In the mood for love: Maggie Cheung and children

Maggie Cheung and the young presenters, including Xi-xi (far left).
© UNICEF/China/2010/Martin Ye

Note: This blog post was written in 2011. In 2021, China announced the eradication of extreme poverty in the country, having lifted nearly 800 million people out of poverty.

Child poverty is not solely a problem for poor countries. Although China is now the world’s second largest economy, having overtaken Japan in February, its spectacular economic growth has not yet fully reached the poorest children and communities. There are still 100 million children living on less than $2 a day, with stark disparities between urban and rural areas.

Continue reading →

Return of the King: Nepal's royal capitals

The author in Patan’s Durbar Square. © Joyce Lee/2011/Nepal

Nepal is both one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and one of the poorest. In the capital Kathmandu, both the beauty and poverty are very much on display. The city is an odd mixture of historic grandeur and modern squalor. Its medieval buildings and squares have remained unchanged for centuries. Houses, temples and palaces are all adorned with beautiful and intricate wood carvings, which cover doors, windows, pillars and rafters. Stone lions guard the dusty, potholed streets and crumbling buildings. Sacred cows wander unhindered among the tractors, rickety vehicles and women carrying baskets on their heads. There is a Hindu temple on almost every street corner and square, from small shrines to local spirits and sacred trees, to huge towering monuments to the major Hindu deities Shiva and Vishnu. And it is all marvelously intact – there are no office blocks, shopping malls or multi-story car parks to disrupt the historic skyline.

Continue reading →

On the roof of the world: trekking in Nepal

Working on my blog, with four days’ worth of beard.
© Joyce Lee/2011/Nepal

Our reason for being in Nepal was to hike the Himalayas, so after exploring Kathmandu (see part one of this blog) we took a light aircraft to Pokhara, the starting point of our trek in the Annapurna mountain range. Tourism has saved this region from many of the ills that plague the Kathmandu valley. The streets are cleaner and the buildings in better repair, with even slum houses painted sky blue. There is also 24-hour electricity thanks to locally-produced renewable energy. Solar panels on houses heat people’s water and hydro-power in the valleys provides electricity for the villages. Houses here are painted with the words ‘Never End Peace And Love,’ the first letter of each word spelling out ‘Nepal’. “In Kathmandu, it means: ‘No Electricity Product, Always Load-shedding,” a local woman joked.

We signed up to do a five-day trek through the mountains to Poon Hill, with a local organisation called ‘Three Sisters’ that employs, educates and empowers local women. Our guide, Kamala, had been working with them since 1999. We also had two teenage porters, Manuka and Danu. As soon as we set off, we started feeling guilty about letting the girls carry our heavy backpacks while we carried lightweight daypacks. Every time we stopped, Joyce and I would take something out of their bags and put it into ours. We felt less guilty, however, when we saw the other porters. One Dutch couple had a single 60-year-old man as a porter. Each morning he tied three large backpacks together with rope and attached them to a strap across his forehead. While Manuka and Danu often raced ahead of us, waving cheerfully back from the top of the next hill, the old man struggled along behind his group, taking slow and shaky steps up the steep mountainsides.

The thing that struck me most about the mountains of Nepal is that they are very much lived in, in a way that European mountains no longer are. There are bustling villages all along the trekking trail, where subsistence farming is now combined with tourism. Even the smallest group of stone huts now has a restaurant, a guesthouse, a general store and – bizarrely – a ‘German bakery’. Children in crisp school uniforms run up and down the vertiginous stone steps like nimble mountain goats. Women dressed in bright colours wash clothes in the river, work in the fields with babies strapped to their backs, or dry mushrooms on rooftops in the midday sun. Men drive trains of donkeys (“the mountain car,” Kamala called them) laden with rice sacks across rope and wood bridges over deep gorges. Others carried goods themselves, using the same forehead strap as the old porter. We saw one man carrying a cage of a dozen live chickens in this way. Strings of brightly coloured Buddhist prayer flags were hung in even the most remote locations.

Inevitably, the accommodation in the mountains was basic. On the first night we stayed in a makeshift building that bore a close resemblance to the slum houses I’ve seen on UNICEF project visits in Bangkok and Manila. The ground floor was made of concrete but the first floor, where we slept, was a ramshackle construction made from sheets of metal, wooden planks and plastic windows, all nailed together haphazardly. The room was unfurnished except for two mattresses that were best left unexamined and a couple of Bibles on a concrete shelf. There were gaps in the walls where they failed to meet up and a cold wind blew through. Despite this, both Joyce and I slept soundly for eight hours. Dinner and breakfast, as elsewhere in Nepal, was cooked on a wood stove made from baked earth. In the evening, the guests, guides and porters huddled around a single heater in the dining room, playing cards and chess, reading or discussing the day’s hike.

Politics reached here too. The Annapurna region was a Maoist stronghold during the civil war and several times we saw communist slogans painted on rocks and huts, often accompanied by a Soviet-style hammer and sickle and a clenched fist. In one guesthouse, however, I spotted a faded picture of the former royal family still hanging on a wall in the dining room. In the past Maoist rebels would waylay foreign hikers along this route and demand ‘political contributions’. Now, however, there were official government checkpoints where we paid a pre-arranged fee and had our trekking permits stamped.

Sunrise from Poon Hill – like this, only much, much bigger.
© Andy Brown/2011/Nepal

Our destination was the inappropriately named ‘Poon Hill’, which at 3,200 metres is more than twice the height of the UK’s highest mountain, the comparatively puny Ben Nevis (1,340 metres). In fact, it is only a ‘hill’ in comparison to the ice-and-snowbound mountains that tower above it, many of them over 8,000 metres and among the highest in the world. In the evening, I sat on the balcony outside our lodge at Ghorepani on the slopes of Poon Hill and watched the massive stone peaks slip in and out of view as the clouds moved across the valleys. They looked fundamentally wrong so high up in the sky: way above the clouds where millions of tonnes of rock had no right being. It was a bit like looking at skyscrapers in New York – your neck would start aching after a while from being held at such an unusual angle.

We got up at 4am in order to make the final ascent to the summit in time for sunrise. We started off climbing through trees in the pitch black with flashlights. Occasionally, we would see the lights of another group through the trees. As we came out of the forest the sky was lightening and we could see the outline of the mountains, dark blue against a paler sky. There was now enough light to see the path so we turned off the torches. After climbing for about an hour, we reached the summit just before sunrise. The sky was clear and we could see the whole Annapurna range stretched out in front of us along the horizon, as if nature had laid on its most spectacular display for us. The mountains were unfeasibly high, massive pillars of rock punching up through the sparse clouds and rising to over 8,000 metres above sea level. This is the ‘roof of the world’ – the highest point on Earth. It was awe inspiring. The sun was still behind Annapurna South, but it started to light up the top of Dhaulagiri Mountain, turning the peak and ridge pink. Over the next hour, the line of light moved slowly downwards, picking off the ice-bound slopes and ridges one by one. Along the top of Poon Hill, tattered Tibetan prayer flags fluttered in the breeze in faded shades of blue, white, red, green and yellow. “They represent the five elements of sky, air, fire, water and earth,” Kamala said. With the exception of fire, we were visibly surrounded by them all.

One of the things I enjoyed most about being in the mountains was getting up just before dawn and wandering round whatever village we were in with my camera, watching sunrise, visiting temples for the dawn prayers and meeting local people. I’m not religious myself but there was something undeniably magical about watching sunrise from the balcony of Ghandruk Buddhist monastery while old women burned incense, rotated prayer wheels rat-a-tat-tat and banged a gong with a deep, echoing boom. All the while, a tape played a Buddhist chant: “Buddham… saranam… gachhami”. “It means ‘Go pay your respects to the Buddha,” Kamala told me when I played her back a recording on my mobile phone. It sounded trite when I heard it at a souvenir shop but somehow it worked here.

Nepali women feeding chickens in Tadapani village.

