Palong Hill-tribe villages

After our two nights in Chiang Dao we visited two Palong villages to learn about how, as marginalized people, they manage their land, farm and live.

Palong is an ethnic hill tribe group that came to Thailand many years ago from Burma. There are still many Palong in Burma. Because Palong people are not Thai citizens, they cannot own any land, which makes farming difficult because their land could be taken away from them at any time.

UHDP (Upland Holistic Development Project), the NGO community we stayed with for the second half of our field course, helps teach hilltribes like the Palong how to farm sustainably and diversify their crops to meet the dietary needs of a family. While visiting the Palong villages we saw a lot of agroforests and spoke to Palong farmers who had previously been monocropping.

Staying in the villages was a very different experience from being in Chiang Mai. There weren't any roads and everything was muddy. All of the toilets were squat toilets and the showers were bucket showers. The bathroom was a box of corrugated tin for the walls, roof and door. All of the houses were raised off of the ground, with equipment stored underneath. You could often see through gaps in the walls. Packs of children ran around barefoot and muddy. The women wore traditional outfits: elaborate skirts and short jackets. They all wore rattan belts. The old women were chewing beetle nut to get intoxicated. It made their mouths red and it looked like they were spitting blood (it was initially pretty alarming).

All of the students slept in a long house (bamboo structure with floor raised about 3 or 4 feet off of the ground). We slept on the floor with mats, pillows and mosquito nets around us. I woke up in the morning to a symphony of animals; pigs, dogs, roosters. The roosters were the worst. They started calling the sun around three in morning. One had crawled under the floor of the long house and was crowing right by my head.

I never felt very clean or comfortable in the Palong villages and I became acutely aware of how many of the things that I consider to be necessities are, in fact, luxuries.

I'm happy to have been exposed to the city life of Chiang Mai before going to Mae Ta and the Palong villages because the villages are so different that I probably would have been overwhelmed by culture shock. At the same time, I'm glad to have visited the villages because, had I not, I think my view of life in Thailand would be warped.