This log runs through February 7, 2001

January 10, 2001 in Kanchanaburi, Thailand
Yesterday, we finally returned to Kanchanaburi, via night train. This week we're preparing for our move to the Kwai River Hospital near the Burma border, which we'll do this weekend. This  This is the complex we mentioned earlier, and these are the wonderful people who took us to several remote villages where we helped local people with health problems, and with their first celebration of Christmas.

For about a month, we'll volunteer whatever skills we can offer, and do whatever duties the hospital can find for we non-medical workers. We are something of an oddity, as most western volunteers there are doctors and nurses whose duties are obvious and predetermined. We hope they take maximum advantage of us! They have several major and complex computer projects they'd like us to undertake, and we'll also design some brochures and videotapes for the hospital's use. We'll likely also serve as carpenters, electricians, chauffeurs, English tutors, pack horses, and anything else they need. We are heading to Huay Molai (the village where the hospital is located) with an open mind, and hope that we can be of some assistance.

We will live in staff housing, in a nice little apartment, and are making arrangements to hire someone to shop, cook, do our laundry, and clean every day. This is really a necessity, since there are no markets or restaurants anywhere within walking distance. We are a bit apprehensive about moving to this compound among the hill tribes, because it is very isolated (from our perspective), and we will have no Internet or telephone access. We can hitch an hour-long ride (10 miles!) to Sangklaburi, where we can sometimes check e-mail, but overall, we will be without any outside news or contact other than our short-wave radio. This will be quite an experiment for us.

To those who contributed money to the mission hospital at our request, THANK YOU SO MUCH! Your gifts will make a huge difference in the care of people who suffer from Malaria, TB, and various other maladies including Leprosy. Because of these contributions, mostly from our friends and family, the hospital is now constructing long-overdue isolation wards for contagious patients. We will update this website with photos of these new digs as we can. This undertaking is in addition to our personal project in which we handed out hundreds of blankets, mosquito nets, shoes, toothbrushes and other items to people in need.

January 12 in Kanchanaburi, Thailand
While we find it fascinating when an elephant walks up to us on the street, we're concerned about the care these animals receive. Their owners make money by selling bags of fruit to feed the elephants, but in often they don't get enough to eat, or a good food balance, and walking on the pavement is hard on elephant's feet.

Tigers are another story. We visited a Wat west of town to see caged Tigers and Cheetahs, and many other animals on the compound. While the Tigers were beautiful (and huge), we heard reports that some are not healthy -- and that while they are in cages and seem docile around the Monks, they have grabbed passing adults and children by reaching between the bars.

We have met a wildlife specialist who says the only food some captive animals get is that purchased by visitors to give them. We'll research this topic and report more later.

January 16, 2001 in Huay Molai (why-mo-lie), northern Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand
We moved 140 miles northwest of Kanchanaburi, and only eight miles from Burma where we live in an apartment with a comfortable verandah on the grounds of the Kwai River Christian Hospital Complex. While making additional financial contributions toward the hospital's construction project to create isolation wards (with most of the money already contributed by our generous friends), we will work here a month or more, depending on the success of our visa renewal efforts. We continue to rent the house in Kanchanaburi town until the end of January, and will soon move the rest of our belongings to our apartment here.

Don is servicing the hospital's few computers and gives computer lessons to staff, finding that using the Thai version of Windows is a major challenge. Rebecca teaches English and is creating brochures about the facility, which we hope will spur contributions and more volunteerism. We are offering to do anything and everything we can, and Becky was surprised to find herself administering polio vaccine to about a hundred children and babies! Someday they'll look at their medical records and wonder whose signature is in the polio box. We love this opportunity to help out and to pursue creative ideas in a "wild west" atmosphere, free of bureaucracy. Readers of previous logs know this remote facility is the only source of medical services to many Thais, Karen and Mon villagers, and displaced people from Burma living in nearby Refugee Camps. The amazing range of services performed here are outlined in our Special Notice.

Living here is an isolated existence. We have no newspapers, television, radio, telephone, magazines or Internet -- there isn't even a town, just clusters of houses in this mountainous area of forest and jungle -- including right outside our door. So that we have more time for projects, we employ a local Karen woman to cook, buy groceries from the morning "food truck," clean our apartment, wash and iron our laundry, prepare two full Thai/Karen meals a day (with a set table awaiting), and wash dishes. All in all, it's a fascinating place to be.

