Life in Phana

COLLOQUIAL and other C-words

Look away now if you are of a sensitive disposition. Look away now if you have a tendency towards nut allergies. And if the idea of Combining linguistic insensitivity with nuts appals you, SHUT DOWN YOUR COMPUTER.

One of the people Pensri and I always visit and look forward to seeing in Phana is Yai Air. She is in her late seventies, but when she was a girl fresh out of primary school she used to take Care of Pensri and her sisters while their mother was teaching reception Class. Yai Air lives near Wat Burapha, about 150 metres from Pensri’s Childhood home, as she did even then. She Came to our wedding in Bangkok, so I have known her a long time, too.

Pensri went to visit her recently. Yai Air asked her to wait a while because her step-son had gone to her field nearby to harvest some of her Cashew nuts and she wanted to give some of them to us. She said that last year she made 3,400 Baht (she was very precise, but I doubt she fills in a tax form) by selling them in the market. That surprised Pensri, because Cashew nuts are quite Cheap, so it represents a whole lot of nuts. Yai Air said her step-son would return with a bucketful.

Now what really surprised Pensri was the reminder of what people in the village Call Cashew nuts. Pensri knew, but away from the village for so long she had had no need to discuss Cashew nuts with anyone from Phana.  In Phana, Cashew nuts are referred to by the same word as Clitoris.

Something to do with shape, size, the way they grow enfolded in … well, no need to go into too much detail, perhaps.

So when Pensri heard that the venerable Yai’s step-son would be Coming home with a bucketful of Clitorises, she was momentarily taken aback.

He didn’t, in fact, but that is a (short) story for another day.

If you have read this far, think of Life in Phana next time you order Chicken with Cashew nuts. Or maybe you never will.

For those of you struggling to enlarge your Thai vocabulary, I won’t help you. The word is probably a Lao one, anyway. Colloquial, Certainly and local, possibly.

In language learning, as in just about everything else, you learn best by finding out for yourself, not from being told. But this is not a quiz. No need to post the word. I know it already, though I didn’t before Pensri got home from visiting Yai Air.

It's all new in Phana

When you go home you expect to find things as they were when you left. I remember that as a small (and presumably insecure) boy I would sometimes dream of coming home from school to find the house and my family had all disappeared. So when we leave England each winter we hope that everything in Phana will be as idyllic as it was when we left six months earlier. But always we also find ourselves expecting some changes and hoping that they will not diminish our love of living here. The changes that have taken place in the last few years have all turned out to be positive ones, though thinking about them in advance did not always suggest they would be. What that says is probably that the decision-makers in Phana have a much clearer and more positive vision of development than I have.

A good example of this is the new market, which is situated less than half a km from our house. Between us and the market there is one house, two side roads, a bridge over a small steam, and you are there. I had thought it unnecessary, a nuisnace to me personally, and of no great benefit to anyone. A white elephant in English terms, if not in Thai. I was wrong on all counts. So you can expect a post dedicated to the new market before long.

A change I had known about was the arrival of the two new volunteers from Project Trust and we were looking forward to meeting them but when we got here they were on holiday (the schools they teach in were closed) and we only met them when the Desk Officer for Thailand arrived with his asistant for the annual monitoring visit. This involved us accompanying them and the tetsaban representatives to all three schools for meetings with directors and teachers. The volunteers, Billie andRosie, arrived in Phana at the end of August and when I reported that here (I was in UK then) a commenter suggested that they be inteviewed for this blog. I hope they will agree to that. They certainly seem to be first-class volunteers, keeping up the tradition which is now firmly established in Phana.

On our first day back our friend and neighbour Add (deputy mayor of Tetsaban Phana) came round to co-opt Pensri onto a small delegation going to Amnat Charoen the next day to discuss a pilot project on Community-Based Tourism being set up by TAT in two provinces, Amnat Charoen (in the north-east, inland, rural, little visted by tourists, on the Lao border) and Surat Thani, (in the south, on the coast, including Koh Samui, already a major tourist destination). Pensri duly attended the meeting, and now I too have been co-opted onto the provincial committee, adding a 'foreign' perspective and a little expertise in the English language and experience in producing brochures, etc. The next meeting is sometime next week (I think, this is Thailand, so it may not be), and here in Phana we are very excited by the idea and have already formulated some plans. I will be keeping readers up to date on this in this blog -- and even inviting some of you to visit as guinea-pigs!

