Life in Phana

The Isan House that Moved

There is a house in Exeter, where I live half my time, known as 'the house that moved'. It was originally built in the late 16th or early 17th century and had to move to make way for a new road. Now there is a house that moved here in Phana; not quite so old, but old enough that lots of people are surprised we didn't demolish it and build a new concrete one. I have posted about this house at several stages of its reincarnation, Moving House in Isan Part 1 ,  and Moving House in Isan Part 2, and Keeping the ancestors informed . The work is finished now, and the upper storey is occupied, while we are still preparing the ground floor for a 'grand opening' on March 8th.

The renovation/restoration/refurbishment, call it what you will, has been carried out through donations from a large number of family members of descendants of Ta Rin and Yai Homhual Mahanil, as well as other relatives and neighbours in Phana. The generosity of all these people has been amazing, and those of us who have been closest to the work are most grateful to everyone who has donated.

These two pictures show the house as it now looks from the road:

Here we can see the ground floor after we moved some of the furniture into it, although when the picture was taken we hadn't finalised the arrangement.

The old doors at the back lead into an enclosed area that is part of the 'upstairs' accommodation. This largely open area on the ground floor is going to be a community study centre, containing a library, seating and meeting areas, a screen for showing DVDs, and temporary exhibitions. The opening exhibition will centre around the loom, with pictures and information about weaving and the process of indigo dying as it is practised in Phana.

Behind the closed doors at the back are these stairs and a shower room. The stairs lead to the accommodation we are providing for the Don Chao Poo Research Centre which will serve as the base for people conducting research into all aspects of the nearby forest known as Don Chao Poo, and especially in all probability into all aspects of the long-tailed macaques which live there.

At the top of the stairs is a 'kitchen area'. There is an electric hot-water jug, a 4-slice toaster and a double electric hot-plate.

 

The dining area is shown looking towards the front of the house. In the top right corner is the door to one of the three bedrooms. The doors and the bedrooms they lead to are the original ones, as are all the floorboards and the ouiter wooden walls and shuttered windows.

You can see our lab bench in the picture above, but here is a better view of it. The two microscopes were donated by Exeter University, and our other equipment at present consists of binoculars, a DVD video camera, a hand-held GPS, two stop-watches, and various glassware of a scientific nature.

And here, looking towards the back of the house. The kitchen area is to the right of the bathroom.

This is the sitting area. The chairs have been donated by a generous neighbour, Acharn Kalyani, who also gave us the old dooors downstairs, the stumps that form the front fence, the shuttered windows on the ground floor, and several other valuable pieces of wood that were used in the renovation. She has also provided the meeting table and chairs, three old wooden chairs and a small table, and lots of very interesting books -- all of which are in use on the ground floor. 

Next to the sitting area, towards the bedrooms and the front of the house, is this small library of reference books on academic subjects as well as local history, travel and so on. There are three bedrooms here, but we currently have four researchers in residence, so one has to sleep out in the main room as you can see. They have formed a rota so that this 'privilige' is shared among them.

As I mentioned previously, the bedrooms and their doors are original. Here is the middle bedroom door:

This is the bedroom that Pensri and I always stayed in back in the 1980s and 1990s. When I came to stay in the 1970s I wasn't senior enough to be given a bedroom, so like our fourth researcher I used to sleep on the floor.

Back downstairs, we are still in the process of arranging the study centre. We are presently awaiting a truck-load (!!!) of books being donated by family members in Bangkok. Also to come is a series of DVDs to help secondary school students to revise for exams in all their subjects. These have been offered by Pink, the daughter of a neice, who has just finished her secondary education and has been awarded a scholarship by a university in Japan, which she will take up later this year.

This view looks out towards a rice and noodle restaurant which our researchers have named 'The Shack'. They eat there a lot, especially at mid-day.

The blue house across the road is home to Panda, a white dog with black markings over his eyes. Panda was quite hostile to the researchers whenh they were staying at our house, but when they moved in here he had a change of heart.  In fact, he moved in as well, sleeping beneath the house for the first few nights. Now he has returned to the blue house, but he has become friendly and protective of the research centre and the researchers. Both have become part of his territory, no doubt.

