Living and Teaching in Thailand

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

This week it was a coup d'état. What next?!!!

My wife Bernie and I moved to Thailand from Canada several years ago just for the adventure. Well, adventure it has been, and we have enjoyed almost all of it! It’s a beautiful country, and we love living here.

We have observed the extraordinary economic development of the cities, and the growth of the middle class. However, we have also watched predations by government on the lives of Thai people. (We hope the peaceful coup will bring that to an end, but we have our doubts.) We have witnessed the desperate poverty of many people in hills and slums. And delightfully, we have also experienced the great kindness and gentleness of the Thai people.

Underlying all of this was my job as a teacher. I began teaching English, but today I teach visitors to Thailand how to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL). My work has brought stability into our lives, and it has brought us in touch with the Thai people. In Thai society, teachers are held in high esteem, and Thai students are a pleasure to have in class.

In this commentary I want to talk about living and teaching here, but also to offer a perspective on the country’s culture and politics. If the latter isn’t your thing, you can always stop reading!

Working in Thailand. I enjoyed a long corporate career before coming here. However, to get a job and a work permit in Thailand, before leaving Canada I took a one-year fulltime university program to get certification as a teacher of English as a second or other language (CERTESOL). That was a lot more than I needed, but it made it quite easy for me to get a job at Chiang Mai University (CMU) when I arrived. A year ago, I moved from the English Department to CMU’s Language Institute.

If you want to work in Thailand, TEFL accreditation is now required. You can get this from a number of places, although I personally think the TEFL course my colleague Karla M. Portch and I have developed is first rate. You will find many references to it on this blog.

Effective October 1 of this year, Thailand is putting severe restrictions on the right of foreigners to stay here indefinitely on tourist visas. As a result, becoming a long-term resident is now much more problematic. So, the other thing you need when you come here is a non-tourist visa – preferably a B (business) visa. If you can arrange that, it will be much easier to get a work permit.

If you have a TEFL certificate, you will be able to find work. Jobs are usually available at language schools, but they do not pay particularly well as long as you are a part-time teacher. Even small pay checks go a long way in this country, however, unless you want to enjoy a Western lifestyle.

As you gain experience, full-time opportunities can open up at language schools. They are also available in the public and private school systems, especially beginning at the end of May when the academic year begins. Chiang Mai alone is home to five universities, and many technical schools besides.

Also, many of our TEFL graduates find themselves teaching individuals or small groups of private clients. Most Thai people know the advantages of having English language skills, particularly because this country relies so heavily on the tourist trade. The demand for better English is great.

Living Here. Now settled, our lives seem normal. We think of Chiang Mai as just the place we live. Oddly, the ways we spend our days sometimes do not seem terribly different from when we lived in Canada -- different landscape, different language, different climate, different food and, yes, definitely a different pace of life! We have the occasional twinge of yearning for things more familiar, but that generally passes quickly.

Since we arrived here, we have witnessed all of life's rites of passage among our friends: marriage and divorce, birth and death. When a friend died a painful and lingering death from cancer a few months ago, it oddly created for us a special closeness to this city.

We are nearing the end of the rainy season, and we have had quite a bit of the wet stuff this year. In this part of Thailand the rains generally come for brief periods (often at night, when we are asleep), and are not at all disturbing. The rains are warm, and they keep the air clean and the vegetation lush and green. However, we don't travel a great deal during these months. But the dry, cool season begins in October. That's a great time for road trips.

A Recent Diary. A few weeks ago, Bernie and I went to a refugee camp at the Myanmar (Burma) border as part of my Rotary work. It was extraordinary to see again how different the two countries are. At one point we went to a temple whose landholdings were now, by international agreement, half on the Myanmar side of the border.

Once the border dispute was settled, the Myanmar authorities destroyed the village on their side and forced the Shan villagers to flee to Thailand. The army took over the concrete temple buildings and filled them with soldiers. The border now bristles with these people, who have also laid land mines just inside the border.

It's hard to believe the cruelty of the Burmese government to its ethnic (for example, Shan) minorities. This kind of thing is routine. On the positive side, a sort of "normal" life has been created in the refugee camp compliments of the Buddhist temple and an NGO.

The refugees now live in single-family bamboo huts. The kids receive a basic education at the temple, many of the women receive vocational training like dressmaking and crafts, and the men and some of the younger women go off to the fields to pick chillies or whatever else happens to be in season, for 10 baht (25 cents) per kilo. These people do not have Thai citizenship, so their movements are at the discretion of the Thai officials.

