Some snippets and incomplete thoughts from April.....

April 11 Sunday We slept in, eventually had breakfast and got sprayed by various Songkran celebrants as we made our way back to the hostel along the moat. We both fell asleep again and then I started watching Invictus, a film about Nelson Mandela at the time he took over as president of South Africa. Partway through the film a character asks one of Mandela's body guards what he is like and the response was that with the previous president his job had been to be invisible, but with the new president “To him no one is invisible.” Because of things I have been seeing and thinking about that was enough to make me start crying. That is what God is like to me. That is what I wish my life would convey to others. No one is invisible. No one is unworthy of acknowledgment. We were made to need human contact and contact with a higher power and yet most people spend great amounts of time and energy cutting themselves and others off. It is a challenge to me on this trip because sometimes I am inundated with beggars and these are a whole different class from the homeless in America. The range of physical deformities is astounding and cringeworthy and I can't possibly give money to all of them, but at the same time these are often the people who most need to know that they aren't invisible. The crowds move by like they aren't there and I do the same and I feel heartsick about it.

April 15 Thursday A good portion of today was dedicated to getting my taxes filed. My mom had gotten most of the necessary documents scanned and emailed to me and I was able to file online with a minimum of difficulty. It is nice to be getting everything back, even though it is not a very large amount since I only was working for the first two months of the year and then I had no income to speak of. (I did not bother reporting the $10 Australian I earned moving furniture at a hostel in Cairns). Of course this was secondary to celebrating another day of being wet to bring about the end of Songkran.


And part of an essay I was working on about the sex trafficking situation in Thailand

An Essay: The sex trade in Thailand and implications of trafficking

Part of the reason we came to Thailand in the first place was that it is an epicenter for sex tourism and human trafficking. We wanted to learn more first hand and possibly help to increase awareness of the issues for ourselves and within our spheres of influence. In that regard it has been an eye opening experience, with some preconceptions confirmed and many discounted or modified. The story goes back a long time, since much of this is tied to the oldest profession in the world.

There are two lynch pin pieces to this issue as I have come to see it, those being the historical male Thai perspective on relationships and the Vietnam war. To look at the first part of that, you have to understand that for centuries Thais practiced polygamy. This idea that men could have multiple partners openly and really have that be seen as a sign of wealth and power is deeply ingrained in the culture. It was only in the early part of the reign of the current king that the law was changed, banning polygamy as a gesture to the Western Civilized nations, that they were not as backward as some of their neighboring countries. So the gesture was made, but no change was effected in the mindset of the average Thai male. As a result, modern Thai men adjusted to have a wife and then many mistresses and/or prostitutes on the side. This apparently satisfies and preserves their cultural masculinity. There really is no stigma attached to visiting prostitutes.

The second prong, the Vietnam war, is when the sex trade really took hold, as Thailand became an R & R point for the US soldiers. The demand for sex was met by a willing Thais who saw the money making situation for what it was. By the time the Vietnam war was wrapping up, Thailand was gaining a reputation as a tourist destination and a place where beautiful girls and cheap sex were readily available.

It is a combination of these two things that has generated the human sex trafficking that tarnishes Thailand's reputation now. And it gets more tangled and complicated to closer you look. When foreigners come to Thailand looking for sex, they bring with them money and in the grand scheme of things the women servicing them are doing quite well for themselves financially, if at untold emotional and psychological cost. This can be demonstrated with the not uncommon example of a girl who has gone into prostitution returning to her home village capable of building a nicer house than the village chief. Other girls see this and since there is little stigma attached to the profession, it is very tempting and many do go into it willingly. The girls in this sector commonly do not work with pimps. The consequence of many girls and women going into sex work with foreigners is that there are fewer women for the average Thai man to achieve his virility quota. This is exacerbated by the issue of migrant work forces, where many men are away from their families for months at a time for work. These workers are commonly on the lowest earning levels, but they still have this ingrained cultural need to have multiple sexual partners. They demand access to very cheap sex and that demand is met through trafficked girls and women from neighboring extremely poor countries, such as Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,and Burma. These are the girls that are living in absolutely atrocious circumstances and the horror stories we have seen and heard about are sickening.

There are other parallel issues dealing with the Ladyboy/Transgender and the Gay/Lesbian communities. Ladyboys are young men who are living as women. The sheer numbers of them is astounding. They are not openly accepted or ostracized, but they obviously....