Karen Village Homestay

Well, as I said, finals week got the best of me and I have just been running around like crazy with studying, exams, papers, and my last week of service work not to mention trying to get everything packed up and ready to leave the country TOMORROW. I don’t think I’ll believe it until I’m sitting on the plane headed over the Pacific Ocean.

I wanted to do a full post on the Karen village experience that I had the week after we got back from Bangkok. The Karen are an ethnic minority in Southeast Asia, mostly living in Thailand and Burma. The trip was meant as an extension of our service learning, but was a bit of an experimental trip as my program director was invited by a personal friend named Man to visit his remote village of Mae Pah Bpoo for a weekend and was encouraged to bring some students. Four students (myself included) volunteered to head up on a Friday afternoon until Sunday evening, ready for adventure and to have a unique and immersive cultural experience.

We were advised to pack light – just a backpack or so – but warm because being up in the mountains during the “winter” was sure to bring some chill. I packed the thickest jacket and scarf I brought with me to this otherwise tropical climate and after Buddhism class on Friday we piled in a pick-up truck to head up the windy mountain roads. We stopped first at a market to buy food and bottled water.

The journey was a very bumpy four hours, but the view was beautiful and we had a nice time talking, laughing, and bonding so the time went quickly. We made a quick stop at the town of Samoeng, which is famous for its strawberries! Sadly they were still one month out of season but since being back in Chiang Mai I’m starting to see them at the markets. It was nightfall when we finally reached the village, and we were greeted by the headman before we took our stuff to Man’s uncle’s house where we would all be staying. There was a small bedroom for the two guys and some mats laid out on the floor in the main room for the three girls. We then went over to Man’s mother’s house for dinner. Karen food is absolutely amazing – a mountain of rice that you can top with different stewed vegetable and meat dishes. My favorite that night was boiled pumpkin, and there was also different kinds of mountain vegetables and morning glory vine, which is a popular dish in Thailand and very tasty.

After dinner we drank some beer and tea and then went around visiting a few different villagers. One man who fondly asked us to call us “Grandpa” invited us into his house to sit and chat. Man could translate for the villagers who only spoke Karen, and my program director could also speak with them if they knew Thai. We also picked up a few essential Karen words: “tah blueh” is the word for both “hello” and “thank you,” so we said that a lot. “Oh ah ah” means “eat a lot!” – we were urged to do that at every meal, to the point where our favorite phrase in Thai became “im jah dai” – “I’m so full I’m going to die.” We also heard a lot of “gola,” which means white person, the equivalent in Thai is “farang.”

We didn’t go to bed terribly late but it felt like almost no time had passed when Man came in to wake us up. We got dressed and had breakfast at Man’s mother’s house again. Man had told us about the oldest woman in the village. “She complains all the time that she wants to die already, but she has a good heart,” he told us. She was very tiny, as you can imagine, but still very alert and could move around her house by herself. Her son in law was the “Grandpa” we visited the night before. I gave her the last bar of soap and basket I brought from home, both handmade in Colorado, and she seemed to like them.We asked several times how old people thought she was, and we would get a slightly different answer each time, but all estimates were over one hundred, which was amazing. She had helped build the road to Wat Doi Suthep in the 1930s, and had walked all the way from her village to Chiang Mai and back in order to do so. When we went back and took pictures with her the next day, I sat next to her and she held my hand.

We were originally supposed to help the villagers build a rice barn on Saturday, but the headman had called a meeting and it was decided that the village would rather use the money to buy chairs for their elementary school instead. So we had some free time to talk a walk to the next village over and visit the river. Man told us it was “just over that hill” but after two hours of hiking up a mountain in the hot sun we began to question his judgment of distance. We were accompanied by a flock of elementary aged boys, who ran ahead, climbed up the trees, pulled off branches to eat berries, and shot at birds with the slingshots they carried with them. At the top we stopped to talk to some teenagers on motorbikes to see if we could negotiate an impromptu taxi service. We were in luck, though, when a guy from Mae Pah Bpoo pulled up in his truck, heading for the same place we were.

