Emily's Week 5 Report

Writing funding proposals



My past week has been filled with ups and downs. At the beginning of last week, I started working on a proposal for a sex education program for hill tribe youth. Poor sex education means that students are at higher risk of contracting STDs and HIV/AIDS. In fact, Chiang Rai has the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rate of any province in Thailand, yet students only learn basic anatomy in sex ed in schools, and misuse contraceptives in a really dangerous way – for example overdosing on morning after pills (having 20 – 30 tablets) once they find out they are pregnant.

Writing this proposal has been great because I get to offer feedback on the project – and some of this feedback is worked into the project. Today we also discussed further changes such as advocating the provincial government to make a concrete curriculum for sex education in schools.

Teaching and modelling…

I was also teaching English last week.... as well as doing some modelling for e-Bannok, which is the small business run here making clothes and jewellery by the hilltribe women in a women's empowerment project. So I was the model! I did some last week too: last week it was in front of a white sheet with everyone watching me, which was so funny and a bit awkward! This week it was posing in front of buildings and trees. Hilarious.

Going to Mlabri
However, the biggest challenge of my week by far was going to Mlabri Village, which is in Nan province, about 5 hours drive away from Chiang Rai. This week I jumped in the deep end and went to Mlabri with eight Thai interns and three Thai staff from the Hilltribe Team of the NGO. The Mlabri people used to be hunter gatherers and lived in the forest in Nan, but less than a generation ago, moved to their current location in a village about 30 minutes inside the Nan border. Traditionally, they have been looked down on by other hilltribes as being ‘dirty’ and ‘primitive’. They used to wear banana leaves for clothing, however now wear second hand clothes. In Thai, they are given a derogatory name ‘spirits of the yellow leaves’. However they prefer to be called Mlabri. The village we went to is quite small – only about 125 people.
I significantly struggled with not understanding Thai for four days – as conversations went on around me and over my head. It is amazing how much not grasping language impacts on you – it affects your confidence, ability to be yourself and your ability to participate. It seems fitting that I struggled with these things while in Mlabri, which is a village of a group of people whose language is spoken by roughly only 450 people in the world.

Fishing in Mlabri
Still, one day in Mlabri, we went fishing. The team said to me - ‘we’re going fishing, do you want to come?’ I said ‘Yes, I’ll come watch’ – imagining that fishing was - fishing - on a stick, with a rod, and string, and a hook. We went down to the stream with some people carrying hoes and it turned into a massive adventure. People started hacking madly with hoes in the scrub, and created an alternative channel for the stream through the bushes. We scrabbled around for rocks and started building a wall, filling it in with huge chunks of dirt that we passed along a line to fill in the wall. The water was all diverted to further down the stream.
With our hands, we started scooping out the water from the pools the stream left behind, trying to find shellfish, fish (plaa), crabs and freshwater prawns (goong). After a few minutes, someone called out ‘there’s a snake!!’ I jumped up immediately, and people were pointing to the pool, where I just had my hands! There was a snake in there! One of the little boys who were with us (there were about three of them, about seven years old) fished around for it with his hands, picked it up, played with it in his fingers and said its good food... And we went straight back to the pool.
It was amazing. We were there for a few hours, bailing out water with hands and buckets from about fifteen metres of stream stepping through squidgy mud. All the time people were calling out PLAA! PLAA! PLAA! GOONG! GOONG! and you would see a fish suddenly slapping about on the rocks and run over, scoop it up in your hands, run back and throw it in the bucket, hoping it didn’t pop out of your hands on the way! I started to be really good at finding the goong, because you can see their antenna floating on the water. I was a bit scared at first to pick them up because in Australia they have big pincers. (here they don’t) The little kids were mad little machines, running around putting their fingers into every nook and cranny, their fingers emerging thick with fish. Afterwards we returned to the Mlabri village and the little kids ate all the fish with us.

Fieldwork in Mlabri
I will be writing a funding proposal collating what we learnt in Mlabri to a funding organisation to get funding for a project to assist them.
While we were in Mlabri, the Thai interns went around doing field work, and I watched and listened to them - asking questions in Thai to each family, about who lived there, and what languages they could speak/read/write, and information about the debts that the Mlabri owe to the Hmong. Most of the Mlabri could not read or write in Hmong or in Thai. All of their business transactions with the Hmong were purely oral – in a language that was not the first language of the Mlabri.
The Hmong are a different hilltribe group that live in the village just 500m down the road from the Mlabri. They own the majority of the land surrounding, and the Mlabri have just a tiny slice of land for themselves. Therefore, the Mlabri have to go and work in the Hmong fields – they rent the land from the Hmong, plant corn from corn seeds sold to them by the Hmong, reap the corn, and sell it to the Hmong using transport they have bought from the Hmong. The Hmong, as far as I can understand, take undue advantage of the Mlabri – and have used their vulnerability to benefit themselves. The Hmong live in beautiful dark wood homes – simple, admittedly, but good wood homes. The Mlabri live in bamboo huts with banana leaf roofs. The floor is the dirt ground with thick cracks in it. In the wet season, the people must live in mud.
On our first night, a girl called Dian was crying, because of the problems facing her family. Families are indebted more than they can afford to pay back. After the harvest season, and they had paid off some of the debts, her family were still 20,000 baht in debt to the Hmong– and only had 2000 baht (under $100A) in cash for the family to live off for the next year.
One instance which I found particularly unsettling there, was just after sunset one night. It was dark, and we had just been interviewing family after family about the debts that they owed. I was standing with one of the interns, who was my main translator, among houses at the top of the village, and we could see a neon light on a hill in the distance, and hear singing echoing across the hills. It was the Hmong village, singing celebrations into the night. There was such a deep contrast.
It struck me, that it was so unfair, that the Hmong could have so much and the Mlabri have so little, right next door to each other. It seemed so unfair that the Hmong could be singing and happy for all the things they had, when they had earnt it off the backs of the Mlabri. And then I thought to myself – is it such a different picture back home? Of the West, so rich, and so well off, and their relationship with the poor? Is this picture, of the Hmong and the Mlabri, side by side, a much more obvious picture of what goes on every day all around the world... and are we like the Hmong singing ignorantly on the hill in the dark?