Judi goes to Bangkok

When I first met my NGO ‘counterpart’, the program director, he asked me whether I would consider coming to Bangkok with him and the director of our NGO. The idea of a trip to Bangkok sounded appealing, but I questioned him closely on the purpose of the trip and why he wanted me to come.

It turns out that the trip was for networking, connecting with other NGO’s involved with HIV and that the meetings would be conducted in English, since Khmer and Thai languages are very different. The program director felt that my English would help to smooth the way --- so I agreed to go.

I kept asking which NGO’s we would visit and got a vague response, until the day before we were to leave when I insisted on knowing. Turned out that we were going for 3 days and that we would ‘probably arrange the meetings when we got there’. Besides, he had a list of potential organizations to which he had sent emails and they hadn’t yet responded. Well, that just wasn’t quite good enough for my Western sensibilities. I suggested rather strongly that he contact them again. I even drafted an email for him --- which he finally asked me to send. Luckily the people in Bangkok were very kind and by the next morning, we had five appointments set up. Phew!!

At this point, I should mention that the director didn’t speak English as far as I knew and that we really needed the program director as her translator. Well, one does learn flexibility in these situations, because when we arrived at the airport, the airline turned away the program director on the grounds that his Thai visa wasn’t valid – which it wasn’t since he had already used it earlier in the month. He was sure he could rectify the situation by driving quickly over to the Thai embassy and coming on a later plane. So, the director and I flew off together, smiling at each other and using a lot of hand signals to communicate, fully expecting my counterpart to arrive later that night. It was not to be – the Thai embassy staff were fully-occupied for two days looking after their PM who was visiting Cambodia – and they weren’t issuing visas.

The story does go on, but I’ll try to summarize the Bangkok part of the trip…. The hotel that was supposedly booked for us, had never heard of us. We stayed one night there and moved to a cheaper alternative. (The first one was 4 stars for $77 a night)….The director does speak a lot more English than she had let on (and a lot more Khmer than I speak). Her uncle who is a Cambodian-American was in Bangkok so came along to some of the meetings as a translator, but didn’t really understand any of the HIV or NGO language so wasn’t a lot of help (but he was very charming). ….Most of the meetings were with organizations that weren’t really relevant to the work of my NGO and I had to stretch to try and think of questions that would build some kind of credibility for us…. On the good news side, the director and I really bonded and I think this will help with my work going forward. Bangkok is a really cool modern city – so I was able to get a new power cord for my computer, 2 lbs of Starbucks coffee and new swimming goggles. Despite my extreme frustration at the beginning, it wasn’t all a write-off!!

The photos in this post: the lovely smiling lady was very happy because someone had just bought her complete supply of bread crusts for feeding the birds and the fish in Lumphini Park in Bangkok. The second photo is the NGO director and me before we went on a river cruise. We even got to do some line dancing!!

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