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No doubt it was my experience in the Philippines, which led to great pressure to leave Dudley College and its inspiring students within a year of returning to them, to go off and work in Thailand. The Thai officials were very impressed by the Community Schools and wanted them, or something like them, introduced into their country. Thailand is one of the least westernised countries and the Philippines perhaps the most. Spain ruled the Philippines for the long period from 1565 until they became a colony of the USA in 1898. In contrast, Thailand had always remained an independent country. It always maintained a very distinctive culture of its own, heavily influenced by Buddhism, akin to those of its neighbours, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia, but nevertheless distinctive.
Buddhism was in evidence not merely because according to their calendar the year 2500 was fast approaching and the temples had mostly been repainted for the great occasion, but mainly because of the saffron robes of the monks or Bhikkhus as they are known. It was customary for most men to spend a year as a Bhikkhu attached to a monastery, going out on their alms rounds with their begging bowls for others to feed them. The Bhikku's would go from door to door, each time simply standing at the doorway, not actually asking for anything, because that was not the way, but waiting for the people of the household to bring them just a little food. In this way they would collect small quantities of food from each willing household, rather than an entire meal from just one person. This, according to tradition, was forbidden. Even the King had

followed this custom while living like a Bhikkhu until the roads became too blocked with the cars of those wishing to see this remarkable sight. He also set an example on Teachers Day, a day set aside for appreciating the work of teachers. The King did this by teaching a lesson himself, to learn to appreciate what skill is required in teaching.
Dissatisfaction with the government did not affect the King. He was greatly respected. The supposedly democratic constitution did not, however, prevent the abuse of power and changes were made by frequent military coups, unlike the Philippines. It might be the government backed by the police prevailing over the government by the army or vice versa. These changes were brought about with very little bloodshed. I once explained to a Thai student studying in Birmingham about the occasion when the Royal Air force dropped a bomb down the funnel of a naval vessel in the river during a coup. On board the vessel was the Prime Minister on a visit, who had to swim to shore after damage to the ship. The student commented: 'Yes, that was my father, but three weeks later he was playing golf with the new Prime Minister.'
During one such coup, Ruth and I had to send our two boys aged seventeen and fifteen on their own, through Bangkok, itself 300 miles away from us, to the airport. Difficulty was added to this situation by our not speaking the language. We were advised to do this because the four younger children at Ubon needed both of us more. Reports about what was happening were few and not of violence and cruelty but, for example, of the tank which knocked over a letterbox containing letters from the previous two months!
We had two unusual sources of information about local people. The first was a tall man from the United States Information Service who, we read later, was some kind of spy, employed to counter Soviet influence in South East Asia. He came frequently of an evening when the children were in bed. He did not accompany himself singing with the banjo as he did in youth groups but he made himself very acceptable by passing on information about current international affairs. I had the impression that he saw no future for the United Nations. He was always witty and never self-centred and we missed him when he no longer appeared.

The other visitor who had even more local information to give us was the chief of police. He had been seconded to the Lancashire police for a period and spoke excellent English. He told us the story of the Prime Minister who travelled to England to learn about the Mother of Parliaments and how democracy works! He was taken to Hyde Park to take a measure of the freedom of speech. This impressed him so much that on his return he had a Hyde Park established in every provincial capital. 'That was all very well' the chief of police continued, 'but he did not like what was said about himself and his government. So an additional ruling was made that a loudspeaker could only be used by those supporting the government. However can I enforce that when I know they change their tune as soon as my jeep comes into view? As a matter of fact, this afternoon, I took a microphone from a member of the opposition and spoke to him through it, so that the crowd could hear "much as I love you. I don't really want you locked up with me, so give up using this mike." That's the best I could do.' He ended. It sounds like a very civilized way of policing; courteous, non-violent, and effective. I can only hope that international policing becomes equally effective as the years pass on, by living in a culture of peace.
Shortly after that, the chief of police went to the Philippines. He did not explain whether he was on leave or on business. It may have been a diplomatic exit, because while he was away the army staged a successful coup to take political power from the police. A short time before that happened, he had been to see me to offer me armed guards to protect us from riots against British people during the Suez Crisis. When I refused, he said 'Mr Gillett, you are a very brave man.' Later, as the situation worsened, despite my refusal, some guards arrived. It proved difficult to protect the household from the soldiers.
According to law, certain offences require capital punishment, but executioners are so hard to find that foreigners such as Chinese are requested to help. Gentleness is noticeable everywhere and this applies to man and beast. I never heard of corporal punishment in school or home, whereas I will never forget a huge picture of bastinado in an Iranian teashop in which a young man had been tied up with his legs in the air and was being beaten on the soles of his feet. When I asked my counterpart whether this still went on, he

