(Apologies in advance for the volume of emails, today and tomorrow–I’m trying to get the Akha trip written up before I leave for India, and I’ve only got a day and a half. I’m going to try getting the Akha photos up on the website, too–probably tomorrow.) ———————————- Sometime in the afternoon, I asked how often the Akha killed pigs. Being a city girl, I am of course fascinated by livestock…after four months in Asia, the novelty of chickens and pigs is starting to wear off, but I’d never seen a pig slaughtered before, and I mentioned that.

As it turned out, they were slaughtering a pig that day! Asaw asked when, and they said, “Right now!” So, we ran off to see.

On the way, Asaw explained to me that this wasn’t a normal slaughtering, but a ritual requirement. This pig had had a very small litter–only two piglets–and they both died. This made it a “bad-luck” pig, which had to be killed immediately and the meat distributed through the village. It also meant that the animal had to be killed outside the village gates, up on the hill used for such sacrifices.

(Akha villages, by the way, have gates that they take very seriously. The legend is that once upon a time, spirits and humans lived together. Then they quarreled, and the gods decided that they should live in different places. The village gates delineate the boundaries of the humans’ place (the village) and the spirits’ place (the jungle). They’re ceremonially rebuilt once a year–the old gateposts are left up, so you can get a rough estimate of the age of the village by the number of old gateposts lined up before the current one. It is taboo for tourists to touch the gates, and if you do, they have to hold a purification ceremony–so I didn’t.)

I asked Asaw to explain what made a pig a bad pig, and he explained that each animal had different standards. If a chicken, pig, or dog had a small litter (1-2 babies), that was a “bad-luck” animal, and it had to be killed on the first good day, and the meat distributed to everyone unrelated to the owner. (For example, Ahta, the Akha wisewoman teaching me spinning and weaving, was related to the owner, so wasn’t eligible. Asaw and I weren’t, so we got some.) A pig/dog who had its entire litter die also had to be killed, but that wasn’t so bad–the owner could sell its meat at half-price.

Similarly, a pig that gives birth in the village, a dog that gives birth in the forest, or a cow that has twins (twins are considered very bad luck among the Akha), all are unclean and must be slaughtered and the meat distributed. Finally, a cow, dog, or pig that gets up onto the roof has been possessed by spirits, and must be killed.

You heard me. A cow on the roof.

This is a neat trick, since Akha roofs start four or five feet off the ground. I could see a dog doing it, if it got a running jump, or a pig (they’re very bright), but a cow??

No one had ever seen it, but apparently the elders assure them that it can and does happen. Apparently the possessing spirit enables the cow to walk around on the roof, but as soon as you see it, the spirit can’t keep the cow up anymore and it comes crashing through your roof. 🙂 Since a possessed cow is major bad news (anyone who’s seen “Christine” can testify to the evils of possessed livestock/autos), it has to be slaughtered.

(If you are looking at this set of rituals and beliefs and thinking “How quaint,” you have obviously never been to a corporate team bonding event, or in fact to a corporate meeting. Any culture that comes up with falling out of trees as a “trust-building exercise” is not exactly in a position to throw stones; I suspect the Akha would crack up immediately if they ever saw the elaborate rites around a corporate meeting. ‘Nuff said. 😉 )

So anyway, this pig had had a litter of only one or two, *and* the babies had died, so it was being slaughtered. I ran up the hill.

The slaughter itself was done in two steps. Normally the throat is cut, but for unclean animals, an incision is made over the heart first. At least, I *think* it was the heart–four or five guys held down the pig (one held its mouth shut), and a man with a machete made an incision partway down the chest. I could see something beating rhythmically, briefly–then they shifted and started sawing at the throat of the pig. (They didn’t stab it in the heart; it was more of a crosswise slice.)

The pig, needless to say, was not happy about any of this and was uttering awful squeals. Oddly, I didn’t find any of it particularly hard to watch–perhaps because I was in journalist mode, trying to record what was going on. The photos are pretty difficult, though–I don’t think I’ll put them up, if you’re interested I’ll email them.

It took a surprisingly long time to saw through the throat of the pig–they kept going through layers of muscle as the pig snorted and squealed–but finally they got through the windpipe, and almost immediately after, they hit a major artery/vein. Suddenly, blood was everywhere. It flooded up out of the throat–the pig gave one or two twitches, then lay still–and into a bowl that a man was holding ready. They drained a surprising amount of blood out of the pig: well over a quart!

After the blood stopped flowing, they turned the pig upside down and carved off the belly skin, exposing the abdomen. They then started pulling out the internal organs, putting them on a banana leaf.

I hadn’t realized this, but the abdominal organs are enclosed in a sheath of connective tissue–so they were easy to pull away cleanly, just tug on the connective tissue. Pulling out the intestines was kind of gross, as they were still attached at one end–the less said about that, the better.

