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Akha
Chronicles Pah Pah Nmm Akha was a border village in a
remote region which gave me the first opportunity to involve myself
significantly with the farming life and economics of an Akha village which
was traditional. In the end I married
into this village and worked significantly to protect its culture and farming
interests from outside predators which included army, police, forestry,
missions and land developers. Pah Nmm They know I am in the woods. The village that I have located in, Pah Nmm Akha, has
become family, and I have had the chance to learn the limitations but also
the incredible resiliency of the Akha and their village to family life. In the end I
have made many wonderful and fantastic friends in the village, one very large
family. Bah Mah Hahn Akha When it I am back in Bah Mah Hahn village. The two older fmailiy girls are already
gone to the fields for the morning to plant corn. The village is
plenty muddy making it a real struggle to get in and out of the village with
my truck, the last long driveway completely destroyed mud tracks that are
very steep and I have to power up. Coming out can
be a dangerous slide down. The fundraising
in the The rice
planting is not done yet. For Ah
Chooh's house it is but not for all the village. It is
interesting to note all the orthodox aspects if you will about the Akha. After the grandfather dies the girls won't sew
on their traditional clothes for 3 months.
Hope to know more about all of this in time. It is very
difficult to write down all that one sees in one day, to put it to words. The Wedding Going outside with the basket, for the stick and mud/shit Jungle context, The rain comes It was almost
like any other event for me, just something in my schedule. I had to remember to leave time for it, for
a trip to the mountains for it, just like any other. I would allow what ever
occurred to make it something different in its own way for an event occuring
with me rather than an appointment or
medical task. I so often worked in
such a daze that this was just how it was, not lacking particularly in
sentiment, just pragmatic. So I knew that
I would need a few days and I headed up to the hill with a couple of clean
shirts. Otherwise nothing
different. I drove in the village, I
was relaxed because I had gotten a lot done that day, those last few days and
so my mind was kind of in a state of play if you will. The village was anxious, they didn’t
know if I would show or not, yes I would show, but not necessarily on time,
so I laid that to rest, the wedding would go ahead as planned in the morning. The very next morning after I awoke at my
fiances house the very first thing that they did was to drive me from her
house, along with her, and tell us both that we couldn’t come back in
for anything for three days. Now what
made this odd, was that because I was gone so much, and I had no village of
my own, my wife would be residing in the new hut that the old woman had
blessed for us, apart from her parents house, but nearby so she would still
have family, since I pretty much lived
either in my truck while it was moving, or in front of a computer and that
didn’t leave much community for her. Since normally
she would be leaving to my village, the ban on entering the house was
necessary since it was still close by.
Numerous related families in the village would not be attending the
wedding, while all non related families would be, to keep the standard
custom. Since I still had to put on a
celebration for all of them as my friends, by choice, I needed two pigs,
since they couldn’t eat from the one that was the marriage pig. That was no problem because there were
enough people that it was going to take that anyway. Good thing I had been raising two pigs. The first thing
that happened after we left the house was that one man lost his grip on pig
number one and it got away, so we had to wait an hour for it to come back to
the shade at which point we made it part of the festival. Actually, we tried to make it part of the
festival once with a spear, but it ran off and we had to chase it into the
jungle where we cornered it in the creek and finished what we had started,
then slung it over a heavily sagging bamboo pole and carried it back to the
village. Then a great fire was built
and the pig was singed till all the black hair and top of the hide was
scraped off. At that point the pig
entered into the festival different from other planned cookings. I was sent to
our hut, then my fiance soon showed up, stopping before the hut, where a
white skirt was pulled over her head, and she dressed in it, removing her
black skirt, the only time a woman ever pulls a skirt over her head. Then a special Akha Jacket, one I
didn’t even know she had been making, was put on top of her wedding
woven hat, which she had put on for this moment instead of her head dress,
and the arms of the jacket were folded over her head and she entered the hut
and went to the woman’s side where she sat down with her back to the
partition. The hut was soon filling up
with adults and children, a mere ten feet by ten feet on each side or less,
two fires, and soon a man brought her her bed role from her mother’s
house. The pig was
brought into the hut and carefully cut up a special way, reading the liver,
and then taking part of the pig to the women’s side and placing it in a
can which was covered for the second day, the rest carefully cut up and parts
hung on a rod over to one side to keep taking from and other parts cut up
immediately and going into a pot. One
man took over the cooking duties after the old elder finished all the cutting
up and cooking certain items on the women’s side of the hut. The elder women of the village from the
other families gathered in a circle on my fiances side and began to feed her. The old men gathered on my side, began
telling stories and doing recitals done at marriages, carefully explaining
all to me as they went along, my not being of the best memory. Finally I was
called to eat on the women’s side with my fiance, splitting an egg
together which we ate with the shell from our hands. That night, an
escort slept in the hut, since it was against the tradition, to do more than
sleep during a wedding which officially lasted thirteen days, though there
was only three days of ceremony. This
was out of respect for the traditions. On the second
day there were more ceremonies, the second part of the pig was eaten spare a
few parts which would be saved to feed the elders on the third day. It did
not matter how big the pig was, the pig was split up for these three days to
be eaten on schedule. I took turns between feeding the Old Women
whiskey, cigarettes and then they in turn gave me token money for my
marriage. It was really fantastic,
that tiny side of the hut, all those elder Akha women in a circle talking and
smiling, many of whom I had not met before, so kind to me, blessing me that
we would have many boys and girls together and that the children would be
raised up in the full traditions of the orthodox Akha, which I assured them
would be the case. Both the many
children and the orthodox traditions.
I can not say that I have ever met such a collection of elderly women
so engaged in their place and role in life as the vitality of the village as
that group and such groups in Akha villages. Then my wife,
by this time, after the eating of the egg, took her turn feeding the men
whiskey and cigarettes and receiving their blessing and permission in the marriage
as I had done with the elder women.
The singing went on and on this second day one man stood out for his
ability to sing the traditional songs.
He sang on for hours. Many
visitors came and went. We ate the
last of the saved parts of the pig from the can, them being split between us
with careful instructions as to what to do with the bone, it must be put in
the fire, not discarded through a hole in the floor. On the third day my wife took two bottles
of whiskey to her parents and the ceremonies were over. Rice Planting There is a lot
to rice planting and care, care we must call it. My wife's
family, they got 120 Bpoh of rice this year.
A bpoh is a five gallong oil can by measure. There are three bpoh to a sack of rice, but
this is with the husk on, and that is how the harvest is measured. Planting the
rice took one day with ten people to help us.
We hired lahu workers, one a very tall and funny man, it rained and
the wind blew and he was very happy
with his long planting stick. It takes about
six days to burn the slash and chop the sod on a large mountain side
field. The slash is usually not trees,
sometimes, but is the bamboo from the field setting fallow for at least three
years. Five days of
work are required after planting the rice, to weed it the first time, with
two people working. The second
cultivation and weeding takes five days but this time with five people. I
helped this time too and it is very hard work. We also have to walk three hours to get to
the fields and back, an hour and a half each way. The land is
very steep. The women get a mark on
their left leg above the knee from resting their arm or hand there while they
stoop and work. They use a small hoe
for opening the soil and removing weeds which they twist into bundles. Vines are the worst and make the work
difficult because as you take them out
it is possible to damage the rice. One
vine has a fur all over it. One vine
is smoothe, these get very big and long.
They come from a great tuber under the ground, which when you are
busting the sod you try to find. When
you dig it up quite deep it is round.
This is good because you kick it good and due to being round fat and
heavy it bounces and rolls very fast all the way into the brush below the
field way down in the canyon. There are also
thorn plants, that maybe would become very big. When you find these small the leaves are
many and red and the stalk soft and you can boil them and add sugar and the
juice is bright red and has a very nice wild berry flavor. There is bunch grass also and other wild
grasses. There are bees
that love to sting you and if they do your face will puff all up for three
days and it can leave a big poc scar on your face. There are many
ants, some bite very bad and you get a big infection and fever, others leave
you alone, even if they are big and dangerous looking. Erosion is a
big concern so the men make side trenches.
The women plant cucumbers, the Akha type, and sunflowers so there are
things to nibble at harvest. They
plant this throughout the rice. The
cucumbers are large and provide wet fruit when it is hot and dry at harvest
time. Terraces are
needed but if the army moved a village it takes them a long time, maybe
twenty years, to build new terraces.
The Akha say it takes a full fifty years to build a village. The terraces
start in the bottom and catch the soil from erosion, they are essential but
do not get built when the village worries about yet another forced
relocation. Today we found
a viper in a piece of wood stump and killed it so it would not be living
there in the rice field, these long green whip vipers go very fast, they are
very thin and hard to see, yet they can leap an jump up off the ground,
moving like a whip. The wind and
rain continued in the afternoon cooling both us people and the earth. Our view was as good as food, which of
course to the whole lot of us we didn't have much. Mountains and valleys all around and below,
we ourselves nearly at the top of it and very close to the Burma Border. Planting Actually we
cultivated quite a lot for the final time there on top of the hill. Amazing what you notice. There are frogs (the Akha girl claimed
they made warts - Ah Pah Buuh See,
something like that). There were
tarantulas that I dug out. There was the one viper, they have a
chisel head like stealth shaped and hard to see. Meeh Chooh the Nyeeh Pah was there and she
had a dream about the snake then that night. Then there was
quite a commotion down the hill.
Though the mountain ridge is big, it is one long family from t his
village, Pah Nmm Akha. The otehr ridge
is cultivated by Pai ah Praih Akha. So
every one can see every one else through the distances even though it is a
great way. One can call out which is
heard a long way or is passed on.
Sometimes one can hear the other Akha singing from very far away. From here you can also see to the south to
Huuh Yoh Akha. And down below there is a Lahu village. What is beautiful about this now is that it
is still natural. The Thais want to
build the whole area up so it wont' long be this way but will soon be full of
business. The village
itself sits on very small ground, far to the east on the trail and towards
Hua Mae Kom and But anyway,
there was this commotion down below on the far "beach" five Akhas
jumping about obviously trying to swat or rid themselves of a bee.
When we got back to the village one woman's face was swollen so bad
her eyes were closed shut. These people
die quickly. After the big funeral by
only a few days one man went out to work cutting bamboo. Came home not feeling well. Began t swell up and a day later went to
the hospital and died. I figure he
tore a kidney or something. But theser
would b e little hope of good medical care to these people if the chips were
really down. When the hospital does
save them from this or that, particularly by way of surgery, I am always
impressed. Many of the
services coming to the area don't seem to be intended for them, but for Thais
who will move in and displace them. We got the
cultivating done. Lahu will plant the
rice. Ten people for 60 baht a day was
600 baht. Lots of plants. They know which ones you can gather and
cook. The road we
used is steep but clay drys very quickly from a rain. I am learning
how much one family farms. What
different crops etc. A medical note. Swollen stomach is a pain they complain of
here. Ulcers or too much chilis, not
sure. The other is what I call creeping
death. The hands and feet drain of
blood which appears to be just a lack of enough high calorie food and fruit. Maybe I should
have been out in these villages earlier, sure I should have been, I knew
that. It was learning the language etc. Can't do it all
but there is no doubt a great demand for help, books, first aid, etc. And all the
birds and bugs you get to hear every day.
You learn to listen to that and you never forget. Rock and roll was a crime against birds and
insects. Cause after you listen to
that too long you won't be able to hear them. Its funny, the
west is so concerned about the export or use of drugs from these places,
which the west exports huge amounts of toxic chemicals to these places, and
sure in greater quantity. Paraquat,
hedonal. The Akha here
spray salt water mixture on the weeds in the rice when it is hot in the
middle of the day. Then they gather up
the weeds after the salt has burned them.
I am not sure why the double action. The loss of one
working person to a family would be significant. Beating the The Story of Ah Meeh What they did to her, missing my cue Building the Pah Conflicts with the Lahu and their
motivation for those conflicts Jeh Teeh Jeh Boh The Lahu (Jeh Teeh) try to get me thrown
out of the village Help from Foreign Volunteers Rich Moments - Funeral I see so many
rich moments among the Akha, like the old man's funderal at Bpah Mah
Hahn. Then the coffin sprung a leak
when they were taking it out of the village, not nice that was, us all
dodging it when we were climbing the trail, death in the village, up close
and personal, and no one likes it, that is why there is a culture for
handling it. While the men
make the final preparations of the hole in the ground, there is quite lude
talk between the men and the women, the only time that I know of that it is
allowed, in a fashion to be the celebration of life, as compared to the death
before them. I find this quite
interesting, the perception of the balance of this. The Lahu Block the Road Pah Nmm Jeh Teeh the lahu blocked the road from
the village to the fields. He joined
with Jeh Boh, the headman who the village was named after. Jeh Boh did not want the road to cross his
rice terrace. Jeh Teeh tried to get me thrown out of the
village but I was still there. The Pig I remember the
time I bought a pig and hauled it to this village to have a little
feast. And what do you know, the
"family" took possesion of it and said no way were they going to
cook it, they'd get it fattened up real big and use ift for some other
occasion. Perfectly logical from their
standpoint. So much for my
sense of joy that I wished to share.
You see anyone in this house having any joy, we're dirt poor and broke,
sorry. These people
could suck water out of a stone. They appear to
have a religion of non want. If they
can't make it come up out of the ground they don't want it. There are
exceptions. A pig is not one of
them. Couse this is just one village. There appears
to be no want of one kind for outside items and then onother want of another
kind for everything. A joy to back
good ideas and actions. In Their Heads Best I could
tell the Akha were still in their heads.
The rest of the people had fallen out and were walking around outside
their heads, doing everything in their imaginations to get back in their
heads. Buildings, cars, houses, toys,
refrigerators. And so the Akha
lived from within their heads, singing was the only communication outside of
that, and everything else was an unimportant external item that you used only
if needed, that you did only if needed, such as planting rice. This varied
from village to village. The
missionaries spent all their time trying to beckon the Akha out of their
heads into the missionaries state of Eternal frustration. Even the body
seemed external to the Akha from my view of it. Opium Opium was the
most powerful "I don't care" medicine known to man. Some people claimed that the evangelical version
of Jesus was a drug of the same nature.
Christianity a religion to opiate the people. A comparison for this reason. A good smoke
left the man "unconcerned" for days and sleeping for a couple, so
one could only wonder about those who smoked a new piece of opium as long as
your thumb every day. The new stuff
was dark yellow pitchy and left a big hangover. The old sticky dark black stuff smelled
like fine deep perfume when you inhaled deeply through the nose and people
who smoked that stuff said it was super smooth. But it was all
a diversion from what was happening to them and was like having somebody inside
your body taking the controls and not doing anything with them. Used in small
quantities it had it purpose, few people who used it hurt anyone else as
compared to alcohol related traffic deaths or spousal abuse. The drug war to
get rid of it as compared to getting rid of alcohol was an incredible hypocrisy. Squash Leaf Notes If you wrap
squash in their own leaves it sticks to them and protects them on the way
back the village down bad trails which you must walk. For Her Love of the Fields Sometimes she
wanted to go far away from these mountains, all the heat, the sun, the steep
and slippery trails, the long walk to the fields and then working all day
only to eat a few vegetables with chilli pepers and salt. Her back hurt
so bad at the end of the day, from stooping all day in the fields that it
took her a couple hours to get to sleep. No Smoke I went up to Ah
Chooh's village. This is like the 17th of Nov. An
excellent farmer, she loves the earth. The village is
very excited about making use of the n ew road. It will be finished. I thi nk a circuit road would take back to
the old village and make walking safe again. Everything has
been on standstill for a very long time. I alway enjjoy
so much to go and be in the villages.
My greatest sadness is that it is taking so long to do more fore the
Akha. I do h ope this
changes very quickly. Anyway, the
villages, dusty, alive, full of life, people, friends, personalities. And there is
belief and hope that things will get better. Nyeeg Pah Meeh
Chooh has just made up a beautiful garden below the house. Many things growing now. This is what I want to encourage. There is so
much to do and give careful care to. My little boy
has been sick but very well growing also.
Back in the mountains Was a beautiful
ride on the way out. Stopped
by Booh Sah's place and met a Shan women doctor. The little girl of Booh Sah is not getting
better but the Shan doctor tries to help her with herbs. I dropped off some cotton for the flat
village. Running Goose Ah Seh, he told
me that of his family he was the only one who carried ammo for the Burmese
army over the years, ten years, and two years for the Wa. The Burmese
went to kill everyone. So the Wa
faught them also. He would walk
carefully in the old foot prints, to avoid stepping on a mine, Two Akha died
one time. He saw so many
dead. Near Tapin bridge too. Heads blown off, faces, arms, legs, and he
helped with a lot of medicine. The Burmese
used mortars that had poison gas in them.
Everybody close by died. Ah Seh
smelled it, was real bad, would smell the shells before they were fired. He packed them for the army. Where ever they hit everyone died. Their faces turned black, green snot and
blood ran out of their noses. The
Burmese killed Wa and Lahu this way. They used long
pins to probe the trail for mines, then walk exactly in the foot prints. There was gold
mining too. A mine shaft near Meh Joh
Akha in a place called Meh Poh Akha.
The Akha called them bird holes because hundreds of birds like swifts,
flew into them, straight down a hundred feet.
Akha and Lahu didn't work them, only Hmong. Then in a place
called Meh Bpah Tsaw there was a waterfall.
The Lahu found gold there, lots of it, at the base of the water fall. But Kuhn Sa told them not to work it. But they kept digging so his solders came
one day and killed all the Lahu, the men, the women, the children, everyone,
some thirty people. This was only five
years back. There is
another palce where the old men divined gold.
