Gerrymandering Looks Like Dogs

Saturday was the King's birthday. Everyone had off school and work on Friday and Monday. My roommate went home for the long weekend. Imagining party hats and cakes in every house around the country, I asked her what she did to celebrate. "Light a special candle" she said.

It's hard to imagine having a king, especially one like in Thailand, who has ruled for the duration of most people's lives, and who seems to be genuinely liked and widely admired. I don't know if it's even possible for me to imagine. What comes to mind is the challenge of imagining looking at the world as if you believe in God if you don't, or as you don't if you do. Having a king and having a god are very different--I would be surprised if the King figures as much as God into people's perceptions of the world, but it's a hard question to answer.

Last week I volunteered to sit on a panel organized by the Khon Kaen University School of Public Administration. The panel was part of a big event on the history of the Thai constitution, and they wanted an American student's perspective on our constitution.

Last night I had spent a couple of hours discussing politics and the constitution with Miles, one of the program facilitators. He was had printed out and highlighted wikipedia articles for me and kept saying things like, "I was lying in my bed the other night thinking about the constitution and I thought 'Oh god, they're going to ask Liz about this.'" Needless to say, it was an exciting discussion, and I learned a lot.

So this morning, instead of performing jingle bells at the Isaan Community Gathering human rights festival, my friend Jenny and I rode across campus. There were about 75 Thai students in the audience and some students and professors on the panel. The other panelists talked about corruption, how the Thai constitution is rewritten to suit the needs of politicians rather than coming from the people, and how most Thai people don't have much attachment to the constitution. Thailand has had 18 (I believe) constitutions, so when it was my turn, I tried to emphasize that although our constitution has lasted for 200 years, it is not perfect and interpreting it is usually controversial. I read the list we had devised about why the constitution hasn't been scrapped: it has broad language that leave it open to interpretation that changes over time; it has been modified a great deal since 1787; it is a symbol and a source of nationalism and pride.

By the end of the two times I talked, I had touched on many of the things I wanted to. Although I really wanted to talk more about human rights, I did get to work in the inclusion of the right to culture in the 2007 Thai constitution, something that, to my knowledge, is not really protected by the US at all. The whole experience was really fun, and I had the benefit of time to collect my thoughts while my translator was talking. Afterwards, we took pictures as they handed us a "token of appreciation," Mine was a notebook that said "I love study." I may have to write in "the Constitution."


I also learned:

* In Venezuela's constitution, all nouns are written with "o/a" endings. This contruction includes both the feminine and masculine form, even though when something includes both men and women, Spanish just uses the masculine form.

* The rights set out by the US constitution are all rights that cannot be violated; there are no rights for things that the State is required to provide (e.g. health care)

* The US has some of the freeset speech laws in the world. Canada's right to the freedom of speech comes with a long list of exceptions, things like hate speech and pornography.

Lists

Everything has its trends. This semester at CIEE, one trend has been reading. Ian was the first. He read constantly, every few days closing one book and opening another. People started asking to borrow them, and soon he organized a book swap. It has been amazing to see everyone excitedly reading and talking about books, really good books: In Cold Blood, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, To the Lighthouse, Crime and Punishment, East of Eden. I have been plowing my way through Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, which has recently become a trend in and of itself. Hopefully we will have a discussion about ethics and tactics of community organizing and revolution-making in the coming weeks.

And everybody is writing lists of things they want to do before they die. This trend can be traced to our program facilitator, Miles, who revealed his list one night in all of its 100+ item glory. Miles’ list is carefully crafted, with a detailed preface stipulating that the list is not binding and asking forgiveness if any of his items are distasteful. The list is then organized into categories and specifications (e.g. spend 3 months in Brazil).

“What I Want to Do Before I Die: The List” caught our imaginations. Why not write it down? Why not dream up things that will truly satisfy you? What do you want to do? What do you want to have? I saw lists that said make goat cheese, build my own house, take an African dance class, travel with my sister. As I began to think about my own list, I was surprised that it was hard for me to think of things I want to do before I die, and that things I expected to write just didn’t seem to fit. What I wrote was this:

Write a book
Take a figure drawing class
Learn how to play the fiddle
Learn how cars work
Work on a farm
Do a one-week meditation retreat
Go skinny-dipping when I’m 80
Travel by myself
Know enough about something to speak insightfully about it for 30 minutes

The list continues to evolve. I wouldn’t be crushed if I didn’t learn to play the fiddle or figure out how cars work, and there are things I know will be on this list when I find a way to articulate them. It was fun to write the words, fun to open up the space and time to think about what will make me happy. And it was good to share lists with friends, to find out more about them, discover common hopes, and to begin to hold ourselves accountable to what we think is important.

A Note About Trash, And Cities

Trash facts:

• Americans throw away about 5 pounds of trash per year.
• They recycle about 1.5 of those 5 pounds
• Decomposing trash gives off large quantities of methane, which in some places, is fed into a system that uses it to create electricity.
• Paint thinner, nail polish, batteries, transmission fluid and motor oil are toxic in landfills (and groundwater if the chemicals are not contained).

--from "This is Paradise" by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ Magazine May 2009

Published in the New York Times just a few days ago, "Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash":
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=1&ref=science

***

"Around a billion people--almost half of the developing world's urban population--live in slums"
--from "The Megacity" by George Packer, published in The New Yorker, November 13, 2006

A slum, according to the UN definition, is a place where people live with any one of the following conditions:

1. Inadequate access to safe water
2. Inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure
3. Poor structural quality of housing
4. Overcrowding
5. Insecure residential status

Let's Have Fun

When I first walked into Theparak 5, a slum that snakes along Thailand’s state-owned railroad, I saw a billboard rising above the entrance. It showed young people leaning over their scooters, with a city rising against a bright blue sky in the background. “LET’S HAVE FUN,” read the sign. Cars passing on the road would have seen the billboard, but not the tin-cement-reclaimed plastic homes nestled together below. I was struck by the pairing of “LET’S HAVE FUN” and a community still working to ensure that they won’t be evicted by the railroad company, that their recent three-year leases will be renewed, and that they will have access to affordable water and electricity. But in the next twenty-four hours, I found that “let’s have fun” was not as out of place as I thought.

