All in a Day's Work ... Or Not

When we agreed to help Dada’s “brother,” Ming, harvest the Tapioca root, we only knew to meet him  across from the banana grove at 8 am. It was still misty when we finished our instant coffee and walked down the dirt road from the volunteer huts to the banana trees. 

We were excited to be useful and even though I had come to help with English curriculum, I was happy to be stretching my comfort zone a bit. I wasn’t totally sure I even knew what Tapioca looked like, only that you could make pudding with it and sometimes it floated in that bubble tea that my 16 year old nephew, Sammy, liked to drink. And that sometimes here in Thailand they also called it Cassava root. 

Geraldine explained that it was a root that they often used to make flour with and a few food dishes that I had never heard of before. She told us that they would sell what was harvested today at the market in Sanghkluburi the next day. We were happy to help. 

Ming came limping up the path in a royal blue t-shirt, black shorts and flip flops. His right leg was decidedly shorter than the left and he leaned heavily to one side as he walked up to greet us, a machete in his right hand. 

“Good morning! You eat?” We told him we would eat afterwards and he nodded. “Two sisters come with me and do the watering here.” He motioned to the rows of green plants behind him under a green house roof. “Brother! Come with me.” 

He tapped Jojo on his shoulder and walked up the road and made a right into a field where a man worked with a  machete cutting similarly sized skinny logs from bamboo looking trees in the ground. He left a small stump behind in each one. Ming showed Jojo how to grab and pull the stump and low and behold up came the tapioca, looking like a cross between rhubarb and a sweet potato, strung together by their sinewy roots and the dirt that clumped around it. 

We stood wondering what we would be assigned to do and watched as Jojo pulled futilely at the first plant. “No!” Ming pushed him to one side, “Like this.” 

He showed us how to find the way the roots grew and use that as leverage to pull the thick plants from their hiding spots in the ground. He instructed Celi and Elena to collect the remains of the logs and stack them like a tee pee along the rows of plants and told us that later they would be used as stakes for other plants during the rainy season. 

Kai Si and I were put to work initially collecting the massive tapioca clumps that Yohanes pulled up from the earth, but it quickly became evident that two of us were not needed for that job and before long, I joined Johanes pulling the thick, stubborn plants from the earth. The sun came out from behind the mist and beat down on us as we worked up a sweat. Branches and thorns scratched at us and our backs began to ache as we pulled and stacked and pulled and stacked and dug through patches of hard group to unearth the tapioca hiding deep under the dirt and rocks. “See this – white? This means broken.” 

Ming pulled the rest of the tapioca root from the earth were I had left it behind. He didn’t say it, but I heard the “be more careful” in his tone and smile. 

As we reached the end of the first row, Geraldine and Isi joined us, having finished watering and Ming handed me a pair of blue gloves that I donned proudly, feeling like I had earned his respect as a tapioca puller. My legs burned, my back ached, sweat poured into my eyes and I glanced at the time . . .we had been working barely an hour. I couldn’t imagine that this was how so many people spent their days and once again, my privilege stared me in the face as I envisioned hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the US, and farmers all over the world, doing this type of backbreaking work, day after day, from early in dthe morning to late at night. 

“Pull! Pull!" Kai Si called to me as I struggled against the roots of a particularly hard tree. 

CRACK! The branch snapped and I landed on my butt. I stood and crouched low and looked at the roots in front of me. Maybe I had been pulling the wrong way. I tried the other side and pulled and pulled, sweat pouring down my face into my eyes and mouth. I felt the roots give and heard the sweet sound of success as the plant shook the earth free and came up. 

“Big one!” Kai Si approved taking it from me and tossing it on top of the others. 

As we made our way down to the end of the second row, he asked us again if we wanted to eat, but we all agreed we  were ok. After all, a few hours of hard work was not going to kill us. He pulled out his machete again and showed us he would cut the tapioca off the branches, after which we would gather them in burlap sacks and buckets and transport them to another area under the green house. 

Two other young men with machetes had joined us and we waited as they shucked the tapiocas from their thick roots to gather them to transport. 

“You strong?” Ming asked me and I smiled and nodded. He handed me a knife, “You know?” I shrugged and watched as he effortlessly used the machete to slice off the thick bulb of tapioca from the branch. He nodded at me and I made what I thought was the same motion only to see a small nick in the wood. He smiled and said, “more stronger!” And I swung again hitting a completely different part of the plant. 

