CMIRC Completes Successful Wall Painting Project at BK Kee Patient House

Wow! And I can just say "wow"! We completed a one-day project in partnership with the patients, caregivers, and staff at B.K. Kee patient house. Six months ago, we started planning to repaint the north wall that had a mural painted in early 2020. Unfortunately, the paint behind that mural was not concrete paint and therefore it was falling apart and flaking poorly.

I would really like to thank our CMIRC Rotary members and friends for coming out today and helping to make this joyous work possible.

Thank you, Nick Dale and Pink. Andy and Colleen Boud, Caroline Marck, and Owen Hodgson. Service above self!

I would also like to thank our new friend, Ms. Aye Myat Win, who spoke at our February 4 meeting on the topic of 'Humanitarian Crises and Health Care Accessibility of Myanmar Migrant Workers in Thailand’.

Festivities were supposed to start at 9:00. I arrived early, before most of us arrived. The residents brought out the supplies, started scraping, and wire brushed the wall. Two things immediately became evident. First, that the wall was in much worse shape than I had thought, and second, that I hadn’t purchased enough tools. As we deployed, scrapers and wire brushes, the residents supplemented them with garden tools, kitchen knives, and even a Thai Dharma (short sword). Nick graciously offered to buy additional scrapers, paintbrushes, and rollers locally. When they returned, Nick and Pink dove right in and scraped away.

Our first big challenge came when I thought the first two panels had been scraped sufficiently to apply primer. I quickly found that the primer I had been sold that was supposed to go over old paint acted more as a stripper. It bubbled up the previously stable portions of the leftover paint, so we needed to scrape all over again. We decided to do without the so-called primer for the rest of the wall, especially since the paint we were using was supposed to contain its own primer and be a single-coat finish. It did a pretty good job, but we ran a second coat anyway.

Amazingly, I had said “we should be finished by 2:00” and we were. Andy even said “two minutes early.” It’s a good thing because we were all pretty much done. However, the residents weren’t! As I was leaving, I saw that they were painting everything they could with the leftover paint, including the bathroom we built in 2018. Trim on additional walls, etc.

From the time we started ‘Puzzle Day’ as one of our weekly activities, it appeared the patients wanted to keep their most complicated puzzles intact, but we had no way to really do that. Hence, the idea to mount them on the wall. I thought that a repainted wall with weather-sealed puzzles would be great. Weather sealing would not be perfect; we expected that the puzzles would hold up maybe two years if we were lucky and would need to be replaced.

Last week, Kanchana informed us that she had a better idea. She once again thanked us for repainting the wall but is hiring a Burmese artist to paint a new mural on the wall. We will still mount some puzzles: in the rooms, the new planned library, and walls under the roof.