My host sister Juan was 12, and she liked to have fun. Her best friend from next door practically lived at her house, and other neighbor kids gathered in the narrow street. One round youngster carried a plastic “sword” at all times and ineffectively attacked people at unpredictable times. Another drew small, careful pictures on a balloon. Another led me into a nearby library and repeated the English words back to me as I read her the story of Fluff’s disappearance from Apple Tree Farm.

From the minute we arrived, the 12-year-old friends were proposing games. We played badminton, volleyball, basketball (with someone holding an actual basket), and Simon Says. We sang songs, we played a more violent version of monkey in the middle, we wove through lines of poles as we ran. When we smacked a badminton birdie onto a roof, they knew just how to bang the tin to send it flying back down. “What should we play next?” they’d say, abruptly throwing down their rackets.

Life in the slums is not all games. Our host parents sat inside the windowless house all day, weaving baskets to sell. Our host mother rarely smiled or left the house. But playing Marco Polo in a fifteen-by-fifteen foot part of the house, the only part open enough to really move in, I couldn’t stop laughing. As I reached for people hiding in the same places they had hidden the time before, I realized how much fun people can and do have, no matter where they live.

Looking for the Landfill

Paw Kham, a scavenger and leader in his community, surveys the Khombone Noy Landfill in Khon Kaen, Thailand.


The Khombone Noy Landfill receives 200 tons of waste each day. Gathered in such quantities, it is hard not to compare trash to something powerful and geological. Here the strata of 44 years of dumping emerge as older trash decomposes and leaches liquid mixed with toxic chemicals.


Scavengers comb through the river of trash that has just been unloaded.


The scavengers rake deftly through heaps of trash, holding their tools like a farmer might hold a hoe.


Meh Bi covers her arms, legs and head before going to work. For a farmer, these actions protect from sun, water, and insects; for a scavenger, from grime, fumes and syringes. When she is done, only Meh Bi’s hands and eyes will show, but not everyone has the masks, boots and gloves they need to protect themselves.

The workers harvest useful things from what people in the city don’t want, trading plastic, glass, and tin for money. Most scavengers work in the landfill for fifteen hours a day to make about 120 Baht, or 4 USD. People sorting through the trash save 39-47% of what would otherwise accumulate in the landfill.

Sometimes Meh Bi finds money. She checks each envelope, holding it up to the light. With careful sorting on a lucky day, you might even find a diamond ring mixed in among the rotting vegetables and juice bottles.


Meh Toi finds everything she needs in the landfill.


Reusing is a way of life. When her grandson pops his balloon, Meh Toi makes another one out of the scraps.


Meh Bi and Paw Neyoum’s makeshift garden. The villagers say the chemical-laced water from the landfill kills the rice crop. Smoke from the nearby incinerator, they think, makes vegetable plants look sickly. Although most of the scavengers plan to work in the landfill forever, many said they would like to have land to farm.


Bang, Meh Bi’s son, relaxes at home. If their families need the extra income, children might start working in the landfill as young as three or four. Bang’s father, Paw Neyoum says, “I want my kids to do something else, but if they have no other choice they will come back to scavenging.”

Who is more personal than the person who rips open the bag containing your toilet paper, who opens your discarded mail, who wears your old clothes? Like the people who feed us, those working in the landfill provide an invaluable service, and they are intimately connected to thousands of people. But to these people, they are just doing their job. When they rip open bags, they see money, not people. Garbage is grand and metaphorical only from a distance. From up close, it is individual objects, a source of work, and the lives of the people who comb through it every day.

Profile of A Scavenger: Meh Toi

Another homework assignment...Several days ago, I spent the morning scavenging bottles, cans, and mysterious types of plastic (The answer when I asked my host mother, "Want it?" was as likely to be "No" as "Yes") with members of the scavenging community. It was a good experience--hard work and strangely rewarding. It was surprisingly easy to adapt to the warm garbage smell and ignore the unappealing contents of the bags we ripped open. In the afternoon, I interviewed with Meh Toi, one of the women in the community.

When I ask Meh Toi if I can interview her, she is standing over her two-year-old grandson. I watch as she stretches the scraps of his popped balloon into a sphere, tying a miniature new balloon. He stops frowning and, still clutching her skirt, reaches up to take it.

Meh Toi moved with her grandmother to Khombone Noy Landfill when she was ten. After almost thirty-five years of scavenging, she stays home to take care of Tone, her grandson, while her three daughters work in nearby Khon Kaen city.

Scavenging has provided a fairly reliable source of income for Meh Toi’s family. They have tried other things. They lived in Bangkok for a while, making decorative mirrors. Organizations have come to the community, teaching construction and other skills. But, she says, “every time we go back to scavenging.”

“I am used to living here. Nobody wants to live with a landfill, but I have no choice. This is my work, my career. Most people think that trash is really dirty and smelly, but I think about money. Money is on its way.”

I ask what you can learn about someone from their trash. Meh Toi responds, “We don’t analyze the situation. We open the bag and take what we can get.”

“People like to live here because it is not far from work…They just walk to the landfill.” But Meh Toi draws a clear line between her home and her work. “I always keep my house clean. The landfill is on that side...When I throw out trash, I collect it and put it in another bag so it looks like there’s nothing in it…When someone’s digging through it, they’ll know it’s trash and not something valuable.”

But the landfill is not strictly confined to “that side.” With the exception of food, she and her husband find most of the things they need at the landfill. “If I find something that can be cleaned and used, I will get it.” Whether it is the practice of scavenging or the fact that “we don’t have the money to buy it,” Meh Toi’s actions at home, like tying up the broken balloon, reveal a mentality of reuse. “I will throw it away when it really doesn’t work,” she says, “If the handle broke but the lid still covers, it doesn’t matter.” Like working in the landfill, Meh Toi’s practice of reusing meets practical needs.

Meh Toi stopped going to school when she moved to Khombone Noy. Although she wanted to continue, “poor people in those days finished fourth grade and didn’t have any opportunity to continue studying. In the past, there wasn’t a Department of Education to give money for loans.”