“Keep try.” He called as he walked off to go get another machete for himself.

I squatted and chopped, squatted and chopped, squatted and chopped working along side the two young men, imitating their technique and before long I had a rhythm. Admittedly, some of my tapioca looked like it had been cut by a 3 year old, but nevertheless at the end of it all, it sat in a neat little pile, branches free, just like theirs. 

“You eat now.” Ming told us. It was no longer a question. “Hot.” “Come back 2:00.”

“2:00 is not hot?” Celi asked voicing aloud what had come to my mind as well. 

“3:00 ok.” 

We agreed and walked down the hill to the dining area, visions of coconut rice, green beans and tofu dancing in our mind. 

“He’s sending us to go eat, but I guarantee he’s not going to be taking a break.” 

And sure enough, as we headed back up the hill before 3:00, we could see his machete slicing through the thick brush ahead. 

Day 2 Tapioca

I definitively was not excited to go back to the tapioca fields after the two sessions on Friday. I was happy that Ming had said that we would just be cutting the tapioca so it could dry, but I couldn’t figure out how all the kids and all of us would all be able to cut at once with the knives that I had seen around the property. 

Sure enough after my bowl of rice soup, I was greeted with the sad news that all the knives had been distributed among the kids that were already in the field on the tarp chopping the tapioca into slices small enough to dry for the next seven days. 

Dada said they still needed help harvesting and I located the blue gardening gloves, and winced as the fabric brushed the blister that had formed on my left hand. I definitely didn’t want to spend the morning pulling those stubborn roots out of the ground, but felt bad leaving the kids on their day off from school harvesting on their own while we galavanted around town. 

The harvesting Saturday turned out to be way less organized ordeal than the day before had been with no one cutting away the brambles, weeds and thorns nor cutting the trunks off the trees. So now instead of just struggling to pull the roots out of the ground in the sweltering heat, we were also fighting the large, skinny tapioca tree trunks, weeds, thorns and other obstacles that Ming and his assistant had cleared for us previously. 

I was only too glad to call it quits when Wee Wat told us it was time to go if we were getting a ride with him into town. My arms stung as the cold water hit the scratches and I was sure that my finger nails wouldn’t become clean for weeks to come, a deep dark layer of grime settled so far down the nail, it looked like I had put it there on purpose.

Tapioca Day 3

I will never look at tapioca the same again. I may never look at another fruit or vegetable the same again. There was something fun and exciting the first two hours we helped Ming on Friday morning. Before the blisters and the scratches. Before we realized that the back breaking work we did for two hours barely scratched the surface of what was needed to harvest the whole tapioca field by hand. The afternoon, while less enthusiastic, still managed to feel productive and even a bit fun. 

We hadn’t planned to  harvest Saturday, but when Dada told us all the kids would be there to help with the cutting and harvesting, we couldn’t very well leave them and so we stayed and spent another two hours in the heat and sun, scratching our arms up as we pulled and cut and transported the sweet potato looking roots from underground to piles with branches, to piles without branches, to cut into small pieces to dry in the sun.

 

But I think this morning is when we realized how little we had actually done in the grand scheme of things. We had seen Ming last night as we walked by the fields to get to the volunteer house and said hello. He was cutting at 9 pm, but we didn’t think much about it until today when he told us that the tapioca root goes bad once harvested if it is not cut and put out to dry within three days. Today being Monday made the third day for what we had harvested on Friday morning. 

This morning he told us he had been up till after 3 am cutting and placing the root out to dry, while we slept. 

There was a long tarp laid out with the root that the kids had cut on Saturday and there were piles and piles of tapioca root, both cut and uncut to transport. 

We grabbed buckets and worked on transporting the root from the ground to the back of the tractor trailer truck and then accompanied Wiwat to unload the same root onto the cement playground next to the play structure at the entrance to Baan Dada. We thought we were done. We thought wrong. 

We spent the morning cutting the rest of the root and at 1pm when I finally decided to take a break, there was still hundreds of pieces to be cut and laid out to dry. And according to Ming at least 4/5th more of the fields to harvest, transport, cut and dry. 

