RURAL VILLAGE LIFE

Home Stay, sponsored by the FEDRA project, in rural, northern Thai Lawa village, Ba Muang Ka, January 2-January 5, 2003.

The sii-lors (red trucks that carry groups of people around and about the city of Chiangmai) came and picked us up from the Chiangmai International Center. We left most of our belongings at the center, stocked up on bottled water and headed to Mae Rim to the offices of FEDRA and Mr. Sawapchai, who was making the preparations for our home stay. WE were nervous a bit, because we had been unable to receive information about the exact nature of our home stay. Would we be staying alone or in pairs with families? Would there be any English spoken in the home? Would we all be residing in one village and, if not, how far apart would we be from one another? What exactly is a rural Thai village like? Will the many vegetarians in the group be able to stomach the eating of meat for the first time in nearly all of the 20+ years of their lives?

When we arrived at the FEDRA project office at Wat Pa Daraphirom in Mae Rim, we were told that all had been arranged. We'd be going to a northern Thai village where people who were indigenous to the land we now call Thailand, the Lawa people, lived and farmed.

We traveled by sii-lor to the Village of Ba Muang Ka, just about one hour away from Mae Rim, nearly two hours from Chiangmai. We were deposited by a small gathering place near the village center and slowly, at the beckoning of the assistant lead man of the village over the loud-speaker, mothers and their childrens and some of the village men came to the town center to meet us. We paired off with our families, had a group picture, then went to get settled in before we returned to the village meeting house for question and answer about life in the village.

I had the good fortune of being paired up with the translator who accompanied us throughout our experience, Khun Kaeng. I'd had the opportunity to stay with families without the ability to speak the language when I was in Nicaragua. This time it seemed more important to me to be able to ask questions and learn more about village life. I'll admit I was also a bit scared of getting sick and not being able to communicate, of feeling like I might be an imposition on the family.

Kaeng and I went with our "mother" to her home. It was one of the newest and in many ways, the most elaborate, at least on the outside, of any house in the village. Our mother showed us to our room, brought us sleeping pads, pillows, and mosquito nets and then went to prepare lunch. I watched her as she pounded out chiles, garlic, and onion with her mortar and pestle. Then she squatted and cooked by the small stove in the kitchen that was attached to the back of their house. The home was quite simple. There were two bedrooms, a living area and an eating area, along with a bathroom with a squat toilet and a washing machine, and a cooking area that was attached to the back of the house. There was a cat, some visiting dogs, and, upon my arrival a big, creepy crawly thing that Kaeng said was "lethal" as she screamed and jumped to the other side of the room while the family's five year old grand-daughter, Ouy, poked it with a plastic stick. We ate our lunch, quite spicy, and then returned to the gathering space.

At the gathering space we learned a bit about the village. There were 40 famlies in the village, equaling about 180 people, with over 200 cows. The village was a 100 years old. I learned later that they just had a road that came into the village about 12 years ago. Prior to that time, the people were very cut off from the rest of Thai culture. They did not, for instance, know anything of the Vietnam War, when I asked some of the older people about their memories of that time.

All of the people in the village were farmers. The men and the women worked in the fields. My mother took me out into the fields with her on the second day of our homestay. There I saw numerous kinds of fruit trees (banana, guava, coconut, linchi, etc.) and beneath their shade and in the open spaces grew numerous kinds of vegetables, such as squash. My mom took care of eight cows, one pig and a flock of chickens. In one of her barns she was proud to show me her litter of baby kittens. We walked up and down the farm land where we were able to see a magnificent view of the entire village. WE passed by other students who were out working in the fields with their families, in some cases getting blisters on their hands that they would not fail to hear about for the rest of the time there. I got the distinct impression that they thought we may be kind of "soft" and not used to a life of hard work, especially the girls. My mom held my arm up next to hers within a few hours of my arrival and laughed at the differences: how my arm had some excess skin and flab that shook when tapped while hers was firm. I knew within just a short while that something I was to learn from this family had to do with strength.

The men were excited to take us foraging in the forest on Sunday, but it rained so hard we were unable to go, for fear of the leeches! Instead, some of the men brought the herbs to us and explained their usage. They also showed us traditional techniques for cooking in the wilderness, and offered us a tasty frog soup!

In the village, many of the people are related to each other. My family's son, for instance, has a young daughter from a former marriage, who is being raised by his aunt in the house next door. The assistant lead man who made sure that we were all taken care of during our stay was the brother of my mom. One of her two sisters lived just next door to us. My mother had three living siblings (two sisters and a brother) left from a total of twelve children initially. Her mother would appear and stand silently in the background smiling at us from time to time. While most of the people did not speak English and we did not speak Thai, it was also the case that the oldest people in the village did not even speak Thai, but rather their indigenous language. Even the people of my mother's generation (she was 56 years old) seemed to prefer to speak their own language, even though they did know how to speak Thai.

Village life seemed to revolve, at least while we were there of several things: food production, harvesting, preparation and consumption, working on the village irrigation projects, and watching television at night. Within three months of getting the road into the village twelve years ago, I was told that the entire village loaded up on trucks and went into the city to purchase televisions. Each night, my family cuddled up on the floor in front of their tv and dvd player and watched game shows, horror films, and what appeared to be a kind of Thai soap opera. I usually went to bed, finding it ironic that even in Thailand, in a home that scarcely had any furniture, I still had to retreat to my room to get away from the all too present sound of the television.

