UPDATE
After about a week of no rain, finally this afternoon the sky turned black and now hours later there’s still thunder and lightning, the ground is soppy wet, and the heat has backed off. No matter how much rain has already fallen this rainy season, a week without rain still gets on everyone’s nerves. Every day the clouds gather in the afternoon, for sure it looks like rain, you bring in the “sakpa”, and then nothing.
Next door the charcoal-making concluded today, three and a half days in. And tiny Fem (aged one and a half), who has been in a full-length leg cast from an accident with his father on the motorcycle (his father hit a cow), today has his cast finally off after six weeks.
And the fish pond that father made: about a week ago a truck arrived with hundreds of tiny fish swimming in plastic bags of water, and they were then dumped into the pond. We all went to look, the fish about three-quarters of an inch long. They entertained Moo Noi and Tey for almost an entire afternoon! This evening I went to look again, and how they have grown. Some look almost two inches long.
The election continues to hold everyone’s attention. Turns out that candidate number four used to be the boyfriend of Yindichati sister number one, and that they got in a big fight about a year ago and he beat her up so badly that she was more than a week in the hospital. So here he comes today asking Mae and Pa if they will vote for him! Mae was polite, but Pa without saying a word made his way to the hammock in the back garden. Number four is definitely number one candidate not to vote for, but apparently he has a huge family so his chances of winning are good.
Nue came by last night to bring a bottle of rum, and Lek and Pun came over to share the spoils. At some point in the evening I went to get a five-hundred baht note (about 15 dollars) to give Nue as a campaign contribution. It was something I had thought about days ago, but forgotten to do. I also want to give Lem the same. But at the table where we were sitting, everyone burst out laughing, and said “no, no! He is running for election. He is supposed to give you money.” I insisted, though, and Nue said thank you.
Today it was further explained to me that yes, it is expensive to be a candidate (all the bottles of lao khao, beer, and rum), but if they win, they will then receive a salary, something very rare here in the countryside. It’s a gamble that they take.
There are apparently 380 people eligible to vote in these four villages. Nue feels quite sure that if he can get 90 votes, he will win one of the two spots. I don’t know how it works exactly, but one candidate comes from each of the four villages. Lem is the candidate from the village where I live, and Nue from the first village further down the road.
Two of the Yindichati sisters who live in Bangkok are eligible to vote here, and they will come by bus the night before. Four sisters are coming, but only two can vote. The election is a big deal.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Shop
THE SHOP
I’m sitting outside with my laptop (which still never ceases to amaze me, working on a battery, and a computer, here on a farm where there has never been toilet paper...), just back from the shop. The shop is about six minutes there and back by bicycle, and this time of night (around 6 pm), there is no better six minutes on a bicycle. Overhead there is blue sky, but to the southwest and to the southeast there are enormous cumulus clouds building, and thunder in both directions. In an hour it will be dark, but now it is pure tropical glow, the sun the coconut palms, the tall tamarinds.
Poo Yai (the village headman) and Ngot run the shop. In the back it is cement dwelling that can’t be closed to the outside, but immediately on the roadside there are three connecting thatch shelters, one with a cement floor and two with hard-packed dirt. There are four hammocks, three tables. People mostly pull up on bicycles, or by foot. Ngot has a table in the middle that has an assortment of market treats: sweet sticky rice and mango, a curry, fried bananas, stir fried greens, stewed bamboo, and on and on. The assortment from day to day is never the same, so people always look over the small plastic bags, wondering if they need something more to put out for dinner.
But it’s the back of the shop that the shop is all about. Here there is fish sauce in a bottle, cooking oil, dish soap, all the essentials. And there is a cooler with cold beer and soft drinks. On another shelf there is rum and lao khao.
This time of day the shop is almost a bar, except for kids who are ALWAYS here, sent by their parents with 5 baht to buy a tiny toy or a snack. Moo Noi and Tey are at the shop a minimum of five times a day, either on the back of Mae’s bicycle, or together on Naa’s motorcycle. If ever one of them gets left behind from a visit to the shop, there is solid crying for fifteen minutes. The shop is big!
But like I said, this time of night it is almost a bar. Three or four men are there without their shirts, having coming home from the fields and already showered, now stopping for a glass of lao khao (or two) before dinner. The day’s gossip lives at the shop. When I go to buy a beer, I know that whatever I’ve done for the last fews, especially anything out of the ordinary (like transplanting), has already made the rounds. There’s no denying anything because it is already set in stone. A farmer from another village is refusing to pay 2000 baht he owes in credit, I just heard at the shop. Two thousand baht is no small deal. And credit here is how things work.
I don’t go to the shop alone as often as I’d like. It’s never a problem going with a Yindichati, but going on my own I know I will always be asked to join the men for a lao khao (and probably two). And while I like lao khao and I like them, my language skills get pushed beyond capacity, if you know what I mean. If I am doing the talking I am okay, but if I’m responding to a question and I don’t fully understand the question, then I’m uncomfortable. My goal is to feel comfortable by myself at the shop, and I am getting there, but I still have a long way to go. I realize more and more these days that where I most often screw up is with Lao, not recognizing that it is Lao. The Yindichatis, as I’ve written, speak Korat. And central Thai I get on TV every day. But Lao, and a lot of people here speak Lao, I don’t know enough to hear. It’s not like at the shop anyone is speaking purely one thing. They’ve been talking with each other their whole lives!
I’m sitting outside with my laptop (which still never ceases to amaze me, working on a battery, and a computer, here on a farm where there has never been toilet paper...), just back from the shop. The shop is about six minutes there and back by bicycle, and this time of night (around 6 pm), there is no better six minutes on a bicycle. Overhead there is blue sky, but to the southwest and to the southeast there are enormous cumulus clouds building, and thunder in both directions. In an hour it will be dark, but now it is pure tropical glow, the sun the coconut palms, the tall tamarinds.
Poo Yai (the village headman) and Ngot run the shop. In the back it is cement dwelling that can’t be closed to the outside, but immediately on the roadside there are three connecting thatch shelters, one with a cement floor and two with hard-packed dirt. There are four hammocks, three tables. People mostly pull up on bicycles, or by foot. Ngot has a table in the middle that has an assortment of market treats: sweet sticky rice and mango, a curry, fried bananas, stir fried greens, stewed bamboo, and on and on. The assortment from day to day is never the same, so people always look over the small plastic bags, wondering if they need something more to put out for dinner.
But it’s the back of the shop that the shop is all about. Here there is fish sauce in a bottle, cooking oil, dish soap, all the essentials. And there is a cooler with cold beer and soft drinks. On another shelf there is rum and lao khao.
This time of day the shop is almost a bar, except for kids who are ALWAYS here, sent by their parents with 5 baht to buy a tiny toy or a snack. Moo Noi and Tey are at the shop a minimum of five times a day, either on the back of Mae’s bicycle, or together on Naa’s motorcycle. If ever one of them gets left behind from a visit to the shop, there is solid crying for fifteen minutes. The shop is big!
But like I said, this time of night it is almost a bar. Three or four men are there without their shirts, having coming home from the fields and already showered, now stopping for a glass of lao khao (or two) before dinner. The day’s gossip lives at the shop. When I go to buy a beer, I know that whatever I’ve done for the last fews, especially anything out of the ordinary (like transplanting), has already made the rounds. There’s no denying anything because it is already set in stone. A farmer from another village is refusing to pay 2000 baht he owes in credit, I just heard at the shop. Two thousand baht is no small deal. And credit here is how things work.
I don’t go to the shop alone as often as I’d like. It’s never a problem going with a Yindichati, but going on my own I know I will always be asked to join the men for a lao khao (and probably two). And while I like lao khao and I like them, my language skills get pushed beyond capacity, if you know what I mean. If I am doing the talking I am okay, but if I’m responding to a question and I don’t fully understand the question, then I’m uncomfortable. My goal is to feel comfortable by myself at the shop, and I am getting there, but I still have a long way to go. I realize more and more these days that where I most often screw up is with Lao, not recognizing that it is Lao. The Yindichatis, as I’ve written, speak Korat. And central Thai I get on TV every day. But Lao, and a lot of people here speak Lao, I don’t know enough to hear. It’s not like at the shop anyone is speaking purely one thing. They’ve been talking with each other their whole lives!
Election
ELECTION
I have two best friends here, but not that I know them inside out, or even very well at all. But they have been my friends since I first arrived, and my guess is that they feel about me similar to the way that I feel about them. We are all around the same age, and we have a lot of trust. Early on when I was here, I was in the “small room” (a topic for a different time), and someone came in and told me that my friends were here to see me. “My friends?” I wondered to myself. I went out onto the veranda and there standing were Nue and Lem, Lem holding a bottle of Sangsorm, aThai rum.
“They are here to drink with you,” said Norm, sister number four.
And so we did, and we have been friends ever since. Nue, as I’ve written, is Mae’s brother number five, and lives just down the road. Lem lives across the street and two farms up the road. Lem is not a local. He is from Asawanyapaket, a town on the Cambodian border. He married Tor who is the sister of ...., and they are from a neighboring village. But Lem, like Pun directly across the road, feels like family.
Both Lem and Nue are hugely handsome men in the greatest of ways, these bright smiling happy healthy faces and bodies as lithe and strong as can be. Both men wear the brightest of shirts – Hawaiian prints – as over the top as they can find, but on both of them the shirts look as normal as can be. Everyone is happy always to see either one arrive.
Lem rides an old clunky motorbike that barely makes its way down the road, his head always high in the air as if not to miss a moment of a glorious day. He is a dancer here of a fabulousness that has no peers, unless of course it is his spouse, Tor (and well, the Yindichatis). Watching Lem and Tor dance together is a study in Asian village dance, two farmers dancing from their incredibly strong feet and calves, their upper bodies moving with South Indian grace.
Nue is not a dancer, but he has a speaking voice that stops a room, a voice I can barely describe. It’s as if he is drug dealer making a deal, but I mean a very big drug deal, millions on the line. And that is the way Nue speaks always, usually wearing a big silly hat of one variety or another, a hat usually adorned with big bright plastic flowers.
The other night these two arrive and we convene at Pun’s across the road, her floor hard-packed mud, a casual place. A bottle of Sang arrives, and soda, coke and ice, and out of the blue I learn that Lem and Nue are running for village council. Village council! Nue is number one on the ballot (“ber nung”), and Lem is number two (“ber song”). People vote by number and not by name. There are two seats open and four candidates .
I ask them both what they will do about the terrible condition of the roads, and we all laugh (knowing “nothing”). I ask them what they will do about foreigners like me not being allowed to vote, and we all laugh again. I pledge my vote (if I were to have a vote).
Election time: It is fabulous to watch. Lem and Nue are by far, and I mean by far, the best candidates. It is like Obama running against Newt Gengrich (please, blog readers, excuse me if I have offended....). But of course it isn’t all that simple. Turns out Mae might vote for “number four” and Nue (who she absolutely has to vote for as he is her brother). Ber Four is a cousin, and perfectly nice, but not to vote for Lem is unconscionable. Nue is trustworthy and loved by everyone, and will always have everyone’s best interest in mind. But Lem (and okay, so he’s not Nue’s and my age, but eight years younger) is the smartest guy in the village, has the most energy and by far the broadest perspective. (Ber Three is a write off and he will probably win!)
“How do people feel on election day?” I ask.“Two people feel really good.”
I have two best friends here, but not that I know them inside out, or even very well at all. But they have been my friends since I first arrived, and my guess is that they feel about me similar to the way that I feel about them. We are all around the same age, and we have a lot of trust. Early on when I was here, I was in the “small room” (a topic for a different time), and someone came in and told me that my friends were here to see me. “My friends?” I wondered to myself. I went out onto the veranda and there standing were Nue and Lem, Lem holding a bottle of Sangsorm, aThai rum.
“They are here to drink with you,” said Norm, sister number four.
And so we did, and we have been friends ever since. Nue, as I’ve written, is Mae’s brother number five, and lives just down the road. Lem lives across the street and two farms up the road. Lem is not a local. He is from Asawanyapaket, a town on the Cambodian border. He married Tor who is the sister of ...., and they are from a neighboring village. But Lem, like Pun directly across the road, feels like family.
Both Lem and Nue are hugely handsome men in the greatest of ways, these bright smiling happy healthy faces and bodies as lithe and strong as can be. Both men wear the brightest of shirts – Hawaiian prints – as over the top as they can find, but on both of them the shirts look as normal as can be. Everyone is happy always to see either one arrive.
Lem rides an old clunky motorbike that barely makes its way down the road, his head always high in the air as if not to miss a moment of a glorious day. He is a dancer here of a fabulousness that has no peers, unless of course it is his spouse, Tor (and well, the Yindichatis). Watching Lem and Tor dance together is a study in Asian village dance, two farmers dancing from their incredibly strong feet and calves, their upper bodies moving with South Indian grace.