Less exciting was finding that our water-storage tank which collects roof run-off and provides us with drinking water was empty. Our 'helper' had not made the necessary adjustments to the pipe after allowing a few weeks of rain to clear the gutters. So off we went to the small village of Ban Nong Ka, where water is pumped from a deep well in the wat, treated, bottled and delivered to customers all over Amphur Phana. The facility was very impressive and I will feature it in a later post.

The wat where the well is located is one which I had never visited before and it turned out to be rather unusual. It is a typical small-village wat, no grand buildings, no ubosot (ordination hall), very simple kutis for the few monks who stay there, an old wooden preaching hall with very little decoration, and lots of trees.

But outside the wat was this sign:

 

It seems that the senior monk here is a computer wizard! Possibly more of this another time.

Across the road is a small forest, and here is the Phu Ta, the guardian 'grandfather' of the place (a little hand-shake or out of focus, sorry):

 

And inside the forest, something was going on! More of that, too, another time.

Perhaps the strangest thing we find when we return each year to this quiet, unknown little back-water that is Phana, is how much is going on and how much there is for us to do and to get involved in. I always think there will be nothing of the sort, that I have seen and done everything there is to do here, but that is far from the reality. It's in England, really, where we live an uneventful life. I am not complaining: we still need both kinds of life and still enjoy living in both places. But it is definitely in Phana that we are much more involved in social and community activities. That doesn't seem to change, and we are glad of it.
 

 

 

 

 

When is an expat not an expat?

Writing about my friend Al recently, I was reminded of an encounter I had with a particularly obnoxious Englishman in Khong Chiam a couple of years back. I was researching restaurants for a guide book at the time and he told me that no farangs like Thai food so I was wasting my time. I pointed out that in England Thai restaurants were very popular and he replied that he couldn't live in England any more. When I asked him why that was, he said that there were too many immigrants in England and they made no effort to integrate, in particular they insisted on having their own food and did not learn to speak English. This seemed pretty rich coming from what I had already learned about him and I certainly did not detect any sense of irony in his remarks.

I pointed out to him that he and I are both immigrants in Thailand but he refuted this. We are expats, he told me. What is the difference, I asked. His answer to that was: "I should think the difference is obvious."

What is obvious, I think, is what he was implying.

A result of this encounter has been that I have developed a dislike of the word 'expat', seeing it as denoting a sense of superiority. I realise that this is not entirely rational, or at least is not fully deserved. Some of my best friends are expats, as they say. There is some evidence, however, that the word is not exactly neutral. People from neighbouring countries who come to work in Thailand are referred to as 'migrant workers' whereas office workers in Bangkok who come from further afield are always known as expats. There is surely an implied racial (but not necessarily racist, let me be clear) element to phrases such as 'expat hang-outs' and 'expat food'. I am reminded that Pensri worked in the UK for 30+ years, held a UK passport before arriving, and was often referred to as an immigrant, but never ever as an expat.

But whether a word is neutral or loaded (postively or negatively) is often a matter of intention on the part of the speaker or interpretation on the part of the hearer. For me, 'farang' is a neutral word on most occasions, but I think I can tell when the intention is otherwise, and that is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. 

Time for some help from reference books. The Chambers Thesaurus entries for 'expat' and 'immigrant' are sugestive of a difference in emphasis: EXPAT: emigrant, emigre, exile, refugee, displaced person. It seems that the emphasis here is on someone who has LEFT their native country. IMMIGRANT: incomer, settler, migrant, newcomer, new arrival, alien. Here the emphasis is on ARRIVAL.

Two dictionary definitions (Shorter Oxford) suggest the same thing but also add the idea of temporary and permanent residence: EXPAT: person living abroad, especially for a long period. IMMIGRANT: person who comes as a permanent resident to a country other than one's native land.

