Margo Somboon wears the robes of a devout Buddhist and keeps a LinkedIn profile. From her temple in Ayutthaya, she posts about religion on Facebook, shares pictures of His Majesty the King on Pinterest and wages a YouTube campaign against genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
STRAIGHT TALKING: Margo Somboon, 57, has distanced herself from her American past and now lives at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhol in Ayutthaya.
Living at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhol, the 57-year-old American is a mae chi - the shaven-headed women in white who observe the eight precepts of Theravada Buddhism. She speaks with an accent wavering between harsh American and a softer, lilting South Asian. Her skin is light and her eyes a pale blue, and she's missing most of her teeth.
Margo is the only farang mae chi at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhol, a popular tourist spot known for its impressively tall chedi and reclining Buddha statue. Margo, who has been at the temple since 2008, is disconnected from her Western past.
''I'm an American who would never admit I'm an American,'' she says. ''I've not been in America for 50 years. There is no dignity in being an American any more. I think you know the reasons for that ... when people ask me if I'm an American, I say: 'Does it matter?'''
Margo first came to Thailand and began working as a mahout about a decade ago, she recalls. Before that, she worked with horses in Singapore for more than 25 years.
As a supervisor at the Singapore Polo Club, she started to become fed up with routine red tape and bureaucracy.
''No one could make up their minds and no one knew what they were talking about. So I said, 'Stuff this, I'll go back to being a simple trainer and make my life easier.'''
She then moved to the Singapore Turf Club to work as a stable manager, but she still failed to find the personal satisfaction she was looking for. Unsure where to turn, Margo ended up on Koh Samui, where she began caring for elephants. It was there that she met the man who would become her husband.
He looked after a five-year-old bull elephant called Plai Kow. In retrospect, Margo says that problems between them started when she wouldn't buy Plai Kow.
Margo and her new husband moved to Ayutthaya province, where they both worked as mahouts at the Royal Elephant Kraal. There, Margo struggled with alcoholism. Her husband, who sources at the kraal (shelter) say was also an alcoholic, eventually left her and effectively disappeared.
A senior official at the kraal said that while Margo was troubled, she had no problems looking after the elephants there and that she was a good mahout.
PHOTOS: CHAIYOT YONGCHAROENCHAI
Margo recalls that one night at the kraal, she drank half a bottle of lao khao. ''Alcohol only became an issue after setbacks, one after another,'' she says.
''I've paid heavy kharma in this life already, and under other circumstances I would have died a bitter and disappointed woman ... through the kindness I finally received, I have come to understand the nature of kharma and how it relates to me - and I've been able to make peace with all that has happened.''
Margo moved on to another elephant shelter, to work as a mahout at the floating market in Ayutthaya. But just as she began to shed her personal demons, she became infected with the life-threatening bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
The bacterium infected her leg. There was nothing the local clinic could do, so she was sent to Thammasat University Hospital. Margo bears a deep scar as a result of the surgery she underwent, but she feels lucky she didn't lose her leg.
The surgery cost 57,000 baht. At the time, the manager of her elephant kraal was given permission to raise money via an email campaign and donations reached 20,000 baht within a month.
''A year after the operation I could climb up onto an elephant, no problem. Everything was back to normal ... and that's when I realised I had to become a mae chi - if for nothing else than to give back something to appreciate the blessing that I'd received. To give back to the Thai people who'd helped me,'' she says.
But Margo faced another difficulty when she was ready to enter the temple. While she had no problem communicating in Thai and learning how to chant in Pali, there was nothing she could do about her US citizenship - and two weeks after she joined Wat Yai Chai Mongkhol her visa expired.
''I came back three months later, got shaved and never looked back,'' she says, referring to the practice of those entering a temple to shave their heads and eyebrows.
Now, Margo can be found up in the chedi gilding the Buddha statues there with gold leaf. This is her duty as a mae chi. When she's not in the chedi, she's downloading movies from the internet for her and the other mae chi - ''I'm human, too,'' she says - or waging her campaign against what could be a US government conspiracy.
