Life in Phana

Tetsaban Phana: Tod Kathin 2552/2009 Day One

Tetsaban Phana organised their Tod Kathin to take place right at the end of the month following Awk Phansa. The presentation of new robes was to be made at Wat Trirat, a wat in the amphur that is hidden behind Samarkee School -- the school that is now run by the Tetsaban. The ong kathin was set up at the market place in Ban Phana and throughout the day (October 29th) people came to make offerings. As always these were scrupulously recorded.

 

 

Monks from several temples in Phana were invited to chant at about 4 pm. The mayor was leading the ceremony so he lit the candles on the shrine table.

 

The Chao Kana Amphur was invited to give a dhamma talk. He is quite a young scholar-monk who became head of the amphur group of monks two years ago. He is abbot of a temple in a village called Ban Sao Rik, about 6 kms from Ban Phana. It houses a large school for novices which I plan to feature soon.

 

 

The chanting followed his teaching. I didn't follow his teaching, but he spoke in Lao and there seemed to be quite a few jokes in with the more serious parts, and his audience / congregation seemed to appreciate it all.

 

Here are some of the people of Phana listening to the chanting:

 

 

Tetsaban workers were giving out drinks of cold water throughout the cereomonies:

 

When the chanting had finished they also served food:

 

Every month the Tetsaban gives a pension of 600 Baht to every one in their area who is over 60 years old and not receiving any other pension. In other words, they do not give these pensions to retired teachers, civil servants, police or military. The law states that Tetsaban can give pensions at their discretion but as far as I can tell, very few actually do so. The current Tetsaban administration make much of their policy to provide for people 'from before the cradle to the crematorium' and I will be saying something about this in a later blog. 

On this occasion, the distribution of pensions took place on this first day of the Tod Kathin, which of course is a good way to make sure some of the people stick around to the end!

 

 

 
 

And then it was time for the entertainment to begin. For the next four hours, from 6 pm to 10 pm, we were entertained by young and old people from Phana, and just a few people brought in specially from outside. But that will have to wait for a later posting.

 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

Small celebration in Phana

I arrived at a great age today; the sort of age I once wouldn't have thought it possible to achieve. This wonderful offering arrived about a week ago and there was no attempt made to make it last until now. It came with my two eldest sisters-in-law who both live in Bangkok.

 

 They have known me for more than 40 years so the 'Mr Lawrence' seems a bit over the top. They never call me that so I guess it was added as a politeness by the cake shop decorator.

Pensri and her sisters were obviously going to enjoy this.

 

And so did I!

So a very big THANKYOU to P'Saisawarth and P'Arunee. Please come to stay again!

More Tod Kathin in Phana

 We went over to a temple in a small village where our friend Mae Chee Kalaya was one of the sponsors of a Tod Kathin taking place the next day. This is Mae Chee Kalaya, a lovely woman who went to school in Phana with one or two of Pensri's younger sisters. She had a good career in the Ministry of Commerce, I think, and spent several years abroad working in Thai embassies, so her English is excellent. Her children are grown up and have children of their own and they fully supported her decision to leave married life behind her a few years ago to become a nun. She doesn't spend all her time here in Phana. Mostly she stays in a community of Mae Chee somewhere north of Bangkok.

 

 

There is very little of the wat and the abbot told me that it had only been established three or four years. It has a lot of ground, mostly still covered in trees, with about eight small kuti for the monks. Mae Chee Kalaya has a nice little kuti which her children had built for her. Other than that the only other building is a large sala, at present no more than a floor, a roof and the beginnings of some walls. I had been there once before when the abbot was installed as Chao Kana Tambon, that is the chief abbot of the tambon group. At that time a Buddha Image had just been installed and I think it is one of the most beautiful I have seen. I like it because it looks very plain, but in fact it is more special than the usual glittering image. It is carved from a huge stone of some sort, possibly a kind of soapstone. The carving was done in Saraburi but I'm not sure whether the stone also came from there.

 

 

 

 

An ong kathin is always set up, either at the sponsor's home or less usually at the wat, as here. A rectangular area is marked off by fruit, baskets and seemingly assorted odds and ends like brooms. A gong is always featured. People who are going to contribute offerings bring them to this place. When it is set up outside a wat, it is always dismantled and taken in procession to the wat to be presented along with the robes which are the main idea of this festival.

 

 

 

These women were busy making their ornate contributions and it would have made a good photo, but because I asked permission to take one they immediately stopped work, stopped laughing among themselves, and arranged themselves and their 'work' as you can see: 

 

 

 

Another feature of all kathin (at least here in this part of Isan, but I guess everywhere) are pennants showing four creatures: a crocodile, a turtle, a mermaid and a centipede sort of thing. I have always wondered what their significance was, and the abbot explained. They represent millionaires who never practised generosity, never took part in kathin. Re-born as these unlucky creatures they see a kathin procession and ask to be part of it so they can gain merit and perhaps be reborn into a better life.

