Can you possibly believe this?

WWF reports that a new species is discovered every two days in the Mekong region. Can you believe that? Among the ten species highlighted in the WWF report is the snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri). Found in Myanmar’s remote and mountainous Kachin state, locals say the monkey can be spotted with its head between its knees in wet weather to avoid rain running into its upturned nose. 

A staggering array of 28 reptiles was also newly discovered in 2010, including an all-female lizard (Leiolepis ngovantrii) in Vietnam that reproduces via cloning without the need for male lizards. Five
species of carnivorous pitcher plants were also discovered across Thailand and Cambodia, with some species capable of luring in and consuming small rats, mice, lizards and even birds.



This only confirms the biodiversity of the human race as you might know humans who hide their heads between their legs when it rains, all- females who reproduce through cloning and people who use pitchers to eat rats, mice lizards and even small birds.

Children reign

Catapulted from Savannakhet to an alternative school in Vientiane. My first day was with 36 seven year-olds. The din was so loud some children were trying to protect their eardrums. It was home alone.

So at first I thought seven year-olds were a pain, but only because I could imagine them as the adults they would become. Strange how a pudgy seven year-old could so easily morph into a beer-bellied slob – in my mind.

Then, I started to understand them as children, not as misbehaved adults. I started to appreciate the excuse I had to experience delight as a child. Mind you, I’ve never sung in public before, but singing and dancing is at the core of being a child. Now, I’m the elementary school teacher looking for puppets in the market and sifting threw garbage bins for good arts & crafts materials.

Let’s do a curious Benjamin Button and see if we can design a curriculum where children grow up to be responsible and capable adults without losing their divine delight of being.

The good and the bad

The good can be good and the bad can be really bad. Shall we play the “Let me top that story” game?

So I heard about this teacher. He went to class drunk. That’s not surprising because many teachers drink before their evening class so it’s likely that some are drunk, right? Well, he was probably drunk enough to slur his consonants and the students couldn’t understand him though he’s pretty incomprehensible anyway. So someone asked, “Teacher, have you been drinking?” or maybe more directly, “Teacher, are you freak’n drunk?”

I guess he was because apparently he slammed his fist down on the desk and continued to rant and rave for the next 30 minutes. In retaliation, he gave the students a hopelessly difficult passage to translate (probably something he wrote himself) and then failed them all. How come nobody got that on a mobile and let it go Lao viral? Or did someone forget to flush?

Rocking and Rolling

Can’t say it’s a boring life. Got kicked out of the Teachers Training College. Forbidden to enter their grounds. I’d covered too much of it. They were making threats so I packed and left Savannakhet in two days leaving 3,000 books stashed and $2,600 US paid on rent.

No time to lick my wounds. Schools in Vientiane are lining up for training in signing. Years ago, I was doing dental work, trying to get teachers to work on their “skills”. Now, school directors are fully onboard and students are rockets at the pad.

I visited a school and everyone greeted me in sign language. I was flabbergasted to see a girl practicing signs during the flag raising ceremony. From 50 yards away, I could see her saying “go home, white, mango”. Then they spotted me and we greeted each other though I was three floors up and behind a pane of glass.

The teacher thought it would be easier to gather the 7 and 8 year olds together so here I had more than 100 children. Maybe this was some kind of record. We had a mini rock concert and I didn’t even need a mic. No electric guitar either. 

Rice is growing

Rice is growing, green and tall. Or at least in some places. This is the year of devastating floods and much of the rice has drowned. What do people do when they don’t have rice? I’m not quite sure.

Rice is growing green and tall. That is, if it can survive. Anything can grow green and tall if given the chance, if not choked off at the roots or smothered at its tips.

If people know that rice can grow green and tall, it really takes someone hideous to cut it early, dry it and sell it for private profit as pig feed.

On the other hand, the desire for an easy buck is easy to explain. What could possibly motivate someone to snip roots or smother leaves just for the sake of doing so? Can they be forgiven because they don’t know, even if it’s their chosen profession to raise rice?

I’m searching for a place where rice can grow because I am convinced that all students can grow green and tall.

Reaction in Progress: Indicators (continued)

The definition of indicator has something to do with pointing fingers. Yes, I do that sometimes. But I’d like to offer a simple indicator to measure the quality of a teacher. Measure the minutes. How late are they?

