Life in Phana

Lottery Numbers -- remember you heard it here first

For several days now, some strange people (by which I THINK I mean people I don't know) have been coming to look at one of our banana trees. I have been taken to look at it several times but have no doubt shown my farang insensitivity by being very unimpressed. I knew I had to look at the small bunch of bananas growing on it, and I have taught some of the people how to say "hand of bananas". I had no idea why they attracted so much interest.

Today, when quite a group of people all arrived at the tree at the same time (it is at the back of our house), I found out what all the fuss was about. There are three 'hands' and they are growing in the wrong way. Or the wrong place. Or something. Actually, they hardly seem to be growing at all. However, they are very significant, apparently. Here they are: 

A mor song 'an expert who can see things' had been called in by someone (not anyone in our house) and here he is making his preparations:

 Soon he addressed the banana tree, but he did it in silence as far as my hearing goes:

 

As owner of the tree, Pensri was called from what she was doing to make a little offering to her tree. I should perhaps point out that Pensri and most of her sisters have a deep scepticism of this sort of thing which they learned or inherited from their father, a very rational man.

 

And then the expert took over again:

There followed some careful peeling back of the soft bark of the tree, some picking away at the surface of the trunk, and quite liberal sprinkling of scented talcum powder. I had wondered what that little pink container was for. And then some gentle, thoughtful hands on.

And this is what he had found:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The important bit being this:

     

And he wrote down what he saw:

 

And here are two people who now aim to put his information to lucrative use. I know and like them both and wish them success (though as the saying goes, neither of them is short of a bob or two).

 
And you too could strike lucky, thanks to our banana tree. Not me, because I never buy lottery tickets. Still, remember where you got the numbers, if you should happen to win big.

 

 

 

Man (and Girl) at Work in Wat

Since I retired I have taken a greater interest in the work that other people do. I have the time to watch them, for one thing, and the interest to see how other people are spending their lives so differently from what I used to do in a classroom. A lot of work in Thailand is a part-time activity, something you fit in between farming, child-rearing, and so on. This does not mean it is not real work, just that as a rule there is no particular urgency about it, and no tight schedule that needs to be kept to. I have felt frustrated a few times when visiting villages that Thai Tourism Authority leaflets assured me were hives of craft activity only to find that everyone is out in the fields, or at the wat or a neighbour's house celebrating something or attending a funeral. I'm more used to the pace of life now, and that means my levels of frustration have decreased considerably.

Today I'm going to feature a man I found at work in a temple compound. I was there to visit a museum, and he was the man who unlocked the building and showed me the exhibits. But when no-one was visiting the museum he was busy producing cement tiles for the wat. While he was unlocking the doors and opening the windows, his young grand-daughter helped him out.

 

The following sequence showed the pecise but relatively unskilled work that her grand-father was engaged in. 

 

 

 

What I did not find out was where in the wat these tiles were going to be used. Looking at the few pictures I took of the main buildings I can not see any of them. I think it is possible that they would decorate the perimeter wall or possibly the gateways.

 

Singha outsold in this part of Isan

 
We don't have to rely on the big suppliers of drinking water in Phana. A couple of small minibuses deliver fresh bottled water to houses here. You can call on them to stop, but it is better to make a telephone call and tell them how much you want to have delivered.

In our household we have only rarely called upon them. Most years we have had enough rainwater in our big storage jars to quench our thirst until we leave to go back to the UK in April or May. But this year our 'helper' fogot to collect the water while we were away and when we got back to Phana later than usual the rainy season was over.

 

Before ordering any water we decided to go over to the village where it is produced to take a look at the plant and the process. I like to see the small-scale local industries which are a form of self-sufficiency that I am sure HM the King would be proud of. The plant didn't look paricularly interesting from the outside, but the simple open-plan interior was a hive of activity, even though only four people were there and working. You can see three of them in the picture below. The fourth is in the very important room to the left of where Pensri is talking to one of the operatives. 

