First Accident

I wanted to go ahead and blog about our first accident in Thailand while it was still fresh on my mind. Before you get too worried though, it was a very, very minor accident. But the way events unfolded, we were on the side of the road for a couple of hours trying to find a resolution to the matter.

We were coming back from Pawn's grandmother's village being thankful that we were going to arrive home before dark. Yesterday was the first day of the Songkran festival which includes a huge water fight, and it's not a safe time to be on the roads. The holiday quickly becomes deadly due to accidents caused by drunk driving.

Rusty had pulled over to the side a bit and stopped because there was a big truck crossing the narrow bridge coming our way. We sat there for a few seconds when something hit the back of our truck. We got out of the truck, and there was an older man with his motorbike on the ground. Rusty helped pick the motorbike up, and we gave the man some cloth and water to help clean his wound. A couple of people stopped to ask him about what had happened, and someone called the police. We called Tawm to find out what she would do, and she advised us to call our insurance. She said if we had any problems with this accident after that day, it would be hard to settle the claim. This sounded like a good idea to us since people had already begun to ask us for money to help the old man get to the hospital.

The policeman arrived (more like a local motorbike cop who knows everyone in the community) and gave the old man a pretty good dressing down for driving drunk. Then he turned to us, found out we understood Thai, then proceeded to ask us what we wanted to do. We told him our insurance claims man was on his way, and we wanted to wait for him.

While we were waiting on the insurance adjuster, another older man showed up who wanted us to let the man go and tell the insurance adjuster that it was a hit and run. We told them we weren't going to lie. Then the policeman tried to get us to let the man go since he didn't have any money. We told him if he (the policeman) said it was ok for the man to go it was ok with us. The man continued to wait. Then they tried to tell us that if we claimed it on our insurance rather than paying for it out of our pocket, our insurance rate would go up by 20% next year. It was very difficult to continue to wait, but after another phone call to Tawm we were committed to waiting.

Finally the insurance adjuster showed up and assessed the situation. He started off by asking the man for 1000B to settle the claim. Then everyone started pleading the case of the old man that he didn't have any money. We finally told them that our real concern was not that we couldn't pay for our own repairs, it was more about him being allowed to get back on his motorbike and continue driving drunk. They all thanked us for our concern and finally settled on paying 500B. Everybody left (including the man driving his own motorbike), and we waited for him to come back with the 500B. It ended up being only 300B, but I guess that was ok with everyone.

Tawm also came out to help us with the situation. It's great to know we have people we can trust here to give us good advice. Pawn was with us too and tried to help us as all of it was done in Thai. God's really blessed us with good friends and takes care of the situations we get into. And finally a lesson learned...he wasn't required by law to carry insurance that would cover the damages to our truck just any injuries we might have had. Interesting point learned.