shrugged his shoulders and said: 'It was done to me when I went to school.' The way he said it made me avoid questioning him about the circumstances.
In Thailand it was too hot to hurry even when driving cars, the quietness of life was such that it showed in the way the pace of oxen set the pace for walkers, as they passed our house on their way to Ubon market. In a related way the deep influence of Buddhist culture and the meditative steps of the Bhikkhus (monks) and the smiles on their faces removed any possibility of mental stress. Smiling was one of the general rules of health included in the posters on the classroom walls. Even major disasters such as an a bus accident were treated with laughter, and a high level of concern.
The schools with their uniforms, their punctuality, their authoritarian ethos and flag ceremonies did not seem to fit in well with the rest of life and I kept wondering whether Scouting for boys and Red Cross activities for girls on Thursdays were designed to mitigate the effects of other more usual school work. The former King had been in the habit of sending his sons to England to look out for good ideas for introduction in Thailand and Scouting had come in this way. The children gained experience of cooperation, teamwork, leadership, and public service, which fitted them for embarking on the new community education we were helping to introduce. It was significant that the schools that did not wish to participate were those where the pupils lived within reach of the secondary schools who had a possibility of becoming teachers and civil servants. I was reminded of the four year old in London who began attending a Nursery School but was found putting on his coat to go home. He complained, when the teacher asked what he was doing, 'All those toys and games won't get me through the Eleven Plus Exam.'
Further away from the provincial capital, the response from parents and teachers was enthusiastic. It is difficult, however, to maintain discipline in ordinary schools where competition does not provide the main motivating force. For helping our project a professor of sociology had been sent in advance to prepare a more thorough description of the local culture than we could provide for ourselves. I did not understand why he omitted the social or cultural changes and some account of how they had occurred, including

the names of individual innovators, so that we might know to whom we might turn to for help. Social change is an essential and major part of UN Technical Assistance programmes and it is vital to take into consideration the changes, which have already taken place, whether they failed to take hold or succeeded.
These were the circumstances into which the work at Ubon had to fit. The work was in two parts, a large institute, the Thailand UNESCO Fundamental Education Centre, known as TUFEC, in which a dozen UN officials trained community development officers who had been picked for senior posts. The nature of their course is indicated by the list of expatriates.

Donald Faris from Canada for Food and Agriculture. Advised me on making compost in unfamiliar conditions.
David Smith from Canada for Adult Education. On the arrangements for courses, seminars etc.
John Allen from UK for English Teaching. See below.
Nurse Heafey from Dublin and the World Health Organisation. On making a set of slides about the life cycle and treatment of hookworm.
Dicon Nance from UK and the International Labour Office for Crafts. Designed a special basket wheelbarrow for making compost.
Jan Kinket from Holland for visual aids. Especially photographs of the lesson about elephants.
Conrad Opper from UK Chief of Mission for both TUFEC and TURTEP. Helped with his wise administration.