Out of curiosity we asked him how much he sold the root for and he told us that the kilo was 5 baht or about 13 cents. We had harvested and cut about 500 kilos, which meant that all that work. . .Friday, Saturday, Sunday and today was the equivalent of about 2500 baht or $63 US dollars. I was tempted to pull a few hundred  out of my account and tell him that I wasn’t cut out for the hard labor, but thought better of it when I realized that that would have been insulting and just resigned myself to torn up knuckles, palms and arms and an ache in my back from crouching and pulling for hours on end. This was a blip in my life. This was their life. And days and days of labor with multiple people working all day long. . would equal about $1100 total. 

I will never look at tapioca the same way again. The dirt on my hands caked on from handling these root vegetables that come from deep within the earth a reminder of how much work it takes to go from farm to table . . . 

Day 4....

If I never see a piece of tapioca again, I’d be grateful. The fields seem to reach out to infinity with always more to pull from the ground, more to cut off their thick base and more to chop and carry over to the tarps to be dried. It was never-ending. The fields needed to be cleaned, the trunks leaned on one another in teepee looking stacks and while our work was only a fraction of Mings, the novelty had definitely worn off on day 4. 

I was grateful for a break in the monotony as I had convinced the nursery school teacher to let me come in and teach English to whomever had shown up. She sat the two children on the floor and I used the puppets to sing Good morning to you to the tune of Happy Birthday, followed by a series of songs and games to practice the days of the week, the alphabet and the parts of the body. We then did the main lesson of the day and I explained later to the teacher that my vision was that each main thematic lesson should be taught daily and that the routines should always start and end the lesson including the good morning and good bye songs. Tip and Po ho were entranced as we sang 10 little fingers over and over again and then counted first our fingers, then legos and then used the number chart on the board to count to 10. 30 minutes flew by and the third child that joined us half way through easily joined in the activities. 

At this point I had made up 7 lessons and have about 6-7 more that I have thought to write up and spent time writing up the songs and recording them on my phone. 

Now if I could just get a wifi signal, I’d be able to send the songs and see if they are able to be downloaded to the computer or another phone and make the flashcards for each thematic lesson. My hope is that the teacher and future volunteers can use the write ups, flashcards and recordings to continue teaching it once I am gone. 

The tapioca was unexpected and the lack of internet has made it slow going to make all that is needed for the English curriculum, but hopefully be week’s end, it can be mostly finished. The real question is will anyone use it or will it be another thing here that is started and not utilized. 

This afternoon we’re going back into town to go to Baan Didi’s bakery in Sanghkla buri where she will teach the girls meditation and Jojo will go look for some internet while we are busy. I wasn’t so thrilled about the meditation, but staying here meant cutting more tapioca and I needed a reason to take a break besides I just didn’t want to do it. So I figured the trip into town would serve that purpose. 

Tomorrow it will be back to tapioca and English class and hopefully I can convince one of the German kids to watch and maybe even record the class so that it can be repeated later after I am gone. 

Tapioca again??

On the 5th day of pulling tapioca, of hauling tapioca, of cutting tapioca – of seeing tapioca, we were all delirious. It took little to no convincing of the Germans to come with me to the nursery school to watch me teach the English class so they could carry it on after I left and continue to prep the lessons. 

There were more kids in the class the day the Germans came to watch me teach and I put on my best Sesame Street voices as I attempted to interest five 2 year olds to participate in an English lesson they couldn’t understand. 

Together we sang the Hello song I had made up, the Days of the week to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle and then played a little Simon Says in which everyone wins. I switched to the theme of the week and we practiced our song, “One little, Two little” though in this day in age we count fingers instead of Indians (Thank God) and on the second day of the lesson, Poho and Ting were able to remember to pick up their hands to follow along. 

It was humorous, though not surprising, that the only one not listening and running around the room during the lesson was the teacher’s daughter, who I managed to catch as she shrieked in happiness as she rounded her third lap and had her help me hold the number book I was reading aloud. 

They quite possibly would learn nothing from these English lessons, but if done daily for the allotted thirty minutes, it wasn’t going to hurt them, and in fact the routine would be good for them. 

After the English lesson, we figured we could kick back and relax for a bit, but couldn’t help but feel bad as we saw Geraldine’s head pop up now and again as she carted the buckets of tapioca from the field to the cutting station. 

The tapioca fields stretched out for miles, as I had discovered that morning on my run earlier that day. I had run up a huge hill past tapioca and tapioca and more tapioca, the skinny tree trunks reaching up to the sky in greeting, as if to say, “Here we are! Come and get us!” 