After that, they split up into two groups–one cleaned the internal organs, and one went off with the rest of the pig. I followed the men with the pig (all the slaughterers were male), to where a fire was burning.

They flung the pig on the fire–Asaw explained that this was to remove the hair. After one side was singed, they flipped it over, and started scraping at the carcass with knives and sticks. They flipped and scraped it until the outside was burnt, and not a trace of hair remained. (Which is important, because their pigs are *really* hairy.)

Meanwhile, the other group cleaned out the internal organs, cutting apart the liver, washing out the stomach, and snipping the intestines into tiny bits. This was kind of gross since the undigested contents were still in it (I don’t know what happened to the large intestine, and didn’t ask–some things you don’t want to know!). But, they washed the whole thing out thoroughly, and cut each organ into thirteen pieces, one for each family receiving part of the pig.

(There’s nothing particularly significant about the number thirteen–it could be more or less, depending on the number of recipients–i.e., village families unrelated to the owner.)

I asked if *everything* got cut into thirteen pieces, or if they just weighed it out and approximated–but no, every organ and most of the identifiable muscle meats get hacked into thirteen pieces, so each villager gets a totally equal share of the pig. The only exceptions are the head and feet, which go to the men helping butcher, and the brain and tongue, which (for unclean pigs) must be eaten by old men whose wives are past childbearing.

They brought back the main carcass and hacked it into bits, which they strung on bits of bamboo, skewered on sticks, or put in plastic bags to give to the families, and that was that–a very quick process, maybe forty minutes from live pig to fully distributed pork bits. I was quite astonished.

Oddly enough, it didn’t affect my appetite at all. I had kind of expected the whole thing to be grosser.

On the way back, we saw fires burning outside in the yard of a number of houses, which is unusual–normally they’re inside, in the kitchen area. I asked Asaw, and he said that unclean animals have to be cooked outside and eaten outside–and the utensils used must be left outside overnight as well. Quite serious, here.

We got invited to dinner with the (former) headman, to eat our share of the pig (Ahta, the woman I was staying with, was related to the owner, so she couldn’t get any). He was a really neat guy–he had been headman for four years, but decided it was a major headache, so gave up the position. We ate the pig as larb, which cooked Akha style is a bunch of coarsely chopped bits cooked and mixed with spices, eaten over rice. I’m not overly fond of Akha-style larb (especially since the first thing I got was a chunk of liver), but since the entire pig had to be eaten that day (leftovers had to be discarded), I ate my share. It tasted, well, like pig. 🙂

After dinner, we drank some herbal medicine “to ward off the effects of the bad pig”–this wasn’t an Akha tradition, but a Chinese herbal medicine that the headman’s father/grandfather had bought from a Chinese guy for five silver coins, several decades ago. It’s good for settling the stomach, a good idea when eating an unclean animal. It tasted very nice (which is unusual for Chinese herbal medicines)–like licorice tea.

That was more or less it for the evening; we went back down to DAPA, where I spent the evening. (No hot showers, however. *sigh*)

The following day, I started learning weaving and spinning, but I’ll leave that for another email.

Tien

Well. I now have the world’s best drop spindle. Laceweight, perfectly balanced, gorgeously decorated, spins forever–oh yes, and solid silver. 🙂 97%, a bit higher than sterling.

I arrived at the silversmith’s in the early morning, along with Asaw, my new guide. (Chatree, my guide from the previous day, was off with another tour group that day.) After a cup of tea, we got started, with cutting and mixing silver.

It’s astonishing how little equipment Akha silversmiths need. American silversmiths (like American crafters generally) are insanely fussy about having the right tools: one wouldn’t *think* of making silver without a bunch of complicated and generally expensive equipment: a kiln, ring mandrels, casting wax, jewelry saws, files, etc. But you could probably buy all of Ati’s tools for a hundred bucks: a single reversible hammer (one round side, one rectangular), an iron anvil, a rusty machete, two sets of tongs, a pair of tin-snips, one flat piece of lead, and four or five decorative stamps. That’s it.

(Actually, that’s not *quite* true. He has two timesaving modern devices: a mill for extruding silver wire, and another for rolling flat pieces. But he doesn’t *need* either of them.)

Back to the silver. The first step was cutting a piece of 90% silver into four pieces. I started by putting a flat silver pancake into the fire and pumping the bellows. (The bellows is a hollowed-out log with a stopper in it; pulling back and forth injects air into a tiny charcoal fire.) Ati piled burning charcoal on top of the pancake, explaining that for big pieces, burying them in hot charcoal makes them heat up faster. I pulled back and forth on the bellows, making sparks fly out: not good charcoal, good charcoal doesn’t spark. Unfortunately he hadn’t been able to get any of the one kind of hardwood that doesn’t make sparks (we are not talking charcoal briquettes here 😉 ), so we were stuck with what we had.