I believe that it was Dr Malcolm Adiseshiah who held a senior post at UNESCO, who conceived the ingenious idea of putting the Thailand UNESCO Rural Teacher Education Project (TURTEP) on the same campus as the Teachers' College. In that way we had access to the specialist expertise of the TUFEC staff. There were three of us at TURTEP’s, one of them Mr Ertem, came from Turkey. During his work in Turkey the future rural teachers learned to make their own ploughs, and breed and train their own horses so as to establish themselves fully with the peasantry, as part of an agricultural reform movement. Mrs Jesse from the USA was the third person in our little group. She said she had learned all about developing countries by working in Kentucky. She concentrated

on education for girls, Mr Ertem on school gardens and I took the wider brief of community education towards which all of us contributed. We did not work well together but we each thrived individually. Thinking about it afterwards, I decided I should have asked Con Opper to call us together to coordinate our work more effectively. In very strange circumstances it is easy to miss spotting what needs to be done. We agreed that each of us should select three schools spread along the same road for thirty miles to simplify transport, both for the students and for ourselves.
My meeting with the Minister of Education soon after my arrival, augured well for the future. Despite the heat I borrowed a jacket from a friend for the occasion and I was glad to have done so, when I saw the size of his office and the brilliance of the Buddhist shrine in it. I had no wish to look disrespectful to this man who, I later learned, was both a general and a poet. He had begun writing poetry in English when studying at Christchurch College, Oxford. I would have liked to have asked him whether he had ever read 'The Scholar Gypsy' with its reference to 'The lines of festal light in Christchurch Hall.' The Minister quickly came to the crux of his briefing when he said: 'Go and see what the rural schools are doing. We know it’s all wrong. Then find out what the real needs of the villages are, and start making a new curriculum from scratch.' He knew, and welcomed the fact that I knew what the Philippine schools were doing, but we were both too diplomatic to suggest learning from another country. Instead of that he went on to explain that European schools had been copied, although the conditions were quite different. I was elated by the invitation to look for the real needs. I knew full well that the so-called real needs might appear differently to the teachers and the parents from the list, that UNESCO or I might identify. This, however, was my mission. As an epigrammatical introduction to our pamphlet, 'Briefing of International Consultants.' We had written Jonathan Swift's provoking words:

To guide his steps afford your kindest aid
And gently pity whom ye can't persuade;
Leave to avenging Heaven his stubborn will,
For, O, remember he's your brother still.

Unfortunately a tacit assumption is being made that one is always right oneself, which is obviously untrue. In the end, all we are really left with is, at best, our own opinion, or even worse, our assumptions.
I would have valued any attempt by the Minister to explain how real needs can be discovered, but either he thought me too new to the country to benefit, or it would come better on some future occasion. So far as the Minister was concerned, it appeared over the two years as though we could not put a foot wrong. The work after one year was planned to be spread to all other rural teacher-training colleges before there were enough teachers trained to do it. We were embarrassed by the offer to increase funds because we thought that teachers should not have to suffer a cut in resources once they had left the college. The third indication of the satisfaction in the Ministry was that in the course of a few years the two bright young men who had served as my counterparts were appointed as head and deputy head of the Ministry of Education dealing with the Primary Schools.
UNESCO failed me by the end of my mission. Con Opper left, presumably without having reported on our work. Maybe we should have invited him to visit. Years later he begged me to join him in Iran where he 'Was having a hard time.' His successor, formerly an inspector for the London County Council, who said of his colleagues that they were the best group of educationalists in the country, went to UNESCO Paris for his briefing but must have missed seeing Dr Eagleton who had recently visited us and acclaimed our work. I can only assume this because when I showed him the village work he remarked curtly at the end of the day, 'You've no business to be doing this work. No one in Paris knows what you are doing.' He was so rude that I did not argue the point but left him to find out what a mistake he had made. He may have been influenced by members of TUFEC who saw us as rivals, or he may have believed in plain work on reading, writing and arithmetic not backed up by practical applications.
By this time I was due to hand in my resignation to rejoin my family. They had not thrived in the difficult climate. Ruth lost a third of her weight, and Candia found sleeping even more difficult than she did at home and Jonnie the youngest caught hookworm

