Next week, I'll be returning to Lampang, Thailand after 12 years. Yo-Yo is still the song-tel driver, and the team leaders I had on that fateful journey are now the local hosts. In August of 2011, I took an intensive writing class with Victoria Rowan. I wrote 2500 words a day, took a lot of criticism, rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, finally finished my Grad school essay and mapped out a book. This is by no means a finished product, but I wanted to share it with you to commemorate my first build - a trip that inspired me in so many ways - and why this blog began.
1.
In February of 2004, I had to make
a last minute business trip to a movie set in Italy, where I was expected to
deliver results in the form of a full length Electronic Press Kit interview
with a bristly movie star who had been avoiding my crew for the entire shoot
schedule. The studio had high hopes for
an Oscar nomination and locking in any coverage with this eely personality
would be a key component to the PR campaign.
I was working as a Senior Publicity
Director at the Walt Disney Studios, a job I always described as
“glamour-work”. Of course, there were exceptions, like this one, when you have
to deal with a prickly man no one has had a good experience with. I arrived on location, a dark and damp half
finished hotel on the outskirts of Rome to supervise the shoot before the film
wrapped the following day and we lost him to scheduling conflicts and lame
celebrity excuses. It was during this interview that my ears
pricked up after the standard response “This director is a genius. Blah Blah,
Blah…”
He was talking about being satisfied
with his life, having just won a Golden Globe, saying, “You know, we start out
at one point on a graph, and if you’re lucky, you ascend on the path you want.
Most people make choices based on what someone else wants, or for
self-preservation or whatever, and they end up over here” and he pointed to a
far a way place on his imaginary graph. “I’m still where I want to be”. I shuddered, at first thinking it was the
chill in the room, but realized that I was one of the people he was talking
about, in fact, that he could quite possibly be speaking directly to me. I was over there – where he was
pointing, off the graph. When we completed the interview, I stood up, extended
my hand and said, “Congratulations on your award, and thank you so much Mr… “
Instead of taking my hand, he put his right one on my shoulder and pushed me
out of his way.
We always laughed off our favorite
celebrity foibles with “We’re not curing cancer here, we’re making pizzas”, and
while his dismissal was rather rude, what I couldn’t shake was my lack of
placement on that imaginary graph. I mean, I held a highly coveted, highly paid
job, but at the same, it didn’t feel like it was enough. The more I thought
about it, the more I realized that I was working in
an environment that demanded YES to every possible whim or request. That day in Rome was proof, I thought,
remembering how my crew and I had waited for hours, how we were instructed to
order a full seafood take out lunch in a place where there isn’t take out or
delivery from local restaurants and then set a table with borrowed china
and flatware from that restaurant, wait for him to sit down, eat it, and smoke
a cigar before we could get our work done. Maybe it was the push that did it,
but I knew then that I wanted, needed, a life that existed outside of the land
of make believe I worked in. I wanted to cure cancer – or more realistically,
something bigger than supplying sycophantic-laden pixie-dust to a grumpy movie
star.
When I returned with the interview,
I marched into my boss’s office, full of bravado, with plans to give notice. He, in turn, talked me out of making such a
rash decision by urging me to tap into my stored vacation time and take a month
off. Returning to my desk, determined to ignore the pile of work in front of
me, I Googled “Volunteer abroad”. Up
popped Habitat for Humanity Global Village. My criteria was
pretty simple: 1) a time slot after our big summer films had opened 2) to a
place I’d never been 3) where I didn’t speak the language and 4) no one would
ask me about Disney or the movie industry.
The destination that fit… Thailand.
I believed that hard work and quiet meditation would give me the respite
I needed to mull over my career malaise. Maybe, at 37, I was going through a
mid-life crisis.
Thailand! Once I was formally accepted to the team, my
anticipation grew. I didn’t know what to
expect; but that was exactly what I wanted, something completely foreign to me,
out of my comfort zone. I’d never been
to place that required a seventeen hour flight, I wanted to see the giant
Sleeping Buddha, the Grand Palace where the Siamese King danced with the
schoolteacher, Anna Leonowens, but I also was eager to meet my teammates, the
villagers and get down to work. Six weeks before departure, I was basically
emailed a packing list, location, the date and time the team should meet in Bangkok
and that was it. Traveling to a foreign country with a group of strangers, I
could do that. I purchased my ticket
through an agent, read my borrowed travel guide on the flight over and then
figured it out.
