good tidings

Good tidings from the vast and varied metropolitan area of Chiang Mai, home to Wats, markets, and this weekends Loi Gaton (sp?) festival involving floating candles down the Mae Ping River and releasing flying cloth covered candle cubes into the night sky plus fireworks and such. We just began the theory portion of our next course: the political ecology of forests, which will and has already questioned my idea (and yours?) of national parks and environmentalism in general. These issues look a lot different from the perspective of the third world and the marginalized people that get pushed off of their native land by national parks working towards biodiversity.

Looking back on my last course, the second half of which I have not yet blogged into the bowels of the interweb, I have truly been overwhelmed with experience and information. Learning every day all day, from the Thai people that are living what we are studying, constantly on the move taking in new places and people - definintly felt an overload upon my return. I will give you the short synopsis.

After my Mae Ta blog entry and our mid course seminar, we backpacked about an hour into the hills to 2 different villages who are just beginning to practice agroforestry - integrating a diverse array of crops and useful plants into a forest on a hillside. These upland palong villagers don't have enough land and many of them are not official Thai citizens. They must farm on the hillside, battling bad soil, erosion runoff, and a whole host of other issues. UHDP, the Upland Holistic Development Project works with these villages to train them in agroforestry. We spent days touring the agroforests, evenings playing with the children in the villages, and nights talking with village headmen.

Next we headed even more north, within 15 km of Burma, past the city of Fang, to the campus of UHDP, where we learned in the many experimental plots that they produce - trying our new strategies of agriculture and animal domestication to bring into the upland villages. Some highlights:

ritualistic pig slaughter: from pig to dinner, 4 of the most traumatic hours of my life. The pig was tackled, tied up/wrestled, and my roomate was the one designated to insert the knife into the heart which produced some agonizing sounds I can only describe as gasping and gurgling. Next the skin was burnt and scraped off, the body opened up, and a crazy Thai man proceeded to drink the warm blood straight out of the diaphragm. From here crazy butchering processes took place with all of the students involved, and culminated in dinner. I wouldn't eat meat if I had to kill the animal every time... really makes you think about where your meat comes from.

natural pesticide: neem, lemongrass, and galingal crushed up and steeped in some water, sprayed onto the crops keeps the pests away

foraging: we foraged all the food we ate one lunch from the agroforest and cooked it in foraged agroproducts - bamboo vessels and banana leaves

Monday we head out to backpack for 2.5 weeks in the mountains near Mae Hong Son, between 5 different Karen tribal upland villages.

I am getting kicked off the computer - thinking of you all!!