The typical teacher is around 15 minutes late. If they leave the teachers’ room 5 minutes late, it’s perfectly reasonable and then if the classroom is far away, another 10 minutes is quite sensible. It’s hot. Why rush?

I worked in Japan for 15 years. It is in my system. My blood changes color if I’m late. In the 15 years I worked in Japan, I remember being late one time.

I know a few teachers who are not late. One says that his time to teach is never enough. He even finds ways so as not to waste time taking attendance. He knows each student by name and is proud that he instilled confidence to learn in every student. Giving students confidence requires planning and monitoring, consulting and amending and this takes time.

I was surprised with another teacher when I found him in class before I arrived. It happened more than once. What’s going on? I noticed a qualitative change in him. Rather than give tests with questions like, “How many personal pronouns are there in the English language?” to students who admitted that they can’t even write the alphabet, he negotiated with them. “What can you do? What do you need?”

The students agreed on clear and reasonable goals and rose to the challenge. The teacher gave them an oral test and looked at me repeatedly in surprise at what the students could do. Seeing students thrive on success rather than be browbeaten by defeat is something I suspect most teachers don’t see, don’t look for, don’t recognize and surely don’t cultivate. This one teacher was delighted at what he saw and I’m sure that is what brought him to class on time.

Back to indicators, I won’t argue with the number crunchers, but maybe we should just use definitions of “indicators” from chemistry or biology. Both are quite useful.

“A compound that changes color at a certain PH value or in the presence of a particular substance and can be used to monitor acidity, alkalinity or the progress of a reaction.”

“An animal or plant species that can be used to infer conditions in a particular habitat.”

Indicating the indicator

I hardly think I can get you interested in downloading, “Indicators of Educational Development: Concept and Definitions www.educationforallinindia.com/.../ ..”, but you might glance at the pretty diagrams and the techno speak.

Even the guy at the ice cream shop was asking me, “What are your indicators? At what level do you feel you’ve succeeded in what you’re trying to do? How do you determine that education has improved?

Strange that in the same day a half naked man at the herbal sauna asked, “Give me a number. How far do you think you’ve come? Ah, forget the abstract numbers. Considering your effort, you’ve got to be at least 50% there.”

That’s how well I’m known. That’s how much some people are concerned of my sanity and that’s how futile many people think the whole thing is.

Nobody really knows how to measure things. You can’t measure a stench. In this paper, with all the pretty diagrams and mind-bending formulas, there is only one short paragraph for indicators on educational quality. It’s easier to measure access to a school in inches and yards, how many schools have toilets, how many students enroll and how many drop-out. When it comes to quality, this is a quote:

“The indicators of coverage and efficiency fail to give any idea about children completing an educational level and also the level of their educational attainment.”

This sentence is even better: “Educational attainment is measured in terms of learners’ achievement. Learners’ achievement is also considered one of the important indicators of quality of education.” (I think this is a tautology, but I go cross-eyed first.)

Furthermore: “In India, data on learners’ achievement is not available on a regular basis, as the same do not form part of the regular collection of statistics.”

So even after this disclaimer, the report spits up its indicators of educational quality that include; “completion rate”, “gross completion ratio”, “net completion ratio” and “graduation rate”. Pardon my English, but this is so stupid. In Laos, it should be, “gross rate of complete inability to communicate in English despite being awarded an A and an advanced degree.” Oh, come on. Completion rate depends on how much you pay. Everyone knows that.

Battle over words and minds

Words, definitions in particular, can be used to challenge conventional thought. What term took on the idea that all legitimate learning only happens in schools?  I would vote for the all too unimaginative term, “non formal education.” There are even disputes as whether to use a hyphen or not.

The  “socio (hyphen) cultural accepted norm” for learning was first challenged by Scribner and Cole in 1973 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-formal_education). They said, “Most things in life are better learnt through informal processes, citing language learning as an example.” They encouraged us to look at what happens in indigenous communities for more proof.

There is no such thing as an exciting term without an agenda. What’s in it for who(m)? For starters, online distance learning programs could issue PhDs in “life learning” for those who like to travel to places like India. There’s got to be a market for that.

If this is the case, the desire for certification takes us back to formal education and the reason most people endure insufferable years in a classroom.

