We arrived in the Laos capital of Vientiane, nice vibes (hippy talk) it has an old French colonial feel to it. The weather is perfect, sun is shining and the people are in the streets walking around with umbrellas for the sun or on bikes peddling about. Lots of young backpackers. They still have the kerosene fueled tuk tuk’s sputtering about. You don’t pronounce Laos with the “S” the S is silent on the end, its really Lao. Our taxi driver corrected Tali in no uncertain terms. So there you have it. LAO. We are only going to be here for two nites before flying to Luang Prabang. Its cheap here, almost every thing is 8.00 USD. when you buy something or pay for a meal they give you a breakdown of how much it is in Thai Baht, USA dollar and Laos Kippers. 100,000 kippers is about 8.00 USD carrying kippers can fill your wallet up. This country is within the golden triangle, There is no NA here, although we passed by a school that had a sign saying “drug free school” its just a matter of time and NA will get started here although NA has had a hard time getting permission to hold meetings in Communist countries like Laos, Viet Nam and China there is literally no place on this planet earth that drug addiction isn’t happening, even up in the Himalayan mountains in the Kingdom of Bhutan where their gross national product is called happiness, NA is there and growing. Guess there will always be people like us who just can’t get enough of that happiness stuff no matter where you come from. Tali is celebrating her 29th year of recovery here, no meeting no cake, I bought her a cookie in the shape of a star and told her she was a star today. It sort of worked but not really. Laos was the most heavily bombed country on earth. It was hit by an average of one B-52 bomb-load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973. US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period than was dropped during the whole of the second world war. I wonder whose bright idea that was? This is a tiny country. Can you imagine every 8 minutes for 9 straight years? Talk about mans inhumanity to man. What’s crazy is here it is over 50 years later and we are walking around this country as dumb tourist oblivious to the damage our own country was involved in. All to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail The results of all of this is people are walking around with no limbs, children are still stumbling upon unexploded bombs and getting killed or maimed and the communist flag with the cycle and hammer flies over the country. “WAR WAR what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.”. We spent five days on the Island of Koh Samui before heading this way, Samui is in the gulf of Thailand, a small island, reminded us of home on Kauai except that the tourism is all there is on this island. 40 years ago there wasn’t much as for infrastructure, very few Thai people lived there they only started coming to live there when more and more tourist started to come and the hotels and resorts popped up every were. The Eagles wrote a song called the last resort. That describes so many places like this and my Hawaii, “call some place paradise and kiss it good by.” The traffic was bad, more moped and motor bikes than anywhere I have seen. The cool part of this adventure was staying with Olaf and Yui and family and celebrating Christmas eve. They have great kids as well as an extended Thai family, we never could get it straight as to whose kids were whose? Olaf and Yui’s just brings them all in to the fold. They had workers at the house who you couldn’t remember if they were the family or not. The NA on the island was good, a meeting every day and sometimes twice, Olaf had started a meditation meeting every morning on the beach, we actually attended it every day even though I am not big on group like meditations. We went back to Bangkok on Christmas day to go to two parties that started the same time on different ends of Bangkok, We flew in, took taxi’s then trains and then a boat to do it. The one at our friends Top’s was off the charts, she is a professional cook celebrity who had her own TV show, the food was so good and so much, with lots of friends and people we have met over the years in Bangkok, we would of left earlier but I couldn’t stop eating. (Still no sugar of heavy carbs) Then we got over to our friend Neil’s on the other side of Bangkok at his apartment; there must have been 70 people there. Again food and more food, Neil is from Australia and started NA in Thailand over 20 years ago and is a close friend of ours, we also have mutual friends from Australia. Neil’s apartment looks right down on the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, its quite a location, barges and river taxi’s and ferries moving about in chaotic harmony if that makes any sense. We headed back to our hotel and off to Laos early. There is some exciting opportunities opening up for the Thai fellowship, a couple of years ago the world board sent Siamak from Iran and my self to try to help kick start a new effort to translate the NA literature into the Thai language. There were then a handful of clean members who were Thai and were eager to carry the message into the Thai community. They didn’t need a whole of assistance from Siamak and myself; I think initially it was knowing World services supported them that was important, the process can be quite challenging beyond the actual translation. But they completed all the IP’s, the LWB, the readings and the Basic text in two years. They are now finishing up the daily