Dear Friends:

Sometimes it is helpful as one views the work here through the eyes of a guest.

Lorenzo and Massimo are working on a documentary about the plight of the Akha people, from the Italian perspective.

With them we interviewed Italian Priests working among the Akha to destroy their culture.

And Protestant as well.

Here Lorenzo says his mind:

Dear friends

Last february I spent some weeks together with Matthew Mc Daniel, to shoot a documentary for Italian Television about Akha tribes. It was a deep and intense experience.

The general impression is to face a people, vital and alive up to now, who is slowly laying to rest. Because someone is getting them to sleep.

The contact with the alive moments of their life was fascinating. I remember the villages rested on the tops of the hills. Gentle, light like leaves. And people living and walking inside and around, like insects of the forests, perfectly integrated in it.

We did a tour in the forest, I, Matthew and Massimo Gabrielli, the camera operator, together with the spirit woman of the village. Through her eyes the nature changed completely. For us it was a dense and beautiful forest. For her, every fragment was significant, useful in their life. The spider to put in the soup, the bark like chewing gum, the holes in the bamboo, sign that a grub passed there time ago, the roots, the fruits. And the sound of bamboos rubbing with one another, they say that the forest is singing.

I have been observing her pace so long. Nothing similar to ours. We generally walk with defined, separated paces: one, two; three. They don't. The woman "rolled" up and down, in the steep forest, her walking was not a cadence, but a flow, soft and light.

One day we drove very far in the mountains, in villages where there is no electricity. After sunset inside the houses many little fires are born, people are like moving, suspended shadows. If you spend some hours with them, in these conditions, you learn to feel their presence not by the sight, but by a tactile sensation. Not because you touch them. Even if you don't , you feel them on your skin, and if you close your eyes you feel them perfectily.

The first time we were there it was without camera. It is a bad kind of presenting ourselves to arrive with the camera. But Massimo was very sad: an incredible environment, faces cut from the light from the fire, fleeting glances, voices in the darkness. A paradise for every camera. But our human relationship with them in that moment was more important than any footage.

In front of the fire an old man was sitting in silence, with deep liquid eyes, and a face like carved in the wood.

After a while a second old man arrived, and began to sing. Sitting closed to me, he sang a very old song, dedicated (Matthew explained later) to us. He was looking at us, and smiled. And with his hand he began to touch my knee, intensely. And caressed my hand, gently, like a baby. I posed an arm over his shoulder, in that moment he was my grandfather, my father and my child. From the hollow deep of his chest I felt the vibrations of the voice, and it was a telluric movement coming from the center of the Earth.

The other old man was at the other side, the song made his look still more absent and deep and liquid, and I felt a very phisical, sensual contact with both.

Deep unrepetible moments.

But if you spend there more than a couple of days, you understand that this separated world, miracoluosly survived up to now, is seriuosly endangered.

The Thai government is carrying out a project to move all the Akha from the mountains to the flat.

In their lands, where they make so many efforts (the land is never enough) to make some cultivations, many of them are planting new trees, completely foreign to the natural enviroment (such as pines). The Forest Department pays them for that, and they don't realize that in such a way they are destroying their own resources.

Further on, the work of catholic missionaries is trying to disjoin their cultural tissue. In a very subtile and dangerous way. They don't force them to abandon their gods, to embrace Catholic religion. No. They wait for them. When Akha people demonstrate, one by one, the signes of a crisis due to the impact with western society, and begin to get confused, they, the missionaries, appear, with a great smile, good, comprehensive.

Malinowski wrote that a culture is like a complexe and delicate tissue, and if you pull out just one thread, all the texture is quickly destroyed.

To break the separated world of Akha people, to move their villages, to change the trees in the forest, are is much more than just one thread. After a while, comes the moment when all the cultural texture collapses.

The missonaries, still and inexorable, wait for that moment. And they say; "Why are you so upset, so worried, so concerned about all these taboos? Taboos don't exist, the spirits don't, you don't have duties in front of anybody, excepted God. But he is very mercyfull, and always forgives."

Taboos are the framework of a culture, the adhesive, the soul itself of a community. Without taboos people feel to be free for a little while. But this is the "kiss of the Death" for them.

Missionaries for the soul, prostitution for the body of the girls. An extreme choice to get accepted in the modern world. An Akha girl gives up everything linked with her culture, strips herself of every pattern, habit and costume. Remains her body, phisically and symbolically naked. But it works. It permits to get money, even naked, mainly because naked.

Change of the trees, missionaries, prostitution. And tourism.

