so, and itchy feet set in after six months on the ground, it's awfully hard to know where one's paycheck is coming from a few months into the future. The end result is that perhaps a third of any given year is spent sending out various job applications - though thankfully not outright unemployed.

At least I feel like I'm climbing the ladder a bit. I've just applied for a spot with the World Food Programme in Rome - a hypercompetitive position I'm unlikely to be interviewed for, but it's not so farfetched that it's not worth a shot. Jeepers, I'd love to live in Europe for a little while and stop struggling with craptacular internet access. If I got anywhere with it, I'll probably find out in the next few weeks, but it wouldn't start until September.

Other travel plans abound. I've applied to join an expenses-paid advocacy trip to New York to lobby UN members to assist my grad school. That one I'm very optimistic about, rating my odds at about 70%. Cross your fingers for me, and I'll find out on the 16th.

Meanwhile, I'm attempting to weasel my way into Burma for a little fieldwork. My bosses think it's a great plan and thoroughly safe, but my neurotic paymasters with the Canadian government are rather less sure. They've denied my initial request for travel authorization, but I whined and appealed and I'll learn more this week. Wish me luck again.

In other news, my Nonviolent Social Change class isn't going entirely as planned. I had my students act out a meticulously planned roleplay of an Alabama lunch-counter sit-in during the 1960s. Instead of learning key lessons about nonviolent assembly, they cheerfully thumped the tar out of each other with water bottles for twenty minutes. Oy. Can't I teach a class about violent social change? Seems more in line with my expertise...

In which I complain and plead for clemency...

Posts are likely to be both brief and unexciting for the next couple of days, folks. I've stumbled into a busy week. I'm teaching a class on Nonviolent Social Change all day, every day, which is a bit odd for me, given that my expertise tends to be in the *other* kind of social change. At least my students and I have found common ground - neither they nor I are wholly convinced that Burma's problem can be solved without some judicious application of brute force. But we'll see if we all change our minds after watching Gandhi tomorrow.

So you'll get your daily posts, but the brutally time-consuming work of Laos-blogging, accompanied by cropping and tuning photos, will have to wait until Friday afternoon or so.

In which I whine...

The hot season held off longer than expected here in northern Thailand. Normally it hits by March, immobilizing this chunk of the country entirely. Thankfully, probably due to the aforementioned suffocating haze, we got a welcome reprieve through most of March, and the weather was merely brutal.

Now the hot months have fallen on us like a hammer. The temperatures routinely crack 40 degrees in the afternoons. Movement of any variety is sheer suicide between about 10 AM and 4 PM - at all other times it's still quite foolish. My decision to commute under my own power no longer looks so sage as it did in fall.

All of this explains why Friday's brief and lovely rainstorm was so welcome. The sky darkened and cooled, the wind picked up, and the skies eventually opened for a blissful half-hour, pouring torrential rain down on us. It's tough for a Vancouverite to go without rain for six months. All the male students cowered indoors, but the teachers (myself included) and several of our female students converged upon the two-inch-deep lake that appeared on the former site of our soccer field. We quickly discovered that it's impossible to kick a floating soccer ball - the mightiest strike only creates an epic splash as linear motion converts into angular and the ball is left spinning madly on the surface of the water.

So badminton became the new lake sport, and we six or so batted the birdie back and forth until the clouds abruptly dissolved and the sun reappeared. When the rain died shortly thereafter, one of my students stamped her feet in annoyance, looked at me with an indignant pout and demanded "Teacher! More rain!". I didn't have the heart to tell her that I don't control the weather - and I like to keep the fear of god in my students - so I shrugged noncommitally and wandered, soaked and slightly filthy and supremely entertained, back to my desk.

P.S. My pay-per-post policy has come back to bite me. I owe Christian $10 for missing Friday - but it ain't retroactive, since you're out of luck for Wednesday. This policy exists to keep me blogging and to keep people reading, so the castigation must come more quickly to be valid. And to Sunshine - sorry, my blog is on Pacific time, so I think I managed my Saturday post.

In which I dabble in Thai politics...

Largely because my trip to Burma consisted of: 1. Step across the border. 2. Buy Chinese DVDs. 3. Step back into Thailand. Total time in Burma < 30 minutes. Not exactly the stuff of travel legend, so instead I'll launch into a rambling dissertation on Thailand's political travails.

You're all aware that Thailand's somewhat dodgy civilian government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in an abrupt but bloodless coup last September, two disorienting days after I arrived here. The coup was greeted by a startling (to me) level of public acclaim from people who were remarkably eager to ditch their hard-won democratic gains. The military government swiftly appointed an ex-general as interim prime minister, and promised a overwhelming flood of evidence into Thaksin's alleged corruption - the presumed preponderance of which was the stated justification for the coup.

