Long-Time Coming

Well, it’s been so long I don’t even recall the last thing I wrote; I could always check but combination of laziness and not reading my own writing prevents me.

So right now I am living in an apartment complex nestled between Chiang Mai University and the locus of nightlife, Nimahaimen Road. The old city and my host family are only a short taxi ride away. I only live here for a week at a time, but I enjoy it because it affords me much needed rest, relaxation, will all the comforts of Chiang Mai. Besides that, it’s three weeks in the field. I am in the week between Rivers and Forests Block.

Rivers Course was great! I spent a week in Don Chai, a week in Laos, and a week paddling the mighty Mekong River! The course was about dams and how they affect people. This issue struck home for me since I have lived my whole life around dams and the area I grew up in depended on the dams for energy. I have seen all sorts of dams- giant ones like the Bonneville dam, medium ones like the ones that used to store up huge recreational reservoirs on the Clackamas River, and small ones like my Dad built to create a pond in our yard. I also found out that my ancestors were displaced by dams and were forcibly relocated to a new town, creatively called New Town. It seems that dams have had almost a personal aspect to them. Now, I have an abundance of scientific and social information stored up by dams, and it was a long-time coming since dams have silently played a huge role in my life.

In Don Chai, I stayed with the village headman who I rarely saw because he was busy preventing a dam from being built that would flood his village. The village has prevented this dam for thirty years, yet it still hangs over their head threatening to destroy their way of life. Anyways, I mostly interacted with the headman’s wife. She was sixty years old with a bad hip but she had this sense of vitality that was not represented by her lack of garrulous qualities. She took us to her prized pig farm where we then became stranded. Meanwhile, she took us to her orchard arming us with multiple machetes along the way. I thought, “Oh no! She is going to have us butcher the pigs, or she is going to kill us, or some other ludicrous thought, etc.” Actually, she started chopping down trees and barked orders at us to do the same. When we did something wrong, she would raise her hands flail around half laughing, half shrieking. We finished up and then had to figure out how to get home. The day was heating up and walk back to the village would be long. We weren’t sure if she could make it back. Truth was, she couldn’t. She plopped herself on the side of road and told us to leave her. We tried to protest but her air of command compelled us to leave her but making sure she had enough water and food to last until… someone picked her up? In all honesty, we weren’t sure what was gong to happen to our geriatric compatriot. But, not having walked a blistering hot one hundred yards did we hear her pipe up; she had waved down a truck and a moped and ordered whoever these people were to take us back the village. They quickly accommodated us and took us to where we needed to go. It seems that respect for one’s elders is still a powerful force here in Thailand or rather our host mom was a powerful force.

Laos. Never thought I would end up there. I didn’t even know until a week before that our studies would bring us there. Well, most of the time we stayed in the capital Vientiane; a city replete with French cafes, communist soldiers on street corners, Soviet style government buildings, and old ruins. I was able to take myself on a walking tour and bicycle ride to really get a sense of the city. It was beautiful at first, but the longer I stayed the more I saw the façade break down and the cracks of poverty and oppression shine through. Slums seemed to be tucked away, the city shut down early because of past enforced curfews, we had some of our meetings in “secure” locations and we had to tell people we were only tourists to not raise suspicion of nosy American students who invariably would criticize the authoritarian regime. Apparently, Americans have a pesky reputation of telling other countries what to do. Not us, we were only tourists; we weren’t studying the social and environmental abuses that Laos inflicted on its people through reckless dam construction. That would be abhorrent.  Anyways, we visited a dam company who proved to be rather benign, a dam site and a relocation village. Nothing too exciting. Some of the students had to bribe soldiers because they were on the beach too late, though. I am glad I went to Laos, but I was happy to leave, because I think at the end of the week, I was beginning to feel oppressed.

The Mekong was one of the things I was looking most forward to. I had watched an hour-long show about this magnificent river when I was younger and always wanted to see it in person. Also, this river somehow reminded me of the Columbia River. It seems so wild and powerful. People always refer to the Columbia as mighty, unbridled, and raw. The Mekong is not much like the Columbia. It is a powerful river but it was so hot! I loved canoeing down the river- I think we traveled over 130km. We stayed at guesthouses at night which are somewhere between a hotel and a hostel with its own inexplicable Thai flair. We were able to visit a bunch of cool towns at night and stay with another village. We met a man who has a sister who lives in Chicago and owns a restaurant. I can’t wait to visit that restaurant.

After this course, I know a lot more about dams than I ever thought I would, but it makes it much harder to be pro-dam or anti-dam. I have seen the positives and negatives first hand. Dams have benefited my own life. It seems that the old adage rings true: the more you know, the less you know. I do know that this experience has been invaluable in shaping my education and giving me an understanding of this issue and other issues that I could have never learned in a classroom. For that, compounded with my comparative wealth, and American education makes me so much more thankful for the life I have lived and the life I continue to live.

I am also putting up pictures. I didn’t bring my camera on this last adventure, but I will steal pictures from other people haha.