. Nevertheless they spent a year learning how interesting novel ways of life can be. Jean the eldest daughter, aged ten at the time, still insists that it was the best year of her life. She quickly picked up enough of the language to talk with students and Bhikkhus’ who made frequent visits to our house and garden. One day she remarked to me with a smile 'You've no business to be here. These people are perfect. They're more Quaker than the Quakers are.' This was a remarkable opinion in itself but the story was enhanced at the Hague Peace Conference forty-five years later, when a Thai Buddhist sitting next to us laughed so loudly on hearing this story that I looked puzzled. 'That's what I say,' he said, 'Only in reverse. We had two Quaker visitors to my Buddhist community and I had to tell my people that the Quakers were more Buddhist than the Buddhists!' That made a very happy story and a good introduction to the year of the Culture of Peace, and a good way of fitting into other people's shoes.
We were much helped by the four children who occasionally came to the villages and played regularly with the children of the Teacher Training College staff at games like Oranges and Lemons, hop-scotch, Paper, Scissors, Stones, or climbing up an obliging ox either over the tail or over the horns. They learned songs and dances. After ten months Jean helped me by coming as my interpreter to the villages on a day when my counterpart was absent. My second counterpart for my last few months was Mr Saiyut Champatong, who was just back from studying in England. It was a pleasure to work with him.
Counterparts are a vital part of UNESCO technical assistance, indeed of all technical assistance. They are too easily overlooked. They are expected to learn enough from the expatriate to be able to carry the work forward when he or she leaves; or at least mark time until a successor arrives. They are therefore expected to do two jobs rather than a single one. Interpretation from one language into another is in itself difficult, and the mastery of the technical words of the two languages may be far from complete. In addition they have to learn the substance of what is being taught. Mr Panom Kawkamnerd, for example, my counterpart of whom I cannot speak too highly, had to know details about compost-making, water-seal slabs for latrines, hookworm, classroom teaching, the use of puppets, flannelgraphs and paraffin slide projectors as well as being

able to teach both students and school children. No one can be master of such a wide variety of skills, but they must have enough confidence in their own versatility and a willingness to 'have a go.'
Mr Panom adjusted to village work admirably. At the end of long hard days his sense of humour did not fail him. On one occasion travelling home at dark, he began speaking so seriously I was quite misled, 'You see that broken tree over there, it looks sad. I want to stand beside it and then, if you take a photo of me, I will send it to my mother and she will be sorry for me.' One month he had lost his salary cheque and at first would not accept any help from me. Finally pretending to be a bit angry I said: 'you are a friend of mine aren't you?' 'Yes' he replied suspiciously. 'Well, friends are people with whom joys shared are doubled and troubles shared are halved. Here's half.' He acquiesced with a smile. Nearly thirty years later, to my embarrassment, he told the story to a large lunch party of the English Speaking Union in London. Making friends with a counterpart is the best first step, sharing goals and experiences follow. They may feel overshadowed and everything must be done to build up their confidence, noticing their successes more than their mistakes. It is very tempting as the expatriate picks up the language to correct him in front of an audience, it is usually wrong to show off in such a way. I wish we had written in our UN pamphlet 'Build up your counterpart’s confidence, not your own. Then your own will look after itself.' Unfortunately the counterpart/expatriate relationship varies widely from person to person, from skill to skill, and from country (culture) to country, so that it is difficult to give general advice.
Mr Panom had been instructed to get everything down on paper. This explains my efforts to get details of all our projects in some written form. This overcomes the difficulty in most countries that there is always a language gap and spoken instructions are only partly understood. By the time the expatriate has explained to the counterpart, the counterpart to the students – in our case – and the students to the schoolteachers, and their teachers to the children, and their parents, there is ample room for mistakes and misunderstandings to occur. Even though my English had to be translated into Thai with its unique alphabet, it was worth spending evenings drafting pages of instructions. They would have been better

