Week 3, Sunday: Longest Post Ever (in three acts)

Act I: I'm Losing It
While this trip so far has been worth making, it has submitted me once again to my relentlessly dangerous absentmindedness and general forgetfulness. I'm sure those of you who know me well enough issued a collective groan when I reported that after a week I'd lost my first phone (my number here, by the way is 08-1397-5133. My Skype name is cephasjenks in case I'm on, which is rare). While I admitted the likelihood of my actually having lost the phone, I noted at the time the conspicuous convergence of the phone's loss and my sleeping for eight hours on a crowded bus. Nevertheless, I submit that the phone was in all likelyhood just ignored for long enough to be forgot about and then disappear before I could find it again.

Since then, I've remained silent in past blogs about other small losses, as they were small, but frustrating. My $8 watch (probably the 10th of my life to go that way) and my wonderful and necessary raincoat (replaced by the infinitely inferior Thai 'plastic bag raincoat' because the raincoat is basically made out of plastic bag material).

I still have my laptop, still have my camera, still have the CephasPhone Mark II, still have my passport, still have my secret cash stash, still have my wallet...

Or not. The wallet, that is. This past weekend, Friday and Saturday, I took a bustrip down to Phang-Nga (the next province to the south of Ranong) which was the province hit the hardest by the tsunami (in the form of an 11 meter wave. Not kidding). There was a big meeting there between different minority groups and generally disenfranchised people and the NGOs who support them and the assistant Prime Minister and other various potentially corrupt Thai government officials. The whole thing was rather sad (I'll write more about this later), but the sad part was that I lost my wallet on the way down.

The last time I remember using it (because that's what I know mom would ask me) was at a 7-11 at a gas station just outside of ranong on the way out. I bought a bottle of water and this Thai menthol nose thing that clears stuffy noses. (Dr. Kasuga is making a suspicious face, I'm sure). Anyways, everything cost something like 70 cents and I paid it and that's the last time I remember having my wallet in my hand. When I got back onto the bus, I decided to take a nap, and I didn't think about my wallet again until that night, getting ready to sleep on the floor of a schoolroom, I looked for my wallet everywhere and didn't find it. So amid the hubbub I was crushed by apparent failure to behave like a responsible adult. (I went back to 7-11 today (two days later) and they hadn't seen the wallet).

In the wallet was about $12, but also my MA driver's license, my atm card, a credit card, and my harvard id. There is absolutely no reason the last four items should have been in my wallet, I now realize, and in all international travel from now on I won't leave them there. Being naive as I was, or stupid more likely, I basically had my American cadre of plastic on hand to be lost.
While I keep saying lost, there's a little something at the back of my brain that has made the following observation: both my first phone and my wallet were lost while on a bus. I fell asleep on both bus rides. It's possible that I put my phone/wallet in my bag or the pouch in front of my both times, or it could have been on me (but then I would have it?). So I don't know. Anyways, there's no excuse for the situation I'm in. The card's being rushed to Somerville, though, and I know this really cute there who kind of likes me and I'm going to ask her to send me the new card here in Thailand. Not the end of the world, just a relatively bad day. Fortunately I had a little stockpile of cash in another place and my (Replacement for a Lost) Passport so I'm ok for a while.

Act II: The Powers that Be
So this conference I went to was basically a time for various NGOs who had done tsunami relief to report on rebuilding structures, and then mostly for different minority groups to make complaints and ask for citizenship, etc. The Mirror Foundation, which is a Thai organization working for citizenship rights for minority groups. The Assistant or Vice Prime Minister was there, which I guess is something.

Anyways, most of the other people there were Muslim, who also really have something to complain about when it comes to the way the Thai government has treated them. I was there with the Moken, there, and the only white person there the first day and the only one until later on the second day. The Moken generally seemed to be glad I was there, though, and I got to talk with a lot of them during the trip, which was good.

Anyways, the actual presentations consisted of a bunch of powerpoint presentations. The Moken issue was relatively close to the end of the initial dispute session before the government response, and there were two Moken men up there and Phii Naw, who I stayed with last week, who has a silver tongue. The Moken man (Jiew) went first. The basic translation of what he said is first. "Hello. My Name is Jiew. I am Moken. Watch this video." They then showed a video which relayed the information to the bored-looking government officials about how some 80 Moken living on Koh Surin (an island farther to the South than Ranong with another Moken community) had been granted citizenship due to the efforts of Acarn. N (who was the first professor I met in Thailand). After the video concluded, Jiew continued saying something like: "It is very difficult living where I live. It is more difficult because we don't have citizenship cards. The Moken at Koh Surin were given citizenship cards, but we still do not have cards." He then paused and said "Phi Naw will say more."