There are just four steps in the production process and each person had been allocated one. Two young girls who had been at school earlier in the day were responsible for cleaning the returned 20-litre jars. They were doing it very thoroughly, too. In the first of the two pictures below you see the girl cleaning the outside of the jars by hand. In the second picture the girl is cleaning the inside with the help of power jets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The water is piped from a deep well in the temple just across the road. The first thing that happens to it is that it is forced under pressure through this machine which contains a carbon filter to remove any colour and smell.

 

 

 

 

 

The water then passes through each of these three purification columns. The first removes manganese, the second passes the water through resin  and the third contains multiple membranes to filter out any extraneous matter.

 Finally the water enters the filling room. Out of sight in the top right hand corner of the room, the water is zapped with ultra violet to desroy any residual bactria and treated with ozone. The small metal fillers are used for filling 1.5 litre bottles. You can see that the two taps, one red and one blue, are turned off because the operative is filling the large jars from the pipe on the left.

 

 

 

 

The plant aims to fill 200 20-litre jars per day and the filler is paid 2 baht for every jar she fills. These jars sell for 12 baht each, with free delivery. The purchaser has to put down a deposit of 80 baht for each jar.

I must say that the professionalism of the four women and girls we saw working was admirable and the hygiene beyond reproach. It is good to see a small-scale enterprise such as these providing a service for the community as well as employment for some of the villagers.

I am not so impressed by the spelling on the labels on these bottles, though.

But the water is delicious.

 

 

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.

Pic of the Day 1-7 March 2010

These are the first week's Pic of the Day for this month. I plan to post at the end of each week in case you have missed them. Click on a thumbnail to see an enlarged image.

All this week's pics were taken in Phana with the exception of the 'welcome to this house' sign which was on a beautiful new house in a village on the way to Ubon Ratchathani.

You can see them as well as the new Pic of the Day by using the tab at the top of this page.

 

 

Falling short of Paradise

I have very few complaints about living in Thailand and almost none about living in Phana. What complaints I do have, I try to keep to myself. However, when I returned from Chiang Mai last Friday morning I was greeted by the news that a new termite infestation had been discovered in our house and we would be having treatment for it on Sunday.

Getting the work done on a Sunday, and by a firm from Ubon at Chinese New Year, is the kind of thing that makes living in Thailand so much less stressful than back in the UK. So the complaint I do have is against termites. I suppose the problem is that we don't have termites in England (but we do have woodworm) so I am just not used to them. Aussies, Americans, they seem to know about termites.

 

 

We opted for a thorough treatment which came with a two-year guarrantee, meaning that if there was any sign of termite attack in that time they would come and zap it at no extra cost. Apparently the chief cause of termite problems comes from a variety that live underground, so the main treatment was to flood the soil beneath the house with chemical mixed with water. This involved drilling lots of holes through veranda tiles, parquet flooring, bathroom tiles, and so on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vast amounts of chemical/water were then pumped under pressure into the soil. There were no obnoxious smells which was a relief because this part of the operation took a long time. They had drilled more than twenty holes in all. One interesting development was that whatever this flooding did to the termites, it certainly scared the scorpions! At least four (that's how many the workmen caught and squashed) came scuttling out of the patch of garden next to the veranda. Maybe I will stop walking around the garden barefoot at night and invest in a pair of wellies.

Finally, active termite infestations were tracked down. They found four or five places where they were active, and said the evidence suggested the attacks had started some seven or eight months ago. Luckily none of the sites was damaged enough that we needed to replace any wood. The whole programme of work took more than six hours. Hopefully, we can go away in a couple of months' time and be fairly certain that we won't need it to be repeated until the guarrantee runs out in February 2012.

Preparing for retreat in Don Chao Poo

Every year Don Chao Poo forest in Phana is taken over by hundreds of monks, novices and men and women in white who have undertaken to join them for 10 days of meditation and Buddhist teachings. The people of Phana undertake to feed them every day from 21st December to 30th December. Different villages take it in turns to do this, though other people are welcome to join them on any day. Some people go to the forest every day to offer food as the long line of monks go on the morning bindabat, or alms round.

The opening ceremony, which is not attended by the monks, will take place in the forest tomorrow morning. But for the last few days people have been preparing the forest.

Boys and girls from Udomwitayakorn Primary School near the forest have been working hard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of their work has been sweeping leaves from the main entrance to the forest and collecting some of the rubbish that litters the area.