I ask more and more challenging questions. Meh Toi laughs. “I have three translators!” she says, pointing to the Thai translator, the American translator, and her sister, who is sitting nearby. “Sometimes the questions are easy but sometimes I cannot understand. I don’t have the knowledge. Sometimes I understand but I cannot describe,” she tells me. “Most people who are uneducated cannot have a wide perspective,” Meh Toi concludes. “When I had a test in school, I would have to come back and do it again.” Meh Toi’s explanation of her answers—why she thinks they aren’t good or important—betrays a lack of confidence I didn’t expect.

“Most people here didn’t go to school at all,” her sister tells me, “After they have children, they do everything to support their children to go to school.” Meh Toi, especially, has always made her children’s education a priority. She and her husband left Bangkok and returned to Khombone Noy because her daughter wanted to go to school. Scavenging meant money, and money meant education. Through the years, Meh Toi has nurtured the next generation—of people, and of things rescued from the landfill. Her youngest daughter graduated from middle school, her middle daughter from high school, and her oldest daughter from university.

Meh Toi’s success, though, means her children don’t live next door, like her sister does, or around the corner, like her parents do. Once a week, she rides into Khon Kaen city to stay with her daughters.

In November, Meh Toi goes to the Khon Kaen silk festival. “What do you like about the silk festival?’ I ask. “I see what’s happening outside,” she answers, “But actually I don’t like it because I spend a lot of money.” “On what?” I ask. “I buy delicious food. Whatever the children want I buy for them.” I ask when she is happiest. “When all of the family is together and eating, happiness, a lot.”

Working at the landfill has provided for Meh Toi and her family. It has given them enough to eat, enough to help her daughters through school, and enough to teach another generation—her grandson—“to grow up and be a good person.” And although she is proud that as a scavenger she did honest work, she tells me, “It’s very challenging. I never thought I would work like this.”

Meh Toi is pragmatic. The first thing she says when I ask what she would change in her life is “finish the construction on my house.” She laughs again. “There was a project from the government to give land to families if they wanted it. Six rais of land.” Now, she says, that government support is gone.

“I live here with trouble,” Meh Toi tells me. “I want people to come from outside to help the community to be better. Help me live easier. The public—in the city, the outside—should know about this place.”

Long Weekend in Pictures

This weekend, we visited Tamui, nestled between mountains and river, the eastern-most point in Thailand. Many of the villagers, we were told, had swum the one or two kilometers to leave Laos and settle in Thailand. The first night, I slept on a platform near the edge of the river. Except for the sprinkle of raindrops, it felt no different from sleeping anywhere else in the village.

Walking through a National Park outside the village. Mountain, forest, Mekong, Laos.

The oldest cliff paintings in Thailand.

After hacking our own path down the hill, we found that darn waterfall. Even though the "fall" was about two feet, it was incredibly refreshing.

The Naga, a five-headed monster who lives in the Mekong, was supposed to shoot fireballs out of the river near Tamui in celebration of the end of Buddhist lent. Hundreds of visitors rolled into town and set up mats and picnics next to the river. We camped out for five hours on the platform where I had slept the night before. We were fortunate enough to be sitting next to a guitarist, a fiddler, and a traditional pipe player.


As we waited, we watched flaming boats float along with the current.


I bought a floating flower-shaped craft decorated with banana leaves, marigolds, incense and candles and pushed it into the river. The Naga wasn't tempted; we never saw any fireballs.


My favorite was watching human-sized lanterns being filled with flame and sent into the air, where they curved in lines with the wind. They stayed lit long enough to look like stars.


We left Tamui as the festival was winding down and drove overnight to Bangkok, arriving just in time to get out of the van and into the lines of people marching for World Habitat Day. People from slums around the country walked between buildings speaking and reading their demands for protection from eviction, for funds, and for legislation to help communities obtain legal tenure. It was powerful to see so many people from so many places coming together, and to realize that although there is a long way to go, they have made progress by doing things like this.


We left the demonstration in the afternoon at the surrounded UN building, where another group was protesting a Climate Change conference.


Before. We returned to Khon Kaen and the next morning, began tearing up land to create a garden at the program facilitator's house. The work went quickly...five and a half hours later, after lunch and a trip to buy seeds:


After. Ready for fire pit and planting. This was the most satisfying day of work, topped off with a "shower" in a canal whose current forced me to crawl up the wall 20 meters down, and a delicious celeberatory dinner we helped cook at P'Joy's farm. Miles called the day, which ended with watching my friend play with a Thai band in a local club, a "full-spectrum day." But it was really just part of a full-spectrum long weekend.

if everything happens that can't be done

I have loved almost all of my education. And I’m good at it. But being here in a program that focuses on group process and experiential learning has made me think about the things I haven’t gotten from my education.

The director of our program prefaced a lecture with statistics. An hour after a lecture, he said, people remember something like 10% of the information, after more interactive teaching, 30%, and after learning from a peer, 80%. At dinner the other night, my friend offered to explain the tangled events of recent Thai politics. Granted, this was something I was interested in and motivated to learn (maybe that’s part of the potency of peer learning), and she spoke articulately, but I came away with such a full picture and clear memory that I’m convinced there was something different about that kind of learning.

P’Joy, one of our drivers, dropped out of school in 4th grade because other things were more important to him. Cultural things, like fishing and the land. He can make all kinds of things, is a fantastic cook, knows the name of every bug and plant we point to, and can do exciting tricks like shooting a stalk of stiff grass into the air with one quick motion.

P’Bamrung, a community activist and farmer, is not going to send his daughter to school. When his friend’s children were 3 and 6, the parents stocked the refrigerator with meat and went to a meeting in another city, leaving the boys alone in their rural home for three days. The six-year-old took care of the three-year-old. He cooked, swept the house and put his brother to bed. “What is more important?” P’Bamrung asked, “Going to school, or learning about real life?”

In his usual calm way, P’Decha, a coordinator for Khon Kaen’s NGOs, told us, “The more education you have, the more selfish and competitive you become. If you can’t work together, what is the point?”

