There are some kids next to me smoking
hooka. They look to be about fifteen and I can't believe they're
allowed into the bar. Maybe it's the floods?
The waitress at lunch misunderstood
my order and brought me a hot plate with little sizzling strips of
pork on it. It never occurred to me before I came to Thailand but I
now realize that accents don't just change pronunciation but actually
entire words. Water and wada for example, or hello, elo, and hulo.
It's a bit unnerving when you hear a word you know in another
language said so differently you don't recognize it. How useful is
learning this language if I can't understand people from outside of
Bangkok?
Over the last week I've been running
into people from all over Thailand, they're all escaping the flood.
Their accents confuse me and because many of them have not traveled
much they struggle with my bastardization of a Bangkok accent. When
I went to the train station it was very crowded with families who
were spending the night there in hopes that the flood water would
recess and they could take a train home. The train I took went south
to start me on a journey towards the beautiful island of Koh Phangan,
where I would find an insane party, a little Thai playmate named
Axel, and that pavement is hard and unforgiving.
When I got back to Bangkok a week
later my street was preparing for the floods which now, a week after
that still haven't happened. I walked up onto the skytrain and saw
the 7-11's and every other shop with any money behind it sandbagged
three feet high. Here in the land of conspiracy theories, where too
often they have been true, people are saying that they're
deliberately diverting the water away from the rice fields that
Thaksin owns at the expensive of homes and rivals rice fields.
Being an exiled prime minister who still holds a large body of
support makes him the most obvious target for such rumors. Although
in my short time spent in Thailand it would not surprise me if they
were not just rumors.
The one body that is not being given
any praise during this multi-billion dollar disaster is the army.
They have undoubtedly done the most good for the people of Thailand,
sand bagging, levy construction, evacuation, all the things that need
to be done in a disaster but without all the politics, the
accusations and the misinformation. The science minister went on
national TV and issued an evacuation order for two northern districts
and then twenty minutes later went on again and said it was a
mistake. The prime minister, who happens to be Thaksin's sister,
said the worst had passed in the same morning that the governor of
Bangkok announced that it was only going to get worse. All of this
has led to a massive amount of discord in peoples expectations of
what the flood actually will do. For me the most shocking thing has
been going down to the grocery store and seeing them completely out
of bottled water, ramen and eggs. It's been this way for over a
week. They've changed their story about what is going to happen so
many times that at this point I will only believe it when I see it.
The frustration from the locals is
palpable. Facebook has become a war zone.
Thai, “It's so frustrating.”
Farang, “The government is doing the
best they can, what have you been doing?....exactly.”
Thai, “Actually I’ve been
sandbagging for businesses. What have you been doing?”
(Half a day goes by in the usually
instantaneous world of Facebook, then...)
Farang, “I have work.”
It's not difficult to see how quickly
an event like this turns political. The political parties turn on
each other and attack instead of turning to each other and asking how
can we help?”
My friends have almost uniformly had
their work canceled for the coming week, as far as I know I'm the
only person who's not be notified that my work is canceled. I'll be
going in, God willing and the creek don't rise. Ah now that is a
funny phrase. Originally the phrase went, God willing and the Creek
don't rise. The Creek that Benjamin Hawkins was referring to was the
Native American tribe the Creek. The saying does take on a very
different tone when it's seen that way.
Adieu my friends, and wish me luck and
dryness. I will leave you with some pics floating around from the floods over the last couple months. Keep in mind these are the worst floods Thailand has seen in thirty years.
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| A photo from outside my friends house |
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| Northern Bangkok |
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| A crocodile farm flooded and released over 100 crocodiles near a neighborhood in a northern province |
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| See now that's Bangkok, and those little red dots are places where it is flooding, and the pink is pretty much gonna flood, everything in the middle might flood, and that little arrow with the bubble, well that's where I live. |