Nue is not a dancer, but he has a speaking voice that stops a room, a voice I can barely describe. It’s as if he is drug dealer making a deal, but I mean a very big drug deal, millions on the line. And that is the way Nue speaks always, usually wearing a big silly hat of one variety or another, a hat usually adorned with big bright plastic flowers.
The other night these two arrive and we convene at Pun’s across the road, her floor hard-packed mud, a casual place. A bottle of Sang arrives, and soda, coke and ice, and out of the blue I learn that Lem and Nue are running for village council. Village council! Nue is number one on the ballot (“ber nung”), and Lem is number two (“ber song”). People vote by number and not by name. There are two seats open and four candidates .
I ask them both what they will do about the terrible condition of the roads, and we all laugh (knowing “nothing”). I ask them what they will do about foreigners like me not being allowed to vote, and we all laugh again. I pledge my vote (if I were to have a vote).
Election time: It is fabulous to watch. Lem and Nue are by far, and I mean by far, the best candidates. It is like Obama running against Newt Gengrich (please, blog readers, excuse me if I have offended....). But of course it isn’t all that simple. Turns out Mae might vote for “number four” and Nue (who she absolutely has to vote for as he is her brother). Ber Four is a cousin, and perfectly nice, but not to vote for Lem is unconscionable. Nue is trustworthy and loved by everyone, and will always have everyone’s best interest in mind. But Lem (and okay, so he’s not Nue’s and my age, but eight years younger) is the smartest guy in the village, has the most energy and by far the broadest perspective. (Ber Three is a write off and he will probably win!)
“How do people feel on election day?” I ask.“Two people feel really good.”
It finally happened
IT FINALLY HAPPENED
I have two pairs of boots. One, as I’ve mentioned, is a pair of black Wellingtons, tall rubber boots that come up just below my knee. The other pair of boots is a style of boot that I have been living in for almost twenty years, and this is my third pair of almost the exactly same boot. They are hiking boots, I guess you’d call them. They’re all leather on the outside and gortex on the inside, and come up just around my ankle. They’re made by Vasque boots, and while the first two pairs I had were made in Italy, this third pair was made in China but is still very good. I had many back problems since I was a teenager, but since I have been wearing these boots (almost religiously), I keep my back problems (knock on wood) to a minimum. The boots cost a lot, like a couple hundred dollars, but they are one thing I buy new. I have a fourth pair, but I haven’t gotten used to them. There was a major switch in design, about which I feel sad.
Anyway, here I usually wear my Wellingtons because of the wet and mud. But these days I am working close to the house, a lot of carpentry, so the Vasque boots feel stronger. This afternoon I went to put my boots back on, and sure enough my bare foot could only go partially in, as if there was a sock stuck in the toe. I quickly pulled my foot out and looked in, and sure enough, something, but I couldn’t tell what. Then it moved! And moved again. I turned the boot upside down and shook it, and out came a toad, a largish toad, about the size of my clenched fist. It clearly wasn’t happy at being disturbed, but I had little sympathy.
Every day I am afraid of something surprising me inside my boot! I am mostly afraid of scorpions, but not that I know that scorpions like to hide in boots. They probably don’t. But there are so many things here that creep and crawl (a few months back I learned the Thai word “asorapakit”, or creatures with fangs that bite.)
Apart from the toad, today was a relatively uneventful day, something which I think of as a rarity as opposed to something normal. Starting yesterday afternoon Lor, grandmother of Fem and sister number four to Mae, and next door neighbour, began burning to make charcoal. She, her son, and her son-in-law have been working off and on for weeks, chopping away with machetes. But until yesterday, I had no idea what they were doing. Now I know!
Most families here make their own charcoal. Prunings are cut into smaller pieces, and then the wood is placed in something that looks much like a horno, a bread oven of the Navajo and Pueblo peoples in New Mexico and Arizona. The oven is shaped like a beehive and made of mud. A fire is started inside the oven, then wood is placed in and the holes for draft are blocked almost entirely with more mud, slowing the “cooking” way down. All day today when I’ve looked over there has been smoke coming from the charcoal. Late this afternoon, against an almost black sky of storm coming north from Cambodia, the smoke looked like a low lying heavy mist. I have no idea how long they will continue to burn, but there is a lot of wood assembled.
I love charcoal. On the Yindichati Farm I have yet to see charcoal being made, but there is now a large pile of prunings to work with. The younger generation here are less enthusiastic about cooking with charcoal, which means more work for them (as they do almost all the cooking). But charcoal is still the number one source of fire for cooking.
I have two pairs of boots. One, as I’ve mentioned, is a pair of black Wellingtons, tall rubber boots that come up just below my knee. The other pair of boots is a style of boot that I have been living in for almost twenty years, and this is my third pair of almost the exactly same boot. They are hiking boots, I guess you’d call them. They’re all leather on the outside and gortex on the inside, and come up just around my ankle. They’re made by Vasque boots, and while the first two pairs I had were made in Italy, this third pair was made in China but is still very good. I had many back problems since I was a teenager, but since I have been wearing these boots (almost religiously), I keep my back problems (knock on wood) to a minimum. The boots cost a lot, like a couple hundred dollars, but they are one thing I buy new. I have a fourth pair, but I haven’t gotten used to them. There was a major switch in design, about which I feel sad.
Anyway, here I usually wear my Wellingtons because of the wet and mud. But these days I am working close to the house, a lot of carpentry, so the Vasque boots feel stronger. This afternoon I went to put my boots back on, and sure enough my bare foot could only go partially in, as if there was a sock stuck in the toe. I quickly pulled my foot out and looked in, and sure enough, something, but I couldn’t tell what. Then it moved! And moved again. I turned the boot upside down and shook it, and out came a toad, a largish toad, about the size of my clenched fist. It clearly wasn’t happy at being disturbed, but I had little sympathy.
Every day I am afraid of something surprising me inside my boot! I am mostly afraid of scorpions, but not that I know that scorpions like to hide in boots. They probably don’t. But there are so many things here that creep and crawl (a few months back I learned the Thai word “asorapakit”, or creatures with fangs that bite.)
Apart from the toad, today was a relatively uneventful day, something which I think of as a rarity as opposed to something normal. Starting yesterday afternoon Lor, grandmother of Fem and sister number four to Mae, and next door neighbour, began burning to make charcoal. She, her son, and her son-in-law have been working off and on for weeks, chopping away with machetes. But until yesterday, I had no idea what they were doing. Now I know!
Most families here make their own charcoal. Prunings are cut into smaller pieces, and then the wood is placed in something that looks much like a horno, a bread oven of the Navajo and Pueblo peoples in New Mexico and Arizona. The oven is shaped like a beehive and made of mud. A fire is started inside the oven, then wood is placed in and the holes for draft are blocked almost entirely with more mud, slowing the “cooking” way down. All day today when I’ve looked over there has been smoke coming from the charcoal. Late this afternoon, against an almost black sky of storm coming north from Cambodia, the smoke looked like a low lying heavy mist. I have no idea how long they will continue to burn, but there is a lot of wood assembled.
I love charcoal. On the Yindichati Farm I have yet to see charcoal being made, but there is now a large pile of prunings to work with. The younger generation here are less enthusiastic about cooking with charcoal, which means more work for them (as they do almost all the cooking). But charcoal is still the number one source of fire for cooking.
A Correction
A CORRECTION
The ongs have almost finished filling with water. Each day about a quarter more water is put in with the hose, unless there is rain from the eves. Today I realized that the ongs are not clay, as I always thought, but that they are made from concrete. It might be that the base is clay and it is plastered over with concrete, as often happens in construction here. But when I stick my head way in the smell is concrete, not clay. And the water is beautiful!
Every day the kids play in a large tub of water, a tub made from an old truck wheel rubber. They go under the water, they laugh and push each other. And the whole time I am deeply jealous! Days here cry out for water, for swimming. In town there is a swimming pool, but town is a long ways to go to have a swim, and a lot of gasoline. There is water everywhere – ponds, lakes, canals – but everyone insists that no, I can’t swim in them. The big s-word, snakes, always comes up, and that dampens my enthusiasm.
My dream is to build a lap pool. I studied websites on the internet, but it so quickly gets complicated and expensive. Hot humid tropical climates, it seems, are not the easiest places to keep swimming pools clean and swimmable. I like to swim at the Prince Hotel in Chiangmai, and the man who looks after the pool (and has for thirty years) I like a lot (he makes only 6,000 baht a month, but keeps a wonderful pool). He told me that in Chiangmai a good pool with cost almost a million baht (about 30,000 dollars), but here in Isaan I could probably manage for 600,000 (six hundred thousand I don’t have.) So I dream and remain jealous of the kids.
I did shower outside today for the first time, making use of the ongs. And I shaved with a mirror, perhaps an even more remarkable “first”. I once bought a small mirror and put it into the bathroom, but it quickly disappeared. I asked Norm: “There is no mirror in the bathroom. How do men shave?”
The question obviously made no sense to her. “Shave?” she asked.
I demonstrated, pretending to have a razor, but that still didn’t help. “What does Pa do?” I then asked, bringing it closer to home.
Norm brought her thumb and forefinger up to her face and pinched them together. “He pulls.”
“He pulls!”
“Everyone pulls,” she replied.
This was hard for me to believe, but then I remembered that I’d never seen any sign of shaving. That afternoon we were down the road at the shop and there was Poo Yai, the village headman, lying back in a hammock (the shop, like everywhere else, has many hammocks) without a shirt on, one arm extended back behind his head while with his other hand he plucked, one by one, his underarm hair.
Now, if this were a cookbook I could hear my editor at this stage saying “no, no, no.” But it’s not a cookbook so I can keep going? On this plucking issue, my research continues. Some people do shave, but not so much in the countryside. And it is not that people don’t have body hair, because they do. They don’t have as much hair as in some other cultures, but they do.
Personally, I have developed a new way of shaving while being here. One time I had a shave in town, on a whim. It wasn’t a great shave, but it was interesting. It was more like a scrape. No water, no lather, but a good sharp straight-edge and a fair amount of effort. When it came time for another shave at home, I tried the scrape method, and it was okay, a little bit like having dental work (like easy dental work) without novocaine. Here razor blades cost about the same as in North America, and that feels very expensive. I find the scrape method extends the life of my razor.And well, I think as I mentioned before, the hawng nam (literally, “room water”, or bathroom) is a giant topic worthy of a great many blogs, but this one should probably end here.
The ongs have almost finished filling with water. Each day about a quarter more water is put in with the hose, unless there is rain from the eves. Today I realized that the ongs are not clay, as I always thought, but that they are made from concrete. It might be that the base is clay and it is plastered over with concrete, as often happens in construction here. But when I stick my head way in the smell is concrete, not clay. And the water is beautiful!
Every day the kids play in a large tub of water, a tub made from an old truck wheel rubber. They go under the water, they laugh and push each other. And the whole time I am deeply jealous! Days here cry out for water, for swimming. In town there is a swimming pool, but town is a long ways to go to have a swim, and a lot of gasoline. There is water everywhere – ponds, lakes, canals – but everyone insists that no, I can’t swim in them. The big s-word, snakes, always comes up, and that dampens my enthusiasm.
My dream is to build a lap pool. I studied websites on the internet, but it so quickly gets complicated and expensive. Hot humid tropical climates, it seems, are not the easiest places to keep swimming pools clean and swimmable. I like to swim at the Prince Hotel in Chiangmai, and the man who looks after the pool (and has for thirty years) I like a lot (he makes only 6,000 baht a month, but keeps a wonderful pool). He told me that in Chiangmai a good pool with cost almost a million baht (about 30,000 dollars), but here in Isaan I could probably manage for 600,000 (six hundred thousand I don’t have.) So I dream and remain jealous of the kids.
I did shower outside today for the first time, making use of the ongs. And I shaved with a mirror, perhaps an even more remarkable “first”. I once bought a small mirror and put it into the bathroom, but it quickly disappeared. I asked Norm: “There is no mirror in the bathroom. How do men shave?”
The question obviously made no sense to her. “Shave?” she asked.
I demonstrated, pretending to have a razor, but that still didn’t help. “What does Pa do?” I then asked, bringing it closer to home.
Norm brought her thumb and forefinger up to her face and pinched them together. “He pulls.”
“He pulls!”
“Everyone pulls,” she replied.
This was hard for me to believe, but then I remembered that I’d never seen any sign of shaving. That afternoon we were down the road at the shop and there was Poo Yai, the village headman, lying back in a hammock (the shop, like everywhere else, has many hammocks) without a shirt on, one arm extended back behind his head while with his other hand he plucked, one by one, his underarm hair.
Now, if this were a cookbook I could hear my editor at this stage saying “no, no, no.” But it’s not a cookbook so I can keep going? On this plucking issue, my research continues. Some people do shave, but not so much in the countryside. And it is not that people don’t have body hair, because they do. They don’t have as much hair as in some other cultures, but they do.
