After several days’ layover, we left Hong Kong and flew into Bangkok, Thailand, the biggest city in the country. There were three of us consultants and our wives. We spent the night at the airport’s hotel and were picked up the next morning by a minibus the company had sent to drive us to Pattya. We spent a couple of nights in a hotel there until our apartments were ready in Ban Chang. This area of Thailand, a third-world country, had been cleared of jungle for maybe ten years at the most.
We were assigned drivers as a way of employing a Thai citizen, as well as to eliminate culpability if we had an accident while driving ourselves. We were taken first to a golf course that was part of the apartment complex in which we would live in Ban Chang, newly constructed for housing foreigners who were helping with the design and construction of the refinery. Each of the four towers had six floors with two apartments per floor. Our apartment was assigned to us, with the loan of several pieces of furniture—beds, a divan and chair—until our furniture, shipped over from Texas, arrived. Another part of the complex was a club house, where we could have dinner or lunch or drinks.
After we had settled in a bit, we were taken to where the refinery was being built to get our work assignments. I was in training and was assigned a class who would be working in the area I would be supervising when we got started. My first class had probably ten employees, and the second had about eight. Many Thai girls attended school until fourth grade; boys would often go on to tech school, many training to be mechanics for repairing cars and motorcycles. Our employees had learned basic English and could speak to and understand us. Some had been sent to Fort Worth, Texas, for further language instruction at American Airlines’ school where their own employees were taught different languages. We had gotten to know several of them when we lived in Dallas. It was common for the teachers to assign an American nickname to each student, like Jake or Joe, for example. Once during a barbecue given for the Thais and the Americans who were working on the project, two Thai fellows kind of latched onto Pat and me. Although they were hard for us to understand, they did a good job of understanding us. One kept trying to tell us the nickname he had been assigned. “Biwwy. Biwwy!” But we just couldn’t get it. Finally he said, “You know Biwwy the Kid. Bang!” In Thailand, our friendship with “Biwwy” grew; although he wasn’t working in my area, he still found ways to gravitate toward wherever I was.
In our observations of the Thai people, we noticed that women actually did more work manually than the men did. We would see them sweeping the streets, doing landscape work, and the like. As I did some hiring interviews, I often needed a translator because some of them didn’t speak any English. It was common to hear them express the desire to have a good job, a home, a car, and then a family. They sounded much like American youth.
We had training sessions every day with each of our classes, and went to observe the construction of the refinery to acquaint ourselves with where structures were located. Part of the assignments to our classes involved locating different tanks, pumps or other equipment within the refinery grounds.
Near the refinery were manufacturers of electronics, like televisions and cell phones, which provided bus transportation to and from work for their employees. The refinery, too, furnished a ride to work from some areas. Companies that were constructing the refinery had what looked like grain trucks to transport their employees. While they waited on the truck, the Thais would squat on their heels rather than sit or stand. Then they’d load up onto the truck, standing packed to go wherever they would be working.
I was assigned to the tank farm and the marine terminal. We also had an SPM, a single point mooring, 15 miles out in the Gulf of Thailand. The big tankers bringing in crude oil would unload there and an underwater 48-inch pipeline brought it to the refinery’s crude tanks. Refinery employees worked off a boat near the unloading point to make sure that nobody tampered with or stole anything off that single point mooring platform or damaged the 24-inch hoses attached to flotation devices. They were also there to prevent big ships from coming in across our pipeline with their anchor down. This boat also did spill recovery. If any product spilled in loading and unloading the tankers, they were there to lay down booms and recover the spill. We also had to be trained on that work also, and spent several days onboard the ship. Although it was fun, there was a lot of work to it also.
The wives had projects of their own. Because they were from all over the world, it was an adventurous thing when they got together; the language barrier caused them trouble making conversations and getting acquainted. Pat started contemplating what would help and remembered her mother used to belong to a quilting club. She asked them if they would like to learn to make quilts, so that each lady would have her own quilt to take home. Taking turns hosting, once a week they would get together for the afternoon, to get to know each other as they sewed and got things done. They each made blocks with their name and the country they were from, then exchanged them with all the other ladies. The completed quilts made really a nice keepsake of their time together in Thailand; Pat gave hers to Tori. I teased Pat that they must have served margaritas because they were always giggling.
We got Saturdays and Sundays off. On Saturday mornings, our international group of guys had a golf gathering and were the first bunch to tee off just as it got light. I just started playing golf about a year before I retired, and I was not very good. We kept scores and added a handicap. Afterwards we went to the clubhouse and got a couple of buckets of beer, paid for by the golfer with the best score. Luckily, I never had to buy the beer. I got good enough to know I needed to quit after I came back to the states.
We had a lot of social life also in the evenings. A bunch of us would go to the clubhouse for dinner, or we would load up in cars and go to the different restaurant areas and resorts within about 15 miles from where we lived. We’d have maybe eight people around the table and had a good time. One place had a band; we Americans got up and danced sometimes, which the band appreciated, and so did we. We ate mostly pork, chicken, or seafood. What we in the U.S. call shrimp, they called prawn and were as big as your hand. Some were from the sea and some were farm raised, a very different kind of livestock from Kansas farms. There was only one restaurant in Pattya where you could get a steak. That was the only place I know of that served beef. The only cow animal you would see was water buffalo they used to farm in the rice paddies and such.
