Christmas in Self-Appointed Exile

 The sun set over Thailand.  The air was warm, liquid, bathing me, calming my spirit seeming lost in a strange land.  The seeming I think because I wanted to identify myself with familiar surroundings.  I had been battling with this desire for several days.  Longer really.  It wa a test.  For I believed that the spirit lives here.  With me, among me, and in me.

Sure, I was thinking of home.  Thinking of friends, of family.  I saw the snow in my mind's eye.  I could feel the cold on my skin and the warmth of the clothes I did not wear.  There was also the warmth of the homes and people's smiles.  There was the food and the colours and the lights, the wine and the excitement.  I wanted to taste the wines and the sweet breads.  I wanted to hear the voices discussing the children and laughing with old friends.  I wanted to rub the cold out of my cheeks as I stepped into the house.  I wanted to bundle myself up in a coat and scarf to go visit the neighbours.  I wanted to see the fire dancing in the wood stove.  I wanted to see moonlight dancing in the snow.  I wanted to see the stars sparkle.  I wanted to see the magic of the blues and greens and yellows and reds of the Christmas tree lights.

The United States army invaded Panama that day.  I watered the young trees around the house.  I got a sunburn, too.  I tuned up my motorcycle and adjusted the exhaust valve.  I went to Ladree's place and helped her plant squash.  This meant hoeing, sprinkling fertilizer in the holes where the seeds were planted, then planting the seeds.  All by hand.  Dusty, hot, and dry.  Then Ladree and I ate rice together.  Something didn't make sense when I heard the global news, when one of the American soldiers in Panama said, "We are the soldiers of the little people," and this was heard around the world on radio.

Christmas came with a little soft brown lizard darting back and forth on the wall searching for insects.  Christmas with classical Thai music drifting across the rice fields, coming from the temple only several hundred yards distant.  Christmas with a large brass bowl filled with drinking water, clear and sweet.  Christmas with cigarettes, matches, and a small collection of poetry called Names of God.  Christmas with a wooden floor, a single bare electric bulb, and the walls covered with tapestries of dragons and wild beasts from the forests.  Christmas with five large envelopes stuffed with letters from home.

Christmas in exile?

No.

Christmas with my heart both at home and there, wishing the best for everyone and holding them all in my open arms, giving my love as frail, poor, simple, and far away as it was, but giving all the same.

Villages and Cities, Rice Paddy and Cars

 I look at this thing and I call it a village.  Made up of bunches of little things.  Like wood houses on stilts, dirt paths, woven baskets. Also children’s voices.  And buffalo and rice and glyricidia trees and paddy and the wind.  No rice without a village.  No village without rice.  One and the same thing.

            I look at this other thing and I call it a city.  Made up of a bunch of different things.  Like concrete sidewalks, motos, canals, and overhead wires.  Also light at night.  And music and cloth and colourful flags and diesel.  No neon with cities.  No cities without neon.  Pretty much in any country you know.

            Villages and cities change.  People live and die.  Families come and slowly go. Hearts are broken. Joys are found.  Stuff is built up.  And stuff is undone.  Villages and cities are kind of the same.

            And somehow different. Because we can see the entire physical village, because we can easily walk around its circumference, we think it is uncomplicated, simplistic.  A city is very big.  Strolling in the midst of streets and buildings, we are content because we believe we understand the colossus surrounding us.  Complex and sophisticated.

As though a village is not complex.  As though we can build a fish.  Or a buffalo.  As though we can build a village which was there for, perhaps, a thousand years.   To build an automobile, if we are lucky, sticks with us for twenty five years?

We are failing miserably as a species to understand the distinction between the complexity of a village and the complicated quality of a car.  The production of a car consumes some fossil fuels and some minerals.  The operation of a car burns them up in running.  Spits them out.  Rusts.  Ends.  For all intents and purposes, only one species, humans, involved in the entire process.  This is simplistic, complicated if you like, but not complex.

In ten square meters of rice paddy, you have maybe 1,000 different obvious species of insect, plant, bird, and many things living, using and reusing quite some minerals and materials… and then they do this interactively with humans, who also live with buffalo and trees and chickens and infections.   Seems kind of complex, especially since we do not even know how these things really work together.

 So I wonder how do we believe that we, humans, define this world?  Why not that we are defined by this world?  Instead, my people, my education taught me to believe that things ought to be this way or ought to be that way.  Somehow, I was told that my two cents mattered.  That we can fix problems and make things work.  I have been taught to believe how a human world matters.

Yet, when I sit in the village, under the shade of a thatched roof, watching two children play in the dust, surrounded by nothing but rice paddy, the soft wind, and a straw munching buffalo, for the first time in my life I am humbled.

