I'm now in Chiang Mai in the dazzling mindst of a mecca of kinetic cartoon-coloured computer-gaming action. As usual it's hot but this time it's a breezy morning and there's a big fan behind me blowing in my direction (can't seem to shake him off... he says he's in love, but his cheeks are sure to tire soon...). He is though keeping me cool while I race off my thoughts from the last five weeks inside the camp before hot-footing (don't I always seem to be doing this?) it off to the train station here for the overnight express to Bangkok (yippee!).

This particular update is brought to you courtesy of un-edited extracts from my dictaphone-diary, a bloomin' marvel in those plentiful times I can't be bothered to scribble (please nod and wink to James J for its presence here):

"The weather is changing... sweat sweat sweaty sweat sweat..."

The morning mist in the depths of the valley

The days are getting longer (summer brings about an hour's cumulative daylight than winter). Cold nights are becoming sweaty nights. Hot winter days are stifling summer days. Rivers are half their size and shrinking every day. The need for water is undeniable, the water supply is proving to be highly deniable to camp residents (it's transported from a disappearing reservoir five miles away). A new chorus of summer bugs has arrived (and the crispy-crunch camp lunch menu thus changes). The pace of life slows. The umbrella count increases. The need for absent wet-wipes reaches crisis point. The desire for (innocent) daytime nakedness rises. The number of people gobsmacked by my liking of brown skin (and subsequent saunters in the enslaving sun) is rocketing off the gob-stopped, gob-smacking scale (the horror, the horror). The skies are getting confused: yesterday a cloud. How rude.

"The students have finished their exams..."

This means no more rhythmic chanting in misty dawning hours or dusk-lit darkness of humid evenings. The sound is astonishing, but a reminder of the continuted use of a moth-balled, sadly degenerative learning method. It merges with the cacophonous jungle accompaniment of a newly-arrived cicada army, the generator's generous thumping, the distant bark of the loudspeakers, the crows of the needy chickens, and the well-loved creak of underfoot bamboo.

It also means no morning generator, and, as the generator is right by my abode, more morning sleep for a busyben - forty-one winks at the last Count Duckula, before the great nanny of morning crashes through the walls my dreamily cerebral adventures.

"The school is moving to pwe bo loo..."

For the students, despite it now being their three-month summer hols, their days are just as busy as term-time - most troop the thirty minutes down to pwe bo loo (the site of Yaung Ni Oo) to assist in the building of the new boarding houses being rapidly errected there. Time is of the essence as it's all got to be done before the rainy season - the steep slopes of the mountain the current houses are built on aren't safe enough; so a mass mobilisation of facilities for 200 people is in (the middle of) the offing.

"I've taught some of the students at last..."

It's been a bit of a frustration but for most of my time here I haven't taught the actual pupils of the school. So while I spend meal times with them and we share many a smiling moment, you get the feeling they wonder what they're getting out of my presence here. Yet in a small way this has changed over the last two weeks with the imminent arrival of the mobile Overseas Studies Insitute examinations operation, designed to cherry-pick the pick of the refugee crop (24 students a year) and whisk them off to Chiang Mai for serious academic and life enhancement. The test is something else though, an immense challenge to the rote-learned orthodoxy which abounds... so our classes focussed on bigging-up, confindence-building, pressure-relaxing, and the super-dooper benefits one and all would get from just wham-bam having a go this year, with the next firmly on the motivational horizon.

"We've moved the library. We've moved the library into the sa'po. That's actually been successfull..."

The new library mark one was an ill-frequently visited for one reason and another (the room was seen as belonging to the teachers, it was a fair way from the majority of the students, etc etc.) - so we've now brought the mobile library to the slopes of Mae La Oon. While there's no bright yellow lorry to move them (a ropey cardboard box must suffice), I reckon the books are now actually getting to the kids. Counted and brought to the mess room (that's 'sa'po') at 7am daily, and duly collected in the evening, it means the students have access to the books in their place, on their time, on their terms: they decide. I felt a little tingle of special happiness when, after dumping the box there the first unknown morning, a small crowd of students gathered to enthusiastically browse... and with each day passed more are seen lining the bamboo benches esconsed some kind of reading relationship or kidnapping books for their own dormitory literary flirtation - or at least some industrial perusal of the pictures, getting a small but real and so bloomin' important window on the Mae La Oon-plus world.