A retired Ghurkha enjoys the early morning mountain views in Ghandruk village.
© Andy Brown/2011/Nepal

Early one morning I spoke to two friendly women sat outside their house in contrasting blue and yellow trousers, feeding chickens. They smiled broadly as I complemented them on their style and asked if I could take their photo. The next morning, Joyce and I chatted to an ex-Ghurkha soldier, Ramatu Garung, who was sat on a stone terrace in a body warmer and traditional Nepali pointed hat, enjoying the view with a friend. “Where are you from?” he asked. “The UK, Hong Kong,” we replied. He seemed pleased. “I served as a Gurkha from 1945 to 1960,” he explained. “I went to the UK for a week’s training. After that, I was based in Hong Kong, Singapore and Borneo. Then I retired here to Ghandruk – this is my house.”

Nepal has a long history of supplying Gurkhas for the British army. Identified by their curved ‘khukuri’ blades, these fighters are famed for their strength, agility and endurance. Even today, Gurkhas make up some of the army’s elite troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere. For people in Nepal, it’s a prized job with the promise of a comfortable retirement. But it’s not without its risks. “My neighbour is also a Gurkha,” Kamala told us later. “He’s 80 years old. He fought for the British in World War II. There was a big battle and everyone in his regiment died except for him. He only survived by hiding under their bodies and pretending to be dead.”

We finished the trek by paragliding over the hills and lake at Pokhara. I was going to end this blog with a detailed description of the flight, but I’ve tried your patience long enough, so instead here’s a short video which includes the scariest moment: ‘the spiral’. The best part, not captured on film, was when I got to fly the glider myself on the way back down. It was like being a giant bird, soaring high above the lake and treetops, turning into the wind and feeling the tension in the strings as if my arms extended out to the tips of the kite. As we landed, dark clouds bearing monsoon rains rolled down from the mountainside behind us. It was a magnificent end to a memorable trip.

A passage to India: the two faces of Delhi

Me and Joyce at Humayun’s tomb, the precursor of the Taj Mahal.
© Andy Brown/2011/India

A few days after Songkran, I packed my bags once again and booked a ticket to Delhi, India. It’s a country I’ve always wanted to visit. I have several British-Indian friends in London and have watched countless movies about the country, from Richard Attenborough’s classic Ghandi to more recent art house fare like Earth and Water. I’ve always been intrigued by the country’s rich culture and history.

However, I also felt some trepidation. I’d heard about India’s extreme poverty, with slum dwellings lining the pavements of Mumbai, and had been warned to expect touts, scammers and hasslers. Joyce and I went to Morocco a few years ago and had an unhappy time. As soon as we stepped onto the street, we would be mobbed by aggressive and persistent fake guides, who would swear and spit at us when we refused their services. I was worried Delhi would be the same.

Happily, my time in India turned out to be neither quite like a movie, nor anywhere near as unfriendly as Morocco. However, there were two distinct sides to Delhi and its people. It was like a two-sided Venetian mask – one face smiling happily, the other angry and unsettling.

Happy face

I began in New Delhi, the former capital of British India. The city was built in 1931 on the ruins of seven previous capitals. Like them, it was supposed to last for ever but in less than two decades the British were gone, unable to sustain the costs of Empire after the Second World War. I arrived in Delhi late on Sunday night, got a taxi to my hotel and another to the office the next morning. Both drivers were very chatty so I didn’t have much chance to absorb the surroundings. One UNICEF office looks much like another and I got to 6:30pm without much of a feel for the country I was in. My map showed a route back to my hotel through a park, so I took some bearings and headed down a packed earth path towards Lodi Gardens.

I was astonished by what I found. A series of landscaped lawns surrounded spectacular 600-year-old domed and crumbing sandstone ruins, which rose majestically against the orange-coloured sky. They had elaborate carvings on their walls and the remains of coloured tiles on their ceilings. The trees were full of exotic birdlife, with different species home to different types of birds, including several large eagles. They filled the airwaves with their calls and the sky with their circling flights. Small, striped squirrels scampered around the lawns and walls with a bouncing gait, or climbed up walls and disappeared into cracks between the slabs of masonry.

Local people strolled peacefully amongst this splendour or reclined on the manicured lawns. Most of them wore brightly coloured traditional Indian dress. It’s one of the few countries I’ve been to wear young people choose not to wear jeans and T-shirts. Many had come with picnics and children. Others played sport, with cricket the clear favourite. I spotted two young guys up on the roof of one building, smoking a joint. After an exchange of gestures, they pointed to a stone staircase in the corner of a wall, and I climbed up too. I sat on the edge of the roof, next to a group of large and evil-looking blue-grey birds, and got an aerial view of the sun going down behind a group of children throwing brightly coloured balloons into the air. The air smelt of dry, baked earth and the sounds of children’s voices mingled with bird song and the soft thwack of badminton racquets.

Lodi Gardens – an urban oasis in the heart of New Delhi.
© Andy Brown/2011/India

I felt like I’d somehow wandered onto the set of a Merchant Ivory production, an impression which was more than just a metaphor. “In fact, a lot of movies are filmed there,” my colleague Jyoti said when I described the feeling the next day. “There are often film crews shooting in the evenings.”

As I was leaving the park, a group of Indian boys fell into step alongside me. “Hello, how are you?” one asked. “I’m good, thank you,” I replied. “Do you like Delhi?” “Yes, it’s very nice.” “America is very nice too!” “Not American, British,” I clarified as they disappeared in the direction of a 1950s style ice cream van.

The road from the park back to my hotel was wide and tree lined, with vast colonial-era villas taking up half a block each. There were large birds in these trees too, or so I thought at first. In fact, they were huge, furry bats. They climbed awkwardly up branches, hung upside down, fixing me with stares from their demonic eyes, or glided between the tree tops, casting sinister and unnatural shapes against the dusky evening sky.

On another occasion, I was walking through the gardens on Easter Sunday. There was a huge crowd of people on the lawn, dancing in a circle to a tribal drumbeat. I asked my colleague Shweta what was going on. “These are tribal groups who have converted to Christianity to escape the caste system,” she explained. “In traditional Hindu culture they’re considered Untouchables. In the old days, if their shadow fell on you, you would have to go home and wash. But in Christianity they’re all equals.” This change in status is not always done with pure motives, however. “The church provides education and social services,” Shweta continued, “But they often force people to convert in order to get it.”

If I was surprised and delighted by the ambiance of New Delhi, I was equally captivated by its inhabitants. My colleagues at work were incredibly welcoming and immediately made me feel at home, plying me with samosas, taking me for lunch and picnics and helping me plan my weekend. They spoke English with a beautiful, musical accent, while smiling and waggling their heads in a uniquely Indian gesture. “We lived side by side with the British for 200 years,” said Shweta without a trace of resentment. “I’m going to London in June. I’m very excited because I’ve read so much about it. I want to have tea and scones for breakfast and visit the Queen in Buckingham Palace.”

In addition to their hospitality and generosity, my new colleagues also had a wicked sense of humour. After one training session, I put people in pairs and set them the task of building an HTML email from a template, using stories from the UNICEF India website. Priyanka and Shweta instead made up their own stories about the ‘Web Guru’, using pictures of a mustachioed Mike Myers and links to my personal website. As their work was technically correct, it was hard to mark them down for it.

Angry face

If New Delhi represented the happy side of my Venetian mask, Old Delhi was its evil twin. I was well aware that I was living in something of a bubble among the broad boulevards, whitewashed mansions and trimmed lawns of New Delhi, so when Joyce came out for the weekend, we decided to spend a day visiting the Red Fort, Chandni Chowk market and Jama Masjid mosque in the less salubrious old town.

The Red Fort is a huge Mughal-era building, with imposing walls made from red sandstone around white marble palaces and British army barracks. The Mughal Emperors ruled India for over three hundred years from 1526 to 1858. Originally descended from Genghis Khan (the word ‘Mughal’ is a corruption of ‘Mongol’), they soon adopted Indian culture and Islamic religion. The most famous Mughal Emperor was Akbar the Great, brought vividly to life in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. Passing through Lahore Gate you enter a covered bazaar where shopkeepers used to sell silks and jewellery to the Mughal’s important guests. Their descendants still provide essentially the same service for modern tourists.

