Thailand: Years troubles give reasons to
frown in Land of Smiles
By TERESA
MALCOLM NCR Staff Bangkok, Thailand
Thais were a trifle cranky in 1997, a little less effusive than I
remembered them, a little less willing to offer evidence of the countrys
nickname, the Land of Smiles.
The source of the malaise was evident. Thailands rapid
growth as an Asian tiger during the past decade was cut short this
year, brought to a halt by overspending, wild lending and corruption in
governmental and financial institutions.
In August, the Thai government accepted a $17.2 billion rescue
package from the International Monetary Fund. A sharp decline in the worth of
the baht and the prospect of rising inflation worried ordinary Thais.
Newspapers reported runs on grocery stores, as people hoarded food
in anticipation of tax hikes. The subject was on everyones lips. The
Asian tiger, had largely benefited the capital, Bangkok. But its
crashing end seemed most likely to hit the poor across the country.
Amid the economic uncertainty and the striking Thai contrasts --
gorgeous religious architecture and urban blight, lush rural scenery and
pervasive rural poverty -- are powerful examples, particularly among the
minority Catholic community, of activists working for justice.
Of course, the boom that was ending in August did not benefit
everyone in Bangkok. The evidence was clear throughout the city: beggars
outside the busy malls, street children approaching tourists for money,
handicapped people selling lottery tickets on the street.
Less visible to the casual visitor are the slums teeming with tin
shacks and garbage, enslaved women hidden away in brothels, AIDS patients
forced out of their jobs and homes. Some things dont change, except to
get worse. The same elements were part of Bangkok when I lived in Thailand 1991
to 1993 as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Bangkok also remains one of the most polluted cities in the world,
where traffic moves at about seven kilometers per hour -- four during rush
hour. But the cars, high-rises and pollution dont detract from
astonishingly beautiful temples and palaces.
Slum schools
In Klong Toey, a part of Bangkok, the slums are nice slums,
compared to those in other countries, in the words of Redemptorist Fr.
Joseph Maier, who has worked in the city for 20 years. The nice
slum I visited with him was a maze of wooden walkways and shacks built on
stilts over ground choked with trash. In the middle of the squalor was a
one-room kindergarten with 95 children in attendance that day, getting their
chance at a head start before they begin the first grade, just like the
children who attend the countrys private kindergartens. The slum
kindergarten was one of 30 run by the Human Development Centre and attended by
about 3,800 slum children.
Beginning in the first grade, public education is free, excepting
fees for uniforms, books and activities, which can be costly for poor families.
It is difficult for most Catholics to pay Catholic school tuition,
said Maier, director of the center. There are a lot of Catholic schools
in Bangkok, and theyre all extremely elitist and only rich kids go
there, he said. The center runs an elementary school that is the only
Catholic school in Bangkok that takes in the poor, said Maier, a native of
Seattle, who attended seminary in Oconomowoc, Wis. We go out of our way
-- if there are any kids with any money, we wont take them.
Sammakhee Songkraw (in English, helping together)
School has about 600 students and is located near the pig slaughterhouse in a
Catholic area of the slums. As far as Thailands pervasive bureaucracy is
concerned, the kindergartens operate a little outside the law. The center could
not ask for permission to build them, because they are all located in illegal
squatter slums.
Just because you have this door up here, you think it exists
-- well it really doesnt, said Maier. The only way a building
exists is if theres a funny little piece of paper down at the district
office that says it exists. And we dont have funny little pieces of paper
down at the district office. So therefore if they dont exist, you
dont have to ask permission.
If this odd piece of reasoning doesnt work, Maier has
sometimes brazened it out, threatening equal parts of guilt and embarrassment
for officials. When the authorities come, we say, Hey, the school
doesnt belong to Fr. Joe or the community leaders, it belongs to the
kids. So you go tell them, Mr. Policeman and Mr. Whoever-You-Are, with your
uniform and all your folks around you with your big bloody guns. Now weve
got 200 kids here, sir, so what I want you to do is I want you to sit down and
you tell these 200 kids that after tomorrow they cant go to school.
Youre going to tear down their school, because youre going to build
a big building for rich people to live in, or youre going to build a big
Seven Eleven store or something to make a lot of money.
And we want to put one of these tape recorder
machines here, so that we can replay it for the kids who are sick today. And
some of their mommies are not here. And you see those loudspeakers up there?
And then the Bangkok Post and the Thai Rath and the other
newspapers, we want you to tell them about it too, because you think its
so important to build your building here.
And for some reason, these folks dont want to!
Maiers speech trailed off in laughter.
The Human Development Centre also runs Mercy Centre, which is half
a hospice for people in the last stages of AIDS and half a home for street
children. The children, most of them in their early teens, swarm all over the
building, mopping floors, playing guitar, dashing by Maier with a quick wai,
the prayer-like gesture that is the Thai greeting.
The staff consists of eight social workers who work on the streets
a minimum of 30 hours a week, finding children and persuading them to come and
stay. Street children face a variety of dangers, and are often victims of
adults who force them into begging or prostitution. Glue-sniffing among the
children is a common problem.