So in the end, there seems no doubt that whatever I may think about the word, since I am still a permanent resident of the UK who spends a lot of time abroad, when I am in Thailand  for six months as I am now, I am most definitely an expat. That is not the conclusion I had expected to reach, but I am comfortable with it nonetheless. The all-embracing term 'foreigner' is still more to my liking, but I am less happy about 'alien'. But there we are. Call me what you like.

 

One Isan Farm

Most people I know in Phana have farms that are some distance away from their homes. This is unavoidable, I suppose, when people have built their houses somewhat huddled together, originally (historically) for security reasons but later because the village grew into a small township by new houses being added as families expanded from one generation to the next.

 When I visited the new headman of Ban Noen That  a couple of months ago, I found this was not the case with him. The village is adjacent to Ban Phana, less than a kilometer from Wat Burapha, but it immediately strikes you that it has a more out-of-town feel to it. His land is right next to the road, his house about 100 metres down a track, and his fields all around the house. Because of this, everything he owns is in the same place, and because he and his family are right there themselves, he is able to raise livestock as well as plant rice. 

So he has lots of hens, ducks, cows, and a couple of buffaloes that I was much taken by. All of this seems closer to my south-west-England-conditioned view of how farmers live than the empty fields that farmers walk or ride out to which is the norm in Phana itself.

 

 

 

Michael Hare, commenting on my blog at the beginning of this week, reminded me that eucalyptus trees are grown to provide scaffolding poles in Thailand. But this farm at Ban Noen That grows them for an industry that almost certainly has need of greater quantities than does the construction industry. The farmer told me that the trees on his farm are grown for sale to the Double A Paper company. You see their paper everywhere in Thailand, and if you drive on inter-city highways you see their huge trucks, presumably full of thousands of reams of the stuff.

Their company website makes some grand claims, including that their trees "solve global warming" by emitting oxygen, reducing carbon dioxide and increasing humidity. This last claim is probably made to counter the fact that eucalyptus trees are notoriously thirsty and have been used to drain swamps in some places. So growing them in the "spaces between and around the rice fields" as the Double A company recommends may not be as good an idea as  they make it sound, but is certainly better than replacing rice fields completely. When I saw my friend's farm and the way he had planted the trees on the field-boundary dykes, it seemed to me a good use of his farm land and a worthwhile investment, since eucalyptus grow pretty fast. The company's claim to "support local communities by providing additional income" seems fair enough.

However, I know that a major Thai publishing house has stopped using Double A paper because they feel that farmers are not given a good enough deal, and I know this is often the way when large Bangkok-based companies sign up Isan farmers to produce crops for them. Once the farmers have been snared it is easy for companies to complain that the produce is sub-standard and so subject to price reductions. I have heard that that has been the case, for instance, in Nong Khai where farmers were encouraged to grow tomatoes for the big supermarket chains. Many Isan farmers complain that they are not just impoverished, but are kept in that state not by "the elite" but by big-time capitalists. One of whom, by the way, is busy buying land in Isan  through nominees so that he (the BIG-time capitalist) can grow rubber trees for export to the very hungry Chinese market. But then, farmers in south-west England make similar complaints about the price of milk, the subsidy or lack of it on various other products. It's a hard life being a farmer, and since so many people are so totally dependent on them, it is not easy to understand why they are unable to exert a bit more muscle. The struggle between consumers wanting low food prices and farmers wanting to make a decent living always seems loaded against the farmer. Establishing large-scale co-operatives would seem to be the answer, but I don't know of anywhere where it has actually worked. It's a hard life being a farmer, that's for sure.

To Have and Have Not

I am finding it very difficult to blog about Phana or Thailand at the moment. This is partly because I am not there, but that doesn't account for it entirely because I have a list of blogs waiting to be written and posted. More to the point is the uncertain situation in Thailand, in Bangkok particularly, where most of my Thai relatives live. It strikes me that much of what I had been ready to write would seem complacent at best and unfeeling at worst.