How has the term been mined in development work? There’s not much sense in awarding degrees for rice farming. Instead, organizations can cull money for “non formal education” projects in literacy for adult learners. I’ve heard first hand that this is much harder to accomplish than it sounds, but it looks wonderful on paper.

The convenience of this funding is that it is done outside the formal schools, a place that is wrapped in red tape and almost impossible to change. However, at the end of the day, we need to consider that many adults are illiterate not because they didn’t go to school, but because they went to school.

So it all depends on how you define the term and why you even bother. If for example, we define non formal education as an activity that people do because they want to learn and enjoy doing so, regardless of the degree they get, it means non formal education should be happening in formal education.

If you find this confusing, come to Laos. It’s not difficult to understand.

The warp and the weft

Culture clash is unavoidable. I’m sure there are people who think Martin is from Mars. I always say our common goal of quality should overcome our differences though that may be innocence itself.

There’s a Lao company that produces hand-woven cotton. They’ve been approached by a major Japanese retailer with orders in the tens of thousands. Sounds great, but we’re working with different standards; Mars and Neptune. In village, there are funerals. Then, villagers can’t weave. Nonetheless, the Japanese company wants updated Excel spreadsheets on time. Otherwise, they’ll have heart attacks.

Apparently the company CEOs visited the village and were entranced. Here were villagers weaving to the sound of rain and frogs croaking. Chickens at their feet, the smell of soil. “Hand woven cotton from a developing country! This is it!” It’s green, it’s ethical, it’s developing country. It’s got to sell. Then the project managers came and were appalled. “You can’t weave with all this dust! What are you going to do about the chicken shit? We need quality!”

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t have your organic hand woven cotton from a developing country delivered on time with Excel spreadsheets. They should have known better.

For me, the quality in this fable is not about expedient shipments for a major company trying to make a profit off of romantic cheap labor. For me, it’s the heroism of the Lao entrepreneur. Against all odds, if she can pull this off, she’s done something historic. 

Spoiled meat

In high school, I ended up on the tennis team. The gloom of getting up at 6 in the morning set in the night before. Worse yet was the coach hitting balls at me. I learned to pretend with no real intention of hitting back.

It may be the same for any level of professional incompetence. It’s not that hard with English. If the teacher keeps students in the dark, students don’t even know how incompetent the teacher is. It’s harder to bluff one’s way through with computers. I guess that’s why they just keep the room locked.

I have seen graduates from overseas MA programs typing with two fingers. Some people can type quickly with two fingers, but these people could not. At the rate they were typing, it would take three years to type the first draft of a dissertation. No wonder I’ve never gotten email from them.

When it comes to teaching computer programs, a sufficiently confusing explanation will keep students clicking aimlessly. Then the teachers can just blame them. “See? Students from the countryside don’t know anything.”

Who is it that doesn’t know anything? I heard that an international organization paid big bucks for teachers to train in computer literacy in Vientiane, innocently letting the school decide who could go. They came back with two fingers, but that was about it. But that's OK. At least it's not spoiled meat.

Harmonious circles

I was told years ago that garbage is cultural. “Martin, it took years even in developed countries for people to stop littering.” I don’t know about the anthropological evolution of littering. I just know that I hate a dirty classroom.

I’m not an order freak. I’m just interested in how people interact with their environment and how that affects learning. If students treat classrooms like garbage dumps, they probably assume that’s what they’re receiving too.

Likewise, there is the sociology of chairs. People choose where they are comfortable sitting and will not budge. Move the chairs and some are ready to sit on the floor rather than move. The most radical configuration is a circle. Lao classrooms are not familiar with circles. I’ve seen circles turn into squares and go concentric in order to create a safe back seat.

Once students get used to it, life is different. They look at the teacher. They stop using their phones. They talk to each other. Circles are equalizing, democratising and harmonious. Rather than an ox cart with slow students dragging the rear, circles spin in forward momentum. With circles, there is a happy hum among the students. It’s the sound of satisfied learning.

No exit

This is from a final paper, submitted by a graduating student at a Teacher Training College.

General information about teaching and learning of KLSS is the technique of teaching and learning not enough and perfect for both teachers and students. Moreover, most of the teachers are old or senior

It passed, but how? Should it fail because it is indecipherable? Should it pass because the next passage is perfect?

In order for students to communicate well they need to have to expand their Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency level (CALP). CALP contains the genres of power that leads to success.

Pass/fail is not that simple. Nor is true or false. Are these statements true or false?

