It's all new in Phana

When you go home you expect to find things as they were when you left. I remember that as a small (and presumably insecure) boy I would sometimes dream of coming home from school to find the house and my family had all disappeared. So when we leave England each winter we hope that everything in Phana will be as idyllic as it was when we left six months earlier. But always we also find ourselves expecting some changes and hoping that they will not diminish our love of living here. The changes that have taken place in the last few years have all turned out to be positive ones, though thinking about them in advance did not always suggest they would be. What that says is probably that the decision-makers in Phana have a much clearer and more positive vision of development than I have.

A good example of this is the new market, which is situated less than half a km from our house. Between us and the market there is one house, two side roads, a bridge over a small steam, and you are there. I had thought it unnecessary, a nuisnace to me personally, and of no great benefit to anyone. A white elephant in English terms, if not in Thai. I was wrong on all counts. So you can expect a post dedicated to the new market before long.

A change I had known about was the arrival of the two new volunteers from Project Trust and we were looking forward to meeting them but when we got here they were on holiday (the schools they teach in were closed) and we only met them when the Desk Officer for Thailand arrived with his asistant for the annual monitoring visit. This involved us accompanying them and the tetsaban representatives to all three schools for meetings with directors and teachers. The volunteers, Billie andRosie, arrived in Phana at the end of August and when I reported that here (I was in UK then) a commenter suggested that they be inteviewed for this blog. I hope they will agree to that. They certainly seem to be first-class volunteers, keeping up the tradition which is now firmly established in Phana.

On our first day back our friend and neighbour Add (deputy mayor of Tetsaban Phana) came round to co-opt Pensri onto a small delegation going to Amnat Charoen the next day to discuss a pilot project on Community-Based Tourism being set up by TAT in two provinces, Amnat Charoen (in the north-east, inland, rural, little visted by tourists, on the Lao border) and Surat Thani, (in the south, on the coast, including Koh Samui, already a major tourist destination). Pensri duly attended the meeting, and now I too have been co-opted onto the provincial committee, adding a 'foreign' perspective and a little expertise in the English language and experience in producing brochures, etc. The next meeting is sometime next week (I think, this is Thailand, so it may not be), and here in Phana we are very excited by the idea and have already formulated some plans. I will be keeping readers up to date on this in this blog -- and even inviting some of you to visit as guinea-pigs!

Less exciting was finding that our water-storage tank which collects roof run-off and provides us with drinking water was empty. Our 'helper' had not made the necessary adjustments to the pipe after allowing a few weeks of rain to clear the gutters. So off we went to the small village of Ban Nong Ka, where water is pumped from a deep well in the wat, treated, bottled and delivered to customers all over Amphur Phana. The facility was very impressive and I will feature it in a later post.

The wat where the well is located is one which I had never visited before and it turned out to be rather unusual. It is a typical small-village wat, no grand buildings, no ubosot (ordination hall), very simple kutis for the few monks who stay there, an old wooden preaching hall with very little decoration, and lots of trees.

But outside the wat was this sign:

 

It seems that the senior monk here is a computer wizard! Possibly more of this another time.

Across the road is a small forest, and here is the Phu Ta, the guardian 'grandfather' of the place (a little hand-shake or out of focus, sorry):

 

And inside the forest, something was going on! More of that, too, another time.

Perhaps the strangest thing we find when we return each year to this quiet, unknown little back-water that is Phana, is how much is going on and how much there is for us to do and to get involved in. I always think there will be nothing of the sort, that I have seen and done everything there is to do here, but that is far from the reality. It's in England, really, where we live an uneventful life. I am not complaining: we still need both kinds of life and still enjoy living in both places. But it is definitely in Phana that we are much more involved in social and community activities. That doesn't seem to change, and we are glad of it.
 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Mike]

Lawrence, great post, made me feel like I was returning too. I look forward to the future articles you mentioned.

[Lawrence]

A pity you are not (returning)Mike. Now I'm a hostage to fortune (is that right?) -- I'll have to make sure I do write those follow-up posts. Hope I don't keep you waiting too long.