Outside Lahore Gate is Chandni Chowk, the heart of Old Delhi. Here, streets are narrow and buildings are dilapidated. The roads are lined with clothes and food stalls, the latter selling produce that is virtually guaranteed to bring on ‘Delhi belly’ in anyone not brought up on it. Between the stalls were a dense crowd of people and animals, including goats with full udders and carts drawn by large oxen, which battled tuk-tuks, cyclists and 1950s-style Hindustan Ambassador cars for command of the road. Disabled beggars limped between vehicles chasing a few rupees and a naked man with wild hair wandered down the middle of the street. It was hot, noisy, chaotic and bewildering.

A rickshaw driver followed us for a while, pushing his services. “Where are you going?” he demanded, reeling off a list of tourist sites. “You cannot walk here, it is too dangerous.” We managed to shake him off among the stalls and skirted the side of the market, heading for the tall minarets of Jama Masjid mosque, which was built by Shah Jahan, grandson of Akbar, in 1656. We’d been warned to expect scams here, so I was alert when a brusque and aggressive doorman tried to charge us 200 rupees each to enter the free-of-charge mosque and, at another gate, someone demanded a highly improbable ‘exit fee’ to leave. “You’d think people would behave better in a mosque,” Joyce said.

Jama Masjid mosque, the view from the minaret, and the marketplace outside.
© Andy Brown/2011/India

The mosque itself was an architectural marvel in red sandstone and white marble, with three large domes and two tall minaret towers. We had to take our shoes off and the hot stone ground scalded the bottom of our feet, except where a tatty, threadbare strip of carpet had been laid out. In the centre of the courtyard was a dried out pool of green sludge that was being raked by youths and put into small plastic bags, possibly for sale. A crowd of children watched this odd activity until a bearded mullah in a white robe came over and chased them off, shouting at them and threatening one with the back of his hand.

We were charged another 200 rupees to climb one of the minarets. It was a health and safety nightmare – a narrow stone staircase that emerged into a tiny, crowded turret with no railings. There were spectacular views out across the marketplaces of Old Delhi, to the Red Fort and the Yamuna River beyond it, and back down into the courtyard where foreshortened figures has resumed their sludge raking. There were around a dozen of us up there, all standing on narrow window ledges and clinging onto the metal grills. We quickly took a few photos and headed back down, squeezing past another dozen people coming up. Clearly, no one was counting.

We also skirted the edge of Delhi’s infamous railway station, travelling on its little brother the Metro. It was like a nightmare version of the London Underground at rush hour. Getting on or off the train was nothing short of warfare. As the train approached the platform, the ranks of ‘on’ and ‘off’ lined up, determined to give no quarter. As the doors opened, both sides surged forward. Elbows, shoulders and bags were the weapons of war and no prisoners were taken. Even women and children were not spared. There was nothing for it but to barge with the rest or never leave the train. The crazy thing was that as we emerged, beaten and bruised, onto the platform, we saw that the carriages on either side of us were half empty. The whole battle had been completely unnecessary.

Although I found Old Delhi fascinating, it was hardly a relaxing place to be. “I think I’m more of a New Delhi type,” I said to Joyce as we headed back to my comfort zone. “You’re such a colonialist,” she laughed.

Delhi Daredevils

The other thing I wanted to do while in India was go to a cricket match. I’d heard that these were very different to the stuffy, upper-class events at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. In India, cricket is the game of the masses, like football in the UK. One of my new colleagues, Ashok, was a cricket blogger and he quickly found a match for us to go to – the Delhi Daredevils vs. Kings XI Punjab. It was a choice between this and a day trip to the Taj Mahal. Clement, head of the fundraising department, was incredulous at our choice. “What, you’re not going to the Taj!” he exclaimed. “Are you crazy? It’s a monument to love! It is so much more romantic than a cricket match. But then I am French,” he added with a shrug.

We caught a tuk-tuk to the stadium but as we approached it the traffic ground to a halt and we got out and walked with thousands of local fans in Delhi Daredevil colours and red plastic horns. It was like the time I went to a football match at Wembley Stadium (Southampton vs. Carlisle) but much more chaotic. The path to the ground went through a slum area with makeshift stores and street kids. The atmosphere inside the stadium was, for lack of a less-clichéd term, electric. People danced and sang and stood on their chairs to get a better view of the cheerleaders, who were wearing red hotpants and white vest tops. Joyce had been to a match in Mumbai where they were much less popular. “People booed and threw things at the cheerleaders,” she said. “They were scandalised by their outfits.”

The Delhi Daredevils in action (this is not my photo!)
© Delhi Daredevils/2011

The crowd was much less tribal than in the UK, where football fans are segregated to prevent violence. Our stand was mostly Delhi fans but there were a few Kings XI supporters, including an extended family a few rows in front of us who would go wild whenever their team won a point. Nobody seemed to mind. “In India, people are more interested in the stars than the teams,” Ashok explained to me. “When a famous player comes on, everyone will cheer for him until he’s bowled out. Then they’ll go back to supporting their own team.” Sometimes this hero worship gets out of hand, however. “When India won the World Cup, there were temples set up so people could worship the players,” Ashok said.

Not being cricket fans, we struggled to follow the match but it soon became clear that the Delhi Daredevils were on course for a major victory. Australian batsman David Warner hit a string of sixes, which sent the ball arching high into the air above the floodlit stadium, coming back down to Earth to land in the crowd. For more match information, see Ashok’s blog at Web Umpire.

On the way out, we gave our tickets to an excited group of street children who gazed wide-eyed at the floodlit stands, and listened to the roar of the crowd from inside. Sadly, a used Delhi Daredevils ticket was the closest they were ever likely to get to their country’s national sport.

On balance, despite its rough edges and occasional shady characters, I really liked Delhi. It also resisted easy generalisations. Although taxi and tuk-tuk drivers were often the worst scammers, we also met some charming and friendly exceptions. On Sunday we went to a place called ‘Olive Bar’ in the far south of Delhi with only the vaguest of directions. The driver, a jovial and chubby middle-aged man called Johar, had to keep getting out to ask people if they knew where it was. “No problem: your problem is my problem,” he said as he eased his bulk out of the small tuk-tuk and we tried to apologise.

On the way, Johar told us his family history. “My grandfather was friends with a British colonel during the Second World War,” he said. “After the war, he went with him to visit London. It took a month to get there on a ship but he only stayed for 15 days.” I asked what his grandfather did in the army. “He was a storekeeper,” Johar replied. “He was in the army but no fighting!” Joyce found him delightful. “He was like a big teddy bear,” she said. “I just wanted to hug him.”

‘Untouchables’ congregate in Lodi Gardens for their Easter Sunday celebratio.
© Andy Brown/2011/India

For more photos, see my Facebook photo gallery.

On the waterfront: Songkran in Thailand

An ingenious variation on the traditional water ceremony at a temple on Koh Kred.
© Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Water has many associations in Thailand at this time of year. It’s a symbol of devotion to elders and the Buddha. Yet it’s also a sign of youth and anarchy; of childhood and play. This week is Songkran, or Thai New Year, when the entire country marks the anniversary of the Buddha’s birth by staging the world’s largest water fight. According to the traditional Thai calendar, the year is now 2554.

The word Songkran comes from the Sanskrit ‘saṃkrānti’ meaning astrological passage. It lasts for three days, from 13 to 15 April, and falls into two distinct parts. In the mornings, Thais go to visit their elders and pour water on their hands as a sign of respect. Then they go to the temple and wash Buddha statues with water and flower petals from golden bowls.

At work this week, we had a short ceremony where we poured water over Anupama and Tomoo’s hands – the heads of UNICEF’s regional and country offices respectively. We also saw temples where ritual washing was in progress. At one, on the island of Koh Kred in the Chao Praya river, an ingenious contraption had been set up. For a donation, you got a bowl of water that you attached to the claws of a golden bird. By turning a wheel, you activated a series of pulleys that hoisted the bird on a cable up to the top of a temple spire, where its bowl tipped over, pouring water and petals down the side of the building.