What is the point? Why do we get educated? Why does it mean less and less to get a high school degree? A college degree? What are we training ourselves for? Is there a point to academic work that is so theoretical and unconcerned with people’s lives?

I think there is a point to education, and even to some of the ivory tower discussions that seem so abstracted from reality. Education, in good circumstances, is teaching thinking, teaching learning. I think as long as people come along to build tin can phones between ivory towers and take their musings into the streets, academia has its place. I am not planning to leave my children with a hunk of meat and walk out the door. I think education should be guided, if nothing else, by role models and people who help kids access resources and answers to their questions. But there is a lot to change. Education is so compartmentalized—in time, in subjects, in roles, and in schools. Learning is something that should happen all the time, and maybe what we need most is to recognize and use that fact. And learning should focus more on experiences, the real world and people. Every child in school should at some point have to decide why he or she is there.

In the past few weeks, I have realized how much I have to learn about working with people. Listening is hard. Making decisions and taking actions with other people is hard. Realizing and changing your own faults is hard. Criticizing is hard. These are the skills we should be using more than any others.

Education is a complicated task. We have chosen certain goals and methods above others. Can our society as we have built it even support the child who grows up climbing trees instead of learning math? Where do we go from here?

if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one

one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we go who)
one's everyanything so

so world is a leaf is a tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now i love you and you love me
(and books are shutter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we

we're everything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one

-e.e. cummings
  

Food

In the village. Sometimes it's worth it to wake up at 5 AM.

In the past week, rice has captivated me. I have eaten fresh red and white sticky rice, watched it shake out of its husks in the rumbling of a mill, and walked through its neat green paddies. Rice seeds are planted together in threes or fours. As they grow, the seeds move from the base of the plant to shoot out the top of the stalk. Harvesting is one quick motion: grab the bundle of stalks with one hand, slice the sickle through with the other. Rice is not only Thailand’s staple food, it’s a staple of Thai culture. Thais often say “eat rice” when they mean simply “eat.” In the village, every mealtime passerby was invited to “eat rice!” In the early 1960’s, researchers collected 2,000 varieties of rice in Thailand. In the area around the village I stayed in, they found 69 varieties. After the Green Revolution, just two varieties were being grown there. Through the work of the Alternative Agriculture Network, they have recovered 31.

For four days we lived with families who have switched back to organic farming. It’s a small number—3,000 out of the 65 million people in the Northeast, most of whom are farmers. Like in the U.S., organic farming is a complex and advanced way of farming that relies on knowledge of making fertilizers, integrating crops, and responding to conditions. But there are a lot of contrasts. Farmers almost always say they switched for health reasons, often because using chemicals was making them sick. “Food is medicine,” said the herbal medicine doctor in the village. The second reason they tend to give is the environment. They noticed that there were no worms in the soil and the other effects chemical agriculture had on their land. Finally, many talk about self-sufficiency and the value in feeding your own family without relying on anyone else.

Still, it’s a hard transition. It takes about three years for the soil to be replenished and the yield to be comparable to the level of chemically driven agriculture. Although the rice they grew in that time was enough to sustain them, they still had debt from buying the fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Even without buying these costly inputs, most of them are still in debt.

Debt is an even bigger problem when it comes to contract farming. We visited a sugarcane and cassava plantation where we met with a few farmers who were experimenting with reducing chemical use in order to reduce the eternal debt to the companies they were bound to sell to. For each bundle of ten sugar canes, the farmers made 1 baht, about 4 cents.

In the past two years, all of the farmers have been affected by the huge variability of when the rains start—September last year, April this year. They attribute this to global warming, which the UN announced in a conference here was in large part the responsibility of agriculture’s methane production. The small Thai farmers with found this accusation hilarious. “You’re telling me my two water buffalo’s shit is causing global warming?” one reportedly said. Agriculture may be a big factor in global warming, but there’s a difference between large and small farms, chemical and non-chemical.

Another huge difference between Thailand and America is in the social role that organic food plays. Organic food is the same price as non-organic food. On Sunday morning, Kara, the other girl living with my family, and I, stumbled downstairs at 3 in the morning. Our host mom was gathering up bags to take to the Green Market, and her friend was dividing tubers into bags. I helped do three bags, and then the women rushed onto the truck. Kara and I watched the stars until 5 when we were picked up. The Green Market was not what I had suspected. There were about 30 tables in a concrete pavilion beyond a parking lot. By the time we arrived at 6, much of the food was sold, and my host mom had sold out entirely. It was exciting to see not only things that had been grown, like rice and herbs and garlic, but things that had been gathered: frogs, crabs, tubers, plant leaves. It turns out that the organic producers are actually raising their prices to compete with the normal prices. Our host families didn’t have to include the price of the fertilizers and pesticides in their prices and so by selling for the same amount they were just adding profit. They were also benefiting by selling directly to the consumer instead of going through multiple middlemen.

Although I didn’t get to try out my innovative sales pitch (“Dee mak!” “Very good”), we did get to talk to some green market organizers and consumers. The consumers were also there to get food that was good for their health (one had even heard about organic food on the temple radio). The producers were organizing the market in addition to farming, and they were working to build up the number of farmers involved and the amount of food they could sell. Consumer awareness was another thing holding them back, as was their hard-to-see location. We made some suggestions, including bringing musicians and artisans to make the market more of an event and gathering-place. It will be exciting to see this market build up. I think it is one of just three green markets in the whole country.

One of the best parts of our homestay was getting to go to the farms with our families. Kara and I walked out to the fields with our Meh around noon. She had bundled us up in long jackets and hats and the walk seemed to take forever (the villages are very dense and the fields spread out around them, a pretty ecological layout). Paw zoomed up on his motorcycle and we followed them around as they fed the cows, water buffalos, ducks and pigs. The 18 piglets were Paw’s pride and joy, and he spent a long time in the pen convincing the sow to lay still and nudging the runt into the pack of suckling piglets. We walked along the raised paths dividing the small rice fields, Meh stopping to hack at weeds or grab edible leaves and seeds. After that, there was little to do except sit on the platform and wait for lunch.