Apitsit Srirungruang, one of the social workers, said he seeks the
children out in the parks, bus stations, department stores and under bridges.
It is not always easy to convince them to come in. They have freedom
staying on the streets, he said. Here they have to wash clothes and
clean. We tell the kids in a friendly way, there is food and good friends if
they come and stay here.
Saving street kids
Maier keeps the rules of the house at a minimum. We adults
expect them to follow our rules after adults have almost killed them? How
arrogant, how absolutely, bloody arrogant, he said. Adult rules
dont work. Why should they trust adults? We run an open house, and the
kids make a lot of the rules. Theyre in on all the decision-making.
Children done in by adults, as Maier put it, are often
physically abused, like the 14-year-old girl staying at the house, the daughter
of a prostitute and a German man. She lived with an uncle who abused her and
threatened to kill her if she came back to his house. She began dressing as a
boy -- the only way to protect herself, Maier said. At Mercy
Centre, she still wore her hair cut short and dressed in boys clothes.
She is very violent, and her being here ups the level of violence in the
house, Maier said.
A 13-year-old boy at the house came from the north of Thailand
when an agent convinced his family to let him come to Bangkok, where hed
get a good-paying job. Instead, he was forced to beg and give the money to the
agent, who beat the children under his control if they did not bring in enough.
Apitsit said the boy was found at the railway station after he had run away
from the man. The center hopes to send the boy back to his family. In the
meantime, he stays at the house and is studying in the first grade.
The Klong Toey community doesnt always win in the face of
bureaucracy and money. On the way back to the centers office, Maier drove
past what was once a soccer field, now half dug up, surrounded by construction
materials. His anger was plain as he talked about the field being paved over as
a parking lot. I get discouraged by the absolute stupidity of government
officials, he said. They just dont give a shit. It was the
only soccer pitch -- a tiny one for half a million people. Now we have to fight
all over again for a tiny soccer field for kids to play soccer, where no one is
parking cars or dumping trash.
Parking lots and trash are symptomatic of Bangkoks
population and infrastructure problems. During Thailands boom, the city
grew rapidly, planning governed more by money and bribes than safety and logic.
Only about six percent of Bangkoks land is dedicated to roads (compared
to 20-25 percent in most major cities), resulting in notorious traffic jams.
Numerous commercial structures, shopping centers in particular, were built
flagrantly ignoring building and fire codes.
Add to this the increasing rural migration as Thailand moves
toward an industrialized economy, and the human tragedies emerge. Most
well-publicized in the world media have been the young women who come to
Bangkok to work in prostitution, serving both tourists and locals. Some come
voluntarily, hoping to help their families; others are either sold or tricked
into the profession. Nearly all are poor.
Agents hover at stations as trains and buses from up-country
unload passengers, hoping to draw in young female newcomers to the city.
Many young girls have had very few years of formal
education, so when they come into the city, theyre often duped into
thinking that agents are going to introduce them into lucrative working
areas, said Sr. Meg Gallagher, director of the Womens Desk of the
Catholic Migration Commission. They end up largely in prostitution.
The women are also recruited to jobs outside Thailand, usually in
Japan or Taiwan. There they are put even more at the mercy of their employers.
They dont know the language, and many are illegal immigrants: If they
complain theyll end up in a detention center.
As a migrant herself, Wannapha Phantipat, coordinator for the
Womens Desk, understands the difficulties and dangers. Wannapha -- Thais
are commonly called by their first names -- left her native village in the
northeast province of Sakhon Nakorn to work in Bangkok, and then got a job as a
domestic worker in Hong Kong. There she got involved in an organization of
Asian domestic workers, and eventually worked for Thai social agencies in Hong
Kong. She returned to Bangkok when she was offered the job at the Womens
Desk.
Big city dreams
A large part of Wannaphas job involves education, including
going to rural villages to cut off migration problems at the beginning,
encouraging villagers to try to make their way at home and explaining the
dangers they may encounter in Bangkok or elsewhere.
They dont know whats going to happen to them in
Bangkok -- they only know about the good things, Wannapha said.
They dont know the bad. We show videos and slides. They are very
happy to know and also worry about their children going to Bangkok. When we
show them about children in factories, they cry and say they didnt know
that would happen to their children in Bangkok.
There is a certain contradiction, given Wannaphas success.
Like so many others, she could not see how she could live where she grew up,
surviving on its limited economic opportunities.
If I had a chance, Id like to go back to my
village, she said. But theres no way, because if I go back to
the village, Id have to work on the farm or in a small shop.
The Womens Desk has a temporary shelter for the newly
arrived, offering them education and helping them find alternatives to
prostitution. The staff members of the Womens Desk have sometimes gone to
the train station themselves, along with other social workers, to make a
counter offer to women: Come with us and well help you get on your
feet.
I wouldnt say the majority that we have met there and
talked with are willing to come, said Gallagher, a Rhode Island native
who has worked in Thailand for five years. Some are afraid that
were out to harm them. Some say they already have relatives in Bankok. In
some instances thats true, but in many unfortunate cases, theyre
connected with agents that take them into their business.
