Sustainable Food Systems (renamed from last year's more poetic, elusive-sounding Agroecology) rocked my world, but I have missed Chiang Mai deeply.
Example: right now I am sitting with my roommate Sarah in a big, relaxing open-air cafe that smells like incense, is playing a lot of smooth jazz Christmas music and the Police, and is crammed with stuffed animals, strange childish paintings, and plastic toys from pretty much every decade. And a beautiful collection of what look like glass bongs, I just now saw.
It's very, very difficult to figure out how to recount the past three weeks, since I really had no time to keep much of journal except for daily reflections that were taken for a grade, which were supposed to detail the connections we were making in the course that resulted from our daily activities. Those do a pretty good job, taken consecutively, about how I felt at any given point or what kinds of things we were doing.
So, first week. October 4- 9. My group (group B) left for Mae Ta, a village northwest of Chiang Mai that is settled into rolling hills and forests. Here we learned from members of the Mae Ta co-op, a program that was set up about 14 years ago to help farmers in Mae Ta switch from chemically intensive monocultures that have been prevalent there to organic subsistence farming, which they can use to feed themselves first and then sell the surplus. Learned so much from this place, especially from my really exceptional host family: Mae and Paw See Wai and their little granddaughter Nong Mai. Della and I lived there with them and had a great time hanging out with Gabe and Ted (who lived next door), trying to hear our Mae (the most soft spoken person on the face of the earth), and "farming" (which consisted of about an hour and a half of planting broccoli seeds, and then hanging out and eating the fruit he brought to us) with our Paw. Oh and playing with Nong Mai and taking spectacular amounts of pictures of her. What struck me was how hungry I was all the time there. It's not that I don't have an appetite in Chiang Mai or other places. I think it was the fact that we were reading about food, hearing about food, planting food, and surrounded by more food than I've ever seen. It was always on the mind. We made dishes with pumpkin, fac keo (a sort of transperant squash), steamed bamboo, bakchoi, rattan, mushrooms, and SO MANY FRUITS. Also, Della and I knocked back like a bucket of sticky rice a night. Unlike in Chiang Mai, where host moms are always shoving bowls and plates in front of you, I think our host parents were actually astounded at how much we could eat. Nong Mai's most oft-used phrase (she's just learning to talk) became "Gin yeu-yeu!!!" (Eat a lot!)
Our host mother, because our names (Della and Emily) are so deviously hard to translate to the Thai tongue, gave us nicknames the second night we were there -- Della became Naam Wan (sweetwater) and I became Naam Som (orange juice). Or better yet, as Nong Mai called us, "Pi Naam Wan and Pi Naam Som" (big sister sweetwater and big sister orange juice).
Here is what I wrote about after a day of exploring agroforests, which actually sums up pretty much what I thought about Mae Ta.....
The food is built into the land, and the people are too, through their histories and migrations. This resounds for me in how Paw Pat described a vacation for us; that it is something uniquely Western and market based, stemming from a world where we take a job we hate to pay for two or three days of a “real” lifestyle. Mae Ta's kind of self sufficient farming is the real lifestyle – a style of actually living. A system based on a person’s link to their labor and food (and therefore, their life) is a crucial part of the establishment of a system of sustainable agriculture. I think I’m learning that a “sabai” lifestyle is not a life insulated from labor but a life in rhythm with it, a life able to plan and sustain and provide, and have everything that you need. I felt like Paw Pat’s farm was giving me a hug.
From Mae Ta we went to the mind-bending ritz and luxury of the Nest, a five-star eco-tourist resort in Chiang Dao, where we had a seminar, watched Food, Inc, and spent pretty ostentatious amounts of money on lots of Thai and non-Thai food. Too bad the pool was shaped like a big penis. You'd think that at least one of the guys in charge of the design would have been like "hey, what if you look at it from above? Or look at it at all?"
The following week, we hiked for two days up into the hilltribes of Northern Thailand, talking to village head-men and taking walks through agroforests and looking at the backyard gardens and catfish ponds and pigpens that people have been using more and more thanks to things like UHDP and The Royal Project. This was some of the best hiking I've ever have the privilege of doing. We were in rainforests one minute, then skidding down a muddy road through rice paddies and into another village, and then in a big open expanse of tangerine or corn fields, and across rivers and next to field of big lumpy cows. Stayed in longhouses, every one of our group of 17 crammed onto sleeping pads and under mosquito nets, on improbable sheets featuring every cartoon character and floral design ever conceived by man. Every village had a bunch of old folks who, when they smiled at you, displayed a set of alarming, dark-red teeth. This is from the Golden Triangle drug of choice, betel nut (which I think is a sign of affluence in lots of places). We asked about it at one tiny little snack shop, and a full set of the betel nut, limestone (which increases the potency), and some other thing called "blamamoo", cost about 30 baht (one dollar), so Taylor Sruba bought some and that night we sat with a wise old Palaung man who taught us how it works, and also taught us a ton of Palaung words....
Ha-mook-doo: Hello/goodbye/thank you
Anyuay: tea
Kapow: bottle
Sai: salt
Salai: bowl
Dakuay Dakuay: Sabai Sabai (the thai phrase for relaxing)
Biaow gun gun: lots of fun!
Then we moved onto UHDP, where we lived in hostel-type dorms and learned about ecology, plant field studies, how to calculate biodiversity and productivity of an area (during which time I had to count hundreds of cruel, spiky rattan and gained a deep hatred of them except that they are delicious in naam prik [spicy paste]), and general things about how to live in Northern Thailand, how to get protein, etc. This, of course, included the pig harvest.
Sometime I'll probably post my reflection about the pig harvest, since it's a famous feature of the Thailand program that everyone at K seems to know and freak out about, or experience apprehension about. The fact that we would have to help slaughter and butcher a pig was never a deal breaker for me, or anything like that, but it was something I really wondered about. It was one of the more intense experiences of my life; let's say that. But valuable, and REALLY interesting.
I loved UHDP for a lot of the same reasons I loved Mae Ta- it was gorgeous, and friendly, and fascinating. And hilarious, in a lot of ways. Example: for the first time ever, I saw a successful execution of the bucket-of-water on a door prank, and a few other choice pranks.
But home again home again jiggity jog. It's been overwhelming to try to keep up with everything now that the Internet is accessible again. In a lot of ways I kind of wish it wasn't, because I feel windswept/crazy in the presence of so much news and technology. Whatever. Chiang Mai is still great; as I said, I've missed it a ton. Last night we rode a pickup truck to a Chiang Mai FC game, which they won, and watched very little of the actual game except for the spectacular displays of showboating and the very-uncomfortable-looking and very scantily clad "cheerleaders," who stumbled around on 6-inch heels and arbitrarily waved pompoms around. It's good to be back. :)