Originally, Songkran was all about these devotional activities but, like Christmas in the West, it’s taken on a more secular character over the centuries. Songkran is now primarily about celebrating, with street parties and water fights erupting across the country during the afternoons and evenings. We’d heard that the biggest fights in Bangkok took place on Khao San Road, which runs through the heart of the backpacker district near my office. So after lunch on Wednesday, Joyce and I changed into shorts and T-shirts, with dry clothes and a camera cocooned in layers of plastic bags in a backpack, filled up our super-soaker water pistols and headed out to do battle.

Children guard a water station by Phra Sumen Fort.
© Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Game on

We didn’t get far before our first water fight. We arrived at the boat pier at Kiak Kai to catch a boat to Banglumphu. An extended family had set up a checkpoint at the entrance to the pier, with a large tank of water and a hosepipe. They weren’t paying attention when we arrived and there was only a small girl at the water tank. Her parents shouted at her to get us but she just looked at me, eyes wide with apprehension. If we thought we were safe, however, we were mistaken. A young man and a middle-aged woman pursued us onto the pier with bowls of water, which they tipped over us. In return, we shot as much water as we could at the young man. The woman made signs not to shoot her, presumably because of her age, but I felt this was a poor excuse given the drenching she’d just dealt out, so I gave her a modest squirt from my gun.

In Banglumphu, we made our way to a small park by Phra Sumen Fort, an old whitewashed fortress on the riverbank. This octagonal brick-and-stucco building was constructed in 1783 to defend against naval invasions and was one of 14 watchtowers that once lined Bangkok’s old city wall. Today, a music stage had been set up here and a band was practicing, with speakers covered in shrink-wrapped plastic. Children were running around with water pistols, shrieking with joy. We had a few fights but invariably ended up coming off worse – the kids had better guns than us and were already soaked, and hence fearless. We shot one small girl with her parents, however, who was so started that she dropped her gun.

There was a small bridge set up on the pavement where you could fire at passing traffic. Occasionally, a pickup truck would come past with a gang of well-armed teenagers in the back and the fighting would intensify. Occasionally, we fought among ourselves. We got ambushed by a young Thai guy manning the nearby filling station (normally a drinking water fountain). He was wearing a motorcycle helmet and had a plastic backpack in the shape of a Japanese cartoon character, full of water with a hose connecting it to his gun. Afterwards, he raised his visor so we could shoot back, smiled broadly and filled up our guns for us. “Sawatdi pi mai,” he said (Thai for Happy New Year), as he handed them back.

Throughout the day, the atmosphere was incredibly friendly and good natured. We chatted to a Thai couple at the filling station. “You can shoot anyone you like,” the young man said. “But if they’re unwilling you should always apologise first.” Later in the week, when we were dressed up and on our way to the cinema, a teenager cornered us with a bowl of water. “Sorry, sorry,” he said before tipping it over us.

A reclining Buddha statue, still wet from his morning bath.
© Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Band of brothers

At the park, we met our friends Michael and Kari, a Kiwi-Aussie couple who run a regular yoga and daal night on Tuesdays. They were wearing floral ‘Songkran’ shirts and Michael had two large guns on a strap around his neck, reminding me of a character from a John Woo movie. “It looks cool but they’re a pain to carry after a while,” he said. Both of them were already drenched. “We got a tuk-tuk here and the driver stopped at every water point so they could soak us,” Kari said. “He got wet too of course. It cost 400 baht but it was well worth it.”

Together, we made our way down Phra Athit and into the backpacker district. Some tourists were just arriving, fully dressed with wheelie suitcases, and were very upset about getting their stuff soaked. I felt sorry for them but Kari took a harder line. “They should have done their research properly,” she said. Other, better prepared travellers were indeed wearing waterproofs and had their backpacks wrapped in plastic.

We took a short cut through a temple complex where orange-robed Buddhist monks live in traditional Thai-style wooden houses. Here the fighting eased off as people burned incense sticks and a line of golden Buddha statues stood glistening in the sun, still wet from their morning ablutions. We came out of the temple opposite Khao San Road, where the size of the crowds and intensity of the water battles exceeded anything we had seen so far. It was also a much more adult affair. The road was lined with bars and scantily clad girls danced on top of barrels holding up signs advertising beer prices. Sound systems pumped out dance music and occasional party classics like House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’, which I remember well from indie discos in the 1990s.

The road was completely rammed and you had to push slowly through a crowd of revellers in varying degrees of drunkenness. The militias that lined the roadside here were more hardcore. They had a new weapon – massive ice blocks that melted to produce freezing cold water. We were already wet but it was like getting soaked all over again. It’s a bit like diving in a brackish lake you come to a point where you suddenly realise that there are two types of water. Water fights here often took the form of locals vs. backpackers but it was hard to say who was winning. We also encountered another feature of Songkran here – teenagers with pots of white clay which they plastered on your face, hair and clothes, usually with a ritual “sorry, sorry”. This practice originates from the chalk that monks use to mark blessings, but now it’s just another part of the general mayhem. At each end of Khao San Road was a mountain of discarded clay pots, and the water underfoot turned white with their run-off.

Locals and tourists face off amid the mayhem of Khao San Road.

The Khao San Road militia, armed with cartoon character water backpacks.
© Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Time out

Half way down Khao San Road, we escaped down a side alley and ordered pizza and mojitos at a bar. A large, pale American came up to us with a cigarette and lighter. “Can anyone help me light this?” he asked. “I think you need dry hands, or at least a dry thumb.” His hands looked terrible – the fingers were white and puffy like a bloated corpse. Then I looked at my own hands, which were suffering from a milder form of the same condition. At the next table was a Thai nationalist, a rare exception to the civility and friendliness of the day. “America will be destroyed! Britain will be destroyed!” he ranted at an unfortunate pair of tourists. “In Thailand we have a great and powerful King.” The next minute he threw up down the front of his shirt and passed out on the table.

We finally emerged at the far end of Khao San Road by Democracy Monument – the scene of recent political protests by ‘red shirt’ demonstrators, where we jumped in a tuk-tuk and headed home. On the way back, I emptied my water pistol by shooting at passengers in other tuk-tuks whenever we stopped at traffic lights.

Later in the week, I explored our neighbourhood on foot to experience the local side of Songkran. By this point, Joyce had had enough so I headed out on my own with my trusty plastic pistol by my side. There’s a 7-Eleven store on virtually every corner and these were invariably manned by a small mob with a sound system, water tank and hosepipe. In some cases these were family groups, in others teenagers. On one corner there was a group of transvestites in coloured bras and wigs, dancing to kitsch disco music. At another corner a small boy stole my gun, then wrapped his arms around my leg and tried to stop me leaving, to laughter from the adults.

The group nearest our flat were having a street party that had lulled until I arrived. When they saw me coming with my super-soaker, they turned their music back on and began dancing excitedly in the street. After exchanging good-natured waterpower, they poured me a whiskey and ice and refilled my gun. I practiced my conversational Thai and chatted for a while to a young man who spoke broken English. He indicated three girls in the street. “Ladies no man,” he said several times. I didn’t get what he meant at first but when the girls competed to take a photo with me, giggling loudly, the truth dawned. “Sorry, I have lady already,” I apologised.

Songkran was probably the best time I’ve had in Thailand so far. It was a chance to meet local Thais from different social backgrounds, to understand more about their culture and national character, and to take part in one of the biggest and best-natured street parties I’ve ever been to. Perhaps most of all, it was a chance to get in touch with my inner child. As a boy, I’d always dreamed of being able to shoot water pistols indiscriminately at passers-by but it’s not something you can get away with in Britain’s more formal culture. Here, everyone is a child for three days. Adult Thais even talk about themselves as such. On Thursday I turned up for work in a T-shirt and shorts, with dry clothes in my bag as a precaution. “I see you’re ready to play today,” my colleague Pear said with a smile.

