What day is it?

Today it’s Wednesday 17^th March 2011, but it feels like Monday or Tuesday and our bodies really don’t know what time of day it is.

We arrived safely but bleary-eyed at Chiang Mai airport on Tuesday evening and were met by Sarah and Kath, one of the other Partners people. Sarah took us to the Night Market to eat where we had various noodly means for a few pence. To follow it up Ben and Jay shared a large bowl of spicy seafood soup. It tasted delicious but was so hot their mouths echoed for most of the night.

After a fitful night’s sleep on hard Thai mattresses we spent the day at the Partners office. Sarah had to spend the day in a meeting with the other national directors so the rest of us spent the morning with Dan learning about the history of Partners and the plight of the Karen people. He also gave us some do’s and don’ts for getting by in polite Thai society. We visited another room in the building to see a Karen lady who was using a traditional back-strap loom to create a woven garment.

She kindly consented to be photographed. Karen weaving is a time-consuming process but the resulting pattern is very beautiful. We also visited an upstairs laboratory were Partners have been working on making their own soap. This started out as a craft project to enable people to raise money, but it has been more valuable in enabling people to make soap very cheaply for their own use.

After lunch three of us were taken by Dorothy to buy some musical instruments. We’d decided to bring none apart from Jay’s saxophone and flute, and Susanna’s whistles and melodica. We have use of a keyboard for the retreat, and decided to buy a guitar or two and leave them behind at the Bible school or a refugee camp. We went to a tiny music shop in the Central Mall where a young man with red-dyed and gelled hair sold us two guitars (one branded Yamaha), a tambourine, two maracas and two “egg” shakers for 9060 Baht – just under £200. Back we went to the office and spent the rest of the afternoon practicing.

It was the first time the five of us (Sarah was still in her meeting) had played together and thankfully we flowed together very well musically. Jay had a bit of trouble playing his saxophone quietly enough in the rather small room, but we coped alright. The piano arrangement of Ben’s song Olive Tree came together very well. It had been done as a favour by David Ball, an old friend of Jay’s, now living in Chiang Mai. That evening we took him and his family out to dinner to thank him.

When we got back to the hotel Jackie and Hazel went to bed but the rest of us sat up late until gone midnight. Many people have shown an interest in Jay's footwear, so to sate their curiosity here he is modelling these fantasies in injection-moulded plastic:

And so to bed.

Tomorrow we're practicing some more in the morning, and the Partners retreat starts in the afternoon.