What a day…

I actually wanted to write about the last two days, but since I’m still tripping on today’s experiences, I will write about that first.

In the morning we (Soe, Maja, Carianne / The girls in Phuket) started with a meeting with mister Suwit in a coffee bar in Phuket city. He is the leader of the Tsunami Network and we got into contact with him via mister Chaiwhat in Bangkok. Allready after five minutes we saw that we where connecting with a very special person. We had our lovely translator Bow with us, since we still don’t understand a word of Thai, but only his eyes and bodylanguage showed us enough: that it was a man that worked from out the heart. We had a very nice interview with him and he told about the projects the Network worked on after the Tsunami. And yes, hearing the story of that disaster from a personal experience has some impact. Many many people didn’t only lost their houses and maybe even family members, but many communities (with a lot of poor people involved) lost as well all their identity papers, lost their ownership on ground and other important paperworks. A complete mess was the left over.

Mister Suwit started to work from out these legal issues. Bringing people together (locals, NGO's, network members) to find out together what was needed and find the real problems. Then he started to work with, for example fishermen, to start up again their own business and let that become sustainable again. Now they are working in the same way for water supply, education and so on. To hear this was a wonderfull moment. This was the reason we wanted to work with local organisations, to hear THIS story. It sounds maybe strange, but it was really overwelming. There are people in this world able to navigate very well in a complete chaos. And all of that with ‘happiness’ as dream and goal.

After the interview we drove to one of the communities mister Suwit is working for. Small crapy houses, with a lot of garbage everywhere, children running around, animals, dirty water, dirty everything and a lot of happy people... We where warmly invited and had a nice conversation at the sea side with the representatives of the community. Very special to sit between them talking about dreams and opportunities. And then those people, who do such great and good work, ask if we have some suggestions for them… I realised at that moment sronger then ever before that we are here in Thailand to listen, learn and share. Not to help them in one week of time, because we actually don’t have a clue with what we are dealing with. But to have the opportunity to learn from these people (and do it) is really wonderfull.

We gave them juice and Danish cookies and they gave us a beautiful souvenir and invited us to go fishing with them next week. How nice to finish our project here with that….

Many more stories to write, they will be continued tomorrow!