Friendly locals pose for a photo outside a nearby 7-Eleven store.
© Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Away match: Bryan Robson visits Bangkok shelter

For many people, football is a sport, a passion and a part of their regional identity. For UNICEF, football is a way of keeping children fit and healthy and of teaching them life skills like discipline and teamwork. We also team up with leading football clubs and players to raise awareness and funds for our work on children’s rights.

Manchester United legends Bryan Robson and Andrew Cole were in Bangkok last week as part of a fundraising tour to help the club raise £1 million for UNICEF’s work with children. During their trip, I went with Bryan to visit Baan Phumvej Reception Home for Boys, to learn how UNICEF is supporting children who have been abused or trafficked.

I arrived in Pak Kred an hour ahead of the main group. The boys were practicing for a music class and changing into Man Utd kits, bought specially for the occasion. Bryan arrived later with Alex from UNICEF UK and John Shiels, from the Manchester United Foundation. Also known as ‘Captain Marvel’, Bryan was the longest serving captain in the club’s history and is now manager of the Thailand national team.

We also met Ann and Nang from Peuan Peuan (‘Friends’ in Thai), part of the NGO Friends International, which gets support from UNICEF to work with migrant and trafficked children.

I asked Bryan how the Thailand national team was getting on. “I’m really enjoying the experience and working with the Thai players,” he said. “We’ve done well in one competition, the Asian Games. We didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped in the Suzuki cup but in July we’ve got our first World Cup qualifying game coming up, so for me it’s all about building up for that.”

Pak Kred is a shelter for children who need special protection. Some of the boys are victims of child trafficking or domestic violence, others are former street children. At the shelter, social workers look into each child’s situation. Educational activities prepare them for work or formal school and, where possible, preparations are made to return them to their families or communities.

However, staff at the shelter are not fully equipped to deal with non-Thai children. The shelter is home to 130 boys, around 40 per cent of whom come from the neighbouring countries of Burma, Cambodia and Laos. They arrive with migrant families or through child trafficking. Staff from Friends International visit Pak Kred shelter three times a week to give these children non-formal education in their own language. The organisation also works with NGOs in neighbouring countries to try to trace their families.

Bryan Robson holds a football coaching session at Pak Kred Reception Home for Boys.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Piyanun Kiatnaruyuth

On tour

We took Bryan and John for a tour of the shelter. They saw a hairdressing room with leather chairs lined up before a wall of mirrors, where the trainee barbers practice new haircuts on each other – and on visiting celebrities. Bryan got a quick trim. Next door was a pottery workshop where boys made ceramic animals and flowers from rubber moulds.

In another room a class was performing music with traditional Thai bamboo instruments called angklung. Each instrument produces one note when shaken, so the melody was determined by the teacher, who conducted the class. Bryan and John joined the orchestra, carefully copying the boys on either side of them. “It’s good for the arms,” Bryan joked afterwards, before giving signed photos to the boys.

After the music class we went out to the centre’s football field, where the boys had assembled in their Manchester United kits. Bryan spotted one boy in a number 7 shirt. “That was my number,” he said. Bryan and John ran a coaching session for the children, teaching them how to score goals. They put them in numbered pairs, with one boy as a striker and his partner as a defender. At the end, Bryan took a shot and scored. I felt a bit sorry for the young goalkeeper, who almost certainly had never had to defend against a professional player.

After the training session, I interviewed Bryan for a short video for the UNICEF Thailand website. I asked him about his impressions of the project. “What I’ve seen is a fantastic facility,” he replied. “The children are really well behaved and very concentrated on what they’re doing. I’ve seen musicians playing, I’ve seen them on the sports field. It’s a terrific facility for badly abused and homeless kids. So they do a terrific job here and I’m impressed all round. When you see facilities like this, no wonder Manchester United want to be involved with UNICEF.”

Bryan was particularly impressed by the focus on sport. “What’s great for me is that they’re doing sport as well as education,” he continued. “We all know that education is very important but when kids get onto a playing field, no matter what sport they’re doing, they really enjoy being outside. And it’s good for them, for their health and keeping fit.”

I asked Bryan what he’d learned about UNICEF’s work. “I spoke to the staff here and it’s not just about bringing kids off the street, it’s about educating them how not to end up back on the streets,” he said. “It’s about trying to get the older boys some employment so they can learn a trade. Also trying to get some of the Burmese and Cambodian kids who’ve been trafficked to Thailand back to their own countries.”

Bryan and John join a music class at the shelter, while Alex and I watch from the doorway.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Piyanun Kiatnaruyuth

Child protection

One of the boys on the team Bryan coached was nine-year-old Fahan (not his real name), who had been taken from the Burmese border area and brought to Bangkok with his sister Meliha by a trafficking gang. Fahan is from one of the Muslim minority groups in Burma. His family is very poor. They have four children and live in Myawaddy village on the Moi river, where the father drives a boat.

Recently, a child trafficker went to the family and offered them 3,000 baht [£600] for two of their children. Traffickers often promise to look after children and give them a better life, but the reality is very different. He brought Fahan and Meliha to Bangkok, where they lived with him in a room above a shop. They slept during the day, and he forced them to sell flowers on the street at night. If they disobeyed him, he would beat them. They earned around 1,000 baht a night, but the broker would only give them 10 baht each for a snack.

On a previous visit to the shelter, we talked to Fahan about his situation. “I used to live with my family in Burma on the Mae-Sot border, near the Friendship Bridge,” he told us. “I went to school there. I was in the second grade. There was someone who brought me and my sister here from Burma. I don’t know him. We came in a big bus. When we got here I sold roses with my sister in places where there were lots of tourists. We sold them from 8 p.m. until the morning. After a while we ran away from where we were working and a Burmese guy brought us here.”

Fahan seemed happy at the shelter but was keen to go home. “During the day I sweep the floor, take a shower, work in the kitchen and eat soup,” he said. “I like learning Thai and Burmese, and playing and listening to music. I would like to go back home to my family in Burma.”

Luckily, Friends International were able to trace Fahan’s family in Burma and make sure it was safe for the children to return. As Bryan left the shelter, he walked with Fahan for a while, and I talked to Man Utd’s camera man about the issues facing trafficked children. Solving these kinds of problems can be an uphill struggle involving UNICEF, the government and other partners. Support from football clubs like Manchester United makes our job a lot easier and helps give children like Fahan a chance for a better future.

China: Back in the P.R.C.

The author hiking on the Great Wall of China in 2011
© Andy Brown/2011/China

In 1876, Gore Vidal’s historical novel about the US centenary, narrator Charlie Schuyler returns to New York after decades of self-imposed exile in Europe. He is struck by the transformation of a city he once knew into something brash, modern and unfamiliar, as America rushed to catch up with and surge past the global powers of the Old World. I got a bit of the same feeling returning to Beijing after a ten-year absence (I first visited on a Great Wall hiking trip in 2002).

Driving into town, the horizon was a jumble of skyscrapers and tower blocks, stretching out from East to West with barely a sliver of sky between them. Everything was clean and orderly, with neat rows of silver birch trees lined up behind spotless pavements and well-managed cycle lanes. The tiled ‘hutong’ houses and bicycle-drawn carts I remembered from my last visit were nowhere to be seen. As the light began to fade, we reached the embassy district where Western brand names, neon-lit Chinese characters and a huge Apple logo lit up the sky above a brand new shopping mall. There was even a billboard for a Bob Dylan gig at the Workers’ Gymnasium. It felt more like Geneva than the hectic and historic Asian city I remembered.

Continue reading →

Human traffick: a shelter for abused children

Yarzar talks to Fahan (not his real name) in a classroom
at Pak Kred Reception Home for Boys.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Athit Perawongmeth

Poverty is relative. For families living on the bottom rung of the social ladder in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the streets and slums of Bangkok promise a lifestyle worth making a long and sometimes dangerous journey for. In the troubled border regions of Burma, meanwhile, there are people desperate enough to sell their own children into slavery. As shocking as it sounds, this is a common enough practice to generate a thriving trade in child trafficking at Thailand’s border towns.

