Thai Street Life

This is another beautiful part of Thailand. You could practically do all of your shopping in Thailand without ever setting foot inside a store. Food vendors. Seamstresses. Salesmen of magazines, paper, cosmetics, home appliances, batteries, shoes, clothing. All scrunching their business into a four by seven cart on wheels along the sidewalk, there for your convenience.

This also adds to Thailand's food culture. This is far from an Italian "two meals a day, don't even think of ruining your appetite by snacking" culture. Thais, especially in cities and towns, will graze throughout the day: a smoothie here, fried chicken feet there, and a plate of Pad Thai if you really have an appetite. Because of this, even when you think you are ordering a full meal, it is never overly filling. A dish of Pad Thai is probably not meant to be a full diner; I am expected to have picked up a bag of fresh roasted peanuts an hour before and fried bananas after. This dining does not have to be hurried and can be comfortable and classy, as well. Often a cluster of these food carts will have table seating and real china dishware. This could be your destination for a night out on the town; not just a pit stop on your way home from work. And do not think that you are sacrificing variety: with a wok at hand, there is nothing that these Thais cannot cook up.

You can also pull together an entire wardrobe in the sidewalk space between two crosswalks. Shoes, socks, undergarments, ultra-hip teeny bopper clothes, business casual, gym workout, linen hippy...the possibilities are endless.

And perhaps you need a garment mended? Look no further than the little corner lady perched in front of her sewing machine. Hand your garment off and by the time you pass by after work she will have it waiting for you.

The Future of Food

At Pun Pun, we watched a video entitled "The Future of Food." While incredibly depressing (ignorance is bliss!), it had some extremely important information.

Here is an unorganized list of some of the important points.
-Technology (used against enemy) from WWI was tweeked after war initiating the use of Nitrogen fertilizers, and nerve gas (also used against enemy) from WWII and again from the Vietnam War (remember Agent Orange?) was modified for insecticides. How healthy are these REALLY for us, our children and our environment? Food for thought.

-The Fifties brought about the systemetizing of agriculture and monocropping to "increase efficiency"
-It has also led to increased food vulnerability to insects and disease (Potato Famine) and loss of dependence for farmers who used to do subsistance farming.
-Excuse has often been that this will "help with food shortages." Most countries facing large hunger problems used to be all subsistance farmers that had to switch to monocropping exports to pay back World Bank loans. Monocropping has stripped much of their former land making it no longer farmable.

-Gene Revolution
-Then came genetic changes to make crops "round up" ready. Round Up kills anything green (it is in similar vein of Agent Orange.)
-Terminator Technology
-Seeds have been genetically altered to, after one season, "commit suicide" so that the seeds cannot be reused and must be rebought (profit for seed industry, and profit is number one priority!) What happens when these seeds cross pollinate with other non-genetically modified seeds (as has already happened)? What happens when they reach the third world?

-Patents
-Article 1 of the Constitution says that you cannot patent life and was upheld until a Supreme Court case voted in favor of a man who had tried to patent an oil fighting microbe that he had "invented" through genetic engineering.
-This case opened the door for an entire industry of patenting plants, animals, seeds, etc.
--This video focuses on agriculture, but this is a huge problem elsewhere.
A company has patented a gene that causes breast cancer, haulting any labs from using the cell to search for cures without a huge fee. So this company's profit is above finding a cure for cancer.
-Companies began going into seed banks and patenting any seed that did not already have a patent, giving them the rights to that seed and royalty from its use.
-Seventy-five percent of the world's farmers save and use their own seed.
-Now seed industry monopoly Mon Santo (who appropriately owns Round Up) owns patents for most seeds. If you are a farmer who saves your own seeds and those seeds become cross pollinated with a Mon Santo seed, even unknowingly, you are at fault and they own all of your crop (based on numerous court decisions.) You either owe them for your earnings or you burn the seed that your family has cultivated to perfection for generations.
-As if this isn't all heartless enough, many of these large companies are pressuring to unify patent laws around the world so that they can take and patent seeds out of the other countries. Thus, the third world agriculturalists will be paying the first world seed owners who have never seen, grown, nor would even have the climate to grow those seed.