Personally, I have developed a new way of shaving while being here. One time I had a shave in town, on a whim. It wasn’t a great shave, but it was interesting. It was more like a scrape. No water, no lather, but a good sharp straight-edge and a fair amount of effort. When it came time for another shave at home, I tried the scrape method, and it was okay, a little bit like having dental work (like easy dental work) without novocaine. Here razor blades cost about the same as in North America, and that feels very expensive. I find the scrape method extends the life of my razor.And well, I think as I mentioned before, the hawng nam (literally, “room water”, or bathroom) is a giant topic worthy of a great many blogs, but this one should probably end here.
Age
AGE
Writing about Mae I am reminded of a blog I wanted to write and haven’t. How old is Mae? Good question. Mae is number two of twelve children, the majority of whom live in this village or in villages nearby. Mae’s mother and father live in a village nearby, and her grandmother (five generations....)!
I was first told that Mae is 57 years old and that Pa is 68. But the other night in the emerge I heard Pa tell the doctor that he is 66. No problem, 66 or 68, whatever. But Mae, her age never stays the same. One daughter will say that Mae is 54, and another will think about it (when asked) for a while and say 58.
I find this all interesting. In my family, give or take a year or so, my siblings and I could always tell you how old our parents were. But things are different here. One night we were sitting in the kitchen, a bunch of us. Two of Mae’s siblings were there, sister number four and brother number five. So I took the opportunity to ask, “How old is Mae?”
Nue (who I call Nuay, or “tired”, and subject for another blog....) looked at the ceiling, then to his left, then to his right, thinking. “She is fifty four,” he said with some hesitation.
“I am fifty-seven,” Mae then said, though not looking entirely confident, more looking for help.
“I think you are fifty-eight,” adds sister number four (Fem’s grandmother...). Definitely Mae’s age was up for grabs.
On another occasion, Nue was in the kitchen and it was a large gathering, a cremation. There were a hundred people or so, forty people cooking. “Nue,” I asked, “are you number four or number five?”
Nue looked at me, and looked around the crowded room. He spotted a brother (number five) and yelled out, “am I number four or number five?” Number five thinks, then responds, telling his older brother that he is number five, and that Nue is number five.
Now, if you are reading this you may very well be thinking that everyone is having a joke on me, but I can tell you no. It comes up over and over and over, and not just in this family. Pun, who lives across the street (twenty feet away), was swinging in one hammock, me in another. “Pun,” I asked, “how old is your son, Ney?”
Pun hesitates, thinks, and responds: “Sip gwa (ten years up)”
Naa, who is also on the veranda and listening to this, and who is of the younger generation (she is 28), can’t believe what she is hearing. “Pun, he is seventeen!”
“Oh,” says Pun.
Writing about Mae I am reminded of a blog I wanted to write and haven’t. How old is Mae? Good question. Mae is number two of twelve children, the majority of whom live in this village or in villages nearby. Mae’s mother and father live in a village nearby, and her grandmother (five generations....)!
I was first told that Mae is 57 years old and that Pa is 68. But the other night in the emerge I heard Pa tell the doctor that he is 66. No problem, 66 or 68, whatever. But Mae, her age never stays the same. One daughter will say that Mae is 54, and another will think about it (when asked) for a while and say 58.
I find this all interesting. In my family, give or take a year or so, my siblings and I could always tell you how old our parents were. But things are different here. One night we were sitting in the kitchen, a bunch of us. Two of Mae’s siblings were there, sister number four and brother number five. So I took the opportunity to ask, “How old is Mae?”
Nue (who I call Nuay, or “tired”, and subject for another blog....) looked at the ceiling, then to his left, then to his right, thinking. “She is fifty four,” he said with some hesitation.
“I am fifty-seven,” Mae then said, though not looking entirely confident, more looking for help.
“I think you are fifty-eight,” adds sister number four (Fem’s grandmother...). Definitely Mae’s age was up for grabs.
On another occasion, Nue was in the kitchen and it was a large gathering, a cremation. There were a hundred people or so, forty people cooking. “Nue,” I asked, “are you number four or number five?”
Nue looked at me, and looked around the crowded room. He spotted a brother (number five) and yelled out, “am I number four or number five?” Number five thinks, then responds, telling his older brother that he is number five, and that Nue is number five.
Now, if you are reading this you may very well be thinking that everyone is having a joke on me, but I can tell you no. It comes up over and over and over, and not just in this family. Pun, who lives across the street (twenty feet away), was swinging in one hammock, me in another. “Pun,” I asked, “how old is your son, Ney?”
Pun hesitates, thinks, and responds: “Sip gwa (ten years up)”
Naa, who is also on the veranda and listening to this, and who is of the younger generation (she is 28), can’t believe what she is hearing. “Pun, he is seventeen!”
“Oh,” says Pun.
Transplanting
TRANSPLANTING
This morning I went for a walk back through the forest and into the rice fields. I was surprised to see Mae and Pa, the only ones out in the fields working. Pa was working the Kubota (the two-wheeled tractor that you hold onto a little bit like a motorcycle), using it to plough the muddy field. Mae was bent over (as always), using a bucket to distribute water from wet patches into the path of where Pa was ploughing. We greeted and I watched for a while, and walked on.
One of my favourite pastimes here is sitting in the shelters out in the fields, rice growing 360 degrees around me. There are always lots of birds, and usually human voices from fields nearby. In the shelters there will often be a thermos of drinking water and a hammock (a “pley” in Thai). One could write a book about the vernacular architecture of field shelters because everyone is different, wonderfully quirky unique structures.
The one I ended up in this morning didn’t have a hammock, but it had a covered platform of beautiful wide weathered wood. Last night I didn’t sleep well, so in the shelter I put my head down and eventually fell asleep, happy just to listen to the birds.
When I woke up I looked around and everything was still as peaceful as when I had fallen asleep. But unusually for mid-morning, to the south coming from Cambodia there were already massive cumulus clouds building, looking unbelievably beautiful with the green of the rice. I put my Wellingtons back on (a person can’t take a nap in Wellingtons!), and then headed home through the fields. I got to the field where Mae and Pa had been working, and Mae was still working but Pa was no longer there. She was eight inches deep in the muddy water, transplanting seedlings, bent over at ninety degrees. Without stopping, she asked me “sa bai dee, mai?” (am I okay?), and of course, “hew khao mai?” (am I hungry?).
I replied that I was good, and then I stood there watching. I have taken a thousand photographs of people transplanting rice. It’s one of my favourite shots to take! But I have never put my stupid feet into the stupid water and helped. I took off my Welly’s and stepped into the water. Mae, great unflappable Mae, tossed me a bundle of seedlings, gorgeously tied with a length of straw. I untied the bundle and asked Mae for instructions. She showed me on her muddy fingers to take two or three seedlings (about fourteen inches long) and with my thumb to sink them down into the mud until the root is submerged to the first knuckle of my thumb.
I started in, and even though the sun was hot, it was okay to be in the water making my way through the mud. Transplanting was work, but pleasurable. Mae of course transplanted five for every one of mine, but together we made our way down the small field, not talking, just planting. About ten minutes in, Mae looked over and asked “soowai mai?” (beautiful?).
“Soowai.”
Once we had finished our field, we went to another field nearby to gather more seedlings. This field was also small, but packed with seedlings (now two months old from seed) growing intensely together, like grass on a golf course. Mae showed me what to do, asking me first if I am right handed or left handed. She showed me to take a handful of seedlings and put them almost flat to the ground on top of my left hand, then at the base to pull hard with my right hand, dislodging the roots when I pull.
This was much harder than transplanting! At first I broke several seedlings, getting the stem but not the root. Then I started, unlike Mae, doing just a couple at a time, and even this was hard, but at least I wasn’t killing the seedling. Mae, to my side, bent over, was motoring through the field. After she would collect a large handful, she would then rinse the roots in muddy water nearby and then kick the roots with her foot, dislodging as much soil as she could.
This part, I quickly realized, was going to take a long time to learn!
And luckily, Moo and Tey arrived with Naa, and soon everything was silliness. Tey was up past his waist in mud, and Moo started collecting wild irises (“dok gra jeeo” in Thai), pink, red, pale blue and purple, hundreds of them, almost half his height.
It was time for lunch. But not for Mae, who had already eaten lunch that she had brought with her to the field.
I figure Mae was transplanting for at least eight hours today in the hot sun, and on top of chores. And my left forearm, as I write tonight, is still sore from ninety minutes.
This morning I went for a walk back through the forest and into the rice fields. I was surprised to see Mae and Pa, the only ones out in the fields working. Pa was working the Kubota (the two-wheeled tractor that you hold onto a little bit like a motorcycle), using it to plough the muddy field. Mae was bent over (as always), using a bucket to distribute water from wet patches into the path of where Pa was ploughing. We greeted and I watched for a while, and walked on.
One of my favourite pastimes here is sitting in the shelters out in the fields, rice growing 360 degrees around me. There are always lots of birds, and usually human voices from fields nearby. In the shelters there will often be a thermos of drinking water and a hammock (a “pley” in Thai). One could write a book about the vernacular architecture of field shelters because everyone is different, wonderfully quirky unique structures.
The one I ended up in this morning didn’t have a hammock, but it had a covered platform of beautiful wide weathered wood. Last night I didn’t sleep well, so in the shelter I put my head down and eventually fell asleep, happy just to listen to the birds.
When I woke up I looked around and everything was still as peaceful as when I had fallen asleep. But unusually for mid-morning, to the south coming from Cambodia there were already massive cumulus clouds building, looking unbelievably beautiful with the green of the rice. I put my Wellingtons back on (a person can’t take a nap in Wellingtons!), and then headed home through the fields. I got to the field where Mae and Pa had been working, and Mae was still working but Pa was no longer there. She was eight inches deep in the muddy water, transplanting seedlings, bent over at ninety degrees. Without stopping, she asked me “sa bai dee, mai?” (am I okay?), and of course, “hew khao mai?” (am I hungry?).
I replied that I was good, and then I stood there watching. I have taken a thousand photographs of people transplanting rice. It’s one of my favourite shots to take! But I have never put my stupid feet into the stupid water and helped. I took off my Welly’s and stepped into the water. Mae, great unflappable Mae, tossed me a bundle of seedlings, gorgeously tied with a length of straw. I untied the bundle and asked Mae for instructions. She showed me on her muddy fingers to take two or three seedlings (about fourteen inches long) and with my thumb to sink them down into the mud until the root is submerged to the first knuckle of my thumb.
I started in, and even though the sun was hot, it was okay to be in the water making my way through the mud. Transplanting was work, but pleasurable. Mae of course transplanted five for every one of mine, but together we made our way down the small field, not talking, just planting. About ten minutes in, Mae looked over and asked “soowai mai?” (beautiful?).
“Soowai.”
Once we had finished our field, we went to another field nearby to gather more seedlings. This field was also small, but packed with seedlings (now two months old from seed) growing intensely together, like grass on a golf course. Mae showed me what to do, asking me first if I am right handed or left handed. She showed me to take a handful of seedlings and put them almost flat to the ground on top of my left hand, then at the base to pull hard with my right hand, dislodging the roots when I pull.
This was much harder than transplanting! At first I broke several seedlings, getting the stem but not the root. Then I started, unlike Mae, doing just a couple at a time, and even this was hard, but at least I wasn’t killing the seedling. Mae, to my side, bent over, was motoring through the field. After she would collect a large handful, she would then rinse the roots in muddy water nearby and then kick the roots with her foot, dislodging as much soil as she could.
This part, I quickly realized, was going to take a long time to learn!
And luckily, Moo and Tey arrived with Naa, and soon everything was silliness. Tey was up past his waist in mud, and Moo started collecting wild irises (“dok gra jeeo” in Thai), pink, red, pale blue and purple, hundreds of them, almost half his height.
It was time for lunch. But not for Mae, who had already eaten lunch that she had brought with her to the field.
I figure Mae was transplanting for at least eight hours today in the hot sun, and on top of chores. And my left forearm, as I write tonight, is still sore from ninety minutes.
Emerge
EMERGE
Late Last night I drove Pa to town to the emerge. Lem, Mae, Moo, Norm and me: five people in the tiny car, and it would have been ten if the sisters were here. Pa has something weird on his thigh, like a tumour. He hates the hospital, hates doctors, and doesn’t talk very much, and for me, trying to pry things out through the dictionary. I don’t know. But an operation was scheduled for today, so another trip (the 21 kilometres on the pot-holed dirt road, everyone being cheery in the car and everyone tense).
