“I can back up here?” Sister Ning asks the proprietor of the restaurant we are going to for breakfast. I almost don’t believe my ears. Is she really asking to back up? We are in the road circling the inside of Chiang Mai’s old city wall; another street circles the other direction on the outside of the moat. In China, you would never ask this question. You could back up on the freeway if you feel like it. They have stop signs here, the familiar red octagon but they say ‘หยุด’ instead of ‘stop.’ You get some nosing in, but it is not the same. The first time I came to Thailand, the traffic was the worst I had ever seen, but this time it is a welcome change. The power lines here are ten times worse. In china, post will have three or four large wires strung on it. Here there are hoards of black coated wire hung on every post, and if need power somewhere else, just through another wire up. As we drive about the city and also into the country side, the roads and fields are by no means clean, but not nearly as littered. Trash cans aren’t as hard to find either. In the Chinese markets, standard procedure is the throw the trash into the aisle and the sweeper takes it away. Still I don’t know if the relative cleanliness is due to an effort to be cleaner or the lower density of people here.
I am surprised at the relatively good standard of living of a number of the members here. Brother Muu and his wife have recently married and opened up a tutoring service in their town about 50 km from Chiang Mai. He just started selling smoothies on the side. Drink and snack stands are very common here, but I can’t imagine that they are extremely lucrative. Brother bird lives with his wife, kid, parents, and siblings. His dad has sold coconut milk and curry paste at a local market for years. It seems that everyone takes turns in husking and shelling the coconuts, grinding and squeezing the milk, and grinding the spices to make the paste. This occupation seems to support the household, and bird has a car. Po Muen in Udorn farms a field and his wife sells insurance and they own a truck and recently refinished a lot of their house. Granted refinishing a house in Thailand is quite different than other places. It includes filling in more dirt, pouring concrete, building a few brick walls, and laying tile floor, as well as maybe some carpentry for the upper portion of the house. Still, these differences don’t seem to match up. Many of the people I work with are engineers, what should be a relatively high paying job, and only dream of owning their own car. China, a much more industrialized country ought to have a higher standard of living. The only explanation is that a serious trade deficit has increased the scarcity of goods in the country producing them, thus lowering the standard of living.
Thursday night I catch an night bus to Udorn where I take a Tuk-Tuk, Thailand’s three wheel motorcycle contraptions with a covered back, to Ban Sam Praw, where Pa Muen lives. It is out of the city probably almost ten kilometers and is an agriculture and service community. It has two Wads, a School, some government buildings, and probably at least 800 houses. I stop in front of a gas station where an old lady has a little shack with three fifty five gallon drums with a pump. A motor cycle pulls up; she cranks the pump which fills a small tall glass drum with delineations on it. She then lets out the amount of fuel they want to buy, the drive away and in not long another motorcycle pulls up. The street is busy as people bring kids to the school. The grade school children wear pink and purple bolo shirt uniforms and the middle and high school students wear uniform that look much more like Girl and Boy Scout uniforms. There are several buildings for the different grades but they are all in the same perimeter. The school is a long building, two stories with a masonry first floor, wood second floor and a tin roof. This is an older traditional style of building, many of the new schools are up two four floors, all made of cement, and with external walk ways. I walk around for a while looking for Pa Muen’s house but can’t find it so I call him and he comes out to pick me up on a pink scooter. We go to his house. He is just getting ready so he showers and with a tank of Ganyaa as she went to Bangkok to receive an award and some training on insurance. She asked her sister Lak to look after me it seems. She is from a different province but up visiting. I tell her some about the church and she seems interested. She has gone to a catholic church a time or two and says she is very afraid of death. I get her phone number to give to the Elders in Surin. We decide to try to go visit Sister Jan and Brother BanyaPon. The live on their farm out a few more miles, so we get in his truck and drive out. On the way we happen upon Pa Brichaa and Ma Ning. They are directing large dump trucks that are coming on and off the road where they are dumping. Pa Birchaa has a business hauling dirt and building up land. This is a very common construction practice in the East of Thailand where the land is very flat and prone to flood. They will build up a site about 6-10 feet, usually to the height of the road, and then let it sit for a few years before building. Before the advent of dump trucks and cheap transportation they would deal with the flooding problem by building in stilts, and many still do. The house is elevated about eight feet off the ground. They will place a bamboo platform that elevates people about a foot off the ground and sit on it to eat, visit, or rest. Pa Brichaa owns two trucks, a tractor, and also rents additional trucks when needed. He serves as the branch president now. We visit a while, then head farther out. When we get to Ma Jan’s house, no one is in the old house where grandpa and grandma live or the new style house where they live. We can see someone out on a Kubota tractor tilling the field. Tractors getting more common; initially all tilling was done with water buffalo, then the large walk behind paddle wheel ‘iron buffalo’ were introduced. The buffalo is still commonly used. As I travel between provinces in the large open tracts of rice patties I see a good number of water buffalo. The ‘iron buffalo’ is also common; I even see them on the streets in China. It seems like the number of tractor stores have increased significantly since my last trip. We yell for a while and hear Ma Jan answer and walk out to meet here. Here fields are all lined with a slender tree she says they can sell to make paper pulp. We talk for a while they agree to go to lunch. Pa Brichaa treats us all to lunch at a Nam Nueng store, one of their favorite Vietnamese dishes. As I drive around with Pa Muen, he talks and talks, he tells me about the woes of his wild kids, his sickly childhood, and his expectations for life. He says as a kid they would plant and harvest rice, and then scour the fields and forests for fish, frogs, snakes, and edible vegetables. He really didn’t expect to do much differently and married Ma Ganyaa, whose family had a fair amount of land. He does farm, but life for his kids is quite different. They don’t really know how to work, don’t value what they have, and don’t listen to their parents. This expectation probably would have been valid a hundred or even fifty years ago, but life has changed significantly. They maintain a good standard of living by the insurance income Ma Ganyaa brings in.