--80% of our beef products are processed by four companies, and the majority of agriculture is also monopolized by a very few.
--Today food in our supermarkets travels an average of 15,000 miles before it reaches our shopping carts! Most of our apples are from...can you guess where? Washington (which is already a huge trek to reach us in the East)? No. Answer is: China!!

All of this can be summarized as followed: buy locally and buy organically!

(I will one day return and better organize this...when I am not paying for a slow computer.)

Sea Gypsies--fishing dilemmas

The Sea Gypsies have little money and inferior equiptment. The waters of Thailand are already overfished, so sometimes they will go to the nearby waters of Burma where there is not such a large fishing industry. The problem: they must do so illegally. Because they do not yet have Thai nationality, or any nationality for that matter, they are in particularly big trouble if they get caught. A couple days before we arrived, a group of men was out fishing late at night illegally in Burmese waters (weigh: fishing illegally and risking getting caugh with no knowledge of national laws...and being able to feed your families.) Burmese officials stopped them, confiscated all of their fish, and confiscated their boat. One of the Moken men went back the next day to get the boat...and he still hadn't returned. Many of these men have spent time in jails from Burma to India, for days, weeks, or years, and with no papers, no traces with which their families would be able to locate them, and no way to communicate through these different languages (many Moken do not even speak Thai,) you can imagine how terrifying it must be.
Their livelyhood has become very dangerous. Also to catch fish, when times get rough they also still use bombs (they blow up in the water, shock, and kill a wide range of surrounding fish) which are both illegal and an environmental nightmare. There are at least two Moken men walking around in this tiny village with one arm because of unfortunate accidents with these bombs...they are very dangerous for people, too.
Yet another dangerous practice: deep diving to fetch sea cucumbers (apparently the Chinese love them.) Without masks or scuba gear, teenage boys and young men will go out on diving missions for weeks at a time gathering shell fish, sea cucumbers, and other food on the ocean floor at depths as low as 75 feet. The village chief's son has been hospitalized in Ranong for the past two years because of a diving accident; he got the bends (similar such problems are all too frequent) and still has no use of his legs. One afternoon they took part of our group out while to see how they fish, and it became fairly clear why they sometimes are pushed to these extremes. Two Moken men, clearly masters of the water and more comfortable on their boat than on land, showed us how they fish with nets. The net was about six feet high and perhaps three football fields long. We trew it out into the water, waited and went for a swim, and then returned to collect our winnings. Our "winnings" could not have filled one person. In the entirety of the net, about five puny fish were caught. With the effort that it took, it certainly is not the most efficient method (the gain probably did not even outweight the price of fuel used to power the boat.)
We bought masks and snorkels to use for our few days following volunteering on Ko Lao on Ko Phayam to then give to the Mokens. Hopefully they will be able to both use them for diving as well as offer them to tourists to rent, bringing in some extra income.

Ko Lao--Medicine

Ajahn Vichai is an older man staying with the sea gypsies, by choice, to help. He used to work for the UN and was part of a group in the early 80s that won a Nobel Peace Prize for their work done to help SE Asian refugees fleeing to the West (mainly from Vietnam and Cambodia.) Today he receives a very small living allowance (I'm not sure from whom) and lives alone on Ko Lao to help with anything he can, from medical care to teaching families how to keep their own chickens. Mike, Emma and I went to Ranong with him one morning to pick up medical supplies with the money that our group donated. While Ajahn Vichai explained all of the different medicines that we needed and thus explained why we needed them, the pharmacist was initially very helpful, recommending other medicines that would be good to have for our purposes, and then insisted that we take it all for free. He also does similar work with some of Thailand's poor peasants and is eager to help his fellow Thais and fellow good samaritan aid workers such as Ajahn Vichai. We walked out with two full cardboard boxes taped shut of medicines: it was uplifting to see such a personal interaction and such good hearted people helping each other out. Emma and I tried to buy Menthol inhalors (Thais sniff them all the time: at first glance you think they are snorting crack cocaine but realize that it is Menthol and pepperment oil among others to help with congestion...and to wake you up.) because we are trying to live more like Thais, and he even insisted that we take them without paying because we were doing such good volunteer work.

I love Thailand!!

