Agroecology Field Course Highlights

I will try to recap the last three weeks for y’all, I dunno how much I can get through, but here it goes!

The first place was arrived were the villages in the northern corner of Thailand. The people were the Palong Dang, the grandfathers of the villages had fled Burma because of the violence/internal conlict there and were living on diffing degress of small amounts of land between national parks and private land. The first village we arrive it we met a man named Pi Ja Wat who showed us his Agroforest. Agroforests are plots of lands planted to minic a normal forest but are planted with all useful and valueable plants. They produce food and market products and take almost no imputs, they repair the terribly degraded and eroded soil! Pi jaw at says he used to work all day, now to work he sits on his front porch and lets the forest grow.

Ok. Wowah. There is just tooo much to write.

Er.

We spent two days hiking from village to village learning from the people there about how the farm, what problems they face, and the role of this NGO Upland Holistic Development Program that is helping them switch to more sustianbilbe food sorucesl ike the forests, backyard gardens, ext and helping get them citizen ship, ext. Then we lived at UHDP for a week and learned, there they we did a week long homestay in the selfsufficiency first oriented, organic farming community of Mae Ta.

Coolest things:
- in one village I wet out on my own while the other students were hanging around the bunk house, I met a group of kids and made friends. We talked and talked and sat down under a tree and talked more, then they invited me in to their house and we hung out and I had lunch with them. They fed me fruits they grew in their own garden! One girl wants to be a teacher, the other a journalist. The journalist girl was very easy to understand and had great questions!
- All the kids I talked to at all the villages said the liked to go to school, and liked to work in the fields.
- We slept in huts made of bamboo split into a bunch a slats and tied to a frame. One night it rained very hard, and it was very exciting.
- The roosters crowed like loud, angry, drownding mega-phones starting at about 4:00 am.
- While hiking through the foot hills of the mountains, through corn fields, and bamboo trees, we turned a corner and there was an elephant! It had a guild on its neck, and two tourists on its back.
- We killed a pig at UHDP. We took it out behind the center in a cage. I had orgnianlly expected some kind of ceremony, but although the community did come together for the event, ti wasn’t exactly what I expected. We were all gathering around, looking about for what was going to happen and then all of a sudden they let it out of the cage and a man hit it over the head with a hoe, and it was screaming an we lifted it onto a platform and our guide helped one student stab it in the heart with a knife. A lot of girls cried, and most people were shooken up. I expected to take it hard and have this ground shaking emotional experices, but I didn’t, which at first was disappointing. However, it has really cool to pull apart how and why I responded like I did (or didin’t). I think growing up with a rich love for understanding nature, playing cave people, and with the kind of childhood that helping Alli’s grandpa butcher a deer was a treat, made it so that the whole thing didn’t ruptrure my world view, rather it fit quite well into it. The pig clearly didn’t want to die, and we human, wanted it to since we had raised it to eat it. The pig had lived a better life than his bacon making realtives in CAFOs in the US, and it was probably the most sustainable meat I’ve ever eaten. It was like the best dissection ever. It was so cool. I was fascinated. It was very intense, but it was cool to be so connected to the real food chain for the first time. It was interesting to see when it changed from being a pig to being pork. For me that was about when it stopped moving, but it was really different for different people. we covered it with a burlap bag (Pi Apot said “go to sleep” to it in English, which was so funny and helped break the tension) and poured boiling water over it so we could scrape off the hair with machetes. Then we cut it up. I got to cut off the head. By then the boys were already hadning out pieces of the grilled tail. It was good, a bit crunch from cariclage. The organs went into a bucket, and (the girls but not exactly by rule just by our cultural training I guess) went over and cleaned them. We pooped the intestines (fun and crazy). Pi Gurd held up the membranous sheet that held the organs in (whats it called?) like lace. The organs were so fun to hold in our hands. We ran water through them to clean them and turned them inside out and they whirled like streamers under the hose. You could see and feel the micro-felia in the intestines. Once it was clean it was poped on a fire, grilled, and we ate it with salt. It was really really good. We butchered it and cleaned it and had a barbeque and ate it. It was delicious easily the best pork I have ever eaten.
- At the debrief after sam who killed it has a great insight. He said, when we eat animals, we like to thank them.but the truth is we want to thank them to make ourselves feel better. I wanted to thank the pig afterwords, but that wasn’t right. That pig did not want to give us anything, it did not want to die, and it was going to do everything it could to keep us from killing it. If it could say anything to me now it would be Fuck You.
- One day we visited a church in a near by village.
- We harvested and cooked a meal made entirely ofjungle plants and animals the UHDP raises there. We had smashed up frog sauce/paste. Spiky bitter vine heart becomes soup.curry. meat cooked in banana leaves. Fried crickets (amazing, better than pop corn) and many deilciosu things besides.
- Everything in Thailand that is not horribly horribly bitter is called “sweet”
- One night, some of us played cards with Pi Gurd, one of the staff of UHDP. She told us all about her life. At 14 her mom tried to marry her to a 35 year old rich man from Bangkok, but she refused to, and how she used to be very skinny and all the boys would fight over her, (from tons of different tribes too) but she was a “tom” (same word as in English) and wasn’t an object. Now she is married to Pi Apot (our guide for the outdoorsy bits of learning about ecology and farming) who she seemed luke warm about and said he was a good man because he eidnd’t drink and hit her. She wanted to go to school for the environment, but had kids, and has a sponser now but can’t go because of her new baby. When we asked her if she was happy with her life she said causually, I dunno.
- We ate strawfruits that grew on the hill side.
- One morning I got up early, and Britney and I hiked to the papaya farm up the hill and she wrote and I painted the papayas and the hills.
- One evening I sat in a hut on the hillside and watched the sun set. I drew the hills and fields below.
- Across from the center were conventional corn fields, they burned part of the fields one day and we saw all the smoke coming up.
- There was a friendly dog at the center named Fu.
- I made friends with a little girl and we wandered all around the center. She didn’t speak much (Thai or antyghitn) but she knew the words to smell good and to smell bad, so we walked around sniffing everything and its uncle. Also pulling leaves of plants and trowing them.
- I got to know many of the other students really well, we would stay up nights talking and learning about eachother.
- After the pig slaughter we had really great nightly brief and we all talked about our experiences.

