I already never want to leave Thailand. I'm here in Kata Beach, Karon,
Phuket with an incredibly dedicated and warm-hearted team of participants in relatively luxurious accommodations in a country full of character and surprises. Since the moment of my arrival, my days have been filled with activity, from frantic calls to lawyers, to visits to the hospital, to finding a hand-constructed ethernet cable at the night-market in Phuket town, to dancing to Purple Rain with a 75 year old Thai neighbor.
Seemingly simple logistics such as purchasing office furniture, setting up a working kitchen, and using computer equipment without receiving a frightening shock have proven to be difficult. On the other hand, setting up reliable internet access was mercifully simple thanks to a local internet cafe owner who is our new biggest fan and new favorite person.
More than a month of searching by several different Collective scouts led to our current campus in Kata Beach. The accommodations are nearly ideal, except that we are located in the most expensive neighborhood of the most expensive region in all of Thailand. Often prices are the same as in the US! We all feel uncomfortable with the worst of traditional tourism that is so prevalent in Karon, but these obstacles who forced us to be smart. Our House Manager,
Shelley, has become very shrewd at finding good bargains including amply portioned dinners for the group for $1 per person, and fresh bread delivered twice per week. For housewares, we hire a
tuk-tuk to take us 30 minutes outside of Kata to the local superstore.
Monday marked the first working day at the CouchSurfing Collective where everyone could focus on their job role rather than pitching in with the logistics of setting up the Collective campus. Our professionally experienced participants, including a mediator, project manager, and server administrator all graciously pitched in for a week to help move furniture, buy housewares, and organize our communal home. But considering that we arrived on the previous Tuesday, we are all very happy about being ready to return to our professional roles in less than a week.
Appropriately, we celebrated Monday night by inviting our neighbors to a party hosted by us, bring together the Thai and the
farang, CouchSurfing style. When you party with CouchSurfers you get plate juggling lessons, dancing senior citizens, Thai language lessons, and cocktails made with Fanta and Sang Som for the neighbors. We learned more about our landlord and next door neighbor, Narong, who operates a t-shirt silk-screening company, and who built our home himself. He is a trained fine-artist and painter as well as carpenter and business owner. We learned that the names of his two friendly dogs who we've been playing all week are Mih-keé and Doh-dóh. We can stop calling them Dog and Dog-dog, but they seem just as happy with either name. We met the t-shirt shop employees and other Thais, as well as our friend from the internet cafe, Detlef and his wife. Detlef is a German expatriate and his wife it Thai. He has virtually donated his internet access as well as hardware to strengthen its signal around the campus.
Today we welcomed the 9th Collective participant,
Shonali from India. We were able to secure a special visa for her requiring nearly 30 pages of documentation from our lawyer in Thailand. We were rushed to get the paperwork done before Shonali's appointment with the Thai consulate and at the last minute our lawyer was locked out of his office and couldn't find an internet cafe in Bangkok with a working scanner to send us the documents. But Casey explained how he could use his digital camera and email the pages to Karon where we then used Photoshop magic to convert the photos into clearly readable pages, getting them emailed to India just hours before her appointment. I now know more about international PayPal procedures, international wire transfers, and Western Union foreign IP tracing policies than I ever could have imagined I would need to know when I was hired as General Manager of CouchSurfing last June.
Other than a couple of close calls, I'm thrilled to report that everything is proceeding on schedule and according to plan. What's the plan? To build several sustainable volunteer expert teams to help us accomplish our mission of increasing intercultural awareness and tolerance by connecting people of diverse cultures.
By the way, the hospital visit was minor injury (not mine) that is healing nicely. We have found a way to properly ground our outlets to avoid electrical shock, Narong fixed the flooding in the bathroom, we've found Thai food that no longer sends our chili-spice-intolerant Collective participants into convulsions (though I add the chili's back in), we've discovered that
durian fruit will not split open even when thrown forcefully onto concrete from a second-story balcony, and I can report that the Thai people really are always smiling.
On Sunday we took the Collective participants on a team building excursion to Hey Island and went snorkeling in the surrounding coral reef. As we ferried out to Hey in the morning, it was looking like snorkeling wasn't going to work out with high winds churning up the water. So we went on a trek, following a blue butterfly down a short nature trail where Jeff found a 6" long millipede.
After lunch, the weather and the water cleared. It was my first snorkeling adventure. Just a few meters off shore we swam in the fantastic world of the corral reefs with dozens of species of colorful and playful fish and the undulating coral plant life. I couldn't help but pretend that Sir David Attenborough was narrating everything that I saw below the surface. I can't wait to try diving.
As the shower intensified, the entire ocean sparkled as millions of tiny droplets leapt up from the calm surface of the water across our entire field of vision. The air sparkled too with the crisp sound of endless minute splooshes as each raindrop attempted and failed to defy gravity.
