BAD EYES AND NO MONEY
     
        Here we are again, guess a year has passed since I stared this blog and the rains have come again. Much has passed and yet little has happened, like most the years roll by and all we get is older.
    

       Took the wife and kids back to Australia for the dry season, no rubber, so no money. Wife will spend like there is no tomorrow, Buddha will prove.  Not a western logic, but we have been married near on 10 years and Buddha has done his bit.
      

        Arrived back with $300. wife was going to get a job, which meant I was going to get a job. First problem, I couldn't see. My eyes were getting worse, I was unable to drive or read a book, off to the optician. Sit in the chair, girl looks into my eyes through the scope they use. You can't see because you have very bad cataracts, relief on my part as I was not going blind from some incurable eye disease. OK Australia has free medical care, can sign on the sick benefits and kill 2 birds with one stone. Get paid by welfare while I wait my turn to get the 10 minute operation.
       

      Next week off to see the specialist eye surgeon, bad news, waiting list for Government Medicare is 3 plus years. No way am I living here on welfare for 3 plus years. I will have to pay and pay big if I want it done privately, but I have no money and can't see to work. Time for Buddha to give a helping hand.
      I had turned 55 years old and had some superannuation, not much thanks to the system, it added up to less than I had paid in and was losing money each year. Enough though to pay for the eye operations, have a good holiday in Australia and a bit left over for me to buy my new chopper in Thailand. Done deal in my book, only draw back is when you take the money there is no more unemployment benifits and you are not allowed to work more than 10 hours a week, but as I was now classed as a non resident I was not entitled to benifts unless I return on a permenent bases.
         

      Three months later I was on the plane back home, the wife and kids had left a month earlier, so the kids could go back to school, plus they were bored and cold.



 HOW ISSAN HAS CHANGED ME.


     Think it is hard to see change in yourself, but change is part of life, you adapt, grow and learn. There are things you can see when you look into the mirror, little hair that is grey, a fat belly and sore bones, but it's the things you don't see that are more important.


     In my old life violence was a daily occurrence, prison fights, stabbings, ODs and suicides, were to be expected. It is not the incidents that wear you down, but the waiting for the next one. Every time you check  a cell, will the occupant be swinging, or covered in blood. One day while sitting a my desk a prisoner walked over carrying a TV. I thought it must be broken and he wanted a replacement, but no, as he approached he raised the TV over head and throw it at me. He had had a bad day and I would have a bad moment from then on, every time I saw a prisoner carrying a TV.


      There is what we call the real world, which most of us live in and any form of denial of it's reality is escapism, but children see the world differently.
      My kids watch videos about fairies, Peter Pan etc. One night the littlest one calls, all excited, daddy, daddy fairies. I walk to the front of our house, where she is standing in awe. There is a star fruit tree and it is alight with fireflies, she does not see fireflies, but fairies with little lamps, Tinker Bell.
      I pick her up and we stand and watch, I know they are fireflies, but I have changed and I see fairies with little lamps, flying and dancing in the tree.