Life in Phana

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.)

Spirits and their spiritual homes

Phana is busy with the spirit world at the moment. Placating spirits in one place and inviting them to another. It is all about Phana Municipality's plans to have a new lak muang (usually translated as the city pillar). This will be sited at the old market, in front of the community building which is taking shape based on the old fresh-market building. All of these developments are a blend of the old and the new. It is a compromise: many people want the new as a source and sign of civic pride; many others want to cling to the past, to preserve their unique history. Many people have only a hazy idea of the past. History doesn't figure much in the minds of most people, maybe because so much effort has been made by the Thai education system to expunge the memory of a time before the Thai state took over. That effort hasn't been entirely successful in Phana; there is still a strong feeling of Lao-ness here amongst the ordinary people.

The compromise was necessary because a lak muang (of sorts) existed beside the main road through the old village. Here is a photo of it taken back in February 2011 when Pensri and some friends tidied it up before the cycle rally. A group of school students were there on the day to tell people about its history. 

What you can't see from the photograph are the marker stones. You can't see them from the road either. They are exposed, but are about one metre below the level of the road. What that tells us is that the original sandy track was also about one metre lower than the present road. The houses nearby tell us this, too, because to get into them you have to go down some steps.

For years, after the road was raised by several successive 'improvements', the marker stones (bai sema) were buried and forgotten. Then about ten years ago, the Phana Municipality unearthed them (an old-timer must have drawn attention to them) and erected the concrete structure and wooden pillar you can see in the photograph above. This came to be known as the lak muang, though a surprising number of people pass it in their cars and never see it. It became neglected, as the original stones had.

For special occasions such as the cycle rally, the site was smartened up as you can see below:

The marker stones are as hard to photograph as they are to see, but this is my best shot. Click on it for an enlarged view:

Rumours went about that the current Phana Municipality planned to move the lak muang to a new site. Elaborate plans were drawn up and a lot of excitement was generated. But there were people, too, who felt that the move should not take place. This is where the compromise came in. It was finally agreed that the marker stones should stay where they have been for the last 300 years, and that their site should revert to the old Lao name of Bue Baan (navel of the village) and be marked as such. The pillar would be removed to form part of the new lak muang. Perhaps surprisingly, the site chosen for this new structure is at the old market place, in the original village, rather than the administrative centre known as 'the amphur', two kilometres further west. A good decision. Everybody happy. Hopefully, the spirits housed at the bue baan and later at the lak muang will be contented, too, when this grand new structure is completed.

Back to Phana... again

Here we are back in Phana, far from the floods that are ravaging much of Thailand. We have been here a week now, but our broadband connection was only restored yesterday, so this is my first post in some time.

Our journey from Bangkok was uneventful although the train to Ubon was diverted via Chachoengsao, and the journey time was two hours longer than usual. Warin Chamrap, where the train arrives, on the south side of the Moon River, was quite flooded, with the two large lakes overflowing and people who had had to evacuate their homes living in makeshift shelters along the main road to Ubon.

Arriving on the outskirts of Phana, the fields were full of rice and it looked as if here, at least, there is a good harvest in prospect.

At home in Phana we found  the garden hedge in full bloom and  attracting large butterflies:

We had heard that some of the sandy paths in Don Chao Poo Forest had been 'improved' and we were somewhat fearful that this meant more concrete. It wasn't as bad as that, and perhaps is not so bad at all. Certainly if these new paths encourage people to explore the forest a bit more that might be a good thing.

 

The paths lead to the four Buddha images that have been in the forest for the last 30 or so years.

The monkeys seem to have adopted the paths. Whenever they spend time on the ground, they seem to prefer to spend most of it on the roadways and now on these paths. They eat ants and termites and it may be easier for them to spot these and pick them up from the hard surfaces.

There are still some very pleasant, sandy paths, shaded by the tall canopies of the yang trees. This one leads off one of the concrete roads. I took the picture early on my first morning back in Phana, with the sun just beginning to break through.