 

 

 

 

 

 
Well, the kathin season lasts for a month after awk phansa, so it is very nearly over for another from that when I got up! This evening, though, there will be singing and dancing at the old market place, so I hope to be there for that.year. For me there is just the one organised by Tetsaban Phana still to come. It started this morning when people went to Wat Trirat in the amphur to feed the monks at breakfast time. I saw people coming back

 

 

 

Wild Orchid Conservation at a Thai Forest Monastery

Earlier this year I visited a wat in Khon Khaen Province and a recent post on My Thai Friend reminded me of it. I was on a bit of a tour around Isan and this was just about the last on the list of places I had planned to visit. To a certain extent I was a little disappointed because I had read that I would see hundreds of orchids there. It's true that I did, but what I had not expected was that there would be just the one species. But still, this was not an orchid farm but a forest monastery which had conserved the species that was already growing there.

This helpful notice was just outside the monastery:

 

This notice was less helpful to me because I am illiterate but I love this version of the Thai script:

 

And here are two of the orchids:

 

 

Beautiful, aren't they? But we don't need photos of all 4,000 of them to get the idea.

Over at My Thai Friend (here) (then search: Dan Singkhon) you can read about wild orchids for sale at a border market in Phrachuap Kiri Khan Province.
 
 

 

Tod Kathin, Kathin, Kathin ... in Phana

The Tod Kathin season is already in full swing and in small towns like Phana the coming weekend is likely to see a final burst of activity.  This is because of the long weekend starting with King Chulalongkorn Day on the 23rd. Long weeekends are when 'exiles' from rural areas like this return home to their families and roots.

Each wat with at least 5 monks in residence is entitled to benefit from one robe presentation (Tod Kathin) each year. Originally that is all it was, the presentation of a new set of robes to one monk nominated by the abbot. Nowadays, and for some time past, it has become a major source of fund-raising for the temple, a major source of merit-making for lay people, and a major source of economic activity for the makers and sellers of Buddhist supplies and for local construction companies. Oh, and it is also a major source of sanuk for everyone who takes part.

 

Wat Phra Lao was the first of Phana's temples to benefit this year. On 9th October a so-called 'mobile' kathin was organised by a Bangkok family who originated in Phana. They came with their friends and colleagues and were supported by the few distant relatives they have here. I imagine that raised quite a lot of money but don't know how much.

 

On 11th October the family who live just up the road from us held a Tod Kathin at a wat in a village about 2 kms from Phana. We are neighbours but unrelated, so our contribution to this one was small. My own contribution was mainly to give up lots of sleep (see my recent post 'Sleepless in Phana').

 

Next up was a 'united kathin' at Wat Burapha. This one was a bit unusual, at least in my experience. There were 4 different contribution patterns, if I can call them that.  The aim was to raise money to build or re-build the pavillion used for cremation ceremonies. The crematorium at Wat Burapha was the first in Phana and the facilities are very much in need of renovation. One individual, an uncle of the abbot, offered 100,000 Baht. Another family living near the wat pledged to raise at least 120,000 Baht. The wat committee invited people to make individual pledges of 500 Baht per unit (ong). Other people, mostly those living close to the wat could of course join in by making any donation they wished -- those would be samller than 500 Baht. The total raised was 580,000 Baht, so there must have been a lot of 500 Baht ong and small donations.

 

My photos on this occasion were not very good but I will include a few anyway.

Here is Pensri posing in the garden before we set off to Wat Burapha.

 

Donations were registered in separate books for units and other donations.

 

Not only money is offered on these occasions. Many of these small pillows will be given away by the monks on subsequent occasions.

 

 

After the ceremony concluded and I was outside talking to the sandal man (previous post) one of the monks came out with plastic bags of fruit which he hung on the gates of houses in the neighbourhood.

The nest sequence show people enjoying giving to the temple.

 

 

 

And the abbot (whose mother brings him food before noon every day from her house just down the road) was very generous in his thanks. He has a good sense of humour as well as being a 'scholar monk': Phra Maha Jantee is his name. The monks also distributed auspicious souvenirs of the occasion to all the lay people.

 

Coming up is a united kathin at Wat Don Kwan on the 21st, a tetsaban organised kathin for Wat Trirath on the 29th, which will include the bong lang orchestra and dancers from the Tetsaban-sponsored Samakee School. On the 23rd the family of one of Pensri's uncles is holding a kathin in Ubon and lots of her cousins will be coming for that from all over Thailand. On the 31st another kathin in Ubon is being organised by a school-friend of Pensri's. They were at school together more than 50 years ago! These are just the ones we will be involved in! I'll maybe post some photos when it's all done.

