The rice cycle!

It started the way it ended. Remember my first trip to Ayuttaya early last fall when I met that wonderful family. Now fast forward to the last few days when I met another wonderful family in Issan in a town called Roiet ( which literally means eleven gates.) As I was sitting in the park this morning, as usually happens, no always happens, a toothless man starting talking with me, or was I talking to him and before you knew it I was at his house having lunch with his family with me the centre of interest.

As you go down any dirt road in these small towns, I suspect what I discovered is quite typical. Like the Kennedy compound in Hyannis port, the nongchai and piesou etc ( younger brother, older sister etc) live in adjoining houses but I guess this is where the comparison to the Kennedy family ends.

Let me try to describe a typical Thai house in this area, the poorest area in all of Thailand. As you enter the house, and I use enter loosely since there is no door, there are a few low platforms where people are eating, sitting cross-legged or sitting on another platform idly chatting. It seems that all of the extended family is at one house or the other all the time. I was wondering about how they could all be so idle until I started to think about. They plant the rice at Songkran (about a month ago) and then they wait four or five months until they harvest? What do they do in the meantime? Like an anaesthesiologist there are long periods of boredom followed by frantic moments of panic. I suspect with the rice farmers it is not so much panic as hard work getting the rice in before it spoils.

Anyway, back to the house. I guess the two most important parts are at the back where there is the outhouse and elevated seed storage area, always kept under lock and key except when special guests arrive! I did climb up and look in the storage area, but I did not have the heart (or thank God) the need to look at the outhouse. Also near the back could be what is loosely called the kitchen where everything is done in the outdoors and I suspect, for the lady of the house ,are constantly busy preparing the meals .There did not seem to be electricity of any kind or natural gas, except mine perhaps.

The stories that I heard are, unfortunately all too typical. Q, the little boy you see in the pictures lost his parents ( the children of the host) in a motorcycle accident, 2 other children live in Bangkok and the youngest daughter ( who showed me around the farm) lives with the elderly parents to care for them. All of the children ( Daniel and Josh, are you reading this?) support their parents with regular monthly cash deposits.

Each village ( it seems of about 100 houses of extended family) has it’s own wat and crematorium as you see in the picture. Again, as I have asked myself about a million times these past two years, who has got it right? The poor people of Issan who spend the day, cooking, eating, chatting, gossiping, I presume ( about me) or the west where we get up and go and spend our days becoming as alienated as possible from our extended families as we focus on our own families! When I have ever, to speak personally, ever just sat around chatting without an formal invitation of some sort to someone’s house?

On a reflective note, I am also getting to know a little history and culture. You will notice from the pictures that Phimai, also in Issan, looks very much like Angkor Wat even though it predates Angkor by a hundred years. I am beginning to recognize architectural styles and religious iconography. I am also getting to learn a little bit about the history of the region by what I see.

Tomorrow, I am going to try to move my flight date home. One or two more things to do, but they are rather mundane like picking up pants and getting my laundry done, so this will probably be my penultimate blog entry. I do have an eleven hour layover in Japan where I hope to go into the town of Narita ,so as I sit on the plane to LA, I should have some tale or two to tell!

See you all in a few days.