From akha@loxinfo.co.th Mon Oct 18 06:35:30 1999 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id GAA17400 for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 06:35:29 -0700 Received: from chmai.loxinfo.co.th (root@chmai.loxinfo.co.th [203.146.0.65]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.08) with ESMTP id GAA12086; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 06:35:12 -0700 Received: from loxinfo.co.th (p8-criHS1.N.loxinfo.net.th [203.146.34.8]) by chmai.loxinfo.co.th (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id SAA01347; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 18:30:15 +0700 Message-ID: <380B060E.B5DF1FE8@loxinfo.co.th> Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 18:35:43 +0700 From: Matthew McDaniel X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 (Macintosh; I; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: akha@loxinfo.co.th Subject: Poets of the Earth: Akha Update, 10/17/99 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Poets of the Earth Months ago we had all worked together and turned the soil of that very steep mountain side, the sun burning us, the wind buffeting with dust, the rain chilling and biting and the mud eating the skin off our feet, but then the rice, we planted it, crawling up that face with every muscle in the body urging to just climb to the top and be over with it. Course that was the difference between them and myself, my body wished to climb the ladder, they lived on it. The man had come and cut a deep rut down through the face of the hill side in a couple of directions to run off the rain water. As soon as he had done that one girl took a bag of sunflower seeds and walked up the hillside crosswise, following the ditch, planting sunflower seeds on the down hill side of the lip of this narrow trench no wider than what you could put your foot in. The hillside all brown, her scarf of red, it was funny to see in all that landscape one ditch, cut across it all as if surreal and then this tiny moving pollen of color creeping across the face like a wind jipsy in a sea of tossed soil as if on some great voyage lonely and forgotten, sewing seeds for them to die and birth again in some ode of timelessness of these people. And the rice came up and we went back over and over, pulling the many weeds. You don’t use a cultivator the man said, cause the rain goes in too deep then and the rice grows too tall and the wind knocks it over, you just pull the weeds out with a minimum of soil disturbance and pile them up and burn them. And we did. The woman, old with work, not with time, she was a spirit woman, she worked at this as if she her self had been born of one of the seeds to help plant all the others and to scratch the back of the earth with her love and care as if it were tired, or jolly or itchy or all of them at once. She did it well, loving the dirt, like a kind mother, who tended it in partnership with the tending of the children. I loved her, who she was, from her late night chanting beside the fire in the glow of the coals, all the elder women gathered around in the darkness, to the way she could wack into bamboo to find a grub, to the stories she told me of Yah Loh Yah Shoh Ah Mah Ah Dah, the old man and woman who lived in the rice field and took care of it at night and on the days that she was gone to another field. To them she owed much thanks and did not offend. And out in the fields when we worked hard and then sat down to the noon fire to eat, she always brought something new and different from the jungle or the field to the fire for us to eat. She never quit talking it would seem, as if life was one long poem that you just kep reciting the old and new lines too, murmuring under her breath, the slights and bumps of the day and about all the goings on, as if a lung for all the rest of us. Her daughter was the same, whatever someone said, she repeated it again, for all the others to hear one more time, maybe some clarification added again. This was a very common trait among the Akhas, the collective mind, the collective talk. No conversation, no sentence owned, shared by everyone, passed on with a lift from all the friends, no they didn’t even care to think that they owned their own words or thoughts, these were all shared in the collective, cause you dreamed across to the other and then checked if your dreams were ok, if there was no harm, if you had been right, if your story happened like the dream. She could see me in places in the truck, far from that village doing things she could only know if she had been there, well she was, she went and spoke to me in her dreams and saw me, who I was with, what I was doing, and I think that the more that the old spirit woman and I wove these together in time the clearer she could see it all, me just some extension of her dream, not her dreams some odd copy of my reality. And so in this kind and loving