Cultural Experiences in a Thai Village - Part 2

For those who have not read the first of these postings, here’s the link, Cultural Experiences in a Thai Village - Part 1, or, here’s a brief background which might be helpful in understanding this blog. It’s about an aspect of my experience from last February, when I located myself in a collection of small villages in north-eastern Thailand, close to the Laos border. I was there to study culture, to see what I could learn about a community and the worldviews of the people within it by just, basically, hanging out, for a short period of time, in this case about a week and a half. It was a great experience, with a variety of learning for me. I chat about some of what I experienced in terms of others’ impressions of me and how that affected my experience in my first posting on this topic. In this one, I’m sharing some of what I learned about a most unexpected area of these peoples’ existence, something I thought would be of interest to anyone, really, interested in the human condition.

This learning evolved from a series of conversations I had with my host about the economic situation in the communities, land and property ownership, marital processes, and a few other topics. Gradually more came out, and a greater understanding was gained. Let me see if I can summarize it here, without being too assuming. What one would likely “see”, as an outsider, of this, if one were observant, would be the interesting demographics present in the communities during my stay. There were virtually no men or women, other than the school teachers, between the ages of about 16 or 18 and, oh, about 35 or so, in the area. There were, however, many children, and some people over 40, and some elderly individuals. I was a bit curious about who was looking after all those children, well, apparently, they kind of look after themselves. At least insofar as living arrangements. Apparently (I did not go wandering into the houses at night to count heads) the kids hang out in whatever houses suit them, by themselves, during the non-rice harvesting season. Breakfasts are kind of, sometimes, provided by elderly individuals. Lunches, as I saw, are provided at the schools and the preschool. I have no idea what happens with dinner. The kids show up at school as they show up. Older kids help out with the younger one (this I noted). Family structure appeared to be fairly loose, meaning, kids moved from one base household to another rather fluidly. My hosts had a couple of “children” of their own who, um, just, well, showed up one day and so they, my hosts, allowed them space in one of their shelters, shared in the food, and called them their children. Adult partnerships also appeared to be fairly fluid. Even when a partnership has been acknowledged, it was expected for the woman at least to have at least one other boyfriend. I don’t know what the expectations are for the men. In terms of land and house ownership, the women appeared to dominate. According to my host they held the ownership of the majority, and the biggest, properties and houses. This was because their off season work was so much more lucrative than the men’s. Which brings us to where all these young men and women were during the period I was visiting…

Apparently, during the off-rice season, all reasonably responsible young men and women of the community leave the community to engage in work elsewhere, sending back a portion of what they earn to be used by the community, supporting all those children, some of whom I would guess are theirs. The men generally head to Bangkok, the women to Phuket, that wonderful cesspot of human sexual activity, where they make their relative fortunes. In pursuing this the women are incredibly well organized. When the time is approaching for them to head out of the communities they send a delegate to Phuket. This woman will scope out the bars, set up arrangements with the owners, and find a place for all the women to stay. Once this is done she is joined by the remaining women and they go to work. They pool their money and every now and then send someone back home to deliver it to the community. They do also apparently keep some for themselves, because they use that to make their housing purchases. They typically do quite well and are able to, through this approach to income, not only provide for their families and community in the immediate time, but also save enough to purchase a very nice, by local standards, accommodation, to provide for their future.

I was at the same time fascinated, awestruck, and horrified by this situation. These women, these people, have very little opportunity for advancement, and their living conditions are undesireable. They are very poor. There are government restrictions on what they can do, for example, nobody local is permitted to own a power saw, a restriction which effectively prevents the locals from expanding their income to include the use of other locally available resources. Their education is not the best, so income requiring education is inaccessible. They are of a minority that is not well regarded, so there is discrimination. They know what else is out there, and I am guessing they would like some of it. But how? Well, there is this huge demand for women in Phuket, which is, now that there’s a road, accessible by bus. So. Get together, organise a way to supply that demand, and you have a way out. It is impressive, what they have done. They have worked together, they are providing for their basic needs. Imagine what they would be able to do if they were allowed the opportunity to put that initiative and business sense to another area, I don’t know, maybe building a business with a little less personal cost and more ownership than the one in which they are engaging, or managing some company’s finances, or something! They would conquer mountains. That’s what leaves me awestruck. Minimal education, minimal resources, yet they work together, and they accomplish really a miracle, raising their entire community up. What horrified me of course is the cost that is being required, of them, of the community, of the children who are raised outside the presence of the entire generation of their parents. The robbing of the opportunity to form intimate relationships. And… the loss of opportunity, for the betterment of everyone. With the risk of sounding like a child myself, it’s not fair!