Giving the Mokens medical aid is not as simple as handing them free medicine, however. Often they do not trust medicine. Most cannot read, so often they will use one medicine for any ailment that they have, not being able to read the instructions. They also are reluctant to go to the hospital. They have no means of paying, and even though aid organizations will now help, they still have fear from past experiences. They also do not want to miss a day of work. If the sick must go by boat to Ranong and stay overnight, they loose a day of work and so does whoever accompanies them. A woman gave birth in the village while we were there...in the village. She would not go to the hospital (nothing in the village is clean or sanitary, including water) because she and any women who accompanied her would miss more time of work, collecting shellfish to feed their families.

Burma

We went to Burma (Myanmar) for a day! Yeah, one more stamp in my passport!
It was quite an experience. Although only a narror strip of water and a 20 minute boat ride divides them, the differences are vast. Thailand has had a fairly stable history, and one can tell being there. But Burma has had many problems throughout history and in recent history, and it shows. People are much more destitude. People were more aggressive on the street, but aggressive because of their situation. Right away we had an eleven year old tour guide showing us around; girls like her drop out of school, learn languages from tourists,and then try to show tourists around for whatever those tourists are willing to offer. Hopefully just enough to feed her family for the day. I also felt that men were much more aggressive when they see a foreign woman than here than in Thailand...but I guess they are just preparing me for India.

Ko Lao--The Land of the Sea Gypsies

I have arrived to the land of the Moken people, or the Sea Gypsies. "The land of the Sea Gypsies" is a bit of an oxi-moron and for them even a bit bitter-sweet because, historically, the Sea Gypsies have never had a land of their own. For centuries the Mokens have been nomads of the water, living off of the sea. They traveled, worked, played, ate, lived and died all on their boats. They are true masters of the seas, nomadically roaming the seas of SE Asia. Traveling the seas to follow their livelyhood of different sea organisms, they would stop at ports only to sell some of their catches in exchange for anything they would need that the sea did not provide.

However, especially in the past 50 years, the countries of SE Asia have strenghtened their national boundaries, moving them out into the sea, creating problems for a travelling peoples with no nationality. The Sea Gypsies have no papers, no passports to be stamped by coastguard. The Burmese say, "you must stay out of our waters, you are Thai." But the Thai say, "You are not Thai, you have no proof." Mokens all around SE Asia have had to settle on islands and abandon their centuries old lifestyle.

We stayed on the island of Ko Lao for one week, working to help a small community of Sea Gypsies. There are many, many small communities of Mokens, not only spread out on Thai islands but also on those of Malaysia and Indonesia. The Mirror Art Group--the same group that works with the hill tribes of the north--in the past decade has begun working to gain citizenship for the Sea Gypsies, in addition to aiding in numerous other projects.

The Moken of Ko Lao have it particularly tough. While aid money flooded into SE Asia after the Tsunami of 2004, Ko Lao has only now begun to see a small amount of it. With such a large scale catastrophe and so many different aid organizations, some families and communities received too much and took advantage of it while others recieved nothing at all. Little record could be kept of aid in the chaos after the tragedy, so this sort of hole in the system unfortunately was able to occur. Recently they have received more aid, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has been helpful. Many disheartened Mokens talk of corruption in the aid organization, who often try to involve the community very little in the decisions being made on its behalf. Also, having numerous different aid organizations with different focuses is not always good either. Christian missionaries built a big, beautiful church to be used for the children. Not long after, MERCY, an organization that helps communities with childcare, preschool, prenatal care, and basically anything concerning children, built also a very nice daycare. They at least seem to be doing well for the community: they try to have meetings with the villagers to include them, they feed the children, and the villagers seem to give positive reviews. The missionaries, on the other hand, keep their big, beautiful structure locked up save when they are there on Sundays to sing Bible songs with the children (but at least they let aid orgs. like us use it as a dormitory while we are there.) The point: different groups, instead of working together, are wasting resources building the same thing twice while other necessities are not being built at all.

Interesting Fact:
While 225,000 people died in this earthquake, not a single Moken from Ko Lao was killed, and very few elsewhere. Why?
Because they knew it was coming. Very few Mokens have any sort of formal education, but they know their sea and the signs it gives. Mokens all over packed up and sailed North or went inland before the Tsunami came.