After a bumpy ride down the mountain we arrived at the river and all the boys immediately pulled off their shirts and jumped in the freezing water. Since there wasn’t anyone else around, we girls stripped down to shorts and sports bras and joined them. The water was so refreshing and exhilarating to totally lie down and immerse our whole bodies. We wandered upstream for a little while before having to get out and catch the truck back to Mae Pah Bpoo.  We took turns taking showers; the village has running water in a few small bathroom buildings that are shared by the community. By this time it was mid-afternoon, so we had a late lunch (I could not stop eating this excellent noodle dish that was basically Ramen and cabbage except awesome) and then a little nap on the floor of Man’s mother’s house before going outside and watching the boys play soccer in the late afternoon light.

In the evening we met back with the headman, as he wanted to talk to us about coming to their village and about their way of life. Our director had brought a huge tin of little shortbread and apricot biscuits, which were so addictive that I must have had “my last one, I promise” too many times to count. The village does not have electricity except for rewired car batteries and  solar panels that were given to them under former prime minister Thaksin. When the lights went out suddenly people just lit some candles and thought nothing of it. We split more beer and hot tea and a few of the ladies in the community decided to give us Karen nicknames. I was christened “Poh Loh Eh” which means “cute flower.”

Exhausted, we had a late dinner and then slept like rocks. We were awoken by several of the young boys peeping in the windows and yelling, “Good morning, gola!” Before breakfast we visited a lady who had a few extra woven items we could buy. Each of the girls got a bag, the guy student got a shirt, and one of my friends got a long white dress that signifies being unmarried. She was a little wary about wearing it around because several women had expressed the desire for Western daughter in law! After breakfast we donned our Karen attire (some of us borrowed shirts) and went to try our hand at rice pounding.

The village uses one big lever-type mechanism to pound the shells off the grains of rice, and then wide, flat baskets to sift the grains of rice out. We weren’t very good at either activity, and it was probably a miracle that we managed to produce more rice than we dumped on the ground by accident. No one seemed to mind, though, and the morning passed quickly. We had enough time for a final lunch, and then Man’s mother performed a blessing for us. She prepared a plate of rice and a plate of the apricot biscuits, while Man told us that in lieu of the biscuits they would usually use meat of some kind, usually a freshly slaughtered chicken. I was pretty grateful that they did not feel the need to kill a chicken just for us, as I try to eat as vegetarian as much as I can. Man's mother then draped several white threads over the plates, and one by one she wrapped the thread around each of our wrists while saying the blessing, then broke off the end and threw it over our shoulders. Man translated the sentiments of the blessing as gratitude and well wishes for long and happy lives.

We gave gifts of tea and chocolate to Man’s mother, then a special ornament to the uncle who hosted us before departing on the pick-up truck. The way back to Chiang Mai was a bit shorter, although we did get stuck in some traffic. We arrived back at Uniloft sad that the weekend in the mountains was over, but so grateful for the opportunity to experience it. The “hill tribes” like the ethnic Karen have been turned into somewhat of a commodity for the tourism industry, with tour packages taking people by the busload to a few closer villages to gawk at the "natives." This visit was a far cry from that, as our main objective was to be observers and a humble presence in the village. Several people expressed how much they wished they could speak English and talk to us, and we would respond that we wished we could speak Karen!

The other thing that we heard a lot was a desire for us to return. I would love to go back and visit Mae Pah Bpoo, but I just don’t know when that will be! I really enjoyed being in Thailand and I have hopes of coming back someday, but the world is just so darn big and there are so many other places to explore. The Karen people will always have a special place in my heart and I am so glad that I took the opportunity to go out of my comfort zone in some ways, but actually return to my comfort zone in others because I am much more content in the forested mountains, up in the fresh air and dirt, than down in a large city. Guess I always be a Coloradoan at heart.