They did xrays, and wanted to operate. Pa asked if he is in danger. He wants to “finish farm”, meaning rice harvest in December. The doctor said okay, not in danger. But Pa is in pain, and if he is in pain, he is in Pain! One day during planting season, which is almost as intense as harvest, I accidently caught Moo’s (aged three) thumb in the car door. There were about fifteen people there, eating lunch in the field before going back to work. Every single person present loves Moo like nobody’s business, and everyone saw what happened. But no one got up (as they always do, many times a day, taking care of children). This was one of those moments. Moo was in pain, big pain, and this was a moment when everyone, without saying a thing, called on Moo to put a cap on tears, and he did! (My son, Dom, who went through an extraordinary amount of pain as a child, is the same.)
Pa came back home to the farm, worked a little. He walked out to the fields, and came home through the forest, holding the bottom of his shirt up to his chest carrying a load of wild mushrooms. The farm brings him calm.
I’ve now been several times with Pa in town. The first time was when he co-signed a loan so that I could buy a car, putting up his land as collateral. It seemed so strange, sitting in a car dealership, everyone dressed in suits and talking on cell phones, and here was this man clearly from the country, wearing of course a pressed cotton shirt and shorts. (Pa, like almost every single person here, has a fashion sense that blows me away every single day. Bleached red snap-button cotton shirt, Nike cap - as if he has any clue what Nike is, or cares - and cotton shorts down below his knees. Mother’s sister number four, Fem’s grandmother, immediate neighbour to the east, is a close runner up. She doesn’t have a single piece of clothing that isn’t a great color, and that doesn’t hang beautifully off her wide strong shoulders).
Last night Pa didn’t have his dentures, his lower jaw caved in. (Pa reminds me VERY MUCH of my own father, two men with enormous personal dignity). He was polite, always polite.
A few months ago, just after buying the car, I woke up one Sunday morning looking forward to a do nothing day.
“What are you doing today,” a daughter asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied suspiciously, like there is ever a plan for the day.
“Father’s uncle, well, not his uncle, is dying. Maybe we can drive.” So we jumped into the tiny car, two toddlers, four adults, and we drove. And we drove and we drove and we drove! Hours. And I couldn’t help myself, but I was seething, simmering, beyond tired and knowing that I had to drive all the back again.
We arrived, a village, down a lane. We parked. There were a few drunken men outside wanting to practise their two words of English with the foreigner, the kids bouncing off the wall.
We went into the small house, through a front room and into another room, and there was a man close to death on a bed, an IV, and a Buddhist nun clothed in pale grey (or monk, I don’t know what to call). I don’t know exactly Pa’s connection to the man dying, but suddenly Pa looked like he was thirty. The man on the bed, realizing that it was Pa, kept his eyes closed but he smiled, and they grasped hands. The man’s hands were not a dying man’s hand, nor were his feet. He was mid-eighties, I think, but his hands were big and strong, and his feet (oh feet, another blog). Pa grinned, one side of his face to the other.
Late Last night I drove Pa to town to the emerge. Lem, Mae, Moo, Norm and me: five people in the tiny car, and it would have been ten if the sisters were here. Pa has something weird on his thigh, like a tumour. He hates the hospital, hates doctors, and doesn’t talk very much, and for me, trying to pry things out through the dictionary. I don’t know. But an operation was scheduled for today, so another trip (the 21 kilometres on the pot-holed dirt road, everyone being cheery in the car and everyone tense).
They did xrays, and wanted to operate. Pa asked if he is in danger. He wants to “finish farm”, meaning rice harvest in December. The doctor said okay, not in danger. But Pa is in pain, and if he is in pain, he is in Pain! One day during planting season, which is almost as intense as harvest, I accidently caught Moo’s (aged three) thumb in the car door. There were about fifteen people there, eating lunch in the field before going back to work. Every single person present loves Moo like nobody’s business, and everyone saw what happened. But no one got up (as they always do, many times a day, taking care of children). This was one of those moments. Moo was in pain, big pain, and this was a moment when everyone, without saying a thing, called on Moo to put a cap on tears, and he did! (My son, Dom, who went through an extraordinary amount of pain as a child, is the same.)
Pa came back home to the farm, worked a little. He walked out to the fields, and came home through the forest, holding the bottom of his shirt up to his chest carrying a load of wild mushrooms. The farm brings him calm.
I’ve now been several times with Pa in town. The first time was when he co-signed a loan so that I could buy a car, putting up his land as collateral. It seemed so strange, sitting in a car dealership, everyone dressed in suits and talking on cell phones, and here was this man clearly from the country, wearing of course a pressed cotton shirt and shorts. (Pa, like almost every single person here, has a fashion sense that blows me away every single day. Bleached red snap-button cotton shirt, Nike cap - as if he has any clue what Nike is, or cares - and cotton shorts down below his knees. Mother’s sister number four, Fem’s grandmother, immediate neighbour to the east, is a close runner up. She doesn’t have a single piece of clothing that isn’t a great color, and that doesn’t hang beautifully off her wide strong shoulders).
Last night Pa didn’t have his dentures, his lower jaw caved in. (Pa reminds me VERY MUCH of my own father, two men with enormous personal dignity). He was polite, always polite.
A few months ago, just after buying the car, I woke up one Sunday morning looking forward to a do nothing day.
“What are you doing today,” a daughter asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied suspiciously, like there is ever a plan for the day.
“Father’s uncle, well, not his uncle, is dying. Maybe we can drive.” So we jumped into the tiny car, two toddlers, four adults, and we drove. And we drove and we drove and we drove! Hours. And I couldn’t help myself, but I was seething, simmering, beyond tired and knowing that I had to drive all the back again.
We arrived, a village, down a lane. We parked. There were a few drunken men outside wanting to practise their two words of English with the foreigner, the kids bouncing off the wall.
We went into the small house, through a front room and into another room, and there was a man close to death on a bed, an IV, and a Buddhist nun clothed in pale grey (or monk, I don’t know what to call). I don’t know exactly Pa’s connection to the man dying, but suddenly Pa looked like he was thirty. The man on the bed, realizing that it was Pa, kept his eyes closed but he smiled, and they grasped hands. The man’s hands were not a dying man’s hand, nor were his feet. He was mid-eighties, I think, but his hands were big and strong, and his feet (oh feet, another blog). Pa grinned, one side of his face to the other.
kids
KIDS
I often wonder what life would be like here at the Yindichati Farm without Moo Noi and Tey. Moo is almost four, as I think I mentioned, and the son of Norm, sister number four. Tey is just turned three, and the son of Kantung, sister number seven who lives and works in Bangkok. Naa, sister number six, lost her job in Korat (the nearest big city), so she returned here to the farm to help Mae and Pa look after Tey. Kantung lives in Bangkok in order to have a job in order to make money, and sends money to Naa (and Mae and Pa) to look after Tey. In this part of Thailand (“Isaan”, or Northeast Thailand) and in other poorer parts of Thailand, this is not at all uncommon. Jobs (and money) are in the city, not in the rural areas.
But back to Moo and Tey, and as I embark I know that this is not an easy blog to write. I have two great friends in Toronto – Ed and Dawnthebaker – and their daughter, Evelyn, is same as Moo and Tey (and I miss her, and I miss them). It’s not like I love ALL children, like Boom across the road. But children! On the Yindichati Farm it’s impossible to keep a grumpy face because sooner or later I will encounter Moo or Tey. Tey will be on his tiptoes (he lives at least half of his waking hours on his tiptoes, his eyelashes longer than his big eyes wide) and Moo, oh Moo, for whom there is never a moment in life not spent curious and engaged.
I was first introduced to Tey as “he cries always.” And that was accurate. It wasn’t that he had cholic; he wasn’t a baby. But his first response to almost everything was to cry. “Just like his mother, as a baby” everyone would say, referring to sister number seven, Kantung. Moo, on the other hand, was always tough as nails. He watched his second father beat his mother badly many times. His birth father, a good man, died from cancer when he was eight months old. He lived a time with sister number two, Malai, in Bangkok. He lived with Mae and Pa. By the time he was three he’d lived in many places, urban and rural, and then suddenly he had to live with Tey, who cried all the time, and who suddenly had something to REALLY cry about: An older “brother”. Poor Moo!
Fourteen months later Moo and Tey have not only come a long way, but now they are brothers. Tey has learned not to cry (thanks in large part to Naa, having a policy of “zero tolerance” for crying). And Moo, perhaps, has increasing confidence that his world is not going to radically change just around the next corner.
For me (and I think for everyone), Moo and Tey bring laughs and smiles, and disbelief, in great abundance. Not a day passes when the two of them don’t drive me absolutely crazy, tinkering with my tape measure, whacking away at a newly planted baby tree. But they are amazingly happy kids, and it’s infectious. Fem, just down the road, is the same, and Fai (the only girl), just across the street. Boom, as I mentioned, has an alcoholic grandfather, but he is still okay. So as for parenting and grand-parenting on this dusty dirt road in the middle of sugar cane, manioc, and fields of green rice, I’m impressed.
Four o’clock each afternoon, give or take a few minutes, an old Toyota truck with benches in the back (and a roof) pulls slowly up and comes to a stop, kids’ voices, uniforms. Several kids jump off (Boom is one, aged six), backpacks on their shoulders, while all the other kids yell good-bye. Sometimes the parents and grandparents are there to meet the kids, but often not. They’re farmers after all, seven days a week and not on the clock. But everyone present is happy to see the “school bus”, happy to see the kids. The sun has already given up some of its intensity, like mushrooms in a hot skillet starting to get juicy. The colors of the day are different, all warmer.
A short while later more kids arrive, but in drips and drabs, older kids on their bicycles, more girls than boys. They’re not riding in a hurry, and seldom riding alone. They are, as I think I already wrote, almost unanimously riding on bicycles that are far bigger than they. But they’re fine. They feel almost like adults at this stage, looking in on each farm, smiling as they pass. This is already their world, as it will be soon enough for Moo and Tey.
It’s rainy season. Every other day, or every third day I would guess, they’re bicycling in the rain, in the mud, and sometimes in incredibly heavy rain, trying to protect their backpacks, their school books. There’s no other way to get home.
I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, and through grade six I attended the school about a quarter mile away, maybe more, across the prairie. We had snow, we had wind. Chad (now deceased), Everett, Russell and I would ride our bikes, bikes also way too big, down a skinny dirt path.
Moo and Tey - maybe they’ll end up in Bangkok, or Khon Khaen, or Korat. Or Dubai? But at three years old and four years old, they are strong and they are happy (and this, a way TOO big a subject, for me, to write about! ....but it’s a blog.)
A beautiful green monster preying-mantis-type bug just landed on my laptop as I write. Nue, Kantung, and Soora all won the lottery today, but that’s perhaps a better subject left for tomorrow (not the BIG lottery, and not a legal lottery, but still.....).
I often wonder what life would be like here at the Yindichati Farm without Moo Noi and Tey. Moo is almost four, as I think I mentioned, and the son of Norm, sister number four. Tey is just turned three, and the son of Kantung, sister number seven who lives and works in Bangkok. Naa, sister number six, lost her job in Korat (the nearest big city), so she returned here to the farm to help Mae and Pa look after Tey. Kantung lives in Bangkok in order to have a job in order to make money, and sends money to Naa (and Mae and Pa) to look after Tey. In this part of Thailand (“Isaan”, or Northeast Thailand) and in other poorer parts of Thailand, this is not at all uncommon. Jobs (and money) are in the city, not in the rural areas.
But back to Moo and Tey, and as I embark I know that this is not an easy blog to write. I have two great friends in Toronto – Ed and Dawnthebaker – and their daughter, Evelyn, is same as Moo and Tey (and I miss her, and I miss them). It’s not like I love ALL children, like Boom across the road. But children! On the Yindichati Farm it’s impossible to keep a grumpy face because sooner or later I will encounter Moo or Tey. Tey will be on his tiptoes (he lives at least half of his waking hours on his tiptoes, his eyelashes longer than his big eyes wide) and Moo, oh Moo, for whom there is never a moment in life not spent curious and engaged.
I was first introduced to Tey as “he cries always.” And that was accurate. It wasn’t that he had cholic; he wasn’t a baby. But his first response to almost everything was to cry. “Just like his mother, as a baby” everyone would say, referring to sister number seven, Kantung. Moo, on the other hand, was always tough as nails. He watched his second father beat his mother badly many times. His birth father, a good man, died from cancer when he was eight months old. He lived a time with sister number two, Malai, in Bangkok. He lived with Mae and Pa. By the time he was three he’d lived in many places, urban and rural, and then suddenly he had to live with Tey, who cried all the time, and who suddenly had something to REALLY cry about: An older “brother”. Poor Moo!
Fourteen months later Moo and Tey have not only come a long way, but now they are brothers. Tey has learned not to cry (thanks in large part to Naa, having a policy of “zero tolerance” for crying). And Moo, perhaps, has increasing confidence that his world is not going to radically change just around the next corner.
