Field Course #2: The North Country

Alright. I've recovered enough from the shock of being back in the city to finally write a new blog entry. The past three weeks were uncomfortable, challenging, smelly, amazing, beautiful, enlightening...I could go on and on. We stayed in host homes the entire time with the exception of the last night. We stayed with the Karen hill-tribe who are known for their traditional clothing and rotational farming. Most of the villages we stayed in were Christian, but some were Buddhist and Animist, or a mix of the three.
We started off by taking a bus to Mae Hong Son province which borders Burma. My half of the group took vans into our first village called Pa Ko Lo. This village is only 5 km or so outside of Mae Hong Son proper so it has an interesting balance between rural traditional beliefs and urban life. We only stayed there for a night though, and then we hiked to another village called Hua Nam. This hike was hands down my favorite. The first half was so amazingly cool. For most of the first half, we were weaving back and forth over a river. The last 1.5 km sucked though. It was a steady uphill until we got to the village. Luckily we hiked quickly though, and only took about 4.5 hours instead of the estimated 7-9 hours. We went to the school the next day in the same village on our "family day" and played games with the kids from the village. It started off pretty awkward, but we ended up having a really fun time playing tag and duck duck goose (gray duck for my fellow Minnesotans) and having obstacle course races. Emma, my homestay buddy in that village, and I also went to the rai (field) with our host mom that day which was literally on a mountain side. I still can't get over how the villagers in the uplands of Thailand can walk not even 10 minutes to their field and just casually look out at some of the most beautiful landscape I've ever seen.
The next day we hiked to the next village which is called Nam Hoo. This village was my favorite, but the hike to it was pretty awful. It had an incredibly steep uphill for the first half, but never led to any beautiful scenery like the rest of the hikes. The second half was on a road that went steadily downhill for about 2.5 hours. I got a big nasty blister about the size of a quarter on my heel during the uphill portion then a pretty intense callous on the ball of my foot from all the pressure from the downhill. Once we got to Nam Hoo, we had to divide up into groups of 3 (instead of the usual 2) because the village is so small. There are only 9 homes in the village, but only 7 homes could take in students. I chose to live with to girls from Kalamazoo, Kari and Cody, which was really fun. Our host mom made delicious food and actually ate with us which is rare. Usually the host families in these villages don't eat with their guests because it's polite to them, but we are encouraged to try to get them to eat with us. On our family day, we got to help our host mom saw/chop up some firewood...she obviously did most of the work. These mountain women are so incredibly strong and energetic, it's unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. I literally watched an old woman (at least 70) in Hua Nam chop wood for over 7 hours. It was insane. Anyway, in Nam Hoo we went to a small cave that they're famous for and spent some time just kind of hanging out there. One morning, we were trying to make conversation with our host mom and we asked her if she had a husband because we hadn't seen any men around so we were curious. She nodded yes, but then started speaking in a mixture of Thai and Karen that we didn't understand. I deciphered that he had passed away because she kept pointing up the ceiling and saying something about a house, so I thought she was saying that he went to the house of God. We gave her the sad/understanding face that people give when they hear news like that, then moved on with the conversation. Later that night while we were helping her prepare dinner, some random man walked into the room and made himself at home. It's dark in these homes because there's very little electricity so we only had the light of the fire. I finally caught a glimpse of his face and it looked like a man I had seen in a picture earlier. I told Cody and Kari that I thought he was our host dad, and then we all cracked up because we figured out that he wasn't dead at all. Turns out, he had been working in the field with our host sister or something and was perfectly fine and healthy. During dinner, Cody kept looking up and saying "Look at our dad, he's so young and healthy looking" which was hilarious to us so we kept bursting out in laughter throughout dinner.
The village we hiked to next was Huay Hee which is where we had our mid-course seminar and met up with the other half of the group. The hike there was kind of funny...it was literally a hike straight up a mountain and then back down. It was beautiful, and was the highest we had been until that point. It's so crazy how far you can see when you're up that high. It was also cool because we could see where we had hiked from previously. Huay Hee was fun because we got to catch up with the other half and relax in a village for more than 2 days. We stayed there for about 4 days. It was really hard though because we had assignments to do that were hard to get done with 33 people around. I lived with Alice (from Colorado College) in that village which was really fun and our host family was awesome. Our host grandpa was very involved in orchid conservation in the area and received the royal orchid from the queen which is an incredibly honor. Our host mom was so sweet and generous. She gave Alice and I both scarves that she had woven for us. We had two little sisters. The youngest one's nickname literally means "meatball". She's 2.5 and pretty quiet and shy, but she eventually opened up to us a couple nights in. The older girl was 5 and so funny and adorable. Every morning before she went to school, she would do a little curtsy and say "Sawasdeeka Pi Hannah, sawasdeeka Pi Ally". If insides could melt, mine did. In Huay Hee, we also hiked Doi Pui which is the highest peak in Mae Hong Son province. It was a pretty easy hike because we were already up pretty high, and it was absolutely gorgeous. It was only a day hike, but I wanted to spend a lot more time at the top. It was so beautiful. I did a handstand on the exact highest point, which in hindsight is actually incredibly inapprorpiate because Thai people are very concerned with making sure that feet are never put above people's heads because they're the dirtiest and least sacred part of the body and I put my feet above everyone's heads...probably in the entire country. Woops.