Soh Yah Akha is the place, the old men said it was there but no one
dug long enough. Sometimes the
Burmese army, he went with them for 20-30 days at a time and they would come
to an Akha village. If everyone fed
them, no problem, but fi they had run away they always burned the village. He saw 5 Akha villages burned, 10 lahu
villages burned this way. The Burmese
seemed cruel to him, always killing. They "took" women, and
"took" her daughter too if she was a widow. He used to live
in Loh Meeh Shaw. Then his folks moved
south because of all the war of the Burmese.
Every year war and carrying weapons. Ah Seh also
rode many years on the opium trains for the Chinese, speaking Chinese, Lahu,
Burmese, Akha of course. They packed
bags full of opium bricks fro here to there on horses. Then there wasn't allowed to be heroin so
much, the chinese did t hat, and it was very dangerous. In all th ose
years he bagan opium smoking. Ah Gaw
in Tachilek had such an old man in his mango orchard too, one who had seen so
much. He gave him every day opium,
cause he was worn out from the same war.
I remember that. Ah Seh said he
saw thousands killed. Lots of times
300 to 400 soldiers at one time, both Burmese or Wa. So his wife is
back, I told her not to bother to run away any more.
Rice Shortfall Pah Nmm I noticed in Pah Nmm Akha that after the
rice harvest (shortfall) that things really got tight in the village
financially immediately noticeable. Impressions of Ah Seh Ah Seh's wife
came back, it really was silly on her part. She must wait, as the rest of us have t o
do for things to get better. Ah Seh sat
there, talking to her through the wall, to himself, his hands stained dark
from opium, his hair always an incredible black tussle like a bear, a
small man. My concern was
the mountain road and economics, bringing in cash, but also good land and
food security. There were rice
terraces for sale that I could help them buy, but I didn't have the money for this. One close buy, quite large was overpriced
at $8000. A tribal center
was also needed, I thought of this, say high up on the mountain if I could
find a donor. Pah Nmm Akha
was far removed from the farming land, everything was made much more
difficult by this. This year Ah
Seh had good crops of all kinds. Less
people in the house this year as well. The ginger crop
would be big and healthy, everyone else's crops had caught fever and turned
yellow and died. They dug the ginger
all up and sold it very cheap. Crops really
were best for humans to survive, not quite so good for raising cash. Malaria Nov. 2000 For a surprise
from my I was glad to
be over it, working hard and then wham, nearly dead. The risk with malaria is that you can have
pf malaria, or cerebral and it can kill you very fast. The medical
staff doesn't really care about the difference, as they say, some live, some
die. Karma. Pig to Loh Mah Cheh Back in the
village was good. Lots of work to do
and progress to make. Ah Seh and I
took one of his large pigs to Loh Mah Cheh Akha and butchered it there in the
very early morning. It was still
dark. The manner of killing a pig was to stick
it in the heart down through the bottom area of the throat, catching all the
blood in a bowl, then the pig is burned all over to clean the skin, then
scraped white, then scribbed white with water. Then the guts are removed, and the pig is
chopped up. There is not much of it
that is not used. But there were not
too many people so we were unable to sell it all and I hauled the pigs head
between my legs on the motorbike, a big sack of meat behind me on Ah Seh's
lap. Quite a load. Disease One only has to
get hit with a disease here one time to know how hard these people have it. Malaria, even if it is treated, really
takes it out of you. Complaint One common
complaint I heard about the Akha was that all the young men only sat around
the village. What they didn't note was
that it wasn't always the same young men.
This was the village defence force and the Akha had plenty of reason
to have one. As to the Akha
men they were no light weights when it came to hiking, hard farming or
hauling bambooo out of the mountains over incredible distances of long and
steep trails, dragging huge loads. The
women worked long and paced in the fields. Men half my
size carried 100 lb sacks of corn straight up mountain sides through the
brush to the ridge trails where it could be packed out by horse. Same for harvesting rice, ginger, beans. Some men caught
fever which they called "Meeh Yeeh" in the rice terraces while they
got them ready for the planting, in days they wasted down to nothing, taking
men months to come back. Others died,
one got kicked by a horse, dying in days. Some limped
scarred by bullets from porter days.
They were the lucky ones. Burmese soldiers took long needles and probed the mud
for land mines. Ah Seh was
walking behind two other Akha porters when there was an explosion. Distracted for a moment, one man did not
watch his foot step placement and stepped on a mine. Both died.
Ah Seh didn't like portering.
The Burmese shooting then the Wa or Shan shooting back. Everyone got their chance to die. Muling opium
was better. He had a gun. He had a big bag of money, and he went and
bought 400 to 500 kilos of opium at a time and brought it with five horses
back to Khun Sah. He said those days
were good and happy days. Yoh
Byoh. No one stole from you, the Lisaw
headman wouldn't allow any robberies. I met the one
Lisaw headman at Loh Mah Cheh Akha.
Long nose, fine fingers, thin, he was quiet, soft spoken, and came
across as a very straight man. He too
had lived years on the top but Thai army moved everyone. No imagination then, killing people's
souls, robbing their eyes. The Thais took
the land, broke up history and villages. There were many villages now that had no
land at all. Don't Hit that Snake A viper lay in
the road. The drive didn't hit
it. He got out of the vehicle and hit
it with a stick. He said his brother
told him to never let the vehicle hit an animal because later on the vehicle
might go to hitting a person. Seemed good
logic to me. Opium Lives Some of the men smoked opium and after years of
this their wives would sometimes run away, maybe more than once, but smoking opium
was not always a detractor. Viagra had
nothing on opium. And the women knew
this. Opium smokers also stayed close
to home, didn't beat their wives, were laid back, watched the kids. Some people
would jump to conclusions and condemnation, but this was to miss the moment
of human beauty in the event. Opium
was not evil, it was not near as dangerous or bad to the body as alcohol, and
it had many wonderful uses. That is not how it was portrayed. Because the
husband denying nothing , would put on his best attire, and the village all
wishing him well, he would go off to the distant mountain in pursuit of his
wife and woo her kindly and gently back, promising to do better and get off
the smoke, or address some need that was a grievance to her. Maybe work more and smoke less, but surely
it was part of the marriage and not all women that I knew were full opposed
to it. I would doubt 50% of them were
against it. This was
theatre of human hope and given the land hard atmosphere that men faced in
the rugged illages over land problems, it was a noteworthy moment. The dispute
was, they couldn't get it up or they could keep it up a good long time. In Search of Akha Dreams Best way to say
it all these years, getting in their minds, trying to understand their lives,
and living long enough to do it. You had to lay
down in their beds to catch their dreams, looking at the laquered ceiling
thatch, bamboo, listening to the talk, the smoke rolling up thruogh the
light, the warble of opium, dark colors, creaking boards, brown boards,
village to village, the days and years gone, wrinkled faces, clouded eyes,
scratching life from the good earth, us outsiders, it foreign to us, but
these poeple lived upon the earth ntimtely, as if they knew they hd to
scratch its ears. Over the years
and up the mountains I had come, looking for their dreams, listening with
ears and eyes, their trails of songs, labor and tears, dancing in the village
square. Akha Pigs Some of the
pigs were really big, faces so fat they could hardly see. Some big pigs were 100 kilo, but the
really big ones, maybe 200 kilos. A big pig was five years old. But 60 kilo was a good size pig to
kill. You could sell all the meat in
one day. Bigger than that and there wasn't enough
peole to buy it all. Chopped up in pieces. Pigs were
mostly all fat. Really every best part
was lots of grease, but the hide was really fantastic, peole chewed or fried
the hide. Salted chilled fat was relly
good. Raw of course. Killing a pig
was a village affair, but it started really early in the morning. To see it happen you had to really get up
early. It certainly was part of a community
event. The Akha were expert dividers of the meat
not only by weight but also by content.
Keeping it fair. Gah Tauh Bpah Festival end of the year. In an act of community the festival of
tops and tossing seeds noted when the whole village at once got a year older
together. Ah Durh Tsaw urh, thowing seeds. Chauh Beeh, throwing the tops, slamming
them into each other, keeping score, making bets. One man spun his top down, then others
took turns striking it with their tops, spun with cords and sticks from the
hand. Somebody Important Every now nd
then somebody important came to the villages. The boss's lined the roads with flags,
police and so many big important cars went by All the
villages waited for ours till the cars got there, a few gifts, a few photos,
many men and women with cameras, rushing around from house to house, door to
door, classroom to classroom, then in a cloud of dust and flashing lights
they are gone and everyone wondered what it had all been about. The wait was
long, the food poor and usually for the hundreds of people who came and
waited with their small chidren there was no running water or no toilets. The babies and
small ch ildren cried, the legs and b ack hurt, and it either rained or was
hot, the air full of dust covering the motorbike riders as they went home
again. Always there
were these events, much flury, much fuel spent to get there, and nothing come
of it. The actual event of the day
lasted a few minutes only. Big gates, big
fan fare, big deal. Denial in an Best seen in
christian villages. Villages were
different. In some villages problems
were an aside. The village was mostly
prosperous. In other villages the
problems were the main dish and overwhelming at that. In all th ese cases the problems had been
imposed by outsiders. Army and
forestry. Missionaries did best if
they had the help of tragedy. They
considered tragedy a b lessing for their own agenda when it conveniently
happened to other peole, in this case the Akha. One could go so far as to say that by
omission the missions prayed for tragedy upon others. In the case of
tragic villages, ones with immense problems, a n ew trait appeared. Denial.
Total denial of everything. No
body moved, there was no where to move or attempt to alter the
situation. In the ase of Pah Nmm the
fields were way to far. To admit there
was a food and economic crisis was way too much, the soul would collapse in
despair. Instead they denied
everything. The food was excellent,
there was plenty of it. Rice,
vegetables, fruit. Well, there wasn't,
so what there was plenty of was salt and chili peppers. Dirt.
So you forgot to take the
cooking pot to the fields. So what, putting off eating for a day urnt
nothing, did that all the time. And it
traslated into everything. If first
you couldn't get to your fields, no hope of survival, then responsibility or
admission of all else was denied as well, to preserve ones self. It was down
right maddening. If people have been
denied hope, certainly the case here, then all else collapeses. No matter what
it was no one knew anything about it, who was suppose to do it or why it
didn't get done. Where did
something go? No one knew. Why didn't
something get done, no one knew. But the salt
and chili peppers were excellent and drugs were the main theme. For me I was
trying to help. I knew what the solution was, and I struggled for resoureces
and energy, amazed that the Akha held on so long, like dying, withering
child. Death asleep in the door , been
thre so long, not doneyet. Akha Frailties Few people
understand what it took for me to hold this whole effort together, from
keeping the basic doors open to the needed communications, computer, phone
line, rent, fuel, transport, and supplies. I didn't ride
hard on the Akha, because words would not be sufficient to describe how hard
their lives were. Full o freasons for
despair if not despair itself. I didnt have to
be there, but if I was going to be here, if I was going to be effective, it
demanded that I be as close to their lives as possible, and this was real
close to poverty. Mostly their houses
had scant rice and nothing else much to eat. I could not
sustain myself on wat these people ate.
And to say nothing of the haunting lok in their eyes as they looked
around a dark hut, shelves bare, just the mind. This was a
herculean effort, not to just go into poverty, but to set up camp there nd try
to do something about it over the long term. It was not easy
to see how hard these people had it but also to explain it, or do something
about it. While Back in Pah Nmm....... I got up to Pah
Nmm Akha and found out that one of the girls had tried to kill herself with
poison, but they got to the doctor in time. The kids work
hard, and despair effects them too, in this case it is a three hour walk per
day to the fields. Sometimes they would like a break, go to town and can
not. This means a lot to overworked
people, let alone young people. Two Kilos Opium One Akha man
bought two kilos of opium which he was busy reselling to others. Everyone trying to make a go of it, I
wondered how much he would smoke. It was some
thick and sticky, not this years he said, but not thick as older stuff I had
seen. Like the one ball I found in the
bed. No Money That way One man had a
white truck. He was owed some money
and the man wouldn't pay him so he caught his wife and tied her up, leaving
her in the jungle for two nights, thinking that this would get him his money,
but instead he had to pay the man and the man had to pay him nothing. Ah Meeh - Meeh Yuuh In a place
without mercy. I have to say
that seldom had I seen such a helpful person as Ah Meeh. Meeh Yuuh.
I think that Ah
Meeh had quite a capacity to help out in the village. I have seen
so many beautiful things here either
damaged or destroyed yet I hope on. Ah Meeh was an
extract of all of this, able to hope the best. Then there was
pain, a good share of it, and that is proof that you are alive because the
intensity comes across in all forms at that level. Capable of experiencing great joy and great
sorrow, good will and kindness. Pah Nmm The encouraging
sign in the Pah Nmm was that the villagers were talking about giving up opium
smoking, but there were nasty rumors of brutality from the army. About five
younger men went to a dry out camp with the army nearby. The older men would have to stop in time as
well, while those over sixty I think would be left alone. Opium smoking
was an impediment to consumption so one could not know for sure which was the
chief motive, health or consumerism.
Market economy. Ah Seh was
going to have to quit in two or three months as well. What I wondered was how many men would
ultimately end up in prison or on meth? Not all events
are related. But one could
not help but notice the size of the Chiangrai prison. Other than
that, making all the men quit was a good idea. Allowing some smoking for medicinal use was
valuable however. Pharmaceuticals
sure had an interest in this. Sept. 2001 Sick This time of
year I got sick with cold and fever, sinus infection. August and september. August had been lots of rain. Then
hot. Not much wind. Lots of clds and I succombed. The stress over the rent money of course
did not help. I had one sinus
infection one day and then came bck in a couple of days. Usually if I
got a cold at all it was in the winter. I covered the rent
and then the Sept 11 attacks on the The Flavor of Eggs On Sailom Joi
the Eggs had flavor
but the Thais always boiled them in oil.
Chili peppers were used to disguise bad cooking was my opinion. So I tried to
teach her how to cook scrambled eggs without oil. Pah Nmm Akha Ah Meeh worked
in the village at her own little store. We had been friends, now she was
married and had a daughter. I hadn’t seen her in years. She was the
cousing of my wife, daughter of Ah Beh. Around Transition The transition
from Maesai to the mountains was more confusing than substantial problems. I needed a while to organize my mind about
it al. Ah Chooh's
mother made a great stir in the village, I am sure it was not only her, but
the whole family, which was not helpful and added to our matrimonial
stress. By spending long hours with Ah
Chooh I was able to heal much of this. Everyone hears
everything in an Akha village so the fact that we had the Lychee Tree and
terrace land helped us to find space apart where we could go a shrot way from
the village and talk. The entire
process had beeen an illustration to me that I would narrow my project and my
contacts and would be very careful not to let people get inside what I was doing and needing to do and destroy
it. Many of the
porjects that I wanted to do were too widely structured to allow them to
succeed without better donor support and committment. I now knew the limits of that. Although Sept 11 was a not too frequent
occurance, it did help me to make major restructuring of how I was going to
do things in the future. Being better
integrated into the village was my goal and now I was moving back in that
direction. I gave the building and
accumulating useful resources a year, and did not like the result, so now
went the other way for a low financial overhead and profile, limited physical
assets, outsourcing all that I could, and high mobility. I still had to
seek funding, but apart from old bills I now had nearly zip overhead. My next project
was to get the Pah Nmm road built. I thought about
buying the press then decided that I would look at having all my printing done
in Chiangrai so that I didn't have to have a place for a press either. The relief of
the stress always left me feeling that something was wrong, having been under
it for a year or better. I was getting a
better feel for the village life and the things that were going on there. I do knot know
if my situation with Amy would be healed or not. House in order. I was slowly
getting my own house in order here in the village. I had sperated Ah Chooh, my wife, from the
connection with her mother, but I and her mother were still friends in the
end of it. When ever I got
a little peace I tried to write down the events I had seen happen around. I had gotten
very angry that night.. I moved Ah
Chooh to Ah Hkauh's house, my adopted father's younger brother. Ah Baw Sah was
my father, Byauh Leh Gooh. My name was
Pooh Jurh. Ah Hkauh's wife
had run away and married another man who then had to pay him a fine. But now I was
back in the new hut which sat empty for more than a month and was fixing it
up and trying to mend my heart and other things which was not easy. I finished the
bathroom with the help of Ah Baw Gurh, Meeh Yeh's father. Also my Ah Shauh. My house had
concrete posts but not concrete walls yet.
I wanted to build them soon
enough. Building the
bath was my first experience at laying brick or block and I was learning fast, but building with
block was very slow, tall and narrow, was a little work to keep them
straight, but not bad for my first project. I had built a
metal hotplate in my house, for cooking pancakes on. I would have liked a stone biscuit oven. There was much
I needed to do to weave the house together. I had
books. One computer, the other one
sold to Zera who didn't pay me in time.
I was beginning to finally decide that Zera was on the taking end only
and didn't know how to give back. I
wanted nothing more to do with him. He
could keep the money he owed. Making a transition Making a
transition into the village as I had takes much time, much effort, keeping
relationshiops in tact and so forth.
