Quarantine Ends

{Above photos:  A downpour oblierates my view.]

11 April 2021

Tomorrow morning I shall exit to a hotel closer to the elevated train and the heart of Bangkok. The Siam Heritage is listed as 4 stars, has a special mention in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and costs $16/night! We’ll see. Usually the interesting but modestly-priced hotels have guests who are open to chat at breakfast. People are more insular, I find, at the fancier places.  

My promised 45’ of outdoor walking in the riverside gardens has been a relief from sloth. It was possible at the halfway mark of my stay, after my first nasal swab PCR test was negative. I walk briskly in loops around the property and sometime jog on the lawn.  I figure a full circuit is about ½ km and I do 8, so that is 2 ½ miles.  It’s not much exercise but is better than none. Today, unfortunately, as you can see from the photo above, in came the rain and washed the spider out so I am writing instead of walking.

On my second and subsequent days of walking I met a family of 4, including 12 and 9yo girls. They were returning from a visit to their ancestral home in the Shenandoah Valley in early March 2020. Thailand soon shut its doors and they are only now able to get back to their lived-in home. Of course, business investors and tourists have been able to enter much earlier than some, since they bring more money. These parents are missionaries who have lived in rural NE Thailand for 10 years. The girls are fluent in Thai and during my walks as I’d pass they would be playing traditional Thai music on their phones and doing graceful Thai dances.  They looked very sweet; it was lovely to see children being able to be children, not feeling pressure to mature and, especially as girls, not have to become prematurely sexualized.

It is so difficult to raise kids in the US, especially in cities now. They are confronted with so many temptations and pressures, as if their own internal development didn’t contain an adequate number. Thus, they have to make decisions for which they are not really mature enough. Perhaps I’m simplifying or glorifying rural life or earlier eras; I’m sure they had their own challenges. As a parent it is difficult, of course, since you want to protect your children but not smother them. And protection is a moving target, very different now from protection even 60 years ago, given the cultural shifts in sexual mores, prevalence of marijuana, etc.

Linda told me the 4 M’s that describe those committed to working in developing countries: misfits, martyrs, missionaries, and mercenaries. I think I best fit in the missionary category, though clearly not of the religious type. I bring the gospel of helping children, of their development and developmental interferences, of their rights, of their mental unwellness, and of their families.

I’ve binged on a TV series, “Breaking Bad”, in the past two days. It is incredibly violent and bloody but not gratuitously: that is, the slayings all are strategic to move the plot along.  It is remarkably well done—cinematography, acting, script, editing—with constant plot twists and surprises. But I feel, at the end of the day, sort of wrung out, like I’ve been drinking and eating salty snacks from sunup to sundown, which I am not. I’ve not binged on TV before. It’s enough to drive a person to read! 

I’ve been quite remiss in planning my 4 weeks here. I am ambivalent about scuba-diving; I want to dive and the experience is so much better than snorkeling but I retain a bit of worry about my age and lack of a right upper lobe.  Still, I can hike and walk and my experience of scuba is that it is only mildly aerobic. I don’t want to motor along a cliff-face because I’ll miss seeing the minutia. If I limit my depth and only dive 2x/day, I should be fine.

The Surin and Similan Islands are supposed to have world class dive sites; Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand and Koh Phi Phi in the Andaman Sea are also supposedly very good. Khao Sok National Park has one of the oldest rainforests (160 million years old) in the world and is filled with birds, plants, caves, and waterfalls.  I expect it will be damp. I think I’m going for nature; I’ve seen enough ruins for now.

The news from Myanmar is heartbreaking, as more and more protesters are killed by the Tatmadaw and increasing numbers of police have been killed by the protesters who are now fighting back. A few of my students are trying to flee the country and who can blame them? The military has refined their practice of intimidating people over their 60 years of rule so it is hard to imagine they’ll take seriously any non-violent response from the opposition or outside nations/entities. Where is an avenging angel?

It seems like most loud-mouths—Trump, Matt Gaetz, etc.—shout others down so their own actions and words won’t be examined closely. I have the funny feeling that Jim Jordan has some skeletons he wants to conceal, but that is the sort of inuendo I disapprove of so I’ll go no further. He certainly likes to talk over everyone.

Joe Biden cannot please everyone, even in his own party, but if you look at what he’s trying to do and how he is going about it, I think it is impressive. Who would have guessed? I didn’t, just thinking that defeating DT would be enough of a step forward for a first term. He’s relying on science for covid measures, re-establishing our diplomacy, trying to stanch the upward hemorrhage of wealth, and looking out for the poor, people of color, and working classes. Providing health care, as with the ACA, to millions cannot be a bad thing; Canada, Japan, and every other developed country are way ahead of us with a national health service and their health expenditures per person are much lower than ours. Not surprisingly, their life expectancies are higher. Trying to invest in our infrastructure and simultaneously address climate change seems like a good thing: job creation, keeping us competitive in the world markets, etc. Now if we can just cool the fires of ultranationalism and white supremacy that are growing here and seem to be consuming parts of Europe. Al Jazeera has a superb and lengthy investigative piece on it.  Good TV journalism in depth is such a contrast to the American talking heads and sound bites! Frontline is, of course, often terrific.

As I read over this rambling piece, I think I can see how too much TV and inactivity hollows out my mind. I’ll look forward to having the focus of travel. I really have no “tasks” here in quarantine. I’m too lazy to try to learn Thai language, to edit my blog, or any other major undertaking. The gears of my mind have ground to a sluggish halt.