Thai Life in Phana

Retreat in the Forest, Day one

We arrived too late this morning to take part in the alms round at Don Chao Poo so we had to take our food offering directly to the 'food station'.

All the food offered to the monks into their bowls is pooled and sorted. Far too much food is provided, but it has to feed the monks and all the men and women in white (upasika) who take 8 precepts each day of the retreat. And when they have all eaten it is the turn of the lay people.The monks eat directly from their bowls during these 10 days, as forest monks always do. 'Wet' food is put into a little plastic bag and tightly sealed with a rubber band. Most of the rice offered this morning was the sticky variety and I guess that will be the case  every day.

Now what looks good here?

All of it!

Be patient ...

... and now you can help yourselves. When a monk's bowl gets full of rice it is emptied into a big basket like this one. The bowls quickly get full so the men pushing the basket-on-a-cart have to be spaced out along the line of monks.

The girls just want to have fun.

We put up with this every year ...

... so we might as well make the best of it.

 There's a good-looking fella!

The pillow suggests he lay down to sleep rather than sat up as the most stringent tudong monks do.

A neat and tidy monk was here:

How did this robe get so far up a tree? It's a mystery.

 
 

Caught in the act!

 

Women eat Thai food (and some men too). This is their time (at last) and place.

Schoolgirls have been taking care of the food arrangements and now they are serving the lay people.

Here we have a young monk with his proud mum and sisters. There was a call for him on his mum's mobile and he had to be found so he could take the call. When he got to them it was the tiny little boy who had to hand him the phone because women don't hand something directly to a monk. I guess if his sister had had a baby daughter I would have had to do the honours as the nearest man.

When everyone had eaten it was time for most of us to go home. Not for those who were staying to practise meditation and listen to some teaching later in the day. I left too but will return again before the retreat is over.
 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

Thai restaurants in small towns in Isan

Finding a restaurant in a small town in the middle of the day often proves almost impossible. If you do find one between noon and 1 p.m. it is usually so full of local government officials and secondary school students that you don't like to intrude. Or you don't want to wait that long. Or you don't want to be confronted with a scared waitress who seems to believe you are speaking any language except Thai although the older woman she calls over understands you perfectly well.

If you go along a bit later another factor preventing you eating comes into play. The restaurants are usually too well disguised for you to find them. The thing is that the people who live in these small towns all know where the restaurant is so it doesn't need a sign, or tables and chairs outside, or anything helpful like that.

My wife often drags me protesting to what I can only call dark little holes in the wall and almost always they come up with really delicious food.

 I usually go looking for small buildings with thatched roofs like this one. I have a theory that restaurants with thatched roofs serve good food. No matter how many times I have been proved wrong, I cling to this theory. In this case the tables proved to have big holes in the middle of them, which means they serve korean so-called barbecue which I don't much like.

 

 

This would be my favourite sort of restaurant.

The combination of thatch, an open-air private room, and water, probably with lots of hungry fish in it, is irresistible to me. And usually to various flying insects, too.

At night I feel the same way about fairy lights. Again, I'm often disappointed unless I am in fact looking for a dodgy karaoke bar, which I am not as a rule.

 

 

This is what drew me into a small restaurant in a very small amphur last week. We had been looking for a long time and this place, although on the main road, was well hidden. There was only a narrow entrance and the restaurant itself, a garden restaurant, was set well back in a very narrow space.

This looked attractive though, so it drew us in and conformed nicely to my theory that if people take the trouble to serve their food in pleasant surroundings then the food is probably going to be good. (I seem to have somewhat modified my original theory, so perhaps experience does teach me something.)

The food was good although there was no menu. The young woman running the place said that there was no need for one since she knew everything that was available. It turned out that they had only been open a few days so there was not much available. And they probably have a written menu by now because I'm sure she will get tired of running through it maybe hundreds of times a day.

What turned out to be odd about the place was the decoration, decor would not quite be the word, I think. I was looking for a theme, a motif, but I couldn't find one. Here are some of the things they had arranged for us to look at while we were waiting for our food:

The nest of something that flies and is dangerous.

 

Some interesting bits of twig.

 

A topiary reindeer one day not soon enough.

 

A sort of swan made from wood and dried berries.

 

Designs carried out by a retired sailor, perhaps.

There were several more but you've probably got the idea (or lack of one) by now.

There was a nice place to sit, though.

 

 

 

 

 

The very best thing was this light shade. But I can't help thinking that some distant relative (the one who went to do an MBA in Montana) will one day come looking for it.

Celebrating the Rice Harvest in Phana

The rice harvest is pretty much completed in Phana and a couple of friends invited us to a ceremony at their farm to mark their own successful harvest.

This celebration goes by the name of Su Kwan Khao (Calling the Rice Spirits) although this one that we attended had several non-traditional features. Traditionally, the ritual was held in the fields before the rice was taken back to the house to be stored. Our friends' house is located right next to their fields and most of their rice had already been sacked up. The little pile of unhusked rice in the foreground of this picture represents the way it used to be done.