The next day I head to Srisaket, a town much smaller in the south part of eastern Thailand. I stay at the house of Pa Tawansag and Ma Pratib. They have both been teachers, they are both 58 now, he has retired early and she is will retire in two years. When I meet Ma Pratib, we Way, the traditional greeting. When I meet Po Tawansag we also Way, then he gives me big hug. I experienced the same when leaving Udorn. I don’t know if this awkwardness with hugging women is a Thai culture or remnant of missionary culture. Pa and Ma live in nice masonry house; there are a good amount of people who do. Some of those who live behind the nearby live in houses scarcely better than shacks. Sunday afternoon we have a while to talk so I ask Pa some questions particularly about the structure of grandparents raising the grandkids. This is quite common. Pa and Ma have the kids during the week and send them to school while the parents are working in the country side. In Udorn, Pa Daeng and Ma Muu do the same, though it seems that the parents are living in Bangkok professional work. I ask him why. It is out of necessity; the parents are occupied with providing for the family, so the children are left with the grandparents at home. The parents are primarily responsible for providing for children and parents and grandparents do the majority of child rearing. It seems that in many cases this is necessary, but in some it seems to be a remnant of culture. There are also plenty of parents raising their own children.
I stay the night at Pa Tawansag’s. They try to offer their bed to me and are going to sleep in the other room. It almost takes an argument to get them to let me sleep on a mattress on the floor.
At church the next day I talk to Brother SomGriad, the former branch president. I runs a small computer business. I initially studied art but taught himself about computers. He asks me about my new phone, if it has apps for the scriptures. He is very anxious for scriptures in Thai on a handheld phone. I ask him about the challenges of building a branch here. Since I left, they have built a beautiful building, but still only have about 80 members regularly attending, the same as we had meeting the rented row houses. Yet there are a number of new faces, and some that are families, strong in leadership positions. I ask him if it has to do with the economy. In the past five years, this branch has had at least five strong young people serve missions, some here and some in the US, only one is still here. As young adults, the church puts a very high emphasis on education, and many follow. On missions many learn English. Getting an education can be done in the same city as most have universities, but the challenge comes at finding work. The economy is almost entirely agricultural and supporting service. There are some good jobs in government, teaching, etc, but that can also prove difficult when not Buddhist. Brother SomGriad says that the industrial zones have been limited to near Bangkok as shipping costs are prohibitive. I don’t know if this is really true.
That night I go to Lopburi, my first area and meet up with Brother Am and his Sister Im. He takes me to visit a few members. We go to see Brother Bunchuu. He has been for about 8 years, so about 2 years before I got there. This man wakes up every morning at about 3 am to go to the market, buy fruits, come back to his one room concrete house where he peals the fruit and makes ice cream. He sends his 10 year old daughter and 13 year old son to school, then comes back, finishes preparing and leaves the house around 9:30 to drive his cart around town selling his food. He usually finishes about 4:00 pm. He comes back and does it again. He invited me to family home evening at his house that night. He has served as the Elder’s quorum president for five years or so and saves enough to travel to the Hong Kong temple. He raises and supports his kids as a single parent. As he goes about his morning chores, he is chipper and wears the big bright smile on his dark brown face.
We also stop by the house of an Isarn sister, a new member at the time I came. I wasn’t expecting to go there, but can still remember the first night vividly. I sat on the bamboo platform and ate Som Tam, a dish made with grated papaya, lots of small chilis, fish sauce, limes, peanuts and little crabs. She spoke a different dialect and I didn’t understand hardly anything of what was spoken. It was dark and across the street blinked lights. So strange the details I could recall seven years after they happened.
