Rainer Manfred is the acting headmaster of
CM-Tech, Industrial and Commercial College. He is German, he is
an engineer, but a most outgoing and lateral thinking engineer
who has applied that lateral thinking to the principles and
practice of education.
Rainer Manfred was born in Munich, the only
son of a police officer, in a long family tradition of police
officers. When he was close to finishing his secondary
education, his father said, “In six months you will be
finished school and I will bring home the application forms to
join the police academy.” This was not what the young boy
wanted as his future and this was imparted to an incredulous
father. “So what do you want to do?” was the response from
Loehnert Senior. Suddenly put on the spot, young Rainer Manfred
said the first thing that came into his head, “I want to be an
electrician.”
So off to vocational training did he go, and
three years later emerged as an electrician. He also secured a
position almost immediately with the municipal authority at the
Munich Power Station. There he changed fuses, light bulbs or
whatever else electricians do in power stations for three years,
but then was offered the opportunity to do an electrical
engineering course. “I was not really clear as to what I
should really do, or where I was heading, but I took the
chance.” This was a five-year slog which involved rotating
shift work as well as classroom tuition. He also began to show
an individual streak of lateral thinking. His car needed
painting, so he attacked it with a brush. He could not afford
spray painting, “So I did it the easy way. Nobody says you
have to spray. The paint went on, which was what I wanted.”
Now with his engineering qualifications he
was supposed to again enter government service, to “repay”
his five years tuition, but as Rainer Manfred said himself, “I
was lucky. Siemens needed engineers for a new project and I
applied and got the job. I was also lucky that I did not have to
pay back the government for my education!”
So he went to work in power generation,
looking at steam boilers, attempting to develop new shape ones
for the world market. During this time he also had his first
contact with Thailand, coming over here on holidays. It may be
of interest to the ‘powers that be’ in tourism, that Rainer
Manfred chose Thailand following the recommendation of the
German travel agent who showed the ‘better’ side of
Thailand, with an emphasis on temples and spirituality, rather
than the beaches and chrome poles!
When Siemens interested the Electricity
Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) in these new power
generators, they brought a team of three Thai engineers to
Germany, and because of Rainer Manfred’s experience of
Thailand, he was detailed to look after them. When EGAT gave the
project the go-ahead, Rainer Manfred was naturally selected as
one of the six German engineers to come to Thailand. That was
1989 and the site at Ban Kapong was not really ready. “It was
a rice paddy!”
The power generating station was built in two
and a half years, but there were problems. Cooling water
temperatures in Thailand were far higher than the ambient
temperatures in Germany. This was overcome, but then there were
other Thai style problems that German engineers had not seen
before - shrimps in the cooling water clogged the pipes and
produced overheating. The power generator had become a tom yum
goong manufacturing plant!
However, all these glitches were overcome and
the plant was handed over to EGAT in 1992. Rainer Manfred was
given a plane ticket back to Germany and signed off. Rainer
Manfred was not ready to leave Thailand at that time. He stood
in line at the airport till he found someone wanting to buy a
ticket to Germany and sold it!
He asked friends in EGAT if they knew of any
work for him and scored a 12-month contract in Lampang. “When
that was finished I was on the road again, and was told to try
Chiang Mai. This was a nice place. You could still ride a
bicycle here without being hit every day!” There were no
engineering jobs on offer, but he was offered a job to teach
German and spent the next five years teaching the language at
schools and to Thais training as tour guides.
At the end of that time he was asked why he
was not teaching engineering - after all, he was a fully
qualified and experienced engineer. Teachers were needed in
vocational schools, and there would be positions there. It was
at this stage that Rainer Manfred showed his abilities again in
lateral thinking. “I could speak Thai by this stage, so I said
I would give the lessons in Thai, for Thai students.”
With that simple premise, Rainer Manfred
changed the face of vocational training in Chiang Mai. He
received a Diploma in Education from the Thai government and
joined CM-Tech as a subject master in 2001, and has worked his
way up to being acting headmaster today. A long way from
changing light bulbs in Munich - or from being a policeman!
Again, using his lateral thinking, he has
begun to put training sessions onto CD’s in a long-term plan
to make it possible for students to gain the advantages of good
tuition, but yet study at home.
Rainer Manfred believes that you must always have a dream.
One of his was to work “somewhere else” (outside Germany),
and he has fulfilled that, and has no thoughts of going anywhere
else. I asked him where the future lay for him and he said that
he did not think about it, taking each day as it comes, in some
ways a Buddhist philosophy - a faith that he adopted in 1990.
One of his dreams is entering the monkhood. He has enough time!
“Maybe two weeks!”