Eventually, after it was hot enough, he told me to take it out and cut it.

Cutting a silver piece, Akha-style, turns out to be quite simple. You heat it up until it’s softened, put a rusty machete on top, and whack the machete with a hammer until the blade’s driven most of the way through. Then you take the machete out, lean the silver piece up against the anvil, and whack the backside with the hammer until it breaks in half.

Of course, it helps if you can hit the side of a barn door with the hammer. 😉

I didn’t actually do too badly at whacking it (I’m good at whacking things 🙂 ), although it did take me two tries. This was because they didn’t start explaining to me what I was supposed to be doing until the thing was out of the fire, and by the time Ati explained to Asaw what I was supposed to be doing, and Asaw finished the complicated little game of charades punctuated with English words to explain to *me* what I was supposed to be doing, the silver had already cooled substantially. Translation doesn’t work very well when neither you nor your translator has a clue about silversmithing, your teacher’s never tried teaching before, and speed is essential. But it was fun nonetheless. Life poses far too few opportunities to whack things with hammers. 🙂 )

After that, Ati weighed out the silver, picked out an appropriately-sized chunk, and mixed it with bits of pure silver from the gold shop. He handed me an old pair of hand-forged tinsnips/scissors and a tomato-paste can, and told me to cut the can in half.

A desperate struggle ensued, pitting me (143 pounds of muscular critter, with large mammalian brain) against the tinsnips and tomato-paste can. You know, small bits of seemingly innocuous metal can be devilishly clever? It took me ten minutes to hack the can inexpertly into a bunch of jagged bits–hand-forged Akha shears aren’t anything like the tinsnips I’m used to. (Not worse, exactly–just different.) I am still convinced the darn things were in cahoots against me. Worse yet, the entire household was watching in great amusement as I struggled with the bloody thing.

At any rate, I finally got the can hacked more or less into halves, put the silver in, and stuck it in the fire to heat. Eventually, it even melted. 🙂

Molten silver is really beautiful. It glows red, but has little crackly bits coming off the top where impurities (or maybe just chunks of charcoal that have fallen in) are burning away, and is molten silver underneath. Hot stuff. 🙂

Ati showed me how to blow small bits of charcoal off the molten silver with a blowpipe, and pick the big bits out with tongs. Then he had me grease an ingot mold with pork fat, and pour the silver in. (I botched the first attempt because I used my best chocolate-pouring technique, moving back and forth along the ingot mold–but it turns out that silver needs to be poured quickly, from the edge of the mold. Silver is not chocolate, a fact I will henceforth keep in mind. 😉 )

After that, Ati took one of my misshapen ingots, whacked it in half with a few casual blows, and handed it casually to me. I gathered that I was supposed to whack at the thing with the hammer, and promptly did so.

(1) Flattening things with a hammer is MUCH harder than it looks. Thwacking things with a hammer isn’t that hard (though it helps if you can hit the silver and not the anvil 😉 ), but getting it actually *flat* (and not dinted by the hammer) takes a lot of skill. I rapidly turned the thing into a misshapen lump, but it *did* get a little flatter…

(2) It takes considerable muscle to beat silver. Worse, every time you hit the silver, it gets a little harder, and eventually it breaks. So you really want to thwack it *hard* two or three times, instead of giving it love taps. Combining this with accuracy is really hard–silversmiths must have incredible control and finesse.

By this point I was working up a pretty good sweat, so I was glad to stop and feed the silver through the mill. (More steps than you expected? I was surprised too.)

The mill was more or less what you’d expect, a set of hand-cranked rollers with square-shape indents, which gradually compress the silver into thinner and thinner square wire. (Ati also has a roller mill, useful for flat pieces.) This required absolutely no skill, so no problem. I can extrude wire with the best of them. 🙂

After that, we took the wire piece out, I hammered it round (easy, as only light taps were needed), and then Ati showed me how to hammer a point on one end. I proved totally hopeless at this, so I let him do it.

Then came the hard bit. Ati had at this point worked out that I was more or less hopeless with a hammer, so handed me a test piece and gave me rough instructions on how to shape it. Basically, the hammer has two sides: round and rectangular. The round side is for finishing and polishing, and the rectangular side is for shaping. It’s wider than it is long, so it squeezes out more silver along the top and bottom of the hammer, thus can be used to shape bits. If you hammer at a square piece of silver with the rectangular side, you get a rectangle; hammering at it with the round side produces a larger square.

(I worked all this out for myself later, so I don’t guarantee the accuracy. At the time, I was just told that the rectangular side was for shaping and I should hold it this way….One of the major differences between Akha people and Westerners is that Akha learn best by watching and imitating, Westerners have to analyze and understand everything first. This made learning really difficult.)