For me (and I think for everyone), Moo and Tey bring laughs and smiles, and disbelief, in great abundance. Not a day passes when the two of them don’t drive me absolutely crazy, tinkering with my tape measure, whacking away at a newly planted baby tree. But they are amazingly happy kids, and it’s infectious. Fem, just down the road, is the same, and Fai (the only girl), just across the street. Boom, as I mentioned, has an alcoholic grandfather, but he is still okay. So as for parenting and grand-parenting on this dusty dirt road in the middle of sugar cane, manioc, and fields of green rice, I’m impressed.
Four o’clock each afternoon, give or take a few minutes, an old Toyota truck with benches in the back (and a roof) pulls slowly up and comes to a stop, kids’ voices, uniforms. Several kids jump off (Boom is one, aged six), backpacks on their shoulders, while all the other kids yell good-bye. Sometimes the parents and grandparents are there to meet the kids, but often not. They’re farmers after all, seven days a week and not on the clock. But everyone present is happy to see the “school bus”, happy to see the kids. The sun has already given up some of its intensity, like mushrooms in a hot skillet starting to get juicy. The colors of the day are different, all warmer.
A short while later more kids arrive, but in drips and drabs, older kids on their bicycles, more girls than boys. They’re not riding in a hurry, and seldom riding alone. They are, as I think I already wrote, almost unanimously riding on bicycles that are far bigger than they. But they’re fine. They feel almost like adults at this stage, looking in on each farm, smiling as they pass. This is already their world, as it will be soon enough for Moo and Tey.
It’s rainy season. Every other day, or every third day I would guess, they’re bicycling in the rain, in the mud, and sometimes in incredibly heavy rain, trying to protect their backpacks, their school books. There’s no other way to get home.
I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, and through grade six I attended the school about a quarter mile away, maybe more, across the prairie. We had snow, we had wind. Chad (now deceased), Everett, Russell and I would ride our bikes, bikes also way too big, down a skinny dirt path.
Moo and Tey - maybe they’ll end up in Bangkok, or Khon Khaen, or Korat. Or Dubai? But at three years old and four years old, they are strong and they are happy (and this, a way TOO big a subject, for me, to write about! ....but it’s a blog.)
A beautiful green monster preying-mantis-type bug just landed on my laptop as I write. Nue, Kantung, and Soora all won the lottery today, but that’s perhaps a better subject left for tomorrow (not the BIG lottery, and not a legal lottery, but still.....).
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
food, where to start
FOOD – WHERE TO START?
In June when I was flying this direction, on my first flight from Toronto to San Francisco, the person sitting next to me was a very nice, young South Asian woman from England now married and living in Toronto. We had one of those conversations that are just great good luck, starting in and not stopping for the entire five hours, going places in our conversation where normally people don’t go knowing that we most likely would never meet again.
At one point we were talking about Thailand, because that’s where I was heading, and I mentioned that sometimes I know that Thais can be somewhat racist about people from South Asia, something about “dirty”, and not in the personal hygiene sense. I mentioned that I felt that some of it had to do with food and diet, and immediately my seat mate nodded in agreement.
“You know,” she confided, “the racism, or whatever it is, goes both ways. We find Southeast Asians, well, you know. The things they eat! For people from India, we can’t imagine eating those things.”
I smiled hugely. I had never heard that expressed, but immediately it made sense to me. Here at the Yindichati Farm I am every day reminded of south India and Sri Lanka, the smells, the environment, the arc of a day, everything. But it is absolutely true that in these very similar tropical environments people eat radically different. Jackfruit, for example, an abundant and “free” food, a much-loved food, is never that I know of here eaten as a vegetable (a starch). Here it is only eaten when the fruit becomes sweet and ripe, whereas in Sri Lanka and South India it is most commonly eaten before it is ripe, almost like eating a potato. The same goes for green plantain. It may be here, but I never recall seeing it, and yet in South Asia again it is a very important starch.
Some of the difference in South Asia can obviously be attributed to vegetarian diets and the importance of carbohydrates in a vegetarian diet. Here at the Yindichati Farm there is very little that is “prohibited” in terms of food. Of the seven Yindichati daughters, it is interesting that I don’t know a single one who eats beef, even though both parents do, and keeping cows for food is very common here. The daughters all say that beef is “men”, it smells bad, a description that is more than simply smell. Last night I was told that Pun and her husband eat dog, but that is not at all common here. Neither is the eating of snake.
In the food of Sri Lanka (especially among the Sinhalese) I find the greatest similarity with Southeast Asian cooking. The common use of dried bonita, for example, is very much like the palate here. So too is the sharpness of the curries, and the use of bitter fruits and leaves, various tree legumes, and fresh chiles as opposed to dried.
So what is food like here at the Yindichati Farm? That’s worth many blogs! It is fabulous. It is unbelievably varied and abundant. It is always present, kept under a netting in the kitchen so that whoever wants to eat at whatever time can do so. The Yindichati house has no tables or chairs, no furniture whatsoever except for armoire–type things to keep clean clothes clean. Cooking happens on the floor, and eating happens on the floor, whether it is on the veranda, or in the front room or the back room (the farmhouse is basically two large rooms plus a second floor that is almost never used (it’s too hot!). I have been here for several different festival days: two cremations, one ordination. And the back room will literally have forty women sitting on the floor with tamarind cutting boards and mortar and pestles.
Food at the Yindichati farm? In some ways, almost life itself.
In June when I was flying this direction, on my first flight from Toronto to San Francisco, the person sitting next to me was a very nice, young South Asian woman from England now married and living in Toronto. We had one of those conversations that are just great good luck, starting in and not stopping for the entire five hours, going places in our conversation where normally people don’t go knowing that we most likely would never meet again.
At one point we were talking about Thailand, because that’s where I was heading, and I mentioned that sometimes I know that Thais can be somewhat racist about people from South Asia, something about “dirty”, and not in the personal hygiene sense. I mentioned that I felt that some of it had to do with food and diet, and immediately my seat mate nodded in agreement.
“You know,” she confided, “the racism, or whatever it is, goes both ways. We find Southeast Asians, well, you know. The things they eat! For people from India, we can’t imagine eating those things.”
I smiled hugely. I had never heard that expressed, but immediately it made sense to me. Here at the Yindichati Farm I am every day reminded of south India and Sri Lanka, the smells, the environment, the arc of a day, everything. But it is absolutely true that in these very similar tropical environments people eat radically different. Jackfruit, for example, an abundant and “free” food, a much-loved food, is never that I know of here eaten as a vegetable (a starch). Here it is only eaten when the fruit becomes sweet and ripe, whereas in Sri Lanka and South India it is most commonly eaten before it is ripe, almost like eating a potato. The same goes for green plantain. It may be here, but I never recall seeing it, and yet in South Asia again it is a very important starch.
Some of the difference in South Asia can obviously be attributed to vegetarian diets and the importance of carbohydrates in a vegetarian diet. Here at the Yindichati Farm there is very little that is “prohibited” in terms of food. Of the seven Yindichati daughters, it is interesting that I don’t know a single one who eats beef, even though both parents do, and keeping cows for food is very common here. The daughters all say that beef is “men”, it smells bad, a description that is more than simply smell. Last night I was told that Pun and her husband eat dog, but that is not at all common here. Neither is the eating of snake.
In the food of Sri Lanka (especially among the Sinhalese) I find the greatest similarity with Southeast Asian cooking. The common use of dried bonita, for example, is very much like the palate here. So too is the sharpness of the curries, and the use of bitter fruits and leaves, various tree legumes, and fresh chiles as opposed to dried.
So what is food like here at the Yindichati Farm? That’s worth many blogs! It is fabulous. It is unbelievably varied and abundant. It is always present, kept under a netting in the kitchen so that whoever wants to eat at whatever time can do so. The Yindichati house has no tables or chairs, no furniture whatsoever except for armoire–type things to keep clean clothes clean. Cooking happens on the floor, and eating happens on the floor, whether it is on the veranda, or in the front room or the back room (the farmhouse is basically two large rooms plus a second floor that is almost never used (it’s too hot!). I have been here for several different festival days: two cremations, one ordination. And the back room will literally have forty women sitting on the floor with tamarind cutting boards and mortar and pestles.
Food at the Yindichati farm? In some ways, almost life itself.
sakpa
SAKPA
Up there with “buie” is another object/verb/concept that is hugely important at the Yindichati Farm, and that is “sakpa”. Sakpa is the word for washing clothes, and it’s also used as a noun, as in “clean clothes.” The first time I arrived here, on a steamy June rainy season night in 2008, we at one point walked across the road (muddy as could be, walking on planks and occasionally slipping into the mud) to Pun’s house where there was a stereo system, and where everyone could drink and dance (morlam/luktung, lao music). I remember being there, a hard-packed mud floor, looking around the room and seeing on three of the four walls long bamboo poles suspended from the ceiling. From every bamboo pole there were clothes hanging - shirts and trousers - in long lines. I remember thinking that this family must be in the laundry business.
Now I know better. People living on northeastern Thailand farms, just like people living on farms in Canada, or the United States, dress well! Clothes are laundered every day (sakpa), ironed (reep), and carefully hung up, no matter if you live with a tin roof, improvised walls, and hard-packed mud floors (as in the case of Pun and family), or if you live in the Yindichati farmhouse, with brick walls and tiled floors. Sakpa is sacred.
I grew up shopping at Goodwill. I’m a person who doesn’t sweat a lot, and growing up in dry-as-a-bone Wyoming, laundry was more of an extravagance than a necessity. But here things are very different. If I take off a t-shirt thinking that I will wear it the next day, the t-shirt disappears within the half-hour. Sakpa. If I dress heading out to a cremation, or an ordination, and my shorts (which are completely acceptable) aren’t ironed, then no one is leaving the house!
Naomi, Dom, Tash and I have owned a farm in rural Ontario for about ten years. I didn’t grow up on a farm; I grew up in a town, a university town of about 20,000 people, in Wyoming. I guess I was a “towny”, only I’m not too sure that term existed there. Southern Wyoming doesn’t have farms; it has ranches. But come to think of it, those ranch kids, and parents, were always “turned out”. Those trousers were always ironed, as were those shirt collars.
Over these last ten years in rural Ontario I have come to appreciate the term “clean farm.” The Yindichati farm might not appear particularly “clean” to someone arriving for the first time, but it is immaculately clean, as are almost all farms here, and as are most farms everywhere. Dirty farms are like a restaurant kitchen that gets behind. There is no catching up. When you don’t clean the hoods and the walls, the grease builds up, and then the battle’s over.
But a farm is even more so. A farm is not a business that you punch into and out of. It’s your home, your life. It’s your art. It’s how you take care of your parents, and it’s what you hope can help take care of your children. There is no Sunday-off (at least here).
Clean farm. Clean clothes. Pride. And then at that ordination, dance like hell!
Up there with “buie” is another object/verb/concept that is hugely important at the Yindichati Farm, and that is “sakpa”. Sakpa is the word for washing clothes, and it’s also used as a noun, as in “clean clothes.” The first time I arrived here, on a steamy June rainy season night in 2008, we at one point walked across the road (muddy as could be, walking on planks and occasionally slipping into the mud) to Pun’s house where there was a stereo system, and where everyone could drink and dance (morlam/luktung, lao music). I remember being there, a hard-packed mud floor, looking around the room and seeing on three of the four walls long bamboo poles suspended from the ceiling. From every bamboo pole there were clothes hanging - shirts and trousers - in long lines. I remember thinking that this family must be in the laundry business.
Now I know better. People living on northeastern Thailand farms, just like people living on farms in Canada, or the United States, dress well! Clothes are laundered every day (sakpa), ironed (reep), and carefully hung up, no matter if you live with a tin roof, improvised walls, and hard-packed mud floors (as in the case of Pun and family), or if you live in the Yindichati farmhouse, with brick walls and tiled floors. Sakpa is sacred.
I grew up shopping at Goodwill. I’m a person who doesn’t sweat a lot, and growing up in dry-as-a-bone Wyoming, laundry was more of an extravagance than a necessity. But here things are very different. If I take off a t-shirt thinking that I will wear it the next day, the t-shirt disappears within the half-hour. Sakpa. If I dress heading out to a cremation, or an ordination, and my shorts (which are completely acceptable) aren’t ironed, then no one is leaving the house!
Naomi, Dom, Tash and I have owned a farm in rural Ontario for about ten years. I didn’t grow up on a farm; I grew up in a town, a university town of about 20,000 people, in Wyoming. I guess I was a “towny”, only I’m not too sure that term existed there. Southern Wyoming doesn’t have farms; it has ranches. But come to think of it, those ranch kids, and parents, were always “turned out”. Those trousers were always ironed, as were those shirt collars.
Over these last ten years in rural Ontario I have come to appreciate the term “clean farm.” The Yindichati farm might not appear particularly “clean” to someone arriving for the first time, but it is immaculately clean, as are almost all farms here, and as are most farms everywhere. Dirty farms are like a restaurant kitchen that gets behind. There is no catching up. When you don’t clean the hoods and the walls, the grease builds up, and then the battle’s over.