You must crack the whip but not too much, not too often, because it
takes timefor people to learn what you are like and why you are different. In a village
many problems are caused by ME not understanding what they are doing, and I
learned a lot in a short time when I moved fully into the village. I made many mistakes. The Light Through the Door Pah Nmm Akha Meeh Chooh's
Kitchen, afternoon. Door closest to
the the wood pile and village road. The light
through the door in the late afternoon was always a special time in my mother
in law's cooking house. The light came
through the bamboo slats in rays, lighting up smoke, dust, ashes and
faces. The cooking fire produced more
smoke than heat by times and it was a wonder they weren't all dead of lung
disease. Faces were
beautifully lit in the golden light. Bags of
recently harvested rice from the worst year I had seen, lined the kitchen
wall against the house. Squash sat on
shelves, and a few ants crawled the dirt floor in search of food. Black posts,
bamboo shelves, water bottles a few plates and spoons, such a small inventory
of wealth anyone had ever seen. Corn boiled for
the pigs, and smoke stained the two bamboo drying shelves above the fire,
where dried meat and tea were kept. Bags of seeds
and beans were deceptive of the fact that there was so little nutrition in
the house. These shelves and all on
them were balckened with laquer and webs of dust hanging down. Pah As of January I
was still promoting the Pah Nmm Akha road to te fields, the Lahu,
particularly Jeh Teeh and Jeh Boh were giving me fits about this. They were trying to block the progress at
every turn and one time there was a big fight the Akha punching the Lahu
guys, outnumbering them many times. Jeh Teeh was an
evil man, taking Akha land. Pah Nmm Akha, Army, War There is a fair
amount of army around Pah Nmm, Burmese army thieves ty to steal the Akha men
and the women for loot. Lots of humvees
but none for any good. Christmas Eve - Pah Nmm Now there ar
two incidents of random shooting and abuse that I have documented near Bpah
Ma Hahn and Pah Nmm Akha, Soi Yah Akha below us. In on e case
three men taken out, in another case one man who escaped and hid. Shot at, shot,
beaten, burned with fire, their heads pushed under water till they couldn't
hold their breath any more. So I am
teaching a new story to the Thai army.
Don't come in my village or the ones next to it after dark and shoot
at anything or anybody. In the end I
went to The The wedding So much it was
fun but the younger sister wept as they went down the road, the procession,
slowly walking. They all wept, they
younger woman especially. It was very
hard to see their great love and sadness at parting. The marrying sister would not be back to
the village for nearly a year and they had been close friends all their life. Sharp as a thorn That was the
Akha saying for a smart clever person. Best to keep
the mind that way. A few days later A few days
later I visited Pah Nmm akha. No noe h
ad said anything about the road. Would
let it rest for a while. That is how
one got things done around here, run hot, then run cold, then laugh. Going to the fields I got up late,
around 7. Some had already left for
the fields. I washed, didn't eat,
slurped coffee and slung the baby onto my back, heading to the fields. You cut it
first, sets a few days then carry it and strike the rice free. Cheh Deeh Deeh they say. The fields are
an hour and a half walk up trails that could be made better, but who walks an
hour and a half to fields, who just tell me? When I got
there I ate some green sour mustard leaves which I loved and they were good
in the heat. But there wasn't any
sugar cane, the Lahu had stolen it all. Marriage Pah Nmm Ah Chooh's
older sister Ah Shurh was getting married.
Tommorow there would be a party in the village late in the evening and
then in the morning she would go to Cheh Pah Kah as a Mah Nyeeh, or second
wife. Ah Zah, her husband to be had a
first wife and son. He was a good
enough fellow. I hoped all worked out
well. (later they divorced 2002 Feb.) In the afternoon at Pah Nymm there
would be lots of people coming from Cheh Pah Kah and a pig would be killed
plus whiskey, breads and such, all courtesy I provided. I sat on the
heavy wooden bed and contemplated it all. So far it had been a hard winter and I was
only now being able to take some time to myself with any kind of kindness. The battle
through January to hold Huuh Mah Akha from being moved had put a considerable
drain on my energy, moneys and time.
Following right on the heels I had done a two week video with an
Italian film crew which had only finished days ago. Events were
over running my mind. I had no time. I occured to me
that if yu troubled yourself with any of the porblems of men beyond your own
you needed supernatural power in order to keep the mind and keep moving
forward. At the same time it occurred
to me that the capacity to heal would be of incredible worth. Changing Lives - Loosing a sister Tonight was
going to be the last normal night in Ah Chooh's house because Ah Shurh was
getting married. And so after tomorrow
she would be gone, the house more empty because of it. Miscarriage Today I brought
the headman's son and wife back from the hospital, Sriburi, where we had to
induce labor to give birth to a dead child.
Cost me 10,000 baht, but I wanted to be careful and sure so I took her
to th at private hospital. I brought them
back here to Pah Nymm Akha and the still born child and the old men took the
dead girl to be buried, calling ahead of themselves, for the children to go
inside and h ide, not to look. That is
the law. Turns out that
a Zah Taye or wild bore came into the village. This is considered un natural, so to
protect from illness or disease, tomorrow there will be a ceremony at the
village gte to cleanse the village. Only dogs,
horses, water b uffallo, cats, ducks, and chickengs are natural to an Akha
village, not these other critters.
Pangolins you are not supposed to see in the day time unless digging
them, and snakes screwing you are not suppose to see, both are bad luck
omens. Ah Lmm from
Cheh Pah Kah came and we are talking about raising leadership among the young
people, men and women. The chief
issues are the loss of the law and the loss of the young women to the
missions. But actually we
talked about all the things which are effecting the Akha, not just these. My truck is in
worse and worse shape. i am not sure
of the date above but it would require my attention soon as I have sufficient
money. For now I must build a new
house day after tomorrow and get married the day after that. Of the last two
days I have felt better than mostly before.
It is as though m y mind had some great burden or obstacle
removed. My girl friends sister was
married last week making room for us to marry so that was one thing. There are these
different things I must buy, things I must build, services I must pay for,
and work I must do. None of it is
unpleasant but I do have need to do them if I am going to ever feel caught
up. Pah Nmm Akha is
such a peaceful village. I wonder
often at this because the difficulties for the village are sufficently
great. I feel for thepeople in this
condition. Tonight a man
came from Doi Chiang Akha to date Booh Teeh's older sister. They sell coffee at his village so I would
like to buy from them in the future. Enjoy? When I am in it
I'm often enjoying village life too much to note it in different parts. All of it seems to be there, teaming with
life. The jungle out
the back door is full of trees and birds.
There are so many different species of trees, all companions of
bamboo. I wanted to propegate trees,
and learn more of this culture of course. The huts were
along a saddle and then climbed up the hill in a curving row gving a
wonderful visual sensation. The entire
village only hung over the very top of the ridge to each side just a little
and behind each house the hill fell steeply away down into th e jungle. Propegating
trees to protect the land and also things to plant to protect for them the
land so they wouldn't loose it to other people. Tis was going to require lots of moeny,
lots more than I had. Lots more than I
had been finding so far. In the end of
each house in the gable there were two eyes in the thatch to let the birds
in. The swallows. Every good hut should have swallows. It is only
February late, the jungle is dry, bamboo leavese falling everywhere, yellow
and rustling, the bamboo moaning like a good woman. You can see through the bamboo stands but a
storm blew through yesterday leaving lots of rain and clue that once again in
only a few months the rainsyt season woudl be on us again. What troubled
me about this most was that the earth, the village peoples, who lived in it,
were in trouble. There were more
forces trying to destroy them than forces just trying to live. The concrete
way was coming and runinig all in its path.
I myself didin't think much of nor like the "concrete way". One could
hardly feel that the earth had a chance any more. The evil hwas that a system of destruction
had been made which was rolling over all at very great speed. I lived in both worlds. Sensing the steady gentle pulse of the noe
while seeing a huge amount of the other rush by me, computers, highways, the
internet. In the end of
the hut Ah Chooh fried me potatoes and through the wall in the n ext hut Meeh
Tsoh sang to herself in Tomorrow Build My House So all the men
gathered around on the eve of building my house and began to tell me what my
relational names were to all of them n ow that I was taking a wife. The teh fat
bugs came, flying, the first hatch of the season, the men stood silouhetted
against the late evening sky, taking their very important place on the earth,
even in passing there wasn't a one of them who wasn't important and I was
going to need them all come tomorrow building my house. And then that
night the old man Ah Baw Dauh called me up to the house of the Dzoeuh Mah to
talk about the religious building of the house and my life began. The House Since Ah Chooh
was rather pregnat and her older sister was married now, the mood in th
evillage swung to our needs and the village began to hold elder
meetings. Ah Zah, the headman was there, Ah Dauh, Abaw Yah
Peeh, we called him, he came for me and led me to Ah Sah's house, who he and
his wife were to be my Akha mother and father. And his wife had such a fantastic way about
her. At age she was playful and
gentle, child like. Careful for
others. There was a meeting before th
is, a somewhat stern meeting. Protecting
Ah Chooh,. Did I wish to marry and
stay married to her, not too many other wives, etc. At the second
meeting I followed Abaw Dauh through the village, a pilgrim behind a
sage. At Ah Sah's h ouse I was told
about Ah Poeuh Law, how to care for it at my house, and what it meant. It was remembrance to the long line of
elders before us, we must do our part and pass it to our children the
same. Ah Sah and his wife would give
me a family name that would carry to my children down through their generations. That night I
had a little too much smoke talking to the father of my wife, Ah Seh and Ah
Yeh, my other friend of so many things
we talked for hours, how to protect us, being Akha, going on, and then in the
morning I woke a dizzy corpse, unable to m ove my eyes, so I stayed in bed
after a good up chuck with a little blood from my throat, I guess. Meanwhile I could hear all the men dumping
long barges of bamboo they ahd hauled all the way down from After I slept
more for hours and then got up again when Ah Sah's wife came and inside the
finished house she broke a boiled egg and rubbed egg on all the tines of the
fire irons blessing all th e hosue and the children to eb born and grow up
there. Then we ate it from our cupped
hands and she fed it to many of the small children also. Then Ah Dauh
came and took five parts of a chicken he had cooked in the house over the
woman's fire carefully and put it in a bowl, leaves, 3 and rice and shiskey
went into the Boeuh Loeuh, behind the partition on my wife's side, and then
we plugged it with a cloth. This
carried the house. Later we came back
and ate the chicken parts. Pah Nmm Kah around the 7th or so, March 2000 I woke up late,
the light pouring into the hut through all the slats and slits of the
bamboo. I was late to rise because I
had gotten up from the low lands so late. What a nice
place to be. The sun was up and
getting hot, the village stod still, the air mostly clean and the dry nestle
of the hot season stirred the leaves. A nice place to
be and of course any tie is a nice to be be.
One family brought in wood on a horse, dumpoing all the cut limbs off
next to the hut. Some 0pang in me
about the forest and alll that was going wrong. With turning more of the land into tree
plantations from forestry department, remaining jungle carried more of the
burden. Errors imposed by those who
laid claim to the land but didn't live near it or on it. The day the
Shade. A horse whinnees, a seeping
dog, wandering chickens, a mother walks a child home. Flies. Blood from the boys nose, nose bleeds being
common during the dry season. The old man
stacking the wood was little girl's grandfather, her mother left, no poblems,
grand father there and all the kids and familys. He spoke in a big way, a big voice, an old
man. And he had these great eyebrows,
huge eyebrows, that stuck out. Funny
how everyone gets part of the mint stamped on them. Grass thatch
shingles stacked about the village, and grass bundles, like one legged
people. The uges of the village were
dusty brown mostly where ever you
looked. Dusty brown. Red dirt and the dust from that. How so many
things made by people were very much like people. Surely it was
all slow motion but the earth appeared to me lost, in face of the new and
large economic machine that was developing every last bit of natural land and
natural people, drawing money as it were off an account it could never
repay. Shortsighted is corruption of
course. Ooh Cheeh Wild flat leaf
garlic. You ahve to cut the roots back
to the ball before planting it or it won't grow new roots and will only
stunt. And you cut them down to abotu 6 inches in
length top to base. Not enough time to think My wife was
washing clothes. The we would go to
her sister's village. Cheh Pah Kah to
see about Akha books and Wa Notes Abaw Jah Gaw Awa Chief He used to live on the border where Pah
Nmm was in a place called Nah Moh. He was ambushed and killed near Sam Yak
Akha village about 40 years ago.
Probably by Shans. While riding his horse along the trail
there. He and his people numbered an easy 10,000
in this area. There is an old air strip, Lisaw used to
live there too. Air The Akha say they are long hearted, slow to move
quickly in a bad way. A Full Head of Hair - Ah Seh The man grew a
full head of hair, always talking to himself, repeating his words in a
cadence directing the house, listening carefully to each passing footstep and
conversation. Bees came and filled the holes in the concrete post
with nests and eggs. Geese The geese came,
wagging their tails in the standard way, often referred to. First grey as young, then black, always
crapping about but considered rather indestructable, much more durable than
chickens, they never seemed to die except under the knife, and always raised
a lot of young, because some of them fell prey to animals. The Road Dilema The village
used to be at the upper location but the army moved them years ago. 8 at least 9 years by now. In the old land they had many good things,
good wind, good air, good eyes, nectar, water, level land, heavy forests
nearby, just way too much land to farm and The army moved
them. I say that because they are still scared of both the army and forestry
department. Teh effect was
profound or a catylist with other events and personalities. The present headman had only been there one
year at the old location before they were moved. He took over the job from Abaw Dauh who we
referred to as Abaw Peeh. Ah Baw Zah
had previously been at But currently
Abaw Zah and a couple families were in the
best position to be in the low land village without suffereing. Their house only grew while other houses
could not sufficient get by. At the current
location there was not land close by, the villagers went to the lower reaches
of the land from the old village location, but they had been relocated so far
that this was a very long walk across the face of another mountain. The walk took an hour and a half there and
the same to come back. They had many
miscarriages ocurr in the village.
From the lower fields they had to walk quite a ways up to the old
villag or you could walk out of the new village straight up to it, shorter
way, but still very far. The village
needed a road along the present trail so their trucks could go instead of
walking. Cutting Onion Grass Making sah byeh
he took the hhandful of onion grass (ooh jeeh) and cut it in half. Took the one h alf and doubled it up, and
trimmed the long pieces that escaped under the trimed end so they would get
cut to, and then began carving thin layers off the end of the bunch until it
was all cut into the sah byeh. Ah Djuuh Is Gunned Up, Gunned Down Ah Djuuh was
killed no more than ten days after his brother Ah Doh. Bad boys they said. I came the next
day and saw him still laying there, the police around. I hauled him back from
the autopsy on my truck. Big for an
Akha man. He was shot once through the arm and once
through the chest coming out the upper back by his neck. Ah Djuuh was a
real bad guy. Wasn't always. He beat his wife and she miscarried. 8 months. He was said to have killed many
people. I knew him, he had a short
violent temper. He often came and
parked his motorbike at Ah Seh's house.
He was said to
have killed his younger brother and his wife and the three children. He first would not let them go to
school. It was said that the brother
stole a lot and had a lot of money which Ah Djuuh wanted. Ah Djuuh made the whole family live in the
jungle, then one day went and killed them all. The Akha knew where they were buried but
did not want to talk about it.
Probably the family had no idea what had come upon them. I saw him
quickly hit a guy when I first came to the funeral of Ah Baw Meh at Pah Nmm
Kah. Ah Djuuh was from the I was also
around, didn't see it, but heard about it, when he beat his wife, . Her fathers and brothers told her not to
marry the guy as a second wife because he was very bad but he fought them and
the girl Ah Myauh did not listen. He
had a second baby with her. Then one night
they came for him, he went to a man's house, not his own, around Pah Nmm Kah Various
villages had been at that location for over 100 years. The Thai army moved them greatly reducing
their immune system. For many
reasons. This area was
determined Thai because of control of the water coming ito Khun Sah was kicked out of the area 20 plus
years ago. Some of the
local boys worked in the Burmese candy factories. But all the
chemicals for the various local candies came from the Thai side, least a big
percentage of them. This was no
secret to the Thais. Wich chemicals
were needed. They flowed from All very much a
game. The lives of many people at
stake. The west produce
the chemicals, the chemicals have to make it in, the drugs have to make it
out. Simple, and a few hilltribe along
the way. Little dealers
get caught but the real flow has legs. Ah Seh said
that they built an airstrip near Pah Nmm and unloaded poppy seeds. Self Sufficient Times There was a
time when people were more self sufficient, self reliant, simple, focused,
now they are beguiled to have many eyes and see what all they can buy. Now it is as if
they scoff at knowledge and expediency. Bamboo Walls They took
bamboo, split it in the sides, then cut end to end one side and laid it out
flat, even weighing it down, then built nearly anything of it. Walls, flat bench tops, but mostly walls,
decks, beds. Marriage Rules The rule was
among the Akha that you could not marry anyone within five generations of
yourself. And they preferred not to take a second wife of the same clan as
their first wife. Seperation from Knowledge The young
generation was being seperated from knowledge, their current survival being
relatively easy in apperance if you didn't count those who didn't make it at
all. So there was this gap between the
knowledge they used to have and the impending destruction that they faced as
a result of not having it. And there were
many people of the white race who were deliberately telling them they didn't
need it, to destroy it, pressuring them, forbiding them, it was not all
benign or passive effort. Akha Dreams I often
wondered what dreams the Akha had.
Maybe I was a spectator first, come to help them I think I enjoyed
them first and maybe it was even simpler than that. But there was the innocense compared to
what was coming. There appeared
to be a lack of well defined collective leadership of more than one village
and a dominantly Akha leadership.
Quite frankly they seemed unconcerned
of this impending destruction, very certain of it even in a fatalistic
way, that was shocking, could even make you angry, like a people who were
being wiped out, knew it and didn't give a shit. I don't know if
"deserve" was a good reason to help anyone. Sometimes you had to fake being selfish and
only help them for the general good, keeping the whole thing on purpose at
arms length without working on a big agenda.
Either way one
was building hope and the good. And it was the
mountains and wind and nector for the eyes that I was interesd in. Looking off a mountain top was a singular
event. Live and work
in the mountains with tribal friends. It was also just something to do, to learn
and hope for an event. These people
lived in one of the most interesting
places in the world, I could speak their language to some degree and they had
very interesting stories to tell. The
stories of their lives. Maybe I was
working, secretly hopoing all this time without having put words to it, to The Akha had a
saying, "Mah Beeh Seeh Nyah Urh" which meant to not give someone
the understanding of what was going on.