At any rate, Ati explained to me that hammering a round piece from a square one requires strategy: start in the center and move the mass of the silver out towards the edges, gradually shaping the edges from corners to a circle. This sounded perfectly logical, but requires incredible skill to manage. I didn’t get anywhere with it at all, as I didn’t have nearly enough “feel” with the hammer.

I discovered at this point, by the way, that it is quite possible to turn flesh into silver, and also quite easy. Hit your thumb with the hammer. The flesh underneath immediately turns black, since you’ve just destroyed all the capillaries, but the skin on top stays white, giving a darkish gray color that really does look very much like silver. It’s kind of neat.

Oh yeah: it also hurts. I don’t recommend it. 🙂

They were all quite concerned after I thwacked myself, so I explained that it was nothing (fortunately it was only a glancing blow), swallowed four Advil, and kept going. (One nice thing about AIDS Lifecycle: I am now pretty good at tuning out pain.) I eventually managed to pound the test piece into a more-or-less-flat misshapen lump, whereupon I decided that shaping silver was beyond my current skill. I’ve got muscle, and dextrous fingers; but combining the two would take more practice than I’d get in one day. Besides, my thumb was sore. 😉

Ati then took up the hammer, and in about five minutes, whistling cheerfully, hammered a lump of silver into a perfectly flat, disc-shaped piece. (I suspect a pact with the devil. 😉 ) He then took it up, stuck a rock into a pair of rusty tweezers, and used his makeshift compass to draw a circle near the edge. I was wondering how he planned to cut the silver, but no–he was just checking how round it was. He picked it up again, tossed it into the fire to soften it, and hammered carefully and expertly around the edges. Then he drew another test circle and worked at it again. Half an hour later, he handed me a perfectly flat, perfectly circular disc. Amazing.

(You have no idea how difficult that is: (a) no hammer-marks anywhere, (b) flat, and (c) circular. The man is a god. Very, very, very, very skilled.)

Around this time I got distracted by a friend of his who’d come by and was making bamboo withes. He had a four-foot length of green bamboo, and was carefully slitting it into tiny slivers, then trimming the slivers very thin to produce long, flexible strips of bamboo. These are suitable for, say, tying a house together–which is, in fact, exactly what he was using them for. Dry season is, for obvious reasons, the most practical time for rebuilding bamboo houses, redoing roofs, etc., so a lot of building goes on during the dry season–in fact, they rebuilt two houses during the week I was there. (Bamboo houses need to be reroofed every 2 years, and rebuilt every 8-9 years, as the grass roof rots and termites eat the bamboo.)

You are probably envisioning a guy sitting there carving at bamboo with a small, controllable blade–say, a Swiss Army knife, or something like that. Nope. Knives used in the Akha village are big hand-forged thingies with 12-18 inch blades, which they use for *everything*–clearing land, butchering, hacking up firewood, fine detail carving. This usually means that a guy carving is sitting there pulling a tiny piece of wood along the blade of a giant knife, looking like he’s about to take his thumb off. Which is pretty much what was going on here. (He did not, however, take his thumb off–nor did anyone else while I was there, much to my surprise. I had been envisioning entire villages of thumbless former woodworkers, but apparently Akha people are much more dextrous than Westerners, because such accidents are really rare.)

The guy also had his hair in the classic Akha male haircut: shaved all over, with a little pony-tail on the top of the head. The shaved parts were growing out, so the overall effect was short hair with a 5″ ponytail on the crown of the head. Kind of neat, actually.

Around the time that Ati was performing arcane wizardry to pierce the disk and solder on the shaft of the spindle, a friend of his friend showed up. Asaw translated parts of the conversation for me, which was quite interesting: all about opium farming in Burma. Ati’s friend was from Burma originally, and his friend still lived in their old village. (I apologize for munging the pronouns–I don’t know their names.) They were discussing this year’s opium crop, which was apparently fairly good–Akha have traditionally raised opium as a cash crop, as it grows very well on the hills, is easily transportable (small and nonspoiling), and has high cash value–all very good for rural mountain farmers. His friend wasn’t raising opium himself anymore, but explained to me how opium farming works–apparently one farmer can raise about 1.6 kg of opium in a year (~3 pounds). Depending on the quality of the land, it takes somewhere between 1/3 and 2 acres to grow that much opium–some people have more land, some people have less. It takes a lot of work, but not much space and not much money–and because it’s so valuable, it’s easy to transport, which is important when you don’t live anywhere near a road.

Oh, and his friend was Burmese. He couldn’t get into Thailand legally, but no problem: the border’s long, and largely unguarded, so he just walked across.

(It’s easy to see that Thailand’s war on drugs is going to be in trouble, as long as its neighbors permit opium farming. The border is too long, and too porous. Burma is largely uninterested in rooting out opium farmers–they’re already fighting two civil wars in that region, one against the Karen (pronounced Kuh-RIN) tribe and one against another hilltribe, so they have other worries. The Burmese civil war is a major reason why hilltribes are migrating to Thailand, actually: it’s hard to grow food in the middle of a war.)