I am glad I had the opportunity to have this experience, to visit this area that has produced these remarkable people, to hear a little of their stories. To experience dealing with preconceptions and assumptions about myself, to see people struggle to place me in something familiar, and known to them, and to have to work within the restrictions and difficulties that imposed. At the same time, I am glad I didn’t have to stay, that I didn’t need to watch as those young children, particularly the girls, grow, develop, and likely follow the most logical path for them. So I return home with a greater understanding, of many things, an appreciation for making the best of things, and a much increased appreciation of the spider web of contributing factors that can reach in and manipulate a young person’s future in a far off and relatively remote region of the world. Thank-you, to those who let me in, who allowed me to increase my understanding and experiences in this way. I hope I am able to use this understanding and experience in a positive fashion, to better the experiences of others, increase mutual understanding, and contribute to the improvement of the human condition.

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

Cultural Experiences in a Thai Village - Part 1

Wow. Time passes so quickly.  I can’t believe it’s August and almost 6 months since the experience about which I am going to write. Or that it’s been over a year since I wrote last on this blog, oh dear.

One of my interests, and the focus of my graduate degree, is in relations between groups of people of differing cultural backgrounds.  With growing populations, transportation abilities, and resultant demand for resources not necessarily found in all locations on this planet of ours it is becoming increasingly necessary for groups of increasingly varied worldviews to interact.  This variety in worldviews causes difficulties in agreement on how to proceed not only because of differences in objectives, but also because of differences in the processes of how to interact and how to interpret the interactive behaviours in which people engage.  This is where my interest is, hoping that easing some of those communication difficulties will result in increased likelihood of success in addressing the other differences so that a globally communal path forward can be discerned.   In the interests of increasing my education in this area I arranged for myself to locate in a community of rural housing collections in north-east Thailand for a short period (a week and a half) to see what I could learn about various cultural aspects of a community of relevance to inter-community interaction via in situ observation.  This was an engaging experience, and I learned many things.  I have chosen two to write about now, one which was rather entertaining on the experiences I had there of dealing with the local peoples’ preconceptions about me, and how this affected my ability to engage in my purpose, and another which came up quite unexpectedly and brought quite to the fore how worldwide issues can reach in and affect the lives of individuals so very far away….

I originally wrote about these in one singular blog, but this ended up being rather lengthy.  So I have split them into two.  This posting is on the first topic, that of how the pre-existing perceptions of a local community can influence a visitor’s experience. 

It was February, and I had arranged for myself to set down in a collection of small rural villages in eastern Thailand, Isan territory, near the border with Laos, to observe, well, culture. As mentioned, my more focused objective was to see how much I could learn about a community’s orientation on certain cultural characteristics of impact in interactions between different cultural groups in a relatively short time, (one to two weeks), through observation from within the community. I had chosen the location I had because… access was easy, safety was good, the culture was reputed to be somewhat different from the majority Thai culture and thus unfamiliar to me, the culture was neither forbidden nor forced, the residents had not been existing in isolation from the world population, there would be a language barrier, and there was lodging within the community. With all that in mind I had “spoken” with several potential homestay hosts about my goals (to see how people in the area interacted with each other), chosen the one I had, reserved myself a spot and voila!, there I was arriving at the closest airport on a nice sunny day in February. I stayed for just over one week, and the experience most certainly would be termed a success in that I learned much about what I had set out to learn about. It could also be termed a success in just generally increasing my experiential knowledge base on the human condition and matters of relevance when one is attempting to engage in observational research. It is because of this usefulness towards a general understanding of the realities of the human condition that my experience provided that I am writing about it here, I am hoping that through the sharing of my experiences I will also help in that expansion in others, by making a little more real, more concrete, perhaps, some of the experiences that can be encountered in the field, as well as the realities of the implications of some of those terms, like human trafficking and sex trade, poverty, and education, that those concerned with the human condition bandy around so casually.

