First the News:

Need sponsors for printing project and fish hatchery well for water supply. Contact Me for details if interested.

Huuh Mah Akha now has two villagers who are employed to be paid teachers. They need writing paper, pencils, chalk, construction paper, these kinds of supplies. As well as repairs to the school toilets. You can mail donations of said materials or make donations of funds for this purpose. They have been really courageous at holding on with slim support, and then the families each hewed pieces of wood into hand built writing tables and benches. It is a two room school. The fish tanks are done, we have donors of fish, we are just waiting for water supply as the water has to be changed every three days. Drained water goes right into crop fields of the village as well, making use of the fish droppings.

We can get a price reduction on the printing press if we get it paid off soon.

Still seeking volunteers who will help sponsor a project and come over and help complete it.

Matthew McDaniel

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Akha Days
Border Lies:
The Truth Behind the Akha Migration Story

In many cases it is becoming increasingly clear with research that the Akha who live in Thailand actually lived along border areas for onwards of a hundred years, with only some villages moving further into what is Thailand.

The Thai manner of dealing with this is what produced a disaster among the Akha. Moving villages from high mountain locations, which in fact might have resembled a border dispute, was similar to seizing the citizens of another country. Little concern was given to what happens to people who have lived for generations as mountian people, into low sweating valleys with no view, places where people such as the Thai live. Done often under the guise of border security or drug control it was in fact the effort to clear people of the desired border region with Burma, with little to no thought of the consequences for those people. The Akha were not the only people effected, but also Lisaw and Lahu. The Lahu it would appear the most severely effected. Where the Akha resisted moves down to the very bottoms, the Lahu were in fact moved into the creek beds and suffered endlessly from fever and the effects of the warmer temperature on their ability to grow traditional livestock foods. As well, they were greatly effected by the close proximity of the road. The Lahu appear to have been under the effect of missionaries longer than the Akha and their culture is almost completely destroyed as a result. Opium abuse appears to be higher among the Lahu in these situations and their villages certainly in worse condition.

The consequences for villages which were moved as compared to those which were not moved is startling. For instance, Cheh Pah Kah, called Pai A Prai, in Thai, was a large Akha village that was not too far from the border but was lived close to Chinese and Lahu. It was not moved and has prospered greatly over the last ten years. It has now a wealth of fruit trees, tea plantations and various other fruits.

Next door, Pah Nmm Akha, which was located at a higher elevation than Cheh Pah Kah also had a splendid village scene, water, fruit, forests for pigs and cattle, close proximity to the border with view of an immense distance of the horizon. Some rice terraces were established but being on the top of the mountain the entire area had, at worst, a gentle roll to it where vegetables, rice and fruit could easily be grown.

For reasons not yet known, accept a general policy of the Thai government and Army, some eight years ago the village of Pah Nmm Akha, was moved off its ancestral lands, having been there more than a hundred years. Some say that the Ampour's office disapproved of the move and the army did it secretly. At any rate the army did move the village far down the mountain. They attempted to move the entire village into a sqalid flat area next to the creek where now stands a new clinic, but the Akha fought that and stayed one hill up. The Lahu however were moved to that location and almost complete opium addiction now represents what has occured to them.

However, to the hill which the Akhas moved, there was no room to farm, no room for pigs and another Lahu village was near by, and Lisaw as well, leading to many conflicts about animals and ground, as well as the problems brought on by over crowding. A second Akha village from another place nearby along the same ridge was moved just below them on the back side of the hill, further increasing the crowding of this area.

This village is called Soh Yah Akha and was moved into an opening in the hills just below Pah Nmm Akha and just below the creek. There is no view, not of anything, just the jungle, and looking up at Pah Nmm Akha. Interestingly enough this village has a very high crime rate, if the soul can be seen from the eyes, this is little wonder, since there is nothing to see around them. Similar to living in the back end of an alley between large buildings towering over with only a small lane in and out.

To continue to live and eat the Akha of Pah Nmm Akha had to continue hiking back into the mountains and farming the lower slopes of their ancestral lands but the area was still a good hour and a half hike up hill one way to reach their fields. Add to that an hour and a half hiking back down in the evening carrying food stuffs made the situation quite the ordeal. This immense distance to farm and food radically effected both the moral and health of the village.