The village is such a humane world.

And so little upon which it depends is human.

From Sombong's Laundery

Rainfall

A crowd of shopkeepers gathers at the little tables under the awning in front of Sombong’s laundery.  They babble, point, and guffaw at the shenanigans the rain brings to their street.  Motorcycles brought under cover.  Shoes left on doorsteps soaked already, unceremonious sacrifices.  Who cares!  Oh ho!  Your shoes are wet!  Ha ha!

The rain spatters furiousl.  Wet darkness swamping down in sheets.  People.  Absolutely soaked!  Rickshaw drivers continue peddling, changing only the bend of their heads to allow water to run off their brows.  Lights of cars and trucks dancing in the murk, swushing wheels beeping sopping engines roar by dull come again gone.  Two young men hop under an awning, to another awning, store front to store front, their white shirts pasted to their backs and their black dress pants hanging heavily.  They hop one last time to the awning at the nightclub - ah, ushers.  The girls who work there, too, laugh when they open the door to let them in.

Now black as pitch, streetlight piercing, taillights red streaming past, pounding water from the sky, swashing sounds.  Damp drafts nudge the heavy air hanging in the laundery.  Little tables littered with glasses of thick coffee and cigarettes.  Bodies sitting, some clothes wet and dank, others dry.  All eyes turned to the yawning black square, the storefront looking out at rainfall in Ubon.

The Laundromat

The shop is deep by eight metres and wide by three.  Racks of clothes, baskets of clothes, two ironing boards, three dryers and a washing machine clutter the space.  A ceiling fan swirls above, obliviously swirling, swirling, while people cloth baskets food smiles anger come and go.  There are two patterns of linoleum on the floor, one marked with orange squares and the other spattered with blue blots.  This is Sombong's shop.  She is twenty-eight.  At the moment she is out.  She zipped away on her motorscooter to tend to last moment business before the rain fell again.

Thud-crunch tinkle.  Silence.  An accident on the street.  Excited chatter and bodies rush past the opening of the shop.  Chatter turns to laughter, so the accident not serious.  A child stands still at the entrance to the coffee shop.  Eyes staring wide after where all the people went.  Her hair and little dress buffetted, flickering in the wind.  Her face and shoulders relax.  It is not Sombong.

A fellow who had got knocked off his motorcycle by a truck is now sitting on a chair just inside the shop.  Some ointment is applied to his foot and then a bandage by the woman who was driving the truck, a friend of Sombong.  He is sent on his way smiling with ten dollars in his pocket.  Sombong arrives, grabs a bag of clean laundry, and leaves again.  Two other friends arrive, wearing tight jeans and flowers stitched into their jackets.  They ask for Sombong and decide to sit and wait.  An empty tv squats on a nearby table and watches the women listlessly, waiting for the rain.

Outside, grey evening darkness.  A swushing wind threatens rain.  In the shop, we are glamourless, two fluorescent bulbs casting grainy light, the in-here distinguished from the out-there.

The rain falls.

Rainy season laundromat.

The Amway Gal

She slides in out of the rain, sits down, and says she that she is Sombong's friend.  She's got a sparkling, delicate watch, bands of silver on her other wrist, a ring of gold on each hand, whopping huge earrings, hair curled in a permanent, a pretty face.  She, she believes, has got Sombong sold.

She has handed Sombong a pamphlet with lots of sharp pictures of pots and pans and cosmetics and household cleansers and other assorted etceteras.  Each page is colourful and the items are neatly arranged.  Some pages have a blue scheme, some have a pink scheme, and some a vibrant yellow.  The pamphlet has just so many pages, not too few.  Short written descriptions tucked neatly in columns to the side.

Without a breath in between she slips Sombong a card.  Explaining this and that.  You use this for that and that for this.  Use some here, or there, oh everywhere!  That is for some of the time, this is for all of the time.  So many places, uses, applications.  Hardly costs a penny.  Oh!  And this is for that and so and so used that once for this, over there, over here.  The air around her filled up with pots and pans and visions of non-detergent hands.  Out comes a sharp, leather notebook.  And this is how much I am making!

Sombong places the open pamphlet to the side of the ironing board and, keeping her eyes on the pictures and her ears on the Amway gal, she reaches to the left for another basket of her many customers' clothes and pulls out a shirt for pressing.

Rural Development – A Naïve Gestation of Terrorism

A Sunday.  Sitting at my desk at the field crops research station, back to the window, rain falling in sheets for days.  Nothing at my house.  No one venturing in the downpour.  So I skipped to the office and let myself in.  Coffee.  Letter from the mom waiting.  So much, so many things happening back home.  A friend's wife is having a baby (is it my friend's also?).   World tumbles on.