January 17, 2001 in Huay Molai, Thailand
There are ugly little reminders of the situation in nearby Burma. Today we noticed a man with a hand injury -- a gunshot wound. A Karen minority who lives in Thailand, he had been hired to work on a road project across the border in Burma. Burmese Army soldiers heard him and others speaking Karen and, deciding they must be Karen resistance forces, started shooting -- wounding this man and killing four others. A month ago the same Thai contractor taking people to work in Burma lost several other employees the same way.

Early this morning, a mere hundred feet from our apartment, two men -- presumably Burmese -- stole a locked and chained motorbike and made for the Burma border. Failing to stop at a Thai Army checkpoint near Three Pagoda Pass, they were shot at and chased, but got away. The bike was returned to our friend. We never heard the thieves making off with the motorbike, possibly because of the incredible chorus of frogs, lizards and other jungle creatures who serenade us all night.

Hospital report: a Leprosy victim was treated today, as if to underscore the importance of our isolation ward construction project. A sad note: in an earlier log we mentioned that Don gave blood in anticipation of a difficult operation being faced by a man with a Typhoid ulcer. He had felt better when we saw him at Christmastime and he even attended the community Christmas party in a wheelchair. We were very saddened to learn yesterday that his recovery reversed, and he died.

January 18, 2001 in Huay Molai, Thailand ("Under Five Day")
"Under Five" is one the hospital's most important projects, and Becky helped with it this week. On designated days, villagers come to the hospital with their kids who are under five years old -- including families who traverse the border to travel from Burma for this occasion. Here, the babies are weighed, examined and given various immunizations. These children are fortunate and may live healthier lives than their parents, in large part due to the health education provided by dedicated hospital staff.

Rebecca asked Olivia is she needed any extra help, thinking of paperwork or organizational necessities of the clinic. To her great surprise, Rebecca spent the rest of the day wrestling with toddlers to administer polio vaccine. Poor kids, the stuff tastes terrible, and they were nervous wrecks from the nearby inoculations.

The hospital's "Prenatal Program" is equally popular and important to the target patients. And it's fun to watch Program Director Olivia use her simple, archaic, and perfectly accurate trumpet to examine the expecting mothers.

January 19, 2001 at the Kwai River Hospital near the Burma Border
The situation in Burma is growing worse. We've prepared a document outlining it. Here is one paragraph:

Ai Mya, male, 6 years old: "The Burmese soldiers came to my village and beat my father to death. I ran away with my mother and we came here. I was very afraid. I am still afraid. I will be a (Shan) soldier when I grow up. I want to fight the Burmese because they killed my father. They beat my father to death with sticks, there were 20 of them."

We have met some fascinating people who are attempting, under extremely difficult and dangerous circumstances to help people being attacked by the Burma Army.

January 20, 2001, Huay Molai to Kanchanaburi
We are making a brief trip to our "other home" in Kanchanaburi today (five hours south) to take care of various duties such as updating the website and pleading with the Thai Immigration Authorities visa extensions. Most likely, they'll only grant 15 days, which means we must head for the border, then re-enter to gain another 30 days. The nearest official border crossing is with Laos, on the opposite end of the country.

We will also go to the world famous Ponthip Plaza in Bangkok to purchase equipment for the hospital's computers, which we are trying to keep in operation. While in Bangkok, we'll also inquire about Laotian visas.

As today is Inauguration Day in the USA, we extend our warmest congratulations to the new President and Vice President.

Book Tip: For an amazing account of the building of the "death railway" and Kwai River Bridge in WW2, read "The Railway Man" by Eric Lomax.

January 22, 2001 in Kanchanaburi
Immigration only gave us 15 more days, but will consider our request for more. On February 5 we'll know whether we have the leave the county within seven days after that, or can take our time. If we have to leave, we'll go to Laos, receiving a 30 day Thai visa when we return.

January 23, 2001 in Huay Molai
Strange news day. In China they executed a bus driver for driving at night and running over two people. In Beijing, five people set themselves on fire. Here in Thailand, a Monk who raised money to help with the national debt announced he didn't think the money was properly used and he would therefore cut off his right arm.