Crops they had included bananas, coconuts and tapioca. Before the bananas were ready to be harvested, the banana growers would build little shacks out in the banana orchard. Someone would stay there to keep monkeys out of the orchard until harvest. After harvest, no one needed to stay there for another several months. They also had elephants used for clearing the forest, and I don’t know what else they used them for. We were out once when our driver was off for the evening. I was driving home in the dark and came up behind a truck without tail lights and nearly ran into it. I told Pat, “That guy better get his lights on!” But as we got a little closer we discovered it was the butt end of an elephant! He almost got rear ended by me.
Pat and the other ladies visited a farm where elephants were trained and gave rides. No saddles were available so she rode one bareback. The prickly hair on the elephant’s skin made the experience like riding a porcupine. As Pat walked around the yard, a young elephant came running toward her, ears flopping. The trainer hollered, “No banan, no banan!” Apparently that little elephant thought she was going to feed him a banana. He was running so fast that if the handler hadn’t gotten him turned, he’d have run into her. Pat was afraid she’d be a floor mat for a baby elephant.
In Thailand, there were many street vendors that sold food. Some had a four-sided glass box attached to the front of their bicycle, or a wagon that had their food and equipment. Inside that glass box were ducks that had been killed and plucked and were hanging by their heads. The vendors would stop on the street, and people could pick out the duck they wanted to have cooked. The vendor would use their hotplate and a five gallon bucket. When the food was ready, the people would stand there to eat it. They would hand back their plate when they were through; the plate would be dipped into the bucket of water, and was then ready for the next diner. We never ate food from a street vendor because they didn’t have very good sanitation.
In a restaurant, we would usually get the prawns or pork chop or something like that. We’d get fried rice with an egg mixed in; or they’d serve rice with an “over-medium” egg laying on top.
When my driver took me to work at the refinery every morning, there were activities I knew would be going on at a certain location before I got there. For example, a ring was set up in a yard where fighters trained in boxing and kicking. Every morning there’d be several boxers standing around outside the ring watching those inside the ring sparring.
At another location was a slaughterhouse for hogs. The hogs were transported in the back of a pickup in cages so short that the animals couldn’t stand but had to crawl in on their knees. By the time we drove by, they had already butchered the hogs, I don’t know how many a day but several. They had to start early in the morning to be able to make their deliveries to the stores. Most of the meat had already been hauled off by that time and someone was using a water hose to wash everything down to be ready for the next night’s work. It was different from what we’re used to.
The population of Thailand is 95% Buddhist. If I rode with my driver through the town or sat on the street somewhere, I often saw Buddhist monks, perhaps five in a group, each one carrying a little pail. As they walked by the different storefronts, the proprietors would run out and give them food, like rice and such. That’s how they got their rations, I guess, every day. Although it wasn’t mandatory, each Buddhist male was expected to spend a couple of months as a monk during his lifetime.
Bangkok is a dirty city. In Thailand the sewers run under the sidewalks and the slab of the sidewalk is the top of the sewer. Often the cracks between the sections of the sidewalk were not sealed very well and the ammonia coming through would burn your eyes.
Most families didn’t have a car, but the luckier ones had a motorbike. Two riders were the limit, but we would frequently see the dad driving, the mom always sitting side-saddle on the back and often holding a baby, and several children standing up and hanging on somehow.
Not only were we expected to support the local economy by hiring a driver, employing someone to clean our apartment was also assumed. Pat, being Pat, didn’t want or need help, but eventually got the same woman who cleaned many of the other Americans’ apartments to come in four hours a week. Les didn’t know much English, but she and Pat could mostly understand each other. Before she arrived, Pat would be hurrying around, doing the dishes or picking up, but Les would correct her, saying, “No, no. My job.” She was very kind, like most of the Thai people, and an older lady; I think she and Pat mostly just goofed off.
Our caddies, when we played golf, were women in big bonnets with veils to block the sun; they were anxious to keep their skin from getting browner.
Pat and a friend from California had been at a luncheon at the clubhouse. When they returned to the woman’s apartment on the fourth floor (ours was on the fifth), they found the door locked. Thinking initially that her husband had come back and locked the door, they soon discovered that the apartment had been broken into. Missing were some Levis and tools. Pat and the woman went to the floor’s lobby window overlooking the parking lot and shouted to the drivers that they needed help right away. The drivers came up, got the door opened, searched the rooms, and found another driver, who they later discovered had a drug problem, laying on a shelf behind hanging clothes in the master bedroom closet. The rescuers dragged him down all those flights of stairs, beating on him the whole way.
Our drivers took good care of us, and we tried to take good care of them. Our first driver, Bamein we helped with paying his rent. We often tipped our helpers as well. Our second driver, Sushot, was from an area in northern Thailand populated by artists such as potters.
We enjoyed our year there and came home to America before the refinery opened.
