Looking back at my time in Chiang Mai, a lot of my life was centered around the gallery where Mika and I lived and I worked. Though my initial plan upon arrival in Thailand had been to find another English teaching job like we had in Istanbul, I realized that given the choice I would rather do something that I was more interested in. Teaching in Turkey was a means to support ourselves and meet locals, but was never meant to be a career choice. Doing an internship for an NGO, on the other hand, was something that would be more pertinent to my future plans, and interesting on a day-to-day basis. Both Mika and I had discussed interning as a step up for our resumes, and taking an unpaid job in an inexpensive place like Chiang Mai made immensely more sense than doing so somewhere like Washington DC, where the cost of living is monstrously higher. Looking for local organizations involved in human rights, media, education, and more, I quickly found Documentary Arts Asia.
DAA is a fairly unique organization. Its main center is a three-storey photography gallery near the old city, where monthly photography exhibitions are held. The exhibitions feature work by Asian photographers or those who work extensively throughout the continent, and address topics like cotton production in India, the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis, and the explosive red shirt/yellow shirt protests in Bangkok in 2010. The gallery hosts free film nights twice a week, showing documentaries and Asian cinema on a large projector. DAA staff and outside professionals in various fields teach photography, filmmaking, web design, grant writing, and other workshops on the weekends, and frequently there are special informational or cultural events in partnership with other local organizations. There is a heavy focus on furthering awareness on social justice issues and teaching journalism skills to Thai, Burmese, and indigenous people so that they can better document their lives, especially in the case of Burmese migrants and refugees experiencing abuse by their government and military. DAA also operates a satellite center in the remote Kachin state in northern Burma, one of a few ethnic regions still struggling for autonomy.
My role at the gallery as center coordinator varied a lot from week to week, but I was responsible for scheduling and running film nights and events, organizing and hanging new exhibitions, continually editing and updating our website and online presence, and doing most of the day-to-day decision-making, communications, and upkeep. I had a lot of responsibilities primarily because Ryan, the founder and director of the organization, left for Kachin just a week or two after I started volunteering, and left me in charge. Ryan, an award-winning photographer and interesting guy, has been shooting a documentary on the Kachin people for several years that is scheduled to come out later in 2013. I had no contact with him for much of the time that he was gone, and even after he came back to Chiang Mai I retained most of my job description.
DAA became a literal home for me because we lived in the workshop room upstairs for several months, but it was also a good base because there was always something going on. I helped organize a lot of events that drew crowds of up to 130 or more people, which was more than enough to fill the gallery to overflowing. When there weren’t visitors coming to a special screening of a Chiang Mai-produced documentary, a panel on freelance travel writing and photography, a book reading from southern Thailand, a program of speakers and dancers from an ethnic Shan orphanage, or some other event, our friends would come over to watch movies and TV shows on the big screen. I was always very busy, but there were really rewarding experiences throughout my time there. It was a great place to be and I’ll definitely miss living and working at DAA.
The Way and the Wayfarers 