Emotionally Distraught & Sick :'(

Song for the day : Nelly Furtado "Powerless"

Thank god for the massive floods in Isan because our trip is now postponed till next week! I think everything that I've learned and experienced from this Chiang Rai trip is getting to me. It's like I feel so emotionally drained and just want to get back to our luxury apartment and just relax, rest, reflect and be CLEAN again! Living out of a suitcase not knowing where I am going, what I am doing or where I will be sleeping is tiring. I've been travelling with Reena and 3 OPENAID staff (Justin, Rattana and Wanna). I think the constant togetherness is driving me nuts and I just want space from all of them. Reena I can take but the others....I hate that they treat us like babies and ditch us all the time. Like tonight they got to stay in this really amazing, fabulous house. We are now in a small town called Maesot by the Burma/Thailand border and we got dumped in some really getto, nasty and scary hotel in no man's land. I've been having diarrhea for the past 3 days and I just want to go home already and what's worse is that I got some eye condition. All of a sudden I wasn't able to open one of my eyes and now that I finally have it open, it hurts like hell when I blink or close my eyes! I feel scared and don't know what to do because nothing is open. All I see is pitch black outside...Our hotel is pure nasty! Water is dripping from our curtain, there is bugs crawling on the floor, our beds are so gross and I feel itchy all over just sitting on the bed.

The other night Justin & Ratanna got me so tanked. I haven't been that wasted in sooooooooooo long. It was Justin's way of "getting to know me better" and sort of coerce me into designing the organization's new logo and new tshirts. So now I am commited to doing this stupid project of his when I already commited myself to design the school material for the Burmese migrants. I felt bad for Reena that night because apparently I was really loud and obnoxious and I shared a little too much to Justin, Rattana and Wanna. Our neighbors were also hating on us because I couldn't control my volume or my laughing fits. So Reena took me to the 7 Eleven to get something to eat so I wouldn't be so hungover the next day. While I was eating my snacks at the lobby there were prostitutes with these old, nasty British men having drinks and apparently I was yelling at them saying what they are doing is so wrong. This is what Reena told me but according to my memory I was just whispering my thoughts to her!

The freakiest thing that we learned and saw that night (pre-alcahol) was that the nice hotels in Chiang Rai are home to trafficked women. These women (mostly from poor villages or Burmese women who entered Thailand illegally while trying to escape the war going on there) are kidnapped and locked in the basement, and unable to see the outside world. There is a secret door behind these hotels where men can go inside and take their pick of the women and have sex with them. Justin made Reena and I go in to see it to believe it. We had to pretend we are lost, stupid tourists. So we go in there, and behind a glass wall we saw young women all dolled up. Some sitting, some standing. They looked like mannequins you see in store front windows but they were real! All they do is stand or sit behind the glass wall waiting for a customer to select them for sex. It looked like the hotel clerks (2 Thai women) were shocked to see us there and were trying to get rid of us in fear we may report what we saw to the police. The whole thing was insane! I felt like I was in a movie because the whole thing was unreal. I've never ever heard or imagine anything like that exists! I think that was by far the most shocking thing I've seen in Thailand so far!

There is so much more I want to say but right now my eye is killing me and I am sweating like a pig in this ghetto nasty hotel!