reading book ”Just for today” I have been able to drop in on the LTC each time I visited Thailand and they and WSO keeps me in the loop of the progress. They have done amazing work. Two months ago they were summoned by the ministry of interior to a meeting to discuss how NA might be integrated into Thailand. I just happened to arrive in Thailand the day before this meeting and was asked to attend incase there were questions that the local members wouldn’t feel comfortable answering. PR on this level can be intimating, It turns out this might be the tipping point for help for addicts in Thailand, some of you might know that over the last several years there has been movements and protests in Thailand that has shut down the airports and for a while crippled much of Bangkok, It finally ended in a military coup and martial law imposed. I was in and out of Thailand during most of this, it was nothing like you would see in Egypt and some of the spring up risings in the middle east. It felt more like a wood stock festival atmosphere, with families camping in the parks, marching and singing slogans, painting their faces with the national colors, food everywhere an rock concerts. You feel completely safe until someone fires some sniper shots or throws a hand grenade into the crowd. The General of the coup has sense become the Prime minister and has a mandate to root out corruption and inefficiency in the government. Part of this mandate has been to look at the drug addiction problem in Thailand and find solutions or programs with a success record. In their research the name Narcotics Anonymous kept popping up as one of the only programs with successes, so they contacted the local NA members and requested this meeting. Given this task was a retired LT. General and former chief of police for Thailand and a retired Governor of several Thai providences who were brought back into service by the PM. The meeting last two hours and they had many questions; they had clearly done their research as they were aware of our traditions and of our limited human resources in actual clean Thai members. They wanted to know how they can help NA grow faster in Thailand? We told them the way NA has grown around the world is through people like them who took an interest in us and befriended us. They can open doors that we cannot. They wanted examples and we told them in the west the courts will send addicts to NA instead of prison, also the prisons are full of addicts (they said 85%) if we can be allowed to carry our message in the form of H&I and at the very least be able to get our literature into the prisons and treatment centers. 15 years ago the Thai government created black lists in the rural Thai providences of known or suspected drug addicts and dealers and rounded them up, amnesty international said at least 2,500 were shot dead in the streets. The prisons are notorious, some of the worse conditions in the world. So for this level of the Thai Government to contact us is huge. They wanted some action from NA, in some ways this is an un presented opportunity, one you don’t want to slip away. To demonstrate how serious they are they actually attended an open NA meeting and said they were very impressed. There is over 78 Government run treatment centers in Thailand and these guys can set policy as to how they focus their treatment model, they all ready admit that the centers them selves have been inefficient with no successes. They know they can’t start NA but also know that NA is one of the best options they can have. It always blows them away when they realize we don’t want and won’t accept any money and we stay out of politics and religious matters. We don’t even insist someone stays involved with NA after they get clean, we hope they do but we are not a cult and do not dictate what people do with their lives once they find the freedom we have found. Our NA World Service office staff put together a video of Addicts around the World celebrating their recoveries at conventions and home groups, particularly in Asia. They inserted readings in Thai in the video and did it in such a way so the Thai members in Bangkok can edit it so it reflects a more culturally representation of their land. You can see this through out NA around the world; in Japan they call it “Japan Style NA” so this will be “Thai style”. The members in Bangkok are very excited with this video. They realize they can have copies made and hopefully the 78 treatment centers around Thailand will show it to the addicts. Personally I can just imagine one or two addicts seeing it and saying to them selves we can do this, we can help each other stay clean and help others. Long ago when I was on the board I realized that our literature translated was great but in our world the vast majority of addicts in these third world countries esp. in the rural areas are illiterate and can not read, so our literature doesn’t help them at first, but if we were able to put our literature on MP3 sticks or on Videos it would work to fill that gap. It’s still my hope and dream that we will look towards making this kind of investment in our future. I mean if we really want to fulfill our vision statement. We just arrived in Luang Prabang, we landed just as it was getting dark, we flew in through steep rigged mountains, its very beautiful here even in this light. I realize this travel log has gotten way too long and I probably lost half of you, sorry .
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 16:03:54 +0000
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