In the evenings, the family often ate or hung out with the neighbors (who were related), sitting and chatting (or in my case, listening) on their bamboo platform. The calm and the rhythm that I saw in my short and relatively superficial stay were alluring. I started to imagine myself digging through the paddy, eating, gossiping, sleeping. But a whole lifetime…

We also made a surprise visit to the fields our last night. Kara and I had just interviewed Paw (he and Meh sat across from us wearing their reading glasses), showing them pictures of home and drawing a US map with a big circle in the middle to show where most of our farms are. It was fun to connect with them in this way, and afterwards, when I heard something about herding the pigs, I jumped up, put on my headlamp and struck a pose. Slowly I understood that they had just meant for Paw and Meh to go. I stood in the door, refusing to understand, until they caved in. The four of us squeezed onto the motorcycle and rode out. I couldn’t take my eyes off the stars. When we got there I stuck my hand in the feed bucket and filled the ducks’ trough and squeezed into the piglet pen after Paw. It felt good to insist on being involved, and to act with my host family.

Our family also had some smaller members. Both were young and both were very naughty. One was a 4-year-old girl named Naan. The other was a puppy who I named Eloise. Eloise was a chewer and a jumper, naughtier than most puppies. What was disturbing, though, was how the family responded to her. Their reactions seemed disproportionately harsh, and in one day, I watched her get kicked, hit with sticks and other objects, including the back of a knife, and run over (accidentally) with a motorbike. It was hard to watch.

Naan was often sweet. Naan liked attention. Naan really liked sweets. Every time we passed a shop, she darted in to finger the sealed packages. We gave her some green nail polish, which she used to paint a lot of things, including her scratched up Shrek 2 DVD. We gave her a coloring book and some crayons. She rapidly filled all of the pages with similar monochromatic squiggles whose identity we could not understand in Thai. A couple of times, she squatted on the packed dirt floor and peed, garnering barely a glance from Paw and Meh, or grinned as she stood dripping and naked in the middle of the room after a shower. On our last night with them, we discovered that Naan was actually the granddaughter of Paw and Meh. Her mother was in Bangkok, rarely returning to the village, and her father was out of the picture. Suddenly things made a lot more sense (the half-hearted punishments, the Shrek DVD).

Urban migration is a powerful phenomenon in Thailand, as in many places in the world. Especially in the Northeast region, there is a whole generation that seems to be absent from the villages. You can make more money in the city, and the young people who leave send home some money and sometimes, children. In fact, a lot of the organic farmers we talked to didn’t have children at all. One student’s host sister told her that it was impossible to support a family and just be a farmer. I don’t know if that’s true, but the fate of many farms—of couples who were childless or just had children who weren’t interested in farming, was uncertain. Our Meh told us Naan would farm their land. She sounded certain, but I wondered if she had sounded certain about her daughter too, so many years ago.

Red Sticky Rice


Red Sticky Rice, cooked, and packed into the special baskets I love.

Meh overlooking the fields. You can see the slight curve of her sickle if you look closely. Thai farmers wear clothing that covers them almost entirely when they work outside.


Self-explanitory

A pretty intense kid at the temple school. Rural Thais, especially children, splash themselves with baby powder to stay cool.

Paw combing Naan's hair on the bamboo platform.

Kara, the CIEE student I stayed with, and Naan at her finest.


A table at the green market. The producers arrive now at 4 AM because consumers kept coming earlier and earlier to get the best selection.


In the village at our Roi-Et homestay the last night, all of the women seemed to weave. The stooped grandmother kept pointing to a book that showed patterns she had created. Our Meh, at her wood and bamboo loom.

The finished product. This cloth is silk.

A Sack of Rice

I wrote this as a commentary for class and thought it might add some facts and some of my thoughts.

for some reason I can't make this rotate...

Last September, my housemate came home from the superstore Costco with a sack of rice. We were all excited to have this seemingly endless supply—of jasmine, no less—for a cheap price. For the next four months, the rice sat prominently on the kitchen floor and was measured into puddings, curries and stirfrys for ten ravenous people. Looking back, I realize there is no way it was not Jasmine 105, the hybrid form of rice that has taken over much of Thailand’s farmland.

The Green Revolution of the 1960’s brought chemical agriculture to Thailand. The government encouraged the transformation from integrated, diverse farming to monocropping. These techniques were paired with Jasmine 105, easy to grow and in high demand by the market. Today, 95% of farmers in Surin Province use chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Rice, Thailand’s nutritional and cultural staple, has dwindled in diversity, the number of varieties shrinking by 45%.

Buying the sack of rice was our way of being self-sufficient. Living in a house without my parents for the first time last year was the first time I had to plan and shop and cook on my own. My friends and I prided ourselves on our frugality and self-reliance. To me, self-sufficiency meant being able to get everything you need on your own—knowing where to buy milk and how to get a job and who to call when your sink leaks through the ceiling.

To the organic farmers in Thailand, self-sufficiency meant human survival at the most basic level: relying on the food you grew yourself, making many of the things you needed, and eliminating the ties to the outside entities who would dictate how you carried out your livelihood. Self-sufficiency was a goal for every organic Thai farmer we talked to. One activist farmer had never sold his rice. Another bought only oil and cell phone minutes.

Most people depend on people thousands of miles away for the food they consume each day. I am dependent on the farmers who grew that rice, and all of the people who packaged and shipped and sold it. Most Thai farmers are also dependent. In 2008, an estimated 88% of Thai farming households had significant debt. In Roi-Et Province, we spoke with a group of farmers who were under contract to sell their crop to a large sugarcane and cassava company. Reducing the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers they bought from the company was their way of trying to escape the debt that forced them to sign contracts year after year. In another village, the company supplying villagers with chicks and buying back the grown chickens stopped providing them during the avian flu panic of 2004, depriving the villagers of their livelihood for two years.

Our mutual dependence in the face of agricultural globalization sunk in for me when, walking to my host parents’ farm in rural Northeast Thailand, I spotted a Cargill bag hanging over a bamboo fence. Cargill’s headquarters are 45 miles from my school in Minnesota.