Who knows what the future holds for them? Well, at least for now they don't have to live in fear.

East Asian and Western World Views. While Thailand now has much of the feeling of home, the cultural differences are many, with Thais seeing the world quite differently from the way we view it in the West. Here are our quick summary and general observations: Westerners see things as rather black and white, while East Asians see them as heavily nuanced by relationships. Beliefs in the equality of man and in human rights are very real in the West. In East Asia, patron-client relationships are more important. And the immediate family is an incredibly powerful social unit.

In Thailand, one of the most extraordinary institutions is that of the monarchy. His Majesty King Bhumipol has been on the throne for 60 years, and the celebrations here have been great. It is quite hard for westerners to appreciate the reverence Thais have for their king. He's seen as simultaneously the embodiment of the Hindu god Vishnu (the preserver) and the incarnation of the Buddhist ideal of a king inspired by Dhamma (cosmic law). Thais believe without question that he can guide his people toward greater goodness, and his support of the recent coup was essential for it to succeed.

It is impossible to imagine how this country will ultimately respond to his death. Long may he reign!

The Coup. Like other westerners steeped in the traditions of democracy, I believe coups d'état are terrible. However, until the recent one occurred, the political situation here was an incredible mess. The country was running smoothly because of its efficient civil service. However, Thailand had not had a functioning government since February. That's when the prime minister and his cronies finally reached a level of corruption even Thailand couldn't handle. Although popular in rural Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra was mostly despised by the middle class, intellectuals and the country’s elite.

There were weeks of mass protests and a rigged snap election that the opposition parties boycotted. The king called for the courts to settle the political controversy, and the results say a lot about the state of corruption at that time. The courts overturned the election and demanded a new one. The key members of the country's Election Commission were thrown in jail for their part in the travesty. It is unfortunate that the country did not have the political maturity to continue to rely on the courts to solve its problems. But perhaps the coup was the only viable solution. Who knows?

Final comment. There is still a great deal of blood being spilled in this country, but it is mostly limited to the three (Muslim) southernmost provinces. A tragic, shadowy insurgency began there nearly three years ago, and the previous government mishandled it from the start. People were being killed by both the terrorism of the insurgents and nastiness of the government, who waltzed over western concepts of human rights.

The recent coup offers some encouragement. The general in charge of the coup is a Muslim (such a thing has never happened before in this Buddhist country!) and he is known to be conciliatory. Perhaps the mess in Thailand’s Deep South can finally be resolved.

To my mind one of the biggest mysteries of this affair is how completely Thais seem to have accepted it. An extremely popular leader (at least, in rural areas) has been overthrown, yet the people have said nothing. Those I have spoken to seem to believe democracy is alive and well. Another common theme is that the king is safe and healthy, so why worry? Perhaps this just reflects how Thais view the world: after all, Buddhism teaches us to accept whatever happens.

Or perhaps they are afraid to express what they feel. The soldiers are serious about having taken power, and they will brook no interference.

Village of Widows

Although he was a life-long pacifist and supporter of human rights causes, Albert Einstein will ironically be remembered also as the man who convinced US president Franklin Roosevelt to begin the Manhattan Project. The Anglo-American atomic weapons effort took place during World War II. It led to the use of nuclear bombs in anger, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it opened the Pandora’s box of atomic energy.

In a now-famous letter, Einstein suggested that nuclear chain reactions in large masses of uranium could release “vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements.” And, he speculated, “extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” While America had only poor ores of uranium, Einstein noted, “there is some good ore in Canada.” Therein lies a tragic story.

At the end of 1998, a Canadian Indian named Cindy Gilday described that tragedy to a United Nations conference on Human Rights. She spoke on a panel considering whether the environment, the economy and human rights were “cross currents or parallel streams.”

Amoco had sponsored Ms. Gilday’s presentation at the conference, held in Edmonton, Canada to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The program brought together many of the world’s foremost human rights activists. One speaker after another described the global struggle for human rights. (Many of the speakers have themselves been jailed for having had the impertinence to suggest, for example, that their national governments endorse democracy.) They argued forcefully that human rights are universal, and do not conflict with cultural or religious values.

Ms. Gilday’s presentation spoke to the experience of one band of Indians during the Second World War. Those Indians lived a traditional nomadic existence, very few spoke much English, and they knew almost nothing about the war. As it happened, however, their traditional territory was near the uranium mine being developed for the Manhattan Project.

