By Alex Moore
Mae Joo is a village of about 100 families. Diana and I stayed the week with Pee Noi and Pee Nit and their two children, Noi (7) and Nii (11). They had a lovely wooden home that had belonged to Pee Nit’s father (today, to build a house out of wood in Thailand is near impossible because of the extreme deforestation in the past 50 years) with two luxurious squat toilets outside and running water (I realized how luxurious their home was later while staying with the Juhu hill tribe where there were no bathrooms and only one place in the village with running water). Most Thai houses make no effort at having tight seals. What is the necessity? Often there is a foot or two gap between the top of the wall and the start of the roof, the windows have no screens, and bugs are just as acceptably part of the indoor environment as they are part of that of outdoors. And bugs–and not the standard USA sized bugs but mammoth ones–make neither house moms nor toddlers flinch. A six-inch grasshopper? Great! Let’s watch the two year old pick it up and play with in inside the house.
Our meals were always eaten on the floor with an elegant newspaper “table” cloth, and we typically ate sticky rice and veggies, fish, etc. with our hands. I have not had a single meal without rice (while staying with a family) in Thailand, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Thai cooking ingredients include: rice, fish sauce, soy sauce, oil, MSG, salt, sugar, garlic, hot pepper, veggies, and tofu, fish, chicken or pork in a wide variety of combinations. That is Thai cooking in a nutshell. Examples of veggies: bamboo, pumpkin, tomato, greens such as kale, green beans and edamame.
On the second day we walked the few miles up to the nearby Lahu hill tribe village, Hu-e-La-Bute. The scenery en route: wet rice paddies, banana trees, papaya trees, avocado trees, trees of fruits that I am not quite sure I can pronounce, water buffalo and rolling hills and mountains. In the village all of the adults were gone out in the fields save perhaps one school teacher, and children seemed to be running about unchecked. In all of these hill tribe villages, there are pigs and chickens/ roosters galore. There are very few water buffalo or cows compared to what there used to be, however (we saw a small herd here and none in other hill tribe villages). In the past, cows or buffalo were a family’s bank. If a family came upon wealth, they invested in animals. There was no bank in which to secure money, and so it was much safer to use a cow as a bank, earn interest in calves, and when need be sell them for money or trade. But this came to be looked down upon by Thai society as outside influences poured in and so very few families do it anymore. All of the hill tribe houses here were made of bamboo, and most had thatched roofs. A good thatched roof will be impervious to rain and will last a good ten years. Smoke that gets trapped in the roof from families cooking inside will prevent termites, bugs, and mosquitoes…and did I mention that they are readily renewable and often at no cost?