Depending on an outside source, especially when it does not have your best interests at heart, can only expose you to problems. It can also allow you to knowingly or unknowingly ignore the realities of the things you are relying on because they are removed or far away. The Jasmine 105 I ate for four months was grown with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that depleted the soil and increased erosion rates. The chemicals polluted the water, and the degraded soil demanded more fertilizers, accelerating these processes. The people who planted and harvested my food likely have debt that is three times their annual income (if they are like 68% of farmers in Northeast Thailand), and may have been sickened by overexposure to chemicals. Self-sufficiency, as one farmer here explained, demands awareness and respect for other people.

There are certain things we need to survive: food, water, shelter, energy. But of course, no one is self-sufficient. Even the hermit eating berries in a cave depends on the environment. That was something that these organic farmers understood absolutely. When the rains stopped too soon, “it’s like our hands and feet were cut off.” When the land was soaked in chemicals year after year, the worms disappeared and the land’s fertility ebbed away. We have to be dependent, and that fact can draw us closer to the earth and to each other.

But globalization and relationships between actors don’t have to, and shouldn’t, disturb self-sufficiency, at least in terms of our most basic needs. At each level, we should have a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Ideally, individuals would grow some of their food, repair their own appliances, or at least be able to function when the power went out. Communities, too, should have some self-sufficiency. They should be the source of their staple foods, depend on their own water, and provide their own health care workers, teachers and building materials. Finally, nations must grow food for their people to eat before they churn out exports and cash crops. This is why, as many have suggested, food should be excluded from free trade agreements. Food is more than a commodity. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes food as a fundamental human right (Article 11). If we “free” its trade, governments will be unable to protect not only their self-sufficiency, but their people’s livelihoods.

In Northeast Thailand, individual and community self-sufficiency through agriculture is growing. Three thousand farmers are members of the Alternative Agriculture Network, which works with farmers and the government to promote organic agriculture. In Yasothorn, the profitable Green Market has about 30 stands; in Surin, 80 families sell their organic food at a Green Market each week. One Yasothorn organic farmer explained, “We have rice to eat, freedom. We are director, manager, janitor. We eat everything we grow.”

Self-sufficiency is power. It is money under the mattress. It is food security and food sovereignty. We cannot and should not be isolated, but we must be responsible for the things we need to survive.

Breathing Out

The past ten days have spun away in the comforts of Khon Kaen. Academically, we have been crammed with workshops in the theme “Social Research Methods.” This has included:

• A Sri Lankan reporter who told us that writing to tell the truth demands writing as clearly and simply as possible from fact to fact.

• A 70-something “radical conservative” advocate of Buddhist social change who has been charged with lese majesté more than any other person (may or may not be true) and spun out commentary on Thai history and social structure. He also provided quotable sentences like “in the West you cannot learn to be good, to be truthful, you learn how to be successful” and led us in meditations (“breathing out, it is a wonderful moment”) that seemed strangely like something my mom told me to repeat to fall asleep

• A Thai professor who was described as sounding like “an Asian Dr. Evil” as he described the “leaky buckey” (bucket) element of the livelihood model of development

For me, the most valuable workshops were the one led by a photojournalist named Nic Dunlop and an introduction to working with human rights documents. Nic Dunlop has worked in Burma, Thailand and Cambodia. After carrying around a photograph of the head executioner for a central Khmer Rouge prison for years, he ran into the disappeared man, confronted him, and helped bring him to trial. The documentation of these events is becoming a documentary (I believe), while his other long-standing project, a collection of photographs of live under the military regime of Burma, will be published as a book. Seeing his work and hearing the explanations, I learned more about these two places than I thought possible in less than an hour.

The task he gave us was to create a set of five photographs that began to tell a story. We had to pick one person and spend time with them, taking pictures of different activities from all the angles we could imagine. Patrolling the streets for subjects, I was surprised to find that I was terrified. I didn’t want to intrude on people, I didn’t want to shove my camera in their face (no zooming allowed), and I didn’t want to get in their way for twenty minutes. Once I had bumbled through my first target’s door, however, I was exhilarated. The permission I had to give myself allowed me to see people I never would have more and more naturally as I stuck around. There was so much going on and so many people in the few blocks around school—construction workers, copy shops, restaurants, an old woman sitting in her house, a snooker joint, and the hairdresser I ended up focusing on. And not surprisingly, the pictures were better. Never again will I whip out my camera nervously and snap a photo while I think my subject isn’t watching.

This woman was lovely, and I wish I could remember her name, but Thai names still haven't clicked for me. I'm still working on the tones of my roommate's.

We had to take four types of photos: establishing shots, portraits, action, and detail.

Our human rights workshop also sparked my excitement. Together, we read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which the United States has not signed). Reading these documents, as much as they reflect aspirations rather than assured promises, felt so important. * Their existence alone gives solidity and legitimacy to their contents, and as I read, I felt an incredible sense of citizenship and responsibility to know about things directly. After, we read Thai case studies and combed through the covenants and the Thai constitution, formulating arguments for why actions of the State had been in violation. This, too, felt important, an application for the aspirations.


Other events:

• Being paired with a Buddhist Buddy, someone who is supposed to balance me. The idea is for us to watch out for each other and push each other when we see that the other can be pushed.

• Crossing a rugged terrain of rocks, plates and candles with my Buddhist Buddy Morgan. Neither of us could speak, and the person being led was blindfolded. Despite the copious dirty looks I gave the program facilitators when my foot zinged along a plate, I truly think the world would be a better place if every relationship past acquaintance were forced to walk this gauntlet. The trust and awareness of the other person that had to develop for this to work was truly rewarding.

• Playing three on three badminton in the courts designed for dakgaw, a crazy sport where a bamboo ball must be rallied over a net without using your arms.

• Running near our dorm to find a village-like part of the city and a fresh food market—fish-flopping-fresh—closer than I realized.

• Meeting my peer tutor Mam, who has bright blue contacts, asked if I drink beer unexpectedly between Thai exercises, and made a song composed entirely of the word for "pen" which I could repeat thirty times and forget a minute later. Bak gaa. Thank you, Mam.
  

