A FINN LIVING AND WORKING IN THAILAND      By Ms. Airi Kangas

..   It is a great honour for me to be here amongst you today, and I would like to extend my most sincere thanks to Dr. Suree Bhumibhamon, Vice President of International Affairs and Acting Director of NSC for inviting me to give a small lecture to Kasetsart University today. As you all know, Dr. Suree has studied in Finland and knows our country and people very well. He even speaks our language better than I speak Thai.

     My name is Airi Kangas, I come from Finland. Finland is a Nordic country with about five million inhabitants (the population of Thailand is about 12 times bigger than our population), the total area is about two thirds of the area of Thailand, so we have plenty of room for our small population (we have only about 15 people/km2, in Thailand you have about 115 people/km2). Our country has nearly 200,000 lakes, about 60% of the area is covered by forest.

    I was born (ages ago!) in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland. When studying in Finland and also in England, I had plans and dreams of working in foreign countries in the future, but I wanted to go to countries where the climate was cold - I loved cold weather (in Lapland in winter time the temperature can go as low as -45 C, even lower), snow and winter sports, especially skiing; I was interested in going to countries where rice was not the main dish (I did not like rice at that time, only potatoes!); countries where the spoken language was not tonal (I cannot sing, so I do not hear the tones correctly). I remember while studying applied linguistics in England, we once had to listen a few times to a tape in which a sentence was spoken in Thai, and after that we were asked to try to mimic that sentence - in a group of some six students I was the only one that could not say a word of that sentence correctly. And I was the only one who eventually ended up living the best part of my life here in Thailand.

      I came to Thailand for the first time in May 1977, and I still remember my arrival at the old Don Muang Airport, as if it was only yesterday. I had never been to Asia before, never experienced the tropical climate. When I left Finland it was still springtime, so the weather was cold, although most of snow had melt in Lapland, trees were without leaves, the ground was brown and grey. Before the plane landed and was circulating in the air, I remember looking through the window, and I saw the beautiful green rice fields, the trees full of leaves, it looked so unreal that my breath was taken away. Well, when I got out of the plane, and had the first taste of the topics, it was not only the beauty of the country that made me breathless, but the terrible, unimaginable humidity and heat - it was like entering a sauna! I panicked and the first time thought was: how can anybody survive here, I want to go back home! But I could not return, because I had a contract to work at least for one year - at that time I was to tutor Finnish high school kids, whose parents were working as missionaries or in all kinds of development projects in Thailand.

      That one year contract eventually extended to about ten years, and in 1987 I left Thailand for Finland for good, as I myself thought at that time. I was very sad to leave the country and the people that I had learned to love deeply, but it was time to go back home - to be honest, I was not any longer sure where my home really was. Little did I know in 1987 that I would be again heading back to Thailand in five years' time, because in 1992 I was given a chance to work in the Embassy of Finland, in Bangkok.

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