Life in Phana

A Possibly Revealing Anecdote

Life in Phana sometimes seems like an empty bucket; but interesting, all the same. I mentioned in my previous post that Pensri’s friend and childhood carer, Yai Air, was waiting for her step-son to come home with a bucketful of … cashew nuts. He didn’t.

When asked why not, he replied that when he got to the field he saw a neighbour harvesting some of the cashew nuts. (That’s STEALING, by the way.)

Yai Air asked whether he confronted her, or chased her away.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t want to embarrass her.

I think this tells us a lot about village attitudes to property, but even more about the importance of maintaining friendly, neighbourly relations.

(Having said that, our stay in Phana this time has also revealed some fairly unfriendly neighbourly behaviour. But given the importance I mentioned above, I will say no more about that, for the time being, anyway. But it seems only fair to acknowledge that not everything in the garden is lovely.)

(It has also occurred to me that he did not want to call out, "Get your hands off my step-mother's ... cashew nuts!" -- see my previous post, if you have not yet read it. NB there is no distinction between singular and plural noun forms in Thai or Lao.)

Renewing car tax and car passport in Ubon

I have just completed the process of renewing my car tax and car passport in Ubon. Every year I am surprised by how easy it is and how good it makes me feel that I can do it all by myself. That last bit is rather pathetic at my age, but still, that's how it is. This year I noticed how little Thai I needed to use and how little English the three officers I dealt with had to use. It was almost a communication-free series of events. Apart from the usual politenesses, I only had to ask one question and answer a few in the affirmative. In order to ask my question I did check in advance that I knew the word for 'documents'. When answering, I took a while to remember what Por Lor Bor meant or referred to, and that was it as far as language went.

So what did I have to do? First job was to pay for my new insurance policy since I cancel my old one each time I return to UK. The company (which I am happy to say has changed its name from AIG so I no longer feel I am indirectly supporting Man Utd) kindly suggested that I should only take out third party from now on due to the advanced age  of my car. This saved me more than half my usual premium, but is not subject to any refund so there's no pont in my cancelling it from now on.

Armed with my policy document (Por Lor Bor) I drive to a place that will check the identity and road-worthiness of my car. They take a lot more trouble over the identity check. This takes about 10 minutes and I leave with another document.

Next to one of the two land transport offices in Ubon. I park the car, march upstairs clutching the log book and road-worthiness document, press a button and take my number slip from the machine and take a seat opposite a row of counters. The automated number-caller lets me know there are only three people in front of me. My number is called, I sit down at the counter where the female officer does not greet me so I too remain silent and hand over the log book and piece of paper. She feeds the log book into a computer terminal, puts the document in a basket, and says 1,446.00 baht in Thai, takes my money and gives me change and a receipt attached to my new windscreen sticker. And that's that. Another ten minutes at the most.

Next I go to Ubon's other and main Land Transport Department Office (near the airport) for my car passport or International Transport Permit, to give it its proper title. I could do both jobs here but I know the car tax system at the other place and it seems simpler than here. This is where I have to explain that the car is registered in my son's name and ask what documents are required (I never remember). I have all the documents: the log book, photo-copies of my passport and my son's, a letter from my son in Thai and English giving me permisssion to drive his car in Thailand and abroad, and a stamped application form in his name for the Permit. This is the original one I used four years ago and I always expect them to want a new one. If the car was registered in my name then all I would need to present is my ITP and the log book. A helpful young woman filled in a smaller application form for me, attached a number card to it and told me to "Put in box". I worked out that she meant 'basket', did that, sat down and listened intently for my son's name to be called. This is the newer office but they don't have an automated calling system, another reason why I prefer the other place, but they no longer do the ITP there. The young woman also told me I would have to wait about 40 minutes but in fact I got my renewed ITP after only 15 minutes, so maybe she meant 14 minutes. I preferred to hear 40 minutes because then I felt really pleased that it didn't take so long. (This is like my new credit card, the bank said I should receive it within 28 days and I got it 3 days later. Good work. Good psychology.)

So apart from driving to Ubon (45 minutes) and from one place to another, I completed all these things by spending about an hour in offices. The slowest was the insurance company. The government offices were very efficient indeed. How often do you hear that?

 

Indecent assault in Thailand

 I was visited this morning by a frog which is well known in Isan. He appeared suddenly on a window next to my computer. I think he was looking for the bathroom.

 

This picture makes him seem like a monster, and in some ways perhaps he is. But he can also seem like quite a cute little guy. Especially if you are standing behind him.

So what makes him a monster? Or even cute, depending on your point of view. Or perhaps depending on your mood.

His name says it all. He is known (round here at least, I can't vouch for the rest of Thailand as we are often, and proudly, different) is the KIAT JAB NOM.

If you live in Thailand you will know what this means or be able to find out.

If you don't, here is a little language lesson. Notice how the word order is similar to English: Subject -- Verb -- Object. Thai verbs don't have tenses as such, but we can presume the simple present tense because, believe me, it refers to a habit of his.