To find out what happens to the victims of child trafficking, we went to Pak Kred Reception Home for Boys at Amphur Pakkret, about half an hour’s drive north of Bangkok. In fact it’s only north of Bangkok in the sense that Sutton is south of London – the urban sprawl thins out a bit but there’s no greenbelt or real sense of when one place ends and the other begins.

I live on the north side of Bangkok, so I flagged down a taxi and made my own way to the shelter. There, I met up with Ann and Yarzar from Peuan Peuan (‘Friends’ in Thai), part of the NGO Friends International, which gets support from UNICEF to work with migrant and trafficked children. Yarzar was a polite, young Burmese man in glasses and a Friends polo shirt. Like Nan, the street outreacher worker we met before, he used his language skills to communicate with non-Thai children and their families.

Once my colleagues Tum, Cherry and Ytske had arrived from the office with our photographer, Ann and Yarzar took us to look round the shelter. In some classrooms, older boys were doing vocational training. There was a hairdressing room with leather chairs lined up before a wall of mirrors, where the trainee barbers practiced new haircuts on each other. Next door was a pottery workshop where boys made ceramic animals and flowers from rubber moulds. I watched one boy painstakingly painting a mother hen, completely engrossed in his task and ignoring the visiting farang (foreigner).

There were also classrooms for younger boys. In one room, a group of boys played with jigsaws and dominoes, while others took part in an art class. In another room, a class was performing music with traditional Thai bamboo instruments called angklung. Each instrument produced just one note so the melody was determined by the teacher, who conducted the small orchestra. Beyond the classrooms was a kitchen and open air dining area where staff were cooking lunch. The distinctive smell of Thai green curry hung in the humid noontime air as two boys set out places on the long tables, with inverted bowls to protect the food from flies.

There were also several dormitories around a football field, where a game was in progress. I went over with Ytske to take some photos and was soon persuaded to take part. I gave my camera to one of the boys, who seemed to have a natural flair for photography, and took a few penalty shots at the goal. Another boy drew a picture of a stick man holding a camera. He pointed at the figure. “Where you from?” he asked. “The UK,” I replied to a blank look. I tried again: “England?” His face brightened. “Ah, Liverpool!” he exclaimed. “Yes, the Beatles,” I said but I was on the wrong track. “ManUtd, David Beckham!” he continued.

Boys learn hairdressing skills at the vocational training centre.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Athit Perawongmetha

Child protection

Pak Kred is a shelter for children who need special protection. Some of the boys are victims of child trafficking or domestic violence, others are former street children or have been in trouble with the law for minor offences. At the shelter, social workers look into each child’s situation. Educational activities prepare them for work or formal school and, where possible, preparations are made to return them to their families or communities.

However, staff at the shelter are not fully equipped to deal with non-Thai children. The shelter is home to 130 boys, around 40 per cent of whom are foreign. They mainly come from the neighbouring countries of Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, either with migrant families or through child trafficking. “These shelters are meant to be temporary but some foreign children end up staying for a long time,” UNICEF child protection officer Sirirath Chunnasart explained afterwards. “If they’re from Burma, it can take years to trace their families. In the meantime they often miss out on their education because they don’t have access to classes in their own language.”

Staff from Friends International visit Pak Kred shelter three times a week to give foreign children non-formal education in their own language. The organisation also works with NGOs in neighbouring countries to try to trace their families.

Yarzar introduced us to nine-year-old Fahan (not his real name), who had been taken from the Burmese border area and brought to Bangkok with his sister Meliha by a trafficking gang. Fahan was a small boy with a dark complexion in a yellow t-shirt. He was relaxed around us and often smiled or joked with the other boys.

“I used to live with my family in Burma on the Mae-Sot border, near the Friendship Bridge,” Fahan told Tum and Cherry. “I went to school there. I was in the second grade. There was someone who brought me and my sister here from Burma. I don’t know him. We came in a big bus.

“When we got here I sold roses with my sister in places where there were lots of tourists. We sold them from 8pm until the morning. After a while we ran away from where we were working and a Burmese guy brought us here.

Fahan seemed happy at the shelter but was keen to go home. “During the day I sweep the floor, take a shower, work in the kitchen and eat meat soup,” he said. “I like learning Thai and Burmese and playing and listening to music. I would like to go back home to my family in Burma.”

Fahan helps set the tables at lunchtime.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Athit Perawongmetha

Minority groups

Afterwards, I asked Yarzar to tell me a bit more about Fahan’s situation. “He is from one of the Muslim minority groups in Burma, which face discrimination because of their ethnicity and religion,” he said. “Fahan’s family is very poor. They have four children and live in Myawaddy village on the Moi river, where the father drives a boat.”

The Moi river marks the border between Burma and Thailand. Myawaddy is on the Burmese side opposite Mae-Sot, a Thai border town that has become synonymous with drug smuggling, sex workers and child trafficking. “A broker went to the family and offered them 3,000 baht [£600] for two of their children,” Yarzar continued. That’s a lot of money in Burma. Brokers will promise to look after the children and pay the parents every month, but after a few months they usually stop paying.”

Fahan and Meliha were treated harshly by the trafficker. “He brought them to Bangkok where they lived with him in a room above a shop. They slept during the day and he forced them to sell flowers on the street at night. If they disobeyed him, he would beat them. They earned around 1,000 baht a night but the broker would only give them 10 baht each for a snack.”

Yarzar met Fahan at the shelter after he escaped from the trafficker, but it took a while to win his trust. “Fahan didn’t trust anyone at first because of his experiences. He was very quiet and afraid of everything. I had to play with him and build a relationship step-by-step. But he’s happy now and makes friends with everyone. He’s just like a normal kid now.”

Meliha is now back with her parents in Myawaddy and Fahan will be joining them soon. “We were lucky to be able to trace the family,” Yarzar said. “The Burmese government does not provide social services and we have to rely on local NGOs. Even then, their activities are restricted. It’s much easier to trace the Cambodian children.”

Given everything he’s been through, Fahan did seem like a remarkably normal child and I was struck yet again by children’s resilience and their ability to recover from deeply traumatic experiences. Relatively speaking, Fahan is one of the lucky ones. Across Thailand, there are thousands of children like him working for traffickers. They beg or sell flowers on the streets, they live and work in rubber plantations or sweatshop factories producing goods for Western consumers, or they work on boats in the fishing industry. Some of them spend their whole childhood in virtual slavery and never see the inside of a classroom.

“A few years ago the police raided a big factory in Samut Sakorn where trafficked children were living and working,” Yarzar commented. “The owner was sent to prison. But it still goes on and they don’t always get caught.

Yarzar walks with Fahan back to his dormitory block.
“I would like to go back home to my family in Burma,” Fahan says.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Athit Perawongmetha

Friends in need: children living in Bangkok slums

Like any large city, Bangkok is multi-faceted and the view you get can be radically different depending on your perspective. Having seen the city from the viewpoint of a tourist and an office worker, my next job was to see the same locations from the perspective of the urban poor: in particular children living in slums and working on the streets.

I went on three project visits around Bangkok with my colleagues from the Thailand office, Tum and Cherry, and a local photographer, Chum. I’m working with Tum and Cherry to create stories for the UNICEF Thailand website on the right to an education, while training them up on producing different types of content, including audio, video and social media.

As well as doing freelance work for UNICEF, Chum is an award winning photo journalist. His pictures from the front line of the Red Shirt riots last year paint a vivid picture of anger, bloodshed and arson among the normally placid Thai people. “It’s hard to get natural shots,” Chum explained. “Even during the violence, people would smile and wave at the camera. These were the best 15 pictures from thousands.” I’d just taken my own photos of Red Shirts on their way to a weekend rally, so it was fascinating to see Chum’s much edgier work.

The projects we visited were run by Peuan Peuan (‘Friends’ in Thai), part of the NGO Friends International, which gets support from UNICEF. For the first visit, we drove a short distance from the UNICEF office to a slum community near the flower market on the opposite bank of Chao Praya, a wide river that flows through the heart of Bangkok.