Anyway, around this point Ati handed me the most perfect spindle I’ve ever held–silver, about eight inches long, with a hammered pattern based on my sketched design, and *perfectly* balanced. (I wish American metalworkers could do as well!) It was a little too heavy for lace spinning, though, so I asked him to make me another one. Which he did–took him about two hours. It is absolutely perfect for lace spinning and I’ve already spun several hundred yards with it. Lovely piece. Ati stamped the big spindle with my name and his, and the date; I plan to keep it forever. 🙂

Anyway, that was it for the day at the silversmith’s…later that day I went to a ceremony where a bad-luck pig was being ceremonially sacrificed, but that’s another story…I’ll write it up later, along with the spinning and weaving.

The Akha village was just fascinating; if you ever get a chance to go to Thailand, try going there yourself, and living with them for a few days. This will teach you much more than any hilltribe trek will–most of those just pass through the village and let the tourists gawk for a couple of minutes. Living there is way different. 🙂

Tien

Well. I have now eaten dog.

It was sort of inevitable, really; I walked into the village in the middle of a ceremonial…no, wait, I’d better tell the story in sequence.

I got to the silversmith’s late this morning because I lost some electronics and spent the morning searching for it. We haggled for awhile, discussing lessons and cost, and agreed that he would spend one day teaching me tomorrow for 1500 baht (about $36). $36 doesn’t sound like much, but in this area, that’s the wage of a skilled craftsman…minimum wage in Thailand is $3.50/day, and northern Thailand is quite poor. (Silversmiths are highly respected among the Akha; it takes great skill to make their decorative pieces.) I wanted to make one of the silver spheres, but he said that was too hard–his brother had been studying silversmithing for two years and still couldn’t make them on his own–so we agreed on something simpler: a silver drop spindle. (Yes, spinners, you can stop drooling now. 😉 ) So tomorrow I’m going to learn to melt silver, to hammer it flat, to put in decorative working, and then to weld the whole thing together. If I have time, I’ll make a bracelet or two in addition to the spindle.

(The silversmith, incidentally, is quite young, 32 or 33–but has been studying silversmithing more or less since he was born, at his father’s knee. I like him; he’s got a wry sense of humor, or at least I think he does–it’s amazing what you can read from facial expressions.)

He was busy that afternoon (or we would have started immediately)–he needed to go buy silver–so we went on to the weaver’s.

The weaverwoman is my guide’s mother-in-law, a bright and perky 61-year-old woman with a long, crinkly brown face, fantastic headdress, bad teeth, and much spinning wisdom. She has ten children (eight living–child mortality among the Akha seems to be quite high), of whom my guide married the youngest one, age about 24. She was very enthusiastic about teaching me; apparently the younger generation is completely uninterested in learning such things, and she wants to pass on her knowledge. She’s shown me all kinds of beautiful handwork that she’s done–bags, leggings, ceremonial skirts–and her indigo dyepot. She also showed me how to spin cotton on the Akha drop spindle, which is trickier than it looks. (I will spare nonspinners from the detailed discussion, but let’s just say I have immense respect for her skill.) Her name is Ahta.

Ah. You want to know about the dog.

Well, as we walked into the village, we ran into a clutch of women sitting around a table. They invited us in to eat–I was going to decline, as I’d just eaten at the silversmith’s, but remembered just in time that Akha custom requires you to enter a house and eat something if you enter a village. Not to do so is very rude–raises suspicion that you’re a thief or a bad spirit, and is bad luck besides (refusing to break bread with them)–so basically, if you don’t want to eat something, you’d better go around the village.

So, I said sure, fine.

We went around to where people were eating, and my guide looked a little worried and said, “Do you eat dog meat?” I blinked. He explained that they had just finished rebuilding the bamboo house I’d seen them gathering bamboo for a few days ago, and it was traditional to feast the workers on dog meat. So there I was, caught in the middle of a ceremonial feast…so what the hell, I ate it. 🙂

Dog tastes very much like duck, dark meat. Or maybe like beef, but a little less hearty. (That’s insofar as I could taste *anything* around the spices.) It’s actually pretty good meat, as such things go–certainly better than either rat or scorpion–but the bits of skin had a disturbing texture: chewy on one side, but, well, *crinkly* on the other side; I could hear my teeth going through it. Not bad, exactly, but a bit disturbing.

I asked my guide (several times) if there was any particular reason for dog meat–if it symbolized anything–but he seemed quite puzzled by the question, and just said it was traditional. Apparently dog meat is also traditionally served at weddings, so I gather it’s a festival meat. I suppose it’s like goose at Christmas and ham at Easter–I’d have a hard time explaining why we picked either of those meats, either.