The big problem is plastic bags. People bring food for the monkeys in plastic bags and although some of the bags get put into rubbish bins, the wind and the monkeys often take them out again. Some of the monkeys also have the habit of snatching bags of food and making off into the forest with it, so bags can be found all over the place. The problem of plastic bags here needs to be looked at and something done about it. Not that there is an easy solution but I'm sure it could be alleviated.

Anyway, at least once a year something gets done and this young lad seems to be enjoying himself even if he isn't working as hard as the other boys. I wonder how he got into this priviliged position. My guess is he knows somebody.

Outside the forest, this tetsaban employee is delivering flags to line the front wall of the forest.

Leaving my car inside the forest while I went off to take photos was a big mistake.

If the schoolboys were working hard, this was playtime for the forest residents.

 

I went back to the forest today, Sunday. The monks arrive today and the tetsaban had arranged a reception counter for them.

Most of the monks have attended this annual retreat before and they knew their way around the forest. All the same, someone was on hand to greet them and help them with their camping equipment. Some of them came with a glot, the tent which looks like an umbrella when it is rolled up. This is the one which tudong monks use when they are on their travels. I couldn't get a photo of one today because monks were changing their robes at each of the ones I found.

 

Many monks are into camping equipment of a more recognisable form.

A kitchen was set up near the reception area.

It looks as if a cup of tea will soon be served. These monks will only eat once a day during the 10-day retreat but tea without milk is allowable at any time, as is water, of course.

There are several of these water tanks in the forest and part of the preparations has been to clean them out.

The most important area is this one where the monks and other meditators will sit. Straw has been laid on the ground beneath the trees and there are piles of straw in several places so  that it can be renewed when necessary.

The monks also practise walking meditation along the shady paths of the forest.
 
 

I will be returning to the forest tomorrow morning because Moo 1 where I live is the main sponsor for offering food on the first day. Because it is the first day, though, there will be hundreds of people waiting to offer food to the monks. Then I will go back on other days to see how things are going. So I hope to post again about this meditation retreat later in the week.

 
 

 

Out of the Fire, into the Frying Pan

The downturn in the global economy has reached Phana. At least one small enterprise that had been looking to expand is currently feeling the chill of currency disparities despite basing  its business on applying some pretty high temperatures.

Behind the innocent-looking facade of this rural scene on the outskirts of Phana, an unlikely business is carried out.

 

 

And this is Mr Arporn, the man who lives here. His field of expertise is in  producing chicken for human consumption. He worked away from Phana for more than twenty years but like many people he has returned here to start his own little business.

 

His career as an employee was fairly evenly spread in terms of time between five different companies. Two of them, the first and the last, were wholly Thai companies, but three of them were joint ventures, one with a Japanese company, one with a Dutch company and one with a company from New Zealand.

Mr Arporn speaks pretty good English, though naturally it is better when he is talking about chickens and chicken parts and the various processes involved in preparing them for consumption.

The business he runs behind the bamboo curtain is the production of cooking oil. He has installed what looks like a giant wok which is heated using wood as fuel. He buys chicken fat from a factory in Warin Chamrap, in Ubon Ratchathani Province. This factory is currently processing 30,000 birds a day. Roughly 70% of their product is for the export market and the remainder for domestic consumption. The meat sold on the domestic market is of lower grade than that for export. That is not quite as bad as it sounds because apparently it is mostly graded on size, the smaller size not being exported. But the lower grade does also include slightly bruised meat and meat which Mr Arporn describes as 'ugly'.

Mr Arporn buys all the chicken fat which is cut off as part of the factory process. It is delivered to him in Phana every day. He pays 12 Baht a kilo and reckons to need about 1,000 kilos a day. During the night the fat is rendered into oil in his giant wok, producing about 750 kilos of usable oil. After mixing the residue with used oil from KFC in Ubon, he supplies it to another business which produces animal feed. This mixture he sells on at 20 Baht a kilo, whereas the oil destined for use by food vendors and restaurants he sells at 25 Baht per kilo. Mr Arporn's younger brother and sister-in-law work for him, carefully decanting a measured quantity of oil into plastic bags and delivering them to customers.