Mae Ta
- The house was very nice/impressive. It was mostly raised up on stilts, with blue tile floors under it and in the kitchen. It had big brown wooden treetrunkpoles holding it up. It was surrounded by a concrete wall, and had pretty wooden trimming around the top. In thai style the rooms were pretty bare. It had a big t.v. and lots of benches. We ate on mats on the floor in the living room.
- I lived with Anglea, who is far and away the best student at Thai, which was really cool because sometimes we would only speak Thai when we were together, and I could learn a lot about my family, but other times it was difficult because the conversations with our folks would fly over my head and i’d feel fustrated with myself.
- At one point my Paw said, whle Angela, him and I, were sitting in the back behind the house, grilling stuffed crab heads, “you have a boyfriend already! you don’t have to be shy” !
- Angie and I would stay up hours after bed time talking in our room, then we would look at our watches and see it was 10:30 pm.
- The first morning we came out of our room and Mae was sitting in the driveway next to a baby pool full of live crabs. She would reach in, pull out a crab, rip off all its legs and then break its shell in two. We would then scrape out the yellow gills into a bowl.
- We did our laundry in the sun, washing out of big tubs.
- The food my Mae, and Pi cooked was really good. One fish soup was sour and sweet and tangy and lime-y. yum yum
- One morning we went to visit a wat and the morning market. The wat was a social gathering place, everyone chating. We added little boquest to golden platters full of candles and flowers, and gave good to the trays of all the monks.
- Huge bugs would fly into our house all the time. The biggest (Ann Fraser guessed a katydid) was the coolest thing ever. It was as big as my hand, like the spirit creatures out of Pan’s Labrinth, and it crawled all over. You could see it expandind its chest when it breathed. It had huge mandibles. It was bright green. Its wings were just like leaves. It was the best day of my life.
- One night we went next door and did aerobic dance in our neighbos driveway it was dark and the music was lively. All the women were steping and steping and pumping their hips. It was lots of fun.
- My Paw saw so sweet and nice, only I couldn’t understand barely anything he said, he was always joking with us. He told us to eat lots here, since in Mae Hong Song (where were heading next) they “don’thave any food”.
- Each day we would ride the motorcycle to the Suan (garden/fields). One day we fished and caught 23 fish from their Tilapia pond. We used long pieces of bamboo with a bit of line and hooks. The pond is surrounded by a fence and the fish are raised with ducks and chickens (nutrient cycling!). We took the fish home and grilled them whole over a charcoal grill for dinner.
- We ate passion fruits off the vine.
- On market days our family would stay up till midnight, harvesting during the day and packaging it up at night. A few hours later they would get up and drive to Chiang Mai or Chaing Dao to sell at the organic markets there. Mae was so proud of her goods, she would package them just right so that they were just beautiful.
- I stayed up with her until she was done.
- Maybe the best moment of the whole stay was this. It was just the two of us still up. We sat on ltitle wooden stools in the drive way surrounded my stacks and bins and piles of produce. Mae ahd a big bucket of live skuddling crabs, which we were putting into plastic bags to sell. She made it seem so easy to reach in a grab them up, but when I tired it I couldn’t do it! I had to fight every animal instinct to will my hand into a bucket of live crabs, and close my hand down. I kept thinking it should be easy, but it was so hard! When ever I took hold of one it was like my hand, watching for its own well being, would drop it like a hot coal! Sometimes i would get one by the leg, only to have it pop off in my fingers. Me and Mae giggled and giggled. Mind over body. Mind over live scuttling crabs. And plop the thing into a bag.
- At the end of the night. When everything was all Riep Roy. I told my Mae thanks, and she told me thanks, and I told her “I don’t talk much, but I like my mae a lot” and she just reached out and she popped a great big smile, and grabbed my arms in a geature of unexpected happiness and affection.
- We took a hike through the jungle to see the watershed. There wre leaches everywhere! Ahh! They would sit in the middle of the path, rise up from and wave their sucker mounths in the air sniffing for a warm foot to lach onto. I kicked three of them (one a big fat one) off my boots. We obsesedly/paranoidedly checked our boots and ankles every few muintes (or every few steps!). one there was a monsterous one just menacing at us from the middle of a steap rocky bit of trail and we just ahd to bolt passed it and high tail it down the path and hope to god it couldn’t grab on.
- The hike was really cool. We ended up at a sting seaping out of the hill side, benath a big teak tree. Spring in Thai is called Dton Nam (Source of Water) and that is the Thai Nick name given to me my family! Dton Nam got to see the Dton Nam. It was really cool. I felt, connected to my new Thai idendity there. The water was so clear/pure we could drink it. We would reach down and cup a handful out of the mass of roots and sticks it filtered through on the forest floor. It tasted great, alive and clean. Snake! Waoh! Me and another student had been standing not two feet from a coiled up, bright green, viper of some sort chilling near the cool water!!! We hadn’t even seen him. Everyone lept away and lept forward at the same time (to take pictures). Then WOAH! There was another one right over there, not two steps from Will! Eeps. Pi Pui managed to get us to at least not advance with our eager cameras and the village guides scared them away with sticks.