(I could have a field day with Thanksgiving, though. “Well, we have a legend, that when the first white men came to live in America, they were very hungry, and almost starved. They thought they were going to die of hunger, until one day a friendly tribe came and brought them a magical feast, including turkeys, so ever since then we have eaten turkeys at Thanksgiving to commemorate the occasion.” Makes a great tribal legend, doesn’t it? except, we can *prove* it actually happened, so we call it history. 😉 )

They actually weren’t *quite* done with the house, actually. They finished it that afternoon (it was fascinating watching them split bamboo with mallet and block, and carve out mortises with hand chisels). It is apparently traditional to celebrate completion of a house by slaughtering a goat, but I unfortunately didn’t stay around to see that. (I confess I am fascinated by the butchering process, since I’ve never seen it before–though I doubt it would do much for my appetite.) I am certain, however, that the goat slaughter did take place; I saw them leading the goat up the road as we were leaving.

So that was today. Tomorrow, I’m spending the day at the silversmith’s, pounding on silver. I plan to take lots of photos. 🙂

Tien

P.S. I have now heard back from the body painter, who says that this month’s Farang! magazine cover was “very well received” (which I think translates to “evaporated immediately”) and many people have said it’s the best cover they’ve ever had. This, of course, makes me very happy. Who ever would have thought it? 🙂

Well, it turns out I didn’t go to Akha Hill House, after all…which is a good thing, since I’ve since been told that it’s a notorious drug hangout. I freely confess to a vivid curiosity about opium growth/production, but since I’m not even slightly interested in trying the stuff, I’m just as happy to skip dealing with all the folks who are.

Instead, I wound up at DAPA, which is an Akha assistance program that offers tours to Akha villages. My curiosity was piqued by the idea of a *nonprofit* organization offering village tours, plus I figured they’d have greater expertise (and cultural sensitivity) than an outside organization. This turned out to be entirely accurate…this was the best hilltribe visit I’ve had so far.

The Akha are one of several hilltribes inhabiting northern Thailand. (The others are the Karen, who are fighting a war for independence in Burma, the Northern Tai, the Mien, and–aargh, I can’t remember the other ones.) Most of the hilltribes are displaced peoples, fleeing the Karen-Burmese war, but some also come from China. The Burmese-Thai border is so long and so porous that Thailand can’t keep them out, but of course Thailand isn’t enthused about having a lot of illegal immigrants either, and doesn’t want to encourage them.

So, most of the hilltribe peoples don’t have Thai citizenship (they’re not citizens of any other nation, either–really and truly dispossessed). This means they can’t own land, go to school, get bank loans, hold legal employment, etc.. They’re basically nonpersons–they’re not even included in the census.

Since their traditional farming method (slash-and-burn agriculture) has been outlawed for environmental reasons, this makes maintaining their traditional culture very difficult indeed. The net result is a very high death rate, illiteracy rate, and a great deal of prostitution–there’s no legal way to get work, so many girls and women wind up in the sex trade. This, of course, leads to a high rate of HIV infection.

(One of the things that has become very clear in traveling around Asia is that HIV/AIDS in Asia is inextricably tied to poverty; you just can’t tell a Cambodian sex worker to stop selling sex and get a “decent” job, because there frankly may not be one. The U.S. is quite unusual in having nearly full employment–by which I mean that it’s unusual for someone looking for full-time, paid employment not to be able to find it somewhere–but I don’t think that’s true in most of the countries I’ve been traveling through. It’s also very clear that subordinate status of women is similarly linked to HIV spread in Asia; women simply have not got the leverage to say no to a man who doesn’t want to use a condom, and the general good-girl/bad-girl double standard prevents women from acting to protect themselves. (The director of an AIDS prevention program, for example, told me that a woman caught carrying a condom is presumed by the police to be a prostitute.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes…the Akha. Basically, with all the things stacked against them, the Akha are roughly in the same position as Native Americans in the U.S., except that they don’t even have reservations. So many of the same cultural issues are happening: the young are flocking to the cities and not coming back, schools are trying to eradicate their cultural identity (if they can get into school at all, they are heavily pressured to take Thai names, etc.), and their tribal crafts/traditions are largely dying out. I was told by the director of the hilltribe museum, for example, that some of the tribes are converting to Christianity because their spiritual leaders have died and there is no one to replace them…I was introduced to their sole remaining silversmith, and one of the few old women who still know how to spin and weave. By and large, these crafts are dying out because all the practitioners are old, and no young people are learning.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that they have not yet lost the crafts, nor their cultural identity…the older women still wear the Akha costume, which consists of an elaborate headdress with many additional decorations, plus a black wrap jacket. The headdresses are quite spectacular–the silversmith I watched said that the average headdress contains 2 kg of silver (!), 40 coins in the back piece, 5 coins in a decorative piece, and much more in the various dangly bits. The headdress itself consists of a silver back piece, and a close-fitting cap covered in small silver hemispheres. Old Indian, Burmese, or Chinese coins (solid silver) are attached as well, as are silver spheres hammered from 3-4 coins each, and large flat triangular shapes. That’s it for the silver, but then they attach strings of bright-colored beads, pompoms, cock-feather leis, horsehair tassels, etc. (LOTS of etc.). It’s really impressive looking and quite elaborate headgear.