Okay. So. Starting with the “experiences in the field” portion, lol. First thing, I arrive at the airport closest to where I will be staying, which was about an hour and a half drive from where I will be staying. Here I am to be greeted by my hosts and then driven to their “farm”. All goes well, we meet up, and the woman, who is Thai, is effusive in her welcome, stringing some flowers around my neck and making me feel as though I have arrived in Hawaii. Minus the lush vegetation that is, this region of Thailand is very dry, or at least it is in February. It is also a rice growing area, and very flat. And since this is not rice growing season, it is brown. But otherwise, the greeting had me thinking of Hawaii. I had communicated with my hostess before arriving, and her English seemed quite good. But that is written English, and of course it is difficult to tell the level of comprehension that somebody on the other side of the world is getting from e-mails. It turns out that her verbal English is a bit rough, but thankfully still not too bad, and basic communication was possible. My Thai is pretty much non-existent, so we were dependent upon her knowledge of English for our communication. Her husband was an expat, from an English speaking country, so his English was quite good and therefore our potential for communication was good, but…. well, their situation was not what I had been led to believe, or perhaps it had just recently changed. They were no longer a pair. Although he was still involved in the running of the “farm”, and in helping out around the place, and with the homestay. The pairing up and separating processes appeared to be a bit different in their region certainly than what it is for us back home, and possibly a little different from other regions in Thailand that I have been. Pairing up in ways that are official to the community, but not to the larger legal Thai system, appeared to be the norm there. And so unpairing was also done through the community. From what was related to me by the husband this involved a community gathering where responsibilities, continuing obligations, rights, as well as position within and responsibilities towards the community, were discussed at a communal level, continuing until some sort of resolution was met, and then, well, life continued on as per the decided upon path. Which apparently meant that the ex-husband was still was involved in the homestay, and some other things, but I don’t believe he lived there anymore, and he and my hostess were certainly no longer a pair.

As we drive along from the airport and I process the reality that my only real English speaking contact (the ex-husband) wasn’t actually going to be around for my purposes I somehow amazingly start to relax, gazing out at the romantic, in a sepia-tone sort of way, rice field scenery. I perk up when I am told we are approaching the farm, only to be thrown completely off-kilter by the huge, um, sign(?) at the entrance, which is on the main road to the villages and thus in a location where everybody in the area would see it. My hostess quite proudly pointed out this sign, explaining this is why she wanted a photo of me before I arrived. Oh dear. Her “surprise” is a HUGE, like, 5ft x 8 ft, poster with a head shot of me above photo-shopped in images of U.S. bills and the words “Welcome Erika” up top and “Thank-you Very Much” over the bills. Oh awesome. I am Canadian, did I mention that? And, although it is of course dangerous to generalize, like many Canadians I am highly averse to being the center of attention. Further, I definitely did not want to appear as though I was some sort of money Goddess, or that my purpose in being was to bring money to poor destitute people, geez. But, regardless of my personal hang-ups, I was quite effectively being advertised to all who passed as the white money bringer, lol, and American to boot. Given that I was the only Caucasian within quite a distance of these villages it would be difficult for anybody to miss the association between myself and the woman on the sign, so this was something I was going to be stuck with. My hostess appeared quite pleased with her, um, gift, of the poster and welcome, so I smiled and exhibited thanks, keeping my consternation tucked safely away, attempting to reassure myself that, really, I could manage working through the impression of me that this had undoubtedly set with the locals before I even had a chance to meet any of them…..