But a farm is even more so. A farm is not a business that you punch into and out of. It’s your home, your life. It’s your art. It’s how you take care of your parents, and it’s what you hope can help take care of your children. There is no Sunday-off (at least here).
Clean farm. Clean clothes. Pride. And then at that ordination, dance like hell!
powder
POWDER
Okay okay, I will admit it straightaway. Like everyone else here, I have become addicted to powder, baby powder. I smother it on morning, afternoon, and night, and when the pink container gets low I find myself in a panic. Tey and Moo Noi one day had a powder fight (not an uncommon occurrence around here), and I was furious, though not because of the mess (everything was white!), but because they had used up nearly the whole container.
I was here in hot season (April and May), and it was hot, but rainy season I am finding somehow hotter. The first few weeks of June I was itching like crazy under my shorts and on the back of my neck and shoulders, and not from the ants or the mosquitoes. I couldn’t figure it out, but often I would have a light rash and it would itch a lot, especially in the heat. One day I was in the bathroom (worthy of separate blog, or two, or three....) and I looked at the pink container of baby powder. “Aha,” I thought. I picked up the container and sprinkled a little in my palm and then rubbed it on. “Not bad,” I thought. The next time I was in the shower and I did the same, and again and again, and after a few days the rash was gone! And so was the itching.
The next time I was in town I stopped into Seven/Eleven (an institution in Thailand), and shyly made my way over to the Powder section, which was not a small section. The choice of powders was dizzying, but I picked up the trusted Pink Container and went, even more shyly, to the counter. The clerk didn’t blink: a fifty-five year old man buying Baby Powder. And I left the store in joy.
My number one problem here on the farm, now that the heat rash has been solved, is ants. Mollison explains in Permaculture that ants and termites function in tropical environments like worms do in temperate climates, breaking down organic matter. Reading Mollison helped me feel better about the ants, but still, they are my dread of dreads. When pruning trees, especially mangoes and tamarinds, there are big red ants, thousands of them, and right as I go to swing my machete one will bite me in an armpit, or on the back of my neck. The bite is a real bite, and it is hard not to twitch or to jump. Pa climbs the trees in his bare feet, and in shorts, and will spend an hour pruning a large tree. I don’t know how he does it.
But the bite of the big red ants isn’t nearly as bad as a certain tiny black ant, and forgive me for not knowing the name of the species (there are an incredible number and variety of ants). I think of them as most often out at dusk, or dark. One night I stepped outside, and not finding my flipflops I thought that I’d be okay. But in thirty seconds both my feet were on fire, burning from a million different spots. It has only happened twice, and both times were terrible.
And there is one more ant, also small and black. It is a different bite, not big but distinctive. When I get the bite I swear, though under my breath (swearing is not much liked here). I know that the next day, and the day after, I’ll be itching and itching. It is a bite like a flea bite (for those who react to flea bites), or a bed bug bite. It lingers.
So far I am considering myself lucky. I haven’t that I know about been bitten by a scorpion, of which there are many, or a centipede. A centipede bite puts father on his back for a day. Naa doesn’t react to either one. I am hoping I am more like Naa!
Okay okay, I will admit it straightaway. Like everyone else here, I have become addicted to powder, baby powder. I smother it on morning, afternoon, and night, and when the pink container gets low I find myself in a panic. Tey and Moo Noi one day had a powder fight (not an uncommon occurrence around here), and I was furious, though not because of the mess (everything was white!), but because they had used up nearly the whole container.
I was here in hot season (April and May), and it was hot, but rainy season I am finding somehow hotter. The first few weeks of June I was itching like crazy under my shorts and on the back of my neck and shoulders, and not from the ants or the mosquitoes. I couldn’t figure it out, but often I would have a light rash and it would itch a lot, especially in the heat. One day I was in the bathroom (worthy of separate blog, or two, or three....) and I looked at the pink container of baby powder. “Aha,” I thought. I picked up the container and sprinkled a little in my palm and then rubbed it on. “Not bad,” I thought. The next time I was in the shower and I did the same, and again and again, and after a few days the rash was gone! And so was the itching.
The next time I was in town I stopped into Seven/Eleven (an institution in Thailand), and shyly made my way over to the Powder section, which was not a small section. The choice of powders was dizzying, but I picked up the trusted Pink Container and went, even more shyly, to the counter. The clerk didn’t blink: a fifty-five year old man buying Baby Powder. And I left the store in joy.
My number one problem here on the farm, now that the heat rash has been solved, is ants. Mollison explains in Permaculture that ants and termites function in tropical environments like worms do in temperate climates, breaking down organic matter. Reading Mollison helped me feel better about the ants, but still, they are my dread of dreads. When pruning trees, especially mangoes and tamarinds, there are big red ants, thousands of them, and right as I go to swing my machete one will bite me in an armpit, or on the back of my neck. The bite is a real bite, and it is hard not to twitch or to jump. Pa climbs the trees in his bare feet, and in shorts, and will spend an hour pruning a large tree. I don’t know how he does it.
But the bite of the big red ants isn’t nearly as bad as a certain tiny black ant, and forgive me for not knowing the name of the species (there are an incredible number and variety of ants). I think of them as most often out at dusk, or dark. One night I stepped outside, and not finding my flipflops I thought that I’d be okay. But in thirty seconds both my feet were on fire, burning from a million different spots. It has only happened twice, and both times were terrible.
And there is one more ant, also small and black. It is a different bite, not big but distinctive. When I get the bite I swear, though under my breath (swearing is not much liked here). I know that the next day, and the day after, I’ll be itching and itching. It is a bite like a flea bite (for those who react to flea bites), or a bed bug bite. It lingers.
So far I am considering myself lucky. I haven’t that I know about been bitten by a scorpion, of which there are many, or a centipede. A centipede bite puts father on his back for a day. Naa doesn’t react to either one. I am hoping I am more like Naa!
we deliver
WE DELIVER
Only one person in the village owns a car, and while many people have motorbikes, just as many don’t. And town is twenty-one kilometres away. One of the many unique ways in which life here moves forward is thanks to very old second hand Toyota trucks. All day long they drive slowly up and down the dirt road, some with loudspeakers, some not. Each truck has a different item to sell, and they are most of the time items that would require a vehicle to carry. One truck will have cheaply made clothing chests, another refrigerators, another piled high with mattresses. When you see a truck carrying something that you need, you simply yell out and the truck will come gradually to a stop.
But the transaction, if there is a transaction, will never happen quickly. First you survey the item as if it is a piece of garbage not worthy of purchase. You find a flaw here, a flaw there. Neighbors gather and everyone frowns and agrees, not worthy of purchase. But well, just in case, “how much?” The vendor gives the quote and everyone gasps. Robbery!
“That’s crazy! Do you how much it goes forth in Nangrong (town)? A fraction of that price.”
“But this isn’t Nangrong,” the vendor politely points out. “Do you know the price of gasoline these days?”
The bartering goes back and forth. No one is really unhappy, because most of the time the purchaser has been waiting days or weeks for that particular truck to show up, and it is hard to conceal their pleasure.
I, for example, today was at last rewarded for my enduring patience. For two months I have looked up at every truck, hoping but never seeing the object of my desire. I’d come to wonder if that certain truck would ever pass this way, because even though I have a car now, transporting on my own would be impossible. And it is not like I want that much, just what every other household has! An ong.
Ong’s are an Isaan thing, worth their weight in gold in a country that goes dry for months on end. An ong is a large earthenware jug, about the size of an old Volkswagon Beetle, weighing about four hundred kilos, one ton. Rain water is stored in the ong, and most farms have at least three or four. Various neighbours, knowing how much I wanted an ong, offered to give me an extra one. And however nice the offer seemed, I could never imagine how I would move one, or how they got theirs in the first place. Whenever I would pursue the question, people would just laugh as if to say, “just wait and see.”
Today I looked up and there was a truck, quite a bit larger than a second hand Toyota. It was coming slowly up the road, six beautiful large white ongs on a platform behind. “Yoot, yoot,” I yelled. Stop stop! And then they did of course, and a crowd gathered. “How much?” the question at last arrived. “Seven hundred fifty baht,” about twenty-five dollars, which was much less than I expected.
“Yes,” I blurted out. “I will take two.”
He drove the big truck back to where the ongs were to go, and then we cleared the sight. The two guys then put two long two-by-sixes, tropical hardwoods, up against the end of the truck and then slid an ong over the side, it’s weight carrying it onto and down the hardwoods. It was miraculous, two people moving one giant ong. With the ong on its side, the three of us could roll it over and then up small incline, then tipping it upright into place. They explained that I should fill each ong only part way up with rain water, then wait a day, then fill again, taking three days altogether. I’m not sure why, but I think it has to do with somehow curing the clay.
Fourteen hundred for the two they told me, giving me a discount. Then it was lunchtime, and no one is ever turned away when food is ready. It’s how it all works.
Only one person in the village owns a car, and while many people have motorbikes, just as many don’t. And town is twenty-one kilometres away. One of the many unique ways in which life here moves forward is thanks to very old second hand Toyota trucks. All day long they drive slowly up and down the dirt road, some with loudspeakers, some not. Each truck has a different item to sell, and they are most of the time items that would require a vehicle to carry. One truck will have cheaply made clothing chests, another refrigerators, another piled high with mattresses. When you see a truck carrying something that you need, you simply yell out and the truck will come gradually to a stop.
But the transaction, if there is a transaction, will never happen quickly. First you survey the item as if it is a piece of garbage not worthy of purchase. You find a flaw here, a flaw there. Neighbors gather and everyone frowns and agrees, not worthy of purchase. But well, just in case, “how much?” The vendor gives the quote and everyone gasps. Robbery!
“That’s crazy! Do you how much it goes forth in Nangrong (town)? A fraction of that price.”
“But this isn’t Nangrong,” the vendor politely points out. “Do you know the price of gasoline these days?”
The bartering goes back and forth. No one is really unhappy, because most of the time the purchaser has been waiting days or weeks for that particular truck to show up, and it is hard to conceal their pleasure.
I, for example, today was at last rewarded for my enduring patience. For two months I have looked up at every truck, hoping but never seeing the object of my desire. I’d come to wonder if that certain truck would ever pass this way, because even though I have a car now, transporting on my own would be impossible. And it is not like I want that much, just what every other household has! An ong.
Ong’s are an Isaan thing, worth their weight in gold in a country that goes dry for months on end. An ong is a large earthenware jug, about the size of an old Volkswagon Beetle, weighing about four hundred kilos, one ton. Rain water is stored in the ong, and most farms have at least three or four. Various neighbours, knowing how much I wanted an ong, offered to give me an extra one. And however nice the offer seemed, I could never imagine how I would move one, or how they got theirs in the first place. Whenever I would pursue the question, people would just laugh as if to say, “just wait and see.”
Today I looked up and there was a truck, quite a bit larger than a second hand Toyota. It was coming slowly up the road, six beautiful large white ongs on a platform behind. “Yoot, yoot,” I yelled. Stop stop! And then they did of course, and a crowd gathered. “How much?” the question at last arrived. “Seven hundred fifty baht,” about twenty-five dollars, which was much less than I expected.
“Yes,” I blurted out. “I will take two.”
He drove the big truck back to where the ongs were to go, and then we cleared the sight. The two guys then put two long two-by-sixes, tropical hardwoods, up against the end of the truck and then slid an ong over the side, it’s weight carrying it onto and down the hardwoods. It was miraculous, two people moving one giant ong. With the ong on its side, the three of us could roll it over and then up small incline, then tipping it upright into place. They explained that I should fill each ong only part way up with rain water, then wait a day, then fill again, taking three days altogether. I’m not sure why, but I think it has to do with somehow curing the clay.
Fourteen hundred for the two they told me, giving me a discount. Then it was lunchtime, and no one is ever turned away when food is ready. It’s how it all works.
buie
BUIE
Two days pass and too tired to write. It all started in the morning, heading out to the forest to collect “green manure”, tree legumes to mulch on the bare soil of which we have a lot right now. I grabbed my favorite machete and the two-wheeled wheel barrow and made my way down the long dirt path through the front field of manioc. When I first came to the Yindichati Farm, the forest was a scary place to me, more like a jungle than a forest. At ground level the bush is thick with creeping vines and ferns. “Snakes!” was my first thought.
But the forest makes more sense to me now. I wear my tall black rubber boots and make my way along slowly, always carrying a machete (not that it would help, but it makes me feel better). The forest canopy, when I bend my head back ninety degrees and look straight up, is the home of pheung and dtang and tall bamboos that remind me of skyscrapers in the city. They own the forest; they own the horizon from my back door. Below them are wild jackfruit and makham and so many different species of trees that every twenty feet I stop and take inventory, trying to learn what at least some of them are.