• Winning our Thai-class sponsored scavenger hunt through the market and being rewarded with a Japanese-style dinner with all of our Thai teachers. Ajaan John asked to sit with the girls because he thought we would eat less, but we proved him wrong, stuffing ourselves with an ark of animals boiled in the middle of the table, roast duck, green noodles and ice cream.

• Celebrating the end of orientation with a party at the program facilitator’s house, lying in their reed hammock, dancing to Issan music with P’Joy, who drives vans and does other tasks for the program, and hanging out with all of the people I have gotten to know over the past month.

*Article 4, ICCPR: “In time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations under the present Covenant to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with their other obligations under international law…”

Orienting in the Orient

I have been here for three weeks. Still, I am figuring out what “here” means and what to say about this country where sweat and rain are inevitable, most people are shorter than me, and I can walk down the street a farang eating a farang (“foreigner” takes its name from the white innards of the guava).

The program that I’m doing doesn’t mess around with free time. We usually go from 9 to 5 or 6, with a day off every couple of weeks or so. I’m very excited to be doing what I’m doing, though, and I think I’m going to learn a lot about the process of social change and issues around food, water, slums and mining in Northeast Thailand.

Bangkok

Grand Palace

We arrived in Bangkok and spent just one day in the city. We were staying one block over from the biggest backpacker street in Thailand and my experience was definitely superficial. We went to the National Museum, a maze of rooms with a jumble of artifacts—clothing, carved ivory, instruments, weapons and enormous gilded procession chariots along with a lot of dioramas depicting battle by elephant. We also went to the stunning Grand Palace and two temples. Wat Pho was filled by the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand. As we rounded his feet, which were inlaid with scenes of dragons and fish, we saw that the ring in the background was of people walking down a long row of metal pots, dropping in coins. We joined the line. Being part of the sound and doing this repetitive action was incredibly satisfying. We ferried across the river to Wat Arun, whose surfaces were covered with pieces of pottery, and climbed up the steep steps to look out over the sprawling city.

Other highlights:

• Stands of people sewing small white and pink flower buds into garlands.

• Giant raindrops monsooned down one evening and flooded the streets up to hubcaps. We ate outside and felt the waves wash over our feet when cars plowed through.

There is something about all cities that is familiar, especially non-Western cities, and this one had that feel, of quickness and cheap plastic things for sale and thick dirty air. I left before I had time to experience the “real” Bangkok, but I was glad to leave nonetheless.

Oriented

There are 27 students here: 11 men and 16 women. The program also has four program facilitators, recent grads who help the group work together on our projects and Ajaan Mike, who oversees them. There is the program director, who is very funny and very nearsighted, and several staff members who teach Thai, translate in our exchanges with villages, and run various other things that make the program work. I have been amazed by the dedication of these people. The facilitators often stay up working until 1:30 or 2, and everything we do with them they have done themselves or practiced presenting several times.

Orientation started seriously when we left Bangkok on a double-decker bus with massaging chairs for a resort in the mountains. They weren’t jagged peak mountains but quieter jungle mountains, covered in thick vegetation. A brown river flowed behind the resort, and the owners had kindly guided it into some little waterfalls. Some of us climbed across the river and my friend pointed out a banana tree.

We started Thai class, learned how easy it is to be impolite—pointing the bottom of your foot at anyone, stepping over bodies or food—how to shower outside—hold the tube of cloth up with your mouth, and did group building activities.

Activity 1: everyone stands on a cloth and without anyone stepping on the ground, flips the cloth over. Activity 2: everyone goes gets from one side of a net to the other, going through the spaces in the web without touching the lines that make it up. Activity 1 took 5 hours, Activity 2 took 7 hours. Both things seemed impossible, and were incredibly frustrating at times, but succeeding was exhilarating. These activities have continued, although in slightly less grueling form. We all touched a ball while keeping it in the air, we did a short meditation with a contemplative education teacher. I learned that I am a Wind, and an “Abstract Conceptualizer.” We wrote down our goals, the steps we need to achieve them and how we plan to measure our progress, and I realized that most goals can and should be made concrete.

It has been interesting to spend so much time with the same people, and to know that there are months ahead of us. I like everyone. Many of us are very different, but there has been a general respect and inclusiveness that has made me feel connected in some way to each person. We are still being oriented, but I am oriented enough to know that being here is going to be a process, with a lot of ups and downs.

Thai language

Thai is hard. Really really hard. It is a tonal language, so you can be trying to say, “It looks like a mustache” but come out with “a man standing in a rice field.” Mother, dog and doctor are all deceptively similar (sorry mom) and the word for rice (“cow”) sounds a lot like “white” and my roommate’s name (she wrote it Kaew but said it Gao). There are also about twice as many looping letters as in English, a deadly “ng” sound, and nine vowels each with a short form (“ah”) and a long form (“aaahh”). Needless to say, my foray into the language has been exciting.

Two or three days after we arrived, Thai class began. We did four hours each morning for about a week, and have been doing three most mornings since then. Divided into small groups, we are not allowed to speak English or write anything except during breaks. We listen as the teacher shows a picture and repeats a word or phrase and then we repeat it back. The system seems to work really well, and although the words often fall out of my brain as soon as we start the next word, enough stick for me to be as functional as I need to be. Staying with a family by myself for four nights also helped so much—using words in context and being forced to puzzle things out is where I have actually learned the Thai that I know. I will never forget how to say “I don’t have it” after playing five rounds of dominoes with my host brother, sister and mom.

Nong John



Nong John is a small community of thirty houses inside what the Thai state decided in the 1970’s should be a national park. Because of this, they are technically squatters, and no one new is allowed to move to the village. Nong John is probably the most beautiful place I have ever been. Here, the lush forested hills were punctuated by stone-faced mountains and the sky reflected off small rice plots.