Aside from the money poster my presence appeared to cause some confusion amongst my hostess and potentially at least some of the local community as they attempted to place me into some identifiable, and I suppose familiar, category. The stereotypes of Caucasian females in Thailand typically include young party-ers, shoppers, or volunteer teachers. I’m too old to be a young party-er, and I certainly don’t present that way with my “protect all parts of my incredibly sunburn vulnerable skin from the sun” clothing, so that left shopper or volunteer teacher. My hostess assigned her sister, who had married an Italian and was back home visiting, to be my “guide”, because apparently living in Italy meant that she would have fantastic English. She didn’t, of course. Perhaps she had fantastic Italian, but as I don’t speak Italian that wasn’t very helpful for our communications. Anyways, I don’t know what she actually thought about being stuck with me, but she didn’t present as being too impressed with the situation. I joined the family on a trip to the city early in my visit, the sister came along also, and although I hadn’t realized it when we left (I had thought the husband was going to show me around), she was assigned as my tour guide for the excursion. Once we arrived my hostess went to get her hair done, her ex-husband was heading off to go get some supplies for the farm (which was supposed to include the cable to get my internet re-hooked up, the previous cable had been run into by somebody else’s truck a few weeks earlier and had yet to be replaced, but, lol, that one got forgotten), and I was dumped at the side of the road with the visiting sister (this was when I discovered she was to be my guide/babysitter). As I had not been intending to do any touring of city, and I had been told by the husband that he would show me around, I had not done any research on what there was to see. So when the sister and I were dumped at the side of the road and she turned to me and asked what see? I really had nothing to offer. I asked her if she had any suggestions, she suggested the market. I have seen many, many markets, and I really wasn’t interested in shopping, so, remembering vaguely that the city was supposed to be on the river, I asked about seeing the river. Much to my relief, this was possible, and, after stopping in one of those ultra-convenient 7-11’s to pick up some junk food and drinks, we set out to, sigh, the wonderful Mekong (I have written one post on my love affair with this river so far on my general travelling blog, in case anyone is interested - Visions of the Mekong - in theory there will be more written on this in time, lol). On the way I noticed a temple, and asked if we could go in there. My guide looked incredibly surprised, as though why would I want to do that?, but accommodated me, which was nice. And then we moved onwards to the river. Which was beautiful, of course.  Unfortunately that experience didn’t take all that long. I could have happily sat there all afternoon but my guide was getting a little impatient, so, off we headed to the market where she picked up a few things and I got to see the woman sleeping on the table with her hogs’ feet and heads for sale. That was different. After that I got a most interesting tour of the city as my guide attempted to find her sister’s hair stylist. We were sooooooo lost. And my guide appeared to have the most interesting impressions of me. She strode off at this incredibly quick pace, well ahead of me, never looking back. I had to stop to put on some sunscreen at some point, and I almost lost her. The only time she slowed was to cross a street, I’m guessing that perhaps tourists have established a reputation as being incapable of crossing the street, understandable, actually, street crossing in Asia can be a rather wild experience, but I’ve done quite a bit of that and am quite capable now, particularly in as relatively quiet a place as this was, but, this may not be the norm and perhaps her sister had stressed that she wished me returned alive, because whenever a street was due to be crossed my guide would reappear, forcefully grab my forearm, and, um, guide, me across the street. Then my forearm would be freed and my guide would be off, well ahead of me, down the street, with me following like some little lost puppy. Hilarious. As we wandered around my guide made several more attempts to get me interested in shopping, but I wasn’t biting. I’m just not a shopper. Which I think rather confused her, but she did appear to get the message, because she dropped the shopping push the next time we went out instead switching to…..

Volunteer teaching. Yes, I wanted to get into the schools. To observe though, not to teach. I wanted to see how these particular Thais taught, how they organized their classrooms, how they and the students interacted. This is much easier if I am not actively teaching. It’s also much easier if there is actually a teacher there, which, unfortunately, turned out to be a situation which was rather difficult to accomplish. Apparently the preconception of visiting females as wanting to teach was rather pervasive in this area. And even with my repeated explanations, demonstrations, whatever, that I wanted to watch, not teach, well, that message didn’t seem to be getting across. I was not brought to one single classroom where the teacher actually stayed in the class. Not even with the preschool. In each and every situation when there was a teacher in the class to begin with the teacher expressed happiness to see me (which was nice), we did some friendly pantomime communicating, I showed pictures, they showed me the classroom, ending in the English language area, and then, they left. So I did a bunch of singing games, counting games, clapping games, pictures showing, because, well, the kids were all looking at me and I would have felt bad just leaving. Besides, they were cute, lol. And I got to see how they interacted with me, and each other, and what their expectations were from a teacher. But it wasn’t what I set out to do. And it did bring forth some of the challenges that can come up as a result of other peoples’ ideas of what a person “should” be.

After my bouts with the primary and preschools, I asked my “guide” if she could show me around the bigger town a little bit. I was interested in visiting the bigger temple and was unsure of the appropriate process for doing that. By that time I think my guide had placed me in the “volunteer teacher” category, as her idea of showing me the bigger town apparently was to take me to the high school, search out a teacher, and then introduce me as the person who would be coming in to help teach. Ikes! I think I managed to communicate, without causing embarrassment to my hostess, that, oh, now, I was leaving soon and although that was a lovely idea would be unable to engage in that, but I enjoyed very much chatting with her and seeing her classroom, and, yes, meeting the student who had been wandering the halls and so they had brought in was wonderful too…..

Sigh, so, learning take-aways from these experiences….

• Flexibility is a requirement. Do not expect, or in any way be dependent upon, things to go as you understand they are supposed to, and be ready to change mid-stream, end of stream, or beginning of stream, to adjust to what is, not what was supposed to be.
• Leave your insecurities about judgements and assumptions made towards you at home. Watch for generalized assumptions, appreciate where any you recognize might have sourced from and why they might exist, recognize they are not personal, refuse to take insult when they are applied to you, and work through them. The people in the area you enter will probably have some preconceived notions of you. Do not ignore them, this will only heighten their impact, but don’t take insult either. Acknowledge and appreciate the impact these may have on your existence and your work, and work through them, with them, or whatever is most helpful to the situation, and DO NOT take it personally.
• Bring your sense of humour with you. It’s essential to your sanity.

And now on to the next type of learning I did, which touched me on a far deeper level…