After Huay Hee, we hiked to our last village which is called Huay Tong Kaw. It was our longest homestay and I lived with Julie who I knew from school before coming here so that was really fun. We lived with a young couple and their two kids who were 6 and 3. The 3 year old was hilarious and would always say "Da Blu" to us which in the Karen language means thank you, hello and goodbye. Oh, I forgot to mention that most people in the Karen villages don't speak Thai but Karen..so basically my Thai was useless for the past 3 weeks. But anyway, because Julie and I knew very very little of the language, he would always come sit and eat with us or poke into our room and say "DA BLUUUU" with a big giant smile on his face. It was really fun. In Huay Tong Kaw, we had a couple "cultural days" where we learned to make baskets and cups out of bamboo, sing cultural songs, how to blacksmith, and about herbal medicine. All of which were really cool. We also hiked to a 900 foot waterfall which was incredible. We didn't get to spend much time there, but the hike was really fun and pretty sketchy. The villagers built some "stairs" down for part of it because the hill was so steep. I didn't take any pictures of them, but I wish I would have because they were funny. It was a really fun time though, and it was a good last hike for sure.
A couple days later, we got picked up by pick-up trucks from surrounding villages and rode in the back of them for about 3 hours and crazy windy dirty roads until we got into Mae Hong Son proper. There, we met with an NGO called PRLC (Project for the Restoration of Language and Culture) and got to interview the director which was helpful before writing our final essays for the course. We stayed in a guesthouse in Mae Hong Son, and went out to a really nice dinner that night then walked around the night market for a little bit then went back relatively early to write my essay. The next day, we met up again with the other half of the group and took vans back to Chiang Mai. The roads are SO curvy that they literally make t-shirts saying "I survived the drive to Mae Hong Son" and things like that. I took Dramamine but definitely still thought I was going to be sick. It was a very uncomfortable ride to say the least.
Our "pi's" or group leaders for this trip were Pi Carrie who went to DU and was on the agroforestry course as well. She's great to have around, and is always happy and upbeat which is really nice to be around on hard hikes or when we all started to get tired of village life. Our other leader was Pi Sawang who was fabulous. It was his first time working for ISDSI. He's a Karen man, but grew up in a less traditional town. He spends most of his time traveling around Asia and taking pictures or working in order to earn money to do so. One night in Huay Tong Kaw we got to interview him and ask him anything we wanted. I don't have any good photos of him, but this man always wears light blue. It became an going joke because he had light blue pants, a light blue shirt that says "Jazzercise", blue crocs, a light blue long sleeve shirt, a light blue scarf, a light blue jacket...and the list goes on. His email is even something about light blue. At the discussion, we asked him about where he's traveled and why he feels the need to travel and all that. He said that he loves his country, but Thailand is not big enough for how far he wants to wander. English is his third language, and it's so impressive how eloquently he speaks. Once we started to run out of questions, Cody raised her hand and jokingly asked what his favorite color is. We all laughed, and then Pi Carrie told a story from earlier that day. She was eating M&Ms and asked Pi Sawang if he wanted any. Apparently he said "yes but only the..." and she filled in the blank with "The blue ones?" and he said yes. She asked him why he wanted to only eat the blue ones because they all taste the same and he replied "I want to eat the sky". If anyone else had said that, it would sound absolutely ridiculous but somehow for him it made perfect sense. We all decided that he needs to come down to islands with us because he's such an important part of the group dynamic.
So anyway, now we're back in Chiang Mai for another week then we're heading off to the islands. We're taking a chartered bus down there which will take 20 hours. Yuck. But once we get there, it's going to be paradise. I told a couple of people this already, but I've come to the conclusion that I could go home right now and be content with the experiences I've had studying abroad, but spending 3 weeks in the islands is just the icing on the cake. I'm sad not to be home for Thanksgiving, but it makes me all the more excited to be home for Christmas. I was also bummed to miss both of my parents birthdays (Happy Birthday again, you two!). Looking forward to being home all cozied up by a fire eating my mom's delicious chili in less than a month...But only after spending some quality time in paradise :)