Dear Friends:

This is the **FIRST** Akha Weekly VIDEO Journal!

On the new combined web page for the Akha Weekly Video Journal there are now the following files in Qucktime video format .

The Swing Festival
The Rice Harvest
The Harvest Festival

Enjoy!!!

Akha Weekly Video Journal Page:
http://akha.org/akha_video.htm

It is the end of the Akha year, in some villages the year end festival is already going on. "Gah Tauh Bpah" is the name of the festival, and it is the highlight of the year, the end of the harvest and work for one season.

All the rice and other foods are safely in their storage, corn cribs and rice cribs.

Melons and squash stacked on shelves, the new fields being cleared for next year.

Pah Nmm Akha doesn't have much reason to celebrate, but they do never the less in this video segment. They got half the rice crop this year since Thai Forestry has taken so much of the land away from them.

So what will they eat the last half of next year?????

Maybe Forestry will feed them? Guess again.

They are still having to do the three hour walk to the fields back and forth every day since the Thai Army moved them off their old village site some 9 years ago.

Course neither do they have anyone to complain to who will listen and has the power to do anything about it.

Never the less, the festive village was filled with top throwing, a top is called a "Chauh". The point is for one man to spin his top down into the square, and then others throw their spinning tops from a start line and try to knock his down. It is quite an intense sport with spinning wooden tops of good size and weight striking the other tops hard and shooting down the road, banging into the bamboo fences as they go, the men running after them, checking to see whose top stops first to determine the winner.

The children play a game of bowling by pitching large brown seeds with their feet down a hill, trying to knock down one of four waiting seeds lined up at the bottom. The seeds are large and bulky, coming from a pod in the forest, rolling like fat little boys to the finish line.

The dances start the second night of the five day festival, going all night, they were still going this morning when I got up to come down off the mountain and I heard them all night long, the drums and cymbols reverbating off the forest.

During this festival, in a statement of Akha solidarity, all the Akha in the village turn a year older collectively.

This village has one of the toughest diets there is, nothing but sparse rice and greens, there are few fruit trees and getting the vegetables into the village from far away before someone else gathers them is very hard.

Squash and melons, common in some villages, along with other fruits, are not common in this village. In villages I visited this last November in Burma, squash was common, many saved on the porches. I saw maybe only one or two per hut in Pah Nmm Akha.

I could not live on rice and greens, neither do the Akha live well on them.

We would like to be able to do a whole lot more for the Akha.

Please consider that these PROJECTS run solely on your donations:

1. NUTRITION project:
Such as the baking for the village children, we now have all the ovens and need baking supplies like flour, etc.

2. The CATFISH project:
We still need a pumping system and additional tanks.

3. The TRUCK continues to be parked until the $1800 bill is paid. The engine has been replaced.

Very difficult to get help out to the villages with no wheels.

Help make a difference for the Akha this winter season.

We hope to have our regular site, Akha.com, back on line soon.

And last but not least, we are happy for the addition of "The Akha Way" Video to the Archeology Channel as noted below.

Thanks to Yellowcat Productions for all their hard work.

Cheers and Joy,

Sincerely,
Matthew McDaniel

"Friends and Members:
Now appearing among our video offerings on The Archaeology Channel, our streaming video website at www.archaeologychannel.org is The Akha Way. Driven southward from their original homeland in Yunnan, China, the Akha of northern Thailand today face an uncertain future in the face of threats from forced migration, Christianization, money, and drugs. This video, created by Yellow Cat Productions of Washington, D.C., brings into view the dramatic and often destructive cultural changes taking place today, under the code name "globalization," among indigenous peoples around the world. As fellow human beings, we should pay attention to what is happening to the Akha and other marginalized cultures."

http://www.archaeologychannel.org
http://www.yellowcat.com
http://www.akha.com