I made a right when I couldn’t go any further and ran past tarps of cut tapioca laid out to dry when the morning mist disappeared and the sun came out in full force, past the cut trunks in leaning on one another like teepees. I ran down and then up and then down again, down a hill so steep that I finally gave into gravity, sat on my butt and slid down the rocky, dusty hill. I stood up quickly as I hit the bottom, brushing off dozens of red ants along with the burs and the orange dirt. 

The run was anything but fast and I wondered if I would figure out how to find my way back home, but just then out of no where, I saw the turn to head me back to our own fields of tapioca. 

 The afternoon was as we expected – hundreds of strangely formed tubulars waiting for us to pull, to cut from the stems, to cart to the chopping area and to chop into small moon like slices to be carted o the tarps where they would dry for 7 days before going to market to be sold at 4 or 5 baht per kilo. 

The sun beat down, the thorns scratched our legs and arms, the knives left blisters on our hands the dirt was so ingrained in our skin and nails that three showers were not sufficient to wash away the earth left there by the cassava root. 

Later that night, after dinner, after the night time English class, after retiring to our little volunteer shack and cracking open a few celebratory beverages to bid me farewell, I apologized to my fellow volunteers. I was leaving the next day. 

After 10 short days, I was moving on and leaving them with weeks of work ahead. 

If I was sick of tapioca after just five short days of harvest, I couldn’t imagine how they would feel after five more weeks. 

Or how Ming and his family felt after five or twenty five seasons of harvesting. 

My tapioca work was a drop in the bucket of what needed to be accomplished.

 I like to imagine that my help was necessary. That somehow I lightened their load. That the English curriculum will serve their babies aged two to four. 

That there are few less pieces of cassava to pull out of the ground or cut into small pieces. That albeit small, there was a contribution. 

I know that this too is egotistical. And that my presence at Baan Dada was likely too short to make a long lasting impact on them  - though my time there will inevitably make a long lasting impact on me. 

Comfort Zone - What Comfort Zone? Arriving at Baan Dada's Children's Home

I am not sure what I was expecting at the Baan Dada Children’s Home in Western Thailand, but it definitely wasn’t this. . . 

I arrived late in the afternoon to the town of Sangkhlaburi after a seven plus hour bus ride from Bangkok. I had eaten some random banana chips and chocolate for lunch and was happy that Geraldine had told the kids from the home to wait for me at the 7-11 so I wouldn’t have to negotiate with the songtheaw drivers. To date, Geraldine had been my only point of contact at Baan Dada, and she had seemed pretty flexible about how long I stayed, when I arrived, and how much I paid for my accomodations.

 I had tried to ask what exactly they wanted me to do and how much they already had developed for their English Curriculum for their nursery school, but her answers had been vague at best - my first inkling that maybe things wouldn’t be all that organized once I arrived. What I didn’t know then was that Geraldine was also a volunteer. She was from Singapore and had been at Baan Dada for three months and had taken over the administration of the organization since Dada was in the Philippines getting treatment for his hepatitis. 

I came off the bus into the late afternoon heat and approached a group of kids hanging on the back of one of the pickup transports. “Baan Dada?” I asked my voice inflection implying the question. They laughed and looked away. I walked down the street and saw another group of kids and tried again, but again was met with head shakes, nervous giggles and some pointing toward the green pick up songatheaws in the lot. 

I approached a driver and used my app to look up how to say, “I’m going to .. . . “ before my location, but he motioned to the motorcycles and told me that I had to go with them for 200 Baht. Knowing that prices are at least 2-3 X the price they should be, I looked up how to say 70 but was met with a shake of his head and no counter offer. I waited patiently only to see him look at a friend and begin talking. 

I finally decided to walk away and see if I couldn’t find the kids in the 711 and wandered over to the store on the only street in town. There were no hostels that I could see, no massage parlors or hair braiders, nor shops selling post cards, there were no restaurants offering Western and Asian cuisine, nothing written anywhere in English at all. 

If I had wanted off the beaten path, I had most certainly found it. 

But now I wished I had upgraded to the pro version of my application to help me with my Thai as I attempted to ask a few more kids if they were from the Baan Dada school. Standard response: a giggle, hand up to their mouth and a shake of their head while looking downward. 

Finally, sufficiently sweaty, hungry and having to go to the bathroom from not having peed in six hours, I decided motorscooter it was and walked over to the two men waiting with their motos in the shade. “Where you go?” one of them asked which gave me a bit of a boost since it implied that they had some management of the English Language. 