I'm not making fun of Jiew. There's something absurd about asking the poorest person at the lowest rung of a relatively low economic totem pole to explain the difficulty of his situation and clearly plead his case: justifying the necessity of his getting citizenship and explaining the reason why the Thai government should feel responsible to give it to him. He only knows that he's lived in Thailand all his life (which he probably should have thought to say in addition to what he did), and that he doesn't have any citizenship. But Phi Naw said he was shaking while talking, as I'm sure I would have been, but public speaking to public officials about his problems is as difficult for him I'm sure as diving in the ocean for sea slugs would be for the said public officials.

Anyways, when Phi Naw (Phi is the Thai word for "older sibling", often used as a prefix for people in your generation who are older than you that you know well, hence making it clear to everyone there that he wasn't aware of formal state jargon, using the most colloquial form of address for her) started talking, she gave a very long and eloquent speech about the plight of the Moken. She hit on a lot of issues, including the 19 men who were imprisoned in the Nicobar islands who went because they couldn't find work here and so on. I think she failed to make a bunch of the actual arguments for their citizenship, though, including the fact than many of the Moken were born and raised on Thai islands and that despite the state's claim that they are Burmese most speak only minimal Burmese while speaking very good Thai. I suspect it didn't occur to her to say these things to her because they are so obvious to someone living in the community. She did focus a lot on how hard things are for them. Part of me is starting to wonder if this isn't detrimental, making the Moken feel like they deserve continuous outside aid. More on this later.

In retrospect I kind of wish that I had thought enough and attempted to say something myself. But then again, I'm just a linguist, and am not Thai. It just seems that there were points that weren't made, I guess.

Anyways, after everyone had finished their complaints, the assistant Prime Minister stood up and gave a speech which can be pretty quickly summarized as "The tsunami is the worst disaster Thailand has ever seen. We have accomplished a lot since then, which is great. But there's still lots of problems, and we're really sorry about that. We sympathize with you."

Two other government guys spoke, one of them addressed the Moken issue directly, but I had a harder time understanding him. It seemed that the main content of his talk about the Moken was just that he thought that it was too bad that they wouldn't be able to get citizenship, but they might look into the matter or something. So maybe a glimmer of hope, but it words are cheap and it remains to be seen what happens.

The government position for denying the Moken citizenship is basically that they're Burmese. I must admite that there is a shade of truth to this claim. A number of the Moken now living in Thailand did actually originate in Burma, and many do return at various points. But their home is Thailand and has been for some 30 years now.

This citizenship aspect of the Moken dispute has actually made me contemplate a career change to human rights law work with stateless peoples, trying to force governments to give them citizenship. I don't know anything about how you would go about doing that, or who does it, if anyone, but I've definitely thought about it as a second career. For the time being, it makes sense to continue getting more experience with the actual people involved, I think. Part of the problem, I think, is the continuing existence of rogue governments like Burma's, which basically can't be dealt with at all (being a military dictatorship).

As for why the Moken need state rights, the older brother of the head of the village at Koh Hlao has his left arm cut off just below the elbow and has a really bad limp. He was showing me his leg the other day and telling me the story of how he was in a boat with eight other Moken and the soldiers came, made them give the Moken all of their gasoline, then shot them all. Only he and one other person survived, and he was in a hospital for two months. (His arm was lost dynamite fishing). Anyways, it's stories like that that make you realize that there are some benefits in being a member of a modern Nation-State. The truth is that even if this small group of Thai Moken get their citizenship, the plight for the Burmese Moken will remain as hard.

Act III: I, Thou, Culture, and Money
It might surprise some of you to find that this last week, spent on Elephant Island, was actually the longest extended period I've spent in any Moken village. I think I'm going to try and spend the whole next week on Koh Hlao as well, though I may go on a little expedition to Koh Phayam at the end of the week with Mayay, who is in some of the pictures I'm going to hopefully post in a little bit.

The week was really great. I got a feel of Moken culture, which revolves around a lot of hanging out. You're basically free to walk into anyone's house whenever you want. The Moken feel free to boil water on someone's stove and drink their coffee, chew their beetlenut, and smoke their bootleg cigarettes, even if they're not there. Spending time alone, which I do when I'm working, appears to be relatively abnormal behavior. I learned a lot of names, faces, and heard a lot of stories and family histories. I also figured out the nasal prefix deletion rule, and I think proved that wh-movement is just scrambling!

