Finding Nemo in a Karen Village

If some unspeakably cruel person were to hold me hostage and forced me to choose my top five experiences in Thailand thus far, I would think this person an exceedingly dull villain. It's hard to choose. I would talk about reaching the highest shrine in Thailand, the lights over the Ping River, the dogs of Mae Mut greeting me every morning with wagging tails, I would talk about my brush with the divine when I first slurped Chiang Mai noodles in Chiang Mai, and then I would then launch into the story of the weekend that Phil, Molly, and I spent in Baan Hoi Hoi, the Karen village nearest the farm.
"Baan" (บ้าน) means both house and village in Thai, because they're both your home. But it’s unclear: are the Hois pronounced differently? Is it redundant? Couldn’t tell you. Between the cost for housing us, cooking for us, leading us to two waterfalls, and basically spending 36 hours with us, plus the cost of the groceries we bought for the first night, the weekend probably cost each of us around $17. Best $34 we ever spent.

Welcomed by the first village puppy.

Originally it was Marco’s suggestion. As we've mentioned before, many of the paid staff at the farm are Karen, and they all live in this particular village up in the mountains. Through Marco, we lined it up with Gai Som, one of the guys who speaks English the best, and was thus Phil's partner for an early sugar cane transplanting adventure, back when we knew even less Thai than we know now. Gai Som used to be the secondary guide for a trekking outfit in Chiang Mai, and now lives in Baan Hoi Hoi because he met his wife while leading one of those treks. Although he isn't a guide any more, it sounds like his family hosts tourists fairly often. Originally, he's from a village two hours north of Mae Mut, but he talks to his ma a lot on the phone.

After work on a Saturday afternoon, each of us volunteers hopped on the back of one of the Karen guys’ motorbikes and clung on for a bumpy but gorgeous 20-30 minute ride up a dirt road, packed hard and run through with ravines. Gleefully, by this point in our stay our Thai was good enough to have a decent conversation about how pretty the mountains, sky, fields, trees, and water buffalo were, along with what color they were. But all I really wanted to say was "suay máaaaaaak" (very beautiful) with my jaw open to collect road dust. Our place on the ridge gave a gorgeous view down in the valley, the green things in it just catching the sun's fading light. Then the village began appearing as bits and pieces, a roof here or a stilt there. The guys called greetings to the various people we passed, some of them on motorbikes, others walking up the road from Mae Mut or from their fields (because, I later learned, not every Karen family can afford a motorbike), all of them looking curiously at the pale specimens clinging to the back of the bikes. Most tourists don't make their way up the mountain that way, I take it.

Our small home for the weekend was perched on the edge of a valley of rice terraces.

Built on a steep slope around one main road, most of the houses in Baan Hoi Hoi are entirely wooden, built on stilts, and have been roofed with of a kind of wide, firm tree leaf. Beneath the lofted floor of the average house are the chickens, pigs, and dogs in their various sorts of homes. Here and there a household might have a concrete foundation, but the majority of the 80 families living there did not. Apart from some solar panels of mysterious origin, there's no electricity, and all cooking is done over wood fires. There’s some running water from the river, like at our host farm. Except our host farm doesn't also have a backyard moonshine still, from which we were offered a taste of half-finished rice whiskey being brewed for the upcoming Buddhist full moon. It wasn't half-bad: a little sweet, very malty, and super authentic in its cut-plastic bottle cup. Meanwhile the family's posse of five matching dogs ravenously lapped up the sour rice mash, which we were also invited to taste (less good, quite lumpy).

The first morning we were there being Sunday, we went with Gai Som to the Protestant church in the village. I’m not sure about Karen worldwide, but in contrast to the overwhelmingly Buddhist population of Thailand at large, the Karen in the mountains around here are virtually all either Catholic or Protestant (called simply “Christian”) as a result of various missionary efforts—possibly, from what we pieced together, they were South Korean missionaries. The church we attended was a one-room chapel with a phrase in Karen script on a beam over the altar. Below the Karen script, in English: “If you seek him, he will be found by you ( 2 Chr 15:2)”. We're not sure what book is "Chr," even though Phil professes to be a good Episcopal. Any clues?

Three different men traded off leadership of the service between one another. One of them had a guitar on a strap that he never took off, even while delivering a sermon (on choosing the middle path, we suspect, given some of his gestures). Everything was in Karen, including the hymns, but there was a beautiful moment in a song where everyone began speaking simultaneously, while the guitar went on strumming, individual voices rising up and blending together or standing alone for a brief second. “Welcome,” one of the ministers said at one point, to the three of us, in the middle of preaching. “We are glad to have you.” At first, after listening to Karen for forty minutes, it took a moment to recognize it as English. “I’m sorry,” he said; “my English is not very good. We have to come to church every Sunday to thank God.” At the very end, everyone shook hands with one another and said “Thank you” in Karen, in much the same manner as the Episcopal exchange of the peace. The Karen shake hands; they don't make the Buddhist wai (hands in prayer position) in greeting.

