supporting The Man

this last unit was entitled "Land." as with all the units previously (urban=slums, food=organic, water=dams) what it really meant was something much more specific:mining. what made this one so interesting, however, was that the issues hadn't actually begun. we stayed in a community where a potash mine was planned but had not yet been given a mining liscence by the government.

basically here is what happened that caused one half of the group to hate the other for being cold-hearted and the other half to hate them for being irrational. guess which side i was on. we started our unit by doing an exchange (meeting) with the mining company. the man who gave the presentation was this canadian geologist who seemed to really know his stuff but was not so good with the speakin good and promoting good PR. he basically said that potash mining is already way cleaner than most other mines, and that the company is going out of its way with this mine to come up with new, extreme, measures to make sure that there are almost no environmental consequences. from a scientific perspective, from what i could tell never having studied mines, they seemed to have all the bases covered as completely as possible. he, being a scientist, had numerical proof for everything he said. then we went to see the villagers. EVERYTHING that is sort of rebellion based in thailand is run by NGOs so we met with this one NGO (one person) a few times. she just kept saying the same thing over and over. these issues that she had were legitimate in terms of the fact that, as a farmer, she should be worried about salt run-off ruining her fields. the problem, however, was that she just kept saying that there was nothing the company could do, no way they could prevent that. that there was no way to take the salt out of water once it was there, that there would be huge smokestacks everywhere.

someone was lying. no not lying, they were just not accurately portraying what would happen. and these two sides have been fighting for 13 years. they have never actually talked to each other. the NGO said there was no reason for anyone to go to listen to the company because they would just lie anyway, and the company just kept saying the villagers were under educated and just would never understand. in the end it came down to us as a group having to decide whether the gut instinct of a farmer or the proof of a scientist was more believable. i decided to listen to the facts, and spend a lot of my time judging this NGO for not getting herself educated and still thinking she could lead a few thousand villagers. i just felt that even if the company was lying, it is just basic debate skills to know your opponents argument so you can combat it.

then we talked to this "youth group conservation club" which was a complete lie in and of itself but the kids (a 19 and 23 year old) talked about how they could care less about how much potash they use in their own life, or to think about the world's dependency on mined materials. all they cared about was that it wasn't built near their homes, it could be their neighboring village for all they cared, just "not in my backyard." this is a completely legit feeling, i would probably feel that way, but it was just a little bit of a shock to hear them just be like, i don't care, why are you asking this, when they were calling themselves the youth's answer to conservation issues.

it was rough. i felt like a bad person. end of story.

but not really the end of story because now i am basically dwelling a lot on the issue of what value facts hold for me, and our society. and how easily they are manipulate. we all know this. but i still think they mean more than someone who just says that they know it because they know it, even if they can't prove it.

who would you believe?

peace yo
ps all yinz are dirty too so don't judge me.

I have lice

there are bugs making their home in my hair.
do you have any idea what this does to your sanity?

wet and wild

so this last unit was the Water unit. i don't remember if i have been explaining the whole unit thing or not but in case i have i will not do it here. we went to two different communities that were affected by dams. the first one is a semi famous dam apparently, called Pak Mun, and we only stayed there for 3 days 2 nights. for the first time i didn't stay with a whole family, it was just us and Pa. he was pretty much the coolest guy i've met here so far, he was like 70 or something and was a medicine man guy. he took us out into the forest to find herbs and trees and mushrooms and whatever else to use in his medicines. he tried to explain it to us but, you know, we don't speak thai, so it was mostly in gestures and most of them indicated a release of constipation. anyway he gave us this little spiel about the government not allowing him to use the forest anymore and how he thought the government was dumb and could shove it because he was using it anyway. i have developed an ability to respond correctly even when i don't actually have any idea what is being said, basically i can read what their general point is i.e. "this sucks" or "can you believe this" or whatever and respond with the proper head shake or chuckle. this makes them feel like we are communicating, which is good, but also gives them the false impression that i can understand thai which comes back and bites me in the butt later when they expect an actual verbal answer and i can never provide one. i'm not going to lie, i was Pa's favorite, he just loved me.

