The
chicken bags are dripping blood juice. We’re standing in a line, me, the Fulbright teaching
assistants, and about forty to fifty local volunteers, passing sticky bags of freshly
butchered poultry from one of several delivery trucks to the kitchen tent at
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, a makeshift flood relief center in the
middle of a city turned to water. It’s been about a month now. Since the end of
the rainy season, the rivers to the north have been slowly moving south, past
the sandbags and retaining walls erected around the Chao Phraya River, filling Thailand’s
capital. Twenty-three of the fifty districts in the city are affected, mostly
the poorer areas, and today about 200 of us will prepare, package, and deliver
meals to roughly 45,000 people displaced by the largest natural disaster to
affect the region in over half a century. Tomorrow we’ll do 60,000. Give or
take, the monks at the monastery down the street prepare food for an additional
15,000 affected residents, and there are other centers also. Small pockets of
volunteers are scattered throughout Bangkok, men and women and students and
children who have put their lives on hold, coming when they can, before and
after work and classes. Beginning at two am in the morning the effort runs until
I don’t know when. I have no idea how many of these centers there are, or how
many people are in need of them, how it works as smoothly as it does. Also, we’re
operating without government assistance. The army’s here, providing tucks and muscle,
but, oddly, the government, elected to operate and protect the country, is not.
“We
refuse to work with them,” my adviser informs us, “they can’t be trusted. If we
want to help each other, we have to do it for ourselves.” She laughs when she
says this, like she’s serious but only partially. Oddly, she’s
always laughing. I’m not sure what to think. Back home it seems to me we’d be
in an uproar if the government didn’t rush to save us. Here, on the other
hand, it seems people just dig in and work.
The
bags of chicken pass from one set of hands to another. Rubber-banded shut, they
leak. Blood-juice is on my fingers, on my forearms, on my face. There’s no way I’m
not getting salmonella. This, I accept. It reminds me of killing chickens back at the farm in Wisconsin where I worked before I started grad-school,
though here there’s considerably more fowl, over a ton of
butchered birds in plastic bags which the cooks will eventually turn to curry. I
continue moving meat. The girl ahead of me, though, an attractive and skinny
vegetarian from Harvard, has had enough.
“Can’t
do it,” she says, putting her hands up, shaking her head, and walking toward the
station where a group of other Fulbrights stand at a line of tables stirring rice. The rest of us laugh—deep down, those that know her knew she wouldn’t
make it—but only for a moment. The line requires a certain amount of regularity,
a fast and steady pace that can’t be broken. If a person slows or pauses or
gets distracted for any real duration they end up with a bag of soggy chicken to
the chest and the line backs up and has to be restarted. Also, the woman on the
mega-phone will yell at us, which isn’t what we want. What we want is to get
the chicken from the truck and to the kitchen as quickly as we can, which takes
about an hour. It’s hot, and the sun is baking down on us between the trees,
and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except to grab what they’re handed
and pass it on. Behind me, a chubby kid with glasses drops a bag between his
fingers and chicken splashes on the floor, a pink and fleshy pile.
Today
is also the first day I’ve met any of the other people in my program. Stationed
in various small towns at schools and universities across the country, the
heart and soul of the Fulbright program are the English Teaching Assistants, of
which there’s roughly twenty. The ETA’s are young and eager and excited to be
here. Most of them have just graduated college and they have that look in their
eyes specifically reserved for the hopeful and the radically un-jaded, those
rare and special souls for whom the world is still full of possibility, openings, doors. The rest of us, researchers with grants to pursue our own agendas and
stationed primarily in Bangkok, are a little older, more weathered maybe, more rough around the edges, though
we’re excited also. The ETA’s rub off on us, make us young again and ready to
be of help in a place and point in time that has no need for anything but faith
and effort. Our faith is that eventually the water will recede and people will
be able to go back to their houses and rebuild them. Our effort is aimed at the
time and place until then, the uncertain space in which so many have so little, and so we
gather together at the University, the Monastery, where ever it is a center has
been set up, and we stand in lines together passing bags of meat.
This,
to me, is necessary. I have been in Thailand for approximately three months,
living in a relatively unaffected area, holed up in my apartment. I read and
write and exercise and cook. I go out sometimes, but only sometimes, to parts
of the city reachable by sky train, and I have yet to see, feel, or experience
the flood in any significant way. For me, it isn’t really happening, though
people have died and homes have been destroyed. I have empathy but it isn’t actually
empathy. I want the waters to recede and things to start again and run again,
but it isn’t real, the wanting for these things to happen, because the desire,
at least until today, remained, for the most part, abstract, a reaction relegated
to a place which is not a place at all but an idea of how one is supposed to feel
given the crises of a situation that one has only heard is real, a responsibility to respond but not the
response itself, an obligation. Feeling from afar, unfortunately, is not
enough, not when there is work to be done. And it is nice to have the chance,
finally, to do it.
A
couple hours later, after the chicken line is finished, after the vegetables,
too, in a line, are moved into the kitchen where an army of cooks
have already starting chopping and throwing things in oil, the pretty vegetarian
and I are in the back of a gigantic camouflaged truck, ten pound bags of rice
and miscellaneous provisions flying through the air in our direction, thrown at
us by a group of young marines on the ground below. I catch them as best I can
and, in a single motion, keep them flying backwards where every now and then
Rachel takes a bag in the chest before she’s ready and ends up on her back
against the mass of bags already piled in the back. Though I’ve only known her
a day and we are obviously different people from incredibly disparate lives—I have
a sense she’s likely a Republican, incredibly religious and from money—for now she’s my partner, the one person
in the world who’s standing next to me, whose help I need, and I’m grateful.
She’s half my size, doesn’t seem the type of person wired for hard labor, and
yet here she is, working every bit as hard as I am, likely even harder.
When
the bags stop coming, I stop for water, catch my breath. Rachel is talking up
the Thai Marines in Thai, which they appreciate. They gather around her. One soldier
in particular, bright eyed and smiling, an incredibly beautiful boy in a tight
green shirt who laughs at everything she says. I don’t understand what they’re
saying and I don’t need to. The sun is out and it will stay out. Any moment now, more rice is on the way.
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