Ich bin Gestern Abend von Hui Kau Laam zurückgekommen. Unsere Toilette, die wir vor zwei Jahren gebaut haben ist am zerfallen. Holz hällt nicht ewig! Sie wird auch von sehr vielen Dorfbewohnern benutzt und ist einfach zu klein um auch noch zu duschen und die Wäsche zu machen.
Wir haben nun entschieden das Fundament zu vergrössern und einen Raum anzuschliessen zum Duschen und Kleider waschen. Drei Tage waren Mathias uund ich in den Bergen und soweit haben wir die Betonsäulen gesetzt (die alten aus Holz waren morsch) das Dach installiert und das Fundament gegossen. der Rest muss noch warten. Es ist Wochenende. Montag bis Mittwoch werde ich wieder Englisch unterrichten und Büro machen. Am Freitag nehme ich ein amerikanisches Team von der Vineyard in San Diego für fünf Tage in die Berge. Da gibt es auch noch einiges zum vorbereiten.
the adventure I find myself in / das Abenteuer in dem ich mich finde
Category: Development work (Page 2 of 2)
Is it an unreachable dream? To end poverty? Or better say extreme poverty as Jeffrey D. Sachs writes in his book “The end of poverty”. I started reading it some weeks ago and try to fight my way through pages of economic change and explanations about the world with its one billion extreme poor people. Thousands of children die every day of malnutrition and sickness. Sachs says it is possible to stop extreme poverty till the year 2025. A very interesting read even for someone who doesn’t have much understanding of economics. It seems to be a very practical approach. I haven’t finished the book yet, but would really recommend it. It gave me some interesting insight into how countries develop.
In the west we are readily to judge so called “third world countries” and point out that it is their own fault and that they should help themselves. But if poverty is at an extreme end, there is no way to get out of it by one self. Millions of people find themselves on the bottom of a spiral without hope of getting out.
Poverty is the inability to choose.
Working with the poor here in Thailand taught me a lot. Still there are many factors I don’t understand. This is a theme that will be researching for months to come. I want to find out what it practically means in our work situation with the Lahu People. One thing that Sachs doesn’t address is the spiritual factor. The Christian Lahu villages seem to be doing much better than their non-Christian counter parts. On the other hand I think the villages who had help in starting their development were able than to develop themselves further out of poverty. Like the Thai Royal projects. I will explore this more in a future post.
Sometimes when I leave the "civilization" as we know it, it can feel like you are in the middle of nowhere. Here we were working on a broken pipe in the Hui Kau Laam valley. The undergrowth of the jungle is burned down. Ashes and dust hangs in the air. In four months this area will be grown over with green. Bamboo will grow everywhere and animal live will return back. Here are different seasons than in Europe. Hot season is arriving and the temperatures are rising to 40 degrees. There is barely any rain since November. It won’t rain till the end of May. This is why a good water system is necessary for the development of a village. Most of the villages I come to the system is not in place or inadequate for a healthy live. Sometimes I realy wish would be able to do more.
Tomorrow morning I will be going to the mountains again. I will take a minivan shuttle. I left my truck with a team last week. They have been up there for a week building water-tanks. So I will be gone for three days again. The tanks are nearly finished. We need to decide where the pipes will go. I will write more on my other blog www.questasia.org later this week. Then I will visit a boarding home with 55 children we have been supporting. They need to move their facilities to another location. I need to see how we could support this. We also have two more water projects we are looking into. So I have been quite busy lately. It is going great.
My wife is not feeling well and my daughter has a fever. This is always hard for me to leave my family. I hope they will get better soon.
It has been a long time since I wrote last. A combination of writers block, laziness, a vacation and to much work. Blogging is not on my top priority right now. Enough excuses….
We had to move our office and two weeks later our outreach center. I am not a stranger to moving my or other people furniture. It seems like that I could make a business out of it. "Phils moving company".
We found a new house for the outreach center. In this house we store the tools and building material. Enoch lives there and often people stay there for the night. we built an additional roof at the back of the house for the outdoor kitchen. On Monday I will be up in Fang to do the cement floor.
I have been on a trip to Hui Kau Laam and spent three in Hui Kau Laam. A family from Switzerland came along and we had a good time.
On this trip again I was aware how difficult our work is and the problems we incounter.
It is extremly difficult to implement projects and have the people to take responsibility for it and to own the project as well as to teach them new technologies (the water pipe isn’t realy a high technology; at least that’s what I thought. The project we made is big (8 km. /5miles of PVC pipes through extremly difficult terrain) The water is going to the village, the maintenance is a nightmare. When pipes have to be fixed, water isn’t cut off, but they glue while the pipe is still under pressure. Along the pipeline they made holes in the pipe just to see if water is comming. We teach them how things should be done to have a long term success. They just don’t seem to listen or care. we had this problem before. Every village is different, this one is rather a unusual situation. I sometimes wonder how much disapointment I have to endure and what the outcome will be from the project. But the most important is that the nearly two hundred people have clean drinking water. My hope that we can finish the work and then let it go.
Wasser ist Leben. Ich habe die Veränderung in den Leben der Menschen mit eigenen Augen gesehen und die Freude wenn das kostbare Nass bis in das Dorf fliesst und nicht mehr von weither geschleppt werden muss. Sauberes Wasser ist für uns im Westen meist eine Selbstverständlichkeit. Ich treffe hier immer wieder Dörfer an, die enorme Schwierigkeiten haben zu sauberem Wasser zu kommen. Oft müssen wir viel Kreativität aufbringen um eine Lösung für ein Dorf zu finden. Wasser hat die Eigenheit den eigenen Weg zu gehen.
Water is life. I saw the change in the lifes of people with my own eyes. The joy that comes when the water flows into the village and does not have to be caried from far anymore. Clean water is for us in the west mostly something we don’t think about much. I come to villages, where the people have enormous difficulties to get clean water. Often we have to gather all our creativity to find a solution for a particular village. Water has the perculier habit to go it’s own way.
© 2025 philsquest
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