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Have you heard of disposable suits?
Darrell Brown on left, with
Gary Hacker and MC Richard Silverberg, following Darrell’s excellent talk.
Darrell illustrated his talk with many photographs, some of which follow.
Have you heard of disposable suits? Club member Darrell
Brown had a story about that along with several other interesting comments
about his service with the US State Department in both Iraq and Afghanistan
when he spoke to the Pattaya City Expats Club on Sunday, April 7. Darrell,
who is an American, joined the Foreign Service in 2002, after a stint in the
navy and as a US Bank Examiner. He is retired now and emphasized that he was
not speaking as a government representative, but was relating his personal
experiences and observations.
Darrell said that while he was in the navy and later as a US Navy reservist,
he spent some time on submarines. Darrell said that the process of choosing
crews for submarines is “highly selective.” To work on a submarine, he said,
“You have take an IQ test and fail it.” (He added that he was just joking.)
In the Foreign Service, Darrell was posted first to Bogotá, Colombia (he had
learned Spanish) and then to Baghdad (in 2004). Darrell gave some background
on the ancient history of the Iraq area which goes back 5 thousand years and
that it was the first known civilization. He explained how the country Iraq
was created in 1919 when England, France, and others divided up the old
Ottoman Empire. Inside the new borders were a number of ethnic groups that
had been known not to get along very well. Darrell commented that thus, “The
seeds of future conflict were sown.” Darrell explained that today Iraq is
still very much a tribal culture. There are 15,000 tribes, some more
powerful than others, some quite tiny. Most people’s first allegiance is to
their tribe, not their country. This, he said, creates a shifting mosaic of
allegiances and betrayals.
Early Afghan ‘condos’.
Darrell noted that his first post in Iraq was in Baghdad,
then the most dangerous place in Iraq. He served as Finance Officer at the
US Embassy. On his next posting to Iraq, he went to Karbala and Najaf to
work on a provincial reconstruction team. These were joint military and
civilian teams. His job was in bank reconstruction. Working on a provincial
reconstruction team was, and still is, dangerous, Darrell said. The day
before Darrell spoke to the club, a woman Foreign Service Officer working on
one of these teams was killed by a suicide bomber. Darrell explained that
most casualties in Iraq at this time came from bombs. He showed a picture of
his usual means of transportation; a specialized Humvee that had a device
protruding from the front that was supposed to block cell phone signals from
setting off road bombs.
Kabul Police Academy.
Darrell recounted several of his experiences including
how special 14 foot high one foot thick walls around his quarters along with
an armored roof saved his and others lives during a heavy mortar attack. He
also mentioned how he met a lot of interesting people. One was the governor
of the province of Najaf, a very intelligent and well educated man. This
Iraqi was a rich man three times over. The first two times, Saddam Hussein
took his fortune away. After the second time, the Iraqi fled to Norway. He
returned after Hussein had been deposed; that’s when he made this third
fortune. Another was an Iraqi exile who ran a clothing manufacturing
operation in Italy. He had returned to help in the reconstruction operation
by setting up a similar operation which made a lot of suits. Darrell said
that Iraqis expected diplomats to wear suits, but they didn’t last long in
the conditions they were in; thus the disposable suit idea. He would buy a
dozen $10 suits from the new factory, wearing one for a bit and then
disposing of it.
Guard tower in Bamyan.
After Baghdad, Darrell spent a year in Washington at the
Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) in the
State Department. Then it was off to Afghanistan where he worked on a
variety of tasks, including helping to train Afghan police. He said that he
had 2,500 subordinates working in 22 camps and that they trained about
22,000 police a year. It was an uphill struggle he explained because the
recruits were mostly illiterate and there was widespread illicit drug use.
He described how they also created a special police training unit for women
and the difficulties women faced in a male dominated culture, including many
of the abuses they were subjected to. For example, a woman who is outdoors
by herself is considered a prostitute and is treated like one. He said that
women were abused not only by men, but also by other women “to keep them in
line.” He said that he believes that these other women were themselves
victims of abuse. “The cycle repeats itself,” he said. So, his people saw
their job as trying to interrupt this “vicious cycle.” But this is very hard
to do. “We tried to help just one woman at a time,” Darrell said. “It was
the only way we knew how to handle it.”
Kabul Police Academy dorm
room.
Darrell Brown was born in England in 1953 and graduated
from Texas Tech with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in
Petroleum Land Management. He has lived in Thailand for four and a half
years. He is on the Board of Directors of the Navy League of the United
States, Siam Chapter, where he serves as Treasurer and Secretary to the
Board.
Master of Ceremonies Richard Silverberg provided an update on upcoming
events and called on Roy Albiston to conduct the Open Forum where questions
are asked and answered about Expat living in Thailand; Pattaya in
particular.
For more information about the many activities of the Pattaya City Expats
Club, visit their website at
www.pattayacityexpatsclub.com.
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Popular expat Lemmers
celebrates 65th birthday
Gerard Lemmers enjoys his birthday
cake.
Elfi Seitz
Many people may dread their 65th birthday, but Gerard Lemmers celebrated it in
grand style at the Royal Cliff Beach Resort.
Well-known in the Pattaya community, Lemmers invited 50 guests, most of them
Dutch, like himself. They enjoyed drinks by the pool and grooved to the hotel’s
Filipino house band. Then everyone sat down for a meal.
Guests swapped funny stories from Lemmer’s long life while several Dutch women
performed a comedy show with a song that was humorous if you knew the lingo.
