Poking Around Dok-My

There's a point to my being here, relegated to this teak round table, poring over anthropology articles and information about the education of stateless people. Jstor can be such a pain. I don't know why they don't hand out access to people who have graduated college--GUYS, really?-- but thanks to the Fishers I can do my work. My eyes are getting kind of blurry and it feels like I've got so much to cover yet.

The students need context for understanding their research community. It's a sticky situation when you add well-meaning westerners into a foreign environment and it still has residues of the stickiness no matter how hard you try, but Dwight's job is to minimize that as much as possible. There's unintended consequences to everything but, if we can, the goal of our class is to pop the floating theories about what it means to "help" people and break the swords of rushing action before anybody gets hurt. Think retroactive effects of the dreaded "Missions Trip". Our belief is that communities can be read like anything else. Our tools are only questions. And the best question is primary:

What would you like to have done to fix your problem?

The Ethnography of Dok-my* CommunityThis is our problem: Dok-My community was recommended to me by the Thailand Church of Christ (CCT) dedicated to helping the Lahu in the area. The Lahu are an expressive, egalitarian hill tribe group in Northern Thailand that have moved down to urbanity to find economic prosperity. An American woman cried at our orientation--The Lahu don't do very well in the city. But what the S&D wanted us to study was the cemetery issue. I know, cemetery? Big whoop, but its actually really interesting: We've got a cultural clash here, folks. The Thai are afraid of spirits and burn their dead. The Lahu Nyi are Christian and bury their dead. The Lahu don't have any rights, so they can't buy land for burial and the Thai discourage and capitalize on such reality by charging exorbitant prices to bury one person. The war of politics and cultural values.

I met with a Lahu Dok-My volunteer geared up about the cemetery business, excited to get our students involved but he ended up saying they didn't have that problem very much anymore. Their biggest problem was that the children are selling flowers out on the road late into the evenings. The volunteer said the sometimes the children weren't allowed to come back home if they hadn't sold all their flowers. And the much harder issue? Dok-My community didn't see that as a problem. He wanted help showing the community that this was one. Not what I had intended. Show a community a problem they don't see as a problem? It feels sticky already.

my descriptive observations:

Location: Twenty minutes southeast of where we all live.
Setting: Rural-feeling community in the middle of an suburban setting. When you step into Dok-My, it even feels different. It feels like you are in a different world.
Demographics

• Population: 64+ families,
• Ethnicity: 54 Lahu Families, 10 Shan Families
• Language: Lahu
• Origins: Mae Hong Son District, Tak District, Chiang Rai District, and Chiang Mai District of Northern Thailand.
  
• Av. child per family: 3 children.
  

Road Infrastructure: Unpaved, pot-holed mud roads.Shelter/Facilities: Temporary, bamboo houses on small stilts. Blue tarps used for excessive rain. Multi-room houses, with one large main room and smaller rooms partitioned off to the side. Attached kitchen, meals cooked over fire (?). Mosquito nets, (big) TVs, dressers, and beds present in some homes. Each family has their own concrete outhouse. Fuel for cooking are sticks and is collected around the community.Utilities: Electricity available in the community and the Thai owner has a water pump for them to use; he charges them 15 baht per_____. The community members pay for both electricity and water along with their property rent. Monthly rent can range from 600 baht to 1800 baht, depending on the size of the family.
Livestock/Agriculture: Visible animals are chickens and only three people have a small partition of land for rice crops because they can afford to rent it from the landowner.
Access to Markets: less than 1 kilometer. Dependent on which resources their looking for.
Transportation: Motorbikes, bicycles, and a few community members own trucks.
Vocation:Most of the community participates in temporary day labor (e.g. construction, flower business, electricians, gardeners in the botanical sense).
Visible Members during the day: mostly women of various ages and small children.
Role of women: Child rearing and participating in temporary labor with their husbands.
Difficulties:

• Their roads are very muddy during the rainy season, making it difficult to travel
• The water provided isn't very good. The water from the tank can't be consumed; drinking water must be additionally purchased because the tank has no filter and the water that is available to them is rusty and smells badly.
  
• They can't develop their land because they do not own it. They do not own it because they are not legally allowed to.

Treatment by Thais : Most of the cultural conflict arises between teenagers! Sure, some of the adult Thais look down on them, but usually adults are able to communicate well with local leaders. Adults seldom ever have problems with one another. The teenagers from both groups, however, clash.
Flower Business:

• The man interviewed said his sells fluctuate but he can usually sell 60-70 flowers/day. He sells flowers with a partner, leaving the house at about 4 or 5 pm and returning at 10pm. If it's a good night, they return early at 9pm. Sometimes he sells peanuts but he can't sell many things. He doesn't know Thai so its difficult to market many products so he sticks to one.
  

Education: Every child goes to school, except the littlest ones (age 4 and below), to a government-run Thai school one kilometer away. Education is considered important to the parents and that's why they do the best they can to send them there. Some of their children (esp. boys) go to the video game shop instead of school and are, therefore, terrible in their studies.

Most children stop at primary and secondary school level. Only a few pass on to the high school level, and less that 10% go to university.

Expressed Need: They want to have a better village to live in. These Lahu want their own land to live on. The local government burns garbage near their community and there's nothing they can do about the fumes. The Thai lifestyle also differs from theirs greatly because Thais are Buddhist and they are Christian. They want a community that's separated from Buddhist reach.


Can the students show that a road to their dream has education on it? Hopefully Dwight knows how.
________
*name of community has been changed for confidentiality purposes. Dok-My means "flower" in Thai.