"Elementary class has changed to ein gee... after changing for the worse as in declining numbers from about fifteen to about four..."

This was the cause of considerable Pho Htaung consternation: here I was putting my all into teaching three classes, not being able to teach any school students, and the numbers of the biggest adult class were tumbling. Without the same cultural importance given to communication here, it took a while to find out what was going on: three soldiers lost to the building of the new store; one mum because of the moving of her husband to Mae Sot; five teachers to the final exams; one dedicated student to the illnesses brought about by being tortured in one of Burma's prisons for four years; two other mums to formal vocational training elsewhere; one to malaria; perhaps some to an aversion to my lessons. What's important is that life here for most is anything but stable; planning is extremely difficult because decisions are made by others (most oft-heard phrase: "I'm not sure exactly..."), with most having to endure the continual reactionary insecurity of daily life (which they are by now well-adapted to). My lessons don't happen in some kind of vacuum; people are always frying the bigger fish of life (though there's rarely any fresh fish), and this is an important lesson for me to be learning.

And as for those amazing, dedicated students who come to Elementary class through thick and thin, week in week out, it is now me who trots off to them. 'Ein gee' means 'big house', the home of two of the remaining four or so, and three times a week we now gather for a few hours of relaxed learning at the close of the day.

Other teaching changes (careful, the excitement-o-meter is about to explode) include me now planning on a weekly rather than lesson-by-lesson basis (bringing a morning calm not morning panic), the introduction of a English Writing Competition so I can publish loads (sic) of the student's own work on this site, and the teaching of videocamera skills to my elementary and pre-intermediate classes so they can (in a similar vein) make videos of their experience of life and the camp (in - to their disappointment but my condition - English). The last initiative has been sadly (but hopefully only momentarily) dashed by the camera battery charger exploding the other day because of the dodgy power supply.

"Htwe Yee and Oo Ni Kay have had their last lesson before Beth comes to do an interview..."

And this brings me to my reason for being in Chiang Mai as I tipple-tapple on this keyboard amongst the twenty coming and going computer-gaming kids filling this, er, gaming zone (its not an internet cafe, there's no cafe, only pictures of Yuri getting his revenge). So, sitting here, I'm mid-way through my trip to Bangkok to pick up Beth from the airport, who will be visiting Mae La Oon and the border for a good three weeks (er, that's Beth, not the airport, who'll be doing the visiting... er, I hope). I'm happy as gary about this - it's always brill when I get to speak to fellow 'farang', if not to yap about home and here with all the common knowingness you can and have, and which those here cannot possibly possess. It brings new roles, perspectives, adventures and allows realisation of things you've begun to take for granted. Plus, in the case of Beth, it affords us the opportunity to secretly hunt for wild boars in the star-struck night.

(If anyone does see gary, please tell him to come down from that tree.)

One of Beth's roles will be to help in the interviewing of the two scholarship students... so Htwe Yee and Oo Ni Kay's last few lessons have been geared towards this: we've done interview role-plays and recordings, made CVs, completed application forms and tested until the cows came home. And that, let me tell you (in a supposedly cow-free country), was a shock.

One more thing about my trip, it's also to do some airport picking-up of a parental type. Yes, it's true - family Hammondo (well, the Pho-Htaung-spawning variety at least) is parashooting (some might say lumbering - not I of course, not I) into jungle life for a few days in the middle of a Thai holiday. Please do wish them luck... despite the experience of cental African VSO years for both at a similar age as I am now, I'm cruelly but excitedly planning to make things as rough and tumble as possible for them, so they get a big slap of the real deal. First up I have built a giant vat at the back of my house which I will fill with ThePaste and serve up for them as 'the only thing we've got left here to eat' on a four-hourly basis. Oh, hark... what fun, what tremendously evil fun!

Hold on, just thought of one last one more thing: a second teacher (Nicola) will be headed out to the camp for three or so weeks at the beginning of April. This is great because it means she (Nicola) can give the students the time I haven't been able to give, and they can get a real chance to tackle their English-speaking ills.