The agricultural tour.  Three old farts well into their sixties changing their ways of farming to systems more suited to the environment of the Esan, Northeastern Thailand.  Mixed farming, water ponds for fish, a fruit tree forest, mulched rice fields.   The three farmers say they are a bit isolated from all their neighbours.  Persons of change.  Shrugs of shoulders. What do they care.  They are changing for themselves.

The second day a day of drunkenness.  The villagers and the monks in one of the poorest villages brought the homemade rice wine.  Holding hands with the men and talking about farming and water.  A huge reservoir of 13 or 14 hectares, lots of water problems, flooding backing up into the next village, inadequate holding capacity during the dry season.  Three or four different varieties of rice wine.  Dancing along the bunds of rice paddy.  That night to the Grass Roots Integrated Development (GRID) project, run by Thai nationals.  An argument with Charlie from Australia, because, he said, I am argumentative for the sake of argument rather than the resolution of a question.  The rich fat cats know what they are doing, he said.  I figured that a rich fat cat guy about my age who grew up with nice cars probably did not think much past the car and the girls.  A very late night.

Next morning off to visit a community forest.  They had planted thousands of trees.  A great happening.  Who owned the land?  There seemed to be some question about this.  And sly smiles, too.  Laughter and winks and invitations: when the government comes to give them trouble we may come and fight too.  It was the first mention of the word fight, of which I was to hear more.  Better translated as war.

To a village where we had supper. To a house where I bought a traditional pakama, for sleeping.  Then to the home in the darkness, upstairs and I crawled under a mosquito net.  A black pig lounging about below, snuffling, loose to go where it pleased but wandering nowhere.  A dog trotting past in the dark, a growl, gone.  Ducks tucked away in a corner, gentle sing-song gurgles.  A calf, also loose, stirrings of straw as it turned in small circles looking to lie down.  A breathy humpf from the water buffalo, glassed eyes watching from behind his gate.  Silkworms knitting cocoons in a wire cage suspended from the ceiling beneath me, a whisper of mulberry leaves shuffling as the worms fed.  Each of us all keeping  company in the silence of night.

Fourth day on tour.  More of the usual.  A failed fish nursery.  Pretty much brand new, but disused because the concrete was poured poorly and the fish tank split.  A water pump display.  More like a bicycle pump bolted to the earth.  Pump, pump, pump out comes a trickle of water, fun for five minutes, slave labour by ten. I took notice of a pig in a harness, harness attached to a rope, rope to a bar, bar stretched between two trees.  Pig jogs happily back and forth with that odd grin they have on their face.

Back to the GRID project office.  There was Khun Nat.  Maybe twenty eight years old.  A moustache.  Deeply tanned brown face already wrinkled around the eyes.  Nat was leaving the organization in two months.  His story was that he would be going to Khorat, north of Bangkok, to work for a friend who makes hydraulic components and ships these to Canada.  Nat kept saying that his friend just needs help so he is going.  Nat knows nothing about what he will do or what he can do to help.  It was Nat who talked about the war.

We sat down with a guitar and a bottle of whisky and we sang and Nat sang about the war - about the students and people who died during and after the Thammasat University uprising.  War as an economic war, a war of poverty, farmers fighting literally for their land.  GRID was a political base, a nucleus of communication.  Workers and farmers who will fight the war, the violence inevitable.  Nat said a losing war.  The government has the guns.  But, what can you do, the war is already being waged against the people.  It was not our choice, said Nat.  A young woman came and filled our whiskey glasses.  She spoke angrily to Nat, looked with stillness at him, dark eyes, for just a brief moment, and left. 

Nothing more to the tour after this.  A meeting.  An evaluation.  Plans for next year.  We white people slipped away from the villages and fields, back to our jobs, our projects, back to our plans and our organizing and busyness.  Really, who among us would turn our backs on our wealth and to join a war?  Who among us could imagine that environmentally sustainable and economically subsistent agriculture was a weapon?  No, no, no… everyone, of course, has the best of intentions.

It was strange to return to the agricultural research station.  It was like a cul-de-sac in a suburb, a place that turns in on itself leading nowhere, lined by houses in which people live without relation to each other except their work and allegiance to their salaries.  I knew people there.  People with titles and objectives and mandates.

Khun Nat disappeared a month later.  I contacted the woman with still, dark eyes.  She said she did not know.  Things happen, she said.  So they were closing down their Grass Roots office.  Nat was never heard from again. 

I looked at the empty desks of my government colleagues while the rain continued to pour down outside.

Hollow space in an imploding world.