The problem for the factory in Warin Chamrap and hence fro Mr Arporn at the moment is the strong Thai Baht and the relatively weak US Dollar. The factory  is processing 30,000 birds a day as I said, but this is down from the 70,000 a day up to the beginning of November and their break-even figure is 50,000 a day. So there is a lot less chicken fat coming Mr Arporn's way, and his customers are crying out for more cooking oil. The other downside for him is that the factory in Warin Chamrap had asked him to try to get more customers for the processed chicken pieces they produce, specifically in Laos and Vietnam where he has some contacts still from his years working in the industry. Laos, it seems, counts as the domestic market (ie they get the lower grade product) while Vietnam is an export grade market. Either way, Thai chicken is very expensive right now outside Thailand so demand has fallen considerably.

All of this may be more information than you needed about one of those topics that is rarely thought about and perhaps best not thought about at all. So it is probably time to draw the bamboo curtain across the subject.

 

I will just add that Mr Arporn tells me that he does eat chicken but only the scrawny, free-range local variety. Who can blame him? We do the same ourselves, buying it in the fresh market on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Happy Returns to Phana

I got back to Phana yesterday from my trip to Malaysia and a few days in Bangkok. I had only been away ten days so unsurprisingly nothing had really changed. The harvest is just about completed so the fields have changed colour quite dramatically. And the weather has changed again. When I left it had got unseasonably hot again after a very brief cold spell. But when I got here at about mid-day it was immediately apparent that the cold weather was back. And by bed-time I was closing all the windows and searching for more blankets.

 

When I got back to Phana in September after six months away, there had been more significant changes so I went around taking photos. The new market and bus station was well on the way to completion, now scheduled for a December opening.

 

 

 

A private building project that had been completed was the new 'resort' just outside town. It looks very nice and has a restaurant with several items listed that I really like but can not get in Phana. Tod mun kung, for eaxample. The waitress said they had that every day so I ordered some. Not today, I was told about 15 minutes later. On my next (and probably last) visit, exactly the same thing happened. All that glitters ...

 

I'm not expecting Phana to become a major tourist destination, however. When I asked how much the bungalows were, I was quoted two prices, one for three hours and one for the night. So I guess they are not exactly aiming at too many long-term visitors. But they do quite a good trade in karaoke, even at lunch time.

The most mysterious change was to the course of the Huay Phra Lao. Upstream from the bridge the banks had been cleared and the stream revealed to be divided, whether around a small island or not I haven't been able to find out yet. The view is certainly improved and it looks as if a riverside walk is planned. Previously the stream only seemed to come from the top right of this picture. 

 

Back in 1982 I swam upstream of the bridge with our kids and some relatives. I can't imagine anyone doing that now, though doubtless it is no less wholesome than it was then and I don't remember anyone getting ill or anything. A little child nearly got swept away but wouldn't have got far because the bridge was just being built then and there was lots of bamboo scaffolding in the river forming a kind of porous dam. I think the present bridge is a newer one.

 

Downstream nothing has changed. A lot of fishing goes on at the weir, usually.

 

Who said Isan is a desert? Not here, it isn't. The Huay Phra Lao divides the old town of Ban Phana from the new town, the amphur. A few kilometres downstream it joins the larger Se Bok, which in turn flows into the Mae Nam Mun east of Ubon. The Mun in turn flows into the Mekong at Khong Chiam, and then it's all the way to the sea through Cambodia and Vietnam.

People thought I would be interested in the new machines set up around the old market place in Ban Phana and along the road where the tetsaban offices are in the amphur. But believe me, despite their lurid colours, taking these photos is the nearest I am likely to get to these things. Other people find them amusing, though, especially round about dusk. Not at the moment, perhaps. Too cold.

 

Close up they are even more off-putting.

 

More to my taste are these new kuti in Wat Phra Lao:

 

So Phana changes, but so far it still looks very nice, I think, and I can't imagine not being glad to get back here. So, many more happy returns, I hope.
 
 
 

 

Sandal Man in Phana

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

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

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

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

 

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