Travel Report Balt van de Made
November 13, 2018 – from Thailand
After paying only a fraction of what you would pay for spaghetti carbonara at Lake Como, we arrived around 4 PM at the grounds of the children’s home, where we were ‘greeted’ by silence. But not for long. Soon, we heard chatter behind the banana trees, and a whole crowd of children came marching onto the premises. In uniform, with backpacks in every imaginable design, wearing hats and caps to protect them from the sun. They had just returned from their daily walk to and from the school in the village, a few kilometers away.
As soon as they saw us, their little hands went together in a prayer-like gesture, reminiscent of Mary in the grotto of Lourdes, facing the church of the Holy Family Catholic Center. Accompanied by shy bows and smiles.
About 130 children live at the center, both boys and girls, starting from around six years old. After attending the village’s primary school – where Dees spent a day assisting the English teacher – they move on to secondary school or vocational training in Chiang Rai or Chiang Mai. Girls for whom secondary school is not an option may stay at the center, but boys may not. Returning to the village is avoided if possible. The girls then take on domestic tasks at the center and learn sewing and embroidery as a specialty. For this, a special training program is provided on-site by a qualified teacher.
The center also houses a large shop where their handmade goods are sold, sometimes even made to order. Additionally, the older girls help supervise the younger ones who attend primary school. Everything is very well organized. Life at the center runs smoothly, with discipline, cheerfulness, friendliness, and touching morning singing at 6:30 AM.
We were immediately embraced as part of the family. You hear the bell for the daily Holy Mass at 6:30 AM, followed by breakfast and all other scheduled events announced by the ringing of the bell.
Most of the children are very affectionate. They come running, folding their little hands, and eagerly engage with us. They clung to us during the games we brought along with other toys.
At first, we found it heartbreaking that they had to miss their parents. After visiting the villages, we still found it sad, but we understood it was necessary for their future. Of course, no one can replace their parents, but Noi and her team are truly loving and attentive caretakers.
We met Ms. Noi, Father John, and Father Peter, who run the center and are responsible for pastoral work in the Akha villages in the mountains of northern Thailand, near the Myanmar border. Father Pensa, who during the car ride told us he had handed over the leadership of the center after 46 years, still does not act like a retiree, even at 78. He’s simply taking things a bit slower, though you wouldn’t notice – he still holds his own in pastoral work.
Since we stayed at the center for several weeks, it was interesting to learn all the ins and outs of the center’s organization, the Akha people in the villages, and how everything came to be. For the sake of clarity, we won’t go too deep and will focus on the highlights. Much can be found online about the hill tribes of northern Thailand, but from our experience, not everything is accurate.
Father Pensa’s mission began in 1972. He came from Italy to Thailand to support a friend and fellow brother from the same congregation in pastoral work among the Akha – a mountain tribe that fled Myanmar due to the advancing communism. The Akha are one of the remaining nomadic tribes from Central Asia, believed to originate from the Tibetan region. Over the centuries, they have spread across Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and China.
Under the influence of the Thai government – apparently even the king got involved – we saw rice, fruit, tea, and coffee being cultivated on deforested plots of land near the villages.
At that time, the Akha still lived as nomads. Groups from the villages around the center would move deeper into the mountains, clearing more forest to build huts and farm the newly opened land. When the soil was exhausted or they were chased away, they moved on. That’s why they settled far from their first settlements. Father Pensa followed them, which is why pastoral work now takes place in dozens of villages, far from the center in Pong Ngan, even as far as near Chiang Mai.
In short, the mountains of northern Thailand are dotted with villages hidden in the jungle, home to the Akha and other hill tribes, each with their own traditions and languages, as different from Thai as Dutch is from Greek.
We visited several of these Akha villages. On Thursday morning at 7 AM, we set off in the Isuzu pickup truck with the three priests toward Chiang Rai to visit Father Peter’s family first. Father Peter is Akha (Father John is Karen). His family still lives in the mountains, where he grew up. (In our last week, we also visited his parents in his birth village.)