The first night on elephant island a girl, who looks like she's maybe 16 but I think is older, came to the door of the house where I was staying. Her name is Dara, with European a's, and she's very small, probably 5' and 90 pounds. I had been chatting with one of the American volunteers who was there to build one of the houses, and she showed up and told me in Moken that she wanted to talk to me and not to talk to him. She used enough body language to make it clear what she meant and he, looking concerned but understanding, left. She then asked to come up to the house, and I I invited her in, (other people were home), unsure of what she wanted and a little wary. She proceeded to ask me if I wanted to sleep with her that night. Sanuk! she said, using the word borrowed from Thai for 'fun!'.

She was drunk. I said no, I couldn't. She was persistent. She told me that her husband had been one of the 19 Moken imprisoned for diving for sea slugs in the nicobar islands (have I mentioned this situation before?), and she was lonely, and she had been drinking a lot because if she didn't drink she would just cry. After I persistently refused, she started asking for money. I asked why she wanted the money (she was asking for just 10 baht, which is what a drink costs), and after it was clear I wouldn't pay for her drinks she said she didn't have any milk to give her children. I went with her to the store and bought two cans of sweetened condensed milk that evidently Moken mothers feed their children. Despite the ethical issues involved in mothers feeding their children sweetened condensed milk (mixed with water, I think), given the circumstances it seemed to be the best available option. And I certainly wasn't going to change a cultural practice by one tight-fisted refusal.

As I talked to people later in the week about the incident, I found out that she had evidently made a similar offer to the other Americans staying on the island as well. I also found out that her husband beats her, severely. Her children are around one and three.

Wife and child abuse are relatively common, according to both Acarn N. and the Moken who I talked to about it, and almost always related to alcohol. While not everyone does it, and I even feel that lots of Moken don't condone it, there's a sense in which they feel that the women who are beat somehow deserve it, or bring it upon themselves. With the few Moken who I had a chance to talk with extensively about this this week, I made it clear that I thought there were no excuses to beat your wife, or children, and that if you did that in my country you can be imprisoned. I said that I didn't think that there was ever an excuse for violence, especially against someone weaker than you.

There were other cultural insights as well. For example, one Moken mother told me that it was important to drink alcohol and smoke while you were pregnant because babies in your womb like it, they crave all the "fun things" just like adults do. (I guess there are bigger issues even than children smoking in the Moken community.) I asked a couple of people about this, and they emphatically replied that they thought this was the case. "The baby likes it", they said. I told them that I didn't think it was good to drink when you were pregnant, but they made funny faces. It seemed to be a bona fide case of cultural common sense being at clear odds with western medical received wisdom--to the detriment of infants, in this case. Needless to say, it's difficult to estimate the impact this might have had on these people group over generations, assuming it's not specific to this one community. Fetal alchohol syndrome is no joke, from what I understand, and this is a community which has home births and a relatively severe infant mortality rate, from what I gather, especially neonatal mortality. Births are performed at home, by other Moken women.

Cholera is also a big issue here, though. I hear there are deaths every year from children with diarrhea (my consultant said her daughter had diarrhea almost constantly). I tried to stress strongly that handwashing was key, etc., but I think especially older members of the community are rather fixed in their ways. But this is not a problem specific to the Moken, I don't think.
Just getting all of this information, and hearing lots of other stories about the community entailed spending a lot of time with different Moken, and I feel very gratified in knowing many more of their names and language than I did before. There's always this undulation from one moment to the next, at first feeling you are in pure relation with someone, and then feeling embarrassingly, frustratingly foreign and Other.

