Part 1: The Senior Trip
Exciting day! There's nothing quite like waking up in the cold, drizzling winter and knowing that by the end of the day you'll be hanging out in the tropics. Because of where we were meeting up to take the bus to the airport, Nelle and I did have to walk in the drizzling wintery rain, wearing only clothes that we would want to have with us in Thailand for 2 weeks, so it was a very brisk walk, to keep us warm, and because we were, as always, running a little behind. We were each put in charge of a group of about 8 seniors, organized by color, with bandannas to match. I was the Reds (Be the Reds!). In the past, herding 50 seniors around inside of airports, with tickets and Alien Registration and money changing and immigrations and EVERYTHING, has ended up being a minor disaster, which it shouldn't take too much work to imagine. So we keep a pretty close eye on our kids.
Travel there was long. ("there" is the Maekok River Village Resort, or MRVR, which is where we live while on the senior trip. The British couple who built/own the place do run a resort, but the place also has facilities specifically designed for teams of students coming through for a variety of reasons.) We flew into Bangkok, and caught a connecting flight up to Chaing Mai, a fairly big city up north. We spent our first night at a hotel here, right next to a night market that is pretty popular with the kids. This location is also the most likely source of "The Plague" (more on that later). The next day, we took big vans even further up north, almost right to the border between Thailand and Myanmar, to Chaing Rai, which is where we stayed. It wasn't that bad, I guess--only a day and a half of constant travel--but it felt like longer. Probably because we had to be constantly vigilant of the kids. Pretty much everyone was exhausted once we got to the MRVR.
The kids were all in bunk-rooms, 6 kids to a room, and the chaperons were in single rooms in the gender-specific dorms. What to do with a married couple, though? Well, they do run a resort.... :D So Nelle and I got to say in the resort section of the place, which was really classy. It's $80 a night to stay there, and it was just really tasteful and beautiful. Far nicer than we could have afforded.Once at the MRVR, there were a variety of activities the staff there had planned for us, both on-site and out in the hillsides. On-site, we first did some team-building things, then various color groups cycled through a rotation of activities like Hiking, Mountain Biking, Tubing down a river, a low ropes course, and probably some other stuff. We also worked some in the local community with the hill-tribes.
**Explanation**
About 100 years ago, the border between (then) Burma and (then) Siam was the Maekok river (which I have now tubed down). The powers that be realized, however, that if the river were to say, flood (not an impossible scenario to imagine) and change it's course, the boundary between these 2 countries would shift. Worse, if the river were to cut a new channel for itself and create
an oxbow lake, it was conceivably possible that people could wake up one morning and be citizens of a different country, if the river had changed course drastically enough. To fix this situation, the political boundary was moved northward, to the main ridge of mountains north of the river--the watershed. Depending on the specific location, this newly designated land between the old border and new that now belonged to Thailand was, in some cases, a lot of land--enough that there were not only whole villages, but whole ethic groups, lived between the two borders. These people now technically live in Thailand, but the Thai government has never really been that excited about welcoming them--they are, after all, not actually "Thai", but Burmese--so they don't receive the same kind of support a normal citizen does--schools, ID cards, public utilities, etc.**End Explanation**
CAJ has gone back to the same area for 3 years now, raising money to buy the materials needed
for the students to work to improve the quality of life in these villages. This year, the studnts worked to fix up a schools bathroom (it had been used for years by people wandering by the school, and had deteriorated to the point that it was pretty much unusable), and to continue work on a nursery facility. We actually got to spend the night out at the school in tents one night, after a fun ceremony where the elders of the village and the heads of the schools swapped songs around a campfire with us. things were organized so that out of the 6 color groups, 4 were working and 2 were teaching english and playing games with the kids. It was at the beginning of this work time when The Plague struck.At first we thought it was just that the students weren't staying hydrated--it was super hot, and we were all working really hard. So, at first, when one or two kids came and complained about not feeling well, we gave them a hard time for not drinking water, and told them they coudl lay inside until they felt better. And it was the ones who were already pretty sickly, anyways, so we weren't that surprised. At first it was one kid every other hour or so, not that big of a deal. One of them had a temperature, so the nurse was checking her regularly. She got the chills, OK, but it was still something that she could have picked up in Tokyo, the flu or something. Then one of the "dehydrated" kids started getting chills, and we found out he had a high temperature too. Just on a whim, the nurse checked a few other, and sure enough! Temperatures all around! The most common symptom seemed to be diarrhea and a fever, with the chills, aches, and everything. The slow trickle of kids getting sick increased in frequency, until more than half the kids were lying down, or had been taken back to the resort. The nurse started getting concerned about our food and water supply being contaminated, and started asking where the nearest clinic or hospital was.