We visited his niece on the outskirts of Chiang Rai. She and her husband no longer live in the mountains; like many young people, they have moved away from the jungle villages. The same goes for the other children in that family, who were also present. Their father had recently suffered a stroke and was in critical condition in the Chiang Rai hospital. If you suffer a stroke in a remote village, you’re in deep trouble. It takes hours to reach a hospital and see a doctor. There are no general practitioners in Thailand. (We heard the day before we left that the uncle had passed away.)
It was moving to see how these people dealt with their grief and how happy they were to see Father Pensa. That was the case everywhere we went; he was sometimes treated like the Pope himself. When we arrived, the man of the house was almost done slaughtering a pig, whose meat he would sell at the market that afternoon. He did this six days a week, he told us.
The slaughtering area was to the left of the ‘front door’; he deboned and cut the meat on the table to the right, where most of the pig was already laid out. You could tell he was a professional. He scraped and cut the little meat from the pig’s head, pushed it through the meat grinder along with other scraps and strips of fat, and stuffed it into cleaned intestines. Fresh sausage. He hoped to sell the entire pig that afternoon, which wasn’t always the case on other days, but Thursdays were usually good market days.
We traveled over narrow concrete roads, bumpy dirt paths with sharp stones, and rain-eroded tracks. Around noon, we arrived in Banmai Jadsan, where the entire village was waiting for us at the deceased’s house.
The village, a collection of huts mostly on stilts with bamboo walls and thatched roofs, had no notable interior. No kitchen either – as in other villages, cooking was done over open fires, both inside and outside.
We shook dozens of hands and were treated as honored guests. Fires were stoked, pots were filled, and a low round table was set for us, the prayer leader, and his assistant. The rest of the villagers sat outside at plastic tables or on the ground. Various meats and vegetables were served, along with, of course, rice.
For the first time, we drank beer with large ice cubes. Well-chilled, but it no longer tasted like beer.
Father Peter explained that Catholic Akha always have a small altar on the wall. They call it an altar, but it’s a wooden shelf about one meter wide and 60 centimeters deep, mounted at eye level, with figurines, holy water, and candles on it. In the days that followed, we saw this in other houses as well, when we gathered to pray the rosary.
In the living room, there was also a sideboard with a box full of candles. We discovered at the cemetery that this was where the deceased had been kept. We saw the coffin, decorated with ornaments and draped with a cloth, being carried to the grave along with the legs of the sideboard, as they were all one piece. That’s why we had mistaken the coffin for a piece of furniture.
The funeral was combined with the All Saints and All Souls celebrations on November 1st, which is why the Mass took place at the cemetery.
Many readers might no longer remember these ‘Sundays,’ but we did have them back in the day, at least among Catholics. On every grave, dozens of candles were placed and lit.
After the ceremony, we didn’t return to the village but headed straight to our next destination, where we spent two nights.
From there, we visited several villages where, except for the absence of a corpse in a sideboard, the same Catholic rituals were performed as in the first village. In the past 25 years, I had not visited so many cemeteries, attended so many Masses, prayed so many rosaries, and had so much holy water sprinkled over me as in those days.
The rosaries were prayed at someone’s home, in the otherwise empty living room, except for the altar. We sat on a low stool next to the altar, while the rest sat on mats on the floor. They have no furniture (yet), which probably wasn’t practical during their nomadic times. Father Pensa told us they only carried what they could. It must have been tough, especially for the women and children. Even now, the women still do most of the work, which is evident. They work the land, not the men, and often with a child on their back. And not on flat land – the banana trees, tea, and coffee plants, as well as fruit trees, are often planted on steep slopes.
These were fascinating days that we wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
In the last week, I went with Father Pensa to another village to bury someone and administer the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick to a man with cancer. Again, we ate with the whole village – as the only ones seated at a table on wooden chairs – and the Mass was held not at the cemetery, but in the beautifully maintained church, where the singing was once again magnificent.
We also made trips to, among other places, the Golden Triangle – the border point of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos. And in Mae Sai, we briefly crossed the border into Myanmar to obtain another 30-day visa for Thailand upon re-entry.
