life and death

Yesterday: Maen is not his real name and he is open with his HIV status

During the day, nothing exciting happened but in the evening I had set up an appointment to meet with a man who I met at the hospital who was HIV +, Maen. I hopped on my motorbike around 4:30 and drove through rice fields and villages for about 40 minutes until I finally got to his village. When I pulled up he was totally surprised that (one) I actually came and (two) I was able to find him by myself. I had apparently proved myself to him, his father and his friends about how gaeng (great) I was by finding my way there by myself since it came up at least 8-10 times.

He had just gotten back from harvesting cassava. He was there all day in the hot sun working and gets paid 160 baht for the whole day of work: the equivalent of 5 dollars. He was okay with it because his family can eat for about 40 baht a day…however, I went with him to the house that sells a few groceries to help with dinner and the pork he was going buy was 60 baht for a ½ kilo which we ate all of that night, not including rice, vegetables etc. And had I not gone in the store and forced to pay for the pork he would of paid for everything. I am continually amazed with their generosity here and strive to cultivate my own.

Maen works as a labor hire (ropp jaeng) because he had to sell his rice fields when he was sick with HIV to cover the costs. I interviewed him for about an hour but only after I had to do the accustomed get to know you conversation with the young men drinking across the street: where you come from, are you married, do you like thai woman, can you drink rice whisky- USA, no, they are pretty, I can but only a little. This is then followed by taking a half-shot of probably my least favorite liquor in the world maybe only topped by bai-jiu (Chinese rice whisky).

Maen got HIV from his first girlfriend and the only other person he has slept besides his wife who is also HIV+. He has been HIV+ for 10 years and he is my age. However, he looks much older than me until he smiles and you can see the youth that is still there. He has a strong sense of responsibility for his family, which was evident the whole evening and the next morning that I was there…and the reason that I think he is still alive.

His father and mother and wife all live there as well as his older sister and two nieces. His two nieces clearly look up to him as a father figure. I think that the girls’ actual father was there too but if it was the one who I thought it was he was drunk early and gone late.

After interviewing Maen and his wife, he drove me to another person in the village who is HIV+. The man and his wife just had a three month old child and they were feeding her bottled milk when I we got there. It turned out the two of them had just recently gone to a conference, with a current PCV for strengthening PHA groups. The conference was part of the program I helped start and was a consultant for with Peace Corps. It was special to see the reach of it and its continuation. He of course, called the PCV and we had a nice but sort of awkward conversation since we don’t really know each other.

We left promptly before 7pm so that Maen could take his ARVs on time. He is on the third level of drugs in Thailand. The fourth level of medication is expensive and is not currently covered under the universal health policy. His wife has not had to take drugs yet and her CD4 count is around 400 still after being HIV+ for 8 years (typically in Thailand they start patients on ARVs when there CD4 count is 250 or below).

The village they live in his very poor, with the streets torn up and long distance to the main road. Their house was your typical old village style house, on stilts, made out of wood and tin roof; however, it was very comfortable inside. Dinner was nice (Eating is always more enjoyable with other people, especially in Thailand). After dinner, we watched a little TV and I help the niece do some of her homework before we went to visit a next-door neighbor who had just gotten back from the hospital.

Maen, his mom, his wife, the two nieces and I, walked down the street around 8pm with a crystal clear Issan sky. You can tell you are on a plateau when it is a clear night and you can see the infinite openness of the sky and the stars. We walked in the dark for about 5 minutes to the neighbor’s house. It was also a traditional house and I could tell by the numerous flip-flops surrounding the ladder to the porch that nearly the whole village was visiting it her.

I will never forget the scene in the house. The woman was lying down with a blanket over her bottom half. She was lying there only occasionally moving, clearly suffering. Her husband was sitting next to her on the left hand side. A friend or relative who was missing her two front teeth was massaging her right arm which incredibly swollen. The woman would close her eyes but could not sleep. There was about 30 people or more sitting around her. The house was completely full with relatives and friends. She had just gotten back from a hospital in Khorat where she was getting treatment for cancer for the last two months. Apparently, the doctors could not do anything else and she was brought home to be taken care of by her family for the last weeks of life.

The atmosphere was so beautiful and so sad at the same time. People would take turns massaging her one on either side. Her husband didn’t say anything and just sat next to door on the wall. People’s conversation would move from talking about her, cancer, health, and for a while about me (the random white guy who speaks their language and amazingly made it the village by himself). It was such an intimate situation and I was nervous about going in initially but people were sweet and welcoming and seemed to enjoy a temporary distraction.

Shortly after we got their Maen began massaging the woman, helping her lift up her legs which she wanted to do about every 20 minutes or so. Earlier Maen had described to me how sick he was before he started ARV treatment and how he felt like he was going to die. He talked about how he could barely lift up his body. I saw him in the same position as the woman, not able to sleep, not able to walk, not able to eat. And now there he is healthy and strong and compassionately massaging the woman knowing what feels like to be in that position.
After we had been there for awhile and the kids started to get restless they asked to see the pictures I had taken of them playing badminton. I began showing them the picture of them playing and they ask to see pictures of my girlfriend and pictures of the US and snow. So I started showing them pictures and movies of us playing in the snow. It was very surreal to feel like I was in both places at once, in the mountains in Seattle with my friends and sitting on a wood floor next to a woman who was suffering from the last stages of cancer in a village in Issan.

One person, next to me talked about how we should not believe all of what the doctors say. He said, they know about medications and drugs but not everything. Which speaks to one the respect of villagers towards doctors in listening to what they say but also a bigger spiritual picture of health and that doctor’s and western medicine is just a part of the picture.

In Peace Corps and yesterday I am struck by the feeling of the closeness of illness and death but also by the openness of it here. In the States, I have never massaged someone dying of a cancer or poured water as blessing on the recent corpse.

We left the house around 9:30pm and sat outside on the hammocks at Maen’s house talking about cancer, death and how amazing it was that I was able to find the village and Maen’s house by myself.

Around 10:30pm I fell asleep and was awoken around 1am by two of the guys who were drinking earlier and a third guy. They were rehashing the evening quite loudly in the room that I was sleeping in. I was trying to act like I was still sleeping so that hopefully they would stop talking but that didn’t happen. So eventually, I rolled over and said hi and they told me how they had lost 3,000 baht gambling ($100). They were talking about how they would try to get the money back and what they would need to do. I am assuming that they didn’t want to tell their wives/family. Finally, they went to sleep and then I fell back asleep until 4:30am when the temple started blasting traditional Thai music out of their loud speaker.


Normally, I love traditional thai music and the ranad-ek, a wooden xylophone. But the constant loud patterning and than the wailing thai bag pipe instrument that begins muay thai fights is just not pleasant at 4:30am and impossible to sleep through.

So I woke up and saw the stars again, waited for sunrise, went to the temple for Wan Phraa before hopping on my motorcycle and heading back to Nang Rong today.