day two: white temple, white papers

The next morning we set off early (once again) and headed back to Chiang Mai. After exhausting ourselves the day before, we all slept on the journey back to Chiang Mai.

Along the way, we stopped at the White Temple, a tourist attraction in Chiang Rai.

The place was so pretty that any where you went, it was a photo opportunity. I also took the chance to take portraits of the profs/faculty for the Club website, and those turned out to be really nice too! Someone commented that one looked like it was taken in the Himalayas (or something to that extent).

Tourist-y things aside, we then continued our journey back to Chiang Mai, where we first got off at Wat Chedi Luang Temple for a Monk chat. There we learnt more about the Monk life. It is quite different from our normal lives, while they have only two meals a day, they do not interact much with people from the outside and much more. However, they also have school, and even university! There they can pursue certain majors such as Philosophy, where they even do Western Philosophy. They also use social media, which we initially thought that they were not allowed to before talking to them.

Hearing more from our Monk friend, it made me wonder what my life would be like if I live like a monk.

Would life be much more straight-forward with less distractions around?

The monk chats were not as helpful as we hoped they would be, but it provided a platform for us to practice asking questions, rephrasing and reframing our interview questions to guide our interviewee in the right direction.

We then proceeded to Nimmanhaemin Street, at the back of Chiang Mai University (CMU). The Thai CMU Political Science student attached to us suggested for us to go there since many students hang out in those areas. There we split into pairs to give our survey forms, gather data for statistics.

While we approached various local Thai youths to get them to help us to complete our surveys, we faced several problems.

Firstly, the language barrier. Although many of the youths understood some english, we found difficulty in answering their enquiries. We resorted to using hand gestures to try to convey our message.

Secondly, some youths read the informed consent and they outrightly refused to participate in the survey. In order not to impose of them further, we just walked away and left them alone.

After walking around the cafes and along the roadside, we decided to venture into CMU where there would be a higher possibility of finding students. There, we saw youths sitting at the void deck of the School of Engineering and some at a cafe nearby within the campus. While these students were in groups chatting away or doing work, we approached them. This felt as though we were imposing on them with our surveys. Although I tried to make the situation better by introducing ourselves and telling them about the purpose of the survey, I still felt bad. However, should we have not done so, we would not be able to gather the data that we needed.

Since this was a group effort and every member of the team had to do his/her part in order for us to succeed together. Perhaps this feeling of imposing on others was not only felt by me, but also shared by the others in the group.

Looking back, having our survey in both online and hardcopy formats, we did not need to carry many physical copies of the survey around with us. Most youths had phones with data plans, we were able to tap on that and get them to access our survey with their mobile devices and complete them. This made our job simpler and it was easy to move around.

That night, we returned to the hotel and had a group meeting, taking the time to consolidate our findings and to key in all the data. This prevented any backlog from forming and allowed us to review on what we could have improved on.

On hindsight, there were things in our survey which might not have been designed well as some of our instructions were misunderstood. For example, instead of getting students to rank social issues from 1 to 7, they rated each social issue stated from 1 to 7. Another question which required participants to select the social media platform they use the most often for a certain purpose, but some participants selected more than one platform. We then made relevant changes to our surveys and hopefully that would help in making the survey better for the next few days of data collection.