A Good Week!

Here I sit, back in the comforts of urban Thailand, with a/c, internet, and a normal, flushing toilet! This past week holds many new stories and experiences, most of which I won't be able to post here. But it was a good week indeed!
I met the team I was going up with on friday evening over dinner at a food stall. They were 3 older ladies, 'near retirement age' as my contact Hong called them, from Canada coming for 3 weeks of Southeast Asia and visiting various projects of OMF.

Saturday morning was bright and early for me. I checked out of my guesthouse and lugged my heavy bag across town, getting slightly lost. I of course, was late, b/c time here as slowed me down even more than usual (though I still feel as bad as any westerner would at being late)! We hopped in a yellow songthaew, rented out esp. for this trip through the hills of northern Thailand.

Our first stop was at an organic farm of an older gentleman from Quebec, who decided to test out his homeopathic techniques here in Thailand. Who would have thought I'd be touring a farm, hearing how pigs are being fed and kept so as not to smell as much etc etc. It was interesting. Most of the workers on his farm incidently were Shan or Lisu (a hill tribe).

We hopped back in (well perhaps not all of us quite hopped), but you get the picture. We briefly stopped in Na Wai, where the team would be staying the latter half of the week. Then on up into the real hills, or rather mountains, of northern Thailand. Now this was the part I enjoyed, taking in the beautiful scenery, feeling the air get a little cooler...but perhaps winding through the mountains in a yellow songthaew with an open back and 2 hard benches wasn't the most ideal way of doing this :-).

But we made it just fine, having gone through 3 army checkpoints without a hitch, and first went to see a well being dug and then on to the simple rented house we would stay in.

To save some space and boring details, let me highlight what i got to see up in Lak Teng, the village we stayed in. On sunday I had the opportunity to visit a refugee camp (set up that way but not officially one), and spoke with the chairman of the camp. There are some 600 ppl living in this camp, and it is a fairly new camp, only 6 yrs old. It is basically a 2 roads of bamboo huts, 3 km from the border with Burma. The children there receive some basic education at a local NGO school, but don't get any papers recognizing that they received any schooling. The men and women all work temporary jobs, whenever there is a big harvest, some construction work to be done etc. It is all illegal. The children, after they have finished primary 5, will try to find some work, but also a lot of them will attempt to run away from the camp to the city, hoping to change their futures.

We also visited the border, where you can see the Burmese army and the Thai one, just across from each other on a hill. Next to the two outposts is a temple. The Burmese army is known to shoot at those who try to cross illegally, but once they are over the border, the Shan can seek shelter in the temple where the Thai police/army cannot touch them. The lady who took us on this whole trip, Hong, said she knows some young people that crossed at this very point on the border (i might be able to interview them as well).

Bc the team I went up with was a missionary team, we visited the local church (where 2 orphans live) and the team also held a baking demonstration there on how to make "fiiddel diidels" as the Shan pronounced them(fiddle diddles), a yummy chocolate-peanut cookie. I was more than happy to taste these!

We also got a chance to visit people in their bamboo homes, and heard various stories. I got to hear the story of an ex-general in the SSA, the resistance army, and also saw for example how one lady's sister had gone to Bangkok and left her daughter, not having been in contact since and leaving her to take of 3 children. I also got to talk to a girl who had recently fled Burma, and was studying in the village until she got her papers (she had money to buy papers). Here, children will often lie about their age so that they can either stay in school or go to work.
In this way, there are many stories to tell. Monday, I was faced with the decision to stay with the team and go to the next village, and perhaps learn some Shan/Thai and visit a few more people...or I could go back to Chiang Mai and figure out what next. So I opted to stay, and we headed down the mountains a bit to a place called Na Wai.

This village was completely Shan (the previous one was a mix of Shan, Chinese, and Thai), and about 2x the size. Most of the people here work on the local farms, planting and harvesting garlic, corn and rice throughout the year. In the afternoons, the team would teach english to the local school children, about 12 would show up between 4-6. Although I didn't really learn much Shan during my stay, again it was a good way to meet locals, hear some of the stories, and also to get in touch with a few more Shan kids. One couple was facing hardship because they were too poor to keep their 4 children at home and had sent them to a children's home. But now they wanted to get them to come back home again, meanwhile they themselves skipping meals during the day. Another lady, expecting her 2nd child anytime, had her husband working in Bangkok, while she had to stay in the village bc she couldn't get good papers.

With the children, I couldn't really communicate very well, and there was no consistent translation available. But I did try out the 'historical narrative' technique, where you get them to draw their past, present and future, how they perceive it and with the most memorable events. But well, it didn't quite work out. They were told to draw where they were born, and where they live now and what they want to be in the future, ha! But it was a good trial, for a better next time. 3 girls and 2 boys came from Burma, or 'a foreign land' as they called it, and 2 girls drew separate plates of food indicating the importance (and probably lack of) food during their time there and during their flight (this was what was told to me by the translator). What was perhaps most interesting, is that when some of the kids from Burma said, 'oh, I came from Burma' and 'we walked a very very long time', the other kids hushed them saying that they weren't supposed to say they were from Burma or talk about it, instead they are just Thai and were born here. These kids are taught early on (they were all below the age of 12), to lie about where they come from.

Unlike in the refugee camp, children in the villages don't really speak Shan much anymore, and certainly don't know about the history. They are taught to become completely Thai.
The children however, can go maximum to grade 9 in Na Wai, and if they have money can go to the next village and further their education. Otherwise they too will start working. Many of the children in the village wander around till late in the evening, and when I asked one girl who spoke a bit of english if she was going home for dinner, she indicated that there was nothing at home and that she was just going to hang around. We brought one girl home one evening, not even a far walk, but the drinking the went on in the evenings around the village made it unsafe.

Hong explained to me that the only way people make money in these villages is by sending their children, their daughters, to the city to work, often in prostitution, or by one of their children smuggling drugs. Apparently the prostitution street here in Chiang Mai is filled with mostly Shan women. Hong also explained that if a local family wants to buy an expensive home in the area they are automatically suspected of doing something illegal, bc that is they only way to get wealth, and so only foreigners can buy up a big piece of land or large homes. In this way Hong and her co-workers managed to buy a 1.6 million baht home for only 600,000 bc no one else would buy it.

Besides all of these stories and details it was good, as I said, to be out of Chiang Mai. I slept on the floor the whole week, and the nights were very cool. The food was delicious, and I just soaked up pieces of the lives of the Shan migrants during my stay. I enjoyed the opportunity! Who knows what the next one's will be like...I will leave again either tomorrow or wednesday, and will find out by the end of today where exactly that will be. Either to visit more Shan families or to visit a school set up for the Shan migrant children.

-->I've included some pics of Lak Teng, the border, Na Wai and the children