The ore came from a rich deposit of uranium and radium along the shores of Great Bear Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. During the long days of summer, a wartime mining company hired local Indian men to carry 40-kilogram burlap bags of ore from the mine to the Mackenzie River. They carried those loads for long hours, for months on end. When the bags ripped apart, they shifted the spilled ore off the trail, but took the contaminated bags to their temporary village. There, the burlap found many uses.

Years later, the ore-carriers began dying of cancer, and the community now known as Deline became, in Ms. Gilday’s words, “a village of widows.” Eventually, the Aboriginal people became aware of the connection between radioactivity and cancer. They also came to understand that they had unwittingly helped contaminate their remote northern homeland with radioactive waste.

According to Ms. Gilday, the families of the men who served as ore-carriers during the war have wounds that are yet to be healed. “Like most Native Americans, their culture, spirit and their very beings are linked intimately with the well-being of mother earth. This has been compromised by uranium mining contamination....If their environment is compromised, their lives are compromised.” She argues that their wartime experience involved a breach of human rights, which no government has ever attempted to redress.

The contrarian could suggest that everyone who dealt with radioactive elements in the early years faced unknown risks. After all, radiography pioneer Marie Curie herself died of cancer.

But whichever side of this argument you take, Ms. Gilday’s story illustrates three powerful trends in modern society. The dynamic relations among public health, safety and the environment comprise a single issue. Another is that many of the world’s indigenous peoples have learned to mobilize public opinion in their effort to reclaim traditional landsand livelihoods. The third is that moral claims based on human rights have economic and political force. Each has powerful implications for globally organized business.

When the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, Soviet representative Andrei Vishinsky dismissed it as just a “collection of pious phrases.” Sadly, for the first two decades of its existence, Vishinsky’s assessment seemed to be accurate. But the declaration has been gathering momentum since the 1970s.

Today, western democracies expect their leaders to raise human rights issues when they visit such countries as China. Large corporations that buy from Third World sweatshops or operate within countries that are the worst abusers of their citizens frequently find themselves the targets of boycotts and picket lines. And countries that systematically violate human rights often find the world’s economic powers imposing embargoes and economic sanctions upon them.

No one understands this better than South Africa’s Anglican archbishop emeritus, Desmund Tutu. As a critic of the former South African system of Apartheid, Mr. Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize. His moral influence led to intense international economic and diplomatic pressure, which eventually led to abandonment of that system of institutional racism. This was one of the great recent victories for the human rights movement.

The keynote speaker at the UN’s human rights conference, the charismatic archbishop characterized South Africa’s victory over Apartheid as a “spectacular victory over the forces of evil and wickedness.” In his introduction to a wide-ranging address on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which he had led, this tiny little man added a small but enormously significant comment – with enormous humility, and to thunderous applause. “Our victory is your victory,” Mr. Tutu said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support.”

After centuries of human rights abuses, Archbishop Tutu said, “We in South Africa are a wounded people, in need of reconciliation. By enabling this reconciliation to occur, perhaps God is setting up South Africa as a beacon to the world.” He chuckled about “the perverse sense of humour” of the Divine, which could make a troubled country like South Africa a beacon of hope for such countries as Bosnia, Rwanda and Serbia.

The movement that Mr. Tutu so articulately represents has gained great strength in recent decades. Why?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a group of related international agreements, including the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949, have created a body of thought respecting human rights, war crimes and humanitarian law. International bodies are giving this body of law some teeth. And publicity promoted by human rights groups is combining with TV screens full of graphic scenes of humanitarian disasters to increase public concern. Victims are no longer seen as someone else’s problem.

There is also the question of the moral high ground.
A very large percentage of the world’s human rights activists are driven by a sense of higher purpose. Albert Einstein, a Jew, famously remarked that “God does not play dice with the universe.” Cindy Gilday talked about the “culture, spirit and very beings” of American Indians as being “intimately linked with the well-being of mother earth.” And Archbishop Tutu’s profession speaks for itself.

While spiritual values are no doubt one important value behind the human rights movement, “the struggle for democracy” is another. In a notable book by that name published a decade ago, Canadian authors Patrick Watson and Benjamin Barber put the point concisely. “We found that to tell the story of democracy is also to explore the fundamental human urge towards self-mastery and liberation: the inclination to speak openly, communicate freely, pray according to one’s beliefs, dance to one’s own tune, think as one pleases – but to do so in the company of other men and women in a spirit of cooperation.”

Many forces are guiding the human rights movement. The expansion of democracy is one. The human spirit is certainly another. A sense of the Divine, perhaps, is a third. And a growing body of international law underlies all three. Whatever the causes of this remarkable movement, everyone, everywhere, is a beneficiary.