Are You Local?

I just realised that I haven’t really explained my situation very clearly, so I’m writing this to provide more detailed insight into what I’m actually doing with myself and with taxpayers money on this little jaunt to the far east.

This is the Yesoh family, the kind people who have decided to let me live with them. On the far right is Pensi, who I met on Khao San Road and who invited me to visit the village last Christmas, which set the ball in motion for my move up here. Where is here? The village is in the Chiang Rai province, right at the top of Thailand. It’s located up a mountain about 15km from Mae Chan, a little town about 50km from the city of Chiang Rai.

It’s a hill tribe village. For those of you who didn’t write your final year dissertation on whether or not international law can help ameliorate the human rights problems faced by the hill tribes in Thailand, there are about 9 hill tribes in Thailand. They are traditionally migratory people and existed throughout the northern region of Thailand, Laos, Burma and Vietnam, as well as Southern China. With modern borders they are restricted to one country and oft-resulting statelessness has caused great problems for these marginalised people. Each hill tribe has a distinct language and set of customs.

The photo above is my house. That’s a lie though because it's someone else's house. This is my house:

This is my bathroom:

The village I’m staying in is an Akha village, so although most people do speak Thai here, amongst themselves they speak Akha. This is an interesting language because traditionally it did not have a written form and everything was passed down through speech and song. The collision with Christian missionaries over the 20th century has led to them adopting a Roman alphabet, though when spoken it bears little resemblance to how an English-speaker would read the words. There are different variants of this written form, but in some of them, for some reason (I’m inclined to blame the idiot Christian Missionaries) the tones of the word and length of the vowel sound are indicated by additional letters tacked onto the end of the word, which makes it even more difficult to read than Romanised Thai. As an example, look at the word for face, written as “myahxf pyawv.” It’s pronounced “Mia Pyoh”, rather than a garbled mix of Xs and Vs.

What I think makes the Akha language sound very unique is the fact that all of the words end in an open vowel sound or sometimes an “mmm” sound. None of them end in T/K/D/G/S sounds. This basically makes all the words sound the same at first, which makes it quite difficult to learn.

There are very few very old men in the village, and quite a lot of old ladies. Even at 70 they’re still active and work collecting vegetables etc. As for the men, eventually a life of rampant alcohol consumption catches up with them and they seem to die at around 50 or 60 years old. Some of the old ladies (particularly the one in the photo above) quite like me, despite their puzzlement with my strange ways. There is one lady who for some reason always wears a Santa hat and she constantly tells me that my mother is crying because I’m away from home.

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78 years old and still hard at work!

There are few economic opportunities within such a small village, but the Yesoh family has a little shop that seems to do quite well. The problem is that in the little village there are 3 other identical shops!. Ours was the first and naturally it’s the best, with an expansive shaded seating area that’s a communal centre for the village. I’m told the lady immediately next door then decided to open one, selling exactly the same things at the same price. Luckily our seating area and recently installed Jungle Gym ensure our commercial superiority. Plus we put extra salt on the French fries to make sure they come back to buy a Coke...

Adding the salt...

Anyone still reading is probably wondering what I do with myself here. The answer is basically that I spend 90% of the time drunk on rice whisky with the other men whilst coughing out bawdy 1970’s hospital innuendos at teenage girls and the other 10% of the time lying around waiting to get drunk. Just kidding. They wouldn’t understand the innuendos.

Seriously, after nearly a month her I can see how easy it would be to slip into doing nothing, so I’ve created a fairly good routine involving fitness, academic study, language practice, exploring and eating that keeps me occupied and productive, while still giving me the freedom to relax. It’s working very nicely.
I like the people in the village a lot. They're always very friendly and everyone will ask me about what crazy activity I'm doing at that moment in time. The only thing that frustrates me are the misconceptions about me, i.e. that I am a millionaire.

This fire is actually burning $100 bills that I don't need because I'm so rich.

I won't be updating this blog any more - go to The Penang Blog to see my new and exciting Malaysia blog!