Hi. I'm Nick Bekker. My wife, Trish, and I are missionaries working in Lampang, North Thailand. This blog was intended to be my musings and questions about life and my personal observations of Thai life and culture. At present, however, it consists mainly of our monthly newsletters.
I work for OMF, a missionary organisation started by James Hudson Taylor in 1865. First called the"China Inland Mission" (CIM), and focused on China, OMF started working in Thailand in the early 1950's after the Communist takeover in China forced all foreign missionaries out of the country. For more info about OMF's history click here.
Our first year in Thailand was spent learning Thai full-time. At the beginning of 2004, we moved to Chiang Mai in the north to help with a new church plant. In June 2006, I was appointed as the Regional Leader of the North Thailand region.
We went "home" to South Africa for 7 months in August 2007 and returned "home" to Thailand in April 2008. We have recently moved to the town of Lampang in north Thailand.
Having spent a number of years in Thailand, learning the culture and grappling with the language, I really empathise with people who have to communicate in a language other than their own. I am deeply grateful for my Thai friends who patiently smiled and nodded, and gently corrected me, as I massacred their language over the years. There were a number of embarrassing moments when I said things that came out wrong, or that just didn’t make any sense at all. These were all very frustrating at the time, but one thing that helped me to keep things in perspective, and to see the funny side of language study, was when I came across some equally horrendous English translations.
I once got involved in an online debate about the effectiveness of Google Translate. I argued that it was only of value if one was able to speak a moderate amount of Thai or English and that it could never be used to converse with people in Thai if you were English, or in English if you were Thai. The reason is that it provides a direct translation of a sentence word for word and is not (yet) capable of translating an entire concept captured in a sentence. This is patently clear from the examples below of menus that were clearly translated using something like Google Translate - broken up into its component parts, each of these translations are correct, but as you will see, the overall result is less than satisfactory.
I’m in Lampang at the moment. A largish town in North Thailand, about 100km south of Chiang Mai. We moved here from Chiang Mai in 2008 and I must admit, at that time, it was quite a shock to the system. You see, Lampang was rather, shall we say, ... rural. It has the unique, if somewhat dubious, distinction of being the only town in Thailand that still uses horse-drawn carriages. Well, the tourists use them anyway. The reason it was a shock to the system is because the entire town, with a population of approximately 160 000 people, had but one large supermarket, which stocked very basic goods. I had business in Chiang Mai about once a month and I would use that opportunity to stock up on “luxury” goods, such as chocolate that was made from milk, not wax, baking ingredients such as vanilla extract, jelly beans, and from time to time, clothing. On the rare occasion that the whole family went, we would splash out and go to a restaurant that served Western food (the closest thing that Lampang had in that department was a Pizza Company, which was more Thai than Western). Going to Chiang Mai always made me feel like a country bumpkin going to the city for the first time. I used to walk around with my eyes bulging and mouth hanging open at what the “big city” had to offer. If time allowed, I would go for a really big treat — an English movie at the cinema! And it was always with a sense of relief that I would retreat to the quiet country backwaters of Lampang after a hectic few hours of retail therapy in Chiang Mai.
But that has all changed! In the 2 years since we left, Lampang has shaken off its sleepy hollow image and has become a retail mecca to be reckoned with. There is a new, ultra modern, 3-story mall, complete with Starbucks, high-end clothing stores, numerous restaurants and even a 5-theatre state-of-the-art cinema, with English movies. But thats not all, in addition to the high-end mall, other large shopping centres have sprung up. A Macro, a large warehouse hardware store (my favourite kind of shop) and a few others. Lampang has rushed headlong into the 21st century at a dizzying speed, and in the process has lost something of the charm that it had before.
Now, far be it from me to deny the denizens of Lampang the pleasure of first-world shopping experiences and Starbucks coffee, but as far as I can see, there are no new corporations, factories or office buildings in Lampang. So I cannot help but wonder where these simple, country people have suddenly got the money from to spend at these high-end malls and shopping centres. I’m sure the marketers have done their research, but I sure do hope that the malls, the clothing stores, the restaurants and the coffee shops are sustainable in the long run, and I hope that hard-earned savings aren’t being frittered away, drawn by the lure of materialistic hedonism. And I hope that credit cards aren’t being maxed out in pursuit of worldly delights.