So they were
secret people. Of late I had to ask
more and more of a matter, to try and see the picture better. But this sense
of control of the understanding of a matter that they had still didn't
explain their unwillingness to tackle an obius obstacle. Or maybe it was
the mountains, repeatedly replenishing itself, with people, then shedding
them down into the valleys. From the n
orth, south and away the mountains lowlands divide shedding from high to
low. Mountains to flatlands, Scots to Then maybe we
can say that figuring out the mind of the Akha is a great event? But I tend to
favor the concept of the migration of people from highlands to lowlands, from
hard, to easy, only the toughest choosing to remain or return to the
mountains. Or possibly they were not volunteers but fled to the mountains and
thus later are choosing to leave. But
even this has contradictions. A very
carefully guarded culture that then goes to pick the easy way? Sounds an odd contradiction. AS well the abandonment of the culture for
the slow death of a foreign culture is a very strange event as well. Fatalism.
A choice of Christianity as an event of fatalism rather than
hope? I wonder if the missionaries
think or care about that? I would
guess they don't think about it and arrogance would prevent them from
admitting that they care. One fellow
suggested to me that it was obviuos that the Akha were once a proudh high
muontain people, but that it appeared that they were very broken now. At any rate,
here I was with a son in the low end
Pah Nmm village and I could see that the only hope was to take hard at
the location of the old village basin and slopes. For the Pah Nmm
Akha this seemed revolution like, but oddly the old village location was very
close to cheh Pah Kah. These villages
farmed to the limit. The only reason
they didn't go further was that the land belonged to Pah Nmm who wasn't using
all of it yet. And they said that the
only reason Forestry was planting was because Pah Nmm wasn't planting, wasn't
planting anything long term. So I had to
build my own team here somehow. Good Cigars Got up late, oh
only a little. Smoked some good cigar
last night, ong slow Then ate some
passion fruit this morning, wife's sister crying, husband smokes it all up in
Pah Ymm. The passion fruit first I'd
taken time for in three years, always seeing them cut and empty on the
trails, the rain stopped the fog hanging in the jungle, somehow like the
breath of hanging leaves, branches and vines. Rebuilding the Trail I would build
trail today to try and help this village, trail and up the hill to the
fields. Trail all the way to the old
village and around. Growing Boy The baby boy
got bigger and happier such potential joy there. Potential joy, yes, that was it, first we must
look for potential jy. Village Nutrition Pah Nmm My chief
concern was the nutrition of Pah Nmm village.
Few wvillages that I knew of had to walk so far to fields. From concern
over this matter I took another hike to investigate the trails to the old village
and to the fields. First I hiked
out of the village up the high trail to the cattle coop and then down that
road to the second cattle coop at the curve of the road. On the way I met some of the village women
tending to the water buffalo the water buffalo life was to once a year work,
and the rest of the year be welath to their houses and eat. The distant clunking of their bells could
be heard in the jungle. At the cattle
coop I could see the old village, nestled in the forest. So much forest in act that the fields could
not be seen. On the way to
th e village, the trail not so good, I gathered wild egg plant and some of
the long pods for mixing in meat. They
were too mature but I took a few with me anyway. Jaw Rgah Lah Mah. The pods were at the top of the tree so I
had to first go down the steep slope and cut a bamboo, leaving a piece on the
end for a hook, and with this I pulled down the pods. Five but later I lost one while crawling
through a thicket. As it turned out
they were already old and tough. On the way t
the village I found where someone was trying to catch an ant eater or some
such animal. They had tunneled for it,
then ran water frmo the creek in trenches and bamboo trough to try and glood
it out. It looks like they had just
left. The whole area
was creeping with drug runners and bird hunters. The old village sat just below the ridge
and the runners from other places ran back and forth through this area just
out of site of the gunners on the top, where the Burmese encampment was. Near the creek
I found an old wooden bamboo tube box but trying to get back with it through
the thicket it broke so I abandoned it at the original village. Maybe that was all to be, just getting
back. Finally
crossing the last creek I missed the trail to the right so I had to fight up
through the massive yellow flower thickets of the village chopping all the
way. A thin machette
was best for this, fast, much wielding to do, for at least an hour. Finally I got
above the village to the trail. There were
many old house posts left and it looked as though they had all burned. But after nine eyars they still stood in
defiance. Above the
village site I cut across to the grass lands hill could see the Boeuh Maw's
village from there, Cheh Pah Kah, the workes.
I was very
tired by this time having cleared much trail, carrying a big long knife for
lopping bamboo and a heavy hoe. But
dark was soon to be on me and there was very far to go. First to the fields and then all the way
back to the village. It was nearly
dark through the long stretch of woods and I got down to the upper fields in
the last light. I grabbed an ear of
corn and munched on kernels with a dry choking mouth. By te time I passed the top farm hut I had
to drop a good ways down into the forest to the first spring. It was dark and I could barely see the
trail now. There was not much moon,
only stars. It was so dark I missed
the cut off and hit the lower trail before cutting right toward the village
again. By then it was black, wit the
long knife I felt the trail, luckily I knew it, and catching any sky light in
puddles which formed in the spots where the buffalo's feet had mushed down in
the mud. I sang a little but was soon
too tired even for that, the trail endless at least two hours it took me now
in this pitch black to the village. I
didn't get back till Pigs Her father
wanted a pig house but I was so close to getting something started on the
ridge that I would hold off to do it there. This first step
phenomenum actually was more complex now that I thought of it. Once the idea was talked about, then it got
talked about more, wishful thinking and testing the border of risk. First talk happened and on that foundation
people built first their own words then action, becaues in this case there
was plenty of fear t go around that there would be a blocking confrontation
on part of forestry or army. Victor Victor was a
full three months on These personal
events made clear how important my fish project was to all the Akha. Pah Nmm After a
spectacular but very exhausting hike in the pouring rain up through the
ountains to old Pah Nmm vilage it was taking much time for the fond
writing. Sense in my mind to
return. My body felt both envigorated
and stiff also. A cut on my hand was
not healing so quickly. Yes, a cut I made while sharpening that blade with a
file. Road Back To The village had
been moved now for nine years, a move into poverty and despair, far from their original stable farming fields and developed rice terraces
in the high mountains where the view to the eye made them none less than kings, and the water was cold and
clear the wind rustling the might uncut forests all around their village and blowing the tall grasses near to their
fields. Their village
was in a way unique because much of the forest near by had been passed over by the logging of the very large original trees which was
done by the Thais in the whole region many years before. Their village
had been there for more than a hundred years, and it was no jump of the imagination to understand why, top of the mountain, a
view of forever, surely there had been a village here as long as
people. Some groups moved on, others filtered in,
just as some were born and some would die, buried deep in the heart of the forest. But then one
year the army had come to Haen Taek.
The Thai Army. For four days helicopter gun ships bombed and fired upon the inhabitants,
Khun Sa and others, driving them from Akha all looked down on this far below
them, the thump thump thump of rotors, the chatter of gunfire and the concussion of bombs rolling up to them on
the wind from far below, a days walk away by trail. But a few years
later, the army not satisfied, soldiers came up to their village where it sat on the top of the mountain.
There were always soldiers, Burmese, Shan, Wa, Lahu, Lisaw, Chinese Haw, but these were Thai. They demanded that the Akha move down off
the mountain ancestral home or they would be driven into what was formally The Akha cared
not whether they happened to live in since there was no marked border here, only the noted flow of the water
shed, and they sat atop the mountain farming both sides, with meters either way. But having seen villages burning which the
army had set afire before they knew this was no idle threat, and with no guns or army of their
own they loaded up what they could of their village and began what was no less than a short march of tears
down the mountain. For tears their were, and great weeping among the elders.
Even tourists had occasionally come to this spectacular place, but now there would be no village. The Thai army,
illegal to force the move of the village, gave them a month to move.
There was not enough time to move everything and the remnants of the
village were burned, the standing posts still scarred by the
flames, black and engulfed by caring flowers. But over 9
years of grief had left the Akha at a great loss at their new location.
What were suppose to be replacement fields were an hour and a
half's walk or more away up steep trecherous trails, not the five minutes from the hut as before. This immediately effected the nutrition of
the village to say nothing of joy and energy. It could be
fairly said that the Thai Army had and has no soul. While
demonstrators were being massacred repeatedly in village women and girls were raped by Black shirts commandos on patrol. The American Baptist Mission knew of this dirty little secret but it never made its way into the press for some
odd reason. The villagers
were under incredible pressure. Big
roads were coming, and they were trying to keep the young people in the village but conditions were
desperate. The long hike to the fields, and poor medical care at the clinics related to at least 8 miscarriages
in two years in the village. There was a
trail back to the old village fields, to the ridge, to the fantastic elevation that gave view of
forever, but it was narrow and shouldered by thick
brush. Robbers and soldiers of unknown origin or from would capture the village women and rape
them, sometimes shoving burning cigarettes into their bodies when they were finished with their captive, her
hands and feet tied to wooden stakes they had driven into the ground. Some of the
robbers attacked them in field huts, others carried knives or guns and would try to steal their head dresses.
More than once groups of village girls hard hurdled themselves down the steep slopes of the jungle off the trail into the bamboo to save
themselves from being captured by these bands of robbers. There were no Thai Army patrols securing the area they
claimed was There was no
real concern for the Akha villagers. So it was
decided to clear the trail wide from the existing fields up the mountain to the top. There were
months of discussion and weighing what would be the army response, but the nutritional situation in the village could not be endured much
longer. The village of forty huts was cramped on a tiny hill with no room to move or farm around it, the sides
sloping off steeply below each hut. Pigs were
routinely shot or poisoned by others. Chickens died of fever. Mosquitos, heat and illness were prevalent.
Malnutrition, not experienced before, was common as well as other nutritional related illnesses. First there was
a group of five men that went out to work on the trail. Then the work paused for two months. Then there was a second group of 4 men
that went out and cleared a longer length of the existing trail. Finally, several days later, some 15 men went with
hoes, machetes and plenty of drinking water to work on the trail. A considerable length of the trail was
cleared and improved, only a couple days remaining. On the finished sections one could see very far in either
direction, both ahead, behind and to the side, and the trail was wide enough to walk in the middle and feel
safe. The village women often came here for nuts which added protein to the diet. Now even light fell upon the trail. But the army
heard rumor of this work at this point and called a meeting with the village head man. The army was
very angry. No one works on trails
that go up, around here he said.
No body goes anywhere without the armies permission and no one
is going to go further up on the mountain to build a farm hut, a trail or anything. He could not
reply to the fact that the women were not safe, nor to the fact that unknown persons, under the cover of the trail being so poor, were
illegally cutting trees. With no trail, the process was hard to prevent. Didn't matter. It also became
quite obvious that there was not only no regard for the Akha as human beings, but that the Army ruled the Akha in a kind of silent implied
terror and gave them no room to move whatsoever. The only option they were being offered was to leave for
the low lands if they didn't like the furnace being applied to them. Water pollution
seemed to be the criteria, since the tree cutting was still going on by someone. Yet water pollution was hypocrisy since large pig
sheds were located right next to the creek once it came out of the mountain before it fed anyone's water
supply. The real point
appeared that powerful people wanted the land, it was going to all be taken from the Akha and that was that. Just the same,
the incredible boost and joy in the eyes of the Akha men as they stood at one ridge crest of the new trail could be seen, looking at first
this village below, ones across the valley and further on. Green mountains and jungle as far as one could
see, as they all remembered growing up before Hitler, Himmler and a few others showed up with their chauffeur
Eichmann. Hoes swung
firmly all day that way, 15 men in a row, flattening out the trail, hoes flying in song, like the many rows on a Norseman Long Boat, up, into the
soil, and again. Old stump snags
came out, rocks, and holes filled.
Thick green cigars from with smoke, and a lunch made of noodles,
one chicken who wasn't happy with the proceedings, and of course chili peppers with heavy mountain
rice. Everyone sat on chairs of
leaves, backs against trees. In the distance could be heard water buffalo bells. The trail
mostly built they had filed down the mountain, knives in hands, hoes over the shoulders, singing songs, never to be the same again. So the Army
stopped them. Maybe this was bigger
than the Army. The Road Back To Finally the
village got into it and we built 90% of the road up the mountain. The army, with no flexibility and way into
the control thing told us to stop. The
village got scared and that was it for a while. The trail is already there, we are just
making it wider and safer for the women, since there are lots of
"strangers". It will also
put a stop to the illegal logging. We cleared the
leaves and branches wide to each side to let the sun come in. As the road
grew long and took shape you could see the rise in hope in the eyes and
voices of the men. Meeting With Army From the
meeting with the army it was obvious that they were going to allow the Akha
no growth at all. This was hardly
community forestry rights. Meeh Tmm Meeh Tmm was an
Ooh Loh Akha girl at Pah Nmm Akha. Her
and a couple of others hitched a ride to town there at Haen Taek once.
She got married and was pregnant but with all my work and passings I
didn't hear the story till two months later.
She had her
baby early in the 9th month and it died within hours, was buried in the
jungle quickly. This was as of
fall 2000, one of many miscarriages in Pah Nmm Akha. Centipede The Boeuh Maw's
youngest was bitten on the foot by a centipede. No swelling, painful but not deadly. The creatures were long, strong and
ugly. They also seemed intelligent in
a very sinister way. They were hard to
kill, could scatch poison into you with claw like antenna on their tails and
then their mouth was heavy and ugly and had two great curved fangs that faced
each other, red dark fangs, more like horns, not like teeth as fangs are
normally thought of. And these in
themselves would be like getting pierced with a small set of nails, but dirty
and poisoned, very nasty yet. Hateful you
could call them. They marched fast,
and made a noise even doing that since I assume they couldn't afford shoes
for all those hard feet. Ah Seh said
there was a monster one in the kitchen that he had heard or seen but it
darted off through the wall. Coming
for food bits left around, like I say, the things are evily intelligent. The Boeuh Maw He lived on the
The Boeuh Maw's
hut in Pah Nmm at the upper end was really full of corn. All the Clues I was coming to
find out that difficulties for Pah Nmm Akha had been much generated by the
Lisaw headman who was there before them.
He gave many of their
opportunities and benefits down the river. The Lisaw and
the Lahu were first to fold to the missionaries and they did all in their
power now to crush the Akha. The young lisaw
Pooh Yai whose older brother had been Pah Luang before Ah Soh was a good
guy. His older brother had been killed
while Pah Luang. Booh Nymm Bpah Mah Hahn Akha Raped by Burmese soldiers while working in
her fields in 1998 or 1999 around May.
She was 30 at the time, they staked her on the ground, then when they
got "done" they shoved burning cigarettes into her. She lived in Soi Yah Akha. The women in Pah Nmm told me about it. Lahu Thieves Lahu seem to be
well known to Akha for stealing farm crops.
Flat village it was the same, here at Pah Nmm it was the same. We suspected
that the Lahu who had five or six huts ont he side of the canyon facing Cheh
Pah Kah were responsible for a lot of this.
Once the army came and shot around the house of one and he ran off and
they took everything he had, cause he was dealing in pills. Not so sure this
is all that effective, like breaking someone without sending them to prison,
they just become more desperate like Ah Djuuh's story. The Little Man of Compassion Plaid pouch He was in the
fields working and came and found some small bits of wood, and ashes and
alittle bronze man, who had a look of compassion to him, so he kept him for
good luck. He needed all the luch he
could get after all, in those days there was so much war. Sometimes they
carried the wounded only to have them shot and die, and so they would pitch
the dead man off in the bushes and get another wounded man to carry. People died quickly and violently. The mountain Fog The fog
appeared to crawl up from the valley
into the canyon as th ough it was on its way over the pass at the
Thatong Maechan checkpoint. Mountas of
wavi to the south, the mountain guard gate I sat on. Guarding to the
touthwest below us it was. The wind
not strong but clear in the face and nostrils, going bright sight to the
eyes. Stars, mountain
lights, valley lights, the noise of bugs, the silence, the largeness and the
murmur of voices in the huts. Nightime
but no electric to blind the eyes. True Life There was a
life of existence, order of life, based on the land, procreation, the raising
of animals, and food by the individual that superceded all the consumer
adventures that modern man went on. One thought in
terms of fields of corn, ginger, beans, fish, pigs, horses, cattle. These thigns gave food and life. Land, water,
good soil, good sun. Varieties of
plants, all that one could gather. It was good to
see the kids be born and grow up. Akha Houses Not Quite Empty It finally came
to me why Akha houses were so empty inside.
Their hearts were full. Their
hearts were where all their existnce was, heart book, conversation. Talking to each othr around the fire, their
minds little cluttered by possesions or how to get them, not by accident but by intention, their
houses demonstrated th is. On first
visit even Akha concrete houses seemed very lonely. But it was only because we have been taught
that possesions fill the soul. They do
in a way but not in a ood way. The
Akha on the other hand had their h earts and lives full so seldom felt
lonely. They did not
thi nk in terms of what they could buy, not yet beguiled, what did a man with
a full heart and lots of songs, much joy, have need of. Akha's don't tend to help
their neighbors Two Black Chickens I got a really
late start, was headed for a distant mountain nearly after dark and still
didn't have my two black chickens. I
wanted them to eat them with friends, it wasn't that the only friends I had
were in this far mountain but there was a village being forced to move and I
must be to go and see that as well and be all done in the next day. Stumbling from
hut to hut in the dark I asked if anyone had two black chickens, big enough
but any size then, any reasonable price.