And while I was writing this we were visited by an old friend, another who went to school with Pensri. This was Mae Chee Kalya, who is one of the organisers of a kathin in a village just outside Phana (but in the amphur) which is being held on 24th. I hope I can do a post about her because she is an interesting woman and the wat where she stays when she is in Phana is an interesting one too. So there's a bit more kathin to come.

 

 
 

 

 
 
 
 

Sandal Man in Phana

Phana is often the focal point for itinerant salespeople, or so it seems. I often wonder where they come from and how they get here. This morning I was standing in the street near Wat Burapha while Pensri was talking to two old friends when a man came along pushing a little trolley loaded with sandals. He was tall, thin, smartly dressed with an amazing hat, broad-brimmed and floppy with a neck-ptotecting cloth hanging down the back. He asked me if I wanted any sandals and I said I didn't but would like a photo of him. He seemed more pleased than I would have expected if I had wanted sandals.

 The strange thing is that I did want sandals, but somehow not being in a shoe shop made me forget that. Luckily he stayed around chatting to Pensri and the other women for long enough for me to remember that my current sandals were in a state of imminent collapse.

 The result was that I tried on several pairs and eventually settled on one I wanted to buy. They all cost 190 Baht and I thought there was little point in bargaining. I ended up giving him 200 Baht (That's how good I am at bargaining anyway) saying the extra 10 Baht was for the photos I took.

 And I got his story too. He came from Mahasarakham and so did the sandals. They came from a village which made them as their OTOP (One Tambon One Product). They were bought by a middleman who employs my new friend on a commission-only basis plus transport and two meals a day. The middleman has several pickup trucks. One had brought my  friend and nine others to Phana and then distributed them around different villages, one per village. They would stay a week based in Phana, being ferried to different villages each day. The driver arranged breakfast and evening meals but the sales force had to get their own food during the day, all being in different locations I suppose. At night they stay in a wat, sleeping in a sala. He didn't know exactly where they would be sleeping because the driver arranged all that. He did say that they all came equipped with their own sleeping mat, pillow and mosquito net.

 

He is a farmer but does this work when there is nothing to do on the farm except watch the rice grow. He said he had been all over the place selling sandals, including Bangkok and the South. And how much did he make out of it? 50 Baht per pair of sandals, apparently. And on a good day he might sell 20 or 30 pairs, though not all days were good. It would take a lot of luck to sell that many (like finding Cinderella, I think) because he wasn't carrying more than about 40 or maybe 50 pairs. I guess any bargaining down would have reduced his commission, not the middleman's cut. So I am glad I didn't even try. He was a really nice man: dignified, informative, proud of his work, a pleasure to talk to and listen to. I am glad I met him.

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.

 
 
 
 

 

 
 

Sleepless in Phana

Loud music is a staple of life in Phana. In the still, traffic-free evenings, nights and even early mornings, sound travels across the open rice-fields unobstructed. Someone, somewhere is having a party of some sort most weekends. That is Fridays and Saturdays and into Sunday mornings. There are merit-making ceremonies of several kinds which entail relatives returning to Phana from all over Thailand. Because so many young and youngish Phana people live far away, in Bangkok and other urban centres, a party is called for whenever they return. Or they return whenever a party is going to be thrown.  I have got used to it and generally feel good that people are enjoying themselves. Sometimes I am there with them, though I tend to come home soon after the karaoke-type singing begins. I have never quite got used to the idea that so many people can get so much pleasure out of singing so badly, and that so many other people get so much non-judgemental pleasure out of listening to them doing so.

 

All that was until yesterday. Just up the road from us a family has been organizing this year's kathin at Wat Phra Lao. We had offered a donation early yesterday morning, but last night we made a much greater sacrifice. This truck parked in the road a little way up from our house:

 

 

Next to our gate (that's our gate, the green one bottom right) a large structure was being built:

 

And back down the road, next to our neighbour's house, the police had been busy too:

 

As dusk started to come on, the structure looked like this:

 

 

And from our side:

 

 

Needless to say, either side of the screen were two enormous banks of speakers. The guys putting all this together told me the films would start at 8 pm and finish at 3 am. They didn't say that they would have finished their building work by 6 pm and we would then be entertained by the loudest music in the world until the films began. But that is what happened.

We don't have glass in most of the windows of our house although there is some ornamental glass above the doors along the front. Sometimes the amplified bass from music a couple of kilometres away has caused the glass to reverberate. Coming from just 20 metres away, I am surprised it didn't shake out all the glass we have. It certainly resonated in my rib cage. I thought that things would get better once the first film started but the soundtrack of one of them (a horror story, I think) consisted mostly of piercing screams and loud bass grinding noises that I guess were spooky or something if you were in the right place -- about 20 kms away, perhaps.