Most clients learn about the Womens Desk by word of mouth
from friends who have been helped. It has assisted over 2,000 women and young
girls since opening in 1995. Their first client came from the beach resort of
Pattaya, where she had been working as a prostitute in bars heavily patronized
by tourists. The woman stayed at the center for 10 months while enrolled in a
Bangkok beauty school. While it was not a smooth transition by far --
because when anyone violates their body to that extent, you have many
emotional and psychological problems, highs and lows, highs and lows,
said Gallagher -- eventually she graduated from the beauty program at the top
of her class and got a job right away. As we understand, shes doing
very, very well, Gallagher said.
Others, for whatever reason, dont seem to be able to keep on
track. One woman was taken in at the shelter after returning from Japan where
she had worked for five years as a prostitute. She stayed until she got a job
at a Japanese television station in Bangkok. Soon she also got a job at a
Japanese tea house.
Not the most savory place to be, Gallagher said.
Such businesses are often fronts for brothels. The woman continues
to work at both jobs, and Gallagher feared she might return to Japan to
work as a prostitute, or encourage young girls to go, while she gets a
commission.
Migration and prostitution have been contributing factors to the
rapid spread of AIDS in Thailand. Despite the decline in new cases of HIV in
Thailand, the number of women newly diagnosed with HIV continues to rise. The
male to female ratio of those infected has gone from eight-to-one to-four-to
one in recent years, according to the Public Health Ministry. According to the
Thai Red Cross, comparatively few Thai women have engaged in what would be
considered risk behaviors, such as having multiple premarital or
extramarital partners or engaging in commercial sex. Women in Thai culture are
expected to engage in sex only in a marital relationship, while men generally
are not expected to confine themselves to one female partner. The thriving
commercial sex industry resulting from these social norms fueled the growth of
HIV in Thailand. Migration added one more way to spread the virus: Men who
traveled to Bangkok for seasonal work returned to their wives infected with the
virus.
In the countryside
Life outside Bangkok can seem more liveable, if poorer. The thick
smog clears, if not the trash on the side of the roads, the traffic thins and
the lush natural beauty of the rainy season offers its own feast for the eyes
amid the typically drab towns and dusty villages. The people in the countryside
are friendlier, particularly in the poverty-stricken northeast region of Issan,
where even the intrepid tourists who want to see the real Thailand
dont often venture, given the regions lack of attractions and
English-speaking Thais. But the brave are rewarded by people who shower the
rare foreigner with curiosity and small kindnesses -- candy, a drink of water,
a ride to the bus station.
It is easy to see the vast economic disparity that exists between
the rural and urban populations in this part of the country. Nevertheless, I
could also find signs of growth since I had been there four years ago. My
village of Tha Kantho had begun to see some development: The school now had
computers and two new buildings to ease chronic overcrowding; the post office
had moved out of someones home and into a genuine public building; a few
new stores had cropped up; and there was now an air-conditioned bus running
from the village to Bangkok. A number of my students had gone on to college.
Even the family with whom I had lived had acquired a phone and a computer.
Whether this modest growth can be sustained in Tha Kantho and for
the poor throughout the country remains an open question. That struck me when I
visited the rural secondary school where I once taught. Among the usual
questions I had been asked countless times by Thai students (Do you like
Thailand? Do you have a boyfriend? Can you eat sticky
rice?), one of my former students asked me, What do you think about
the economic problems in Thailand? I didnt know what to tell her. I
said I wished for the best and hoped Thai people werent hurt too much.
A few months after my summer visit, a new government finally put
the brakes on the plummeting baht, Thailands main unit of currency. After
Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh resigned Nov. 3, political parties battled
for power for a week until Chuan Leekpai, leader of the opposition Democrat
Party, formed a coalition government. The passage of a new constitution this
fall has also brought hope for governmental reforms.
The baht and the stock market may have stabilized, but that will
not stem increasing layoffs, government cutbacks or inflation that will affect
average Thais. The new coalition still has serious economic problems to
address.
So there may not be any new buildings in Tha Kantho any time soon.
Computers and even telephones may once again be unattainable luxuries. My
students graduating from high school will face limited job opportunities, not
only in their village but even in the big cities.
Those in college or moving on to it next spring will have four
years for the situation to improve for them, though careers that best use their
talents will probably not be found in Tha Kantho. Some may be able to stay in
the area if they find work in the provincial capitol.
The worry may crack through the graciousness of the people. But in
the country, even in Bangkok, Thais endure in their own easy-going fashion.
The Land of Smiles is not just a tourist slogan, but an expression
of the way the people face a challenge: with humor, a shrug of the shoulders
and one of the most common phrases in the language. Mai pen
rai, they say -- Never mind. Itll be all right.
To a frustrated Westerner dealing with the petty problems of
travel, its a maddening phrase. But for Thais, it can be a way to get
through a bad year with a smile.
National Catholic Reporter, December 26,
1997
|