p.S. yesterday we went to Burma to renew the something to do with our passports os we can stay in the contry. The otherisde of the bridge was met with hundreds of people selling and vending. Women roasted chestnuts in little stands (hot and nutty flavor), and there was just wall to wall shops of ever sort of knock off imaingable. The streats were lined with pirated DVDs, clothes, sunglasses, jewlry, jems, ext. Some stands had bones, knives, and real wild cat pelts and what looked like monkey skulls. I asked to take a picture and they said no! no! Agela dn I got a Tuk Tuk to take us around (we only had two hours there) which was an excellent choice. we went to a giant golden temple/spire on top o a hill that overlooked the city, ther were beautiful hills all around. There, we released birds to make religious merit. From little girls outside the temple we bought orchids bouquets and live little brown birds in little wicker balls. We got to know a woman at the temple and she helped up us give our prayers and give our orchids to the alters to the days of the week on which we were born to make merit. Iwas born on a wendsay. We prayed and put our boquets of orchids, and candles to put on the alters, and released the birds. They high tailed it to the hills. (mine after a bit of nudging). They might be trained to come right back, or get caught again, im not sure. It was really, really cool. Burma was mostly sad though. There were so many beggrs. Emma said she saw a begger man draggin himself along the streat by his arms because his legs were horribly mangled. Men with trays of cigarettes accosted at every streat corner. It was hard to know what to think.

I wish i could tell more, but there is just so much to tell. I love you all and hope things are going well back home and on your respective adventures.

Also check out all the pictures on picasa (there were 900, but i only loaded 200 and then gave up due to slow internet and loaded the best of the rest). Also i got an AMAZING Thai hair cut, seriously amazing. It was such an adventure. Its very sylish-badass and very cute. There are pictures too.