Waiting for the Rain

Today is May 14, and here in Kravan it's extremely hot.  I believe that everyone in the village feels the heat, because today's extreme.  I'm sitting in front of a fan, but the fan is blowing hot air.  Every once in a while I will turn the fan off, wait a few minutes, and then turn it back on.  For a time the fan will blow somewhat cool air, but then it will be hot again.  Today's hot!  Most days right now are hot, and then every third or fourth day there is a day like today.  It reminds me a little of being a kid in Wyoming in the winter when severely cold patches would come through, and all that anyone could do is to stop and wait.  Here in the village the odd person will drive slowlyt by on a motorbike, covered to protect from the sun and the heat.

I'm back in Kravan after travelling to Canada, to Wyoming, back to Canada, and then finally to Bangkok.  Pee came to Bangkok to meet up again, and for a few days we simply lounged in an air-conditioned hotel room and watched TV.  It was great therapy.  Then finally we bussed the 6 ½ hours to Kravan.  We knew that it would be hot here, and the earth parched, the soil caked hard, almost impenetrable, with the heat.  But any time now the rains will start to come, and then we'll work fast to get the fields planted.  Pee has four rai (about 1.6 acres), and we'll help Mae with her four rai, and sister number one, Kaesorn, who's leg is so bad that she can barely walk.  We plan about 600 pounds of seed rice for four rai.  Brother number three, Tee, has a small Kubota tractor, which will really help.

Kravan is in so many ways similar to the Yindichati farm, but also completely different.  There are eight children in Pee's family, just like the Yindichati farm.  But unlike the Yindichatis (with eight girls, all but one living in Bangkok), here numbers one, two, three, four, and five live in the village, and half the children are boys, half girls.  It's different.

Brother number two, Tat, is the one who everyone seems to respect the most (as it seems so often happens in a large family).  Pee's father died when she was just a kid, getting hit by a car when he was coming home on his motorcycle.  My sense is that Tat took over his father's place.  He works the farm but he also works in Bangkok, working way too hard.  But he "looks after" in that Thai sense of the expression.  He has three great kids, and his spouse, Doi, seems to be just like him:  steady and reliable.

 The other night we were at a wedding in the village and there was Kantrum music, the Khmer version of Morlam (and it's great by the way).  But I ended up dancing with Bpoo, number one son of Tat.  We got to dancing more and more, just the two of us, and while he was in a whole different league than me, it was really fun.   Boy, could he dance.  I don't know exactly how old Bpoo is, maybe 15 or 16.  At some point I had to bow out, totally spent, and for sure he could've gone hours more.  And just a great dancer, long limbs dancing in four different directions, body always in control but so loose. 

A few days later we were all together one evening and after dinner someone put a video on TV of Bpoo in a dance competition sometime last year.  Bpoo was the only young dancer, and it was all traditional Khmer dancing, and no question, he was again by far the best, and this among really good dancers.  Pee made a comment about Bpoo being the only "katuey" (transvestite) in the competition, and people just smiled, acknowledging that she was right.

Later that evening when I brought it back up with Pee, she told me that his father, brother number two, had also been a great dancer, but that Bpoo has taken it to a higher level.  "You know," she said, "it's very good for body and he can make a lot of money with it sometime if he wants."

I finally, at this stage of being in Thailand, resisted the idiotic North American question (for which I am so adept) about how his parents feel about him being katuey, and living at a young age in a small village as a katuey.    They are immensely proud of their son, and so is everyone else here.