So we have: Subject: Frog. Verb: grabs. Object: boob

I have been assuming the frog is male, but of course the frog may not be. Lots of people feel the urge to grab boobs. FROGS, I meant to say, not people. Also, I guess man boobs are also at risk. Kiat Jab Nom like bathrooms because they are generally cool, human ingress is infrequent so they are not much disturbed. I should also point out that snakes like these frogs. So harbouring one could result in another visit that is even less welcome. You can see the evidence of my encounter with the two creatures together here.

Thai Surnames

People who know Thailand are aware that surnames are very rarely used. People are addressed perfectly politely by their given name. In fact surnames have not been around in Thailand for all that long and they obviously have never achieved the same status they are accorded elsewhere in the world.

 

In 1906 the then Crown Prince Vajiravudh wrote an essay which set out some of the practical reasons why he thought surnames would be useful: they would identify individuals more precisely, and indicate family background. In 1913 when he had been king (Rama VI) for nearly three years, he issued a decree announcing that everyone in the kingdom was to have a surname so that government records of births, marriages and deaths would be clear and reliable and so that identification of individuals and their line of descent would be free from possible error. He wrote in another essay: "Now that we have surnames it can be said that we have caught up with people who are regarded as civilized."

The decree announced in March 1913 had twenty articles altogether. The main provisions were these:

 

• A surname was to be adopted by all Thai
• The name chosen would be the permanent name of the family, to be handed down in the male line
• A married woman was to take her husband's name
• Neither given name nor surnname was to be changed without the permission of the Nai Amphur, the District Officer
• The oldest living male of a family was to choose the name
• The surname had to be suitable, in keeping with the family's position, and with no coarse connotations
• The name must not require more than ten letters to write
• There was to be no duplication of surname in a district or neighbouring district
• The decree was to become law on 1st July 1913 and six months later all heads of family were to have complied by registering their name with the district office.

It seems that as late as 1924 the Ministry of Interior was still having trouble getting its own officials to comply with the law despite the possession of a surname being a prerequisite for appointment to positions such as kamnan (commune head) and pu yai ban (village head).

 

I don't know when it could be said that everyone in Thailand had a surname, probably not until the last thirty years or so when minority peoples in the north were pressed into adopting them, mainly by not allowing children into school without a properly registered surname.

 

The avoidance of 'coarse connotations' is a reminder that many nicknames used to be very coarse, unlike now when 'cute' seems to be the preference.

 

The oldest surnames are those that conform to the 'no more than ten letters' rule. Here in Phana almost all surnames consist of just two or three syllables. The very long names are usually quite recent and are generally attempts at translating Chinese names into a Thai equivalent.

New crime figures

The Phana Municipality has recently updated its website and there are some interesting statistics there. Too many to put into one blog, though. I've written about crime in Phana before, so I'll start with some figures provided by Phana police station. They are for the years 2007 - 2008, and I suppose they refer just to the area of Tetsaban Phana (which is just 2.8 sq kms, by the way).

Bodily injuries 0
thefts 3
stolen vehicles 0
money conned from people (rough translation) 0
gambling 1
drug crimes: amphetamines 6, ganja 0, others 0
house-breaking 0
avoidance of military service 5
traffic violations 3
others 2.

Just a few brief comments on some of these figures.

The total number of males registered in the area of Tetsaban Phana is just 1,263. Many of them don't actually live in Phana, but may visit occasionally. Most are of working age (teachers, farmers, municipal employees) and many are past retirement age. So there cannot have been many eligible males who DID report for military service. What does this say about our community? A pretty peace-loving lot, I would say.

ONE gambling offence? Someone at the police station isn't trying very hard, I think. I just wonder what that one person did (or possibly did not do) to deserve being singled out.

And finally, I can't help being intrigued as to what the two other offences might have been. So bad they can't be named, perhaps? Or, hopefully, too trivial to mention.

Serious crimes

     Writing in my last post about Phana’s policemen, I maintained that there was no crime in Phana. This was not quite true. But you had perhaps guessed that, hadn’t you. In fact, in the last five years there have been four crimes that I know of. The perpetrators of three of them were arrested within 24 hours in each case. Not a bad return for policemen who don’t get much practice in the art of crime solution.

 

    The first incident was discovered early one morning when 49 of the new metal grids covering drains at the side of Phana’s newly-comcreted roads were found to be missing. Each grid was about 40 cms wide and 4 metres long. Multiply that by 49 and that is quite a lot of ‘scrap’ metal. It also represented a considerable hazard to the cyclists and motorbike riders of Phana but as far as I know none of them ended up in a drain. This was undoubtedly an audacious crime, carried out with admirable proficiency. The culprit was quickly apprehended, however, because the very next day he went around Phana offering to sell the missing grids to anyone who might need one! The police claimed that even before this they had suspected him, and they may well have done so. They had probably made use of some kind of profiling, and he was the only person in Phana who would fit the profile they would have come up with.