 

I will post some more about the community study centre when we have got it ready for the opening on March 8th.

 

Keeping Busy in Phana

 

The Phana Monkey Project is about to reach a crucial stage. A week from now five researchers, all recent Msc graduates in Animal Behaviour from Exeter University in the UK, will arrive in Phana to begin a project which will provide the basis for the establishment of Don Chao Poo Forest as a research field site as well as educational and informational material for schoolchildren and visitors to the forest.

This team will be carrying out most of the research which the Phana Monkey Project needs at this stage. In addition, they will be conducting some research of their own along lines that they discussed last Friday with Dr Joah Madden of Exeter University.

 

NO APE MUSEUM

As far as the Phana Monkey Project goes, we have not been idle in the last few months. We have held meetings with the Phana Municipality to clarify our role and theirs. At least one of the original intentions has been abandoned: the money is no longer available for an "Ape Museum" to be built in the forest. Although the promise of this was perhaps the key starting point for the then-named Macaque Project, I think all of us who have carried the idea forward see abandoning that particular part of the project as a good thing. There was every chance that had a building been provided, there would have been no money available to keep it staffed and maintained; on top of that, building inside the forest would have been a major disruption. There are already two small buildings in the forest which have been abandoned and left to the monkeys to play in -- their main playthings being ceiling and roof tiles, which they love to pull off and destroy.

COMMUNITY CENTRE

The Tetsaban have suggested an alternative to an 'Ape Museum' in the forest. The old market building is to be converted into a kind of community centre, and it will provide three main spaces. At one end will be a community IT centre with 22 computer stations. There will be a similar-sized space at the other end of the building which we will be able to use to show videos to visiting schoolchildren. The central space will be for occasional community meetings, and we will provide an exhibition detailing macaque information and photographs in that space.

The tetsaban is providing the materials for the conversion of this building but the community will provide the labour. In the following pictures you see the headman of Moo 7 and his wife working on the new floor, which they have completed since the photos were taken.

CLEANING UP THE FOREST

Last week we worked with the tetsaban / municipality and some students from the school they run, to clear the forest of litter. It is amazing how quickly litter accumulates, and monitoring it will be an important focus of the upcoming research, so that hopefully we can recommend some practical ways to reduce the litter produced and ensure that litter is removed frequently. Our monitoring will be made more useful because we have established a 'zero-litter' environment before the monitoring begins. This way we should be able to get a clearer picture of when, where, and how much litter is dropped over a weekend, for example. Already the tetsaban have put a new cleaning team in place to collect and remove litter and we are sure this will be a great improvement on the previous 'emergency' cleaning sessions before big events.

DON CHAO POO FOREST RESEARCH CENTRE

The Phana Monkey project has also been working to provide a centre for researchers to use while they are in Phana, and the team from Exeter University will be the first to do so. The building is almost ready, and the only thing which may prevent them moving in as soon as they arrive is that water and/or electricity may not be connected in time. Details of this centre will appear here as soon as all is ready.

ROAD TRAFFIC FATALITY

Last week we experienced our first recorded road traffic fatality, an adult male killed on the road outside the forest just before 8 am. As it happened, Pensri and I were on our early morning cycle ride, so Pensri put the still-warm monkey in a plastic bag (there were still plenty lying around at the beginning of the week) and took him home. Our first thought was taxidermy but it quickly became apparent that no-one locally had the skill and experience to do this; we soon realised, too, that there was litle point in creating a life-like specimen when we have more than 400 live ones! With advice from Prof Dr Suchinda at Chulalongkorn University, we decided to preserve and display the skeleton. The person in charge of the museum in the Biology Department at Chula sent us some insects (in a box, via the Railway parcels service) and for more than a week now these insects have been nibbling away at the cooked flesh and revealing more of the skeleton. When the process is completed we will post pictures of the skeleton and more detail regarding the process. For the time being, here are a few of the photos we took of our monkey soon after the accident. The monkey had been hit a glancing blow on the side of the head which had fractured his skull but not smashed it. Nevertheless, bleeding was still evident through his nose and mouth, so no pictures of his injury are included here. The blow struck him on the left side of his head, the side not shown here. He was a fine specimen as can be seen from his teeth. (CLICK on the photos for an enlarged view.)

