Cooking for 40

The Lisu village homes lack many of the stuff we find comfortable.  Lisu people are used to sitting on the floor, sleeping on the floor, cooking on the floor, etc.  The homes are pretty much void of furniture.  Yet their pots and pans are big enough to feed an army.  Their material possessions suggest what they value.  Eating together is a priority and sharing is their way of life.  I watched the process of cooking up a pig.  I think every woman had a ladle in the giant pot of stewing pig guts and pumpkin.  Each had an herb or some other vegetable to add to the pot.  When the stew was done, the men took over and rendered the lard over the fire.

On the last night of our stay in the village we prepared a meal for about 40 or 50 people (which means that there was enough food for about 100).  Two pictures show the preparation of the killed pig and the remaining pictures show preparation of our last meal together.  

Rendering the pork fat

Students are pulling stems off of dried chilis.

Mashing the potatoes.

Adding cabbage to chicken foot soup.

Making the tofu stew

Ajan Gai stirs the cabbage

My ma stirring the pig guts and pumpkin stew

Students peel cooked potatoes with their hands.

Ban Doi Lan - a Lisu Village

The Lisu people make up an ethnic minority in Northern Thailand.  They prefer to live near the tops mountains and are quite adept at farming steep slopes.  The Lisu came from Southern China (and perhaps Tibet before that).  The Lisu have their own language which is in the spoken form only.  We lived in a Lisu village for 5 days and observed how they farm and how they live in community.  We were fortunate to arrive on the day of a wedding celebration. 

Our 5 days in the Lisu village have reinforced my conclusion that as countries and villages (like Ban Doi Lan) develop, it is almost impossible to keep the culture and the environment intact.  What a tragic loss for these people who have been self-sufficient for hundreds of years.

More about our Lisu stay later.

Ban Doi Lan

Gathering the daily vegetables.

Preparing the rice field to be burned

Breakfast in my Ma's kitchen.

Gabby teaches the women a new dance.

Guess what's for dinner.

Not a bad view for a rice field.

Dressed for the wedding

 

 

Merit Making

The large drum can be heard throughout the village.  It calls the villagers to the temple.

Our students wearing the clothing of Mae Chaem

The money tree that held the merit-making gifts

The parade through town.  The money tree is ahead of the crowd.

The following is a description of "merit-making" from my perspective.  There are a variety of ways that a person can earn merit in the Buddhist tradition.  For our ceremony in the village, we constructed a money tree.  The trunk of the tree was actually from a banana plant and enhanced to look like a tree with a branch from a tamarind tree.  We loaded "skewers" with money and poked the skewers into the banana stalk.  We also stuck many empty skewers in the stalk.  When the heat of the day died down a bit, we dressed up in traditional village clothes and paraded around the village making an immense amount of noise (cymbals, drums, yelling) to attract other villagers to add Bahts to the empty branches of the tree.  The parade wound its way back to the temple where the head monk blessed the gifts from the money tree.  Payap would have paid the monks at the temple for the use of the temple as our classroom throughout the week.  But by turning the donation into a celebration, the actual amount of money collected was more than twice what Payap donated.  There are very pragmatic reasons to make merit-making a celebration.  Where Buddhism and animism co-exist, there may be a variety of reasons to do "merit-making".  From a Buddhist tradition, the purpose for merit making is to "purchase" good kharma (I apologize to Buddhists for the blunt interpretation) and a better next life.  The animist influence probably uses merit-making to please gods in this life. 

A different kind of classroom

Mae Chaem Valley

Our classroom was in the Buddhist temple complex

Cutting Chicken for the soup

A hot cauldron of vegetable greens

Mixing the rice flour dough for desert

 

 

The second crop of the growing year is being planted