There we met 12-year-old Nuch (not her real name), a slight, quietly-spoken girl in a red t-shirt with a pigtail in her hair. She was living with her mother Dao, stepfather and five siblings in a single room hut. Nuch used to go out begging in Bangkok’s commercial district, but her mother decided to find another way to earn a living. Now, Dao goes to the market early each morning to buy flowers. She uses these to make garlands, which Nuch and her siblings sell to tourists and worshipers in the temple district of Banglumpu, undercutting the prices in shops.

“I leave the house with my mom, brothers and sisters around 5 or 6pm,” Nuch told us. “We go to Banglumpu area with 400 garlands. My mum sells some on the pavement with my youngest brother, who is two and a half. I walk around the area with my other brothers and sisters to sell the rest. We only return after we sell them all, which can be anytime from 11.30pm to 2am.”

Working late at night on the streets puts children like Nuch at risk of abuse and exploitation. Her brother had already been detained by the police and sent to a shelter, although he was now back with the family. Nuch also frequently misses school because of work. “I don’t usually go to school,” Nuch says. “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. If mum doesn’t sell anything, she doesn’t have money for us to go. I like going to school but I’m still in Grade One because I flunked my exams so many times.”

Making ends meet is a constant struggle for the family. “We make around 500 baht [£10] a day selling garlands,” Dao explained, while chopping chili peppers and preparing dinner for the children on a small gas burner outside their hut. “The rent is only 1,500 baht [£30] a month, but I have to feed the children and pay for them to go to school. Yesterday Nuch left her earnings in a tuk-tuk, so today we have no money to buy flowers.”

School’s out

The slum where we met Nuch is not the best environment for a child. It is a small settlement of 50 households, squeezed into a small plot of land between a school and main road. Except for the slum owner’s house, the homes were dilapidated wooden shacks, often on the verge of collapse, with electric wires hanging low across the walkways. There were attempts at decoration, with bird cages and pictures of celebrities torn from magazines outside some huts. In the centre of the slum, an old tree had been turned into a shrine with flower garlands, incense sticks and a small Buddha statue. Everywhere we went rubbish littered the ground, which the children ran across with bare feet.

The settlement was much smaller than those in Manila, which are home to around 50 per cent of the population, but it lacked the infrastructure and community of the larger, more established Filipino slums. In Thailand, slums are usually home to marginalised people like foreign migrant workers and street prostitutes, who rent shacks by the day for 50 baht [£1]. Although the settlement where Nuch lives is next to a large, well-equipped school, the families cannot afford to send their children there. Instead, those lucky enough to go to school have to travel to a free temple school some distance away.

Friends International runs a classroom in the slum, where staff provide life skills education, play activities and a place for children to do their homework. In the classroom, Nuch drew a picture of a large house by a waterfall, surrounded by trees, butterflies and heart-shaped balloons. I was struck by the stark contrast with her real home. Her six-year-old brother Tor, meanwhile, played with Lego bricks while a Friends worker cleaned and dressed a cut on his foot. “The staff teach me how to do homework,” Nuch said. “Sometimes they ask me to draw pictures. I like it here because they are kind. It’s good that we have this classroom near our house because I walk there on the afternoons that I’m free. Mom never tells me not to go.”

“About half the children in the community come regularly to our centre,” Ann Charoenpol from Friends explained. “We need to get to know them first, build their trust and find out about their situation.”

As well as the classroom, Friends runs a ‘child safe community’ scheme. They have trained 15 volunteers living in the settlement about child rights. The volunteers keep an eye on the children when their parents are not around and report any instances of abuse or domestic violence. The organisation also provides income generation activities for the families. They offer them funding, supplies and training to set up a small business such as making products from recyclable materials, which are then sold by Friends. In return, the parents sign a contract promising to keep their children in school.

Soi Cowboy

Our next visit was to a government-run shelter for homeless and trafficked children, where Friends International works with homeless and trafficked children from Laos, Cambodia and Burma to provide them with educational activities in their own language. They also help with family tracing. I’ll come back to this in my next blog.

For our final trip, we went out after work on Friday night to the sex tourism hotspots of central Bangkok, where street children beg or sell trinkets to tourists. We visited the infamous ‘Soi Cowboy’, where scantily-clad Thai women dance for seedy old men in front of bars and ‘massage parlours’ to the competing sounds of rock and dance music. I recognized some of the songs, but not the context. The usual street food stalls had been replaced by street bars, with stalls selling whisky shots to pedestrians. Above us, the sky was lit up by flashing neon lights, with a huge floodlit picture of a cowgirl in leather boots and a whip presiding over the debauchery below. Needless to say, none of this is a good environment for a child.

Compared to the Philippines, the street children here were fewer but more marginalised. The Thai Government has recently proposed a law making it illegal for children to be out on the streets after 10pm. “We find many children from Nuch’s community working here late at night,” Ann said. “We don’t want them to be arrested.”

Ann took us to meet Nang, an outreach worker with Friends International. It was the day of their quarterly street survey and Nang was particularly busy. She had been on the streets since 6am in the morning and was on her second to last shift – she wouldn’t finish until 2am the next day. Together we made our way on foot from Chit Lom to Sukhumvit, looking for street children. For a while we were trailed by two hyperactive Cambodian brothers who ran across the busy roads, careless of their own safety. Another boy, who was begging on the pavement with a puppy, happily posed for several photos for Chum.

We found several young children begging with their mothers or grandmothers on overpasses around the skytrain station. One young girl sat on her own on a staircase. It turned out her mother was just round the corner, but she earned more money if she was on her own. I knew some of these bridges from weekend trips to the malls and cinemas, but walking across them with Friends gave me a very different perspective, as if I were seeing them again for the first time through someone else’s eyes.

Nang comes from the border area between Thailand and Cambodia, which has been in the news recently due to fighting over the disputed sovereignty of a Hindu temple. As a result, she can speak Cambodian and was able to talk to all the mothers and children we met. She handed out information cards in different languages, so that the parents could get in touch with Friends if they had any problems. “Sometimes a mother will phone us up and say: ‘Have you seen my son? He’s been missing for four days’,” Ann commented.

“Most of the children in this area are Cambodian,” Nang told me as we walked to the next Skytrain station. “They cross the border in forest areas and then get a public bus to Bangkok for 250 baht [£5]. Often, the mother or grandmother comes with the youngest children, while the father stays in Cambodia with the older ones. They spend a few months begging, then they go home. When the money runs out, they come back to Bangkok.”

Nang will get to know the mothers and talk to them about children’s right to an education and the dangers they face on the streets. She tries to motivate them to give up begging and join Friends’ home-based production scheme, but it can be a tough sell. “A mother and baby can earn up to 10,000 baht [£200] a month begging on the streets,” Ann explained. “That’s a lot more than they can get doing a low-paid job, even in Thailand, so it can be hard to persuade them to change.” As if to prove her point, a middle-aged American woman stopped and handed 40 baht to a mother. “For the children,” she said.

Nang holds up a selection of information cards in Cambodian and other languages.
© UNICEF Thailand/2011/Athit Perawongmetha

Work, eat, sleep: adjusting to life in Bangkok

Living in Bangkok is a very different experience to visiting it, and after our first week we started to feel less like tourists and more like inhabitants of the sprawling metropolis. We moved into an apartment in Ari, a residential Thai area. It’s upmarket but still feels more adventurous than living in expat central round Sukhumvit. We’re staying in a small block of 15 apartments around a swimming pool. It’s very homely and ‘traditional Thai style’ with lots of shade and pot plants everywhere. We’re surrounded by quiet leafy lanes, populated with villas and garden restaurants. It feels a bit like a Thai equivalent of the more villagey suburbs of London like Highgate or Hampstead.

The streets near the Skytrain are lined with food stalls, selling fruit or fried noodles. Scattered among them are occasional folding tables covered with lottery tickets. There is also a cobbler and a middle-aged man with an old-fashioned sewing machine, patiently repairing an endless succession of garments. The ready availability of fruit here is a welcome contrast to Manila and, along with my twice-daily swims, allows me to maintain the semblance of a healthy lifestyle while eating spicy soup noodles every night.

