Ko Lao and Ko Chang

The past week has been very fun, but also very hard. Ko Lao is very literally a slum island. The people were very nice, but unfortunately they only spoke Moken, so communicating was very hard. We were there to begin building a community center. We got the foundatuion down, so the next Youth International group to go can actually finnish it, but the foundation is the hardest part to do. The only peice of land left to build on was this marshy, low-land area behind the village. It was half mud, half sewage and water was continually seeping in. Basically it was the most disgusting thing i've ever done. We had to dig 12 holes, fill them with cement, lay the tall cement pillar(its an above ground building), and then fill it back in with cement. In theory its not too hard, but walking around was impossible because the mud would suck ur boot down and then three people had to get you unstuck.
Besides being gross, the community was nice enough. The kids were great. They loved playing with us and they tried repeating everything we said to them. The worst parts were the way they treated the straY dogs and that the kids never wore shoes. There were a surprsing number of strays for it being an island. There were at least two litters of puppies while we were there and we adopted two of the puppies. One, we named King because he is cock-eyed like the Thai king, we discovered when the kids were using him as a soccer ball. I, obviously, ran over and quickly stopped that and from then on we tried to teach the kids by example to be nice to animals. We actually think that we made a pretty big impression on them. By the time we left they never put King down and he was constantly being passed around and pet.
The island was extremely dirty and the sea around it was filled with trash, but the food was great.
After being there for about five day we went to Ko Chang for our "vacation." It was great. The island was completely desserted and we had bungalows right oni the beach. The water was the perfect temperature and crystal clear. Even though I used up an entire bottle of sunscreen I still got seriously burned. The second day we were there I woke up and my lips were so swollen it looked like I had gotten collagen injections during the night. Apparently thats how my lips react when they're sunburned, but they got back to normal pretty quuickly. I also found a coral reef and two local girls showed me around and let me help them catch a crab, found me sea shells, and showed my sea urchins and things to poke with my stick.
It was sad leaving there, but I was so burned that I was actually releaved to get back to civilazation. We spent one last day in Bangkok before leaving. This time we were in modern Bangkok, which was completelty opposite of where we were in the beginning. It was a lot of fun, but exhausting. Right now I'm actually in India! We havn't really done much yet, but I'm already falling in love.

Ayutthaya; Oct. 8th to 9th

We got to Ayutthaya this morning at 4am. And I forgotto mention that at the end of our trek we rode on elephants! It was so much fun. Lizzy and I named our elephant Snorky because he liked to spray himself/us with the water(snorkel) in his trunk. We were going to have a boat tour tonight but since its the end of the rainy season the water is too choppy so we can't. Tomorrow we go to Ko Lao(sp?) for a week to build a community center. The island is supossedly just a slum, so it is pretty much garanteed to be interesting. After though,we go on "vacation" to Ko Chong for a couple of days where i should be able to update again. Here are some of my latest pictures:

 This is the resovoir where we went swiming in Mai Jo

This is Pe Mon's house. Right behind it is Pe Noy's house.

Me and Pe Mon at our Going Away Party.

Me getting my bracelet that "ties my soul to Mai Jo"

Everyone riding their elephants

Snorky

Trek in Northern Mountains; Oct 2 to 7, 2009

The trek was incredibly hard. Obviously a "trek" is different than a "hike," but for some reason I just thought it meant a "particuarly hard hike." I was wrong. "Treks" mean walking through dense jungle vegetaion with a 6in trail, completely covered in 5ft ferns, under you with a 20ft drop into even denser and very sharp vegetation below you. Thye first day we hiked for about 2hr before we got to the first hill tribe village. It was pretty difficult, but the village was very welcoming and fun. The second day sucked. We hiked for a good 8hr almost continually uphill. It was not fun. No, it was fun after I had completed it. Then it was fun. The thing about trekking in such a beautiful place is that since I have to be so concerned with where I step and continuing to breathe, its very hard to appreciate my surroundings. The second village was slightly disapointing. The first village was pretty modernized, but I thought that was a given since they were closer to the city, but the second village was actually in the middle of nowhere and they still managed to have DVD players and satelite TVs. Since we had trekked all that way to stay with Hill Tribe families, I had, I thought, rightfully expected them to be a more traditionally focused culture. Unfortunately I was wrong. True, they did perform a tribal dance for us on our second night there, but even then we had to wait for the cheif to come back to the village on his scooter before it could start. You would think that globalization would end up bringing the good technologies to the underdeveloped world before it brought pop music and non-biodegrabable waste to Hill Tribes, but this village still ran off of battery power and the nearest toilet to town was a good 5min walk up a hill. And it was a really gross bathroom.
I went into the trek thinking that I would see grandmothers weaving baskets on the porch while men drove trucks instead of walking to their rice feilds, but instead I got Thai pop blasted through cell phoines at 3am. According to Casey, when she trekked through the area in 2001 that is what she saw, but in just 8years they have lost the great majority of their traditional way of life. Yes, in some ways I'm sure there life is much better, but how musch better is it when a Thai family, all with cell phones, scooters, and cars, end up selling their daughters into prostitution anyway because it brings in more money than sending her to school would?
After a very long day of being on literally every source of transportation used by mankind in the past three centuries, we are at a hostel in Chaing Rai. Tomorrow we head to Ayuthaya where we get to bike around old Wat ruins. I'll try to upload some more pictures soon, but this computer is in Thai and I couldn't find out how to upload them here.

Homestay and Pun Pun; Sept 25 to Oct 2, 2009

Our village home stay was amazing. None of us wanted to leave. We were in a village called Mai Jo. Its pretty much a road with houses on either side and everyones related to one another. I stayed with a woman named Pe Mon, but ate and spent a lot of time next door at her son's house, where Natalie and Eliza were staying. Every day we would eat breakfast then head to Pun Pun, just a short walk up a hill from the viaalge. Pun Pun is a seed-saving farm that also gives seminars on earthen housing and community self-sufficiency. Each day we focused on something new. One day it was plastering an earthen home's walls, the next day clearing and seeding a garden, then making natural shampoo and soap, and so on and so on.
The view from the village was great. We were completely surrounded by mountains and farmland. In a 20min walk to the end of the road you could get to a resovoir, the village's water supply, and go swimming. I did, however, discover that I hate chickens. Particuarly roosters and mostly when they decide to crow from 2 to 4 in the morning. Everyone in the village was so nice. No one spoke english very well or at all, but we got along just fine. Pe Noy, Pe Mon's daughter-in-law, cooked us all of our meals, which was great because she is a fabulous cook. After we left the three of us missed having her food twice a day(we ate lunch at Pun Pun).
The last night we were there they threw us a going away party and had a village elder bless us and tie a string aruond our wrists that was supossed to "tie our souls to the village." I can't imagine that we'll get so attatched to all of our homestay families so strongly, but at least I'll have plenty of places to stay if I ever come back.