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.