An article from a local newspaper reported that as many as 9 million Thais have smelly mouth. Now, that’s a lot of Thais nationwide with stinky breath! The moment they open their mouth, they literally take your breath away. I’m not too sure if those who has the unfortunate disease of having mouth odour are actually aware of their condition. Assuming they don’t, my question is, when you do encounter halitosis sufferer up-close, how do you tell them the truth without hurting them? Should you just buy them a set of oral care and attach a renown dentist’s namecard as their birthday gift? Same thing with people who have body odour, would it be really impolite to give them a gift set of deodorant and perfumes? It’s a terrible disease to have and given my penchant for foul smell, I am acutely susceptible to anything stinky. Still, it’s a hard subject to broach, whether you are friends or only acquaintances. They might take it the wrong way and hate you for telling them such things. But I do hope that someone closer to them would actually offer a heighten awareness of their condition. For me, tell me outright if I’m smelly. You don’t know how much I’d appreciate such things. At least, I can then go do something about it.
March 1, 2009
New Toy
Silver Bullet is now a proud owner of a DSLR Canon EOS 40D after spending months contemplating on the purchase. It is a sleek-looking camera no doubt, but I’m a little intimidated by it. I fear I might just ruin it if I touch it…so it’s best to leave the camera in the hands of those who know what they are doing. I’ll just be putting up pictures taken from his DSLR from time to time.
February 27, 2009
Doing the part for charity
The day of social services arrived in the office yesterday where we, as a company, had dedicated the entire day to do charity work for the community. It was a company’s global effort, so every offices from around the world was activated on this mission.
Our day started as early as 7 am and we had to travel about 2 hours upcountry to Srinawa Community School, Nakorn Nayok. The school has up to 130 students and 8 teachers. There is only one class for each grade with 18-20 students per class. However, the conditions of the classrooms are under-developed. The library is bare with the most updated publication being that of celebrities’ magazines. The playground is filled with broken pieces, no longer usable. most unfortunate is that their annual lunch budget of 25,000 baht (~SGD 1,050) usually provided by the government, is being delayed due to the unstable political situation. All of the lunch is currently supported by people within the community.
The agenda for the entire company really was to surprise the kids by taking them out to Siam Ocean World, while at the same time, revive the condition of the premises. That means, we were split into teams to clean and paint 6 classrooms, nursing room, library, canteen and playground. Necessary children’s items were also donated to the school along with some cash.
No one from my company was spared on this day and I was assigned as part of the team to clean and paint one of the classrooms. It was a really hot day and not the most sanitary of conditions. Bless you if you had diarrhoea (which I did, but luckily wasn’t a bad one). But we pulled through and boy! it was a lot of hard work. By the time the kids came back from their outing, we were all pooped. I’m aching all over now from the constant bending and painting the walls. We only arrived in Bangkok at 8-ish pm. So that’s more than 12 hours travelling and purely physical labour!
It does feel quite rewarding to be a part of it, though. Only, I felt that the kids are probably too young to understand the significance of it and were more excited by the physical gifts we brought them. Here are some pictures.