The Akha grabbed flashlights and went out and shone them up in trees,
first this one, then that one, we chased one chicken out of a tree and around
the hut till we caught it under the wood pile. Bad luck chicken. But finally I had to check with the Chinese
guy, well his mother was Akha, for the last chicken, he was good at raising
them too, since I now saw that he had many. He proudly
showed me his stock and the reason for it, a nice chicken hut. All pushing by size in rows, older and
bigger to the top, hens a place to the side for their nests. I bought the
second chicken I needed and put the bag in the truck, off to the mountain, it
was bloody cold. I got up on the
mountain late, slept in till almost all my friends had gone to the fields,
save a few who gladly ate a little
fresh chicken with me. One of them was
an old Nyeeh Pah woman, before she ate she took a tiny piece of the chicken
meat and made like she pitched over each shoulder, the behind was always the
past to the Akha, your parents before you and to pitch over your shoulder was
a sign of respect to your parents, if they were dead and gone already. Even the Nyeeh Pah's husband was dead, and
she was alone, with her kids and grand kids so we cared for her. She took some
whiskey and dipping her finger in the glass did the same with the whiskey, over
each shoulder. She was more than 73
years old. Akha Friends How can you
write the story here? The Akha friends of thousands. The light caught in the eyes, coming back
to you till you feel guilty for having seen it so strong, the faces, the
smiles, the postures, the hopes that made the chores all worth it. The villages,
the dust, the village centeres full of playing children like friends to the
earth, custodians of joy. Not afraid
of the soil, living in it, all in the most careful of embraces, caring for
it, building trails in it to the fields. Babies
carefully carried on mother's back, to
field and hut, and always a horde of playmates to hold them, as they grew
older, pinching and teasing. Akha Harp Akha harp, Akha
music gourd. There is also sign
language that can go with the Akha harp that is quite good. A man at the
blacksmiths house in Keng Tung named Ah Durh could play the harp this way. Black Teeth There was a
plant, a tree, my friend knew and pointed it out to me, which you pound and
chew the leaves and they make your teeth black and bring happiness. A girl with
black teeth was highly coveted in the old days. The black teeth actually shine like ebony. Sometimes the
kids take these fat red ants or termites and smear them together and rub the
red paste on their lips for fun. The Akha Marginalized by religion and government Tea Seeds July and August were the months to
buy tea seeds, buy ten cans. I am learning as
much as I can about Akha law. One spirit
women teaches me a lot. She is kind, patient and willing to
repeat. Carrying the
zauh in your house, "Ah Poeuh Law Taw Urh" and keeping the fire
going. Required. Really was Hot The valley was
incredibly hot with storms and rain every few days. Up here in the villages were even hotter
and dry, dusty, grey. Everything
begging for water, the fields dry, fires. There was even
less food in the villages than water.
I brought up dried fish, we didn't eat the heads and a girl from
another house came and grabbed them all. One chicken had
a hard day under the knife. While I
was helping to eat the garlic grass root soup the little boy was behind me
ammering on the head of the chicken with a big knife, trying to get the brain
out. The girl ate the cock's comb,
boys don't eat that, might make the face red they say. Then the boy wouldn't lok tough
enough. The only house with a hut side
garden was ours, a year in the building. The New Village I had heard
rumors for weeks if not a month or more and so I asked my good Akha friend if
he would accompany me to find the road that led to this new village that was
being made on the The village is
above cheh pah kah or Pai a Prai as we call it. You take the trail out and come across the
border to Cheh Mai Akha on a saddle and then take a steep hillside up to the
new village for about 45 minutes or less. On the way there is some opium being
cultivated. The new village is on a
beautiful ridge that sees most ways and telephone reception there even, a
very nice aspect, you can see for ever. They had seven houses done when I got
there and more coming, said there would be a 100. Big trees were felled only at the very
village site for new wood for the houses.
Really big nice trees, really nice wood. But the actual area that they were building
in was quite small. They wanted to know if I would help them
with the cost of pipe for water from the spring. I knew the
Boeuh Maw from Pah Nmm Akha where my girl friend lived, he and others had
already moved up, concerned about all the loss of life condition and land on
the part of the Thai situation. I
could not fault him for the location and also for the fact that it was so
very Akha here now. I am sure that I
would visit the village more than once.
My girl friends older sister who wanted to be a second wife for a man,
said that she would find her new village here to farm with her husband and
run a store. It was not so far from fields that the Pah
Nmm Akha had now. Keng Tung goes waiting - Pah Nmm Road I didn't get to go this year, just not
enough money. The building of the road back to the
fields moves forward slowly. The Lahu are all pissed off and I chased
Jeh Teeh out of the village. So he
tried to have me kicked out of the Akha village as well. He had been giving away the land of the
Akha for years. Funny how they would go along with this if
they felt they had no hope to fight the army. Now the villagers even wanted the road,
understanding it, seeing it built, getting more and more hope. Sorting out good foreigners who would
donate and help build the road was not so easy. Many just
wanted a free be so I charged everyone to sort those people out, they
otherwise wanted me to feed them for free. The Lahu would
not let us cross their rice terrace, what they had actually built on the old
army road. So this held us up but we worked on other
parts. Jeh Boh owned the terrace. The Lahu wanted the road too except for
Jeh Boh and Jeh Teeh. The road would make farming easier for
everyone. These two wanted to make life hard, keep
it hard, on more than 450 people and the Pah Luang Ah Soh didn't have the
strength to over ride them yet. The lahu
village was so unable to get along that over the years it had fragmented into
four pieces. Jeh Teeh was the pastor,
forestry agent and city council guy called an Oborthor. Jeh Boh was the headman and who the
village was named after, Jeh Boh Mooser. Jeh Teeh got paid well for all his jobs,
about 9,000 baht a month which is about 9 times more than people here make. The foreigners
helped with the road and this gave the Akha confidence to move on. We didn't dig
further on Lahu land but continued on Akha land till the killing happened to
Ah Juuh and I was busy with that and then my truck engine blew up, maybe I
needed to change the oil more often, the oil went to jell, never seen this
before, gas engines have the oil go thin when you don't change it but diesel
engines the oil goes to jell. It blew
up and cost me a fortune to put a bigger motor in. We had about
four days left to dig on the road, had the upper part done, all the way to
the Ambush stone or the Bird Rock as I called it. You could see
everywhere from there. I called it
that because they cleaned the feathers off hunted birds here on this huge
stone that hung on the face of the valley looking at Cheh Pah Kah (Pai ah
Prai village) To the left up the hill you could see the Thai and Shan border
army camps. This place was called Pah
Noon and the Burmese attacked here last year and maybe again this year trying
to route the Shan army. The Thai army
protected them. There was a
Burmese Army camp further back along the border that you could not see, on
the way to Meh Joh. I used the truck
to push a trail to the cut off to the old upper village site, the villagers
were so happy about this, we had about two days to get the road to the Bird
Stone improved and the road to the old village done. The village had
been very fearful all along on this project and I dug on much of the road
myself for about a month or nothing would have happened, villagers slowly
joined me. I had little food and would
eat one can of condensed milk and that was about it, my hands full of
blisters. The Army would
come and ask me if I wanted to stop, I would tell them no. The chubby seargent liked to play with my
son. We crossed the
big creek and then the villagers were afraid to go on so I did four or five
days on my own. The Moosers and
Jeh Teeh tried to get us to stop each time.
They brought forestry and police and army many times and this is why I
finally chased Jeh Teeh out of the village. If the road was
done they would have full access to their fields. Now the job was
to mark out all the land they used to have and take it back from forestry. Land
demarcation and land divestiture issues were very important to work on. I think the gov
wanted to grab this whole area away from the Akha. They used pressure of
every sort from every side. The Thai
government was not strong, it depended on traitors to do the evil. The Thai
government had no love for the hilltribe no matter how much money they made
from tourism off using them for bait. Hoh Nah Sah was
the forestry worker outside the village who conspired with Jeh Teeh for the
Akha land. (but by Dec. of 2002 he was gone, the
forestry huts breaking down.) Currently sitting at Pah Nmm Akha The army in
conjunction with the forestry is taking a lot of the village land this year. This will have
immediately effects on the village . Now the army,
Col. Sawat, is directly involved in working in this area. Place for anew school and improvements to
the road. Yet the issue
of the land has not been resolved.
Chiefly there is a great need for mobilization of the Akha. Currently each village works to itself, and
ends up being rather easily dominated depending in some degree on the quality
of headman. In the case of
Pah Nmm Akha it would appear that the headman who is somewhat welathy prefers
not to rock the boat, baout the land issue which is effecting everyone else
because he has lots of rice terraes. So often this
is the case that the headman can be fairly esily bought off, wether he is If the village
as a population are going to make it they are going to have to learn to
coordinate and unify between villages and learn to coordinate and unify
between villages, and learn to fight for and strengthen the hand they already
have. In some
villages the will to fight is quite strong.
In otehrs it is bullied to nothing. The New Boeuh Maw I had heard rumors
for weeks if not a month or more and so I asked my good Akha friend if he
would accompany me to find the road that led to this new village that was
being made on the The village is
above cheh pah kah or Pai a Prai as we call it. You take the trail out and come across the
border to Cheh Mai Akha on a saddle and then take a steep hillside up to the
new village for about 45 minutes or less. On the way there is some opium
being cultivated. The new village is
on a beautiful ridge that sees most ways and telephone reception there even,
a very nice aspect, you can see for ever. They had seven houses done when I got
there and more coming, said there would be a 100. Big trees were felled only at the very
village site for new wood for the houses.
Really big nice trees, really nice wood. But the actual area that they were building
in was quite small. They wanted to know if I would help them
with the cost of pipe for water from the spring. I knew the
Boeuh Maw from Pah Nmm Akha where my girl friend lived, he and others had
already moved up, concerned about all the loss of life condition and land on
the part of the Thai situation. I
could not fault him for the location and also for the fact that it was so
very Akha here now. I am sure that I
would visit the village more than once.
My girl friends older sister who wanted to be a second wife, said that
she would find her new village here to farm with her husband and run a store. It was not so far from fields that the Pah
Nmm Akha had now. Pah Nmm Akha All the
personalities and goings on in this village Ah Baw Bauh Ah Seh Ah Beh Ah Soh Abaw Sah Boeuh Maw Grandmother of Ah
Chooh Booh Seh Ah Soh Pooh Seeh Bah Jeeh’s
wife Kuuh Byauh Yoh
Huuh Meeh Zah Ah Zah Cheh Pah He was married
to Ah Shuur. His first wife
ran away and left her son behind. Then she came
back and married to another Akha in that village after she was divorced from
him. Ah Zah was a
kind man and farmed pigs, tea, had rice terraces and other crops. Ah Zah had tea close to his house, never
talked the fool, and was always careful about what he said. You see, I like Ah Zah, because he is
stand up guy, he is gutsy and direct and dependable and forwardlooking in how
he thinks and runs his life. He is the
kind of person that his family counts on and that friends count on. Evidence
suggests that he doesn't keep a record of how often he helps people. A rare trait in this neck of the woods. He always
visited his wife's family in Pah Nmm. They were very poor. And they would go and help him on his rice
terraces come planting season. Planting the
rice in the terraces: We had a lot of
fun when we planted the rice in the terraces.
We sang, joked endlessly and tromped through the mud, pushing the rice
down into the mud with a sort of flip and jab of the hand. This wasn't
something you wanted to do with a machine.
This was pushing the rice into the earth, a very intimate thing. You have to do it more than once and
planting rice in the terraces is never seen as a chore. I think it has to do with the mud pushing
up through your toes too. Lots of
mud. And not like the mud that eats your skin in the mountain fields. You walk carefully on the terrace banks,
then hop down to the next one, cause you start up and work down. Three or four rice plants to the hand, your
fingers smart, knowing how to grab the next three or four with your right
hand while your left hand feeds three or four more out, and when its gone you
grab another bundle from the water, someone is always tossing them out there
in front of you with a fun kind of splash, calling you through the work as it
were. There is something very intimate about this work with the soil, the
mud, the water, very intimate with the earth and food, not obsessed like
computers and cars and trucks, all those things that take one away from the
earth. Some people
call the earth their mother, but to me that is distant. One treats the earth like a wife or
husband, not like a mother. The earth can be more hostile to us than a
mother, more like a lover or a dear friend.
We take great liberties to stride within the trees, to walk within it,
to grip it, to feed it. How often do we
feed our mother except when she gets old?
And the earth is never old, upset, impatient, but never old. We can break its eyes out, but it sees us
with others, like we dropped grapes into the mud, only for the mud to blink
and look at us again. The earth is like our souls need to be, deeply forgiving,
deeply patient, deeply understanding of our condition. The earth would have us toil on its tough
hide, caretakers of its soil flesh, then remember the spot and hope we come
back again and again. It lets us build
memories. Children in the mud,
sandcastles for some, mud balls for others, yet endless memory and slate for
us to work on. The tragedy is when
people spent more of their time ripping the earth up for something else but
food. I don't think the earth minds how many people farm it. And eventually we find a final resting
place deep within its soil. Proportionately
the less people who farm it while eating off it the worse. People abandoning the earth, we can not
abandon our mothers, they raise us knowing that often we will go far away,
that is not why we have mothers, but we can abandon lovers, and I think the
earth sort of sees us this way.
Looking a long time, wondering when we will come back and take the
time to find the magic of the bird hopping on its branches. There is a
great evil that we get carried away. Pah Nmm and Cheh
Pah Kah were not so far from each other.
Directly there were no other villages between them if you took the
trail. If you took the road and went
around you passed by several. Cheh Pah Kah was better off because it had
never been forced to move by the Army as so many other villages had been
subjected to. Someone had
donated tea to the village years before and the village carried on from that
start to now and has many tree plantations owned by the Akha themselves. Pah Nmm hadn't started yet, lucky to make
it to their very distant fields and come back every day. The road was difficult driving into Cheh
Pah Kah, tricky spots to it but I always made it to Ah Zah's house some how. The road was
muddy and rutted very deeply in places. Ah Zah's family
was always kind to me and the sour greens were the best. His family was tight, his brothers wife
was a stocky woman and always cheerful. She was having problems with her
eyes, and asked me about it, I didn't know what to do, or what was causing
the blurring. But she could still make
a mean soured batch of greens, always gave me a plastic bag of them, all a
little frosty white with mold on the inside of the bag, when you know the
stuff is going to kick some ass. If I
wasn't driving I'd have the stuff eaten before I got home. I never saw Ah Zah's mother, can't
remember it, maybe she was there, just didn't stick in my mind. His dad, a small man, yes. I liked the
whole family, their worn wooden two story house, the dark well used kitchen
where the fires were, and we drank tea grown right there. They had tea all
around the village in the trees, made the village like a big park. Someone
gave them a little bit of tea years before and it took off, course the
Chinese were near there too and they had tea and tea drying buildings. They were a bigger village and hadn't been
relocated as many of the villages had. His wife's village where I still stayed
used to be way up on the border and closer to Ah Zah's village but the army
moved them for no good reason down and further away and this wasn't any good
for anyone. It destroyed much of the
economics and made life very hard because they all had to walk so far to the
fields now. Ah Zah wanted
me to come to his place many times, he wanted me to live in that
village. He had lots of land and was
always offering me a place, he raised pigs at times, and wanted me to go in
with him on that but I didn't have much money. First time around he lost a little on the
pigs when he went to sell them. He had
a place for them on the side of the valley not so far from his rice
terraces. He was starting a lot of tea
plants in the ground there too and someone got envious and burned them all
up. The idea of the story was that this guy is
a character from that one village one, its an important village (didn't go
into that did I, oops) and that he is friendly, yet not a jerk, makes for
good friends, and that he visits often, showing that there for me, was a
closeness between the two villages that was created if you will by this
person, a perceptional thing, when maybe the two were not close at all. That we like people who bind things
together, that increase the size of the comfort of humans around us. That make more safety in a hostile land. Ah Zah's
brother had a real good heart too. His leg was bad, from a vaccine, or needle
shot? I am not sure why. I saw it
fairly common, I think it was from a poorly skilled nurse and injection. He
could still drive but had to stand on the tip of his foot with that
side. He was a real good hearted guy. Sometimes I am
at an anjacent village where he visited many times to see a girl that he
wanted to marry. Now since then he had
gotten married to her. He was there very often and he had an intensity and
pleasantness that he could extend to others that was beyond the events that
might be going on in his life at the moment that might get some people down. So he was good company, jokes, laughter,
never drunk, never making a fool of himself, never making a problem, never
having problems around him, he knew how to run his life. Since he helped
the family of his girl friend, where I was staying, well after they got
married then as a return of the favors and help, we would all go and help him
on his rice terrace when planting time came, it was a big job, not horrible,
just took a lot of people at the right time, and that is how Akha farming
works. Twenty people to this field
today, then another tomorrow, always making sure that one pays the other
people with a day of work for the day of work they put in on our fields. And since his terrace was way further than
our own fields it was a change we enjoyed,
half way between his village and ours in the bottom of the valley at
the upper end near the springs. On those days a
bunch of people came from his family side and those from ours, so must of ben
25 people all told. We got it all done
in one day. Planting all the rice in
the soupy mud pools that filled each terrace.
Lunch was a big laugh, can't remember all the things that we ate, the
usual, fruit, chilis, mountain rice, greens, squash, some meat, some meat
loaf stuff that the Akhas were real good at making, soy loaf, yeah, was good,
and of course a tinge of wiskey to kill the chill and the fatigue because it
did rain that day starting about lunch. After we all
ate one man was taking the leg bones from the chicken, and there are these
tiny holes in the bones, you take the two of them right and left, and then he
took a knife and made like tiny toothpicks.
He stuck a toothpick in each hole, one on each bone, on the side of
it. Now the Akha do this to tell if
something is going to be good or bad.
