The Karen Village, Behind the Scenes

So we are back in Chaing Mai again, and it feels great to sleep in a bed, take a hot shower and hang out in civilization. The two weeks in the Karen Village were.....well.....it was what it was I guess. It was two weeks of roller coaster emotions and lots of confusion. We stayed with a family of four that hosts tours like the one we went on a month and a half ago almost every night. So every night there was a new group of tourists that stayed at the house. The children sang every night and we also heard the same jokes every night. The house was simple but spacious. All made out of wood and concrete, with a metal roof. We slept on a concrete floor with a few blankets under us and a few on top. The family was so wonderful to us. The wife, who we called Pi, spoke very limited english but we had a few nights of playing games and bonding and sharing language through books. She was amazing in that she never stopped moving all day. She got up at 6am every morning, cooked breakfast, then went to the school to teach, then came home and did stuff around the house, then cooked again, and then studied by candle light all night. She had headaches all the time from reading in bad light. The husband Saikam spoke pretty good english and was very friendly but was not around that often and when he was he was with a tour. They had two kids a daughter that is about 11 and a son that is 8. They were amazing children. They often had no supervision, especially on weekends. When the parents were gone they would use huge knives to cut fire wood, to make a fire, so they could make themselves and us lunch. Then they would shower on their own and do laundry. They were so good at taking care of themselves but still played like kids at the same time.

We were a little disappointed with the school. There is about 60 students and three class rooms. There are about 6 teachers and most of them speak a little english but it was very hard to communicate with them. When we first arrived we were told that the children were going camping for a boy scout thing and that we could go along but Sky would not be able to teach until the following week. So his teaching time when from a limiting 2 weeks one week which is almost nothing. We went camping and it was fun to learn about all the medicinal plants in the forest and to watch the kids make their own shelters out of branches and tarps. We made an obstacle course for them in the jungle and and basically just sat around and watched for three days not really knowing what was going on because we could not understand what they were saying.

That weekend we wanted to hike somewhere but our host family did not seem very comfortable with that and one day took us to a waterfall but the other day we were just stuck at the house but locked out and all our stuff was inside. They were so strange about things sometimes. We were always locked out when they were gone, they didn't like us walking around and never told us where they were or when they were coming back.

So teaching time finally came around and Monday was a let the kids rest because they just got off a holiday day. Sky got to teach for only a short time. Then Tuesday was Monk Day. I guess it was a half moon that night or something, so we went to the temple to pray that morning for about 20 minutes. The rest of monk day is apparently set the forest on fire day. The kids just ran around raking up leaves and fallen branches and burned whatever they pleased. We didn't really see the point but they had fun. So that day the kids only got a couple hours of class time. Wednesday was sports day. So they run around just playing basically, no organized games, until lunch. Then they eat a big meal, sit in front of a TV for about an hour and then they try to learn. They were all so tired and unmotivated by the time Sky got to teach, and it was really frustrating. Thursday was the most productive day and Sky got some good hours in. Friday just happened to be the one day out of the year that the kids don't write. That's right, no writing at all, but drawing is okay. So all in all it seemed like going to teach in the village was a big waste of time. The other teachers don't make their students stay in the classroom. Many of them tell the students to just study and then start drawing out plans for their new house or whatever they feel like. I really wonder where all the money that is donated to the school goes. It seems to me that they are just lazy. There are kids that are way too young to be in school that hang out in the classrooms as well as kids that have already graduated and just have nothing else to do. There was one student that was deaf and no one made any effort to teach him how to read lips. He could write but he could not talk and when ever anyone talked to him they spoke gibberish or just made sounds like he did. He acted out a lot in class, surprise surprise. Sky even offered to teach extra on the weekend and they couldn't organize it so it never happened. One glimmer of hope though, was one little girl came by on Saturday by herself wanting to learn more. Sky almost shed a tear.

During the week I was sometimes in the classroom helping Sky and the rest of the time I was walking around all three villages mapping with my GPS. The teachers said that they wanted a map of the area and they wanted to know the distances between. This could be used for education or even for something for the tourists to look at when they came to look at the school. So I made them a nice map with the distances between, the perimeters of the villages, the areas, the male to female ratios, # of houses , average # of people per household etc. The teachers loved it, but when I brought it home to show Pi and Saikam they did not like it at all and got mad when Sky showed it to some of the tourists. Why? Those are questions that tourists always ask. Why does it have to be a secret? So strange.

Besides that we did have a good time hanging out with everyone in the village. The older men were the most welcoming and laid back. They shared their home made rice wine with us and one old man even taught us an ancient fighting dance. There was a lady that lived next door that often came by and gave me bananas. The kids where fun to play with. We ate many interesting foods like tadpoles, beetles, fresh water shrimp, pig intestines, and frogs. The frogs where the best. They would put a whole fish that had been fried on your plate so you had to look it in the eye before you took a big bite out of it's face. The head really was the best part. Sometimes I had no idea what I was eating but we always had rice. Rice, rice, rice with every meal. Rice veggies and mystery meat but very little fruit. I was horribly stopped up for the first week and a half.