T/F  1. The text is inscrutable/perfect to everyone because someone was paid 2,000 baht to write it.

T/F  2. The paper passed because the teacher wrote it.

T/F  3. Even if the student wrote it, they’d have to pay 2,000 baht to get it checked.

T/F  4. The students are taught gobbledygook for three years so that nobody knows better.

Look for the answers in a future blog. Or just read past ones to figure it out. Got any CALP? If it contains the genres of power that lead to success, where can we get it?

Fire flies bright

My neighbor is the most conscientious A – type I know. Since he’s already prepared thoroughly for his presentation, he’s been preparing poster sheets for his friends. He uses a felt-tip marker so freshly minted that he needs to wear a mask to protect him from the fumes. Now, he’s got the papers hung neatly in the kitchen.

He is so conscientious that he wants his crib notes copied. I have to explain that my printer is not a copy machine and I’ll only type 100 words a minute for something worthwhile. Memorizing the steps to teach pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading is not meaningful when I’ve never seen their own teachers teach reading anyway.

When the academic board grills him on how many steps it takes to explain the passive tense, I’m tempted to prompt him. “Are you asking about a Lao teacher or a foreign teacher?” Surely, he’d get panned for impudence even though he’s the best they’ll ever see.

I tried to think of ways to get him a chance to study overseas. At best, I think I can introduce him to a local NGO. He has qualities that I’ve observed and confirmed. I feel like I’m on the panel for, “Laos’s got talent.”  Listen to what Simon says.

Burning the night oil

What is this woman doing? I think it’s innocent enough. Just selling petrol from a roadside stool. Actually, she’s conserving energy in a big way.

Think of what it takes to make a gas station. They’re usually the size of a parking lot with gigantic roofs to withstand hurricanes. Monolith signs are built to be visible from the nearest off-ramp.

All that energy is saved when gas is sold from a recycled bottle. Her bottle's not going to crack either. How does she sit there night after night? She can’t read a book because of the headlight glare. She only sits and waits for the next empty tank.

Being idle is impossible for me. If she had a lamp burning, as some cavalier petrol sellers do, I’d be the moth singeing my wings on the flame. I have no intention for self-immolation, but I can’t help but fan the fires for people freezing in the cold. Who wins in the end? 

Broken cups

You saw it here first. Blogged on January 4 / 2010. A year before 60 minutes. Something smelled fishy about them three cups of tea. Aha. They figured it out. Empty schools. Some not even built. Greg Mortenson: one man's mission to to promote peace and sell 3 million books. Pennies for peace and chartered jets.

Now let's look at why someone would leave Microsoft to change the world. It's practically a template. If not schools, why not libraries? Keep the mission thing. "An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children." Then go for numbers: 10,000 libraries, 433 published books, 7.4 million books distributed, 9,000 scholarships to girls and the goal to raise literacy to ten million children by 2015.

If Room to Read bought one of my books for each claimed library, I could buy health insurance. They claim the importance of locally produced books, but maybe because I sell my books rather than "distribute" them, they're not interested. I've tried to contact the regional office many times. This is an email response I got:

Thank you for sharing your company website with us.

According to our procurement policy, we normally buy our books in big amount through biding and quotation process (depending on purchase amount). We would place advertisement on local newspapers requesting for quotations or selling our biding document.

In regard to book selection to meet with our library objectives, we have a team who would set book criteria and select the book to supply to our RR / library.

For this reason, we might not be able to direct to individual vendor, except for small purchase. I have forward your organization website / address to library team (Reading Room program) and HR section for consideration.

Thank you for your interest in supply reading materials for us. We hope that you would remain contact with us in future.

I'd love to bid between myselves, but I guess I'd have to find myself in a newspaper. So I wrote again to ask where I might find myself.

Dear Martin -

I definitely understand your objective to promote printing industry in Laos which we are appreciated - similar to RtR objectives. Please do not discourage, if our committee conclude that your books are matched with our library and then we would place the books on our list for RR.

Even though, we may not buy from you directly due to our limitation, the bidder would finally be contacted you for supplying to them the books. In some cases, we do buy books directly from publishers depending on the situation. However, we could not contact to all individual suppliers. If so, we would increase so much work for our HR team as normally we buy many hundred of titles each year. Hope you understand.