way in gentleness with most of what all they knew the Akhas had accepted that it must be all woven together, that there was no seperation of events of people of it all. And the rice got deeper and I was off doing corn and soy and peanuts and didn’t get in the rice field so often during the long rains, but that was ok, cause the season would bring me back like to the fire of a poet. We pulled corn off the stalks for days, trying not to step on the young soy plants planted in between. They would have pulled it first but I wasn’t there to help and they were always short of hands, so like my schedule would only allow, something that was so extremely odd to them, I blew in like a warm wind and through the fields we went together, spirits lifted with new hands and new labor and we pulled corn till it all got stacked, and even didn’t step on that nigh on foot long centipede that went wipping through the field. Yep, put that in rice wiskey and its really good to drink, what would otherwise bite your ass but real good. But then Cheh Shuuh Dzah rolled around, and I got to drink some anyway, the thanksgiving ahead of the rice harvest, to thank Yah Loh Yah Shoh Ah Mah and all the rest of them and thank in advance for a safe rice harvest, the careful bringing in of the food for so many souls, grown up and pulled from the earth in a kind of kindness that we don’t have words for in pagan english. They handed me wiskey, there in the dark, the old elder men all on one side, the old elder women all on the other, and then the Dzoeuh Mah, new to his role, since the death of his father, Abaw Dteeh, put the first kernels of rice from the new rice this season in my two cupped hands which I then lifted together to my mouth and picked up with my lips and ate, the new rice, to all the new rice and to all the people of the past all the way to Sooh Meeh Oh, the first of us all, who had passed down both our seed and the seed of the rice together, that we could have another good year upon this earth, eating rice, drinking whiskey and birthing together with it all again. This birth of the future year, so it was of no little significance that I ate that rice and gave joy to the thought that I should eat for another year, with the Akha, with the rice, descendants of Sooh Meeh Oh, the first of all the Akhas. The horses came, we packed all the corn we could on them four times and the boys took them back to the village, more than an hour down the mountain each time, and came back again. But in the end there was no more light and there was much more corn and there were no more horses coming back in the dark, so we each took forty or more pounds of corn, and carrying it in sacks and baskets on our backs we made our way down the mountain, the last corn pulled from that field. But in a day we were back in the other rice field again. They had bragged to me how beautiful the rice was, me, I could only see so much into their minds and lives because like crumbs of bread, not enough for one meal, I was scattered to so many villages. But it was more than true, the beauty of the rice, and we had done it ourselves, and it was really beautiful, all grown up there like that, still some green but mostly golden heads laid over, curnels ready to drop, and the golden green across all the mountains that we all had planted. Because though those far hills had some other person’s rice on them from a distant village, how could it at all be separate, they had sung for us, they had danced for us when the bees came, and the had moved as a troup in cadence for us to watch them as they had planted their rice, soldiers of time and man and age, the old women and men together, the young and the old, no nursing home here, in unison trooping up by rank through the earth of the hill, laying in their seeds, long jostling sticks, like philharmonic wands, tossing the earth, making it dance to the arrival of the seeds within it once again, the earth to sing, the seeds to sing, the old to sing and we heard it all and laughed at how silly they looked, like kernels themselves, specks on the soil, moving up the hill like a dotted line, funny like us were funny cooking on the hill on this side, that day, our rice in the day before. Ah yes. We took a break in the rice hill hut, didn’t fire up the coals, just sort of said nothing of all the work we knew we had already done, and we prepared ourselves for the new labor of harvest to come, but to day we were only there on a lark, to gather in the big sun flowers. We took our bags and the old woman was already gone, so the other woman went with me, her daughter, and then like the final ode of a poem, it all came true. There was no place to walk or stand in the rice, so the sunflowers were planted on the lower side of the ditch that the man had dug because it was the only place you could walk now, and you didn’t want it on the upper side towering above you, so thus the lower, and