Lemmer’s life partner, Amporn, took the stage in an original Thai costume and
sang a song, which earned him generous applause.
The cake finally appeared and Lemmers blew out the candles while guests sang
“Happy Birthday.” A Thai band took the stage to cap the evening’s festivities.
Many of Lemmers’ closest friends
turned up for his birthday party.
Orchestral Delights at Tiffany’s
In an Arabian Nights setting, conductor Hikotaro
Yazaki rehearses with the SSMS Orchestra before the concert.
Colin Kirkpatrick
It’s not very often you hear mention of “Tiffany’s Show Pattaya” and
“classical orchestral music” in the same sentence. But Saturday, 6th April, an
enthusiastic audience gathered at Tiffany’s to hear the Silpakorn Summer Music
School Orchestra under the internationally-known Japanese conductor, Hikotaro
Yazaki. The Silpakorn Summer Music School (organised, as you might have guessed,
by Silpakorn University) is one of the most prestigious annual summer music
schools in Thailand.
About a hundred young musicians, selected by rigorous auditions, come to play
music together and further their musical knowledge and experience under the
guidance of Silpakorn’s distinguished music faculty. Generously supported by
Siam Commercial Bank, this year’s course culminated in two splendid concerts in
both Pattaya and Bangkok. It was amazing to see so many talented young players
in the same place at the same time. They even managed to find eleven double bass
players.
Clarinetist Supak Wittayanukulluk receives a bouquet
from Alisa Phanthusak of Tiffany’s Theatre.
The Tiffany concert kicked off with a lively performance of the concert overture
“Carnival” by the Czech composer Antonín Dvorák. Written in 1891, it’s one of
Dvoøák’s most popular works and a great starter for any concert with its lively,
Czech-sounding rhythms and memorable tunes. The orchestra played with panache
and provided some lovely woodwind playing in the slower middle section. The work
isn’t particularly easy to play, especially for the strings, but the orchestra
gave a splendid account of the work with some fine brass playing.
The supremely talented young clarinetist Supak Wittayanukulluk was the soloist
in Weber’s popular Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F minor. Supak was the winner of
the 2013 Thailand Clarinet Competition and is clearly a musically gifted young
man. His superb performance of the Weber concerto was flawless, thoughtful and
intensely musical and his articulation in the faster passages was absolutely
spot-on and every nuance and turn of phrase was played with care and
sensitivity. Technically it is quite a demanding concerto but Supak was in total
control throughout.
During all this time, Tiffany’s stage was bedecked with Arabian themes; columns
and minarets everywhere. It took some time for the penny to drop that this was
in preparation for the performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 symphonic suite
“Scheherazade”. The suite is based “One Thousand and One Nights”, a collection
of stories and folk tales compiled during the Islamic Golden Age. It’s
Rimsky-Korsakov’s most popular orchestral work, full of dazzling and colorful
orchestration, memorable melodies and catchy rhythms. It’s the kind of piece
that as you’re driving home after the concert, you realise that you’re humming
one of the tunes. This major work was the highlight of the concert and proved to
be a stunning showcase for the orchestra. There was some lovely solo work from
many of the young musicians, notably the recurring frequent violin solos
accompanied beautifully on the harp.
Conductor Hikotaro Yazaki steered the orchestra passionately through this
demanding score and brought out some beautiful playing from the string section.
Incidentally, Yazaki is an internationally acclaimed conductor, who originally
studied mathematics at Tokyo’s Sophia University before graduating from the
Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music as a conductor. For two years
he was Assistant Conductor of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra under the famous
Seiji Ozawa. Today, Hikotaro Yazaki is much in demand both in his native Japan
and in Europe.
The stage at Tiffany’s Theatre is absolutely massive and can easily accommodate
a 100-piece symphony orchestra. The acoustics are quite dry which means that you
can hear plenty of detail and with a seating capacity of well over one thousand,
Tiffany’s Theatre proved to be a splendid venue for an orchestral concert.
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Best of British at Embassy Garden Party
British Ambassador to Thailand Mark Kent (2nd right)
joins friends around the centerpiece of the party: a classic E-Type Jaguar.
Paul Strachan
The grounds of the British Embassy in Bangkok were rocking to the sounds of
Blur, Amy Winehouse and the Rolling Stones March 21 for the annual Lifestyle and
Garden Party with a classic shinning red E-Type Jaguar as the centerpiece of the
party.
This event, which made a welcome return last year, was very well attended, with
a host of familiar faces from the Eastern Seaboard such as Graham MacDonald MBE,
Joe Cox from Defense International Security services, Cees Cuijpers from Town &
Country Property and many more.
The Triumph motorcycle is a big hit with the male
party goers.
The theme was best of British and to add to the atmosphere of great British
music played by the dynamic Thai band: Earth Collide, there was a range of
drinks by the various sponsors such as British beers by the Danmark company
Ltd., whisky, bubbly and brandy from Diageo, Moet, Hennessy and the perfect gin
and tonic compliments of Bombay Sapphire.
British Ambassador to Thailand Mark Kent made a brief yet warm and friendly
speech welcoming the guests and remarked about the E-Type Jag and the Motorbikes
on display courtesy of Triumph.
Other sponsors for the event included Qatar Airways, Asia west, TOPS market,
Magnum ice creams, Twinings Teas, Grand Hyatt Erawan Bangkok, Land Rover, SDL
and three international schools, namely Harrow, Shrewsbury & KIS.
And the girls!
If the white wine didn’t cool you down, Magnum ice
creams did the trick.
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