(Inspired by an article by Jeffrey Gettleman)
On Lake Tanganyika fishing nets from skeeter netting
Are practical and inexpensive – and to some, upsetting.
Meant to cheat malaria of its accustomed prey,
The netting used for fishing is a poor person’s mainstay.
But since it’s being used in ways that are not validated,
The NGO’s that pass it out are getting aggravated.
No doubt some regulation will be placed upon the net
To complicate the livelihood of those who toil and sweat.
I have lived in Thailand for a number of years, over a long period of time. The first time I visited the Land of Ten Thousand Smiles I was a volunteer working for an NGO. While the Thai people immediately made me feel welcome and appreciated, the Thai Immigration services were not quite so hospitable. I and my companions were asked to leave the country every three months, to have our visas stamped and renewed at the Malaysian border.
We went en masse, all thirty of us, on the train, boarding in Bangkok and disembarking in Butterworth, just across the border in Malaysia.
When the train stopped, which was frequently, the food hawkers swarmed around the windows with coconut candies, cashews, dried squid, iced sugar cane juice, shrimp fried rice wrapped in banana leaves, and, as we approached the Malay border, rojak – a fruit compote stewed with chilies and tamarind that would lift your head off and send it spinning across the Malacca Straits. I ate everything offered, and spent just a few pennies. My stomach has never forgiven me for that folly.
I recall Butterworth as a sleepy burg bristling with coconut palms and dampened with somnolent government officials who were in no hurry to stamp our passports. Lacking funds for anything but meals, we sat around the public park, picking our teeth with bamboo splinters and trying to keep our white shirts from succumbing to the depredations of the Lesser Cuckooshrike, which inhabits the tops of tropical trees.
In later years, when I again came back to Thailand, this time as an ESL teacher, the routine for renewing visas had changed. Now farangs (foreigners) were required to cross into either Cambodia or Laos. The quick roundtrip, usually by rented car, was frowned on by immigration authorities on both sides of the border; it was thought better if the farangs would stay the night and lose their shirts at the obliging border casinos and other dens of iniquity. Being both pious and cheap I turned my back on such depravity and spent my days in a park, picking my teeth with a jade toothpick (I’d come up in the world!) and still trying to avoid the putrid attentions of tropical birds like the Thick-billed Green Pigeon.
The last visa run I made in Thailand was just four years ago. By then the whole shootin’ match had been streamlined by savvy travel agencies in Bangkok. You boarded an air-conditioned bus by the Victory Monument in the early morning, watched movies while a svelte hostess served packaged snacks, fresh fruit and bottled water. She also handed out dainty therapeutic rice bran pillows. At the border you handed your passport to the driver, got it back, properly stamped, in an hour, and returned to Bangkok before the sun had set.
Leave it to the Thais to turn an onerous chore into a joy ride — and no more dodging Yellow-vented Flowerpeckers!
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