 

    The next crime caused quite a lot of alarm for a few days because it threw into question the peaceful, safe nature of life in Phana. A well-known, rather elderly secondary school teacher stopped her car just outside the town to give, as she thought, directions to a motor-cyclist who had waved her down. Instead, she gave him, or rather, he snatched, a valuable gold necklace from her and then made off at speed. The culprit was arrested a few days later in Amnat Charoen and the necklace returned to the teacher. Everyone was very relieved that this time the criminal had come from outside Phana. If he had not, of course, she would have recognized him anyway.

 

    The two most recent crimes are perhaps more worrying because they illustrate how dangerous it can be when a little backwater like Phana moves out into the big wide world by way of the media (newspapers and television in particular) and new, improved road communication.

 

    The monkeys in Don Chao Poo have become well-known throughout the area and nationwide, too, because they are promoted by the Tourist Authority and several articles about them have appeared in the national press. So one night about 150 of them were ‘kidnapped’ from the forest. Somehow, this became known and something of a police chase ensued, the truck carrying them finally being stopped just south of Udon. They were said to be destined for China where monkey brains are supposed to promote virility, it seems. About sixty of them were returned to the forest, but unfortunately the other ninety didn’t make it. They had all been drugged as part of their capture and some of them didn’t recover from that, while others died as a result of the cramped conditions on the truck. A horrible crime, and of course the real people behind it were never caught.

    Nobody was caught for the fourth serious crime. Again, this one took place at night and must have involved the use of a getaway truck. An antique cupboard decorated with lacquer and inlaid with mother of pearl was stolen from the old sala at Wat Phra Lao, which had been broken into by breaking the padlock on the door. An attempt to break into the ubosot had also been made, but had either proved impossible or it had been abandoned. Luckily. The other lucky circumstance in this case was that there had been two almost identical cupboards in the old sala, one containing old, valuable palm-leaf books, and one stuffed with children’s exercise books, readers and so on from the 1970s. The thieves took the one full of the children’s books, which they emptied out onto the floor. They must not have looked in the other cupboard, or have thought they didn’t have time for it, perhaps. These cupboards had been in the national press, too, because it had been reported some few months earlier that the branch of the National Museum in Ubon was returning them to Wat Phra Lao because they were no longer needed for display there. This crime took place just a few weeks after Phana had celebrated 300 years of its foundation, another widely publicised event.

    Breaking into a wat and stealing property is serious enough, but this crime, too, involved the loss of life, because the four dogs which had their homes in the c  ompound, including the large (and dangerous) German shepherd much attached to the abbot, Phrakru Udom, were all found poisoned the next morning, the first sign that something had taken place during the night.

A Policeman's lot

 

     Whenever I hear or read the phrase “the boys in brown” I know that the Thai police are going to be slated for something or other. But here in Phana I can have no complaint about the police at all. It is true that I have twice been ‘fined’ 200 Baht but I can’t complain about that either.

    In Amnat Charoen I was ticketed for parking on the wrong side of the road on an even date, or maybe on an odd one. I couldn’t read the details of the parking sign. My fault.

 

    On the outskirts of Ubon I was stopped at the Highway Police station and told I had been driving at 95 kms per hour, and the officers proudly showed me their new speed gun. They fined me, though, for not having my driving licence with me. And actually I had thought I was going faster than 95! Now I try to remember to slow down when I’m about 1 km away from there, but I’ve never seen them out with their toy since then. Perhaps they had only been testing it, or they had been lent it temporarily. Anyway, it did the trick of getting me to slow down from then on.

 

    Showing my Thai driving licence, which I have also had to do at several checkpoints in the last few years, is always interesting. It was issued in 1969 and is very tattered although it is still in its original plastic wallet. It looks nothing like the current driving licences, and I look nothing like the person (a young me!) shown in the photo on it. But it is always accepted after a few minutes of puzzlement on the part of the policeman and sometimes an explanation from me about how long I have been inThailand.

    There are often road checks by the police on the outskirts of Phana, always on the road to Trakan. When they see me coming, though, they usually wave me through, and salute me too. I like that. If they haven’t recognised my car, I stop, wind down the window, and the policeman says “I’m sorry uncle, I didn’t know it was you.” That’s nice too.

 

    For several years we were visited at home by two policemen on a motorbike five times every day.  Each time they signed a notebook which was kept in a little red box attached to the gate. This was because we were paying them to provide security for us (‘protection money’ is what Pensri called it, innocently). There is no crime in Phana, so it was never clear exactly what threat we were being secured against. They occasionally provided us with redundant advice about locking the house when we went out, but more often one of them would wander into the garden and either admire the flowers or criticise the layout. Policemen, it seems, prefer their trees and plants to be arranged in straight lines.

 

    Several of the policemen have told me that they are keen to be transferred somewhere else because there is no chance of promotion in Phana. This is because there is no crime. One of them said he was keen to be sent elsewhere because no-one in Phana wanted to marry him. And now the tetsaban has taken over village security so there is no money from that source to be shared around back at the station. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, indeed.