we walked up throught that tiny space, our feet one after the other down in that hoe cut, and we broke the tall stalks over, their heavy heads bowing to us as if to stoop to ask us what had kept us so long, the birds biting them, and we put the heads in our bags, knocking the little ruffles off the faces first, curved and weathered knives like sickles, cutting through the firbrouse tough stalks. But the old woman was way ahead of us and time we got done she had gone back to the hut, looking like a big ball of cotton, white sacks tied all over her back full of heads, till we couldn’t see nothing of her but like some oversized white sheep going through the rice, laughable for how odd it looked, not human at all. We didn’t pick all the heads, I asked the woman why, she looked at me as if I must be sun soaked, why the workers gotta have something to eat when they harvest the rice don’t they? But days move on and from that day of light work, we went into the lower corn fields, like a swarm of ants, the women going down the mountain picking the corn. Now picking corn is no easy task. The women wore sticks, like the bone and metal wedge pins they wore on their head dresses, and these were hanging by a string from the wrist and they shoved this through the ear of corn husk just below the tassle and split the end, took a side in each hand and split it down the ear, long ears, nearly a foot some, beautiful golden kernels, and popped out that ear and raised their arm and gave it this kind of funny flip and it went up and over and into their basket, and they worked down the hill. Now Akha men are always getting branded for lazy, for always sitting at home and so forth by people who mostly never met an Akha man, nor ever spent more than five minutes in their lives or villages. Well, got news for you. Take a muddy hillside you can barely stand on and take two men to every five women and the woman won’t have that their baskets should get more than half full before they get emptied out, and so we go down the hillside in wearied stumbling, passing out new sacks, emptying baskets and then filling these big rice sacks with corn and throwing it on the shoulder and fighting our way up through the mud, the tangle of broken corn stalks and grown over vines, and all the way up to the top again, no point in stopping cause you’ll just fall down more than likely, boots slipping, legs tripping and it all going on. By days end we know we have put in some work, the women coming up from the bottoms, also quite glad that it is over for one more year, the dust covering their arms in itchy welts from the corn husks and stalks, hands rough and cracked, fingers sore from prying at the ears. And we still have to haul it all back to the village. We tracked back over the road we had all rebuilt that washed out with the rains, and grasping the bamboo tube at the spring, filled it with water, drank cold and long and headed off through the rich jungle to the village, like coming home to the crib, both for us and for the corn. The children all cheered to see us come in, gathered into long line from all the fields as we accumulated to the village, women in head dresses, baskets, men, knives, water jugs, horses, packs, babies carried, grass for feed, herbs to eat, grubs from the forest, melons, papayas, bananas, garlic, onions, peanuts, and then we laughed as we sat down to eat on the last of the years rice, getting enough back and forth from neighbors like the whole village trying to get over the hump before the years end and the new rice of the new harvest. I climbed back into my sleep, into a poem, into their dream, fresh from drenching cold water, the sash as it were at the end of the day. The spirit woman murmured on before the fire, weathered hands feeding the coals. Dear Friends: Finally a break from saving infants and others and solving crisis. More work on village mapping and this has all been boosted greatly by the fact that a gentleman from Sweden has donated to us a Magellan GPS so that we can accurately generate map coordinates, so if there are any of you out there with map calculating friends, we could soon give coordinates for the building of a map so that everyone can see where villages are, completed wells and other projects. Besides the general work of medicine, and village visits for the mapping, and rice harvest in a couple days, life has been somewhat calm. Matthew 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 PO BOX 6073 Salem OR 97304 USA Donations by direct banking can be transferred to: (Preferred) Wells Fargo Bank Akha Heritage Foundation Acc. # 0081-889693 Keizer Branch # 1842 04 4990 N. River Road. Keizer, Oregon, 97303 USA ABA # 121000248 Or In Thailand: Matthew Duncan McDaniel Acc. # 3980240778 Bangkok Bank Ltd. Maesai Branch Thailand Web Site: http://www.akha.com mailto:akha@loxinfo.co.th Discussion Groups: akha@onelist.com indigenousworld@onelist.com -- .