As so often throughout the more than forty years I have been in and out of Thailand, (sometimes as resident, sometimes as tourist, and for the last few years as not quite one thing or the other since I spend six months at a time in Thailand and six months back in England), I find myself pondering the nature of poverty: rural poverty in Isan as compared to urban poverty in Bangkok, for instance; Thai poverty compared to the poverty of people in sub-Saharan Africa or nearer to home in Bangladesh. I remember the visit of Thaksin Shinawatra to Phana duuring an election campaign a few years back and how he upset the people by telling them they were poor (a mistake Winston Churchill once made in Liverpool) and giving as an example the fact that the road though the old village was narrow and the houses wooden, both sources of pride to those who live in Phana.

And so the title of today's blog is borrowed from Ernest Hemingway.  I am not going to hold forth on the subject of life in Isan and whether or not it is impoverished because it has often appeared to me that that is just how the Bangkok Thai prefer to think of it and to refer to it and that this has more to do with their need to feel superior than it does to the reality of life, harsh though that is in many cases. Instead I will relate briefly the story of a woman in need and what the community did to help her.

I was visited by the quite-recently-elected new headman of Ban Noen That, a 'satellite' village adjacent to Ban Phana, but outside the boundaries of Phana Municipality. I had met him for the first time at the Wat Phra Lao festival where he was on the committee, but it turned out that I had known his mother well for many years. He came to tell Pensi and me about a woman in his village who had no proper place to live and no money, although she had a daughter with severe learning difficulties dependent on her.

People in the village had raised some money for her and one woman had offered her a small piece of land on which a house for her could be built. We offered him some money to pass on to her, but he invited us to meet her and present it formally.

From the left here you can see the headman, the woman who needed a house, the woman who had donated some land, Pensri, the headman's mother, and an official from the District Office who had helped draw up a contract to safeguard both parties in the matter of the land. He had also facilitated the use of some money from the government (Ministry of Interior) to pay for building the house and putting in water and electricity supply.

 

 A few weeks later we called on her to see how the house was coming along and found it almost completed. She had moved in already and they were putting finishing touches to it around her.

 

 

 

 

Click on the images below (and the ones above) to see enlarged pictures of her new house.

         

Sometimes foreigners get the impresion that Thais lack compassion and that because there is no institutional welfare system nothing is done for those who are in need. But here I could see that a desperate need was identified and the local community and  government officials  got together to provide a practical solution. I learned later that in Phana Municipality two similar houses had been provided for families without their own resources. Of course, this is poverty alleviation, not eradicaion of the causes of poverty, but I think Phana and Thailand can be proud of their responses in these cases.

   
 

 

Phana Houses

My Pics of the Day this week are of houses in Phana.  Click on the Pic of the Day tab at the top of the page to see today's image and the ones I have posted previously. Come back tomorrow and the following days to see subsequent pictures.

 

 

 

I've chosen to show houses that have only recently been completed, in most cases within the last six months. You will see that although some people have opted to build houses using 'modern' materials and in non-traditional styles (though they are becoming the norm, perhaps) others have built beautiful houses using traditional materials and reminiscent of the traditonal Isan house, albeit with elaorate variations. Here are two that do not appear on Pic of the Day partly because they are both older houses.

 

Thai Hands

My pics of the day this week are of Thai hands. I hope I have caught something of the gentleness and elegance that I see in Thai hands, no matter how young or old they are, male or female.

Click on the Pic of the Day tab at the top of this page to view today's image and the ones I posted earlier in the week.

Red Shirts: How do you avoid them?

In so many ways, Phana seems to defy the Bangkok streotype of Isan. The District Town shows no sign of real deprivation despite its lack of commercial development. A person from the adjacent town of Trakan Phuetpon,which IS commercially developed (2 banks, 7-11, daily market, Tesco Lotus mini, etc. none of which we have) recently commented that Phana has no shops but plenty of money. The connection seems pretty obvious to me.

Phana defies the political stereotype, too, because it has been a staunchly Democrat enclave for many years, even though the occasional constituency boundary change has sometimes produced an MP of a different party. 