if there had been time to try them out first, to find out how clear they were, for example, by the time they reached teachers.
As I normally spent only one day each week in the villages and there was a limited amount of opportunity for teaching English, especially as I was requested to teach English conversation to a hundred students at a time, the production of this written material was possible but this happened more by accident than design. It is very difficult for UNESCO officials in Paris to envisage the circumstances on the ground and one has to become a kind of educational entrepreneur with a gift for spotting scope for initiatives and seizing them. For this a light teaching timetable is essential.
Often we worked in the dark only guessing whether villagers, students, or other UNESCO people benefited, despite the advice we received about the importance of evaluation. One lesson that we learned was that every project needs backing up with some appropriate message about its importance. Action needs to be backed up by a public relations section. If a new kind of cooking stove is introduced to save fuel and reduce smoke, it may well not be used unless a salesman's skills are applied. In Thailand, UNICEF offered fish meal for villages where lack of protein was widespread but the children refused to eat it, and TUFEC's expert in Home Economics was working on new recipes. The children, who normally brought sticky rice for lunch in little, woven baskets, at first refused to bring anything to eat at all, for fear of having to eat the fish powder with it.
The government asked us to do whatever we could to reduce hookworm. For this, toilets had to be both made and used. I did not think it sound policy to be involved in a campaign, which implied that people had dirty habits, but agreed, a little unwillingly, in view of being useful to the government. We taught the students how to make water-sealed concrete slabs. As the slabs came out of the moulds the onlookers used to cheer as if they were watching a goal scored at football. They had taken the job to their hearts, but there was still a long way to go. It was desirable that more people should understand the lifecycle of hookworms. Where no toilets are used the tiny eggs blow about in the dust until the ground is damp in the rainy season, then they hatch out and the lucky

ones find some thin skin between the toes or fingers and so get into the bloodstream. Via the heart, lungs, and throat they reach the intestines and there they hook on and feed on the food as it passes. Finally they produce eggs at the rate of 15,000 a day. 'You'd do well' I would tell the villagers 'if your hens laid that number' and so the process begins again. A person can feed up to roughly eight hundred hookworms, but if they have many more they begin to look pale, feel lifeless and find they can't feed so many and also remain strong enough for work.
With help from Nurse Heafey I made colour slides of the process of the lifecycle of the hookworm. These slides were later to be used for showing in the community schools. Coming from Oxford I understood the feelings of the villagers about their boat-race day, to them the most important day in the year, when the huge dug out canoes with dragon figureheads race down the great river, a tributary of the Mehkong. The last slide in the series shows one of those races and the caption runs: 'If you get rid of hookworm from your village, your boat-crew will be so strong they will win the race.' This produced a roar of applause.
The slides may have been helpful in persuading the students to support the anti-hookworm campaign but not, I suspect, the villagers, nor would many of them learn from the written word in the village news. It was the students who exclaimed one day 'We must persuade Mr Suwan. People listen to Mr Suwan and they do what he says.' They talked to him with good results, and later I went to hear him one evening. He is a peripatetic ballad singer, available for weddings and other celebrations. At that time, neither radio nor television had reached the villages where we were working, so that homemade music and musicians were in great demand.
The song was translated for me and was something like this: 'The headman of a village near here had a very beautiful daughter, with large eyes, and arms and hands as supple as an elephant’s trunk, but she suffered from stomach ache. After waiting for it to pass without success, her father said to her "Go and seek advice from Uncle Prasobchai who lives deep in the forest." So she filled a basket with presents of food he might not find in the forest and set off. She was expected to go alone even though there were tigers in the forest. She knew how to sing loud enough to keep the tigers