Another variation  from tradition was that the main ritual was not performed by a Mor Kwan (a spirit expert). Instead, the pa kwan (the decorated trays in the top centre of the picture) was joined to a Buddha image by the sai sin (sacred thread). People in Phana do not generally pay much attention to spirits. Nobody has a spirit house, for instance.

The spirits were well catered for, all the same. At the four corners of the rice heap were plates containing sticky rice steamed in banana leaves, hard-boiled eggs, a boiled chicken and a bottle of alcoholic spirit. The spirits don't seem to be very interested in the offerings (though I'm sure they appreciate the thought) and the guests always end up consuming everything.

 

The ceremony was held outdoors of course in an area shaded by big mango trees. Now usually if I stand anywhere near a mango tree the red ants that live in it find me within minutes. There must have been something about the presence of nine monks that persuaded them to leave us alone that day, because the ants didn't show at all.

This nicely understated set of shrine tables and the paraphenalia that goes with it stood in one corner of the area. The lotus pond in the background set it off nicely. Our friends' farm is fully organic and recognised as a model farm by one of the King's projects.

The contrasting light and shade didn't make photography easy but the atmosphere was very peaceful.

 

Here the acting-abbot of Wat Phra Lao has extinguished the candle at the end of the chant, thereby making the water in the bowl holy.

 

It is always a nice moment when one of the monks sprinkles the lay people with the holy water. You can feel the relaxation of tension after the serious business of chanting and sitting attentively (or not).

 

Phra Dit (the acting abbot) then read from a palm-leaf book, singing the words. They were in Lao, although they were written in the Thai script. This replaced the invocation to the spirits which a mor kwan would have chanted. I was very impressed by the way he could flip the book to a new page using just his right hand. And also he could read all the words without using a finger to point at them, quite an achievement since the words are very small and the lines very long, the pages being very wide. Still, I'm not sure anyone would have known if he had skipped a line or two.

 

The lay people sitting at a suitably respectful distance made me think that the mango trees had been planted with just this ceremony in mind maybe 15 or 20 years ago.

 

While all this was going on, women and small girls were preparing the food.

 

When the time comes to serve it, the young(est) men carry out the trays.

 

The host (in white shirt) prepares to make the offering...

 

... and his wife joins him with the white envelopes containing a small gift of money for each monk, and one for the layman in the dark clothes who had requested the chanting and the taking of five precepts.

 

On this occasion the monks did not eat from individual trays but arranged themselves in small groups and enjoyed the picnic atmosphere. Monks don't speak while they are eating and they don't show any pleasure or displeasure concerning the food.

 

 

We lay people waited patiently for them to finish so that we could eat. We were not constrained to silence when the time did come for us to eat, and we were full of verbal appreciation for the food.

 

Because Buddhist ceremonies in Thailand all follow the same basic pattern, it is easy to think that your experience is going to be the same on each occasion. But in fact there are always little differences in procedure, or place, or people, or FOOD and these things keep them interesting for me even though I have attended so many and often set out convinced that I am not going to have a good time. But I do. Especially now that everyone accepts that for at least some of the time I need to sit on a chair on the fringes of the gathering.

  

 
 
 

 

 

  

 

Fewer than 180 Monks feasted in Phana

180 monks were invited to a ceremony in Phana a couple of weekends ago and so were we. We only received our invitation the previous evening when the organisers -- two good friends of ours -- realised we were back in Phana. We did not entirely understand what was going on but knew that 180 monks had been invited to chant and eat at a new wat on the edge of the town.  Our friends had booked a table for six people in our name and we were to offer 600 baht. We could invite four people to join us, of course.

It was a somewhat unusual occasion but not the first that supporters of this particular monastery have arranged. The monastery was only founded a few years ago. It is in a forested area right on the western edge of Phana, opposite the secondary school Phanasuksa. There is one large wooden sala with a wide verandah in front and about ten small kuti where the monks stay. There is no viharn as such and no ubosot.

The precise nature of the arrangements only gradually became clearer once we got there. It wasn't until the ceremony had finished and the last people (us) were about to go home that I found out why Ajarn Deem was carrying a blue briefcase the whole time.

The sala was crowded with people, there were more out on the verandah, and many more sitting outside under the trees. Under a temporary pavillion to one side of the sala 30 red tables with white table-cloths had been set up. Apparently we had sponsored one of these tables. The monks would eat there after they led us through taking the five precepts, agreed to accept our offerings, chanted, one of them had given an extemporised sermon and they chanted again. Another feature that made this occasion unique in my experience was that all the usual 'old man' duties were performed by women: asking for the precepts, making the formal offering, and so on.