Amazingly, at some point I did get to sleep. I was woken up at 2.45 am by the sudden silence! It was all over. Well, almost. The construction crew then worked for another few hours de-constructing it all and packing everything back into the truck.

The music of the kathin procession did not start until about 7.30 am by which time I was able to wave them off on their way to the wat, as is the custom. I have just learned that more than a hundred people sat on mats out in the road enjoying the films. Good for them. I guess it was an experience they will remember. I will too. Sorry I don't have photos of them enjoying themselves. Somehow I just wasn't in the mood by then.

  

 

Community Projects in Phana

Phana Municipality has built a community centre in each moo. There are four of them in Ban Phana and the one for Moo 1is my 'local'. It is just the other side of a coconut orchard from our house and I have wandered over there several times when they have been preparing trucks for a parade and the like. The people running the place have come to invite us to some of their activities and we have  gone along whenever we could. But to be honest, nothing much has seemed to be happening, although we do hear the noise of women (mostly) laughing and having a good time over there. But yesterday Phana Municipality was being evaluated for the Prapokao Prize 2552 in terms of the promotion of community involvenment and the administration of the project. So every community centre had prepared an exhibition showing what they do and yesterday afternoon they made presentations to the prize committee who had come from Bangkok.

All four of the centres were built to the same design and have the same facilities. The building is quite imposing and very useful but consists of a large bare room on the first floor with an open space beneath it. That is pretty much the basic local house except that a home would also have a guest verandah at the top of the stairs.

This one below is in Moo 9, next to Wat Burapha.

They all have a small toilet block and the facilities are kept clean. And open!

Moo 1 seems to be the only one which has daily newspapers available.

Moo 1 had arranged the clearest display, I must say. They run several little projects here: a weaving group, producing cotton cloth, basket weaving, and their main project which is producing organic fertiliser pellets from animal droppings (cows and buffaloes), rice husks, urea (origin unspecified but I mean to find out) mixed with mud and one or two other ingredients.

This is the building next to the main centre where the fertiliser pellets are produced. I hope to have some photos of the production process to post before long.

This gateway is behind the present market place and announces that beyond it is Moo 7, home to the Phana recycling project.

 

The Phana Municipality has provided an adviser on this project and it seems to be going really well. Moo 7 has been providing training and advice to other tetsaban, in Amnat Charoen and in other nearby provinces. Again, I hope to be showing more about this project soon.

The project involves the collection and sorting of various kinds of waste. People in Moo 7 can open a 'recycling bank account' and are paid for the waste they supply, such as paper, bottles, cardboard and so on. There are fifty people who have such accounts, and they can use the accounts to save money for withdrawal as and when they need it. I looked at several of the account books (I couldn't read the account holders names) and most of them had saved several and/or withdrawn several thousand baht through the scheme.

Here, the adviser is explaining how liquid fertiliser is produced from green waste such as wood chippings and leaves.

Moo 9 has a flourishing project to dye and weave silk cloth but we got there at lunchtime and there was no-one about and the exhibition had not been completed. They also have a project of putting on aerobics most evenings and I expect they did some sort of demonstration later in the afternoon when the evaluation team visited.

Moo 8's speciality is tradional massage and they have had about 15 women trained to do this. Later in the day they were giving demonstrations, but again we missed this.

I shall post the result of this evaluation day (the third and final visit to Phana by the team) when I know the result. But from what I hear the judges seemed pretty impressed by what they saw.

 
 
 
  

A day in the life ... or... life in a day

 

The flowering tree which Pensri is most proud of in our garden in Phana is the 'pudtan'. She originally brought three small saplings from Loei 15 years ago. Since then she has taken numerous cuttings and at present there are about twelve specimens in various parts of the garden. It isn't an easy tree to grow and needs a lot of care and attention because it is very prone to aphid attacks, especially in the dry season. Several people have asked her for cuttings but no-one has succeeded in nurturing them for long.

The tree itself is not impresive at all, as you can see in the picture below. The main stem (it can hardly be called a trunk) can grow quite tall (about 3 metres is our tallest) but only produces leaves near the top. But if the tree doesn't impress, the flowers are something else. A classic Thai song says there are no flowers that can compare with it.

The flowers, usually one or two at a time on each tree, open early in the morning. They open very quickly, and are a brilliant white. This is at 10.30am and it has been in bloom for two or three hours:

An hour later a hint of pink appears:

By 1pm it is positively blushing:

And by 4.30pm it is really quite deep pink but still in full bloom:
 

 5.30pm: darker, and beginning to close in on itself:

By the next morning (7.15am) it has closed up but new buds are getting ready to have their day:

 

On another tree, at about 7am you can see how shrunken the red flower has become, but also what a deep, blood red it is. But it is all starting again and tomorrow that will be today's white flower.