 

We have learned a lot from this monkey and hope to learn more when we are able to examine his skeleton so we have named him "Ajarn Ling" in gratitude. He is not the first macaque to give his life to science, but he will be remembered in Phana, for sure.

( This post has also appeared in a slightly different form at www.thaimonkeyforest.wordpress.com . There is much more about the Phana Monkey Project at that site, so I hope you will visit it sometime soon.)

More visitors to Phana

For a small town, Phana gets more than its fair share of 'official' visitors. I recently posted about the visit of two leading primatologists, one Thai and one Japanese, who had come to Phana to learn something about our monkeys (long-tailed macaques) and Thai culture. (You can read about that HERE.) While they were in Phana  tetsaban Phana (Phana municipality) were also hosts to two other visitors.

Ms Jaree Kiatsupimol was in Phana to assess its suitability to host a Peace Corps volunteer to work in community development. Mr Supot Akhpram was an assessor of the Democratic Community Award Panel, so there was an overlap of the things each of them wanted to see.

Here are a few pictures taken during their visit.

They went to the weaving co-operative ...

 
 
... and the Traditional Medicine Centre ...

 
 

... the library ...

 

... and of course the monkeys:

 
And this time next week, I should be back in Phana, although the train from Bangkok will be re-routed because of the flooding in Thailand at the moment, with more expected in Bangkok when I arrive next Sunday. 

Visit Phana

VISIT PHANA was the theme of the community-based tourism that was on the agenda of the Amnat Charoen Provincial authorities earlier this year. Nothing much seems to have come of it so far, at least as far as the Provincial initiative goes. That may in part be due to the change in government. Not because a change in government necessarily results in the abandonment of all previous policies, but because budget allocations inevitably have to be looked at again in order to reassess priorities.

But in Phana itself some progress was made towards planning for community-based tourism. Perhaps it has taken a new direction, or at least a somehwat unexpected one, in that Don Chao Poo and the resident monkeys have become the focus; and the focus has been narrowed down further to the educational possibilities that they offer.

Another step towards community-based tourism in Phana has been the production of several leaflets, in English initially, but to be translated into Thai and possibly into Japanese.

Here is the content of the first leaflet.

VISIT PHANA 

THE TOWN OF FIELDS IN THE FOREST

Visit Phana and uncover the secrets of this little-known but historic and surprising town in the heart of Isan.

Phana just may be the best place you have never heard of!

Phana is famous for Phra Lao Thepnimit, the beautiful image in a 300-year-old temple: come and pay your respects.

 

Phana is famous, too, for the large tribe of long-tailed macaque monkeys in Don Chao Poo forest – come and feed them, or just sit and watch them.

 

But visit Phana and you can discover much more

Visit during one of the festivals – there is one every month, but the most lively is the Wat Phra Lao festival in February. Join the festivities at the temple. Take part in the bicycle rally around the town …

Come for the rocket festival in May. You can see the young women of Phana competing in traditional dancing as well as watch the firing of huge rockets.

Or Boun Pravet in March when the story of Buddha’s penultimate life is paraded on a banner and read in 13 chapters in a temple.

Or celebrate Loy Kratong at the big pond in Don Kwan village in November.

Visit on market days – Wednesday and Saturday mornings – but you must be up early as most of the action is between 6.30 and 8.00 a.m. The market meets again on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from about 4 – 6 p.m.

Come to Phana and eat gai yaang with som tam and sticky rice, or duck noodle soup, Korean BBQ perhaps.

Or a local speciality: Jao Hawn.

 

Visit the Traditional Medicine Centre for a massage or a sauna – or spoil yourself and have both!

Ask to see how traditional herbal  medicines are produced — and then buy some to ensure your health and comfort.

