I will never leave a plate of rice unfinished again. I will never fail to finish my dinner and throw the remains in the garbage; it is a waste. Parents always say "There are children in Africa that have no food, and here you are throwing yours away" and I feel bad about that, I do. But the truth is, I feel worse that someone slaved over planting, pulling, replanting and harvesting that rice all year, only to have it thrown in the garbage. This past week enhanced that feeling to the utmost.
On Tuesday morning, P'Dtia [P'Kaew's cousin and current housemaid] took me with her to their village to spend a few days planting rice. I stayed with P'Dtoom [I just called her Mae] and her three kids. Nong First is 9 years old and the cutest little boy I have ever met in my life. His older brothers Beer and Art are both 11. Art was adopted when he was only 9 months old. Mae looks after the three boys by herself, their father no longer lives with them. All day Tuesday I watched the boys play video games with the rest of the boys in the village. There was always roughly 20 boys in the living room, all crowded around the television watching each other play WWF, Transformers, Indiana Jones or Ninja 4. A wealthy relative of theirs in Bangkok had sent them the system and games in the mail. I wrote a lot of postcards and read a fair amount of my book. In the afternoon I went with P'Dtia to watch the parade celebrating Buddhist Lent that the boys were marching in with their school band. That evening, Nong First and Nong Art took me on a bike ride along the trail out in the rice paddies. It was one of the most gorgeous landscapes I have ever seen; the clouds in the sky were every colour of blue, as if someone had taken all the blue paintchips in the world and smeared them across the sky. The rice seedlings were a bright contrast of startling green; they reflected the light of the setting sun and shone like a chocolate wrapper in the middle of the street on a sunny day. There were people out in the fields, knee deep in mud and water, planting the seedlings in organised rows. Even more people were pulling the seedlings out of their original paddies and bundling them into neatly packaged groups. Cows and buffalo grazed in the mud filled paddies and the bray of geckos pierced through the silence of the night like a knife. Village life brings a new meaning to silence.
When we returned home - tired from the 4 km bike ride along the dirt path - Nong First and I collapsed on the ground in front of the fan and watched Nong Art, Nong Beer and their friends hit each other with chairs and ladders in the wrestling ring. I never realised how much I loved or missed video games. I helped Mae make dinner [aroi mak mak!!] and we sat on the wooden platform with our plates on our laps and chatted over gayng jeud, pad pak and moong tod. Once the boys had showered and put their pajamas on, we went to vien tien [walk around the temple three times with flowers and candles] and then came home. We sat on their bed on the floor and watched a Thai soap opera for a while until the boys had fallen asleep, and then I went to bed. It was a very restful sleep.
Wednesday morning we were up at 630 to get ready to go rice farming. I dressed in a long sleeve shirt and pants, a hat and a bandana tied to cover the back of my neck. Mae, Nong First and I set out to the rice paddies with a portable radio, a bucket of ice water/cups and my camera. Our job for most of the day was pulling the rice seedlings up out of the ground and bundling them so they could be planted in the mud the next day. We started pulling the seedlings out at the roots, then bashing them against our foot to get the mud and water off of them. Then we piled them on the ground and Mae would come along and bundle them. At first it wasn't that bad, until the sun came out and soon my shirt was soaked through with my sweat [except the back which was face up to the sun] and my hair was dripping from the heat inside my hat. I didn't dare take it off - I would get a nasty sunburn by the end of the day. I switched between bending over while pulling and Thai sitting [squatting with your feet completely on the ground] while pulling; my knees started to shake and my legs started to ache. I thought to myself, "If a nine year old boy can do this all day, I will MAKE myself do this all day". After a couple hours Nong Beer and Nong Art as well as P'Dtia and her three kids had arrived to help. We spent the rest of the morning pulling seedlings out and the kids and I occasionally taking fully clothed swims in pond nearby. I have never had so much fun in my life; it was so refreshing to play with children, to toss them into the water and swim around with them on my back when they couldnt touch the bottom anymore. We made castles out of clay we dug up at the bottom of the pond, lured their german shephard to come in for a swim and ran, screaming and laughing, into the pond. After we took a short break in the pond we were back to work and continued the painful labour until lunch time when we hiked back to the village house and showered and changed for lunch. We let our clothes dry in the sun so we could wear them that afternoon. By the time our rest was over, I couldn't stand on one leg without it crumbling underneath me, and it hurt to walk or sit down. My hands were blistered and I the makings of a rediculous looking long sleeve tan on my forearms. Despite all this, we went back out to the fields and worked 4 more long hours until the paddie was cleared. At one point P'Dtia took me to go plant one of the bundles in a nearby field so I could see what it was like. You have to stand with your legs spread wide so you could rotate in every direction, and you planted the seedlings in knee deep mud that swam with hundreds of worms and little bugs. The rest of the afternoon, the children and I continued our routine of working for an hour or so, then taking a small break in the pond. The seedlings we pulled were home to many little critters - spiders, caterpillars, worms, leeches, ants, bees, beetles - and occasionally I would hear the screams of one of the girls when they saw a caterpillar climbing around in the rice they were pulling. The boys were less fearful and picked up geckos to place them on their shoulders while they worked. At the end of the day we had cleared one paddie, with 12 of us working. I did the math and figured out the following.
1. Each bundle of rice makes roughly 2-3 kilos of rice.
2. 1 kilo of rice is sold for roughly 10 baht [roughly 30 cents]
3. From the one paddie we cleared, we pulled 200 bundles of rice.
Therefore:
1. At the most, each bundle will make 30 baht.
2. 200 bundles at 30 baht is 6000 baht.
3. 6000 baht = roughly 200 dollars.
From one full day of working, the rice paddie would only make 200 dollars. However, the seedlings still needed to be planted and harvested in the month of November before they could sell them. I never realised just how much work it takes to farm rice, and it brings me to tears to think of the pain and effort they go through just to make ends meet. However, the thing that touched me the most is that all of the people who helped farm the rice don't get any money from it, and they know that. They help Mae and her three kids farm their fields just to be together, to help that family make money and to help make the workload a little lighter.
Today my body aches; I have to walk slowly, sit down slowly and it hurts to move my legs. My shoulders ache, I have a sunburn on my chest, neck and forearms and the blisters on my hands prevent me from bending my fingers. But it was worth it. Living in the village for a few days was one of the most stunning and amazing experiences of my entire exchange; it helped me to see more of the culture of a village family in Thailand. It was an experience I'll never forget, and I hope I can go back to visit the boys and Mae sometime before I head back to Canada. The peacefulness and silence in the village was something I thrive from and an aspect I wish I could grasp in everyday life. I will never forget Ban Nong Hoi village.
"What is Nature unless there is an eventful human life passing within her? Many joys and many sorrows are the lights and shadows in which she shows most beautiful." - Henry Thoreau