The village displays a high rate of miscarriage and with little wonder. Pregnant woman walking three hours a day, packing food, seeds, tools, water, in order to farm, then farming for hours upon their arrival on steep slopes in all kinds of weather. Some men have horses which they can assist in the carrying of heavy seed or other food crops, but there are not enough horses to go around. The men of the village are often thin and caught with fever or lower back pain from the long hiking added to the already heavy field work.

The Army was little concerned with this.

As well, being as there was little room for animals, many buffalo had to be kept far from the village, often being stolen or dying, lacking sufficient care. Cattle were non existent, and pigs and chickens few. Both dogs and chickens suffered from the heat and often died of fever. The actual local land of the village was now just the road down the middle of the ridge seperating the huts.

(This only reinforces the importance of having saved Huuh Mah Akha from relocation.)

Now Forestry, another factor, little concerned with the plight of the Akha, is busy taking the lower lands that the Akha have been left with to farm. Pah Nmm Akha is radically effected, Forestry taking much of their lower lands each year for the planting of bastard pine in some kind of odd planting scheme of a foreign specie, which grows fast, but is poorly cared for and produces a poor quality of wood. It also kills all plants underneath it doing great environmental damage to the area. Each time the Akha leave certain fields fallow for up to four or five years, Forestry takes these fields. Then the Akha are left to farming the existing ground more intensely with higher rates of erosion, and the general dehibilitation of the soil and lower yields of crops.

Close placement to the road did not bring the prosperity it promised and lowered food security. While organizations like the Asian Development Bank say they are addressing issues of food security it is actually being lowered by repetitive greedy actions on the part of a few.

Adjacent location of new schools also did not do so much to assist the Akha. Children growing up in the village, going to the fields, learning closely connected to their environments were now increasingly in school, learning books, but loosing knowledge and general respect for what they already knew. The assumption was made to them that if you are being pulled out of the village life for the learning of books then the learning of books must be better. But it was not books that fed them or their forfathers over the years, it was wise farming. With the rushed development styles for the land there is little indication that books are more part of saving the environment for future generations than they are the means to dissipate the villages and turn the children into avid consumers of manufactured goods and lifestyles.

Government offices claim to offer job opportunities in the cities to further pull the Akha youth out of the mountain and weaken the villages in their ongoing efforts at assimilating the Akha.

Although clinics have been placed in the remote areas the service is poor, and pregnant Akha women are repeatedly told that if they do not agree to vaccination they will not receive ID cards for their children, being thus vaccinated with the Tetanus Toxoid during pregnancy at least two times. The issue of being a different race than Thai still appears to be a matter of concern in their treatment. Unless Thai medical staff just treat all poor people poorly?

One could say that it is a common occurrence in Thailand that while one hand plays havoc, the other tries to explain why the havoc has occurred without undoing it, but further administering another greed based solution to the problem. Not that the truth is not available, but few are willing to ask why it is not examined, while the poor are plundered via lies.

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Children of the Gods:

The lives of the pregnant women in the village were made very difficult by the long walks to the fields over many hills and kilometers, taking better than an hour, and much hard work when they got there. This was not how Akhas built villages, but the Army had moved them and they now suffered under this fate. They often talked of not knowing where they would have their children but one couldn't be sure that so many gave birth in the field, least not hearing of such an event.

In the early evening the young Akha woman complained of stomach pains, being fully nine months pregnant, and wished to go to the hospital because she had some perception that the pain would some how be less in that new fangled place. The Akha women laughed at her insistance at going to a place where you could not move about and had to give birth to a child like a prisoner, in a bed, on your back. Further they attempted to convince her that where ever she went, it would not be so comfortable, and the simplicity of the hut offered her more.

