Sustainable Farming the Old Fashioned Way - Karen Village

All this is in the context of the modern debates on global warming, sustainable farming, and land rights for the various hill tribes living in official forest land in Thailand. What we saw yesterday was a bit of paradise in some ways. Westerners looking at the pictures of the housing might cringe, but all things considered this is much more comfortable than a lot of the housing in rural Alaska villages. And, what I learned 40 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Thailand, what Westerners have over less wealthy cultures is a physical standard of living advantage (one that has shrunk considerably in the intervening years, at least for Thailand) and what the Thais have is a social, cultural advantage - things like connectedness to the land and to each other, traditions and ceremonies that tie them together, friendships and family connections that are close and supportive. This advantage is also shrinking.


Of course these are generalizations for both sides. But that discussion seems a pertinent preface to the pictures and comments below.

J's been helping S get his oral English ready for his nine month's training program at the Asian Rural Institute in Japan. He leaves next week. Yesterday he picked us up at 7:30am and drove us the not quite two hours up into the mountains. The following will be a bunch of pictures with some description. At 1200 meters above sea level, it was delightfully cooler than Chiang Mai at about 600 meters up. After we passed the tourist elephant camp, the road up got steeper and windier. J's stomach usually isn't too good, but S drove slowly. Then he stopped at a little shop and came out with a plaster (I'd say band-aid, but it wasn't really) that he said to stick on her belly, which she did. She had no problem up or back.



We got to the village and then his house where we met his mother, brother, sister, and niece. All but the sister were in this picture. They were looking at the Alaska calendar we brought them. We were given Karen style shoulder bags she made - a beautiful burnt orange color.

Here's the house. This has been added on to over the years to get to this stage. The original house is what is just the kitchen now.










And just like in any family anywhere, his niece's artwork is up for everyone to admire.



I had to go to the bathroom and I was led to a little building out back with a row of blooming orchids in front. The bathroom had running water and a regular toilet. He said they have a natural draining system with different materials besides a large hole. Unlike tanks, this one drains well and never fills up. My understanding was they used various natural materials as a drain/filter.



In their English lessons, S had told Joan that they had what he called a "lazy garden" around the house. It's where they threw things and let them grow on their own - unlike the more cultivated fields away from the house. We had passed rows and rows of beautiful lettuce, but I didn't get a picture. The lettuce and some other crops are part of the Kings Project and they get picked up and sold at organic vegetable markets, but he's not sure where.
And not everything in the lazy garden is quite so casual either. Here are some seedling avocados. Avocados were also introduced through the King's project.




And a macadamia nut tree.










This is a fishtank where they can get dinner when they need fish. Though we had fish that didn't come from the tank for lunch later.








This earthen house was built by a friend - there's a big hole still next to it where the earth was dug up. It's in there on the edge of the lazy garden.














And this bamboo, look at S standing at the bottom of it clump. It's huge! You may have to double click to enlarge the picture to see S.







Here's a pig pen right next to the house. Ordinarily this could cause some serious odor problems.









S's holding a bottle of a mixture he's concocted to make the pig pen's smell better, well, not so bad. It's got honey, salt, garlic, oyster sauce, ginger, and I forgot the other ingredients. It's mixed with water and put into the pig sty. And it really did not smell bad there at all. Not like the factory pig farms we passed that were pretty disgusting to smell.






Here's another one of the pigs.








Now we are in the kitchen. It was pretty dark in there and they didn't turn on any lights. There is electricity, but I didn't notice it on - except when his sister was ironing. I took some video tape of him explaining how the kitchen works. It's pretty dark, but I'll try to get it up eventually.







There's a lot of stuff sitting around. But it didn't look like a junkyard. Rather things all seemed to have a place. This is a 'modern' electric rice huller.










Next to it is the more traditional type of rice huller.










And there was a cow too. I think elsewhere there are some water buffalo but we didn't see them. And, of course, there were chickens and chicks running around. They eat the eggs, if they can find them. The eggs we had for lunch later were from the market.





And there's a coffee plant too.










Then we got back in the car and drove up what became a more and more marginal road for a couple of kilometers and then got out to go for a hike. One of the joys of this location is that the vegetation change is most notably visible by the existence of pine trees.









Another ethnic Karen, R, who works at this village through an NGO in Chiang Mai, joined us for the hike. He actually comes from a different province neighboring Chiang Mai.




It was nice to see greener scenery than we generally have in Chiang Mai, now well into the dry and hot season.




It was a bit late in the day to see birds. We could hear some, but it was also very hard trying to find them hidden in the trees. But S showed us some bird calls. I have a video of this too and will try to get it up in a post later. None of the other three of us could make a sound this way, but then they couldn't copy my whistling with two fingers in my mouth. I was able to get some sound out later in the car and I'll keep practicing.



We stopped here in this spot dedicated by Buddhists, animists, and Catholics who are all represented in the village. There was a sign that S translated as "This Forest Forever."










I posted the insect pictures from there in the previous post. Here are some fungus we saw. They do look fairly similar to things we have in Alaska. Also saw some ferns that - at least superficially - looked like ferns we have too. I suspect they're different.











It was a lovely hike back.












When we got back S began gathering greens for lunch - a late, 4pm lunch. The food would be better, he said, because we were so hungry. These are from a tree which reminded me of greens that our friends in Beijing collected on a trip out to the country side in 2004. But I'm sure there are lots of things that look alike. These ended up inside omelets.







Here's what he collected.










S started the fire in the kitchen. A lighter and a piece of soft pine got things started quickly.





J and S were working on the greens.










There was also some Pak Bung, another key vegetable in Thai diets. But he cooked this up with a bean sauce and some honey and it tasted different and delicious.
















Here the greens go into the egg mix. That's S's niece under the blue plastic basket.












And the Pak Bung gets cooked.















And in less than 45 minutes, lunch was ready.











And we all helped clean up. Really, I did more than take pictures.













The dishwater sink drains out to a small culvert and the grey water gets recycled into the garden and the chickens are the garbage disposal getting all the bits of rice and green that were still on the plates when they were washed.



Things are not perfect here, and there are issues of land ownership, and the government is still trying to get people out of the forest areas. But you can also see that this is a pretty sweet place to live. All sorts of tropical and semi-tropical plants grow, with little effort. S's family - and village - lifestyle is pretty in synch with nature and all the stuff we are trying to relearn in the West. Imagine what he will learn after nine-months of training on an organic, sustainable farm program in Japan.






S also pulled out an album and showed me this document which was a work contract for his great, great grandfather to work for a British timber company. He was hired because he had an elephant that was important for getting the logs out from the deep forest and out onto the roadways. I still think we should consider this in the roadless areas of Southeast Alaska. There are still elephants in Thailand who know how to do this, but they are pretty much unemployed as much of the forest is protected. (The elephants in the earlier pictures are now for tourists to ride.) The document is dated 1908 and shows that S's family has been here for at least 100 years. This is of significance because many argue that the Karen all really came from Burma, but this shows a long provenance in Thailand. The Consulate is in Chiang Mai and the other language is Thai, not Burmese. It is interesting to me, because unlike most Thai writing where the words all run together, in this document, each word is separate like in English.





And here are S's sister with her youngest child as we were leaving.