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Here's Mr. Yabeh with the government compensation forms he had to fill out. When we got there (four months after the tsunami), he had not seen so much as a single baht from the government. Wit said it was because "he didn't have the right friends".
After we gave them your donations everyone was sitting around talking (in Thai, of course), and Fiona and I were trying to understand as much as we could. Jaew would try to translate for us, but on-the-fly interpretation is difficult, to say the least.
At one point, Mr. Yabeh was talking, and I heard him say the word "government" followed by the word "corruption". Apparently the words have been taken directly from English. We all had a laugh when I said "America, same same" and made the motion of putting my hand out and then sticking it directly into my pocket.
Some things are the same all over the world.