 

Hire a bicycle to visit the nearby villages. Watch weavers at work at their looms or dying thread; take a tuk-tuk to Ban Soi in Tambon  Chan Lan and see the complete process of silk production from mulberry leaf and silkworm raising to the finished cloth.

Take a picnic to Fai Rong Hin (the Model Agricultural Centre) in Tambon Phra Lao. Enjoy the quiet serenity and take a look at the livestock and find out how farmers are advised to adopt a more self-sufficient and sustainable style of farming.

 

Don’t forget to take a look at those fields in the forest.

 

 

Phana Garden Resort is waiting to welcome you.

Get to Phana by bus from Amnat Charoen or Ubon Ratchathani. Or take the a/c coach service from Bangkok to Khong Jiam.

But don't forget your destination:

Phana

Come on!

Surprise yourself

with an unforgettable visit.

Second-crop Rice

I have been watching the second-crop rice grow in a field next to the Phana by-pass for about three months now. When I first noticed it back in January it had only recently been planted, or transplanted. That was later than is usual for the second crop here, but then the first crop was harvested later than usual because the rain was delayed so long last year. 

Not all the farmers in Phana can grow a second crop. They need access to water in the dry season. Some of them have dug their own ponds and are able to retain sufficient water to irrigate their fields. Others, like this farmer, are lucky enough to have fields next to one of our rivers. This is the Huay Phra Lao (huay being a good Lao word for small-medium sized river) as it passes right next to the field:

The farmer pumps water out of the river ... 

... and into the field:

Now all she has to do is keep the monkeys away. But as I have shown previously, she is well armed. Or her children are.

Community Action Avoided

I am all in favour of positive, practical community action and get involved in a lot of things here in Phana. In return I get recognition that makes me feel less of an outsider. But the annual communal effort right behind our house is something that I always avoid. 

There is a klong (คลอง) or canal running there from the roadside back towards the fields. It's called a klong but it is really a long, narrow, curving pond since it doesn't go anywhere or connect with any other stretch of water. Although it is right behind our house there is a strip of land belonging to our neighbour that comes betweeen the back of our house and the bank of the klong, so we don't have any waterfront. 

There is a notice which tells people not to dump rubbish in there and another which says they should not take fish from it. People out the back do take water from it in the dry season to water vegetables they grow in their nearby fields.

 

It looks nice right now but that is not the way it always looks. In the rainy season the water is dark and murky, home to lots of frogs which are in turn preyed on by all sorts of snakes. The snakes come from the coconut orchard swamp across the road you can just make out in the top of the picture. The frogs let the snakes know where they are by setting up a kind of come-and-get-me serenade each evening. In the dry season the surface is quickly covered in a thick growth of weeds and it is this which has to be dealt with by the good people of Moo 1 before the next rainy season comes around. They start early in the morning, accompanied by loud music, shouting, teasing, laughter, and a good deal of flirting if you ask me. They stop quite early, too, for lunch and alcoholic refreshment of the strong, illicit variety. But in fairness, this is now not just the dry season but the HOT dry season.

Last year I went out the back and took some photos of them at work. That was a bit cheeky, perhaps, and unsurprisingly they invited me to join them in the task. Later they invited me to join them for lunch and refreshments. They seemed to take my refusal in good spirits and I hope that I was able to convey to them my admiration for the work they were doing. But I really didn't want to get as down and dirty as this man was; I don't trust murky waters and what might lurk in them.

 

This year I was conveniently litter-picking in Don Chao Poo, but I took this next picture (and the one at the top of this post) a few days later when it became clear that they were not going to complete the job. I hope they are not waiting for me to go out and do my share.

 

 

Chakri Day Action in Phana

Last week was a busy week of blogging for me. But my blogs last week had very positive responses and outcomes. I am always aware that people at the tetsaban read my blog, and they are always very helpful in providing me with information, and with photos when I need them. I am generally in favour of their initiatives and feel positively about their contribution to life in Phana (as it is lived, not just the blog). Although I am not their mouthpiece, I felt somewhat apprehensive about being critical about what was happening in Don Chao Poo forest with regard to the litter problem and the monkeys.