I'm unsure what the differences are between the Karen Catholic church and the Christian one, but both of them seemed to get along just fine. Gai Som said he felt part of both, because he'd gone to a Catholic school but his family was Christian. We happened to be in the village on a Saturday night when there was a movie being screened at the Catholic church; this happens two or three times a year, apparently. hey'd brought up a growling generator in a pick-up truck and were projecting Christian music videos, all of which featured a handsome Karen man with a guitar leading the hillsides in the sound of music. Half the village must have been crowding in there; we watched from outside through an open window, and a passing woman made sure, could we see enough? We could, though with only contextual understanding of what was going on. The subtitles streaminga cross the bottom of hte screen had single, guttural letters in lowercase and then spelled-out syllables in capitals. I think it was a Roman alphabet approximation of the Karen script, which is similar to Burmese, but surely there's a font for that? It really felt like something special, though, as the sun began to set and all these people kept coming to the church in the amber dusk.

After church, Gai Som led us indirectly back to his house for breakfast. We stopped at the village store operated out of someone's ground floor to see what was for sale (pastel-colored biscuits and various chips, along with necessities like lighters). We pet a very pregnant pig keen on belly rubs, passed many a dog warming themselves by the breakfast fires, and lots of wua and kwai (cows and water buffalo) milling under houses. And finally, we met the maker of the mousetraps, which were amazing. They're all made by hand, and each one can last through the catching of 25-30 mice.


And at breakfast, we got to taste the fruits of just such a trap, barbecued. Mountain mouse: tasty meat, edible bones, very lean. Much healthier, of course, than city mouse, and Gai Som got a kick out of saying it was organic (which it was). Nino, Gai Som's six-year-old son, joined us for breakfast. There are two things you should know about Nino: he is very confident, and he speaks no English. When we first met him, he was serenading the village with his plastic horn, which was bright pink and shrill. That morning, after taking a last nibble of rat spine, he turned to Molly. He said something in rapid Karen. Molly said, "I don't understand." Nino nodded firmly, bowed his head slightly, and walked a few steps away. He then commenced to scream, and continued to scream while descending the ladder. Many of the other Karen people we met, though, spoke a few phrases in English, and with our limited Thai we learned to say hello, thank you/goodbye, rat, and very tasty (used frequently).

Nino peeks up at us from the ground. Since Karen houses are on stilts, the ground floor literally is the ground, and houses motorbikes and assorted animals. And in the case, children.

The rat, before Nino ripped its head off.

This is a manually operated rice mill, which separates the rice kernels from the husk. It takes about an hour to do enough rice for a family of five for the day. Nino shows us how it's done.

In the village, everyone shares. Even the animals. Even the animals' backs.

This woman is making a scarf on a backstrap loom, which I have no idea how to work. I was very impressed.

This little piggy went to market...

Gai Som shows us where the big fish are, and we make them bigger.

The cooking area in Gai Som's house.

During the rest of the day, Gai Som led us through a series of dried-up rice paddies and jungle paths to two waterfalls, one of which is "the best waterfall" according to Marco. I think we surprised Gai Som a little, because none of us were interested in stripping down to bikinis and swimming, like the twenty-person trekking outfit that arrived an hour after we did. Behind the second waterfall, we filled our water bottle from a pipe sticking out of the rock face that we were assured came from a mountain spring, and was safe to drink. We haven't died yet, so I think it's true. The views, as virtually everywhere so far in Thailand, were incredible.

The best part, though, was how Gai Som led us through a different part of the village on each of our walks. We passed by the Karen school, where everyone was assembled in front of a row of tables, which were soon to be bedecked with presents (we're unsure why), and on the way back from the waterfalls, we rested on the cool tiles of a woman's house. She and Gai Som had a lazy conversation while we watched her weave.

And then we met a puppy, who kept leaping up and snapping playfully at my legs with her needle teeth. The only way she'd stop was if I picked her up, and once she realized I was willing to pick her up, it was all over. She followed us back to Gai Som's house, where she was promptly surrounded by the yellow dog mafia from Gai Som’s block. She inserted herself between Phil and Molly, made it to where we were staying, and spent the rest of the night in our laps. I called her Nemo, because nobody had paid her any attention before. "This is the best night of her life," Molly said, and Phil's lap was by far her favorite. Gai Som instructed us, politely but firmly, not to let her inside our little cottage, and we did not, but we could not prevent her from sticking her head through a gap in the bamboo and mewing pitifully. It was really hard to leave her in the village, and if we could return to the United States by land, kidnapped she would have been.