Free The Grey Man by John Curtis Page B

with Peter, the Canadian guy who had been kicked out of Vietnam. He could speak ten languages, most of them Asian, and had been in the Peace Corps. We visited Chiang Rai, about two hours' drive north of Chiang Mai, and also the town of Mae Sai on the Thai-Burma border, which I would discover was a key transit point for children to be smuggled into Thailand to work as sex workers, child labourers or beggars.
    On one of our trips Peter and I hired a car in Chiang Rai but when we were way out in the sticks a terrible whining, rattling noise started coming from the engine. It sounded like it was about to explode, so I quickly pulled off the road. I popped the bonnet and fiddled around a bit, but I don't really know very much about cars at all. I walked over to a man who was sitting outside a small roadside workshop and asked him in my basic Thai if he would have a look for us. He came over, got into the car and started the engine. The noise returned immediately and I was sure the engine would conk out at any second. He looked at me, his face blank, and then studied the car's dashboard. He reached over and pushed the air-conditioning button, turning it off. The noise stopped. I was so grateful I gave him 500 baht (about A$20), although I felt like an idiot.
    Back in Chiang Mai I tracked down yet another NGO, Kids Ark. I went to visit the people who ran the charity, an elderly Swedish couple named Rita and Allan Holm Gustafsson They were lovely people and I warmed to them immediately. Better still, they seemed to think I could help them. Allan was a former Swedish Army ranger and I had met a number of rangers at the Swedish Army's Survival School, so we had a bit in common.
    The mainstay of Kids Ark's work was supporting AIDS orphans in the hill tribe villages in northern Thailand. AIDS has had a severe impact on those communities, perhaps because of a lack of health education, and there were many children who had been orphaned. At the time when I went to visit, Kids Ark were looking after between 200 and 300 kids.
    The hill tribes have been discriminated against in the past because of their different ethnicity: physically and culturally they have more in common with people in Tibet and Mongolia than with the rest of Buddhist Thailand. The Lahu and other tribes in the region were virtually stateless people: their clans spanned the border and people would often move freely from Burma to Thailand. As well as not being automatically entitled to Thai citizenship, government resources taken for granted elsewhere in the country, such as schools and healthcare, were thin on the ground in the hill tribe communities. Kids Ark had managed to address these issues to some degree.
    Both Burma and Thailand have been happy to keep the tribes at arm's length and this marginalisation is one of the reasons many of the tribespeople had drifted into crime. People without papers, who could move freely across borders, could also easily move drugs and other contraband. Alarmingly, it also became clear to me that their children were easy prey for traffickers for the same reason. It was easy to make a child who had no documentation and was not enrolled at a school disappear into the underworld.
    One thing I liked about Rita and Allan and one of the reasons I got on so well with them was that their charity was non-religious. As I'll discuss in more detail later, too many of the NGOs I came across were Christian organisations who were as or more interested in converting the locals to Christianity than in helping them in practical ways. Only about 11 per cent of the charities involved in working with at-risk kids in Thailand are non-religious. I have no problem with Christianity or Christians and many religious charities are doing a lot of good, but I don't like seeing someone trying to impose their ways on another culture and I was saddened to learn that some of the hill tribe villages had been totally converted to Christianity or Buddhism. Again, there's