Word: bangkok
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...days are numbered. "It's the ghosts," says 47-year-old Anand. "We have to change our cars every few years when they get haunted." Before he can explain, a static-coated voice issues from his handheld shortwave radio. Several kilometers away on a rain-slicked stretch of Bangkok's Boromratchanee Road, a black Toyota sedan has plowed into the back of a truck carrying sacks of cement. Anand, one of hundreds of Bangkok residents who voluntarily help mop up the city's nightly street carnage, jumps behind the wheel, while his 16-year-old co-worker Jitchana Srikachang climbs...
...This fatalism is mirrored in Asia's motoring society as a whole. Bangkok-based professor Yordphol says many Thai motorists believe that no matter how defensively they drive, their fate is predetermined. "We are trying to persuade them that accidents are not an act of God," Yordphol says, "that you can avoid them if you are careful, obey the laws, and not speed or drive under the influence...
...Convincing drivers will not be easy. "This kind of thing is an occupational hazard," shrugs Pichet Sorpoon, a Bangkok cabbie who has stopped to watch as victims of the crash on Pattanakarn Road are carted away on stretchers. His sentiment is shared by Ahmad. When it comes to intractable road hazards, he says: "You just have to live with it." In the coming years, it seems inevitable that millions of Asians will have to die with...
...medical services or ambulance companies. Instead, the task of prying victims, alive and dead, out of the twisted metal and carting them off to hospitals and morgues falls to people like Anand, a member of Por Tek Tung, a charitable society operating out of a Chinese Buddhist temple in Bangkok. Founded more than a century ago by Chinese immigrants to provide funerals for the destitute, its staff and volunteers form a kind of ragtag Red Cross, rallying whenever tragedy strikes: when a building collapses, when a ferry sinks, and most often, when vehicles tangle on the roadways...
...their work also helps them acquire Buddhist merit, improving their Karma. There's a worldly angle, too: their organization posts photographs of crash scenes outside its Bangkok headquarters to remind the public of its good work; the more photos, the greater the income from donations, it seems. Anand, a former deliveryman, says he's never had nightmares resulting from his work despite 19 years in the gruesome...