Again, thank you for sharing information with us. Please contract our HR section for any procurement issues.

There are personalized looking websites so I wrote some questions on the comment post. They weren't posted and an automated response comes back saying something like, "Hey, thanks for your support. Bit busy and will get back to ya after the weekend." Ah, there are paying jobs for writing for blogs. 


I finally managed to get an appointment with the regional director. She must have been warned because she was defensive, shrill and hostile. She said she would not buy books from me because they are closing down secondary school libraries. Students weren't using the libraries. The books were too hard. So they were rethinking their strategies and concentrating on elementary school literacy. So they were cutting back and couldn't afford to buy books. She said she knows what she's doing and is the best around. I asked where all the money goes. By now, she was kind of screaming and I couldn't pick out the words. Her assistant was thumbing through the books and after she left, he bought a few.

"John strives to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the non-profit sector. Room to Read combines his passion with the discipline of a well-run global company. He has been described by Fast Company Magazine as "all heart, all business."

Who write this stuff? But, OK, maybe the regional manager was just having a bad day. Several months later, I saw in the newspaper that another couple thousand dollars worth of books had been donated somewhere.

In Seattle, I talked to someone in the supermarket who knows John and said he's kind of stepping down. I don't judge these guys' intentions, but is the marketing on key? Shouldn't it be more like, "Why I quit Microsoft at the peak of my corporate career so that I could make millions more on book tours?"

What color is it? It's pink!

From a real textbook, yes. It’s my favorite because I like to imagine what students would do. You have the analytic test-taker who would memorize the positions of the colors, labelled on another page. You have the unconventional realist who would say it’s grey. You have the pragmatist who would sit next to someone and copy. Then, you might have the iconoclast who would write, “Why in all heavens would you bother to print a lesson about colors in black and white?”

I know the answer because I talked to the people who made the book. I was told, “Because of the cost of printing in color, four students would have to share one book rather than three.” I had another question too. Why print a textbook that has more than 20 errors in one page, uses difficult passages from the Internet and cuts out parts of my logo for the front cover?

The answer was, “We only had two weeks to finish. If we didn’t meet the deadline, World Bank wouldn’t pay us.”

I tell people I’m a volunteer though I have to redefine what that means. In Laos, a “volunteer” usually means you have a big house with a maid, driver, security guard and view of the Mekong River. I don’t have any of these because I’m a volunteer, I don’t get paid and my job is to mop up the mess from the headlong rush to reach quantitative millennium goals. If “Education for All” is ever claimed, we’re going to have to redefine “education”.

Bloody mess

I’ve heard that in some organizations, the foreign medical volunteers are not allowed to touch patients – for various reasons – one I suspect is to respect local staff and to support “capacity building” (a popular development industry term), but what do you do when someone’s bleeding? Like gushing blood?

I’m asked to help with secondary schools and am given two weeks at a key school in the city. The proper papers are stamped in red with consensus of all parties, including the provincial head, the local teachers and the 3rd year students at the Teachers Training College who are doing their long-term practicum. The treaties are nice, but the details are fuzzy. Should I only observe like a no-flly zone? Will there be ground battles?

Many students have never taught before and since most don’t speak English, they’re terrified – for good reason. I decide to guide them through a class using sign language and it works for the students as well as the student/teachers. Toward the end of the week though I need to see what an unassisted teacher would do. I need to see what they’ve learned after three years and need to know what these soon-to-be teachers will be doing in countless rural schools throughout the province.

I need to know, but the truth is not pretty at all. It’s a school play where nobody knows their lines. Most of the students go along with the ritualised pantomime, being good sports because this ia all they've known or worse yet, because they really believe this is how to learn. They shout in response like parrots in joyous oblivion.

Pockets of students, either at the very back or against the wall, have given up and either entertain themselves by acting goofy (boys in the back), using their phones, gazing into space or chatting incessantly (girls near the wall).

Then there are those, too bright for their karma, who sit in reincarnated agony, stuffed into a shoe size five times too small.

I am astonished that the student/teachers seem to have no idea how ineffective they are, or worse, how little what they’re teaching resembles the English language. On the other hand, they’re already incapacitated by the experience of playing a role that they’re miserably unprepared for.

Five minutes before class, someone asks me how to pronounce “us”. She makes a stab at it pronouncing it as “use”.