“Baan Dada?” I responded and then watched as they talked to each other quickly and emphatically in Thai including some hand gestures that implied that Baan Dada was no where close by. 

Finally, one of them got a piece of paper and wrote 150 on it and offered it to me. I offered 70 back and they shook their heads now talking emphatically to me. I imagined them saying something to the effect of, “Lady! You crazy! You know how far that place is??” But I persevered offering 80 as one of them took another fare and left the discussion. 

After much more discussion with my badly pronounced Thai numbers, their broken English and our papers  and calculators, I managed to convince the first guy who had taken off and since come back to take me for 100. I felt vindicated for my savings of less than $2.00 and thought of my brother and David who always laugh at how completely stubborn I get. It’s not actually about saving the dollar in the end – it’s about not being overcharged. (Later I found out that 150 was actually the standard price for the drive, but how was I to know?) 

The driver took my backpack and put it in front of his knees, donned a helmet and motioned for me to get on. I prayed silently  that my head wouldn’t become road decorations and followed his directions. We made no conversation as we wove our way out of the one horse town and into the mountains and valleys beyond. The air got colder and I thought of Sapa and worried about my two long sleeved shirts and one pair of pants in my backpack. 

When we arrived, Geraldine rushed out, “Are you Jennifer? I am so sorry! The kids didn’t understand me.” But I was just grateful to have arrived in one piece and for only $2.75 at that. 

We walked down the dirt path and stopped for a moment so she could introduce me to the other volunteers, a girl from Singapore (like her) and three German university students doing an internship for their social work degrees. They were eating family style around a table and welcomed me to the family. 

We walked past the dining area, past some crops and she stopped to hug a small child as she explained that the kids were all doing their evening chores. We turned right at the rubber tree and walked another 200 feet before arriving at the volunteer huts. 

The volunteer accommodations were indeed mere huts. One long building with two doors, both closed with padlocks. One of the doors was ajar and we entered to find a man working in a dark, dirty bathroom. “The lights don’t worked,” she offered by way of explanation, “so if he can’t get it to work, you may have to share with the Germans.” 

I nodded and looked inside the bare concrete cell of a room. A mosquito net covered two skinny mattresses that made my thermarest for camping look like a luxury sweet. Holes dotted the pink netting. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. A small blanket was folded at the bottom of the mattresses. “You can choose whichever room you like,” she said, “The other girl from Singapore will sleep in the other one.” 

The rooms were identical so I chose the one closer to the grimy bathroom and breathed in deeply. I had wanted rustic. 

“Well, careful what you wish for Jen,” Rustic it was. 

As we walked back to join the others for dinner, I asked Geraldine some more questions about what my role was and soon realized one thing was crystal clear: there was nothing in place to speak of. She explained that she had tried teaching the preschool kids English but they didn’t really listen and that there weren’t always consistent volunteers or a person that spoke English around.

 I began to wonder whether my time here was going to be well spent as I ate some spicy green beans and tofu and listened to the German girls tell me that they had realized that while the kids were at school there was really nothing to do except hang out. 

I was undeterred. I had not come here to hang out. I could do that at the beach and in a much more tropical location to boot. 

The sun went down and the cold settled in along with the mosquitos. We met with the school aged English group, 3 girls around 9 or 10 years old, a 16 year old girl and a teenaged boys. The 4 German students (a young man had shown up during dinner) and I took turns playing games and singing songs with them, but I couldn’t help but feel that there had to be a better way to do this.

I laid down that night on my cold, hard bed and dreamt of the forest and kids from BVHM together with these Thai children singing songs. The floor was so hard that anytime I rolled over, the floor woke me up. The wind blew and the blanked barely covered both my feet and my head. I couldn’t wait for the sun to come up. 

I ran fast in the morning along the dirt road that led out of the home and down the street past the other huts and jumped out of the way when a dog came aggressively at me. 

The internet had not been working  in the morning and I wondered how I would get any research done about the English program when I got back. But first I needed to sweat. I ran up and down the hills past a small body of water and out onto what seemed to be a main road. 

I ran opposite traffic despite the fact that most pedestrians seem to accompany the cars and waved at the few locals that looked at me as I ran by. I could see them shrugging at each other as some of them smiled back, some wished me “Sawadeeka” and some just shook their heads and averted their eyes. A group of men on a pick up yelled something at me as they drove by and I was happy to not understood them.