Each of the street stalls is in fact a small trailer with gas canisters pulled by bike, moped or sometimes by hand. Owners of the larger stalls set up folding chairs and tables along the roadside to create a makeshift restaurant. Late at night, they take all this down and do their washing up with large plastic bowls and hosepipes, emptying the dirty water out into the gutters. One night, after the stalls had gone, I noticed that the pavement was actually marked out into small areas with painted lines like a car park. Presumably the stall owners pay rent on their space to the local council.

My first few weeks at work have been busy but interesting. I’m helping China write a proposal for a new website, while working on a digital strategy for Thailand and training their team on writing for the web, using images and email broadcast. I’ve also been on two project visits, to a slum community and a shelter for homeless boys, which will be the subject of next week’s blog.

My new colleagues are all very friendly and welcoming. Like Filipinos, Thais have two names – formal and informal. Some nicknames are in English, while others are in Thai. However, where Filipinos favour terms of endearment like ‘Love’ and ‘Baby’, Thais seem to prefer a fruit theme, hence ‘Pear’ and ‘Cherry’. So my Thai colleagues Natnapin, Pimsai and Waraporn are known respectively as ‘Kwan’, ‘Pear’ and ‘Yui’. Waraporn, or Yui, is always laughing at me and the daft things I do, like turning up for a meeting on my first day with a ‘Mission Banana’ notebook I’d bought at 7-Eleven with a cartoon monkey on the front. “I think that’s for school children,” she laughed.

Fantastic voyage

In the morning, after waking to the hooting and clattering of tropical birds (‘Baroo, baroo, baroo,’ one bird calls loudly at 6am every morning), I grab a quick swim and get a taxi to work. I’ve been brushing up on my taxi -Thai, such as ‘lieow saai’ (turn left), ‘lieow kwaa’ (turn right), ‘dtrong bpai’ (straight on), ‘hai chah long’ (slow down) and ‘jawt’ (stop).

My journey home is more local-style and provides a fascinating daily glimpse into the changing face of Bangkok. Leaving the office at around 5:30 pm, I hail a tuk-tuk and negotiate a ride to ‘Pan Fa, ta rua’ (the local boat dock) for ‘see sip baht’ (40 baht). Bangkok’s tuk-tuks are similar to the ‘tricyles’ of Manila, but with the passenger seat behind the driver rather than alongside him. The tuk-tuk weaves through the traffic, bypassing the bottleneck around Siam Commercial Bank by driving on the wrong side of the road and dodging back in between cars if something comes the other way. Reaching the intersection at Pan Fa, the tuk-tuk cuts suicidally across six lanes of traffic and drops me at the boat dock. ‘Khob khon kap,’ I say, handing over two 20 baht notes and relieved to be in one piece.

After grabbing a couple of spicy chicken skewers at the street food stalls, I make my way down to the boat dock. The canal boats are basic affairs with wooden benches and tarpaulin sides. They only stop for a brief moment at each dock while passengers scramble on and off. As soon as we’re all on board, the boat sets off and two teenage girls in face masks and pink crash helmets scamper along the outside of the boat, collecting fares from passengers. ‘Ratchathewi,’ I say, holding up three fingers to indicate the number of stops. My fare is nine baht (18 pence).

When the boat comes to a bridge, the roof is winched down and the girls on the sides duck low. I suspect their crash helmets are intended to protect them should they misjudge this and get a face full of fast moving concrete. To start with, the canal is lined with small houses and a tidy path, but this soon deteriorates into a slum, with shanty houses piled on top of each other right up to the edge of the canal. The slum owners have annexed the canalside path and turned it into a back yard. At the weekend, the railing is covered with clothes hanging out to dry on metal hangers, like a downmarket, second-hand fashion stall. The clothes are interspersed with pot plants, the occasional bird cage and even a fish tank, lashed to the railings with a well-tied rope.

Unfortunately, the canal is also clearly used as a rubbish dump and sewer by the slum inhabitants, and as a result the water can get very smelly. Passengers live in constant fear of splashes from boats passing the other way. On her way to a job interview, Joyce was deeply traumatised when she got a generous splash of water full in the face. ‘If I’d had time, I’d have gone home and showered,’ she recalled with a shudder. Despite this, the canal boat is my favourite part of the journey. I feel almost like a local, squeezed cheek-to-cheek between my fellow commuters as the sun sets, creating orange ripples on the water and reflecting off the metal roofs of the shanty houses. The canal boat’s dubious charms are lost on my local colleagues however. ‘I took it once four years ago,’ Cherry told me, adding emphatically, ‘Never again.’

In olden times, the canal was the main transport route through the city – a kind of pre-industrial express way. The few remaining nineteenth century villas have gates opening onto the canal path, which would previously have been their main entrance.

I get off the canal boat at Ratchathewi (prounced like the French vegetable stew ratatouille), walk through an underpass where a drafts board has been set up with bottle tops on an old table, and past the remains of a demolished, graffiti-fringed housing block. Enterprising teenagers have cleared the rubble from one end and turned it into an improvised football pitch where they engage in nightly sporting contests.

Just past the derelict lot, I climb a flight of stairs to the Skytrain and enter a different world, a bit like the moment in a movie when someone discovers a portal to a fantasy world in the back of a wardrobe or some other improbable place. Suddenly, the street stalls are replaced by smart outlets selling iPhone accessories, the pink-helmeted teenagers by an electronic ticket machine and the canal boat itself by a state-of-the-art, air conditioned train with TV screens playing adverts for make-up and motorbikes. I’m used to London’s hundred-year-old underground so the Skytrain feels almost futuristic to me. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the year here is 2554, as Thais count from the year of Buddha’s birth rather than Christ’s.

I sometimes reach the Skytrain station at 6pm, when the national anthem is played in all public places and everyone has to stand still to pay homage to the King. At Ari, I get off the Skytrain and walk for 10 minutes through the hot, humid streets and evening hustle and bustle of the street stalls, to our apartment block where I get out of my sweaty, smelly clothes and go for a refreshing swim in the pool.

Year of the Rabbit

Last week was Chinese New Year (I’m told we should call it Lunar New Year out of respect for non-Chinese who mark the occasion), so on Saturday we went to Chinatown with Lizz,who I used to work with at UNICEF UK, and her friend Esther. We missed the dragon show but the streets were still festooned with red lanterns and packed with both locals and tourists. We explored the narrow back streets, which I was excited to discover stood in for 1960s Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s classic movie ‘In the Mood for Love’.

I’m a big Wong Kar-wai fan – his movies were the subject of my MA dissertation and first publication. On my first trip to Hong Kong, I dragged Joyce and her parents around looking for the location of scenes from ‘Chungking Express’, including the titular Chungking Mansions. ‘Why does he want to go there?’ Joyce’s mum asked her, perplexed. ‘It’s just full of gangsters and fake Rolexes. The Big Buddha statue is much nicer.’ Joyce sighed. ‘It’s a movie thing,’ she explained.

In Bangkok’s Chinatown we stumbled upon a traditional Chinese temple down one of the back streets, where people were burning incense and buying offerings of fresh vegetables, presumably to mark the Year of the Rabbit. ‘Last time they were selling meat and eggs,’ Esther said. ‘That was the Year of the Tiger’.

We ended the weekend at Chatuchak Market, looking for things to buy for our flat. Having spent most of December giving away all our wordly possessions, we’re now having to repurchase many of them, albeit at substantially lower prices. Chatuchak is a bit like Camden Market multiplied a hundredfold. It’s a huge, sprawling behemoth of a place, selling everything from arts and crafts to clothes, pot plants and pets. There’s even a stall somewhere selling baby alligators. With over 5,000 stalls and 200,000 visitors a day, it’s easy to get lost. The stall owners are well aware how bewildering it is, so they all have business cards showing their location in the market, numbered by section and soi (street). In the evening, the character of the market changes and it takes on a party atmosphere. Most of the stalls close and bars open up with live bands or DJs spinning dance tunes late into the night.