we had a lot of fun there; i drank freshly collected wild honey, and chewed some kwai (water buffalo) jerky that i had seen rotting on a shelf along with all the bones the day before. we also got to len footbon (play soccer) with the neighborhood kids and scored some injuries doing so,, those kids don't mess around with football. but we had to move on to a different community with a different dam. we went to rasi sali village next and i stayed with my meh, nung sow, and pa. Meh thought we were a riot and had never seen a foreigner before, my little sister was 17 and also thought we were just ridiculously entertaining, pa was scared of us and wouldn't come into the house until we were asleep. if i were them i would feel gypped that i got defective farangs because both me and the girl i was staying with were sick. i was just developing a really good cough and she got pharengitis while we were there and had a 103 fever the whole night. the family raised cattle and had 2 that lived in the yard. the baby decided that it hated me and charged me everytime i walked outside, it even stuck its head through the window whenever i was inside the house near its pen. that cow was the devil in my opinion. unfortunately everytime it charged at me they would beat it with a stick so i had to pretend it wasn't doing so while still running for my life. it was tricky. thats about it for that trip for me, we didn't really do much and the family didn't want to take us out with them when they were working so we didn't see much local stuff, mostly we went shopping at the markets with the teenager. my friend who was living across the street got bit by a poisonous millipede and had to go to the hospital, her hand swelled up to mickey mouse proportions. all in all it was a pretty eventful trip, though i really didn't learn anything more about how these people are being screwed over by the dams. they just are.

have fun at home everybody, drink some orange juice for me, i am craving it like crazy.

bai teow to the hospital

ok so i know i haven't posted anything in a long time; there was nothing to post and then i was on a homestay. but i will start with the most recent adventure: a trip to the thai hospital. being a farang (foreigner) we got seen pretty quickly. we being myself and two other girls who have what is lovingly referred to as "the black lung" in our group, and is currently affecting at least 15 to some degree. the three of us had decided to finally suck it up and go to the hospital. so we had some doctor type guy check us out in a little office type thing, surprisingly he didn't even look in our throats or anything, something i would have done had someone come in with problems with their throats, instead he just asked us a few questions and sent us to get x-rays of our lungs. we were taken to the next room by one of the nurses whose uniforms are just the most ridiculous looking things ever, they have a short white skirt with a little white collared shirt, stockings, high heels, and one of those little nurses caps that i haven't seen anyone wear since the 50's. all in all it was a pretty successful trip, it turns out i have pneumonia in my right lung, so i got these horse pills of antibiotics and was sent on my way. the other two girls had bronchitis. so yeah that was my latest adventure, i'm bringing back my x-ray as a souvenir ( i think, unless it gets erased when it goes when the x-ray machine at the airport, i don't know how science works) so that's good. by the way pneumonia is so not as intense as i thought it would be, i just have this weird pain in my lungs and this very very strange buzzing/vibrating in my lungs when i breathe.

so i guess i actually learn things too...

i realized that it seems like i do nothing but wait around from trip to trip. this is not the case at all. my days are filled with what seems like a whole lot of nothingness but lasts 8 hours. this last unit was the 'food' unit as i may have mentioned. so basically we learned about organic farming. which, you know, is a kind of interesting topic in a very vague sort of way. do i want to eat chemicals? no, thanks for asking. should farmer's have major health problems because they used chemicals? ummm also no. beyond that i didnt really understand how we could have a whole unit on why organic is great. sure we touched on fair trade which is sorta kinda related to organics, and we met some really great organic farmers, but throughout the unit i couldn't help feeling that there were so many more important things to talk about if we were going to talk about food. i couldn't seem to convey to the more crunchy of the bunch that organics didn't matter if people couldn't get food at all. and i don't even mean in the 'there are starving kids in china, finish your carrots' kind of deal. i mean that in our own country there are an overwhelming number of people on welfare and food stamps and other support programs that can't even access nutritional food, let alone special, high priced organic foods. people in the group were all excited about going on the 100 Mile Diet (which is pretty much the opposite of organics these days because the organic market is so mass produced because it is such a fad right now that most organic products come from farther away and have been more processed and messed with than the regular foods so that a Wallmarter can feel like they are in on the trend) but what i was saying is that people were talking about these huge organic movements that they are going to start so that our little farming families in Surin will benefit without even thinking about anything that could perhaps be done to solve larger food issues. i was just extremely disenchanted with this unit which proclaimed itself to be about the problems with distribution of food, solving world hunger, and looking at how food affects us personally.
at the end of the unit we were supposed to write a paper essentially about how to start an organic movement. i was kinda pissed that i was forced to continue thinking about what i felt was a moot point and instead i wrote about how freely the term "poor person" is thrown around to distance the 'real' people from those who dont care enough to get themselves out of debt. i found out that 1.2 million more people are living below the poverty line in the suburbs than in the cities in america. poor people are all around! can you imagine! anyyyyyway yeah the director of the program did not think it was a worthy topic for a paper because it is not about thailand. surprisingly however, there are 'poor people' in thailand too! and they dont get treated like the regular people either! so when i get back i guess i wont know how to solve world hunger (because im sure if they would have tried they could have taught me how) but i could give you a step by step to become an organic farmer.
thanks for sitting through the rant. buy organic, buy fair trade, but be nice to 'poor people.'
love ya