''I was on Facebook just now getting information on GMOs. The two things that I'm fighting right now are geo-engineering and GMOs. I couldn't care less about political situations, that's your grave if you want to buy into that. But geo-engineering and chemtrails are a grave concern. So I'm still fighting that,'' she says. ''The NSA is spying on me - please, help yourself. I haven't got a bank account, I haven't got a car, I haven't got a house, I haven't got a family. There isn't a damn thing in this world that they could use against me. So go ahead, I couldn't care less.''
Sometimes when Margo speaks, it can be difficult to discern whether she is talking about the life she lives now or the lives she believes she has lived in the past.
She tells the story of when she recently recognised three women in the chedi as fellow male soldiers she fought alongside during the reign of a 16th-century king.
''I had laid out gold on the Buddha images. All of a sudden I heard a voice, 'Can you remember?' It can't be me, it must be talking to somebody else. I was doing my work up there and again, 'Can you remember?' I turned around and there were three women standing directly behind me.
''But I didn't see them. They were three soldiers from the army, I knew immediately that these were my friends from the army; I think it was under King Naresuan, when I was in the army of King Naresuan.
''All of a sudden the chedi was empty. These three came to me and bowed down in tears and asked me for forgiveness for whatever they may have done, and I also had the chance to ask them for forgiveness. You don't get blessings like that very often.''
For Margo, these soldiers from her past who are now women are being punished. It reminds her of a dhamma lesson taught by one of the monks at her temple.
''Do you ever notice that there are a lot of gays, ladyboys and tomboys? A lot. You know where that comes from? And the fact that there are far more women than men?
''It all comes back to kharma, again. Here, committing adultery is no longer a crime in our present modern world. But in the other world it is a major crime.
''Let's say you and I were married to other people in another life and we had an affair. Then we would be reborn in hell, maybe as a tree. Birds pecking at us, dogs gnawing on us. That's our time in hell.
''But it doesn't stop there. When we die in hell, we are reborn as a male animal. Because the males are the ones that are always constrained to stop them from mating. And it doesn't end there.
''Then we are born as a ladyboy, who cannot be ordained as a monk. Nowadays they allow it in Chiang Mai, but you're not allowed to be ordained when you're a ladyboy. The final life will be as a woman, to teach you the five sufferings of a woman that a man knows nothing about.''
Margo adds that these five sufferings are menstruation, the submission of a woman moving into her husband's home upon marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and nursing - the baby bites the nipple when there is no milk.
''These are the five sufferings that a man never has to encounter. Only after you go through these five sufferings do you have a chance to be reincarnated as a man again.''
Like the women who visited Margo in the chedi, she is also being punished, she says, by being born a woman. She admits she never had a good life, even before meeting her husband. For years, she was hurt and angry, following her mother's rejection of her as a child. Now, as far as Margo is concerned, she has no family.
''They're not related to me,'' she says. ''They have their kharma, I have mine. My kharma's in a different part of the world.''
Margo's father was divorced four times, and never told her who her biological mother was. One day, as a curious young woman, she decided to find her mother after tracing her own birth certificate and discovering her mother's name.
''My mother - I knew her for maybe a week - said: 'Go back to your father,' because I looked like my father,'' Margo says. ''It just added insult to her, right?''
Margo lost contact with her father years ago. She believes he died last year, after she dreamt he was wheeled out of a hospital by a spirit. ''I have come to terms with the fact that there is something in my own kharma that I'm answering for,'' Margo says.
Margo apologises for women when she speaks to Spectrum. She says that women are naturally weaker than men - and says this is bolstered by an inherent vulnerability to rape. She also reiterates the problem of ladyboys wanting be monks, pointing to the greater problem of homosexuality as an ill of human transgression.
''It was only later I learned that in Thailand gay monks aren't accepted. Apparently they did something very bad that made Buddhism go downhill very badly about 500 years after the Buddha died. Buddha was himself never in favour of women being ordained. And that's understandable,'' she says.
But in spite of all her apologies - for Americans, for homosexuals and for women - Margo is an incisive straight-talker. She cares little about her appearance and what others think of her. ''My tooth broke off about three weeks ago. I ate something somebody gave me and I thought, 'What's that in my mouth? Oh, my tooth,''' she says nonchalantly. ''But I'm 57 and I look like I'm 75, screw that, you know. It's all going to go to hell sooner or later anyway.''