The tourists are the least conscious, about the evil they provoke to the Akha. But just because that they are maybe the most dangerous. Irresponsible, unaware, shallow. They are just in search of something to consume. "Exciting Hilltribes". And they leave, aboard of their vans, lined up in caravans, like conestogas. We have been to wait for them, to shoot them, in a village whose soul was escaped long ago, and now it was there just for them, for tourists. Akha people were real, but they had decided to become "Akha for tourists". To be shooten is now their job, like actors, simply showing their life.

Tourists arrived, invaded, like lazy and unwilling grasshoppers. We have been shooting them, and when they realized that they got very angry against us. Their look was meaning: why to shoot us? Akha are the monkeys, we are human. Do you think that I am a monkey too?

But the deepest point of the Hell we reached in the last days, that we dedicated to the moved villages, in the flat. We arrived there driving on the highway, and the arrive is the first shock. There is a target along the road, it indicates the village. Like a normal exit from the highway! You exit, and after few minutes you are in the village. And a strong sense of desolation keeps your heart.

You look around. No trees, no hills, no wind. The houses are similar to the traditional ones, and the costumes of the woman too. There is the grat Swing, like in every village, and the Gate with the statuettes of the Gods. But everything is obsolete, abandoned, senseless. The women go on wearing their heavy hats, because they are strong and still linked to the traditions. But up to when? In the flat sure it is different.

Where everything is hot and humid, their hats sure are more heavy. And the missionaries wait, smiling. "Why your hat? It is so heavy. You are not forced to wear it.." The kiss of the Death.

In the villages in the flat people's face and expression is completely different than people's in the hills. Something in them is dormant, a kind of narcosis, a suspension. Here's is drug, here is the true opium. The vegetal opium never reduced them in that condition.

We asked one guy, living in that village, to come with us, in Mathew's car, to get in the ruins of the village, in the mountains, where all the people there have been living up to some years ago, when they were forced to move there. A long journey, several hours. Running and jumping, in the lovely semidestroied Matthew's car. The sun was nearly setting, when we arrived. A deep silence, excepted the sound of the wind in the trees. Trees and bushes everywhere, along the road. The boy was with us, he walked in the paths with the eyes of memory. Here and there some remains of houses appeared in the high grass and in the bushes. The boy walked with us, a look collapsed very afar in the time. He felt the fresh air, the wind. Sometimes he ate some fruit, some fragments of bushes.

It got dark quickly, he led us to the old cemetery. A brief walk, some paces out of the path, and we got there. The tombs of his relatives. The boy seemed impassible, but something was collapsing inside him. Maybe he was very close to cry, but he was ashamed about that. He spoke to the camera. He said that he felt very guilty, because all his relatives remained there, alone, abandoned (for Akha the relationship with ancestors is something very alive, and linked with their life). He also asked us not to insert the footage shot in the cemetery in the edition, for fear that people in Europe could see that the cemeteries were abandoned, and decide to come there to steal. To steal some torn rags, and bones.

An indefinite bitterness was our fellow in this journey among Akha, almost every day. Excepted one. When we were in Huuh Mah Akha, the last village destined to be moved by the Government and the Army. Everything was ready. The new village, not just in the flat, but in a steep field without grass and trees, where all the land was uncovered and ready to slip down with the first rain. There some sheet huts were built. Like metallic capsules.

A new forest composed with pines was around the village. No life, no animals. Everything unknown for Akha, nothing useful for their life. Sure the missionaries were ready. "Why to live in the mountains? So far from the cities, the roads, the civilizations? Come here, relax, rest yourself." The kiss of the Death.

But something didn't work, this time.

People came from abroad, journalists, activists, people working in humanitay organizations. We, from Italian Television. And the Akha Heritage Fondation, and Matthew, so frail and so omnipotent, like a director, in his unreal semidestroied car, in his immense poverty, even capable to change the direction of history.

A meeting was organized, in the Huuh Mah Akha village. The army agreed that they would have respected the decisions of the people in the village. A brief introduction, by an official. Then the vote. One by one the men and the women stood up, came to the table, and pressed their finger in a paper. The men with simple and innocent expression. The women wrapped in their costumes, so wished and researched by the tourists as souvenirs. "Voting souvenirs", could believe.

Everything was unreally still and quiet. And strong. And historical. And awfully touching (to hide my tears I avoided to speak with anybody for a while).

After some minutes, almost only the "No" column was filled with prints. The answer of the village was totally clear and unequivocal: NO to the move.

The army seemed (up to now) disposed to respect this decision, but the surveillance must be watchful.

Lorenzo Hendel