I wrote this as a response to an assignment from my Rotary district in the U.S. but I like how it turned out, so I’m going to post it. It’s short but it’s something at least.
****
Walking along the bank of the river at my family’s weekend home, I saw a fisherman squatting in a boat that was more like a canoe than a boat. Long and narrow it reminded me a lot of a pencil. He wore the traditional Thai cloth wrapped around his waist to make a sort of skirt. He maneuvered the boat so skillfully through the water, it hardly even wobbled. The sun was setting and made a blazing orange reflection on the water.
It was one of the many moments I wished I could paint because it would have made an amazing picture. Cameras just can’t capture that scene.
Thailand is a very modern country in many ways and often it’s not so different from America. And then I see something like this that reminds me where I am. The contrast between old and new, rural and urban is striking and beautiful and it has no boundaries and you can’t have one without the other.
The opposites come together like red and blue and mix until they’re swirled into purple and you can’t separate them. You don’t look at purple and say that it’s red+blue, even though you know that red and blue make purple. You just look at it and see purple.
That’s what Thailand is. Old and new, traditions and change, rural and urban. It’s made up of all those things swirled together until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. All you can say is “It’s Thailand.”ใ