"Turns out after great conversations tonight that I will be teaching in Pwe Bo Loo (which it turns out is actually known as we-bo-loo...). I will be teaching the NHEC teacher trainees and doing a language class..."

NHEC = National Health and Education Committee (Burma). This is the umbrella organisation (I don't think it makes them) responsible for delivering crucial educational and healthcare supplies to the multiple ethnic groups inside Burma and along its borders. Of late it's taken to providing direct training to teachers; the inaugural incarnation of which is a three-month training course taking place inside Mae La Oon over the summer for about 30 trainees from across the country. Some were in tears at the opening ceremony; some had travelled for over a week on foot to get to the border. The site of the training had to be changed because the initial location on the border had become militarily unstable.

It is these trainees I will now have a hand in teaching, too - both English (three days a week) and how to teach English (two days). The second I am slightly uncomfy about (okay, I'm shitting my pants) considering my serious lack of that experience thing, but I am apprehensively committed to going ahead and tackling those things that make me feel exactly this - a sign of challenge and all that.

"I've started swimming everyday..."

Blissful, blessed, brilliant, awesome. I love swimming. It's a different world down by the river; teeming with a freer dilution of life: dwellers swim, wash, watch, mend boats, travel, suntan and study by the shores of the Mae Sariang. Most in Section 13 are rightly wary: sadly the river brings with it substantial fatalities each year (most cannot swim, many in the camp like a tipple - the river's currents and rocks are exceptionally dangerous for anyone influenced by any combination of these). Yet (admittedly because of the privilege of childhood swimming classes) escaping to this quenching oasis at three each afternoon has rapidly become (after rock renewal and recharge) a stand-out quieter moment of the day.

"Nay Htun has moved out of his house..."

I've got my own pad! He only moved out (Pwe Bo Loo and NHEC teacher training-bound) the day before I left but the morning of my departure saw an enthusastic spring-in-summer clean of the hallowed bamboo in anticipation of familiail arrival. I'm not sure what will be there on my and Beth's return (tidy house, empty house, bustling house, demolished house - a significant possibility) - but as an emailer wrote to me (abridged), we seem to value that space thing more than other cultures, so its a good feeling to be (or have been) king of a hutted castle for at least a bit.

"I've started walking around kind of on my own a bit more..."

Coupled to that is the general freeing up of me to do more as I wish, to make decisions based on my experience, to control what fills my days more and more. The rock, the swimming, my evening visits to other folks, my sleeping at others' houses on special occasions, starting organised Burmese lessons and also organising what, who, where and when I teach - all things and decisions I am increasingly responsible for organising and increasingly happy for having the freedom to decide.

"I've talked with D.H. up front, straight to him, right out..."

All in all this is the most important thing about the last few weeks. Life here can be incredibly personal-political, extremely sensitive. Over the last weeks I've seen this more disappointing but undeniably real side of life in the flesh, being the recipient of considerable ill-feeling and suspicion from a specific quarter. It's a difficult thing to have rumours consciously spread about you, or see attempts made to line folks up against you, and one which on its realisation I had to fight, gammut-like, a whole gammut of reactive emotions to finally arrive at a course of action. This action - straight, direct, eye-to-eye, honest and hopefully assertive talking one-on-one - seems to have straightened things out, to my relief and delight. What remains is the knowledge that there are some serious problems here, that people have multiple, often contradictory motivations governing their conduct and decision-making, and that - crucially - many may not be able to speak up or against the way things may be because of their status as refugees with no-where else to go if they question the famous, ageing rock band (I leave you free to ponder that one) - and this outside of SPDC-straight-jacketed Burma in 'democratic' territory.

At the end of my stay I've told everyone of my intention to write a report of my experience, observations, recommendations, and justifications, and have been invited and welcomed to do so by the powers that be: good. Until then D.H. can remain D.H., and any guesses as to what this means can grace an email postcard. While I'm here, I'm also wondering (I'm sure you are too) exactly what 'gammut-like' means, and the real meaning of putting a sentence followed by (sic). When I wrote it in one of the paragraphs above I was feeling ill and just managed to write '(sic' before I was exactly that. A kind sitter-byer wrote the other bracket in by hand. True story.

Welcome to the cauldron Beth, Mum and Dad!