No one understands me...

The Viengping Orphanage is at the back of a large, walled complex which includes the Boys' Home, an office and a hospice for infants with HIV. I go into the office and say I want to volunteer. No one understands me. They don't speak English.

I try explaining that I am here to paint or whatever they need me to do. I even swipe phantom brush strokes with an imaginary paintbrush, but I'm not getting my point across. Finally a woman picks out the words "volunteer" and "orphanage" and she says: "Mayuree speak English. She teacher." So Mayuree is who I need to talk to. They point the way.

I step into the orphanage and see a woman, but when I ask if she's Mayuree I am told: "She no here. She Bangkok." I say: "When will she be back? I'm here to volunteer." She says: "Oh. You volunteer. Come."

The kids are all snot-nosed...

I'm led upstairs. The woman opens a door, I follow. Suddenly I'm standing at the threshold of a nursery. "You play with baby."

I look in at the kids. "Um, um!" The woman puts her hand on my back and gives me a gentle push, I trip two steps in. I look back at the door, which is closing, then out at three Thai women and 13 Thai toddlers.

"But but but..." The kids see me and stumble over, arms outstretched. And so it's me and the babies for an hour and a half.

Here's the deal about playing with babies, at least at the Viengping Orphanage. You don't need to keep them entertained. They just want to touch you. I'm not here 30 seconds and I have three kids hanging off my neck and one planting himself in my lap. And he's settling in. He's not going anywhere.

Six girls, seven boys, one- and two-year-olds, looking well-fed but all really starved for attention.

They are all snot-nosed, huge gobs of the stuff running down or caked on their faces, and they wear dirty baby clothes with smiling cartoon characters peeking out from under unidentifiable splotches.

She cries and cries and cries...

The nursery is painted an off-white, the paint job slopped on, and the Heroes Of Youth (Mickey, Pluto, et al) are on the walls in jagged strokes, put there by an artist whose crude handiwork pegs him as a former prison tattooist. The characters are half-finished and uncolored, and I can only guess the artist ran out of time or paint or inclination, or all three.

But these kids are a very colorful cast of characters themselves, with very different personalities.

Happy is a two-year-old, and nothing bothers him. He grins from the time I walk in to the time I leave.

Big Ears, also two, is a smart boy but a little mean, into the roughhouse even with the little girls.

Saucer Eyes is a girl of about one, fragile and a little lost, but she has the biggest eyes you've ever seen in your life, eyes like an adult.

Monkey Head is somewhere between an infant and a toddler. She has a big tuft of hair shooting out of her forehead and I feel really sorry for her because she cries and cries and she wanders around the room and neither I nor the three Thai women can fix what is wrong with her.