They do it with pigs they butcher, looking at the livers, that is on a
female piglet, and such. Sometimes
they want to know a number so they take some paper and light it on fire and
then they lay a porcelain white plate over it till it goes out. When they
pull the plate up they look at the soot inside the plate and see what number
it looks like. Same with the bones, done at the moment, part of the events of the moment to
look at the future. If the toothpicks stick straight out at
right angles from the bone then things are going to be good with the terrace,
a good rice crop. If they lay down,
more in parallel with the bones, then things are going to be poor. They do this to
find out what happened to someone good or bad too. I believe you can only use a black skinned
chicken for that though, got to do it sort of special. Looked pretty
good for this terrace this year. Then I had this windbreaker that was made
like an Akha flag, gold, white, red, blue and black, and I gave that to Ah
Zah because I knew he wanted one. We worked the rest of the day and got the
terrace done, all tired, and our group went back to our village the long road
and they went up to their village getting there before we did. Course we got stuck too so that didn't
help, took an extra hour cause of the rain and slick green grass on the dirt
track, even with four wheel drive. That labor was
shared back and forth, that the rice terrace was a symbolic of this creation
he made between the villages from my perspective, it was like extended to me,
not sure if other people enjoyed it like that, and that going to that terrace
also took one to see the valley between the two villages like it was giving
you the opportunity to grasp the perspective of it all. It also referred to the rough terrain
between them both for a vehicle, but walking only further because of the army
move. Malice, the
burning of the tea. There was a fire and all of Ah Zah's tea seedlings where
burnt up. Someone did it, Ah Zah says he had no idea who, but someone burned
more than a 100 of his boards one time too. Loss of the
first wife and the gaining of the second one, oh he has a boy by the first
one too. Once I visited
to Ah Zah's house with the father of his wife, Ah Seh. Ah Seh said that he was a little ashamed
because he was an opium smoker and didn't have much. I brought Ah Seh there cause he is my
friend, when he wouldn't have gone on his own, I feeling like it needed to be
overlooked and just enjoy. Course not sure the family looked down on
him just because he smoked opium and was poor cause of it, because he is an
excellent historian. But HE felt he had nothing, see how we all
are. Ah Zah offered
hospitality in a more formal way, but Ah Seh's house was more welcoming and
comfortable, not so business like, crops, pigs, tea, a truck that needed to
be driven, etc. There is also
some erotica in this, two villages both coming off the hill to have a go at
the terrace. Ah Lmm He was a
neighbor of Ah Zah, a very well spoken and pleasant man. Gentlemanly, humor was always on his face,
a sensitive desire to understand and communicate with others. A stocky man in his thirties, he often came
to Pah Nmm Akha. Dependable. He had three
kids and was looking for a second wife. He had various
jobs, some in There was
always a laugh and humor in his face.
A little reddish in complexion.
Ah Lmm wasn't the type to overstate himself, but always left the door
open for someone else. He concerned
himself to others. His father also was a good man. Both Ah Zah and
Ah Lmm were honest people that I could deal with and secure enough that they
seldom pressed me for help of any kind, which I was glad to get a break from
as most the Akha were very poor and I could not blame them for asking me for
help. Both of them
supplied me with information and stories about the life of a border village
and what went on across in Ah Chooh My Pah Nmm
wife, she did such a good job raising Ah Soh, our son. Being Electrocuted While he was
being electrocuted he flailed his arms.
But in Akha humor he said that the soldiers beat him because he was
acting like a monkey. Jan 2002 Isaac Isaac is more
than two years old now. Growing
up. Very blonde. He had a cold
or a cough many times and I attributed this to all the vaccines he got as Ah
Soh didn't have this and didn't get any vaccines. I got in late,
slept well at Meeh Suur's parents place, although cramped. The catholic Akha don't know how to live. The priest
here, Father ?, didn't help teach these people much after taking away their
culture. I still hadn't
built a house here, I didn't get treated very well and had so little money it
didn't seem rewarding. Also Akha
security was very important so if I couldn't build nice one time, wasn't
worth it. They might as well stay
where they were. Each village
was different and took a different kind of grace and understanding to stay
friends with it. I waited while
they cooked breakfast over coals in a stone coal pot like what they use a lot
in Amy as another
story. Ah Lmm Ah Lmm wanted
to marry Ah Meeh but she ran away instead. Living in the Village Pah Nmm was the
first village that I actually moved into and lived in. Each of us
found our distance, I eventually stayed home most the time, did not visit to
other people’s houses, even when they called me, as we had or
differences and I preferred to stay friends. Occasionally I
visited to someone’s house but not very often. The Tail of the Horse Someone’s
horse and water buffalo were always in my rice terrace tearing it up. I had spent a lot for it and more to build
it and I still needed to work on the walls.
I asked around and everyone insisted that
it was not their horse in my terrace till I trimmed its tail hairs, then they
knew which horse it was. Course it
turned out to be the horse of the oldest elder in the village so that did not
make us such good friends after that, he wanted me to buy it, tied it by my house
for a day and all that. But the other
elders said that I was right, it was tearing down my terrace and I should be
the one paid, not the other way around.
I had gotten very tired of telling everyone, so one has to sort of set
the notion in people’s mind one time that they shouldn’t walk on
me. Course I always note that it seems
there is either the subtle or the obvious and that many times there is not a
good interim level that is less blunt, or one doesn’t think of it till
after and wonder why I didn’t think that through first. Anyway, we were
such good friends that I went and did a healing ceremony with him and patched
things up. Ah Baw Peeh. Maidens of Time The Festival of Swing This year they
didn’t build a swing. I
wasn’t sure what it was all about, something about there being too many
men still in the fields and not the four required to haul the heavy bamboo
out of the jungle and build it. There was
great argument about it at any rate and the elders were quite angry. But the festival went on anyway, with four
days of dances. Now it seems in this
village that there were two nights when they danced in the early evening and
then began again about ten that night and danced all night long until
dawn. I think it was something about
the rice. When you live in it this
becomes quite easy to see, the system here is quite easy. You plant rice and
live. You get your rice from the land and if you don’t get your rice
you die. You better know something
about what the off years are about and picking the right “kaw”
for planting rice and for planting corn.
You get the wrong “kaw” (or plot) and the rice isn’t
going to grow and then what will you eat? The neighbor’s rice? Guess
again. So each family, unlike much of
the west, is directly connected to the earth, to produce the rice that they
must eat. One might argue that less
land could be used but that is quite hard to imagine. For the most part, an Akha village, for
people who live in the mountains, is one of the most sustainable ways of
feeding people that one could hope for.
The time and effort that go into preparing, planting and caring for
the rice leave little time for people to be doing things that don’t
relate directly to this. The earth is
like some living part of one’s self that they must care for, must
build, must repair, must listen to, must get along with, and must never take
for granted. Not so many generations
have lived on this earth and so the effects on it are real, and one cares for
it. Trails, watering holes, wells,
springs, when they are “wet” and when they are
“dry”. What time the bugs come
out. When the rice got planted it happened over two weeks and everyone had to
have their rice in by then. In this
village. The elders then count between
12 and 13 days. The days each count
for ten, sorry, not sure how this works, but between 120 and 130 days after
the planting of the rice, the swing festival happens. The reason for the two dates is that the
elder in charge of this counts 12 days (120) but if he had a parent that died
on that day or some other item that he doesn’t want to combine with it,
then he moves the date one more day so it can end up being 130 days. This is
the end of the work. The Akha also say
that the Akha came down from God through the swing. And now it is a celebration of the end of
the hard work on the rice (not that this day has actually been born
yet). And to this they dance, to their
relationship to it all. In this
village they laid out four old planks from the forest and the women took
bamboo tubes about a meter long and as they danced around this square they
pounded the bamboo tubes on the plank which let out a ressonant sound. One man works a drum, it looks simple, it
is not. With easy blows to the top of
it in a rythmic manner he works out a cadence that ties into the lisping
sound of the hand cymbols which they call “wind”. (the hand
cymbols). Actually the sound from the
cymbols appears to mimic the sound that the rice makes when a woman tosses it
in the tray, while it is yet dry, working the tiny stones and the debri to
the edge which she then lets bounce over and out onto the ground. You can make a lot of sounds with a cymbol,
the Thais make one very different to that the Akha do with it. But once you hear the sound the Akha make
with it, you realize that it just didn’t happen, that it is being
played with a signature. So there is
the drum and this rythmic pace of cymbols and the sounds of the bamboo and the
women going carefully and methodically in a circle. I think it better drinking to watch this,
think of far away thoughts, your mother as when you were a child and the
first time you saw her cry, and life moving on timelessly and you not being
any more able to change much as an adult than you were as a child, and the
Akha women, their backs to you, facing in, dance first to the left where they
meet back to back there, and then to the right where they meet back to back
there with the woman on that side, but always moving to the right. And it
goes on, hour after hour, no one stopping.
And when you see the daily commitment they have to the rice they plant
and the earth they plant it in, you know that they mimic this, left side,
right side, but always moving on, yet always the circle is the same. And to this they danced, and they danced
all the way till dawn. Not hard to
figure out to do that, the cadence captivates you and pulls your heart onto
the Akha soul train and you could stay there a little longer than just
dawn. Being Akha. The mountain, rice for another year, the
rain that feeds it all, and the wind that cools them as they work. What magic.
The dress was colorful. The
women in this village are always much fully dressed in their traditional dress
anyway, but these nights are special as the other festivals are and so much
effort goes into making the dress complete, the men with fancy embroidered
jackets, and the fantastic silver head dresses of the women, which they
started building when they were a child.
The work is sweaty and long and muddy and dusty and itchy and biting
ants and bees and by God you got reason to warm it up and dance all night to
this one. An Akha swing
is built using four tree sapplings of long length, or four large bamboos and
then a water buffalo yoke is used at the top or some such shaped wood, and a
long rope made of heavy woven vine and bark strips is hung down with a loop
woven into it. The women may swing on
this with a stick slid through the loop or men swing on it by standing in it
with one foot and using the other to kick themselves high into the air. Since the swing is quite tall it throws
them considerable length out into the air and the swings are built on the
edge of a hill so this adds to the rush. Poets of the Earth Months ago we
had all worked together and turned the soil of that very steep mountain side,
the sun burning us, the wind buffeting with dust, the rain chilling and
biting and the mud eating the skin off our feet, but then the rice, we
planted it, crawling up that face with every muscle in the body urging to
just climb to the top and be over with it.
Course that was the difference between them and myself, my body wished
to climb the ladder, they lived on it.
The man had come and cut a deep rut down through the face of the hill
side in a couple of directions to run off the rain water. As soon as he had done that one girl took a
bag of sunflower seeds and walked up the hillside crosswise, following the
ditch, planting sunflower seeds on the down hill side of the lip of this
narrow trench no wider than what you could put your foot in. The hillside all brown, her scarf of red,
it was funny to see in all that landscape one ditch, cut across it all as if
surreal and then this tiny moving pollen of color creeping across the face
like a wind jipsy in a sea of tossed soil as if on some great voyage lonely
and forgotten, sewing seeds for them to die and birth again in some ode of
timelessness of these people. And the rice came up and we went back over and over,
pulling the many weeds. You
don’t use a cultivator the man said, cause the rain goes in too deep
then and the rice grows too tall and the wind knocks it over, you just pull
the weeds out with a minimum of soil disturbance and pile them up and burn
them. And we did. The woman, old with
work, not with time, she was a spirit woman, she worked at this as if she her
self had been born of one of the seeds to help plant all the others and to
scratch the back of the earth with her love and care as if it were tired, or
jolly or itchy or all of them at once.
She did it well, loving the dirt, like a kind mother, who tended it in
partnership with the tending of the children.
I loved her, who she was, from her late night chanting beside the fire
in the glow of the coals, all the elder women gathered around in the
darkness, to the way she could wack into bamboo to find a grub, to the
stories she told me of Yah Loh Yah Shoh Ah Mah Ah Dah, the old man and woman
who lived in the rice field and took care of it at night and on the days that
she was gone to another field. To them
she owed much thanks and did not offend.
And out in the fields when we worked hard and then sat down to the The Old Woman’s Blessing The old hut,
large and all alive with its overhanging roof of dusty gray and blackened
grass thatch hiding the shadows of the porch, took up a noticeable place on
the edge of the ridge where the village penetrated from the roots of the jungle. I stooped to go inside, and as every Akha
hut, it was full of the men, the women, the children, that kept the hut
alive, kept it from dying, because, in itself the hut was an individual. Not the making of one hand, but the making
of all hands, all hands in the village, the jungle, the eyes that the
swallows flew through laced about with amber browns from the escaping fire
smoke at the ends of the long hut, the crossed peaks of the roof locking the
huts place in time it would seem. Before every
hut I wanted to pause, like I was looking someone in the face, a special kind
of face, like that of an old barn in other countries, eyes, a smile, a tired
smile. Huts always gave the sense that
they were trying to be solid, like a hen for its chicks, thatch thrown here
and there, porches, braces, posts, and steps, pigs, chickens, horses, cattle
and dogs, each gathered in its place below and always the big bunker of rice
near by. A carefully calibrated
assembly of life. A fire was
going, the men on this side, the women on that, some of the men smoking,
others reclining, all talking, passing words to each other like unfinished
thoughts and lines that were only one’s to take and pass along to the
next man where he might finish it or here the cue words from the woman at the
fire as to what was missing next before he passed it on. The Akha had a collective consciousness, a
collective mind and a collective thought.
To say you knew something meant that the village knew it and it was
always there when you needed it. The
men didn’t know it, the women didn’t know it, they ALL knew it.
This was always true except in villages where the missionaries had performed
a cultural lobotomy and the mind no longer worked due to their sinister
needs. But there were no missionaries
in this village. I had seen to
that. I was the mercenary, the holder
of the pike, that bought them another day.
For there were missions to every side of the village, all waiting for
the day when they could end this collective talk and thought. I don’t know who had the last part of
the line or who passed it to whom, but the old man sat on his bed, giving
hand to his tobacco pipe and gazing at me, some change coming about in this
all, I, a white man by best account, making some odd entrance into his life
that he was not yet sure of but was not so surely opposed to. For he was the
Boeuh Maw and it was to him that I had come for a name. For sons must have names, daughters must
have names, and for the Akha this meant that I must tell them where it was
that I had joined to the tree, where I had been grafted in of consent of the
Akha, and this village. Nothing was
said of it for the moment beyond that, thoughts also collective in days, not
supposing to end on this day or that, hanging there in the air till you came
back and took it, turned so many times by so many others as part of the
village. Transparency was an
understatement. I would buy him a pig and a gift and we would have a
ceremony for his favor to me. And then from
behind the wall in realms of power unknown the tiniest wift of the most
gentle old woman came out with hands and air moving in circles, leaning her
head to the side, catching a vibration of who was in her hut like some great
web, some great sensitivity to kindness, and she began to speak. I don’t know what she said, someone
added that at their deaths I buy a water buffalo but she immediately refuted
that and waving about her hands in some slow dance told me what a gladness
that it was for her to add me to her house like a son and my wife and
child. Her head dress was battered and
the silver hung all about, worn down to smooth bead like pieces from all the
shifting from all the years that she had worn it, no less than fifty now,
through how many wars and village moves and fifty years of stooping to hoe
the earth and plant the rice in a dance of seeds and jousting sticks which
tossed the soil in the blowing and raining chill of the pre-monsoon spring
air on the ridges, from the Chinese border high mountains, across Burma to
now some kilometer inside Thailand.
She held no hold on life, nor the history the fools would write after
her as so many gathered to cut her village in pieces, but that caused her not
to shrivel back in the generosity to me. I could not
describe her voice except that I would never forget it. All that day
the village gathered and on the lip of the ridge of the village, one moment
down the steep face, gathered to build me and my wife a hut of our own. The elder came with the dawn and got me
from my bed where I nursed a headache from something I had eaten the night
before, and taking me surely down the cliff with each step of his, just below
the other hut, he handed me a long skinny stick with a rice planting
spade. “Drive it into the hole
one time” he said. I did, and then
pulled it out and he dug the last of the loose dirt from the hole. His face turned to the side and pressed
tight against he earth in exact depth as he reached his hand below. Then he
called for the post, the center post of the hut on the downhill side wall. Motioning, the post was lowered at an angle
to the edge of the hole but not down.
There it was held. Three stems
of grass were tied to the post and the heads entered into a hole in the side
of the bamboo. He handed me a glass of
rice whiskey, used in all Akha ceremonies to bind the occasion, and together
we poured it over the base of the post three times. Then in the other hand he produced a small
bowl with rice and one egg. I took a
pinch of dry rice, touched it to the egg that sat in it, and dropped it on
the foot of the post. I did this three
times. Then standing up, I caught the
post as though to set it firmly in the earth and slammed it down into the
hole as hard as I could calling out each time in unison with all the workers,
“Shurh, Shurh, Shurh!”.
This done, the house was built over the passage of the day. That night the
dear Akha woman who was now my Akha mother, from whom my children got their
clan name, came to the ground above the hut, her tiny frame swaying
timelessly, and climbed down the steps to my new hut. Going inside, I followed her. She had again an egg. She took a ceremonial rice paddle and
cracked the egg. She placed a piece in
my cupped hands to eat, blessing the house and our children all along. Then she called in a small line of waiting
village children and gave them pieces of the egg as witnesses in this life.
Them the Lords of the Jury after all.