Two days ago I was looking for tree legumes that I could prune. A few months ago I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a tree legume. I knew about crop legumes, like soybeans, that fix nitrogen in the soil, but I didn’t know that trees can also be legumes.
I have with me on this trip an incredible book, my bible of sorts. It is called Permaculture, by Bill Mollison. Good friends in Grey County, Ontario lent me their copy, which was unbelievably nice as it is a very special book, and it is also expensive! There is barely a day that passes here where I don’t spend at least some time reading and rereading Mollison’s chapters on tropical agriculture. Much of it is way over my head, not being a botanist or even a farmer, but I find that over time it seeps in. Mollison is from Queensland in Australia, a tropical location much like here, so he knows a lot about the specific problems that arise in monsoon climates.
It was in the book that I learned about tree legumes, and about “green manure”, and it was the reason I was in the forest looking for mulch. I don’t know what the names of all the leguminous trees are, but they are quite easy to spot because they have fern-like leaves. A common one here is the tamarind tree, makham in Thai. At dinner every night there is always a plate piled high with fresh leaves, often many different kinds, all tree legumes. About half of them I can’t eat because I find them incredibly bitter, but the Yindichati family just laughs at me, smiling as if to say “sooner or later”. They refer to them as “yaa”, or medicine. I tease, calling them all buffaloes.
But back to the forest and two days ago. When I returned with my load of tree legume, plus some shredded bamboo that Mollison recommends for silica and calcium, and put it in the place where we will have a new vegetable garden, no one took much notice. I drank a bottle of water and headed back, now drenched in sweat as the day was heating up. Back in the forest I chopped away once again, loading up the wheel barrow. At one point an old man startled me, coming up from behind. “What am I doing?” he asked in Korat. I explained that I am planting a garden, and he shook his head, understanding, and then replied: “buie.”
Buie, or “fertilizer” roughly translated, is a hugely important thing here, and not just a thing but a concept. When the kids pee in the flower garden someone will casually say “buie.” When I have sawdust from making furniture someone will remind me: “buie”. People have been farming here for over 1000 years. A major Khmer temple, Phanom Rung, is just a short drive away. Angkor Wat is across the border and a half day’s drive. This is old farmland, and plus, being in the monsoon corridor, the soils are leached by the rains year in and year out. Fertilizer, or “buie”, is essential in whatever form it takes. Without fertilizer there is no farm.
With my second load of tree legume, I heard chopping in the trees just behind the house. I went to look and sure enough Pa was twenty-five feet up in the tree, shorts and bare feet, completely pruning a khilek (cassia siamea), huge branches crashing to the ground. He looked at me and smiled. Neither one of us needed to say anything. I went to grab my hatchet and began helping. By dusk we had the garden area three feet high with tree legume, khilek.
Exhausted, Pa drank a glass of lao khao (rice whiskey) and me a beer (I like lao khao, but here at the farm I have more or less sworn off liquor besides beer, finding it just way too much for me). Pa and I don’t talk much because Pa doesn’t talk that much in general, and when he does his heavily accented Korat is very difficult for me to understand. But we smile a lot, and we “connect” a lot. “Do I want more?” I realize he is asking. “Yes,” I reply.
Next day, early, Pa prunes another khilek, this one even larger. And by nightfall I tidy up the last remains, completely exhausted.
Green manure. Buie.
Two days pass and too tired to write. It all started in the morning, heading out to the forest to collect “green manure”, tree legumes to mulch on the bare soil of which we have a lot right now. I grabbed my favorite machete and the two-wheeled wheel barrow and made my way down the long dirt path through the front field of manioc. When I first came to the Yindichati Farm, the forest was a scary place to me, more like a jungle than a forest. At ground level the bush is thick with creeping vines and ferns. “Snakes!” was my first thought.
But the forest makes more sense to me now. I wear my tall black rubber boots and make my way along slowly, always carrying a machete (not that it would help, but it makes me feel better). The forest canopy, when I bend my head back ninety degrees and look straight up, is the home of pheung and dtang and tall bamboos that remind me of skyscrapers in the city. They own the forest; they own the horizon from my back door. Below them are wild jackfruit and makham and so many different species of trees that every twenty feet I stop and take inventory, trying to learn what at least some of them are.
Two days ago I was looking for tree legumes that I could prune. A few months ago I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a tree legume. I knew about crop legumes, like soybeans, that fix nitrogen in the soil, but I didn’t know that trees can also be legumes.
I have with me on this trip an incredible book, my bible of sorts. It is called Permaculture, by Bill Mollison. Good friends in Grey County, Ontario lent me their copy, which was unbelievably nice as it is a very special book, and it is also expensive! There is barely a day that passes here where I don’t spend at least some time reading and rereading Mollison’s chapters on tropical agriculture. Much of it is way over my head, not being a botanist or even a farmer, but I find that over time it seeps in. Mollison is from Queensland in Australia, a tropical location much like here, so he knows a lot about the specific problems that arise in monsoon climates.
It was in the book that I learned about tree legumes, and about “green manure”, and it was the reason I was in the forest looking for mulch. I don’t know what the names of all the leguminous trees are, but they are quite easy to spot because they have fern-like leaves. A common one here is the tamarind tree, makham in Thai. At dinner every night there is always a plate piled high with fresh leaves, often many different kinds, all tree legumes. About half of them I can’t eat because I find them incredibly bitter, but the Yindichati family just laughs at me, smiling as if to say “sooner or later”. They refer to them as “yaa”, or medicine. I tease, calling them all buffaloes.
But back to the forest and two days ago. When I returned with my load of tree legume, plus some shredded bamboo that Mollison recommends for silica and calcium, and put it in the place where we will have a new vegetable garden, no one took much notice. I drank a bottle of water and headed back, now drenched in sweat as the day was heating up. Back in the forest I chopped away once again, loading up the wheel barrow. At one point an old man startled me, coming up from behind. “What am I doing?” he asked in Korat. I explained that I am planting a garden, and he shook his head, understanding, and then replied: “buie.”
Buie, or “fertilizer” roughly translated, is a hugely important thing here, and not just a thing but a concept. When the kids pee in the flower garden someone will casually say “buie.” When I have sawdust from making furniture someone will remind me: “buie”. People have been farming here for over 1000 years. A major Khmer temple, Phanom Rung, is just a short drive away. Angkor Wat is across the border and a half day’s drive. This is old farmland, and plus, being in the monsoon corridor, the soils are leached by the rains year in and year out. Fertilizer, or “buie”, is essential in whatever form it takes. Without fertilizer there is no farm.
With my second load of tree legume, I heard chopping in the trees just behind the house. I went to look and sure enough Pa was twenty-five feet up in the tree, shorts and bare feet, completely pruning a khilek (cassia siamea), huge branches crashing to the ground. He looked at me and smiled. Neither one of us needed to say anything. I went to grab my hatchet and began helping. By dusk we had the garden area three feet high with tree legume, khilek.
Exhausted, Pa drank a glass of lao khao (rice whiskey) and me a beer (I like lao khao, but here at the farm I have more or less sworn off liquor besides beer, finding it just way too much for me). Pa and I don’t talk much because Pa doesn’t talk that much in general, and when he does his heavily accented Korat is very difficult for me to understand. But we smile a lot, and we “connect” a lot. “Do I want more?” I realize he is asking. “Yes,” I reply.
Next day, early, Pa prunes another khilek, this one even larger. And by nightfall I tidy up the last remains, completely exhausted.
Green manure. Buie.
A FRIDAY
All day I have been thinking about things to write. It’s not hard here, coming up with things to write; it’s more a matter of choosing. I had a good idea while I was working outside this morning, but then I kept working and didn’t write. Then I had another idea this afternoon, and as I was working away I was composing in my mind. But then I took a nap, and after the nap, groggy as could be, I went out to garden a bit, just to wake up. And sure enough one thing led to another and soon I had completely forgotten about writing. I went to transplant some baby banana trees, but Mae yelled out from across the yard to stop. “Mai alloi,” she told me firmly, not delicious. She will find me others, she explained. “How big?” she asked. “Only babies,” I replied.
Time passed, maybe an hour. I forgot about the bananas, and the tropical sky was turning pink, almost time for a shower. But up comes Mae on her bicycle, the two-wheeled wheel barrow in tow. In the wheel barrow were four banana trees, each about eight to ten feet tall. “Alloi,” she said in her wonderful matter-of-fact way, as she began unloading the very heavy banana trees.
Trees are planted differently here than I am accustomed to in Canada. Instead of leaving a trough around the tree to catch water, soil is mounded up around the base of the tree, like building a pyramid up the trunk so that water runs away from the roots and doesn’t puddle and flood. But in planting flowering shrubs like gardenia and jasmine, Mae very delicately places the dug soil back in, and leaves a trough instead of making a pyramid. I don’t know why, but together we’ve planted A LOT of trees, and she definitely knows what she is doing, because not a single tree is having a problem!
Pa has been working three days straight with two other older men (Pa is sixty-eight years old) building a concrete fish pond attached to the farmhouse. Mid-afternoon I could tell that all three men were feeling tired, and seeing Pa tired was a first for me. He and Mae are two of the most incredible day-to-day people I have ever been around. They are both up well before dawn, and they have strength and stamina that is beyond description (and good humour, I should mention). Mae is fifty-seven or so (age, a blog for a different time...). The first time I met Mae I thought she must be very old, because she often crosses a room hunched over at a ninety-degree angle, as if permanently disabled from working all her life in rice paddies. But now I know that the reason she does it is simply because it is more convenient, and she is DAMNED strong! Mae and Pa are deeply embarrassing for me, being older than me and immensely fit. But I’ve gotten over it.
So there is Pa and these two guys, dawn to dusk, three days in a row carrying sand, gravel, concrete, and mixing and laying the concrete. It’s not like Pa needs another fish pond, but this one is “free”, paid for by the government (not the labour, mind you). And “free” is an important concept here in a relatively cashless culture (but that too is better left for another day’s blog).
Pa is famous for his fish. Nowadays I wake up around seven thirty, which is a big improvement for me (I’ve never been an early riser), but by that time Pa has already been out to the rice fields, about a ten-minute walk, harvested his fish traps from his several hand-built ponds, and returned. Black plastic buckets in the outdoor kitchen are already making a racket, the live fish thrashing wildly in a confined space.
Father builds his traps by hand, slivering bamboo with his machete, while swinging gently in the shade in one of the dozen or so hammocks that Mae also makes by hand. (I love those Mexican hammocks, hundreds of strings. But Mae’s are better. They are stronger and more comfortable. But then I am a big fan of Mae and Pa). End of last rainy season Pa brought home a ten kilo (twenty-two pound) pla chorn from his fish pond! Free food
All day I have been thinking about things to write. It’s not hard here, coming up with things to write; it’s more a matter of choosing. I had a good idea while I was working outside this morning, but then I kept working and didn’t write. Then I had another idea this afternoon, and as I was working away I was composing in my mind. But then I took a nap, and after the nap, groggy as could be, I went out to garden a bit, just to wake up. And sure enough one thing led to another and soon I had completely forgotten about writing. I went to transplant some baby banana trees, but Mae yelled out from across the yard to stop. “Mai alloi,” she told me firmly, not delicious. She will find me others, she explained. “How big?” she asked. “Only babies,” I replied.
Time passed, maybe an hour. I forgot about the bananas, and the tropical sky was turning pink, almost time for a shower. But up comes Mae on her bicycle, the two-wheeled wheel barrow in tow. In the wheel barrow were four banana trees, each about eight to ten feet tall. “Alloi,” she said in her wonderful matter-of-fact way, as she began unloading the very heavy banana trees.
Trees are planted differently here than I am accustomed to in Canada. Instead of leaving a trough around the tree to catch water, soil is mounded up around the base of the tree, like building a pyramid up the trunk so that water runs away from the roots and doesn’t puddle and flood. But in planting flowering shrubs like gardenia and jasmine, Mae very delicately places the dug soil back in, and leaves a trough instead of making a pyramid. I don’t know why, but together we’ve planted A LOT of trees, and she definitely knows what she is doing, because not a single tree is having a problem!
Pa has been working three days straight with two other older men (Pa is sixty-eight years old) building a concrete fish pond attached to the farmhouse. Mid-afternoon I could tell that all three men were feeling tired, and seeing Pa tired was a first for me. He and Mae are two of the most incredible day-to-day people I have ever been around. They are both up well before dawn, and they have strength and stamina that is beyond description (and good humour, I should mention). Mae is fifty-seven or so (age, a blog for a different time...). The first time I met Mae I thought she must be very old, because she often crosses a room hunched over at a ninety-degree angle, as if permanently disabled from working all her life in rice paddies. But now I know that the reason she does it is simply because it is more convenient, and she is DAMNED strong! Mae and Pa are deeply embarrassing for me, being older than me and immensely fit. But I’ve gotten over it.