Fast-forward to year's end, 2006. The government has been glacially slow to lift martial law, partly reneging on its own promises to do so within 3 months after the coup. Though there have been no harsh crackdowns, normal political assembly and protest remains banned. The military government has provided not one whit of evidence of Thaksin's corruption - supposedly so endemic and irrefutable that it compelled a reluctant military to burn Thailand's democracy in order to save it. And then, as you've surely heard, a series of ten small bombs in garbage cans detonated in Bangkok during New Year's Eve celebrations, killing three. A couple more were set off a few days ago at Bangkok media outlets, apparently without injury.

Awash with the luxury of geographical and cultural distance from the bombings (Chiang Mai is 800km north of Bangkok), I rapidly assumed that southern Thailand's long-simmering Muslim insurgency had finally made the expected migration to the capital. All public speculation has dismissed this option, however, and everyone quickly focused on the idea that members of the police or military were responsible - for reasons unknown to me, but the locals know their politics better than I do, so I'll give them the nod. The coup leadership instantly began insinuating (though not explicitly, nor with any evidence) that some of ousted PM Thaksin's uniformed supporters planted the bombs in order to undermine the military's promise of law and order. Other rumours rapidly began to fly of an imminent coup within the coup - the junta's secondary commanders potentially ousting the higher-ups, not to restore Thaksin but to refocus the coup on its ostensible democratic ideals.

All the while, a ludicrous clampdown on free speech continues. The military government apparently considers Thaksin Shinawatra so infectiously corrupt that they won't allow his words on the Thai airwaves, lest his evil taint the populace. CNN International interviewed him last week, in a session I fortunately caught on satellite TV. No saint he, but he merely insisted that no evidence of his corruption has been produced (true), that the coup has not followed through on its promise to restore political liberties (true), and that the government is unfairly censoring him (ditto). The remarkably innocuous interview was banned on Thai cable TV, and all Thaksin segments were mysteriously replaced by muzak-accompanied still photos of Will Smith, Tom Cruise, and Britney Spears (Huh?!). Much of the press, including the noxious English-language Bangkok Post, has shown astonishing fealty to this denial of free speech. The Post, in particular, seems to contentedly defend every move by the coup leaders and daily denounces Thaksin as evil incarnate. I have no idea if the Thai-language media are so spineless.

The next month will be critical. The dictatorship has offered to allow Thaksin back into the country (he's in exile in London at the moment) provided he remains out of politics. Content not to dispute the obvious illegality of the junta's barring him from office absent any criminal charges, Thaksin seems instead to be biding his time to make sure they're not likely to throw him in jail the moment he steps off his jet in Bangkok. He'll be out the country for a while yet, but rumours of his return could set off a wave of Thaksin nostalgia if the coup leadership doesn't soon liberalize things around here. The attendant confrontations could turn ugly - I stand by my September prediction that men with guns don't willingly give up power.

More critical, the army has promised that in one month's time it will release the results of its inquests into corruption under the old government. The suprising legitimacy of the coup will rest heavily on the results - no corruption, no reason for the coup to be tolerated (except for their guns, naturally). I have no doubt that if it comes to that, they'll fabricate evidence, but I'm pretty sure many Thais are expecting the same sleight-of-hand and will be poring closely over the evidence. I have my doubts they'll come up with anything substantive.

So what then? I expect public discontent with the military to grow, and the military (ever convinced of their own selflessness) to begin feeling slightly pressured and isolated. Without more evidence, I can't put much stock in rumours of a coup within the coup, or of a counter-coup by Thaksin supporters. So I re-ask the same question I raised in September: will there be violence? Well, for starters, there already has - a little sooner than I had predicted, but I'm still claiming points for that one.

Will there be more? Seems likely. If the coup was behind the bombings, then their motive to carry out more attacks may increase - they'll want to appear the bulwark against chaos. If Thaksin's supporters were behind it, then it seems certain that they'll grow more agitated as the military's case against their golden boy falls through. There also remains the possibility of future crackdowns against the protests that are sure to spring up eventually.

So am I safe here in Chiang Mai? Certainly looks that way. Chiang Mai's in a very sleepy part of a very sleepy country (recent turmoil notwithstanding). It's quiet and peaceful up here, without a hint of political unrest. Thais are difficult to rattle - losing your cool means losing face here, so nobody does it... ever. They continue about their daily business, and so do I. There's no reason to expect a rapid disintegration in Bangkok, let alone here in the far North. Don't worry, I've got no martyr complex. If things start to go downhill, I'll leave (pending DFAIT's sage advice). For now, that isn't happening... but I'll keep reading the tea leaves.

In which I'm back, and I'm thoroughly terrified...

One of my coworkers had a baby a few months ago, and now she's back at work. She's recorded a 3-second clip of her son laughing, and is using it as her cellphone ringtone.

I'm sure this sounded like a cute idea at the time, but in practice it's just the creepiest thing I've ever heard. She consistently leaves her cellphone unattended in our shared office, and so, several times a day, a rapidly repeating clip of disembodied infant laughter emerges from her backpack, or her desk, or elsewhere. It's very unsettling.

In other news, Chiang Mai has been entirely spared the moderate confusion unfolding in Bangkok over the last couple of weeks. Things are tranquil here... perhaps overly so. More to follow...