out of the away. (That was how Mr Suwan himself had come to know so many songs.) When she arrived she bowed down to greet her uncle and said "Uncle, father has sent me because I have stomach ache. It is bad and I still don't know what to do." Her uncle had been living in the forest a long time and even knew the fruits and leaves that monkeys choose to eat. He gave her the names of certain plants and told her how to find them, and when she returned home she boiled them in a pan and drank the brew.'
'But the stomachache was not cured. She still held her arms across her stomach and groaned a little when the pain was bad. Next day her father said to her "Either you or your uncle has made a mistake. Today you must ask for help from the Buddhists at the temple." She went there quickly and explained her trouble to an old monk who was an expert regarding herbs. Early in the morning when the herbs are good, she went with a friend into the forest and did exactly what he had said. She put some first into the pot and some only needed dipping at the very end when the water was boiling. When she sipped the medicine it seemed to be having a strange effect on her and, her friend asked, "What is the matter, you look paler than before?" She became frightened, but when she had waited all day, the ache in her stomach was still there. She was walking along the village street that evening when who do you think she met? It was the new students from TURTEP at the Teachers College. They saw her arms folded across her stomach, her pale face and the look of pain in her eyes and guessing her troubles they said, "You must have hookworm. Go and ask the doctor for the medicine against hookworm, but you must take it exactly as he says." So the next day she took the bus to Ubon and saw the doctor, he told her when to take the medicine and how much to take, on condition her father built a toilet, and she went home and did as he said and soon the stomach ache was cured like a miracle. She was able to live happily ever after.
Mr Suwan's ballad sounded throughout the great crowd who had gathered to hear him and all went home that night, thinking they were wiser than they had been before. I was not happy about the implied criticism of the monastery because they were keen to help us in our work in the villages, they even built a hostel for the students use.

Mr Suwan and his ballads were a great assistance in the education provided by the new community schools, because he sang in many villages and people liked him and his music. He could be of help by singing about any of our projects. In a similar way the village newspapers were flexible in that they also gave support to other projects. In particular they helped by providing acceptable reading material for all those school children and adults who had learned to read and were glad to display their new skill. They had a wide range of subjects, I found, whenever I asked my counterpart to translate. From the Suez Crisis to a child's story to an advertisement for a second-hand dug out canoe. What was never omitted was recent Community School work, introducing poultry, making compost heaps suited to the climate, meaning, near enough to water to provide for rotting in the dry season, and yet protected from excessive rain by a thatched roof in the rainy season. One student used a large bamboo to make a drainpipe for washing up water from the kitchen to go to the compost heap. In praising him in front of all the other students, the idea was spread.
Many students took initiatives like that. One of them showed me his notebook written, to my surprise in English. He was attached to a school where there had been difficulties. ‘My plan,’ he said, ‘is to build a school dining hall and kitchen. The fathers will either bring a stout post or thatch a part of the roof.’
I looked dismayed, ‘I happen to know that that school has only half as many children as last year, so there is plenty of room for them to eat in the old building.'
He replied politely, 'You do not understand. A school with no lunchroom does not believe in itself.'
'I'm not sure' I said 'anyway the bus turned over by the school and several people were killed. The people believe it is bad for their children, if the place is haunted by spirits.'
'No, I've thought of that!' he smiled 'The abbot, the chief priest has been and the place is alright now.'

He went away after hearing my doubts and wrote his notes for teaching. The notes ended with a memorable remark: 'If I do all my plan, I shall smile all day.' He did smile all day and the school gained a roomy dining hall and kitchen. I liked being proved wrong