Then kneeling first beside the fire on my wife’s side and then
on my side of the hut she carefully rubbed egg on each inward pointing tine
of the fire rings. I could not
remember all that she said, except to be mesmerized by the voice of this old
woman who I don’t think I had seen more than two times to that point in
the village. Then the man
came in and brought with him meat and food, cutting it carefully and showing
me what parts to eat and how. He took
the three heads of a plant with flat leaves and placed it in the bamboo tube
along with a bamboo thatch ring and other things and then place the cloth
plug in it with his hands together with mine showing how the regular
ceremonies to the continuity of life now and before us were kept to insure it
into the future. This, was the
orthodox environmental law of harmony of the Akhas. The The wedding
ceremony took off in the morning, many details, many private to the Akha,
that I put not down on paper, they were sacred in a day of ridicule and
foolish minds. The entire village
turned out for three days. When I left for
town next the old woman told me that she would come each day and bury the
coals of the fire in the ashes as to keep them hot for me, caring for the
fire till I got back, the hut never left unattended. She tilted down
the road of the center of the village, her hands still doing a dance in the
air, the silver coins swinging to left and right, the silver rings on the
ends, tiny little legs that had carried her so far and carried her now back
from one more blessing. And all I
could remember was the great care and concern and very happiness that she had
taken in it all. The sunlight
glimmered on the end of her hut as the swallows floated in and out of the
tiny holes in the thatch and she ducked up into the porch as though cloaked
and out of view her headdress canted to one side. The Wedding Going outside with the basket, for the stick and mud/shit Jungle context, The rain comes It was almost
like any other event for me, just something in my schedule. I had to remember to leave time for it, for
a trip to the mountains for it, just like any other. I would allow what ever
occurred to make it something different in its own way for an event occuring
with me rather than an appointment or
medical task. I so often worked in
such a daze that this was just how it was, not lacking particularly in
sentiment, just pragmatic. So I knew that
I would need a few days and I headed up to the hill with a couple of clean
shirts. Otherwise nothing
different. I drove in the village, I
was relaxed because I had gotten a lot done that day, those last few days and
so my mind was kind of in a state of play if you will. The village was
anxious, they didn’t know if I would show or not, yes I would show, but
not necessarily on time, so I laid that to rest, the wedding would go ahead
as planned in the morning. The very next
morning after I awoke at my fiances house the very first thing that they did
was to drive me from her house, along with her, and tell us both that we
couldn’t come back in for anything for three days. Now what made this odd, was that because I
was gone so much, and I had no village of my own, my wife would be residing
in the new hut that the old woman had blessed for us, apart from her parents
house, but nearby so she would still have family, since I pretty much lived either in my truck while it was
moving, or in front of a computer and that didn’t leave much community
for her. Since normally
she would be leaving to my village, the ban on entering the house was necessary
since it was still close by. Numerous
related families in the village would not be attending the wedding, while all
non related families would be, to keep the standard custom. Since I still had to put on a celebration
for all of them as my friends, by choice, I needed two pigs, since they
couldn’t eat from the one that was the marriage pig. That was no problem because there were
enough people that it was going to take that anyway. Good thing I had been raising two pigs. The first thing
that happened after we left the house was that one man lost his grip on pig
number one and it got away, so we had to wait an hour for it to come back to
the shade at which point we made it part of the festival. Actually, we tried to make it part of the
festival once with a spear, but it ran off and we had to chase it into the
jungle where we cornered it in the creek and finished what we had started,
then slung it over a heavily sagging bamboo pole and carried it back to the
village. Then a great fire was built and
the pig was singed till all the black hair and top of the hide was scraped
off. At that point the pig entered
into the festival different from other planned cookings. I was sent to
our hut, then my fiance soon showed up, stopping before the hut, where a
white skirt was pulled over her head, and she dressed in it, removing her
black skirt, the only time a woman ever pulls a skirt over her head. Then a special Akha Jacket, one I
didn’t even know she had been making, was put on top of her wedding
woven hat, which she had put on for this moment instead of her head dress,
and the arms of the jacket were folded over her head and she entered the hut
and went to the woman’s side where she sat down with her back to the
partition. The hut was soon filling up
with adults and children, a mere ten feet by ten feet on each side or less,
two fires, and soon a man brought her her bed role from her mother’s
house. The pig was
brought into the hut and carefully cut up a special way, reading the liver,
and then taking part of the pig to the women’s side and placing it in a
can which was covered for the second day, the rest carefully cut up and parts
hung on a rod over to one side to keep taking from and other parts cut up
immediately and going into a pot. One
man took over the cooking duties after the old elder finished all the cutting
up and cooking certain items on the women’s side of the hut. The elder women of the village from the
other families gathered in a circle on my fiances side and began to feed her. The old men gathered on my side, began
telling stories and doing recitals done at marriages, carefully explaining
all to me as they went along, my not being of the best memory. Finally I was called to eat on the
women’s side with my fiance, splitting an egg together which we ate
with the shell from our hands. That night, an
escort slept in the hut, since it was against the tradition, to do more than
sleep during a wedding which officially lasted thirteen days, though there
was only three days of ceremony. This
was out of respect for the traditions. On the second
day there were more ceremonies, the second part of the pig was eaten spare a
few parts which would be saved to feed the elders on the third day. It did
not matter how big the pig was, the pig was split up for these three days to
be eaten on schedule. I took turns
between feeding the Old Women whiskey, cigarettes and then they in turn gave
me token money for my marriage. It was
really fantastic, that tiny side of the hut, all those elder Akha women in a
circle talking and smiling, many of whom I had not met before, so kind to me,
blessing me that we would have many boys and girls together and that the
children would be raised up in the full traditions of the orthodox Akha,
which I assured them would be the case.
Both the many children and the orthodox traditions. I can not say that I have ever met such a
collection of elderly women so engaged in their place and role in life as the
vitality of the village as that group and such groups in Akha villages. Then my wife,
by this time, after the eating of the egg, took her turn feeding the men
whiskey and cigarettes and receiving their blessing and permission in the
marriage as I had done with the elder women.
The singing went on and on this second day one man stood out for his
ability to sing the traditional songs.
He sang on for hours. Many
visitors came and went. We ate the
last of the saved parts of the pig from the can, them being split between us
with careful instructions as to what to do with the bone, it must be put in
the fire, not discarded through a hole in the floor. On the third day my wife took two bottles
of whiskey to her parents and the ceremonies were over. 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 waman 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. Kings of I got up early
enough, sleeping in the village, but it was already raining while I ate
handfuls of heavy mountain rice and prowled the hut for remainder of scraps
left behind by the family before they fled to the fields, as is the
manner. The rain came down more and
more heavily and all the village was turned to mud so that I waited
longer. By noon, I became quite intent
over the matter, looking at the sky, the heavy rain clouds on the mountains
to the south, I knew there was little chance for a let up, so accepting the
matter I slung a hoe and long knife over my shoulder, picked up a second thin
knife for brush, and headed out the upper trail of the village that started
so steep to discourage a mountain goat right off the start. The trail went so suddenly up that I had to
weave back and forth between the huts just to get up the slime, the children
in the dark caverns of the porches asking me where I could possibly be off to
in the rain. Taking a visit, my reply
and up into the jungle I went, soon eaten by the trail. The first few hundred meters were not so
bad, I trimmed some of the brush for the next guy, chiseled some layers off
the bad trail in places, and kept climbing what I now referred to as the hump
back trail, it was soon so steep. And
so steep that you did not walking panting, thinking that it was so steep,
that you didn't like it, that you rebelled, but rather your foot kicked out
automatically as if you were falling and did not want to bash your face on
the upcoming ground. Bamboo heavy
with rain blocked the trail in places, so I would unload the long knife and
lop these big limbs off to make the going easier for the next village
person. The pace was slow in places
due to all this work, but I was soon to the first hill top clearing where I
had placed enormous elevation between myself and the village. I was now looking down on that layer of
clouds and many hilltops only stuck up through this ocean of grey and white
mist now. At the first clearing there
was a cattle pen, making use of this area at the end of the road the forestry
people had built three years before.
The road was so big and nice it surprised me even though grown over
with weeds in places. The clearing now
used for cattle could still host a helicopter or two if it wanted. I headed west wondering what this direction
was about assuming I knew the other direction. But soon the road turned up again and I
continued on up towards the ridge to near where one can anticipate the
Burmese gun emplacement. Water buffalo
bells could now be heard, and I had heard these once before, but didn't know
whose they were. Then I heard voices
and soon spotted a huddle under some bamboo that sort of came to life as I
trudged sopping wet like a downspout, into view. The rain did not let up. Three older village women, Akha, from the
same village greated me with surprise and offered me water to drink. I sat down against the near tree on a
banana leaf, wet but not yet covered in mud.
The women immediately exclaimed not to do that as the bark of the tree
began to move, covered in nasty black biting ants as if the wiskers on a mans
face, wet with dew, began to crawl. I stiffly hopped up and they went to
cleaning the ants off, which were already busy digging into my neck. We sat and
talked, about the road, the water buffalo, the cows, surrounded in this
beautiful jungle and it just so much home to them. Yeah, don't go up there in the high grass,
that is where the gunners and runners are, stay down here to the road. But I had been up to the gunners many times
before, slipping by, and was not sure today yet what I would do. I was seeking a solution to nutrition and
fields and the trails that tied it all together. Their village had been relocated and the
distance was too far to be sustainable getting to and from the fields. Finally I
headed on up the road which soon turned down, headed for the old village site
I decided. I spotted a hole in a pile
of dung on the road, and always wondering what went down through a pile of
dung, I availed myself of the hoe and chopped into the stiff red clay earth
of the road. But the host was not
home, so I could not be sure. However,
the hole, was very decently carpeted in this broken down dung felt, and mixed
in very often were broken pieces of cricket, which I figured must be food for
larvae from eggs that would be laid, a pattern among some insects. But as I was observing all this, one of the
Akha women came along and told me about the beetle and that she wasn't home
but out about and busy, a nasty sort that smelt worse than the dung she bored
the hole down through. Where had I
heard that before? The Akha woman went
back the way she came, and I continued on with the road that now tipped off
steeply. She hollered a few times at
the water buffalo but I could no longer see her so she must have dropped off
on a trail there, the wooden bell clunking down in the jungle brush. I spotted a big red fig on the road, and
looked up the bank for the tree and there it was, figs that grow right off
the bark as many fruits in Finally I made
it into the very bottom creek of the canyon, but now was so high up that the
water was small. I looked for the
trail to come clearly out of the creek, but it did not. It dissolved, as
though blurred by vision. So I went left after leaving the creek and was soon
in lush bananas and huge flower bushes, so massive and their many soft
branches nearly impenetrable. I was on
the left side of the village clearing suddenly not on the right side where I
wanted to be, and I did not realize I was already this high up, but thought I
was still far below the village. One
look at the thousands of flower branches towering above me was enough to
dishearted me, waterlogged clothes, and a bit hungry by now. No trail. I tried not to think about what I
saw, and began working my way through all these black arms beneath the great leaves,
felty leaves, that wanted to cling to me when I touched them. Some branches I had to only cut or I could
not go on, as they were so long as impossible to move aside. Despite all the branches, it was as if the
space was clear down there below the leaves, and then I saw them. Standing on these flat earthen benches, like prisoners of time on
a vigil, silent, not speaking, watching me before I had spotted them,
towering above me, were the posts of Akha houses. Their tops each carved with a notch or a
peg, in distance from each other, but still in line, their arms out to each
other with the branches of the flowers, silent, but all in hand, bodies
charred, termite tunnels built up their legs, and then the sound of wheeping
came to me. I suddenly pictured the
old man telling how when the army had moved them from this place they had
wept so sore, moving his hands across his old and wrinkled face as he sat in
what was now the village, a lowland hole, more like a prison without
walls. The cavern of the flower arms
from post to post, showed the red earth of each clearing for each hut, the
soil not collapsed or eroded, more than a hundred years of carefully notched
mountain and not so much as one collapse that could be seen so often on the
hastily built motor roads of the asian wishful empire. The flower velvet leaves and branches were
too thick to spot any trail so underneath them I found my way to the back of
the bench, stuck my knife deep in the earth and pulled myself and all I had
up to the next bench, noting the incredible size of this village. The Akha told me that always someone had
lived here, someone came, someone left, but this village never sat empty and
I could see why. Poking my head above
the clinging velvet leaves I could see for quite forever below, but know also
that I was very deeply in the forest.
I was surrounded by forest, the bananas were the only buffers, and
anyone would have a hard time getting here silently or quickly. The trees so tall one could feel like the
whole village was in a well of sorts.
Bench after bench of crawling, I could still spot no trail, no memory
of how the huts had talked with one another.
I knew it would not be my last trip to this mountain kingdom. Save for the charred skin, the posts had
not shrunken in size, not round, but flat, as the Akha split the wood. I could look at all the notches for the
cross members and spot the whole Akha house, knowing where what and all had
been, and that the total use of wood was small, the bamboo above the ground
not rotting, only the grass on the roofs being changed every couple of
years. Huts inside laquered from
fires, I imagined that I was crouched below the floors, the thunder of
children's feet above, holding my finger to my lips, hoping the pigs and
horses would keep quiet, the dog still asleep on the porch, the mother
calling one of her sons to come and help with the rice barn. Every sound was eaten by the forest, the
banana leaves rolling back and forth slowly, like great flat and green eyes. The soil was asleep, not now polished by
feet, but I could see that the Akha lived with here, not in here, this place
in the forest. The forest was full of fruits and nuts, was so cool for the
animals and in many places not overgrown like the abandoned village was
now. The burned skin on the posts made
me wonder if the village wasn't burnt, what was left behind, or how many
years it stood, huts, roofs, before it was burned. Who burned it? I had seen other abandoned villages due to
forced army moves, they never called it that, but the huts stood for many
years. Vines and all the fruit and
flowers the Akha had planted growing without one kind hand or voice to tend
to them and the laughter and gleeful shouts of all the children gone so far
away. The wind blew,
but not like it does when there are people, more in a slow sad chant from
this mighty place, an Eden of Akha Kings, a proud people, not needing or
asking anything from anyone but to be left alone. No phones, planes, motorcycles, roads, only
trails, the clean clear water of the creek strong as the light in a diamond
of liquid. I drank deeply, afraid of
nothing, the cold water running down my chest, shirt and into me. As I plunged my hand into the creek the
stones were cold, reminding me that the water was cold, clear and real, so
far it seemed from the steam of the jungle trail. But my thoughts pulled back to the village
clearing and I asked myself how anyone could want to leave from this place,
and what anyone at the prison village now had possibly gained in all the promises
that the army had made them? Nothing I
could see, only being turned into consumers for some, and paupers for
others. The chickens, pigs, and water
buffalo died. So did the people. The mountain cool, had no fever for them
before, no fever for the animals either.
Least they talked that they had it much more often now. Everywhere I
looked the water dripped off the leaves of every variety around me, I shoved
my hand to move the next batch of flowers away and make it past a post and up
the next embankment and filled my hands with thorns, pushing one under my
finger nail. I looked, was only a stub
now, would have to wait till later to take it out, feeling the poison aready
biting my flesh. I cut my way on, hoisted
my tools up, and suddenly was on a well worn tiny narrow trail full of fresh
boot marks of tiny feet, there above the village. I looked back, one of my pods was
gone. I now had four. I contemplated going back for it but
refused to enter that mass of towering flowers again, even though now it all
looked distant and knee deep and easy.
Ah, how different life looks when you are top. But now I had
the most fantastic of views and wondered if this was not the throne site,
vast greens and towering trees to all sides and down below the tops of trees
that made you feel that sure you could take flight down over all of them and
stir the foggy mist that sat upon their tops. No, I could not
imagine that to move from here was anything but an act of violence of rogue
people upon the articulate. I felt
like one thread must feel when it stands next to its fellows in a piece of
cloth, knowing that all works together and all belong here. In my minds eye I could see well worn
bamboo items, boards, woven walls, thatch and angles in what was a village
borrowed from the earth around it, all careful sounds, ones that only these
items make, as they gently rot away into the soil and must be put aside for
another piece on occasion. The posts
stood firm however after more than thirty years, standing in the wet soil,
laughing at people who believed in machines that flew and iron, compared to
their own beautiful feet there upon the mountain. Times and times again. Like some long poem that I settled under
the light next to a fire to read, this clearing, the Akha wrenched from it
like a sheer wind, spoke to me all in one piece, all in one moment, as a
place that all fitted tightly together, growing children, no piece of steel
gear, but no piece out of place in a careful pattern of work, sound, water,
leaves, air, birds swiming on wind, and always those brown colors of it all,
some borrowed place agreed upon with the forest, to use, in as kind a human
way as possible. These people did not
dominate the forest, they quietly lived in it, like the poetry upon the
pages, like the children of the very forest, so big, yet feeding them of its
hand, not asking much, and all ears to all they had to say to it and each
other. The ox bell, or the clink of
two silver coins, a dash of salt, the only intruders. It was sad when
I thought that now so many people said the Akha had the poem all wrong and
ripped their pages out of the book. The earth had
places in it. Places for water to fall
very great, places for wind to blow the grass, places for the sea, and places
for villages, Akha villages, and though torn away, this was still a place for
an Akha village and neither I nor the forest had overlooked the matter. I knowing not nearly as well, as the forest
knew it. And all about me there was
great forest, still not cut down. All
around the village. After all, what
could they possibly need trees for? To
fill the lumberyards down below? not hardly. So I walked on
out the upper trail in the evening breeze knowing that darkness was soon to
be at me and I was not out of the woods yet, but I let the forest hand close
back in around the village as I pulled away from it, the thinking and job not
finished. The trail I was on now was a
very old one that came from Along the trail
to the right, were more posts, to guide it, and now I was in beautiful golden
green tall elephant grass, blowing in a song to the wind, like slow
dancers. But the normal trail stopped,
couldn't see it any more and seemed now to be muddy going off to the right
instead so I followed away from what should have been the curve and went to
the right and soon was in a see of grass with occasional trees and a huge
number of trails going everywhere with new boot marks, all fresh, enough to
have moved a thousand men through here.
Still I was in the land of all these couriers moving so many items
which I did not want to encounter. I
made it across the top of these gently sloping flatlands of the mountain tops
to the far ridge of grass that I would walk back down. For these were the fields of the Akha
village, beautifully level, farmed for at least a hundred years, taking no
new forest, and such a sight for eyes.
For everywhere you looked, there were clouds and sky and mist and fog
and rain and mountains, and all below you, your eyes feasting, I dropped my
tools with a clank, mindful everyone knew I was here anyway, my boot print
twice the size of theirs, and took off my hat. The wind blew my hair as with a shout, and
cooled me. Yes, kings, they were kings
these people, and this was their throne room, and the other people could not
stop them being kings so they put out their eyes. But I was still
not at the top, however now a good ways from the gunner. I headed for the last leg of trail going to
the ridge, switching from this horde of trails through the grass turning
everywhere, like so many secretly dodging each other, and soon cut across to
the top of the long ridge that I would run down, for it was way at the bottom
of this ridge, with a small patch of forest in the middle, that the Akha
farmed now. They had been content to
be where they were, asked for nothing, but they were moved, made again to
clear land, and thus trees were lost.
