Tabthai to Bangkok and Back

I just found out about my friend Dan's blog - The Last Blog (บลอกสุดท้าย) - he's living in Bangkok building acoustic guitars and hanging out with applied arts students from Chulalongkorn University (also trying to find employment in the Green Building world...). He's also a really talented photographer. Dan and I stayed together (along with Sandy Chapman, who begins his internship with the Thailand Development Research Institute this week) with Bruan and Chaba Tandee when we were students with CIEE in Fall 2006. They are a young organic farming family and have worked with SFS for several years. Below are some photos from December 2006, when Dan and I visited after ending our semester:
In 2006 and 2007, Bruan left his bean patch after the New Years to work construction in Bangkok - this year, Chaba joined him. I wanted to share one Dan's recent blog posts about visiting our "family," as they worked construction in Bangkok for this year's dry season. After my family visited Tabthai village in late December and the New Year's festivities were over, Bruan and Chaba left their children in the care of their grandparents and headed for the big city. Here's Dan's post from April:

Visiting my parents

When I studied in Thailand 3 years ago, I stayed with a family in Surin Province that grew organic rice and other crops. The 5 days that I stayed there were some of the best of my semester, which is why I went back to visit them a few times. Last year one of my home-stay parent's lost their mother. At the end of the growing season they harvested all their rice, but instead of selling it they stored it for their kids and relatives and moved to Bangkok to work. In order to make merit for the temple they needed to make more money than their harvest would provide, so they came to work in construction just outside of Bangkok. Last week I went to visit them before they returned home to Surin for the New Year. They were working on a restaurant behind a gas station near Rama 2 Road. About 30 minutes from my apartment (without traffic). The day I went to see them, they were pouring the cement framing of the restaurant.

There were 7 other people working at the site, and with me and my parents we had 10 hands. The work went pretty fast as I helped them in an assembly-line fashion. Wearing jeans that day was a bad idea, as I was drenched in sweat and cement in the end.

We finished pouring the cement around 6:30, just as the sun was disappearing behind the distant skyscrapers, and went into their home for some dinner and rice whiskey. We sat in my parents room, drinking rice whiskey and eating chips and cookies that I had brought for them. We talked about Isaan, the northeast of Thailand where they all came from. They invited me to come see them at their homes, which I'm planning on doing soon.


Thanks to Dan for the blog post and photos. Chaba and Bruan have been back home since the Songkran holidays in mid-April and will be starting their rainy season rice transplanting soon. Organic farming has proven to be a sustainable livelihood for their young family, but their decision not to sell rice this season and the financial burdens of merit-making has has a real impact on their way of life. This family rents 6 rai of land (just over 2 acres, for the cost of rice) and will need to consume much of their rice production over the course of the year. Thankfully, however, weekly income from the Green Market is enough to cover costs of living (below, Chaba butchering organic pork at the Thurs. mobile Green Market).

When funerals are organized, families will spend much of their savings on music and dance performances, elaborate menus and donations to the local temple. There is a real social pressure to make the funeral as elaborate and attractive as possible. Those who attend the funeral traditionally bring a small donation and some uncooked rice, but it is often not enough to cover all costs. All of these elements combine into a complicated social and financial situation for small-scale farming families like the SFS members in Tabthai village. The transition to genuine sustainability can be a long one, especially for families with little to no financial resources. The challenges presented by social structure and changing norms about merit-making may be something organic farming cannot yet reasonably approach, but the Isaan farmers' struggle for food sovereignty and healthy, sustainable communities will continue...