They also wear a lot of embroidery on the jacket–mostly couched-thread work in geometric patterns, but also various satin-stitch patterns (also geometric). Recently they have imported the Mien cross-stitch patterns into their work, so older patterns are geometrics, newer ones tend to be diagonal cross-stitch. It’s all exquisite, including the equally-elaborate leggings.

Here’s a fairly nice set of photos: http://members.tripod.com/~tudtu/hillsty1.htm

Anyway, I negotiated with DAPA for a one-day trip focusing on spinning, weaving, and embroidery (woo!), with a side trip to see their silversmith. So we all piled into a four-wheel drive truck (Tiger brand!) and headed out to the villages…first we stopped by two weaving areas with fairly typical Thai-Lao weaving setups, and then headed out for the silversmith’s.

The road to the silversmith’s village was seriously scary. It had rained that morning–which is very unusual, in the dry season–so of course everythign was wet. Not a big deal, on a paved road. On a dirt road in the Thai foothills, very big deal. Imagine a steep hill in San Francisco (which I personally find nervewracking, even paved and dry). Now, replace the nice paved road with a winding, heavily rutted dirt track the exact width of the car. Wet, so the entire road is slippery clay mud. Now, imagine that your four-wheel drive vehicle is slipping, fishtailing, and grinding its way *up* that hill, with a dropoff on one side. It’s the sort of situation that’s heavily conducive to prayer, believe me. I was wishing fervently I were Christian and Catholic just so I could say a Hail Mary. Some situations just call for a Hail Mary, regardless of religious affiliation.

However, we did eventually make it, and stopped at the silversmith.

That was really neat. There is only one Akha silversmith left in Thailand, and I was watching him. (Well, actually, there are two; but they work in the same shop, and I think they’re brothers.) He works with a primitive forge (small charcoal fire with attached bellows), hammer, and a few shaping tools to produce the elaborate Akha headdresses…I sat and watched, completely fascinated, as he heated, hammered, reheated, rehammered, etc. seven coins’ worth of silver into a perfect flat, thin trapezoid to make up the back piece of the headdress. His brother (?) was sitting at a table nearby, delicately hammering elaborate patterns into another piece of the headdress.

I should mention the coins. Akha headdresses are traditionally made from pure silver, and the main source of the silver is old Indian, Chinese, and Burmese coins. (I bought four silver Indian rupees from him; they were dated 1906 to 1919, and had King Edward and King George V on them.) So silver weight is referred to in “coins”, with such and such a piece being “20 coins” or “thirty coins” depending on weight. I got him to weigh some coins, and got a weight estimate–about 12.5 grams. It doesn’t always mean melted coins, though–they also use silver ingots, and whatever else they buy from the gold shop.

I “rescued” an exquisite silver bracelet from the silversmith, in fact–he was going to melt it down for the silver. It’s solid silver, almost 7 ounces, and is beautifully chunky with carved line designs–I’ll try to take a photo. I can’t wear it (too small), but it’s such a pretty piece, I just couldn’t let it be destroyed.

Anyway, we sat for three or four hours watching him weld loops onto the backs of old silver coins, hammer out the flat piece, and demonstrate making silver spheres. First he takes a piece of silver, and hammers it into a flat disk. Then he heats the disk (to anneal and soften the silver), puts it into a spherical form, and slowly shapes it into a hemisphere. (They showed me the wooden form that they used to use–hemispheres carved into a chunk of log–and the buffalo horn that they’re using now. Buffalo horn is better–finer-grained and harder. They saw the horn in half, and carve perfect hemispheres into it with a red-hot iron.)

The whole process takes a long time and requires much skill–just hammering a lump of metal into a perfectly flat, even sheet takes a lot of experience! It was absolutely fascinating to watch.

From there we went to the Akha village, which is a fairly typical set of thatched bamboo houses (I hate to call anything that well-made a “hut”). There I met the spinner/weaver, who’s a 61-year-old woman who absolutely loves her work–she showed me an endless succession of beautifully embroidered bags, jackets, etc., and also demoed spinning on the Akha spindle, which is a mid-whorl drop spindle twirled down the thigh. Her hands were beautiful to watch–the spindle practically jumped about on its own–and she showed me how to prepare the cotton, too.

