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[Matthew McDaniel]

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	Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 18:16:11 +0000
	From: Matthew McDaniel <akha at loxinfo.co.th>
	Organization: The Akha Heritage Foundation
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		Subject: ELL: Akha Weekly Journal
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		Dear Friends:

		Work on the writing in this project, the assistance to
		villages and so
		forth all rolls on.
		Literacy work continues, medical work continues and so forth.
		If you have specific questions about these aspects please
		inquire, I get
		to the email at least once a week.

		*****

		The Weeding of the Rice

		The Akha have distinct rituals of their culture that interact
		with their
		planting and maintenance of their rice.  Certain days they do
		not work
		with rice out of honor or respect to their traditions and on
		those days
		they may only work with corn or beans in other fields, even
		though very
		close together.

		It must be understood about the Akha, and this is very
		important, that
		they for the most part raise completely what it is they need
		to live on,
		and the earth is not taxed beyond that.  If the west is
		encouraging vast
		consumption and these people are being forced into that
		machine so that
		it stays fat and fed, then we have all become fools and there
		is going
		to be a dreadful price to pay, as I was reminded while I was
		typing this
		and a friends CNN show was going, telling all the pulses of
		the cancer
		treatment industry.  Ah yes, we have even made killing
		ourselves into an
		art form.

About thirty days after the rice is planted when it is close to a foot
tall the Akha turn out once again to pull the weeds, mostly broadleafed
weeds, from between the rice.  One Akha man bemoaned that he couldn.
see his rice for all the weeds, and true, hillsides in the same area
have different soil characteristics and in some places the weeds grow
really big and fast, in others there are hardly any weeds at all.  But
when you have to cultivate it all by hand and pull all the weeds it
could discourage you.   And you must cultivate a mountainside that will
take a good walk to reach the edge of your field in any direction and
which grows all your rice for you and the family for a year.  Besides
the broad leafed plants that make most of the weeds there is a variety
of vine that grows rapidly and gets several meters long with all kinds
of runners going everywhere.  This one is hard to chop out in the first
place and comes back in the rice usually, wrapping itself around the
clusters of growing rice plants.  Course you get to know all of this
because you aren. on a tractor, you are stooped over with your face in
it all day long.

If a family has money they will buy rock salt and pack it to the field
on horses and then haul water from the springs.  With a light salt
mixture in tanks which they strap on, the Akha spray this mist in the
fields during the heat of the day and the light salt kills the plant
leaves quickly and doesn. hurt the rice.  Then the plants are gathered
up in piles, clearing around the rice.  This is faster than hand weeding
and apparently doesn. harm the soil for the next crop.

Some fields are too far for water to be hauled or the family is too poor
to buy the salt.

Business people in Thailand try to encourage people to use western
manufactured herbicides on their rice.  This makes people very unlucky.
One might think that they are living in the mountains and drinking clean
water but someone is farming higher than the water source and if they
are using a herbicide it goes right into that water at the first rain.
This time of year there is a lot of rain so that doesn. take long.  A
day or two at longest.  The Akha who know blame this on many ailments of
intestinal distress and fever.

Certainly one can understand the natural concern of the Akha to live up
in the mountain tops.
Course, when you go to the shops, herbicides and pesticides are readily
available and most of the people who use them, if it doesn. kill them
outright, have little knowledge or concern for what these nicely
packaged chemicals can do to them.  Companies like Bayer and Zeneca and
Monsanto are chief offenders, turning dangereous chemicals loose on the
poor for a profit.

As we headed out into the mountains there was this cold chill in the
air, the sky was clear as it ever gets and I was reminded of winters in
far off mountain places I once called home.

The road up the mountains was growing over fast with jungle plants and
grasses and the dew covered leaves slopped all over the sides of the
truck and in the windows.  At one place the bamboo thicket next to this
track was so heavy with due that it was bowed over to the ground,
blocking the road, so I had to take time off and chop back this huge
thicket so that I could get the truck through.  Roads are just little
dirt tracks suddenly.  At the turn in the hill, the spring pipe had
clogged and the spring and rains had been washing the road and it was
now a very tight turn to get passed that in tact.

I was tempted to run up the end of the road to the Burma border but
didn. have time enough.
I had to get out still today to some other villages while the roads were
dry.  They were ok for the moment but the steep red clay could quickly
slide a vehicle to the point it could not back up nor go any further
without rock and modifying the road by hand.

The corn planted not much more than a month before it would seem was
already three feet or taller, I was impressed, had been seed I bought
locally for sweet corn.

The village had moved to the lower location it was now at by the Thai
army and they wished that they still lived at their more undisturbed
higher location.  All that they were promised, like schools and electric
had not paid off.  The children were going to school as if in
anticipation of something while in fact becoming lazy and loosing much
contact with the natural environment they lived in which they needed to
know well if they were going to be living in it and growing their food
in it.  But the schools themselves were like a kiss of death to the
indigenous knowledge system of the Akha, and the difference in useful
knowledge of those who went to school and those who didn. was quite
striking.  Also it appeared that those Akha who had not gone to school
had much more pride in who they were than those who did.
In the end, the electricity did not seem to pay off compared to the
erosion of their culture, the assaults on their culture from missions
which was continuous and the health of their children and farm animals.
The lower environment was poluted with chemicals made in the west and
the village animals which wandered into contact with this died.  And
anyone knowing of the history of the Akha knew that in even recent years
they had lived private undisturbed lives in the mountains.  Now they
were pushed about by the government, told what they could farm and what
they could not under guise of protecting the forest, and treated as
aliens in a land that they had been forced into by war that was also the
end of the mountains for them in their southward march.

I was coming up from the flat lands of Thailand, meeting these people,
and they were coming to the end of the range and meeting me, telling me
about their lives, from that perspective in their centuries journey from
Tibet and beyond.  They knew nothing of the mess the world had become
beyond these mountains, only too much about the problems that had come
to them.  Their culture was based un centuries of surviving as a
singular traditional people, living much the same way for the last 1500
years, kin and kin.  One had to have great respect for a people that had
thus made it this far and also sadness for much of the world that after
all the opportunities to learn from mystakes, still seemed bent on
destroying that uniqueness.  Despite efforts to portray concern for
these cultures as just talk of the .oble Savage.the fact remains that
the Akha had a graceful culture and stable life, filled with the most
minute of detail, all written down in their hearts and shared in their
songs and long chants at ceremonies.  But the world had become a place
of sameness and a place where increasingly intolerant peoples were
wiping out anything different in their sight and few were learning to
take the time to discover who anyone else is.

Listening to the pulsing chant of a wind harp made of gourd and bamboo
tubes which an old man held to his mouth as he wilted and arose in a
dance around a fire I could not help but feel great amazement and pride
in the endless beauty and discovery that I was so priveledged to be
party to in the lives that these people let me share with them.

Matthew McDaniel
Maesai and Mountains, Thailand


--



Matthew McDaniel
The Akha Heritage Foundation
386/3 Sailom Joi Rd
Maesai, Chiangrai, 57130
Thailand
Mobile Phone Number:  Sometimes hard to reach while in Mountains.
66-01-881-9288

US Address:

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

The Akha Heritage Foundation
1586 Ewald Ave SE
Salem OR 97302
USA

Donations by direct banking can be transfered to:

Wells Fargo Bank
Akha Heritage Foundation
Acc. # 0081-889693
Keizer Branch # 1842  04
4990 N. River Road.
Keizer, Oregon,  97303 USA
ABA # 121000248

Web Site:

http://www.akha.com
mailto:akha at loxinfo.co.th
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