Drift Reality > Bangkok > Nareh

Yesterday when I was booking my tour of the floating market, which I ended up sleeping through thanks to the Scotsman and his whiskey, I became acquainted with the travel agent whose name was Nareh. She was gracious enough to allow me to postpone the tour a day, allowing me to catch up on some much needed sleep.

While looking through the tour options with Nareh, one tour in particular caught my eye: a Thai dinner cruise aboard a rice barge that floated down the Chao Phraya River. The only problem was that I didn't have anyone to go with. Never being one to avoid an easy solution, I simply asked Nareh to go with me.

The dinner consisted of some curry and rice dishes as well as some fried pork. It was delicious but I think I was more preoccupied with Nareh. A constant breeze flickered through the barge, slowing the heat while it kissed her hair. Small bells hung from the roof of the boat, filling the air with silver ribbons.

We began talking and Nareh told me that she had studied business English for two years and Business Management for two years. She had been doing tour booking for the past six months.

Every morning she wakes up at 5:00, spends a half-hour getting ready, spends an hour riding an open-air bus and arrives at the hotel at 6:30 in the morning. She then works until 6:00 in the evening and takes the bus for another hour back home. After she eats dinner, she has a grand total of 1.5 hours to enjoy her life before it is time to go to bed and start the process over again. And at the end of each month, for all of her hard work she was awarded a grand total of 800 baht, the equivelant of about 160 American dollars.

The dinner tour that she booked cost 2000 baht, the equivalent of what she makes in one 50-hour week. To draw a comparison, when I was teaching in Korea, it would take me three hours of sitting and watching kids draw pictures while listening to "The Eensty-Weensty Spider," to make the same amount of money that she made in sixty hours of waking up at 5:00 in the morning, selling tour packages all day to foreigners, and riding sweaty buses.

Sometimes I think that I understand why some women in this town resort to selling their bodies because it's an easy way to get foreign money.

It also makes it all the more amazing that this girl refuses to buy into the filth, choosing instead to work for ten hours a day and commute for two hours every day on a raggedy old bus with no air conditioning, only to return home to a tiny apartment that she shares with one of her college friends who is an escort. Just keep going day after day.

It makes me look at my life differently. It makes me realize that I'm fortunate to have been born and raised in a country that is so wealthy that my complaints are that my Dad won't get the dent in my car fixed or that my family goes to Hilton Head instead of the Bahamas over Spring break.