Now even that land was being taken, but one could see that the land
that they had needed all along had never grown. They had used it carefully, so many families need only so much food,
only want to walk so far, which in the past had been only a few minutes from
the village and clean drinking water, now it was hours. Some sticks and
leaves made a shelter nearly torn apart by the wind and there lay a piece of
salt that I quickly grabbed up and ate and a chili pepper. I popped that in my mouth and then ate some
of the tiny wild egg plants I still had with me. The fire still smoldered. There was wind and sky in every
direction. I could see a big village
further below and one village just a tadd to my left into The sun was
biting into clouds and it would soon be below me if I didn't get going. I still had to drop down very far and go
through one big forest to reach the new fields and from the new fields I must
still walk more than two hours. It was
already past six in the evening I figured.
Too tired to make my body or feet scurry, I began walking down the
rolling ridge expecting to take off into the great forest when the trail hit
the bird rock. I called it the bird
rock and all the Akha knew what I was talking because sometimes game birds
were cleaned here, you could see the feathers, or someone hung their legs off
it and had a smoke, looking far away at the sky and villages below and other
mountains in the distance to the east and north. I jumped out on this huge rock for a moment
and then headed down the trail into the darkening forest. The bird rock was called after an Akha man
shot by a Lahu there many years ago, they didn't call it the bird rock to
themselves. I turned onto the trail
and headed immediately into a very big very dark forest, closing over me like
black lava, while I hoped for a spot of light to peer at me from the other
end, but it did not, and just got darker and darker as I made my self do the
best I could to dart throught these stands of trees. The going was rough, the trail getting
slippery with time and dispappearing completely. I guided myself by spotting tiny light to
right and left off the ridge through the great trees to know that I was still
on the center of the ridge and not headed down into some haunting hollow that
would plunge off into steep gorges from which you could not get out of quickly. Twice I had to
find my way back to the center of the ridge.
Snaking through the trees, as if a ghost, no one else there, least not
talking to me, which was just as well.
Compared to the jungle, this was the woods, and not so friendly, not to me, not to the Akha it would seem,
who now had to live below it. I went
on endlessly, the sun long gone, the darkness soon to be black and only
sparked a little hope when I caught the last light dimming as it fled the
stands of rice fields on the sides of the lower mountains as I came out into
them from such a dark wood. The green
quickly turned dark like deep water and I found a trail now west and still
down. But each time the trail had to
cross some spring, it went back into the woods, because there was always
woods around the routes of the springs and then I could see nothing, only
listen to the water, guage the curve of what must be the trail, as trails
tend to be like that, and grope on with my feet, then coming back out into a
little lightness and rushing along fast as I could stir myself, knowing that
I must save energy for two hours still.
Mountain working huts stood in the deep green rice now, forest above,
looking quite disaproving, the bottom of the valley below, not the same
valley, not the same forest, no kindness here. I hurried on, the bamboo chafing a noise to
send me on my way, but no sun to heat the sound of the ants so that it would
come up to me off the trail. Sometimes
in the day I saw those ants, great troops of them, far as you could see, in
great ranks, or the termites, that all snapped back and forth to each other
as they marched and finaly disappeared down a hole, but this night was not
friendly and this trail felt less friendly than the ones above near to the
gunners. I got on along, but soon it
was hopelessly dark, only one star, clouds, all dark. The trail sometimes made a dim light spot
in a long line before me, but I had to think more what the trail might be up
to than able to see it. I could only
feel it. I dropped the long knife down
off my shoulder, it no longer clanking to the hoe, and taking the handle in
my right hand began feeling out the trail for every step. Sometimes the star shone light into the
holes of the water buffalo tracks which had filled with rain, so it appeared
that there were white circles on the ground in front of me. As long as I walked in this splashing
sucking mud, I could know that no soft voiced water buffalo would put me
wrong and went on. But soon as the
trail went hard I had to find it again with the knife, when all around me it
was mostly wind swept hillside, so dark was it. I got off the trail a time or two, soon got
back on, like walking off a cliff or into a wall, but my mind dull with how
far this was and how long it was going to take, crossing creeks still in the
jungle, not being able to hear a thing or even see the white of the water as
it crashed over the rocks. I couldn't
see the rocks either, cause it was so black, like a black hollow sucking light
from fields, dropping it into the water and washing it down the
mountain. So unable to see even
stepping stones or bamboo walks I had to each time cross through the water,
because I could feel the water on my legs and know I was at least not
stumbling into the jungle again. The
trail was hopelessly chewed up by water buffalo, horses, and rain. Very steep in places, I falling down more
than once, feeling the blade of the long knife slide into the flesh of my one
hand, then planting the knife deep in the dirt to hold myself, getting back
up and going along side ways one step at a time through narrow places the
trail went in the dark, brush to each side, nothing but mud, no steps, and
nothing to see. I trudged on, down as
it were into a swamp, no place for kings and found the village before anything
else found me, covered in mud, soaking wet for some ten hours now, and
knowing a little bit more about how a proud people had come to poverty. Oppresion. The Button The button lay
imbedded in the trail of red clay as I climbed the mountain. the Akha man was saying thomething about
fruit trees down in the canyon. I
stopped and picked up the button. One
side was melted along the edge. Four
holes, black plastic like what one might find on army clothes. My friend
wanted to go into the canyon for fruit butI recomended him that we were
already in the high grass and that it was only a short way to the top of the
ridge from where we could catch the wind and the view. We were close
to As we crested
the ridge the wind and the spectacular view hit me and I let out an
exclamation in Akha for that. The man
showed concern and I turned to my left just in time to see a small Burmese
army mountain fortress some hundred meters to the left on the ridge. They would want
long conversation about what we were doing, where we were going and we
weren’t interested in light conversation so we turned right and went
down the ridge that way. Ooh Loh Akha
used to live right there on the The view below
was spectacular. All mountains, all of
The Burmese and
the Thai armies swapped control of the hill tops here. The Thais used to be over on the right but
went below and now the Burmese held the left hill. The armies took
a cow or two when they wandered from the village. But then the armies made them move
below. Armies were a problem for the
Akha. Girls had gotten raped and the
Ooh Loh Akha village broke up and scattered over the rape of two girls by
soldiers. I had long heard of these
rumors but only now first hand from a villager. For these reasons Akha women only went out
to farm in groups, never alone or in two or threes. My friend said
he once owned a very nice five shot revolver that he bought. He bought and sold cows and water buffalo,
and carried the gun with him on the trail so he wouldn’t be robbed of
the stock or the money. But a Thai
policeman caught him. He got to go
before the matter was settled so he gave the gun away. The policeman was still after him for some
reason and so he moved his family to The But one morning
the When his
famiily had been living there five years they moved back to the mountain
village near their present location.
Now the Thai government wanted the mountains for forest preserve and
water shed. The Akha were
loosing a battle of Thai dis-information.
The Akha man showed me where they had farmed, how much land they
farmed. He laughed at the Thais trying
to plant one tree at a time. He said
you had to cut all of one section, turn the soil one time and then it would
all grow up huge at one time, a full forest. But the Thais
accused the Akha of deforestation.
This was hardly the truth. The
Akha could only physically farm so much land.
They formed one section for five years and then let it grow over for
ten years. There were deep forests,
that had no undergrowth. Fruit trees
were there and that is where they ran cattle and pigs. The jungle forest was immense, the farmed
faces relatively small. Without the
forest there would be no animals to hunt.
The Akha, while farming some of the mountains, had immense knowledge
of all of it. But as we
descended the ridge past an old Akha cemetary we dropped off into the canyons
and discovered we were a few days late.
The fruit which used to be part of their backyard had all dropped to
the ground, thumb thick dark blue fruit with a long pit inside. Not a plum, something different. We did find red figs which grew directly
out of the trunk of the tree, a trait of many fruits in this part of the
world. We headed back
down the moutnains through the old village site of a Lahu village too. They had lots of cattle here, in a nice m
eadow, but now they were gone, forced to move to the road below where they
mostly came apart, spent most of their time smoking opium, no view and now
wind, prisoners in the bottom swamp as it were, previously a proud mountain
people. They used to have fifteen
houses here. But now their only friend was fever it seemed. They lived off the Akha for work and
food. I had met them, some of them old
gallant men and women, so I knew that the stories must have been true, because I had seem
them rejoice and dance to plant the rice for the Akha and they did it as old
hands, hefting the gauh cheh’s, the long planting sticks, like old
friends. (A gauh cheh was a small
metal cressent blade spade that had a very long handle maybe twelve feet long
or longer and when they shoved the blade in the ground they would use the
“wag” of the top heavy end to help toss the soil out of the cut) We were soon
down to the old village site of my friend.
Another beautiful spot and he pointed out where his house had stood
for so many years. Only plants and
flowers there now. But most of all it
was a private place. Part of the life
of these people. Everything grew
well and was good here before but the Thais had forced the Akha to move into
low lands, the Akha were mountain people and in the lowlands only sicness,
death and poverty found them. The Thai
government plan seemed to be the displacement and total assimilation of the
Akha into Thai society, all without their permission of course. And the Akha would take the blame for all
the ignorant blunders in the process. The Baby (Pooh Seeh’s Daughter) The old man was
funny. He had this way of talking in a
big way, a booming voice and lots of gestures and these bushy eyebrows that
got out there before he did. If you
put your hands over your eyes and stuck your fingers out straight everyone
knew who you were talking about. But
he was really good hearted and everywhere he went he had the baby with
him. In my mind’s eye I could
always picture him at the fence next to his hut, standing there with either a
black and white plaid cloth baby wrap holding the baby to his back or the baby
in his arms, always talking to her. And she was so expressive, this tiny face,
full of character already, looking this way and that, making some inquisitive
look. She was lucky
because she was seldom sick, and had grandfather’s constant care and
attention and that of half of all the young people in the village. Her father worked in the mountain fields
and as life sometimes has it, because of differences her mother had left and
gotten married to another man in another village. In the Akha
way, children were adults it appeared as soon as they were born. It was not very Akha to strike a child and
children were allowed to have much of their own say very early on. As with disputes between themselves,
parents made gestures of striking with a switch or spoke of striking but
didn’t actually do it. I had
watched this many times. A child
having a tantrum and laying in the road.
Her mother tried to get her to stand and walk on home, but she would
not. And so the mother went and got a
big switch, big enough to give any child in As I think of
it, I can not remember one time seeing an Akha parent striking a child by
hand or with a stick, not in any more than a gesturing kind of way. The Akha preferred to yell, to be loud, but
seemed to have the most incredible patience for their children. And then of
course they were always talking, talking about everything, ad that included
talking about what the child was doing at that moment. The others would all chide in, “Now
see, momma’s gonna beat you with a stick”. She never did, but it was all in the
talk. I had heard the young women say
that a good husband wouldn’t strike his wife or kids. I had only seen one Akha strike his wife,
and that appeared to be in a humiliating way, not by blows. But it did serve to humiliate her un-necessarily
and she paid him back by running away and not coming back, for which all the
villagers chided him. The small
children however seemed to strike each other quite a lot and there was the
immediate sense of getting a big stick, bigger than you were and going for
pay back, and then all the other kids told the object of wrath, which way to
run around the hut to get it on home. But at some age they appeared to
outgrow this and I seldom saw the older boys get into any kind of dispute. There was a
time when young men were allowed to fight over a girl, but it was more or
less a tradition, and they could say very angry bad things by right, but once
again it was considered illegal to actually strike. All part of getting along for centuries it
would seem. The baby was at
the gate when I left, well fed and following my every move. Now That Is A Grub! I have no idea
how she knew it was up there. We were
way out in the “Jungle” (see note). Now the Jungle was like going out to a
place that was say part of your house, not all that different than running
your hands through your hair. I had
gotten down the trail a ways because I saw the trail as something to walk
down, while she was busy viewing what she could do with this knife she had
while relating to all that was around her.
Knives were like devices for exploring, no harm intended to the
plants. Plants were like life pods that you opened, borrowed, cut for a piece
and ate. Predestined meals. Anyway, I heard this “wack,
wack” sound of that knife and Akha Mah was three quarters buried in the
brush of life, dragging on this great bamboo stalk till it toppled and then
politely asked me if I would grab the tip and pull it out of the thicket onto
the trail. I thought she
was looking for those tiny little bamboo grubs. But instead she wacked away
at the top of the bamboo stalk that had still been growing, grabbing it
dispite the fact that it was covered in brown hair which were these wonderful
incredibly fine slivers called “jah saw”, just like sand they
were really great for covering the forearm and in between the fingers before
they ‘changed’ from sand to micro thorns like what you might find
on cactus apples. (hey, I remember stuffing a bunch of those in my pocket
during a ‘raiding party’ in the dark of southern Anyway, with total apparent indifference
that belied her precision, she wacked off the external layer of the tip of
the large bamboo stalk to show me, completely revealed now, the compartment
in which there was a very large grub.
Now this was a GRUB. It had a
black embony head and a tough skin of rinkles on a fat cream yellow body that
wsa bigger than a bricklayer’s thumb.
Serious stuff. She popped it
out with a flick of the blade onto the trail and said that when they grew
completely tired of bamboo that they jumped out and dug a hole in the ground
and later became a huge butterfly. But
she was taking this one back to the village for grandma. She did, and it sat
in a bowl, looking for the corner door, till grandma came but with all the
people in the cooking hut, someone popped that grub, I mean took it
completely out of the bowl and it was gone.
Poor grandma. But there were
some of those bamboo grubs, the small white ones. My friend wacked down another stalk she
spotted and I don’t know how she did that, but she knew and she popped
all the compartments open like she could have shaved a man with that knife
from a distance, sort of laughing as she went along, and came to this one
grub. One grub? Where were all the
grubs? She looked again. Then she found this tiny hole with black
around it and she told me this tiny green snake had gone in that hole and
eaten all the grubs but that one. Ah,
we were too late. But then I took her
word for it because last time I saw a snake it was cooking itself in a stump
because it had a nasty habit of being in the rice field and wanting to bite
hands, so the Akha got the stump real hot, then put it on top of the stump
for a sky bird to eat, which it did.
And next thing I knew that green viper was jumping out of a dream that
this old Akha spirit woman was havin, so I stayed way clear when she started
tellin about what snakes were up to. I
think she could see these invisible trails they left. I looked in
this hole in the clay bank.
Shouldn’t do that she said, there is a snake lives in there
comin and goin. The hole was dead end
but I took her word for it because when I took a small stick and pushed it in
the hole, the stick went through the dirt and kept going, so maybe there was
even a staircase in there, wasn’t sure.
Leave it for now. Not a big
hole, just about small tomato big was all. Now course there was these big hairy holes
like a wind gypsy spun them with down and if you dug down in there it had
this silk thing like a laundry shute and at the bottom was this really big
hurkin spider the size of a thimble before you added on the legs. It had really big hairs on it and went
hoppin down through the field. Well, while
your diggin around, never know what you might find. Now there is this tiny
vine, grows in the rice. Sort of like
an ‘earth joke’ because when you dig down in, there is this
really huge hairy tuber down in there sometimes as big as a melon, and all
these hairs are like a really thick stubble on an old man’s chin, and
when you pop it out of the hole you don’t have to give it but the
slightest poke, really I think it just hops on its own between blinks and off
it goes down the hill, the stubble like ‘anti-lock NO brake
system’ same as the ones melons have, and it don’t stop for
nothing but goes leapin and jackin way up off the ground way on down the hill
faster than you could run or catch it or crash yourself, all the way into the
bottoms of brush where you can’t see it no more. Hey, I tried to get a big stone to roll
like that, lots of times in kid life and I always had to go down there half
way and kick start that damn stone again.
God I hate that. But not these
earth jokes, they jump outa that hole and go hard set for the bottoms all on
their own. Well Akha Mah
showed me where the corn was gettin high, some had three ears on one stalk,
she was really proud of them, good seeds she said. We made it to the spring. Drank long and cold from the water, she
told me the Lahu put a dead dog in it way up there somewhere, but I think
that was before. And never let a Lahu
know you have a melon patch, gotta hide it, cause they’ll bloody steal
them all, hey I knew that one for true, cause they took my melons and next
thing I saw my whole melon family in the market headed off in some Thai
woman’s slave train. But hey, they were really good dancers with rice
plantin sticks so what the heck. I even forgot
where we were goin that day, oh yeah, it was up on the ridge to the border,
but I met this Akha guy huntin and Akha Mah, she said really bad things
happened up there at the border in the trees so she took off down one trail
and me I headed up into the forest and it was all plumb dark time I got my
dogs on home to the village. It rained and the pucker brush was kneck high
and bein soaked wasn’t the word for it.
Course I didn’t notice that because the sky was gettin dark and
I couldn’t see the trail, cause the brush was that thick, lots of the
trail was washed out, so I was steppin in these narrow ruts, the only sound
that came out was the poppin of my knees as I kept from pickin up speed. And it was a long time gettin to the
village from the time I could first see it. (Note:
The Akha did not view the earth from the outside it would appear but more seemed to see themselves as creatures
exuded from its surface as if they were attatched to an external womb by
an invisible cord. They did not appear to see the earth as its
components that they walked on, named and interacted with, but more as if they
were walking on the skin of what bore them, the latest scene current
before them in a show that their ancestors had lived as part of a
great connected distance in the past.
It was a very different way of viewing the earth, what it was and what they were as individuals, and how it
was all sewn together.) End Have a comment or question? Like
to know more? Send me an email at akhalife at gmail.com |