 I passed a toddler waiting on a motorcycles sidecar by herself and she turned around to watch me go. I passed a building with 50 pre school aged kids singing and jumping along with their teacher. I passed a barefoot monk dressed in orange robes who nodded serenely. 

On my return trip, the woman who had averted her eyes by the general store called out as I passed and I looked over my shoulder as I ran to see her give me the two thumbs up. I bowed in return and kept going. 

When I arrived back home, the door to the Germans’ door was still closed. It was close to 9 am. “Could they still be sleeping?” I wondered. I had used the disgusting bathroom before running with my headlamp, but would I be able to shower and feel clean there? I entered with trepidatiously and looked around. 

The dead worm on the floor looked like it had been dried to the floor years before. The tube to drain the sink was inside the sink itself and what I hoped was dirt and mud was all over the floor and walls. I tried the light. Still not working. I wouldn’t even be able to see as I navigated the filthy space. And where would I put the soap?  I could not shower here. I knocked on my neighbors’ door and called out hello as they had told me to do. When no one answered, I sighed, resigned to the disgusting shower ahead of me. 

But then I heard a return hello and quickly pulled on my shorts. Sure enough they had still been sleeping and my knock had woken up Celi. She agreed to let me shower and Elena agreed to help me clean my bathroom later that day after seeing its conditions. 

After my shower I sat talking to the Germans, and they shared their instant coffee with me and I was grateful that I hadn’t gone ahead and given up caffeine as I had planned. I had already given up every other creature comfort. The least I could do was drink Nescafe. 

It was now 11 am and I was determined to be productive. I left the volunteer hut and headed toward the dining hall where I found 6 or 7 children in the 2-3 year old age range playing alone on abandoned tractor. They waved as I walked up and all wanted to climb on me, hug me and have turns using me to turn flips. Soon their teacher came out from the kitchen and shooed them up the nursery area to put them down on the concrete floor for their afternoon nap. 

 I went up to the office and found the internet was still not working. I decided that I could write up the English lesson structure and turned on one of the ancient looking PCs on the desk. It asked me for a password and I looked around the office, but found nothing that resembled one. I tried the second password. This one had two log ons but still I didn’t know the password. I walked around till I found a man and asked him if he spoke English. He shook his head no and I stood watching the 2 year olds sleep wondering what to do. Geraldine was no where in sight and it was already almost noon. 

Another man walked out and I said something about the password on the computer. He responded, “Baan Dada Oath 1” and I assumed he had understood. Sure enough it worked and since the internet wasn’t working, I set out to write up and English lesson sequence. 

When I went to save it, I found that there was a folder labeled volunteers and after some digging, found previous notes on English lessons taught and what the volunteers in September had left to be done for the next group. Some serious systems work was in order. I had some lunch from the always pre set volunteer area and wondered how long the carrots and potatoes and rice had been out as I ate. The internet had come back up so I chatted with home and tried to figure out how to make this time worthwhile for the kids at Baan Dada and for future volunteers. 

Just then Geraldine got back and showed me the materials in the pre school area. Here is what I had been wondering about. There were plastic fruit, puppets, games and some books in the area. This is what I needed to be able to plan. As we sat perusing the materials, two of the girls woke up and promptly sat themselves in our laps pulling books off the shelves to “read” with us. This is what the pre school kids needed – lap time. An idea was formulating in my head. 

I sat reading and playing in English until it was time for all the kids to do math with their regular teacher and then headed back to talk to the German girls and Casey from Singapore. They were just as excited as I and we wrote up a list of tasks and questions to ask Dada when he returned the next day. 

Then it was time to clean the bathroom. Casey, Isi and I grabbed all the cleaning supplies they had bought in town and braced ourselves for the dirty task ahead of us. There were three rooms and three of us. I have been in dirty bathrooms in my life. Fraternity house bathrooms, train station bathrooms, bus station bathrooms, even bathrooms on the side of the road in developing countries in between major cities, but this bathroom took the cake. 

We filled up containers of water and splashed them on the floor and sprayed the cleanser on every surface. We scrubbed and scrubbed and sprayed and sprayed and splashed and splashed until finally an hour later, Casey and I agreed that it was clean enough to use. The light finally had started working as well, and Celi had made a list of tasks for the week. 

It was looking like I might be able to be useful at Baan Dada after all.