January 24, 2001 in Huay Molai
Don is finding that computer maintenance and repair at this remote hospital is vastly difficult than back in Washington. Here, a run to the store for parts is a grueling 14 hour r/t bus ride to Bangkok.

January 30,2001
It would be hard to imagine a medical facility where a doctor would need a broader range of skills. Every day Doctor Phil faces a withering array of medical challenges, and yet has no permanent physicians or expensive equipment or facilities. Even so, visiting medical teams marvel at the care he provides here.

Take for example the motorcycle taxi driver who came in the other night with a badly broken leg. There were multiple compound fractures, made worse when friends tossed him in the back of a pickup and bounced him many miles down a horrible dirt road to get here.

Today this man lives in the hospital's hallway, awaiting completion of the construction project so he can move into a room. He will be here three months, not in a cast, but in traction -- a gallon and a half worth of traction in the form of water jugs. There is no cast and no facility to fashion one. In about a month a huge cyst will begin to form at the site of the break, and very slowly the bone, held in place by the water-weight, will begin to mend.

Not the latest technique, you say? Right. But here is a man with almost no resources who, with the love of a loyal wife who stays with him day and night and sleeps on a hospital bench in the lobby, will eventually return to productive life. That would not have been possible were it not for this remote jungle hospital making the best of limited resources, a place where the only doctor will walk over from his house at 4 am to check on people if necessary, and where nobody is ever turned away.

We have learned that an area one hundred miles north of here can claim the most resistant form of Malaria in the world. Our area comes in third. Other than mosquito nets, insect repellant and screened in-areas, which most people here don't have, protection from getting the disease is almost nil because it has become resistant to various drugs. The problem is complicated by the movement of people.

For example, when Cambodia opened up to foreigners in the late '80's, gem miners swarmed over from Thailand, and many contracted Malaria. The next big "gem strike" took them to western Thailand, where mosquitos spread the infection among more people, who then took it elsewhere. Plus, there are very high infection rates in Burma, and infected people fleeing the civil war there bring it to Thailand.

Meanwhile, medical science has strained to follow the spread and to find new medicines as fast at people have moved, largely because the disease itself quickly becomes drug resistant. This is why the Malaria Research Center at the hospital, where US and Thai Army medical teams visit to work on the problem, is valuable not only to locals but to people in Malaria infected areas throughout the world.

Our thanks again to the generous people who are making contributions to this facility, at our request, to provide ways of isolating infectious patients from others.

Note to people planning travel to rural Thailand: While we are not qualified to give medical advice, the doctor here did advise us to stop taking taking common anti-Malarial drugs. In this area, they aren't effective and some have side effects. Just be alert for symptoms and go to the doctor with any fever.

We see that busy Geography classes in America are sending e-mails throughout the world in order to log the locations of people who reply. While we enjoy this, we urge people not to respond to the the request that the message be forwarded "to everyone you know." That may seem innocent, but it clogs Internet access, especially where it's so difficult and slow already.

Special note to Geography Class students: We are at the village of Huay Molai, Thailand (you won't find it on a map because it's only a small collection of tiny houses) about 8 miles east of the closest Burma border and exactly 175 air miles northwest of Bangkok. We are 7,890 "great circle" miles (the closest distance between two points over the curved surface of the earth) from Don's family in Livingston, Montana and 8,089 miles from Becky's family in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. We are 8,290 miles from Los Angeles, California. We are 8,688 miles from our former home in the Washington, DC area. The time here is 12 hours later than Washington. If we flew from where we are directly north until we were over the North Pole, and then continue in a straight line directly south, we would pass over Cleveland, Ohio after traveling 8,532 miles.

Our precise location is: North 15 degrees, 9 minutes, 49 seconds; East 98 degrees, 21 minutes. Here is a map of western Thailand. We're just off the northwest corner of the map. Hope you get an "A".

February 1, 2001 Huay Molai (why-mo-lie), Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand
Hooray for Diarrhea Night! Back in the days when we were attending black tie events, it would have been hard to imagine getting excited about attending "diarrhea night" in the jungle. But times have changed, and so have we. We happily joined Olivia and other hospital health workers in their evening visit to a nearby village for Diarrhea Night.