. The school did begin to believe in itself. It is little wonder considering that the conditions were such that the student and some of his boys had to hire themselves for removing tree stumps from a side road to earn enough money to buy nails for the two wooden buildings.
I was proved wrong on another occasion. Working in an unfamiliar culture where rules are different, we had to be prepared for making errors of judgement. It happened like this. On my first visit to a group of students I was annoyed to find that they had failed even to begin a survey of the real needs of the village as they had been told to do. I said 'I'll come back next week, will that be all right?' When I came back the following week to the same blank faces and learned that nothing had been accomplished, I was not annoyed, I was angry. It is the height of bad manners to show anger in the Thai way of life and I hope I did not show it. Clutching at straws I said 'I'm bringing a cine-camera next week to make a film of what you decide to do. So you will have to have made a plan by then.'
The next week I found myself filming without having any clue about their plans for a village activity. The film starts with a carefully rehearsed line of children leaving their school building, by the gateway to pass down the main street. No one had made use of the cattle manure which was lying about but I was still hoping that the village was not so difficult to activate as the students implied. The procession turned across the road and through the gate in the bamboo fence and formed a perfect semicircle for the students to begin their lesson. I gradually gathered that the lesson was to be about a flowering, climbing plant, which was held up for all to see. Flowering climbers are very attractive but with every village suffering from kwashiorkor (protein deficiency), hookworm, malaria, periodic famines, and other similar threats, they seemed of less importance. I was fuming when I asked the students the aim of their lesson. I approached the question remembering that they had attended a good lecture on the vicious circle formed by ignorance, Disease, Hunger and Despair, but they had also been taught to ask the villagers themselves. The villagers felt that the children should learn to look after old people who were so unfortunate as to have no children of their own. When I heard this my jaw must have just

dropped and I realised that it was I who was taught the lesson which I needed on account of my western eyes. How can we weigh a Good Samaritan in the same scales as a doctor providing pills against hookworm? It may well be that Good Samaritans are as rare in the West as good doctors are scarce in the rest of the world.
This, like the dining hall, may be regarded as successful initiatives by students, perhaps Mr Suwan should be put in the same category, other methods of giving a message were flannelgraphs for compost making and puppets for the same purpose. The Thai ways of campaigning were much more effective, we thought, and they took to puppets very readily. Slides need more justification. Someone discovered that an unlimited number of projectors were available free and it seemed a pity not to accept the offer. We had to run a training course in the use of slide projectors but I fear that no more sets of slides related to community education were likely to have been circulated.
Going back to the village Newspapers, they were both a project in their own right by providing an essential part of a literacy campaign and at the same time another way of boosting the support for all the other projects. It is true that only a minority of people were able to read and an even smaller minority of the population were able to write, but they would be influential people who could give the most help in carrying out projects and in winning support for them. I think they suffered from the over-helpful education officer. I was speaking to a very large meeting of head teachers about how to find enough writers and readers by making the writing and pictures as interesting as possible, for example parents like to read the work of their children. I wanted to make the activity voluntary on the part of the head teachers so as to avoid dull news bringing the project into disrepute, but the official made it compulsory and I could not get round a huge area to check what was happening. Journalism is not everyone's skill.
Finally the best project was planned in the absence of the three expatriates at a committee in Bangkok. We joked that we were not needed any more. It was decided by our counterparts that each year each school should select and present a model house with garden, compost heap and toilet where children could come and learn each week alongside the house owner. This gave the chance

to make reading, writing, and arithmetic more closely related to practical things in which they had a strong personal interest. According to our counterparts when the children were tested at the end of the first year, their performance in the three R's was improved despite giving less time to formal classroom work. It also helped draw the attention of adults as well as children to the value of improvements in the villages; and very conveniently involved girls equally with boys.
When sleeping in one of the villages, I was woken one morning by a man who invited me to his house in order to suggest further improvements he might make. It was a beautiful house and so well equipped even with fruit trees in the garden, tools on the wall and playthings for the children that I could think of nothing to suggest. I do not know whether he was pleased or disappointed! It was easy to praise what he had done. In some villages there were long waiting lists for house owners who wished to accept the adoption offer and sometimes more than one house at a time had to be adopted. It was more difficult to be fair between rich and poor. In one place the house chosen already had an expensive corrugated iron roof, but we were very far from wishing this to be copied by people who lacked money and we doubted whether the extra protection in the rainy season compensated for the extra heat during the hot season. I wanted to know if a leaking roof was a common problem and whether it was possible or desirable to have either a thatch on top of the iron sheets or vice-versa. In any case, the 'houses were getting better.' The Ban praprung (the house that is getting better) as they were modestly called in Thai, were an enormous success. Villages became places where people were pleased or even proud to live in and thus were able to tempt the men back home from the slums of Bangkok to where they had gone to seek work. Bad harvests had split families in this way and sometimes caused old people and invalids to be left behind, without anyone to care for them. With help from other people I had written a short story about one such family in order to have a text for teaching English.
The opportunity to teach about the UN and UNESCO, as was noted for the Philippines, was reinforced in Thailand. Again United Nations Day was taken much more seriously than it is in Europe. It fell to me to speak to the huge meeting of TURTEP students. I pointed out the value of international law and the importance of