While there were no casualties, everything they had was swept away. Since the Mokens of Ko Lao recieved little aid, they had to fend for themselves. Their boats were ruined. Even once they could fish again, fear that the ocean's fish had eaten their dead relatives kept many Thais away from seafood for years after the Tsunami, greatly hurting the fishing industry.

What an intense, experience. The more time you spend on this island, the deeper you realize their problems run. There are no easy solutions. These Mokens have only been on Kao Lao for 34 years, and it is their first time living permanently in one place. There is a great deal that they never learned.
TRASH
The island is absolutely covered in trash. Nobody has a trash bin; the ocean is our dump. Broken glass, plastic bags, and food packaging litters the landscape...34 years of it. They have taken the western world's "gift" of packaged, store bought snacks, but have not had the benefit of the West's efficient waste removal knowledge. While I would walk around in shoes noting the numerous broken glass pieces every square yard, children would come running past me, shoeless. Because while living at sea it was not an option, they have NO agriculture. They grow nothing. This is the first real generation not brought up in boats: can you blame them? Unfortunately, any sort of agriculture cannot begin until after the trash situation is fixed. And believe me--I had to shovel as we worked on the housing project--the problem, quite literally, goes deep.
FOOD
Luckily, finally the Mokens have received small amounts of aid. The children usually get at least one rounded meal per day, grazie a both the MERCY foundation and Pee Now, a Thai woman who stays in their village, looking out for and cooking for the community. Otherwise, the main staple of their diet is shellfish. Only shellfish. Women sit on their haunches hour after hour scraping muscles out of their shells to feed the family. They have little money to buy any variety from Ranong (the closest city on the mainland) so this tends to be their staple. And (as I said the problems run deep,) much of the money that their families DO see is drank away by the men. The reason becomes clear when you look in their eyes and realize that the people of this village have very little hope; they are very, very jaded. This is perhaps the biggest problem and steepest hill to climb for any benevolent soul or NGO who would like to help, because it almost seems as though these people have lost the will to care.
OUR ROLE
During our time here, we have helped with numerous projects, but much of what we hoped to accomplish fell through. Perhaps our biggest accomplishment came from playing with the kids. The island is tearing at the seams with shoeless, often bare bottomed children running about. But while the adults all seem to be jaded, the children still laugh and see the world as children anywhere do. Many of these children stopped attending school because they had to leave the island to attend a Thai school and after their efforts were treated poorly by the Thai children and not understood or taken care of by the Thai teachers. For them to feel loved and even adequate is important for them to continue with a positive outlook as they grow into adults. At best, we gave the children hope, and maybe even also a little to those jaded parents as they watched their children line up behind us as we airplaned them around with smiles on our faces.

I have SO many wonderful pictures, and SO much more to say about this island, but I do not have time!!

Tomorrow we will be in Bangkok, and then off to India! Woohoo! I am incredibly blue to leave Thailand because I LOVE THESE PEOPLE!--but I'm sure I will have an equally rich experience in India.

Notes on Thailand

Notes on Thai’ness:

Safety standards of the “sue happy” US do not apply here. The perfect example was demonstrated numerous times by Nong Ti, a two or three year old neighbor, in Mae Joo. -The first morning I woke up and looked out the window. There was the toddler Nong Ti outside, playing with a hammer and nail alone. He was emulating all of the grown ups: holding the nail to the ground and hitting it.
-Nong Ti on a motorcycle: We went swimming in the reservoir that is about a 15 minute walk from our house. The entire village has only about three cars, but there are several motorcycles. Nong Ti—instead of being carried back by his mom Pee La (a perfectly standard model Thai mom—rode on a motorcycle standing up behind the driver (teenager) sandwiched loosely with another teenager holding him from behind. All three wet, of course, returning home downhill on a dirt and rock road.
-Nong Ti on tractor—I was walking with Pee La when she saw Nong Ti sitting alone on top of a seven plus foot high tractor playing. She was somewhat surprised to see him there and walked over to get him. I assume there was another adult on the other side of the tractor…but there was no one else in my line of sight.