It seems that I needn't have worried. The response from the tetsaban and from lots of other people in Phana has been very positive. Pensri attended a meeting at the tetsaban on Thursday and distributed copies of a village development plan that was drawn up 46 years ago by her father and a noted abbot in Ubon (born in Phana). Half of this plan was to establish Don Chao Poo as a conservation area encompassing Buddhism, wildlife, traditional medicine and so on. The other half of the plan was to foster village unity through communal days on which the village would be cleaned, roads gradually  improved, ponds dug and so on. Over the years the idea of communal village/town action has diminished in importance as the tetsaban has taken over responsibility for many of these areas of life.

Nevertheless, the meeting, which involved all the village heads, kamnan, councillors and community representatives, agreed to revive the plan and to revise it as necessary. And action was immediate! The following Wednesday, Chakri Day, 6th April was declared a 'community action day' with the emphasis on cleaning up houses and streets. And it worked. People came out of their houses, got together and cleaned up. The mayor, in a cowboy hat (don't ask me why) drove an ice-cream motor-bike contraption around and gave free ice-cream to people out working. Good thinking; he's a real politician. I didn't get any pictures of most of the communal action because I was with Pensri and a gang of a few other adults and some young people in Don Chao Poo. The tetsaban sent a truck to take away our bin bags of rubbish and in the afternoon succumbed to our pleas for more active help. I think 95% of the task has now been completed.

Another turn for the better appeared on Friday. One of the English teachers at Phana Suksa came round to invite us to a meal with him and his colleagues on the Saturday, to celebrate his promotion to a higher grade. We weren't able to accept because we were going to Ubon for the wedding of one of our former volunteers to a young Thai man. But the teacher, Mr Prakong, came with us for alitter-picking session in Don Chao Poo, and afterwards he said that when the new school year began he would arrange for a group of students to pick litter there on a weekly basis as part of the new 'Community Involvement' section of the curriculum. A lucky break that augurs well.

Here is one section of our gang from yesterday:

 

The two girls were brilliant. They came out and worked with us on 5 days, so they deserve a bit of a close-up, I think. They used to come round to the house and learn English when they were at primary school, but they will be in M3 next year, สาวแล้ว, as they say, so they don't do that any more. But it was very nice to see them again, they are two lovely Phana girls.

For some the day's work was just a walk in the park ... or was it a walk on the wild side?

Whatever, at the end of the day it's just nice to put your feet up.

Which is precisely what I was glad to do after 7 days in the forest, helping to collect more than 100 bin bags full of rubbish.

What should we do about the monkeys?

What should we do about the monkeys? In Phana, at least, we have to continue down the road we have been going for the last thirty years or so. There can be no turning back, I'm afraid. But after posting about our long-tailed macaques all this week, I feel I must sum up what it is that we have done. I have already written a lot about them, so I'll try to keep this brief.

By feeding the colony that lives in Don Chao Poo, we have:

• protected them from farmers and others who might have killed them in order to defend their crops and property
• limited their 'ranging'
• prolonged their lives, resulting in population growth and a diminishing share of their natural habitat and food supply
• made them become lazy and greedy
• made them become familiar with humans, unafraid of them, and sometimes aggressive towards them
• introduced them to inappropriate foods.

In effect, we have domesticated them.

On the other hand, if we had fired catapaults at them and had not fed them, they would have lived a more natural life. They would have remained the 'wild' creatures we imagine want them to be.

But we would have been denied the feel-good factor.

I hope that if Phana succeeds in its current aim to set up some sort of educational centre in or near Don Chao Poo, we will learn how to treat our monkeys better and begin to see them for themselves and not merely as a means of making ourselves feel good.

 

A Breakaway Colony of Long-Tailed Macaques in Phana

On the Phana ring-road there is a small colony of long-tailed macaque monkeys. It isn't clear how they got there, several kms from Don Chao Poo forest. One explanation is that when a truck-load of monkeys was stolen from the forest and some of them were rescued by the police, they were left here. I am not sure how credible that is, seeing that the forest is nearby, and the police were local and knew exactly where the monkeys had come from. You can read about this HERE.  A breakaway colony seems more likely. Certainly they would not have been imported here by the farmer who now has them as neighbours.

