The Lahu village

This last weekend our SST group traveled 3.5 hours into the Northern mountains of Thailand, just a few hundred kilometers from the Burmese boarder, to spend the weekend with a Lahu village. There are many different tribal groups in Thailand, the largest of which is the Karen (the group we'll be staying with in April); the Lahu make up a smaller percentage of the remaining tribes. Ajarn Ann and Ajarn Mike have been connected to this community for years and have helped fundraise for several community projects there, like a waterline for the village, a community center and community kitchen, fencing, as well as plans to build a village school in the near future. To get an education, the children have to leave home at around 4th-6th grade, which not only separates families, but also keeps children from learning their own Lahu culture, which is rich and worth perserving.
From what I could see, the village has a strong community focus and everyone helps the others out. Though it might not happen every night, every day the village pulled t ogether to help prepare our meals and to accomodate us. We even went fishing with the village while we were there (which was much different than my idea of fishing, which is either to use a pole or to use a net. The Lahu set up barriers to drain a small section of the river, a team effort, and then search under rocks and debri to find the hiding fish. If you don't find any individually, the whole community starves).
Ajarn Mike told us that the way they did butchering here was what you might label Socialist: each family would take its turn killing a pig to share with the village. Whoever kills the pig gets to choose their own portion but then gives the rest to everyone else. This way, people have incentive not to be greedy when it's their turn to kill the pig and to share with others as that's the only way they can all be able to eat more than just a few times off their own pigs. Communal sharing works so well here, though, because the people see it as a necessity to surviving and it's been a tradition that's kept them alive for generations. To say that the ugly aspects of human nature aren't present here, like greed and selfish hoarding, would be to idealize them.
I say that just as much for myself as anyone because I had a sort of revalation while in the village. Jen and I were talking and she shared an experience she had in Honduras. She was supposed to be making baloon animals for a village but there were only two people making them. People shoved and pushed and hoarded, grown women edging out the kids that surrounded them. "And I was supposed to love and serve these people?". Her sharing that demonstrated that human nature can be just as ugly in a small village in a developing country as it can be in the wealthy U.S., something that I acknowledged in my head but never really had seen neccesarily played out. Maybe it's just a question of how much a society's culture nourishes or fosters those attributes. For instance, the Lahu's culture used sharing as a tool for survival. This didn't necessarily make them more egalitarian, but it did effectively use the human desire to keep one's-self alive to ensure the whole community's welfare.
We did homestays there too, this time 2 to a house. My friend Z and I stayed with a woman named Happie who really seemed to live up to her name. I think some people had it rougher than us, but our house was fairly nice, meaning that there was a big open space for a living room, a spacious kitchen, an "American standard" indoor toilet, and we had plenty of blankets to sleep with on the floor at night.
On Saturday we went to an orphanage where abandoned, impoverished, and/or kids whose parents were killed by AIDS go. They performed songs and dances for us, all decked out in their tribal outfits. There were 2 different tribal groups there, one of which was Lahu. After they performed, we handed out Christmas gifts that we had helped buy but most of which Ajarn Mike had fundraised for back home by being Santa Claus at different places (and really I've never seen a man look so much like the traditional picture of Santa). We then sang some worship songs with hand motions in English. One little girl just latched onto me during that and cuddled up next to me during the whole meeting with the managers of the orphanage. She was the sweetest, most loving little girl and I'm going to miss her. I'm just glad that I got to meet her even once.
Their stories were so encouraging and inspiring: the kids apparently, without aid from Ajarn Mike and Ann, would have only 2 baaht a day to eat with. I can't even imagine what that could buy, considering 33 baaht= $1. After they fed us a wonderful lunch, we played with the kids, and Jen had a sort of cathartic moment: while she was making the animal baloons, instead of pushing and hoarding, the little kids were helping each other make them. That was healing even for me.