Chiang Rai: bamboo forests and hill tribes

Where Bangkok is concrete grey, Chiang Rai is red, yellow and green. We landed at sunset at a small airport surrounded by dusty red earth and fields of tall yellow grass translucent in the evening sun. Beyond the fields, green forested hills curved out of the plains like the backs of whales from the ocean. This was the first stop on Joyce and my adventure honeymoon through Laos and Cambodia – the adventure being admittedly more my idea than hers and obtained against the promise of a future beach holiday. We were in Chiang Rai primarily to reach starting point for our overground journey through Laos, but while we were here we decided to take a few days to see the sights.

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Delivering mosquito nets in flood-hit Bangkok

Seven-year-old Ratnasunder lives with her grandparents and pet dogs in a former classroom at an evacuation centre at Bang Krai Nok Temple, in Bangkok. The ground floor of the building is flooded and the only way in or out is by boat. For a child who had to flee her home in the face of rising floodwaters, Ratnasunder seems happy and carefree. She smiles broadly and lifts up one of the dogs, squeezing it tightly.

Her grandmother Tongploen is more sombre. “We used to live in a single story house alongside the canal at Wat Po Ain,” she says. “We went back once and rescued some clothes but it’s now flooded up to the roof so we can’t get in. We’re comfortable living here but it’s hard to get out. We used to have our own boat but it’s broken so now we use the public boat.”

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Escaping the Thai floods at a Buddhist temple

Twelve-year-old Tang sits with his sister Ice, 13, in a ‘child-friendly space’ at Laksi Temple evacuation centre, in Bangkok. The children are making necklaces from beads and thread. They are surrounded by a mixture of squalor and beauty. Dozens of families sleep on mats on the floor of the temple, surrounded by their few possessions, while the stench of contaminated water drifts in through the windows. Yet above them, ornate pillars rise up with elaborate designs etched in green, red and orange, while golden Buddha statues look down from their pedestals, smiling enigmatically.

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A Bangkok university rises to flood challenge

Tired mother Gaew is one of the thousands of people made homeless by Thailand’s devastating floods. She waits with her chubby five-month-old baby, Peem, outside a makeshift health clinic at Bangkok’s Phranakhon Rajabhat University. “Peem has a stomach ache so we’re waiting to see the doctor,” she says anxiously, holding the boy on her lap. “We’ve been here three days. We left our house in Pathum Thani when the water got waist high.”

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Exile on main street: Chiang Mai street children

Last week, we took a group of popular Thai bloggers to see projects for marginalised children in Thailand’s Chiang Mai district. After two days visiting orchard schools in Fang (see part two of this blog), we returned to Chiang Mai itself to visit a drop-in centre for street children. Run by the Volunteers for Children Development Foundation, the centre focuses on preventing and supporting the victims of sexual abuse. Many of the street children in Chiang Mai were sold to child traffickers at the Burmese border and brought into Thailand to work in the sex industry. Once in Thailand, these children are considered ‘stateless people’ and are not entitled to identity cards. This denies them the right to education, healthcare and – when they grow up – to legal work.

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Fruits of labour: schools for migrant children

I was in Chiang Mai district last week, introducing a group of Thai bloggers to UNICEF-supported projects for marginalised children. After our visit to the orchard night school (see part one of this blog), we went to see a day school in the same area. We got up early and set off in our vans for an orange orchard outside Fang town. We drove through wide paddy fields, criss-crossed by irrigation canals and filled with a host of yellow grass blades glistening in the morning sun. Here and there, women in straw hats were working in the fields, breaking the earth with wooden hoes. The landscape was layered: beyond the rice fields was a line of low trees that marked the start of the orchards. Behind them, craggy mountains rose up with forested flanks. It was a beautiful scene, but Fang is not a tourist destination. Instead, it’s the centre of a sometimes harsh agricultural industry.

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Evening class: visiting Thailand's orchard schools

Thailand is rightly famous for the quality of its fruit. The sois (small streets) where I live in Bangkok’s Aree neighbourhood are lined with stalls selling oranges, dragon fruit, mangos and whatever else is in season. The brightly coloured fruit is piled up on mobile trailers: fresh, plentiful and cheap. But this abundance comes at a price. As we discovered during a trip to Chiang Mai province in the north of the country, many of Thailand’s fruit orchards are staffed by low-paid migrant workers, whose children rarely get to go to school.

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Lost Kingdom of Ayutthaya

In the three-part Thai epic blockbuster The Legend of King Naresuan, the eponymous hero rebels against Burmese rule and restores the Kingdom of Siam around Ayutthaya in 1590. He then expands the kingdom with the help of an army of elephants, ushering in a period of peace and prosperity that lasts until 1767, when the Burmese return to sack and burn the imperial city. They loot its treasures and wipe out its population, leaving the charred ruins to be reclaimed by jungle.

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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.

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.