Isan and Ko Pet

    Isan is the Northeastern region of Thailand.  It’s pretty much devoid of tourists because it is very rural, very poor, and a long way from most traditional Thai attractions.  But, of course, all of those qualities, poverty excepted, are like catnip to me, which is how we came to stay in the heart of Isan, in a village called Ko Pet. 

    The land itself is absolutely beautiful.  Conjure up the loveliest image you can of a rural area, filled with rice paddies, bamboo, gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, animals and friendly people.  Go totally Hollywood on this one.  Come on now, take it one step further…..Yep that’s it.

It’s actually that beautiful.

                           Beauty everywhere.

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    But beauty is only part of the reality there, because it is also an incredibly poor area.  Our hostess, Lamai, was born and raised in the village (and her Welsh ex-pat husband has been there for about 15 years) and as she took us round the village, she explained what life was like there.  Her husband is also a keen observer, so we learned a great deal from him, too. 

[Please note- everything I write below, I write with permission of our hosts, and all photos were taken with permission.  Our hosts created their homestay in part to help their village and the whole village has  essentially stepped into that teaching process.] 

    Ko Pet is poor in the deepest sense of the word.  Most of the men are rice farmers, but there is only a three month growing season.

  They don’t grow the rice to sell, just to eat.  Every family has a shed in which they keep their rice, and their rice is their money.   Apparently, if they need a loan from a bank, everyone in the village adds their rice bags to borrower's shed so that when the bank assessor checks, it looks like they have much more rice than they actually do.  The banks know the practice, but don’t care, because they take it as a sign that the person asking for the loan has a good support network.  Works for everyone!

The women also work the rice and also, during the 9 months of non-growing season, occasionally take in sewing and bead work on skits and shirts that will be sold in the cities.  But it can take 2 months to finish a skirt (worked on around their regular daily tasks) and they are paid around120 Baht- $4 per skirt. 

The village has running water, but they don’t use it because it’s too expensive.

  Instead they use rain water, captured in huge cisterns.  You and I would get incredibly sick drinking it, but they’ve done so all their lives and have built up immunity.  

They raise animals to eat, and also forage for frogs, scorpions, spiders, freshwater crabs, and snails.  We were going to forage for scorpions this afternoon but ran out of time.  Obviously, we were devastated. 

    Kids leave home as soon as they can to get jobs to send money back home to their parents.  Parents  pay thousands of Baht for a “contract,” which means someone takes the kids for 3 years to work.   If the person who hires them is honest, the kids work  about 2 1/2 yrs to pay off the loan then send good money home.  Our hostess' parents signed a contract with someone dishonest.  Her parents took out a loan on everything they owned- animals, rice fields, house to pay the contract fee.  She was supposed to go off and sew zippers into clothes.  Instead she was told she had to haul bags of cement that literally weighed more than she did.  Needless to say she couldn’t, she was sent home, and her family lost the entire contract fee, and thus everything they owned.  They were eventually able to buy it back (because of the dowry from their daughter's marriage), but it often doesn't work out that way.  

    But poverty also doesn’t have the same implications in Ko Pet that it does in the US.  The village is, with a few exceptions such as home building, completely self sufficient.  They grow, raise, and forage virtually all their own food, so they don’t need money to buy it.   There is an expectation that you will pass on debt to your children, so that relieves some of the stress of it (according to our hosts).  

No child is ever abandoned.  If parents can’t afford to raise them, someone in the extended family will take those kids in, or the temple will (if they are boys). If someone in the village doesn’t have enough to eat, someone else will just feed them.  And because most people are in the same financial situation (Though there were some fancier houses there) life is what life is.   

    I hardly knew what to feel while we were in Ko Pet.  The poverty was so prevalent, but so was the generosity and self sufficiency and friendliness.  We were foreigners blatantly gazing into an entire village’s private lives, but also invited to do so and kind of like zoo animals ourselves (I’ll get into that another post).  I had no idea what anyone was saying, which is a bit unsettling, especially when they are clearly talking about you, but they also were so unabashed and enthusiastic about it that it didn't seem like I should worry about it.

    Oy.  So much to say!  Our hosts shared so much, and we saw and learned so much, I just can’t write it all.  Even so, I’m sure I don’t need to point out that what I understood and am sharing with you barely scratches the surface of life in Ko Pet.  So that’s it for this post!