One of the highlights of this last week occured twice in the form of two excursions across Koh Hlao. The first was on foot, and I just walked around, looking for the beach, and walked about a mile and a half before finding it. There were some very barky dogs, and it was actually a Buddhist Monastery on the beach, so I felt kind of bad but it didn't look like anyone was there. Then as I was leaving, and the dogs were barking, a saffron-shrouded monk emerged from a small hut and told the dogs to be quiet...whoops! The next day, after a relatively short day of work, See (a woman, my main consultant thus far) and Mayay (man, a friend from last time who was a consultant for a day) and I did a lot of the same trip, only on different robes, and to the "New Pier", where I hadn't been the day before. We took a motorcycle with a side cart down little windy paved jungle roads, occasionally at speeds that I wasn't quite comfortable with...but in reality the danger was minimal, as fast wasn't actually that fast, and the worst case scenario was driving of the road and crashing into a tree. The side cart made falling over impossible (clearly trying very hard to make this sound safe for those who might be concerned). Anyways, it was fun, but then next day, when working with See, she told me that she thought I probably should have given Mayay something for taken me (so maybe her too), so I gave them both B100 ($3), which was something, but not a lot, which was fine, it just seemed kind of wierd to pay them for hanging out and having a good time, especially as I had already bought gas for the motorcycle on the trip. Anyways, oh well. I think Mayay's going to take me on a trip to Koh Phayam next weekend, though, and I'm planning to pay him for that, as I would any other person, and hopefully help him get a net as a result of the payment. It's a nice solution to the fact that I want to help one particular person who's been especially friendly to me and has a specific need without seeming too unfair. I'm sure it will still instill some jealousy, but there's no way around that, save giving nothing to no-one. Is this Charity or Solidarity? Not clear.

The relation almost always comes through talking about ourselves and our own lives, helping the other person understand who we are and how we feel about where we are. For me a large part of that is trying to explain to the Moken why I'm here, why I think they're language is so interesting and important, and why I'm not here just to help them. I explain to them that I'm a student, that I only study language, and that I chose to study their language not knowing anything about them as a community before I came. I told them that I was very suprised at the difficulty of the situation upon arriving, but tried to express that while I'm very concerned on one hand, in many ways I'm as incapable as them as doing anything about their situation.

But this is only partially true, and they know it as well as I do. At some point in every conversation, whether one about health, culture, history, or faith, there are subtle or not so subtle hints dropped or requests made for money. I do not know if this begging has arisen from the enormous amount of charity which they received after the tsunami. But charity, as Griff quotes someone as saying, is not solidarity, and I crave the latter for some reason, though I am beginning to feel that it is unattainable. The Moken know as well as I do, probably better, and more fully in their being, that the world is unjust, and that the great wealth of our current world lays in the hands of just a few people, and while it may trickle down, it does so only with the sweat of the poorest workers. I'm very wealthy in their eyes, and me not giving them money on a regular basis I think makes them feel that I'm very stingy, no matter how much I try to emphasize that my resourses are limited, and I don't want to just hand them out money.

(Quick aside: I have noticed, as another cultural observation, that money is occasionally just given to someone after a meeting, especially family members. It's not clear, though, if this is a loan, the repayment of a debt, or just kind of spreading money around as a regular thing to do. If it's the latter, it kind of explains a lot, and makes me feel like maybe I should actually just start handing money to people after chatting with them. But that seems kind of wierd?)

The Moken in Ranong have come from a culture of total independence, and traditionally were able to build with their own hands from nature all that they needed to live in deep community with the life around them. With each television, they lose sight of that world a little more, and while I certainly can't fault them for wanting to be a piece of the pie, it seems that within this one community (or two), something has been lost (which few of us have ever had, save maybe Grandpa and Grandma), which is total dependence on your environment for sustenance, and the knowledge and ability to use it without destroying it.

But they're here now, and I think that with the loss of independence come things like education and healthcare, and hopefully freedom and peace. But because of their cultural history, they don't have any understanding of things like saving money or even investing money in their homes or boats, which were both traditionally literally disposable. I think they have been led down the wrong path in the last few years, expecting the world to continually supply them with what they need, on a regular basis. Just as they could traditionally rely on their environment to supply them with their daily bread, I fear that they have now begun to rely on charity. And why not, when there's so much wealth out there that they don't have?

I think at the end of this trip I'm just going to give the Moken on Elephant Island bags of rice, as a small gift, as they have new houses and generally higher "quality of life." I think I'll try to stay a few extra days and buy roofing supplies for the Moken on Koh Hlao, as many of their houses are kind of lacking proper roofing, and they leak all the time. I think I'm going to stay a few days and try and help them put the roofs on, though I don't really know anything about that, and maybe even try and get someone to come help who knows more about building than I do. There are these four Thai guys doing construction on the church on Elephant Island I'm thinking of asking. I don't know when this will be possible, but I hope it's doable. The net idea is out, but if you want to help with building supplies, your welcome to, though I don't think the cost will be great (meaning I probably would be able to take care of it on my own). Anyways, hope everyone is doing well.