The remnants of former communism are still clearly visible in Myanmar, especially in the outdated technology and widespread poverty.
Unlike what tourist websites suggest, we found no trace of the romanticism they describe among the Akha. No women in traditional dress weaving behind looms, no men crafting wooden musical instruments. In every village we visited, only a few elderly women still wore traditional attire, and the men cleaned or drove their pickups as a hobby.
No schools, no doctor, no hospital, no pharmacy, no social services, and often hardly any roads. Wastewater simply drains into the ground. They survive solely on mountain agriculture, which cannot be mechanized. The soil becomes exhausted, strange insects arrive, and fertilizers and pesticides (poison) make their appearance. The youth are leaving, partly thanks to initiatives from centers like the one we stayed at – and there are more, also among Protestants.
Does it all have to be romanticized? In our view, more roads are needed, especially through roads. That would attract tourists, who want to move on, not turn back. And near the villages, restaurants, shops, etc. With only agriculture, they won’t make it.
Especially girls are leaving – the women who should bear the future and work the fields.
Girls who lived in centers like the Holy Family Catholic Center will hardly ever return to live in those backwaters and toil the land.
The story about the water pumps, which was our actual reason for visiting, is probably not of much interest to you as readers. Suffice it to say that the organizers decided to replace the whole system. An excellent initiative, giving the center many more years of use.
It is impossible to describe everything we experienced; it could easily fill a book. Therefore, here are a few keywords and sentences, also as a reminder to ourselves not to forget:
• Whiskey at 7:30 AM.
• Father Catholic, son Protestant, misery, suicide.
• Low on the mountains they grow lychees, bananas higher up, and coffee and tea at the highest points.
• Trade a lot with China.
• Eat worms.
• Food trays on the table.
• Eat with chopsticks.
• Women eat separately.
• Vegetables and herbs from nature.
• Shoes off everywhere.
• No furniture.
• Satellite dishes and flat screens everywhere.
• Pickups are cheap.
• Screen in the rear-view mirror, camera at the back.
• They hawk and spit.
• Elderly stain their teeth black with some substance.
• Only elderly in traditional clothing.
• Different calendar.
• Not long ago, twins were still killed. Pensa witnessed it. We met those people.
• Men dye their hair black.
• Except for one young person, no one smoked.
• No one wore glasses.
• Devout, very devout, also the young people.
• They honor their deceased.
• No one works in the fields on the day of the funeral.
• Everyone eats with the deceased’s family.
• Lots of candles and flowers.
• Sing beautifully in two-part harmony and a lot.
• In church, men sit on the right, women on the left.
• Women receive communion first, then men.
• No benches in church, just mats.
• Church buildings are beautiful, well-maintained, and on the best spot.
• For the Akha, Catholicism (and Protestantism) is a new faith, no more than 50 years old.
• Before that, they worshipped nature gods.
• The poorest mountain tribe.
• There are still 6 or 7 other hill tribes with sub-tribes.
• To us, their houses are shacks.
• Usually on stilts, storage underneath.
• Town crier with loudspeaker on a mast by the church.
• Akha is their own language.
• Not all youth speak Thai.
• Elderly only speak Akha.
• Illiteracy.
• Visited a very remote village in a 4×4 with an Akha man from the village where we overnighted.
• Terrible, steep road, inaccessible by regular car.
• And so on, and so on…
On Sunday, November 11, after exactly two weeks, we left.
An unforgettable experience that, at least regarding faith, transported us back to the 1950s and ‘60s.
The church bell at 6:30 for daily Mass, the bell in the playground, prayers before and after meals (six times a day), the funerals, the anointing of the sick, the celebration of All Saints (still considered a Sunday here), the cemetery ceremonies for All Souls, and, of course, the rosaries.
The monotonous chanting of hundreds of Hail Marys almost made us long for those days.
During the car ride to Chiang Mai (5 hours), we spent 4 hours enjoying Christmas carols from Father Peter’s USB stick. The priests were going on retreat, and we had to go that way too, so we joined them.