One of the highlights of the time in the village for me was the ability to play with children. When I had traveled to Thailand last January with Rudi and Hannah, it seemed that we were always getting to meet children, at play grounds, in restaurants, at schools, etc. During this excursion, I did not seem to get enough of my kid "fix." The grand-daughter of the mother in my family, Ouy, took a liking to me rather immediately. We sat up the first night and played "ball" with a make-shift ball made out of rolled up newspaper that we just sat and tossed back and forth to one another for about an hour. We laughed at each other as we tried to pronounce Thai and English words. I sat and watched Ouy and her friends as they meticulously colored the coloring books I had brought for them from home. I don't think I can ever recall seeing a five year old her could choose such color combinations and give subtle nuances to a coloring book through shading. Ouy gave me the greatest compliment I can recall. She told me that I was her "swingset." She asked her grandma to give me a beautiful hand-crocheted shirt that her grandmother was making so that I could bring it to my five year old daughter, Hannah. I also found myself aching for Ouy and some of the other children who would visit. Ouy had a cough that was so bad she'd just lean over the rail on the front porch and let the phlegm drain out of her lungs onto the ground. When I asked if they had seen a doctor, I was told that all the kids were sick now because of the bad (cold) weather they'd been having lately.

Other than playing with the kids and accompanying my mother out onto the family farm land, I helped to clean up the community plaza where the guardian spirit of the village resides. I observed how the men of the village would cook using bamboo stalks as a utensil and rain water, frogs and fresh herbs that had been foraged from the forest. I could see that these were people who knew how to survive off of a land, that thanks to some smart agricultural choices and the lack of deforestation in the region, was still yielding a great deal of delicious bounty for the people. I ate well, and increasingly vegetarian, as the villagers began to worry about us after Carolyn became ill with diarrhea after consuming cow placenta soup on the first morning! I took walks throughout the village and visited the students at their homes to see that they were well and to get to know other families. One afternoon, we all loaded up on some local trucks and drove about a half hour north of the village to the famous temple where the Buddha purportedly came in the 1300's leaving four gigantic footprints in the ground and the command to build a temple on that very site. During the last evening, we had a feast at our house and all the families came, complete with vegetarian dishes! The men of the village brought their instruments and Joe and Drew played their guitar. We sang:

Stay all night and don't go home. Stay all night and don't go home (repeat) Stay with me til the morning.
Water bound and I can't get across. Water bound and I can't get across (repeat) Home to North Carolina.

On the last day, we went to the village school and sang to the children, teaching them such favorites as "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes." WE introduced ourselves and let them ask us questions. Then we returned to our families to have lunch and then head on to our next destination.

Journal Entry for home stay: Jeanne Sommer

What I didn't realize during that homestay, was that this was just the beginning of bathing by drawing cold water and dumping it over ourselves in the evening, of sleeping on the floor, and of meeting people whose generosity would overwhelm me at times. On that last day, I was overwhelmed by the love that was poured out by the villagers to us. They told us that we were the first people who had stayed in their homes and actually looked them in the eye and treated them with respect. We exchanged gifts.

My family gave me gifts, both physical and spiritual that I will never forget. My father gave me his gold pendent with a Buddha on one side and a Thai lion on the other. He had received it for serving two, four year terms as "Head Man" of the village. When he gave it to me he told me: "Go into the world and be a Head Man and do great things." My mother gave me not one but two of the hand crocheted blouses she had made, one for each of my children. But most importantly, she gave me insight into what it means to be a strong human being, a strong woman. AS we had talked during my brief stay, I learned that she had five children. Two of them had died, one to AIDS and another to a car accident. Of her three children, only one was living with her, her 33 year old son, La, who was broken hearted because of two failed marriages. One of her two daughters had disappeared to where she knew not. The other daughter had given birth to Ouy, left her with the grandmother, only to return once a year for Ouy's birthday and to bring money. She had lost eight brothers and sisters to death. I asked her what it felt like. There was a part of me that wondered if living in a world with so much less in terms of material goods and with so much loss of life, would she become numb to the pain. Or did she hurt just like all the other mothers I've known who have lost their children. Despite the language barrier, I came to the conclusion that the language of loss is universal and is not tempered by severity, duration, or quantity. She felt pain and when she "fell upon my kneck" as they say in the Old Testament, to say good bye to me, she cried, put her hand on my head, recited a Buddhist blessing and prayed that I would be strong for all that I would have to face in my life. I now feel that I have a mandate to be so. What I did not know at the time but would soon find out during the forest walk in the northeast, several days later, was that I was already strong. I was learning what it meant to have contentment and to accept what life offers me.

I will always remember my mom, Fuangnam, out in the farm with her big rimmed hat and rubber boots, at night or in the morning when she was shaking the husks from the rice in a big basket, how she gleamed when she wore the earrings I gave her, as if she were a royal princess. Each night, as I go to bed, I hold her in my heart with all the mothers I have loved, with the mother I have become and I have compassion for her and for myself. I pray that the lessons they taught me about simplicity and generosity will follow me all the days of my life and I pray that her grand-daughter, Ouy, and all the other children in that village will find ways to sustain themselves that do not violate their deep Buddha nature. I pray. I am thankful. I smile. I love because I have been loved. I will go back to that village one day, soon, I hope.