Three other girls and I stayed on the lofted second story of a wooden house. Our host mother looked like a grandmother. She spoke to us almost as if it didn’t matter that we couldn’t understand, like she was talking to herself, and pulled out a batch of papers which seemed to be from when she had gone to school. One had pictures of Shakespeare, Einstein and some European philosophers; another was a carefully labeled drawing of the male and female reproductive system. She and her husband cared for two young boys who play kicked and chopped at each other, hopped gymnastically around the floor on the back of a large stuffed dog, and laughed as we chased them or carried them on our backs. We also encountered an even smaller boy who was always playing with the ribbon of a cassette and a girl who played with my playdoh and listened patiently as we read our Thai class notes to her. We had an exchange with the village and got the chance to ask them about their experiences being forced out of the forest by the government. The headman told us they were not afraid of being expelled again: they had nowhere else to go.

In the middle of the night when I woke up sick, I climbed up the ladder to our mattresses to see our host mom waiting for me with pills. She stayed there, lying on the floor, for a long time.

The next morning, we went with most of the women of the village up the hill to bring food to the wat. Then we watched as the monks chanted and filled their bowls with enormous quantities of sticky rice, fish, sauces, fruit and bamboo passed to them by a village man. I was surprised to see that many of the monks had tattoos and struck by the generosity and community of this ritual. The leftovers were brought to a pavilion, where we ate, and I threw up.

Our host mother in her house, dog in background

School Homestay

After a couple of nights in the Khon Kaen University dorms which will be our base, we packed our bags and were carted to homestays with fourth graders at three schools in poorer areas of the city. I was very nervous to spend four nights alone with a family whose language I didn’t speak, but the days slipped by and the homestay was a wonderful experience.

Things started off well: my little sister Ai was a head taller than the other girls in her class, with a smile that made two vertical lines in the bridge of her nose. The concrete house was next to a large green field, and the neighbor’s chickens and Asian-humped cows wandered through the trash-strewn yard. Three houses across the street were also part of the extended family, and every once in a while produced things like badminton rackets and an extremely cute baby.

Inside, the living room was actually where most of the living was done: it held a shrine, a large bed where the grandfather and smallest children slept, three plastic armchairs and two tvs. The walls were crayoned with toothed eels and stars. In addition, there was a small kitchen, two other bedrooms, each with a tv, and a back room crammed with a jumble of clothes and other things. Last but not least was the hong nam. Hong nams, or bathrooms, here are generally equipped with squat toilets and built-in concrete basins that are kept full of water. I learned early that showering is something you are supposed to do often—at least twice a day, and that if you do not immediately agree to partake, you will be pressed until you do. One evening I came back to school with my family wearing the same clothes as earlier and another little girl whispered righteously that I had not showered.

The other members of the family were nice and provided interesting subjects for observation. Leo, 6, was rarely separated from his nearly toothless female cousin, and loved when I ran after him and gave him scary looks. Jen, who was maybe 4, was rarely separated from her backpack and totally uninterested in me, although I could tell she had her eye on me when Grandpa gave me a cloth of hers to wipe my mouth and she screamed and grabbed for it. I mostly saw the older sister, who worked at a bar, asleep in the mornings with her purple eyeshadow still on. I watched the grandfather eat soup with whole eels, repair a fan, tinker with a motorcycle, and wade through a pond behind the house stabbing the ground with a net. Both parents worked at a printing shop, but I saw little of the father and a lot of the mother, who I realized was technically closer to my age than her daughter Ai.

Although I was worried about having enough to do, it was never a problem. In the mornings, I went to school with Ai and watched their assemblies, where they sat in very straight lines and sang the national anthem and said other things. After, we had our own classes with the program until evening. We threw my Frisbee around, tried out the badminton rackets. We sang “This is the way we wash our cloths”, practiced a hand slapping game, and visited 7-11. They tried to teach me Thai words and letters. We watched some soap operas and played some fast-paced dominoes. One afternoon, the mother gestured for me to get on her motorcycle. I hopped on and we got off at an amphitheater full of people doing aerobics. I joined in and the mom just watched, which was kind of weird, but after punching and hopping and being goofy I couldn’t stop smiling. The next day I petitioned for Ai to come, and we all went to aerobics, but ended up walking around the entire lake instead. The sun was setting and Ai and I raced when the path forked. We passed several more aerobics groups, a bunch of ping-pong tables, and lots of runners. It was lovely. When I left, the mom handed me a note she had written by going through my Thai-English dictionary. It said, “Liz- kind, nice, Liz – skillful, good at” down to “Liz- cutegirlsandkidsonly” and “O.K. I loeu you How about you”.

With Ai, outside of her school

Jen and Leo drink coke with spoons

KKU

The University is huge, and Khon Kaen is the fourth largest city in Thailand, a center of the Northeast. They love uniforms here, and KKU is no exception. I still haven’t been far on campus beyond the couple of blocks that surround our very nice dorm rooms and the office where our classes are held.

My roommate Kaew is very nice. She’s an English major and studies a lot, especially because her finals are coming up, but I’ve had some meals with her and a couple of her friends. We’re going to play badminton this afternoon…

I hear there is cheese somewhere in this city, but I have yet to see it. 7-11, or “7”, seems to be the store of choice and it is always packed with people getting things like prepackaged crab “pizza” they definitely don’t sell in US 7-11’s. But American things can be found. Last night some of us (Bowling names: Appleseed, Bud, Connie, Dee, and Eunice) went bowling. Against a background of American pop songs I haven’t heard in five years and Thai hits, I bowled a 23 my first game as “Connie” and a miraculous 122 to win my second game. We walked to the night market, ate some delicious fried dough and headed to a bar that was jam-packed with students going wild over the band that was playing. Between sets they played hip hop and we busted some moves, some of them inspired by my fanny pack, that weren’t happening anywhere else in U-Bar.

What I Know

Thailand...

* Known not long ago as Siam, the setting of fictionalized "The King and I."
* Where the longest reigning monarch still sits on the throne, protected by the strictest lese majeste laws in the world.
* Never colonized, though its neighbors were consumed by European powers.
* Famous for its sex industry, which bloomed during the era of American Involvement.
* Where the Buddhist words I know are pronounced as though "your mouth is full of cotton," "dharma" dissolving to "thamma."

And where in two days I will get off a plane and spend four months adding to this list.

L'chaim!