Suban

With a short toot of his motorcycle horn and the rumbling of rocks beneath his tires, the kanom vendor, who often frequents the community with fresh traditional Thai snacks, makes his presence known to the patients lounging in the sala. As I sit at the desk within the Care Center, filling out paperwork from my night shift the night prior, I can hear the distinct slapping of Suban’s feet on the floor hurriedly coming closer and closer to the office. When I notice the footsteps have stopped, I roll my chair closer to the door. Peering through the metallic screen door, my eyes meet Suban’s, which seem to be bulging out of his head in patient anticipation.

“What do you need Suban?”, I ask him in Thai, although I already have a pretty good guess.

In his limited speech capabilities, a result of tuberculosis of the brain, he mumbles something that I cannot understand. I kindly remind him he needs to open his mouth when he talks. He pulls in his lips and clenches hard on his jaw as if trying to remember how one does such a thing. When the act of opening his mouth comes back to his memory, he exaggeratedly attempts to say the word “kanom”.

“Ahh, I guess you need some money for that, now don’t you?” I reply back with a sly smile. He passionately nods his head in agreement. When I return with 5 Baht (approximately 17 cents), the coins are barely in his hands before he is running back to the vendor.

As I sit back in my chair to fill out the medicine reports from the night before, I can’t help but think about the hundreds of times I would scream for my parents to give me money when I heard the familiar “Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro?” sounding from the ice cream man slowly traversing the street of my childhood home. When I say scream, I’m totally not even exaggerating. If anyone on my block didn’t hear the ice cream truck’s catchy jingle, they probably heard me yelling “MOOOMMMMMMMM THE ICE CREAAAMMM MANNNNNNN” at the highest decibel my already high-pitched voice could reach. Nothing could get in the way of me and the ice cream man - not being in the process of eating a hearty lunch of character-shaped Mac N Cheese or the truck already being half way up the street. Put these two together and you get a six-year-old Bridgid amidst dozens of other neighborhood kids throwing up SpongeBob macaroni and cheese on the rims of the dear-old ice cream truck after running around to find a parent with money and then sprinting up the hill to catch the truck. Did I still get a 2 Ball Screwball with the 2 gumballs at the bottom? Obviously.

Now, Suban is twenty-eight not six and has yet to throw up on me while in his normal hasty search for anyone to give him money to buy kanom – but I could not stop thinking about the similarities in the encounter. Suban is HIV+ and suffers from a severe brain infection as a result of tuberculosis of the brain. For all intents and purposes, Suban has reverted back to that of a six year old.

Suban – who also goes by the nickname of Gai, which means ‘chicken’ - has been at the Care Center for over three years now, the longest of any current patient in the center. He can often be found napping in his bedroom with a giant white bear wearing a Santa hat tucked under his arm or dancing outside the patient sala or draping his entire body on the back of one of the many other male patients (although his friend of choice is a blind older man named Nipon who wonderfully puts up with Suban popping up behind him and throwing his arms around his neck so Nipon can practical drag him around). Suban is notorious around the Care Center as someone you need to make sure you watch when he takes his medicine and watch in general. In one of his most famous stories, he one stole a bike and rode to Udon Thani (about an hour by car from Nong Khai) and when staff had finally found him a day later, he was wearing five or six pairs of stolen jeans. Not surprisingly then, on my first day of working at the Care Center, I was startled to realize my shoes were not in the place I left them when I got to work. When the patients saw that I was perplexingly looking around for my shoes, they immediately asked Suban if he had taken my flip-flops. He ran them back over to me immediately.

I often think about the person Suban was before his brain infection and how much of the hilarious, always putting on a show Suban I see everyday is a product of the disease or a remnant of his old personality. From what I have heard from other staff members – he was once a very different person – a sort of tough, rough and tumble sort of guy. Thinking of this Suban is not even something my mind can comprehend when I see him everyday making faces out the window of his bedroom that happens to be right behind the TV or bringing his teddy bear with him to daily exercise or being coerced into eating dog food by one of the other patients. I often wonder if he could have chosen, would he choose to be the person he is now? Would the person he is now embarrass his former self?

Suban never fails to put a smile on my face. He is one of those people that I could just watch all day. However, lately he has planted smiles on my face that take a long, long while to dissipate.

Last week, as my community member Anette and I were finishing up making some Christmas decorations, we noticed that Suban was trying to open one of the doors of one of the hardest patient at the Center – Waht. Waht is completely paralyzed from the neck down and although he does not have HIV, he was brought to the Center about a month ago because he was staying in extremely poor living conditions and was not getting proper care from his mother. Because Waht cannot move himself, he requires his position to be moved every two hours or so, which makes for really exciting night duty nights. On the day that I saw Suban going into Waht’s room, he confidently walked into the room and bent down to put Waht’s bed up more and then walked over the side of the bed and patiently and gently proceeded to change his position from facing to the left to facing to the right. He then stood over Waht’s bed to make sure that he didn’t need anything else. No words were exchanged in this entire interaction. When Suban had decided that his work was done, he again opened the door and went out as if it was nothing. When he walked out I told him how proud I was and what a wonderful job he did helping Waht. He put his palms together and bowed his head in appreciation, a traditional Thai gesture, and went about his day.

Similarly, today I was so busy decorating the Care Center for our Christmas party on Saturday that I realized I had not checked on any of the bed-ridden patients in a very long while. When I went to the bedroom of Watee, an HIV+ male currently suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs, he was sitting up on the side of his bed eating a tangerine. Suban, with his new glasses freshly perched over the bridge of his nose, was standing over him attentively making sure he was okay. Watee does not have the power to sit himself up, which means that Suban must have come in and helped him sit up. When I asked Suban if he had been helping Watee, he proudly smiled and shook his head yes. I reminded him of his helping Waht last week and told him how he has been such a wonderful help lately and he began to beam. Before Suban and I left the room, he pointed to the fan to Watee, insinuating if Watee wanted the fan on or not. When Watee, who had been bundled up in three blankets, shook his head no, Suban headed back to the Sala to give a back massage to his best friend Somluck.

I couldn’t stop smiling thinking about how wonderful it is that there is a place that exists like the Care Center where the patients are so caring of each other because they can all understand what the other is going through. And it is not just Suban, it is all of the patients that help eachother. But, seeing Suban, the most mentally diminished of all the patients helping the bed-ridden patients, was something really special for me.

I would give anything to be in Suban’s head for a day. He completely and utterly fascinates me. It’s good to know that kanom isn’t all he thinks about, even though I’m pretty sure it is probably about 65% of his thoughts. But that’s okay, it’s still less than the 85% of my thoughts I spent on the ice cream man.

#gardenoffriendship #nongkhai #thailand