I do have some Red Shirt stories, though, and two of my informants rank amongst the top gossips in Phana.

One story concerns recruitment for the current protest in Bangkok. A recruitment team went to the village considered the poorest in the district and failed to recruit a single person.

Another tells of a man here who was recruited for an earlier demonstration and was promised 500 Baht for his participation. He came back very disgruntled because he had ended up with just 50 Baht in his pocket ... the rest had been 'deducted' for expenses such as travel, food, and so on. He won't be going again.

I have met one 'supporter' of the red shirts, a man, somewhat the worse for drink who wanted me to help him with his MEd dissertation, who whispered his views and asked Pensri and I not to tell his wife or children, who all thought otherwise.

So if you want to avoid the Red Shirts, come to Phana.

Thanks to a reference in the BBC's reporting of the 'bloodspread' in Bangkok, I have discovered the wonderful blog of SOMTOW SUCHARITKUL, also known as the author S.P. Somtow. I loved his first book 'Jasmine Nights' about a boy called Little Frog, and I have also read 'The Bird Catcher' about a famous Thai serial killer whose remains can be seen in the very macabre museum at Siriraj Hospital in Thonburi. That was  in a collection of very Thai ghost stories. In his short post yesterday he made a seriously sensible suggestion regarding blood-letting. I recommend you take a look at it HERE and go on to explore some of his other posts. I guarrantee they will give you an amusing and always different take on Thai life in Bangkok. On life, in fact.

Thai Conversation Pieces

While I was having my car serviced in Ubon recently, the owner of the service station introduced me to his three favourite obsessions. Or hobbies, perhaps. The first was unmissable: two bird-cages hanging about 3 metres apart, each with one bird inside. They were very beautiful birds and occasionally let out some loud, strange noises. So of course I asked about them. When he put the two cages next to each other they engaged in a vocal contest that must have been territorial-based and it seems they often take part in contests in Ubon, elsewhere in Isan and even at Sanam Luang in Bangkok. The winner is the loudest and most vocal. Next up we were shown dozens (hundreds?) of photos on his computer of his two dogs which he also shows around Thailand. Only finally were we introduced to his three children, triplets. When I first started taking my car to him four years ago, his wife was working as his receptionist and cashier and she was heavily pregnant. Now we know why she was so heavily pregnant. She had the children by IVF, so I suppose she was lucky not to have sextuplets or whatever. Anyway, they all look really healthy and happy. As do the dogs, but I'm not too sure about the birds.

 

Then when the termite man came recently he wore his conversation piece proudly outside his shirt. There could be no doubt that he was prepared for a conversation about his amulet becuse he had more in his truck.

 

 

I think the amulets were set in pewter rather than silver but I am not sure of that.

He also came with an eye-piece or magnifying glass for anyone who got really hooked. Luckily our friend Add came round and did get hooked.

  
  

  

It occurred to me later that having a specific interest such as these two guys have is a good way to increase your Thai vocabulary (or whatever language you are hoping to improve: both of these men are Thai). Of course, once you have become fluent in one such subject you would need to take up another hobby. Or at least pretend to do so. In my case that might mean taking more interest in Pensri's garden and gardening. Just learning the vocabulary, not actually doing anything more than moving her pots around.

 

CHECK OUT my Pic of the Day by clicking on the tab at the top of the page.

    

 

 

Introducing my new blog

Some months ago I read somewhere of blogs that post a picture for every day of the year. I thought this was an excellent idea and something I would like to do. But not right at that moment. I would begin the following week.

At some later point I thought it would be best to begin on the first day of the following month.

Then, a sensible starting point would obviously be on my birthday.

Well, you know how it is. For a couple of months now I have thought that the first day of a new year, a new decade even, would be the ideal starting point.

So here we are. I don't usually go in for new year resolutions but that seems to be what I have landed myself with. We shall see. And I hope you will see the end of this procrastination tomorrow.  Lets hope you can find it. It will be called "Pic of the Day" and you should be able to get to it from the link at the top of this page.

As I said: we shall see. In the meantime HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!!