I have been cycling past the spot where this colony lives for some time now. The large vinyl poster on the left was for some time the only way I had of knowing there were monkeys here. They are very shy, unlike the ones in Don Chao Poo.  One morning, about a week after this became my preferred route, there were 15 of them lined up along the bridge as if they were waiting for me to sail past. It was as if a meeting had been called so that they could all see the farang. They just watched me, didn't ask for anything, didn't ask me where I was going or where I came from. Nice.

 

I've never seen that many since then, usually just two or three of them playing in the trees, or sitting by the roadside.

 

There are two reasons why they are so shy. The first is because of the large vinyl notice. There are two of these, one either side of the road, either side of the bridge.

The notice tells people NOT TO FEED the monkeys here.

 

 

The second reason is this: I found it next to the farmer's field hut. A bag of stones, all about the same size. Pretty deadly, I imagine, when fired from a catapault. The farmer naturally does not want his crops eaten or destroyed by marauding monkeys.

 

And I am fairly sure that the monkeys learn quite quickly that the farmer won't hesitate to fire at them. In the same way, they seem to have learnt that people are not going to feed them, even if they stop at the bridge as I sometimes do.

So we have two colonies of long-tailed macaques in Phana. The large colony lives in a forest and receives much of its food from the tetsaban and from passing tourists. That is what they have come to expect. And that is what they have come to depend on. In some cases it is what they have come to demand and to fight over.

The other, smaller, colony is living a much more natural life. It fears human contact and so avoids it. It finds food in the trees, water in the small river that flows under the bridge. On the other hand, the monkeys do range in search of food, and no doubt they are a nuisance to nearby farmers, who can't always be on guard to defend their crops.

Two colonies; two solutions. In tomorrow's post I'll consider the two solutions alongside each other and try to weigh the pros and cons of each.

 

 

 

 

 

Why do we love them so?

Phana is sometimes known as 'Monkey Town'. I am not sure that the people of Phana really like that, but I notice that there is a large, framed collage of photos labelled MONKEY TOWN just outside the Mayor's office at Tetsaban Phana. Certainly the monkeys that live in our local forest are a big draw for tourists. What is less certain is whether or not Phana gains anything from this tourism. We gain litter, yes, as my previous post pointed out,  but that may be all other than a certain notoriety. But I wonder whether Phana needs to gain anything, at least in the sense of profiting from the presence of the monkeys.

The monkeys do make us feel good, somehow. Phana lives quite comfortably with them (give or take a few complaints from farmers whose land adjoins the forest). It has generally been regarded as auspicious that the monkeys live in Don Chao Poo, home to the town's guardian spirit, and to four Buddha images. Somehow people feel privileged to be host to the monkeys. The people who come from outside to feed them evidently feel good about doing so, even if some of the girls scream when large monkeys make a grab for food they are holding. 

Why do we love them so? 

They make us feel at one with nature, I think. We are consorting with 'the wild things' when we go into the forest to feed them.

Feeding them makes us feel kind and generous.

Feeding these monkeys makes us forget that we have exterminated most of the wild things around here. 

 

 

 

At the same time, we see these long-tailed macaques as very human-like:

the babies are cute, the mothers take good care of them;

the young males respect the older males, the older males look wise and are very macho.

 

This may be the world as we would like it to be.

 

It is time for Phana to re-think its relationship with the monkeys here. The Governor of Amnat Charoen Province has suggested (with a little prodding, perhaps) that some sort of 'Centre' should be established in connection with them. Selling souvenirs may have been the extent of his thinking on the subject. But several people have put forward the idea of a Study Centre and contact has been made with an academic at a university in Isan who is interested in the study of primates and their place in the ecosystem. First, though, we must decide exactly what sort of relationship we want to have with the monkeys, and what sort of habitat we are willing to allow them.

COMMENTS and SUGGESTIONS would be very much appreciated.