She Functions as a Roving Thai Liaison

When six Buddhist monks were slain in an Arizona temple last year, Nampet Panichpant-Michelsen of San Clemente knew she had to do something.

So she got on a plane to Arizona. The Thai community was “very traumatized,” she said, and she wanted to help bring calm.

She is now a member of the Arizona temple’s board of directors.

Those who know her describe Panichpant-Michelsen as a tireless activist, a deft politician--and even the county’s answer to Mother Teresa.

Apart from her job as a program manager for the county Health Care Agency, she works as a roving ambassador of goodwill for the Thai community, trying to ease communications among Thais, other Asians and Caucasians.

“She is a politician extraordinaire,” said Joseph Nevotti, a monk at Wat Thai of North Hollywood, a Buddhist temple where Panichpant-Michelsen serves as “chief liaison and diplomat.”

“She should be running for President or something,” he said.

Panichpant-Michelsen, 44, described herself as a “freeway warrior” who is as at home on Interstate 5 as she is on the Paris subway or the Bangkok canals. The odometer on her 1989 minivan hovers near 100,000 miles.

“The only reason I feel I learned to do community work is because I learned to drive the California freeways,” she said during a recent trek between a meeting with Asian leaders in Santa Ana and a gathering of Thai families at the North Hollywood temple. “It’s like covering Southeast Asia on the Santa Ana Freeway in 24 hours.”

Panichpant-Michelsen’s intimate community connections contrast with the life of luxury to which she was destined by an elite family background, said her friend since kindergarten, Su-mei Yu, a La Jolla restaurateur. The daughter of a Thai diplomat, Panichpant-Michelsen was married for several years during the 1970s to an offspring of the Thai royal family.

After they divorced, Panichpant-Michelsen moved in 1980 from Thailand to the United States, where she had attended college in the 1960s. She is now married to David Michelsen, a computer operations analyst for Coldwell Banker in Mission Viejo.

“Suddenly, she was on the other side of the world doing all these things like Mother Teresa,” Yu said. “She had the beauty, she had the wealth, she had the rank. She didn’t have to do any of this stuff.”

Panichpant-Michelsen put it differently: “I came to the United States to eat Marie Callender pies and take a break.”

It was a short break.

As a member of 40 health and community relations organizations and the mother of two children, Panichpant-Michelsen admitted with a laugh, she has had no time to read the book, “Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much.”

Yu said she has watched with amazement the transformation of her friend.

“I never had thought in a million years as we were growing up that she would do what she has done in the last 10 years,” Yu said. “She has gone through a tremendous growth herself. I think that consequently she discovered through this journey her ability to give back to the people who had come from the same kind of world as she did.”