So there is Pa and these two guys, dawn to dusk, three days in a row carrying sand, gravel, concrete, and mixing and laying the concrete. It’s not like Pa needs another fish pond, but this one is “free”, paid for by the government (not the labour, mind you). And “free” is an important concept here in a relatively cashless culture (but that too is better left for another day’s blog).
Pa is famous for his fish. Nowadays I wake up around seven thirty, which is a big improvement for me (I’ve never been an early riser), but by that time Pa has already been out to the rice fields, about a ten-minute walk, harvested his fish traps from his several hand-built ponds, and returned. Black plastic buckets in the outdoor kitchen are already making a racket, the live fish thrashing wildly in a confined space.
Father builds his traps by hand, slivering bamboo with his machete, while swinging gently in the shade in one of the dozen or so hammocks that Mae also makes by hand. (I love those Mexican hammocks, hundreds of strings. But Mae’s are better. They are stronger and more comfortable. But then I am a big fan of Mae and Pa). End of last rainy season Pa brought home a ten kilo (twenty-two pound) pla chorn from his fish pond! Free food
RAINY SEASON
I’ve been many times in Asia during rainy season, but nothing like now. I don’t know why; maybe because now I feel like I am living here, and I am definitely working here. I am on the same farm – the Yindichati Farm – here in northeast Thailand, just north of the Cambodian border. As I write it is absolutely pouring rain, the sound thunderous. I was doing some plumbing in the bathroom (about which I am never very confident), and I had the water turned off. When I thought my work was complete, I turned the water back on and suddenly I heard this enormous threatening sound, and for sure I thought I had done something terribly wrong, and the house was about to flood!
But then it occurred to me to look outside, and outside it was white with rain, rain coming down so hard I couldn’t see across the street. And there were voices, women and children, everyone half laughing, half running for shelter. Everyone happy.
It’s early August, already two full months into rainy season, but still a gushing rain brings delight. Everyone here farms rice. Everyone. And right now the seedlings are being transplanted, and rain is essential. Yesterday we had rain, but for five days before, everyday it would look like rain, and maybe there would be thunder, but no rain. It was very frustrating. I have been planting trees and flowers. I’m as eager for the rain as everyone else.
The soil in this part of Thailand is lateritic. It is basically red clay. When it rains rivers immediately form in the dry earth, and when it doesn’t rain, it bakes hard as clay within a day. Most monsoon soils are similar because a rainy season/dry season/ hot season climate means that during the rains the soil gets leached of organic matter.
I have promised myself today to be a better blog writer. Everyday around me there is so much to write about, so much that for me is wonderful and inspiring. But it’s hard to find a time of day to write, because days are packed with ambitions. I am trying – with the Yindichati family – to get two or three bungalows built by Christmas so that people can come visit, can come learn, same as me. Cooks, gardeners, farmers, cyclists, photographers: lots of people I can think of might like to come. I’ve been spending time in rural Asia for over thirty years, and yet I’ve never been in a place quite like this, and as close to a farming life as this.
The Yindichati farm is twenty-one kilometres outside of a small market town called Nangrong. Nangrong is a four and a half to five hour bus ride due east of Bangkok. There are a great many roads from the farm to Nangrong, but they all either partly paved or dirt, and they ALL have enormous potholes. A motorbike is better than a car, and a bicycle better than a motorbike, but in a torrential rain like right now, a car and a truck are pretty nice!
I just opened a window to watch the rain, and just as I did I heard shrieks, shrieks that I now know! Those are women shrieks, women eating snacks and drinking beer. I love the shrieks; I‘ve never heard anything like them. They’re a kind of communal laughter, a willingness of all participants to make things joyous. I once arrived here at the farm with a litre bottle of duty free Jose Cuervo, thinking that it would be something that no one had ever tasted. And I was right. I brought it out the first night, around two or three in the morning. I was sitting in the kitchen with a group of seven or eight older women, almost everyone seventy-years old and up, I’d guess (there are five generations of Yindichatis, and everyone still lives in their original farmhouse). I cut a bunch of limes and brought over some salt and showed them what to do. They smiled, some shrugged. Okay. One woman gave it a try, a tiny taste of tequila and a pucker of lime. A small smile.
Forty-five minutes later the bottle was finished, and the room was shaking with shrieks. The shrieks remind me a little of the Palestinian woman who have that special sound they make, only here it is not only a shriek but it is combined with everyday speech. The Yindichatis speak Korat, a dialect of Thai somewhere between Central Thai and Laos. I love it. It has none of the “politisms” of central Thai. It’s expressive and distinctive, a little bit like being in a crowded elevator with a lot of drunken people speaking Cantonese. Here it’s sometimes teasingly referred to as “phasa duh”, or language “duh”, because “duh” is used in almost every sentence, a little bit like we use “yes” in English. If I am not quite following a conversation (which is most of the time), and people look at me for a contribution, I’ve learned simply to say “duh” (a very low guttural “duh”, not a high-pitched stupid “duh”), and to shake my head abruptly up and down, and then conversation usually happily continues.
But back to now, or I mean just a few minutes ago. I was summoned and had to go, even through the rain. It was Mae (sister number two of twelve children), Norm, Naa, Mae’s sister number four, Pun, and kids. Pun lives right across the road, and is grandmother to Fai. Fai (meaning “fire” or “electricity”) is a girl, aged three. Sister Number Four is grandmother to Fem, a boy aged one and a half. Mae has two grandchildren who live here: Moo, son of Norm, and aged almost four. And Tey, aged three, son of Mae’s daughter number seven. Mae (pronounced as in Matt), and Pa (pronounced like a dog’s paw) had seven daughters, no sons. And remember that Mae has eleven siblings, and Pa has seven. But I’m joking; I don’t expect you to remember. I have a family tree in my journal, or actually, several family trees, and I’ve been at this for over a year, and still I am only barely up to speed.
It’s safe to say that most everyone here is family. Pun, who lives across the road, isn’t family, but she’s same as family. The dirt road that divides the Yindichati house from Pun’s house can barely accommodate one car. Pun has four hammocks in the front of her house, and the Yindichatis have two, so it is not unusual to carry on a conversation from one hammock to another across the road.
But oh, I should mention volume. People don’t speak quietly here. I like to tease, especially the younger generation, when we are in the same room and they are practically yelling at me, asking if I’m hungry. I’ll speak quietly, suggesting that they needn’t yell. They’ll laugh, and admit that it is the “chawnabot” (the countryside) way, but we both know the reason. Spaces are both intimate here, and large. Many people live in a relatively small area: Children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents. But at the same time these are farms. At any point in time, people are most often far apart. I know that I now yell: “Naa,” “Norm,” “Moo”. It is the only way I can find someone!Anyway so I drank a beer, ate tamarind pods dipped in chile, some pomelo, and then excused myself to come back to write. I’m determined on this blog thing. I can turn the fan on (it is 35 degrees C., mid-nineties F., and 100 percent humidity), write on my computer, and then every few days when I make it to town, I can send it out into that
I’ve been many times in Asia during rainy season, but nothing like now. I don’t know why; maybe because now I feel like I am living here, and I am definitely working here. I am on the same farm – the Yindichati Farm – here in northeast Thailand, just north of the Cambodian border. As I write it is absolutely pouring rain, the sound thunderous. I was doing some plumbing in the bathroom (about which I am never very confident), and I had the water turned off. When I thought my work was complete, I turned the water back on and suddenly I heard this enormous threatening sound, and for sure I thought I had done something terribly wrong, and the house was about to flood!
But then it occurred to me to look outside, and outside it was white with rain, rain coming down so hard I couldn’t see across the street. And there were voices, women and children, everyone half laughing, half running for shelter. Everyone happy.
It’s early August, already two full months into rainy season, but still a gushing rain brings delight. Everyone here farms rice. Everyone. And right now the seedlings are being transplanted, and rain is essential. Yesterday we had rain, but for five days before, everyday it would look like rain, and maybe there would be thunder, but no rain. It was very frustrating. I have been planting trees and flowers. I’m as eager for the rain as everyone else.
The soil in this part of Thailand is lateritic. It is basically red clay. When it rains rivers immediately form in the dry earth, and when it doesn’t rain, it bakes hard as clay within a day. Most monsoon soils are similar because a rainy season/dry season/ hot season climate means that during the rains the soil gets leached of organic matter.
I have promised myself today to be a better blog writer. Everyday around me there is so much to write about, so much that for me is wonderful and inspiring. But it’s hard to find a time of day to write, because days are packed with ambitions. I am trying – with the Yindichati family – to get two or three bungalows built by Christmas so that people can come visit, can come learn, same as me. Cooks, gardeners, farmers, cyclists, photographers: lots of people I can think of might like to come. I’ve been spending time in rural Asia for over thirty years, and yet I’ve never been in a place quite like this, and as close to a farming life as this.
The Yindichati farm is twenty-one kilometres outside of a small market town called Nangrong. Nangrong is a four and a half to five hour bus ride due east of Bangkok. There are a great many roads from the farm to Nangrong, but they all either partly paved or dirt, and they ALL have enormous potholes. A motorbike is better than a car, and a bicycle better than a motorbike, but in a torrential rain like right now, a car and a truck are pretty nice!
I just opened a window to watch the rain, and just as I did I heard shrieks, shrieks that I now know! Those are women shrieks, women eating snacks and drinking beer. I love the shrieks; I‘ve never heard anything like them. They’re a kind of communal laughter, a willingness of all participants to make things joyous. I once arrived here at the farm with a litre bottle of duty free Jose Cuervo, thinking that it would be something that no one had ever tasted. And I was right. I brought it out the first night, around two or three in the morning. I was sitting in the kitchen with a group of seven or eight older women, almost everyone seventy-years old and up, I’d guess (there are five generations of Yindichatis, and everyone still lives in their original farmhouse). I cut a bunch of limes and brought over some salt and showed them what to do. They smiled, some shrugged. Okay. One woman gave it a try, a tiny taste of tequila and a pucker of lime. A small smile.
Forty-five minutes later the bottle was finished, and the room was shaking with shrieks. The shrieks remind me a little of the Palestinian woman who have that special sound they make, only here it is not only a shriek but it is combined with everyday speech. The Yindichatis speak Korat, a dialect of Thai somewhere between Central Thai and Laos. I love it. It has none of the “politisms” of central Thai. It’s expressive and distinctive, a little bit like being in a crowded elevator with a lot of drunken people speaking Cantonese. Here it’s sometimes teasingly referred to as “phasa duh”, or language “duh”, because “duh” is used in almost every sentence, a little bit like we use “yes” in English. If I am not quite following a conversation (which is most of the time), and people look at me for a contribution, I’ve learned simply to say “duh” (a very low guttural “duh”, not a high-pitched stupid “duh”), and to shake my head abruptly up and down, and then conversation usually happily continues.
But back to now, or I mean just a few minutes ago. I was summoned and had to go, even through the rain. It was Mae (sister number two of twelve children), Norm, Naa, Mae’s sister number four, Pun, and kids. Pun lives right across the road, and is grandmother to Fai. Fai (meaning “fire” or “electricity”) is a girl, aged three. Sister Number Four is grandmother to Fem, a boy aged one and a half. Mae has two grandchildren who live here: Moo, son of Norm, and aged almost four. And Tey, aged three, son of Mae’s daughter number seven. Mae (pronounced as in Matt), and Pa (pronounced like a dog’s paw) had seven daughters, no sons. And remember that Mae has eleven siblings, and Pa has seven. But I’m joking; I don’t expect you to remember. I have a family tree in my journal, or actually, several family trees, and I’ve been at this for over a year, and still I am only barely up to speed.
It’s safe to say that most everyone here is family. Pun, who lives across the road, isn’t family, but she’s same as family. The dirt road that divides the Yindichati house from Pun’s house can barely accommodate one car. Pun has four hammocks in the front of her house, and the Yindichatis have two, so it is not unusual to carry on a conversation from one hammock to another across the road.
But oh, I should mention volume. People don’t speak quietly here. I like to tease, especially the younger generation, when we are in the same room and they are practically yelling at me, asking if I’m hungry. I’ll speak quietly, suggesting that they needn’t yell. They’ll laugh, and admit that it is the “chawnabot” (the countryside) way, but we both know the reason. Spaces are both intimate here, and large. Many people live in a relatively small area: Children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents. But at the same time these are farms. At any point in time, people are most often far apart. I know that I now yell: “Naa,” “Norm,” “Moo”. It is the only way I can find someone!Anyway so I drank a beer, ate tamarind pods dipped in chile, some pomelo, and then excused myself to come back to write. I’m determined on this blog thing. I can turn the fan on (it is 35 degrees C., mid-nineties F., and 100 percent humidity), write on my computer, and then every few days when I make it to town, I can send it out into that
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