strengthening support for it. With TUFEC close by it was easy to refer to the individuals sent by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Health Organisation and the International Labour Office. Real people and real projects seem much more distant in England and I closed my speech with a ringing call to uphold the new institutions. I was not expecting nor prepared for the questions that followed. 'Why was the Peoples Republic of China refused admission?' 'How much longer would the seat at the UN be held by Taiwan and the real China denied its rightful place?' 'Don't the United Nations and the United States begin with the same word and isn't the UN really a United States institution for fighting communism?' I replied ‘no on the contrary part of my salary was paid by the Soviet Union and the UN was genuinely international’, but I was on difficult ground when I was asked how long it would be before China became a member. I never knew how prevalent the feelings against the United States were among the audience. Meanwhile the United States was trying to win the support of the students by paying for all the new buildings the college required. The USA, which is the home of public relations and advertising, seemed to be slipping. I wondered what the reason might be. It was not until many years later that the US air force took over the grass airport at Ubon to use it for bombing both Vietnam and Cambodia. My friends wrote to discourage us from returning to Ubon for fear it would break our hearts.
Working so as to give UNESCO a good name, thanks to our effective counterparts in Thailand, proved to be easy. I discovered how much the work in international teams revealed both opportunities and difficulties in working closely with people from different cultures. Sitting behind a very clear empty desk may mean that the person knows how to keep on top of the administration tasks allotted to his post, or it may mean that the person believes administration is a sinecure. Obligations to share living expenses with relatives vary a great deal from one culture to another. It would be difficult for the extended family of a UN official left behind in a third world country, to fully understand the enormous expense their relative would have to pay for rented accommodation in Paris. The thought that an international organisation such as UNESCO is an ideal, worthy to receive loyal service, may be rare but is extremely valuable.

A very different aspect of teamwork is that differences in dress and diet have to be appreciated, and not allowed to grate. It is not for nothing that the briefing of the UN officials includes a section on etiquette. This cropped up in a conversation with an English friend who happened to be holding the important post of chief administrator in Tehran for the whole of the UN technical assistance programmes in Iran at the time I was there. I never discovered whether he raised the matter because he felt I was living too simply. Partly because I was wishing to keep in touch with the Iranian officials with whom I worked, I chose fairly cheap lodgings in preference to a small hotel. At any rate my friend spoke at length about his own problem in being expected to live like the ambassador of a major state if he hoped to be taken seriously, by the Iranian government officials as the administrative head of the United Nations agencies living in Tehran. Where understanding of people's importance is always being assessed in the absence of a common language, it is very tempting to fall back on trappings of power, such as the size of the car or the number of servants to indicate how much of a hearing one must be given. This may lead to misunderstandings back home in a more egalitarian state. I may be a Gandhian by disposition but I learned to avoid judging my colleagues in this respect.
One of the troubles of living with the trappings of power, even though the power is very moderate, is that it quickly goes to the head even among those least likely to be corrupted. I noticed it in myself but I never noticed it in Conrad Opper, even though he had started his career in the colonial services in what was at the time Rhodesia. In Thailand he was greatly appreciated for his gentleness and was very content. In Tehran, where Conrad Opper was head of the UNESCO Mission, I fear that his gentleness was taken for feebleness and he was so unhappy that I fear he was 'walked over.' The day after I arrived there to join him, he was very happy to receive an invitation to move on to New York to serve as UNESCO's liaison officer at the head office of UNICEF, the UN's International Children's Emergency Fund.