So, the Karen live really nice lives. They live in a beautiful place and their life is simple yet comfortable. They are not what they seem when you come through as a tourist. They have solar power, TV, motor bikes, cell phones and more money than they want you to believe. They get funding from Canada and I'm sure they make a good amount off of the tourists. They could do a lot more for themselves if they wanted to but they would rather rely on handouts is the conclusion I have come to. They even tried to charge Sky and I 500 baht for the ride up to the village in the back of a pickup truck while they were running errands around town anyway. It seems to be how Thailand goes. Everyone just wants your money. I don't regret staying there at all and I will stay in contact with the friends that we made there. Sky is even thinking about going back for a longer amount of time next year. Maybe to another village though. It was overall a wonderful experience and it saved us a lot of money too.

So now we only have a few days left in Thailand and we are spending them in Chaing Mai and traveling back down to Bangkok. Then it will be on to India which we are thinking might be the real adventure of our trip.

Back to the HIll Tribe

So we said goodbye to Phuket. No more smoky haze, lines and lines of rubber trees, and beautiful white sand beaches covered with tourists. No more gibbons. No more screaming high school students at 8am. No more motor bikes. :) We were there for a month and it felt like we were there for a day.
On our way back up to chaing mai we had the bus drop us off near a national park called Khao Sok. We hitch hiked the rest of the 40kms to the park. It was still a tourist area but was very quiet and peaceful. Ahhhhhhh. We paid to get into the park but we camped for free for two nights. This park is part of the biggest nature reserve in Thailand and is 160 million years old. It was said by some scientist to be older and more diverse than the amazon. It looked old with big trees, birds everywhere and vines covering everything. It had wild elephants, tigers, bears, deer, gibbons, monkeys, all kinds of snakes and over 150 different species of birds. Skyler and I took a hike the day that we spent there. We hiked up the side of the main mountain and found a good place to swim in a river all by ourselves. We tried to go off the beaten trail a few times but could never get very far. It was thick and well, you know, there were tigers around. Out of all the amazing wildlife that was there we got to see some lizards, spiders, mosquitoes, birds and some beautiful butterflies. No tigers or elephants but I'm sure that only few are so lucky. The forest was so wonderful just to walk around in. It was very refreshing to get away from the crowded tourist spots and big cities. There was a little town right outside the park for food and drinks. The first night Sky and I hung out at the Spirit Bar which was just a camp fire and a tiny stand selling drinks. The guy who owned it also made money giving tourists dread locks. It was fun and very interesting to hang out with a thai hippy crowd. There were also many Germans around. It seemed like anyone else that was white was German.
The day that we left we needed some money and the ATM was out of cash. We needed money for the bus to get to Sarat Thani because we had already bought train tickets all the way to Chaing Mai. We had a mini panic moment and we were asking around at what our options were and some nice thai lady at a mini mart just gave us the money that we needed to get to Sarat Thani. We had no way to repay her but she just gave us her card to say, send me business. It was so nice of her. So we got to Sarat thani and got on our train okay which was a sleeper. Very nice way to travel. Then at 3am the train stopped and everyone started getting off. We were confused until an english speaking thai man told us that a train in front of us had gone off the tracks and we had to get off and catch a bus the rest of the way to Bangkok. So we got off and waited, and waited. Another train pulled up with another load of people needing to be bussed to Bangkok. We had a train to catch to Chaing Mai at 8:30 so we started to get a little worried that we wouldn't make it. Then finally one bus showed up. Suddenly there was a mob of people all running towards the bus. So Sky and I started laughing and ran as well because we knew that we needed to be on that bus to catch our next train. There was young men pushing old ladies out of the way and I caught and old thai lady by the backpack who almost fell backwards out of the door. It was so hilarious, but we pushed out way through and got on. The way sky explained it was, " It was like we were all starving dogs and a bus full of bacon drove up." We got to our train with 15 minutes to spare. It was a long two days of travel.
So now we are in Chaing Mai again. Ahhhhhh, the first hot shower in over a month was the best thing ever. This evening we are getting picked up by a man who lives in the Karen Village that we went to over a month ago. We are going to stay with them for 2 weeks. They said they have a house for us to stay in and that they will feed us while we are there. Skyler is going to teach english and I'm, ah, going to help him i guess and just help out with daily chores that they do around the village. I don't really know what to expect but I'm excited to learn from them. I won't really be able to talk to anyone but I hope that they will show me how they farm and how they make their clothes and how they cook. There will be no Internet or cell phone service so I will be unreachable for two weeks. Don't worry to those of you that might, mother, we are going to be with good people and they have transportation into town if anything happens. So, I will tell you all about it when I get back. Sawatdee Ka!