Although seven years have
passed, I have vivid memories of the Tip Chang Hotel, the local people we
worked with, the colorful meals prepared for us, plates such as braised coconut
with basil and banana sticky rice, the mamas taking care not to make it too
spicy, exotic fruit I had never seen, the driver, Yo Yo with his Song Tel (two
bench) bus that transported us to the lush little village thirty minutes from
the Tip Chang, and the joy that our team leaders got from seeing us have fun
passing buckets of wet cement in a brigade or digging a 16 ft deep latrine or
trying to learn bits of Thai like “chok” (OK) or Lum-thai (delicious!). In fourteen days, we completed two 150 square
foot cinder block houses, two rooms a piece with an outdoor cement kitchen
area. We were anxious and excited to
begin construction on the 100th house in the Lampang Province. The team felt an enormous sense of
accomplishment. Working through a
torrential rainstorm on our last day, we raised the banner that the local
office had printed on our behalf.
“Habitat Thailand’s 100th House!”
Our efforts culminated in a
dedication ceremony, each team member inscribing their name in cement by the
front doors at the request of the new homeowners. Family members knotted strings around each of
our wrists, “blessings”, they explained. This simple gesture was meant to bond
the good spirits of the village to the person it is tied to, offerings of
protection and good luck. Then the men
of the house, who had stoically worked alongside us, silent, proud, anxious and
excited to have a roof over their head at last, spoke of their gratitude,
fighting back the tears in their eyes.
Showing this emotion was not an ordinary event, but this was not an
ordinary day for any of us. This moment was the reality check that I
needed.
Our team
leaders literally promised us on that first night in Lampang, at the Dizzy
Disco within the Tip Chang, that we would have an experience we would never
forget. That was true. I learned to love Thai food, even cook it myself with a
great wok my brother gave me and a fabulous cook book “Quick & Easy Thai”, made
new friends and was subsequently invited on a future build to Taos by one of
those friends, and another build from another volunteer I met on the Taos team,
and on and on. But I had discovered a
personal ideology during that trip to Thailand, a singular creed that would
continue to inspire me over the years when my day job got me down, that of
promoting the ideal of affordable shelter, a basic human right.
The work
isn’t easy, but it is fun in the sense that you are working together, for a
common purpose. By laying bricks and tying together thrush or framing a house,
we were learning how to keep out the harsh elements. Mothers, fathers,
grandparents no longer have to scavenge for plastic tarps and sticks for a
makeshift tent or pieces of corrugated tin and rocks to hold them in place. I’ve
hauled limestone blocks, learned the correct combination of sand, gravel, water
and cement for mortar, nailed chicken wire to adobe bricks, swung a sledge
hammer, planted gardens, raised frames of houses, worked out in the heat and
humidity nailing ironwood together with an 11”cats paw nail puller, and once dug post holes with a
soup spoon when the tools weren’t delivered to the job site. We strangers learn to communicate through
songs, hand gestures and the universal smile.
There are
villages where the water is turned on twice a day for one hour, others, where
water is hauled in five gallon drums from wells sometimes a mile away, villages
where cell phones are charged at a local stand with a car battery hooked up for
this purpose, or where people crowd around a neighbor’s TV set, watching movies
under an impossibly opaque evening sky. During
a disaster relief trip, I witnessed New Orleans’ ongoing struggle to climb back
from the flood that leveled it, and I have clung to the familiar, like a cold
Coca Cola or a game of Scrabble with fellow teammates. It is a lesson in
humility to be a mere observer, non-judgmental of these extreme living
conditions for ten to fourteen days. You
learn this virtue over and over. It is never mastered.
When I search
for and answer to what brings me back again and again, friends will try to fill
in the blank, “You get to travel to some incredible places”, but that isn’t it. I looked forward to the new friends I will meet and the laughter of children
when they see their smiling faces on a camera’s digital screen. I liked to wake
up and follow simple directions that didn’t include complicated personalities. I
wanted to meet like-minded people. I enjoyed being of service, but more
importantly, I felt like I needed to
be there. It wasn’t that I was giving of myself selflessly; it was that I was
gaining something as well; a feeling of usefulness that separated my life’s
work from my day job, an experience that fueled my energy tank, which had
previously always seemed half-full. That feeling of silent purpose and
conviction was what I wanted to attain and retain again and again.
I savor the
quiet mind I possess when I return to a different life hundreds, if not
thousands, of miles away where hot water comes out of a faucet. I’ve slept in a cabin with a dirt floor and a
luxury room at London’s 5-Star Dorchester Hotel and I love both, but I cannot deny
that when I am on a build site, in the team’s morning circle where we set
intentions and discuss the day’s workload, I’ve found something bigger than me
or that summer’s blockbuster film.
Standing side by side with people, most of whom you will never see
again, I can’t help but feel grateful to these families, for letting me
into their circle, for allowing me to help, and be part of their community for
this short time, creating a place called home.
