I have been in Thailand for some time now and I just now fully able to understand the complex ramifications surrounding the phrase "Thai-time." A phrase that has been uttered all too often on this trip thus far. It has paralyzed my hopes for this trip and it is something that I have had to come to terms with. Thai-time is the total opposite of the idiom, "in a New York minute." I am comfortable with "a New York minute" and I can function under its implied constraints. Here, in Thailand, the expression of time is much more loose. Appointment times are more like approximations, no one is ever on time and "later" can mean NEVER.
My uncle, our driver, Yott, and myself were supposed to leave the day after Christmas for the south. However, our trip was postponed everyday leading up to departure and the time we wanted to spend there truncated from five days to one. We then received news that our scheduled driver was M.I.A. and that there was no one else that could drive us the 11 hours south. My knee-jerk reaction to this news was to just take control, get on an overnight bus and make it happen. But I am having to learn (maybe this is the whole reason for this trip) to step back and let some things go. It's hard. I have such a short amount of time here and my hopes for this trip were/are bigger than the backpack I brought with me. It's hard right now to not be cynical. And it was really hard to fight back the tears.
I have continued to work on the web site and presentations for GSM. But I have also hit some roadblocks in this domain. There seems to be a deep cultural trait in Thailand of playing one's cards close to the chest. And the word "transparency," which is a must in US business these days, is not so popular here. I am having a hard time getting all the facts and information needed to populate both the web and presentation. Which is another reason the cancellation of our trip to the south is such a heartbreak. If we had gone, we could have seen one of the projects firsthand. So, I continue to design in a vacuum and hope that the information requested will materialize and the rest of the planned trip will come to fruition.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
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2 comments:
Trust me, New York Minutes are not everything their cracked up to be! loveyou, Me
what a huge bummer, lindz. and i know how very difficult it was and probably continues to be for you to just let things happen even if not what you would have liked. all i know is that God took you there for a reason... and that He will bless you in your work. i pray for you daily and am still super jealous of you, my friend.
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