We have been seeking the world's nooks and crannies, not knowing what we would find. Last night's trip with Olivia and hospital staff up a dirt road, past Army checkpoints and dire warnings against tourist travel, to this collection of jungle huts known as Molakai was exactly the kind of experience we have been seeking.

Olivia, one of the superstars here at the hospital, is amazing. Since the mid 1970's she has helped people in small Karen villages understand the basics of health care. Surveys show a marked reduction in death rates in the places she has taught about things like malaria, TB, nutrition, and baby care.

Over the years, Olivia has refined some ingenious methods to gather audiences for her messages, and keep them interested. In the early evening, she takes a hospital truck to a tiny village, sets a battery powered TV on the tailgate, and there, among bamboo jungle huts that have no electricity or utilities of any kind -- is an instant outdoor movie theater!

Tonight, Molakai villagers flocked in, held spellbound by the antics of Charlie Chaplain. Thirty minutes later, with a promise of more movies to come, Olivia stopped the tape, whipped out her pictures and charts, and delivered a lecture about a local health topic. Here in the so called "No Man's Land" between Burma and Thailand, she and her team talked to 60 people, mostly children, about how to avoid intestinal diseases and diarrhea. They listened carefully as she explained the importance of clean water and personal hygiene. Studies have shown a dramatic reduction in the deaths of children as a direct result of Olivia's work on the many challenges faced by poor people living in the jungle.

After the talk, as promised, she showed another 15 minute video. This one was about ocean fish and scuba diving. We could only imagine what a fantastic world these people were envisioning while watching this video, here, in this landlocked No Man's Land military zone on the border. The TV was switched off, goodbyes were waved, and we, the unfathomably lucky foreigners, slipped out of a village so dark that someone passing close by would never know it was there.

Before our expedition, we thought of ourselves as compassionate and understanding people. But we had never been exposed to places like Molakai, and therefore couldn't predict the depth of emotion we would feel as people, some of whom had fled in terror from their Burmese homes, stood in a jungle clearing and, in the thin moonlight, looked up to Olivia, and even to us, for answers. We saw innocence, hopelessness and hopefulness -- the things that inspire us to help children like this.

If we could be granted a single wish, it would be that secure and prosperous people throughout the world would occasionally reflect on the medical, financial, and emotional needs of a tiny child in a jungle clearing. And meanwhile, maybe these unfortunate people will learn that people like you exist.

February 2, 2001 in Huay Molaik, Thailand
Not every night is "diarrhea night" in the jungle. Last night in our hospital complex apartment home was Movie Night. On our laptop, we ran "Meet the Parents." We bought the movie on CD-ROM in Bangkok at what seemed like a good price. Now we know why: it was filmed by a patron at a movie theater and copied onto disks! How do we know? In one scene, as Ben Stiller is kissing his girlfriend, someone in the audience in front of the camera gets up and walks out! -- as can clearly be seen in the lower left corner, of this photo taken while the movie was playing on our computer.

February 7, 2001....leaving Thailand! (Temporarily)
It has been an unusual few days, starting with a difficult 4 hour bus ride from Huay Molai to Kanchanaburi where we updated this website.

On the 4th we went on into Bangkok with one of the hospital's broken computers and had it repaired before returning to Kanchanaburi and, on the 5th, received our requested Thai visa extension (to April 15). Only hours later we received an e-mail message that Don's dad was in emergency surgery in Arizona.

We believe that world exploration is very important, but being with one's parents when they face medical challenges is paramount. We hastily finished up (patched up, is more like it) our volunteer projects at the hospital and will depart tonight at 2 am for the Bangkok airport to catch an early morning flight to Los Angeles. By tomorrow morning, February 8, we'll be there.

By NO means does this end the expedition. We have many more photos to post and much more to report -- not to mention new plans to make for Nepal, perhaps Russia, and many other exotic destinations in coming years. However, when we quit our jobs and sold everything in order to become full time gypsies, one of our reasons was to gain the ability to be with our families and friends when they might really need us. This is one of those times and, as such, we have no regrets about radically changing our plans so swiftly and leaving Thailand today.

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