In class, I catch a student/teacher translating, “I will go by car.” as “I will buy a car.” I intervene. We have a bloody mess and nobody even seems to think there’s been an accident.

I’m not going to spend the rest of my life attending to these problems one band-aid at a time. I’ve been at the Teachers Training College for more than a year and I know now that’s not the epicentre of change. Everyone says they have marching orders - as if there is some wizard living in Oz somewhere. It’s a broken bus that nobody dares get off, but that’s partly because there’s no nice bus waiting for them.

After talking to myself through the night, I decide the only solution for now is to design lesson plans for each lesson, packaging content and teaching methods in one simple page. The thought that it would be accepted is inconceivable because of the unimpeachable orthodoxy of Oz.

I meet with the provincial head and he approves so quickly I’m bewildered. We will start with one pilot school, present the results to all the other municipal schools and then they can choose themselves. I've already prepared the lesson plans for eight months of lessons. They are simple and can be understood in one glance. The teachers like what they see. They want lesson plans for the other grades, want more audio files to practice with and want video examples. I’ll let them play with the material and I’ll see them again after two months.

I still have to think about how to help the student/teachers before they grab their sticks of newly minted authority and blight the rural schools with their “let’s-pretend-I-speak-English” nonsense. Many admitted that the last thing they want to be is teacher. So what does someone do if they graduate from a Teachers Training College and don’t want to be a teacher? They become police. And are well qualified.

It’s in their hands now

I don’t teach children. I don’t have children and don’t play with them either. I know that’s a clear indictment of being a brutishly cold human, but that’s really the way it is.

I can’t even remember how it happened. I have an informal contract now with the provincial government to improve English education at the elementary school level. People don’t even now if that’s 1,200 schools or a few hundred more. How do you count? How do you define “school”? Some schools are building with no students. Some have students with no teachers.

I’ve already visited a half-dozen elementary schools and could easily use up all the memory on my camera. Trainers are doing the sign language now so I have a chance to video the children. Children are high maintenance when they’re unhappy, but when they’re happy, they are undeniably delightful. Sign language makes them happy. And they’re speaking English too.

I’m trying to think how this all happened so quickly. I just finished a 4-day training for 30 elementary school teachers using sign language. The four assistant trainers assigned to me switched from being sceptics to advocates within days. We’re planning on introducing it to the high schools and training college. I’ll have a workshop in Vientiane and they say they’ll set up workshops for any province that catches word and asks for help.

We can all easily choke to death on teaching methodology and second language learning theory.  We can drown ourselves in our own drool in curriculum planning meetings and I won’t add comments about TESOL conventions. With sign language, you don’t even need to explain. Just show them. Let the children show them.

I watched how children worked their magic on the trainers. The teachers come from old school thinking and should have been the last people to be convinced, but once with the children, they were moving around the room helping children make proper bunny ears. The teachers who had come to train were impressed, but their big day came when they tried it themselves in the classrooms. The came back to the workshop thrilled by the experience.

Now, please imagine. You’re a singer, but have gotten only tepid applause at the best. Most are looking at their watches. No, suddenly you’re a rock star. Your audience is literally waving their hands at you and screaming at every chance.

That’s what’s happening with the teachers. They’re thrilled to see every single child in their class looking at them with big eyes of anticipation. They’re thrilled when they teach 20 new words and by the end of twenty minutes, the children can remember them all. They must feel pretty good about themselves.

The workshop went well, but I wanted to reach the final mile on the last day. Some teachers still felt that being a teacher meant holding a stick. Finally, one grandma-like teacher who showed the delight of an 8 year old from the first day came to the front of the room. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but someone told me she was basically saying, “Take that stick out of your ass. Wiggle your butt, make bunny ears. For chrissakes, these are children!”

Note: I’m not a brutishly cold human as I find these children unbearably delightful.

The golden chedis and red carpets Chiang Mai

I’ve had a good life. I can appreciate things when something good happens, especially after the bad.

It’s rush hour in Bangkok and bicycling to the train station is not like sitting in a hovercraft. The safest thing is to stay in the flow of traffic, but as the road ascends, I realize to my horror that I’m on a one-way highway that spans the Chao Phraya River. There are traffic police ahead. They waving me to come and I hear them saying, “You sucker, this will cost you 1,000 baht.” I wave back, “Uh huh, going back.” The traffic is thick enough that they can’t even chase and arrest me.