She insisted to go to the hospital, but only made it half way through the village, in the rain, when her water broke and she knelt in the erosion ruts of the road, red clay covering her boots. The other young women gathered her up, and led her back to the hut where the old women waited knowingly. All the bedding had been cleared aside, a call was put out to the elders and a bottle of potion of herbs was brought from one hut which the young woman drank to speed and ease the delivery of the baby. One old woman coached her to crouch on her haunches, and then go to her hands and knees each time to push. The pain seemed to subside greatly with this. Between pushes she would rest her head and shoulders on the lap of the old woman and the old woman would coo and rub her back and belly downward toward her legs, calling the baby to come out in a soft and reassuring voice. Then she would wipe the sweat from the face of the woman and laugh about this or that, giving light to the situation, until the woman began to push again. Not coming yet, they kept saying. The woman kept changing her position in the hut, making herself as comfortable as possible.

She kept checking with her hand the state of the progress of the baby's head and finally called that the baby was coming out, she leaned on one leg and raised her other knee to look and the baby tumbled out very much like a fish and was crying in moments, a baby boy, all the fingers and toes in all the right places, covered with hair, and thick black hair on its head, a cow's lick just above the right eye.

The head was very elongated at birth, protruding like an egg to one side. One old woman wrapped the cord at two points and cut it quickly with a thin razor sharp piece of bamboo, and the mother stood in the corner waiting for the placenta to drop quickly which it did, with very little blood. The other old woman took the baby in a cloth wrap and a second old woman began quickly working the protrusion of his head with her hands, like clay, shaping it fully into normal shape in a few minutes.

All laughed about at the quickness of the matter and told the new mother how to wrap a sash around her low belly which she would wear for weeks to hold her stomach up until all took back to normal positions. The baby was immediately fed a piece of egg, specially boiled by the godmother, and then the mother ate the other egg. Old men came and prepared a meal for the mother and father to eat. Once the baby was born the woman's mother could come, not before, and the mother's father would not be able to see the new child until the navel was healed.

The new mother took some few minutes to begin breast feeding the baby, the old women showing what and how to do, as she made herself comfortable. Here there were no scolding sanitary nurses but just kind voices of elders, no shining costly stainless steel as at some baby factory, just soft sounds, rain, bamboo, and the coals of the fire. The mother quickly took a new look to her face, the father held their first born son, and everyone soon tried to get some sleep. Dawn came soon enough.

With dawn, the real masters of the village came, not one by one, but in a long parade, the children. Face after beaming face came in to see the child, not quickly leaving, but giving great music as they stood around, laughing and talking with glea, commenting on all the hair, the nose, the eyes, the hands and feet, giving their consent to adding another child to their midsts. All day long they came, dozens of them, repeatedly.

For if there was one thing that Akha villages lived for, it was the children. They did not live to send them away, or to out live or out enjoy them. Life was considered to pass in stages, watching your own children be born and then your grand children, moving on and on. The children were taken with great care by all, they basically ran the village, as compared to other places, seldom reprimanded, it more appeared that the adults were their servants. It was the Non-Akhas who came to give them ways to stop the children, to sterilize them, to take their children away. Always these others were saying the Akha had too many children, as though bad, that they would like to take some of the children away to do with as they chose, yet always they admitted how beautiful the Akha children were. And take them away they did, Thais and Foreigners alike. Somehow, what had been produced so beautifully was not good enough.

Always the center of the village was occupied and dominated by the roaming children, not the objects of a "nuclear" family, but the possesions of the whole village, not so much different than the seeds on the ear of corn. Although the Akha lived by the guides of a culture that had many ins and out, few seemed to apply to the children. The only time the children were chased off the village square was when a body was brought through, particularly the body of a child whom had died. Otherwise, the village square, and every other inch of the village belonged to them, coming and going, playing with bugs and birds, squabbling, playing a game of throwing sandles at a arch made from more sandles, trying to knock the arch down, fishing, going for fruit in the jungle, painting their lips red with the bodies of ants they mashed. Endlessly they paraded the huts going from this one or that, carrying the latest news or development and then moving on, or back to see again the last new baby born.

Ah Poeuh Ah Peeh, the great grandfather and grandmother of the Akhas brought down to them all their traditions of farming and law, which the children noted through the years as their families grew up and farmed and married together. Never would one meet a group of more beautiful energetic children, children of the Gods.