'Tis The Season!

I missed Christmas in the States....but it seems I came to Thailand just in time for a couple of masssssssive New Years festivals! I'll talkabout one this blog and another the next blog.....but first:

The Migrant hide-out
A week and a half ago I went on a short walk by myself. This wouldn’t be blog-worthy material except for what – more accurately, who – greeted me when I came home. In the twenty minutes or so that I was gone, four illegal migrants had come to our house to hide from the police who were doing a routine search for illegals. The only member of the family who was home apart from Flora was Me Meh, the three year old. Flora said she felt like she should comfort Me Meh but quickly realized that the child was in no distress whatsoever…..police raids are a part of life.
We spent the afternoon talking to one of the women (Maung-Hla’s niece as it turns out) who has fairly good English. We didn’t really know what to do about lunch since Maung-Hla had told us to fry the eggs ourselves and eat the curry he had left for us but we didn’t think there would be enough for everyone. Eventually our hunger got the best of us, so we moved toward the kitchen (which is in a separate building/structure). Immediately, a couple of the people in hiding left their hide-outs to help us prepare lunch! Ah! Hospitality will drive you mad sometimes. We’ve asserted ourselves enough with Maung-Hla’s family to be able to wash our own dishes…..but our new friends were NOT going to have that. She ripped that scrub-brush from my clutches!
When Maung-Hla came home he poked his head in to our room to say hi. I told him he had some “friends over” and pointed to the room adjacent to ours that was in total darkness. Without a pause or any insinuation of surprise he said, “How many friends?” and went over to talk to them. They may have come to Maung-Hla’s house for any of a variety of reasons– it’s at the end of the road, his family is a bit better off than most in the neighborhood, he has been in Thailand for many years and has a clean record….but in the end, it was more proof that he is a community leader.