It made the perfect welcome back to Phana.

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. 

Phana Macaque Project

 

 
The Phana Macaque Project is taking a lot of my time at the moment. I'm not complaining because I am enjoying the contacts we have made so far and it does look as if people in various parts of the world are interested in coming to study our long-tailed macaques. We have interest so far from academics and students in Thailand, England, Japan and the USA.

One way we have promoted the project can be seen if you click on the link below: 

 

Download Phana macaque project

You may have to be a little patient. It will open in Adobe Reader.

I previously posted about the project HERE and you can find other posts in the category 'long-tailed macaques'.

 

Who are you calling an ape?

Apes? Who gives a monkey's? Well, I do, for one.

The Tetsaban Phana website www.phanacity.com has this artist's impression of the planned study centre to be built in Don Chao Poo.  It looks good to me, but I am much less keen on an alternative design that features a large disney-like structure. We are hoping that the centre will be an educational resource as well as a fun place to visit. There is no reason to think that education and fun are mutually exclusive (though years spent in school might suggest that they are).

 

What worries me a little is that the series of pictures and drawings begin with the title "APE MUSEUM". Our monkeys are NOT apes. Apes have no tails. Ours have LONG tails. They are long-tailed macaques. I think everyone is agreed that the centre will contain exhibitions relating to monkeys other than macaques, and that will include apes. But while all apes are monkeys, not all monkeys are apes. 

Just before we left Thailand last month, Pensri and I visited Thailand's leading expert on primates, Professor Dr Suchinda Malaivijitnond, director of the Primate Research Centre at Chulalongkorn University. She had lots of good advice for us, and has agreed to take further part in the project to set up the centre. We mentioned to her that the Governor of Amnat Charoen felt that 'Primate' was not a word widely understood (hence the need for a study centre, in part) so he has suggested 'Ape' instead. Dr Suchinda agreed, but said that the best alternative to 'primate' would be 'monkey'. There is no problem with the Thai title, because as you can see above, it would translate as 'Monkey Museum'. So PLEASE, TETSABAN PHANA:  use the English word 'monkey' for the sake of accuracy.

Another academic, the first we got on board, is Dr Panee Wannitikul of Suranaree University of Technology, Korat. She suggested the name 'Centre for Monkey and Environment Studies'. She pointed out that in a conserved forest there will be plenty of other species (bird, amphibian, insect, plant, fish ...) that make this name appropriate and hopefully of interest to students of schools and universities.

Next week we have an appointment to see Dr Stephen Lea, Professor of Psychology at Exeter University. He specialises in animal behavior / animal social behaviour. His students study monkeys at a local zoo. We're hoping he can point us in the direction of useful audio-visual resources for exhibition. And we are hoping we can point him in the direction of some non-zoo monkeys in Phana. 

 

Parading the abbot

 Parades are an essential ingredient of many celebrations in Thailand and parading a monk when celebrating his promotion is no exception. When the lay people of Phana were celebrating the abbot of Wat Burapha's promotion to the rank of Phra Kru recently, a parade through the streets was the order of one of the days.

 

Dancing girls are an important ingredient. Here they are all wearing skirts woven in Phana to a traditional pattern.

The dancers are accompanied by this group of musicians:

 

Lay people follow the band, all smartly dressed and in exhuberant spirits. The umbrellas are to keep off the sun rather than the rain.

 

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The organisers were keen to involve the tetsaban officers and were insistent that they wore their white uniforms. Many social occasions in Phana are organised either by the wat committees or by the tetsaban; and as in this case, often both are involved together.

Here we have the mayor and his deputy seemingly glad to see me; or glad to see me taking their photograph, perhaps.

The small children amongst the onlookers got very excited when the mayor threw small coins wrapped in silver and gold paper into the crowd and there were wild scrambles to pick up the coins. 

Taking part in the parade or standing by and watching it go past -- both are seen as auspicious events, and the people of Phana make sure that they take advantage of as many occasions like this one as possible.

 

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.

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.