 

 

People who take food to the wat to offer to the monks usually eat there too. On most occasions the food is first pooled and then shared out among the monks. What is left over is then redistributed to the lay people. That is what happened on this occasion. In addition, though, the villagers who live around the wat had bought and cooked enough food to feed the 180 monks they had invited.  I understand that they spent about 10,000 Baht on this. On top of that, people who had brought food also made cash donations according to their means, usually ranging between 20 baht and 100 Baht but there are no limits set at either end of the scale. But our sponsorship of 600 Baht was effectively a 100 baht per person donation.

 

The monks and novices took quite easily to being feasted at tables. But by my calculation there were only about 130 -140 monks present, so there were empty tables and more food than was required for the monks. Added to that is that monks are always given too much and they never finish it all. Their practice is that they stop eating when they have had sufficient. I only wish I had the self-discipline to do the same!

 

People waited patiently and in good humour for the monks to finish eating. It is customary courtesy for lay people to wait until the monks have finished, and also so that excess food can be redistributed.

 

The food was distributed to the monks' tables by  boys and girls from Phanasuksa School. They then cleared the tables and helped villagers to redistribute what had been left over plus the food that had been brought in by lay people. There was plenty for everybody, and again people mostly sat in groups of six, most on the ground but some old-timers like me at tables left empty by absent monks.

 

Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves a lot. Apparently this wasn't the first such occasion that the village supporters of this monastery had arranged. It won't be the last, either, because altough they raised about 60,000 baht above their expenses on this day, they still have some way to go to complete the two gateways. Two days later the workmen returned to continue work on the first one. But of course after the gateways it will be the viharn, and so on until the little kids here this day are well into adulthood themselves.

 

And what was Ajarn Deem carrying that briefcase for? When she opened it she pulled out several class registers and the boys and girls from Phanasuksa lined up and had their names checked against it. They had looked like happy and willing volunteers (which I am sure they were) but they were also fulfilling an assignment as part of their religious and community studies programme.

 
 
 
 

 

 
 

Monkey Troubles

 

    Phana is known as the monkey town by some insensitive people (farangs is how they are usually known). I have never heard anyone from Phana use any such term. The self-coined description of Phana is “the land of scholars” which is perhaps overdoing it a bit but it is certainly preferable to monkey town. The land of scholars thing was well-earned in the past because Phana was home to only the second school in the whole of Ubon Ratchathani province, just one year after the first was founded in Ubon in 1897. From then on Phana’s scholastic fame spread as teachers born there were sent out to teach at schools all over Isan.

 

    Phana often features in monkey stories in the national press. The story is always the same but it has appeared several times in the last few years. It reports that the tribe of monkeys in Don Chao Poo (wildly overestimated as being in the thousands) is starving and needs people to come and visit and feed them. It has never been clear who places this story as certainly no reporter has been known to come and investigate. It might be in the interests of Phana Municipality to attract more visitors to the town, but the story always criticises them for neglecting the monkeys so they are not likely to be the source of the story. In fact, the monkeys are not starving and the municipality has done a lot for them. Similar stories pop up on local radio stations occasionally, too.

    As far as anyone knows there have been monkeys living in Don Chao Poo for ever. They had never been much of a problem until their numbers began to increase quite rapidly in the last few years. Currently I estimate their number as somewhere between 300 and 400. I have tried counting several times but always lose count round about 300. They stay in the forest at night and most of them don’t venture outside during the day, although some do go out onto the road in front of the main entrance. There has been some invasion of new houses behind the forest and a newly-built private kindergarten there was refused a government licence because on the day it was inspected there were quite a few monkeys on the premises. Occasionally a lone old male can be seen wandering the roads, probably because he has been chased away by the others for some reason. A small family visited our house once, a distance of about 1 km. I don’t know exactly how they made their way there but I saw them leave along the power cables above the road.

 

    The increase in the monkey population of Phana is down to two main factors, the first obviously being their natural randiness. The other factor, though, is down to humans. The monkeys are a popular attraction for visitors from outside the town, and they come to feed them, especially at weekends and on holidays.

 

 

In addition, the municipality, which took over the responsibility of the forest a few years ago, provides them with a daily supply of unhusked brown rice, and has also built water troughs for them.

 

 

Once a year they also put on a ‘sit down’ feast on tables with bright tablecloths. I have never been there for this event so I don’t know how they keep the monkeys away until everything is ready for them.

 

  

 

 

    Whenever people feed them they can behave in a very greedy, grasping manner, and if you have food in a bag the bigger males will try to grab it and the winner will keep all the contents for himself. The braver ones also tend to swarm on you and this can be very alarming, although if you can remain calm this is not as dangerous as it may seem. Sometimes, however, you will find that you can feed younger monkeys and females by hand.

 

Be prepared, though, to fling your food onto the ground and let them fight over it. If you have no food with you the monkeys will let you walk amongst them and they won’t bother you at all.