At the peak, something like 33 out or 47 kids were all sick at the same time. It all came to a head the 3rd night there, when some of the students were so dehydrated the nurse wanted them on IV's. While we were there, the doctors did some tests, and came back with a prognosis--Typhoid Fever. AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaggggg! The plague is upon us! Would this be the last senior trip for CAJ? I ended up doing a night shift in the hospital with two sick students who were getting IV's.
One got done after about an hour, and I called back to the resort to have him picked up, but the last kid was taking forever. Finally, sitting around until about midnight--nearly 4 hours--reading and watching stuff on my iPod (and watchin stuff through open doors--yikes!), a nurse came over and told me that the kid had probably another 5 hours left to go on his IV. We reached an agreement--I could take the studnent back to the resort, with his IV still in, and bring him back in the morning before her shift got off. But what to do with the IV? I learned the hard way that it actually is really important to keep the IV bags elevated. (Ever wonder why the tubes don't just fill with blood? Well, I still don't know, but I do know that they will if the bag isn't raised!) I asked if, since we would be coming right back, and she'd still be there and everything, we could just take the IV stand from the hospital with us, and bring it back when we came back in the morning. She agreed! Perfect!All told, 40 out of 47 kids came down with it, and all the chaperons but Nelle and I got it. Once more tests were run, the general consensus is that it was food poisoning from the hotel we stayed at when we were traveling through Chiang Mai. So, no Typhoid. It was still scary in the moment, though.
After our time had ended, we headed out to the airport in Chiang Rai for the flight back to Bangkok, and then Tokyo (for everyone but Nelle, Tom, and I!!). To get to the airport, though, we got to have some fun! The Maekok River runs right next to the place, and they have a dock and everything, so we got to take these long, skinny boats for 2 hours down the river, which, after being filthy and hot and dirty, was just a welcome change of pace. The kids and I played "Hey Cow", as there were cows and water buffalo periodically along the shore or in the water. We did get stuck on a sandbar once, actually only 5 minutes after we had started our journey. As they zoomed by, all the other groups laughed at us struggling in the knee-deep water trying to dislodge our boat. It was great!
The boats didn't take us all the way to the airport, but they did take us to an elephant camp! We all got to have a turn lumping along on the back of an elephant, which is actually a somewhat jarring experience. The trek took over an hour, and included an amble through the river for the last few
hundred meters. A lot of the kids bought banannas and sugar cane for the elephants, so we had fun feeding them all. They really are such big, gentle animals. Some of the kids got to "drive" the elephant, sitting on its head, while the actual driver just wandered off, talking to the other elephant handlers. I didn't get to, sadly, but we still managed to have fun. There's always hope that I'll go on this again next year!From there, we took vans to the airport, and flew into Bangkok. Nelle and Tom and I were supposed to stay with the group as long as we possibly could before starting our own Thailand Adventure, but we weren't quite sure what that would look like. The kids had about 5 hours in the airport between flights, and we were expecting to have to hang out with them until 10pm, although hoping not to. As it so happened, the airport separated the connecting flight people from the baggage claim people almost immediately, which meant that we would leave our kids behind. It was actually kind of sudden--most of the kids were in front of us, up escalators and everything, when we realized that this was our parting point. The other adults were with us, so there was no confusion, but most kids didn't even realize that we weren't behind them anymore until they gathered up a few minutes later.
And from that point on, we were on our own Thailand Adventure, this time down south in the tropical-land!! What happened on this trip? Where were we? What was it like to go back to Koh Chang? And why didn't I wash my hair the whole time? Check back in a bit to find out!