Huay Pe Keng New Year’s
At some point you have probably seen pictures or read stories about the “Long-neck” people – the people who wear gold rings around their necks and below their knees. They are the Kaya people from Karenni state in Burma but many have fled persecution there and settled in Thailand. When most Burmese enter Thailand, they are sent to refugee camps and held there in a permanent limbo state for years, never knowing their future, not able to go backwards or forwards. The Thai government saw an opportunity to earn big tourism bucks with Kaya people because of their cultural practice of wearing neck rings. The result? Kaya people can choose to remain in the refugee camps where conditions are atrocious but they still have a hope of getting out at some point. (Out when or to where they do not know). Or, alternately, Kaya people can opt to forfeit their refugee status and move into one of many villages set up for them by the Thai government. Conditions in these villages are better than in the camps, but the villagers are not allowed to leave, and have hardly any way to change their impoverished condition. The Thai government keeps all of the money earned by tourism except when tourists buy souvenirs directly from the villagers (their only source of income). Some of these villages are like human zoos – people come and stare at the Kaya women’s necks, snap pictures, and leave, never learning their story.
Flora first visited Huay Pe Keng village about two months ago with a group of people connected with NGOs in the area and sent many of you an email about her experience. We had a similar opportunity to visit the village as guests for the most important holiday in their culture (a New Years celebration). People from the three Kaya villages in the Mae Hong Son area as well as in the camps come together each year (rotating the meeting place between the four). Maung-Maung, our boss from the EMFS, told us on Monday night that we should skip class on Tuesday and instead spend the night with someone who’s connected to the EMFS and lives in Huay Pe Keng. The next afternoon we drove to the village, motorbike caravan style, with one of our students (Hon Bil).
After the pleasant but awkward meet and greet with the woman (Lay Lay Wha) who graciously took us in, we headed to the village field for a massive volleyball tournament. We saw a boys game first and they are GOOD. It’s a pity American men don’t usually play volleyball; it’s such an athletic and exciting sport! The real excitement, though, was watching the young women play some scrappy and fierce volleyball with a good stock of fans cheering them on. Most played with their rings on (they can take the rings off if they want to). They were also barefoot which was particularly impressive given the hard-packed earth and rock mix they were playing on. The crowd was rapt and, best of all, the young women were completely serious about their game; they didn’t for a second try to be “feminine” by not giving it their all. Some of them are gifted players! The Kaya in the villages and the refugees in the camps are all obsessed with volleyball. It’s an excellent outlet for young men who have been stripped of their bread-winning status and feel aimless.
The games continued, but Flora and I decided to take a little tour of the village before dinner time. When most tourists get off the river-crossing boat and arrive in Huay Pe Keng, they don’t venture far. People are selling their wares along one main path (bracelets, post-cards, elephant or neck-ringed women figurines, clothe bags….) and that seems to be enough for the average tourist. If you journey 350 meters past the first village along a carefully marked path, you enter the “New Village”. Apparently most tourists aren’t fit enough for that big trek because the New Village gets a fraction of the tourist traffic of the Old village. The Thai government created the New Village in 2007 and promised that people who moved there from the Old Village or elsewhere would have better facilities, conditions, etc. It is fair to say that they have NOT delivered. People in this village are even more impoverished than their Old Village counterparts – outhouses are poorly located, food is scarce. Flora stayed here when she visited two months ago.
The music and dance festivities were supposed to begin at 8pm, but this isn’t America so the timetable didn’t rule supreme. In the interim hours, we met some hilarious Evergreen State college students who we’ve run into several times in MHS (they’re here on a semester program). We were given food by yet more friendly locals and had to eat; hospitality in both directions trumps all.
The festivities (an elaborate dance competition) got underway at about 10:30 and were pretty fantastic. Pictures do justice better than words here. Dance groups from each village did performances decked out in their colorful cultural dress which includes vibrant head-bands. There was plenty of painfully loud music and crowd support and I felt utterly blessed to be a part of the whole thing.
A word on the rings…One legend goes that the woman began wearing the rings to protect their necks from tigers. Girls begin wearing the rings when they are about five years old and add three as often as they can, depending on how fast they grow. It’s considered desirable to peek at about 25 rings. The rings are undeniably bad for the health of women who wear them; their collar bones are crushed, their backs permanently arched in old age, and their overall life expectancy is decreased by seven years. In recent years, some women have chosen not to wear the rings. Muby, a woman we know through work in Mae Hong Son, is one of the most feminist, forward-thinking women you’ll ever meet. She chose to take off her rings years ago partly because it is easier in the workplace and partly because she doesn’t think she should have to do that to her body because she is a woman. Still, she has total respect for the women who still wear the rings. Not only is it an engrained and ancient part of their culture, but the rings are now the only source of their income in the villages. Western outsiders can inform the women of the medical dangers of wearing the rings, but the practice is not ours to judge.
The next morning was the big ceremony! Naturally it started a couple hours late, so I had time to wander around with a friendly Dutchwoman anthropologist who I had met the night before. The main idea to the ceremony is the raising of a big pole (about 35 feet tall) that represents the first tree. Poles from previous years are all in the same area – in a clearing on the top of a small hill. Before anything got underway, over a hundred young men (women aren’t allowed up there) danced around this configuration of giant poles for a couple of hours, playing music…..gongs, cymbals, drums – solid rhythm, really fun to listen to! Eventually, each village brought out a chicken and asked it questions about their fortune for the coming year. Meanwhile, the shamans blessed the pole and then the men began raising the pole…..it took over a hundred men and A LOT of muscle power/rope leverage! Once the pole was raised and secured – music and dance continuing all the while – someone from each village sacrificed the chicken. They then stuck small sticks in the thighbones of the chickens and the shamans read the fortunes of their villages based on which direction the bones tipped. Three of four fortunes were quite good – the New Village is supposed to get more visitors in the coming year….I sure hope so. One of the villages, however, had quite a bad fortune, so people were pretty upset.
The rest of the day was free-for-all socializing time! Our friend from Mae Hong Son, Muby, took us to half a dozen homes of her friends and family members to meet and be offered more food than we could possibly handle (or should possibly take form these impoverished families). Because it’s the New Year, it’s customary to go around saying hello to everyone in your village. The young men were still dancing, but at this point, winding their way through town, having water thrown on them.
It was an absolutely fantastic 24 hours……I felt very fortunate to be there, and proud to be involved with the EMFS. This was all on the 8th and 9th of April. Since then, the New Years festival for greater Southeast Asia has taken place – more on THAT next time! This is already preposterously long.

Love to you all! (Don’t be shy about leaving comments….it’s fun to know if you’re reading.)
~Alice