The next wrong turn is onto a one-way street so I’m riding over the sidewalk rubble, dismounting and lifting the bike over each cross-street curb, cursing the thought of missing my train.

Somehow, I make it to the station and am relieved when I plop into my seat, facing a man who’s supposed to smile in recognition. Instead he looks puzzled and wants to see my ticket. “How can we have the same seat?” Then it’s clear that my train left a day ago.

There should be another train that night. The ticket guy shows me the last seat on his computer screen, but he does so while simultaneously yawning, stretching and picking his nose. I express my disgust and he gets snotty. “Full” he says, clicking away the last ticket. I trade in my pride for a ticket and buy one for the next day.

Just on a hunch, I go to another window and sure enough there’s a seat that night. We go back to the first window to get my money back. I raise my hands like, “Well ????” but he’s peeling lotus seeds.

It’s a new train. I sleep well. The cars are air-conditioned, sealed and kind of boring, but they’ve kept the old dining car intact, either for historical reasons or because the staff would have protested. In the morning, I head that way for Nescafe and the moment the last automatic door slides open, Thai life rushes in. Thai country music blasts and with each rock of the train, I’m so sure the dining car will erupt into a glorious Thai musical.

Staff have started on their whiskeys and greet each other with the warmth of friends who eat breakfast with each other every morning. Someone has his hand out the window, playing with the sensation of the passing air. When anyone moves their hands beautifully, I check to see if they’re signing something. I don’t know his choice of words, but the message is clear. Lifted by the aerodynamics of the warming mountain air his fingers float like feathers on a hawk, I know he’s expressing every golden drop of this sensational moment.

Golden moments continue in Chiang Mai. I am welcomed by the researchers whom I’ve come so far to see. I’m in awe at the signing software they’re developing and they seem flattered. At the university, the inclusive education department is more than cooperative. On the second day, I’m early for our appointment, but I hear them say, “He’s here” and within minutes everyone is mobilized; tripod in place, signed discussed and prepared. I leave with videos of hundreds of new signs, all done in a painless few hours.
Back in Laos, I’m in a sour mood. “Why can’t Laos seek help from Thailand? Look at how much they’ve done?” Someone explains clearly to me. ‘Martin, you don’t understand. We have to watch Lao people painted black and acting as comic slaves on Thai TV dramas. It’s not time yet.”

He’s right. It’s unfair to compare. Within an instant, I’m back in Laos. I thought I’d never forgot those golden chedis in a land where some people’s profession is to give good service, where some people are happy to share knowledge and a place with perfect cappuccinos on every corner. There are claw marks on the tarmac. “I don’t wanna go,” but it all fades upon impact. Lao charm can do that to me. People will ask, “Where have you been? Haven’t seen you in a while.” They’re saying, “Welcome back.”

Where the sun rises 2011

Happy New Year. 15 hours ahead of the time in Seattle – and in a sleeper car in transit from Ubon to Bangkok.

In search of Thai sign language books, I’m bicycling through traffic in the mega-city of development, light-years away from Savannakhet. Gliding silently over asphalt in what must be the closest experience to being in a hovercraft. I can marvel at everything curious and miraculous, awakened to a new eon, and still stay safely detached.

Even the biggest book store in the biggest shopping mall with the biggest aquarium in SE Asia doesn’t have the books I’m looking for, but the employees are well trained in the service industry and print out directions to the place where I will find them.

I’m tired from walking in this shopping universe without my hovercraft and when looking for the exit, I’m made aware that if I wanted to, I could buy chandeliers, rococo furniture, Hugo Boss suits and even a few cars if I wanted to, but if I really wanted a box of Krispi Donuts, I’d have to wait for at least an hour in a line that looks longer than immigration. What are these people doing? Poor people must be hungry from empty stomaches, but why is it that rich people never feel full? And why does it seem like all roads to development end in a shopping mall?

I will not spend more than five minutes thinking about this. What is more impressive about development in this country is the advances made for the non-hearing. I’ve heard about several award-winning projects done by students which include things like signing robots, speech recognition translation to signing systems and what will be more manageable for me, software to visually digitize signs.

The reason for my anticipation and urgency is that signing will be a part of an elementary school level English language education program in Laos, a mouthful with an acronym that looks like ELELEPL, but in simpler language, I think it’s going to happen. In 2011.