She takes plain ginned cotton and puts it in a pile on the floor, then starts twanging a small wooden “bow” so the string catches the cotton bits. As she continues plucking the bow, the vibrating string catches the fibers, separates them, and sends the bits floating into the air–after ten or fifteen minutes this produces a homogenous fluffy mass of loose fiber.

(This is, incidentally, much harder than it looks; she let me try it, and my first attempt was, um, disastrous. Also very funny, although she valiantly tried not to laugh, and patted me encouragingly on the back.)

She then picks out short bits of fiber and bits of hull, takes a small handful of the finished fluff, and puts it on a wooden board. She then takes a slender piece of bamboo and rolls the cotton fluff around it, producing a nice little cotton puni, ready for spinning.

(It is not true, by the way, that you have to spin cotton finely. She was spinning cotton singles on the drop spindle that were the diameter of cheap cotton string.)

Anyway, she also showed me her indigo dyepot and indigo dyeplants–two species, both different from the European standard *and* from the Lao plant. One of the species smells very nice when dried–she showed me a sprig she had hanging up as air freshener. We didn’t have time for her to demonstrate dyeing, alas, but I did buy some lovely indigo black fabric from her–handwoven and handspun, of course–and some lovely soft white cotton fabric. I think I’ll use it for embroidery.

We ate dinner in the standard Akha style–sitting at a low table, dipping food out of common bowls into our bowls of rice, and dipping bits of green stuff (mint, and some sort of spongy stem that they said was from a plant like taro (but not taro)) into bowls of spicy chili paste. Unlike the Lao, the Akha eat “regular” rice with chopsticks. (The Lao eat sticky rice kneaded into balls with the fingers and then dipped into chili or fermented fish paste, or pinched up with a bit of some other dish.)

Akha food is heavily spiced (LOTS of chilis), and vegetable-dominated. Dinner and breakfast were very similar–fried eggs, instant noodles, chicken soup with bitter melon/bamboo shoots, chili paste (hand-pounded in a mortar!), and a spicy fish dish. To be honest, I didn’t really like the food much, but fortunately I had a nasty cold so I really couldn’t taste much of anything.

With every meal, there was tea and the inevitable firewater–rice whisky seems endemic throughout Laos and northern Thailand. This stuff was truly awful, though–sort of what you’d get if you took firewater and aged it in green bamboo. (Oddly enough, I suspect that’s exactly what happened. 😉 ) Fortunately, Akha hospitality isn’t quite as insistent as Lao hospitality, meaning that while the whisky does come out as soon as you sit down (whisky with breakfast??? yep!), it doesn’t get refilled quite as often. This means you have *some* hope of getting through the meal without getting totally sloshed.

As we were eating, I saw the dog sticking its head into the cooking wok and happily licking out the leftovers, and the cat sticking its nose into one of the mixing bowls and doing the same. Well, different people have different standards for cleanliness; fortunately, the stuff all gets sterilized anyway durign cooking. I hope.

(Besides, there’s no point in bringing along all that medication for food poisoning if you aren’t going to use it: see, there *is* an upside…!)

Anyway, it turned out to be a fascinating trip, and they offered to have the silversmith teach me! and the weaver…she had disassembled loom bits freshly carved out of bamboo (the bamboo was still green…that’s how fresh it was 🙂 ) sitting outside her house, and will show me how to construct a bamboo loom! starting with digging the posts into the ground…so I’m spending the next week or so in that Akha village, if I can schedule it around straightening out my Indian visa. I have changed my Air India tickets to Feb 20/March 18, so I’ll be passing throuh Bangkok around Feb 15-16, best guess. then, on to delhi, India, and the Tibetan cave yogis.

I forgot to mention that there were a pair of beautiful white/brown sparrows nesting in the bamboo house, perching on two grass-blades sticking out from the thatching. It was beautiful to watch them hover. Apparently, they’re a good-luck symbol; it’s unlucky for a house to be without them.

anyway, that’s the news from here…sorry if today’s update isn’t quite up to scratch, I’m suffering from a very bad cold and my brain is pretty much shut down, which makes writing difficult. One of my big tasks for today is to go off in search of cold medication–I’m out of it right now, so I’m living on cough drops.

(Parenthetical note: if you ever travel to Asia, take LOTS of cold medication. This is the single item that I really regret not stocking–the “hard to get” antibiotics like Cipro turn out to be readily available OTC–even in Laos–but cough medicine without antihistamines, codeine, or tincture of opium (I kid you not: tincture of opium) is very hard to come by. And I guarantee you will get a LOT more colds than obscure tropical diseases…)

sniffling off to the pharmacy, then back to DAPA to negotiate silversmithing/weaving lesson prices… 🙂

Tien

P.S. Did I mention that the villagers are also in the process of rebuilding a house?!? THey had piles of bamboo stacked in front of one of the houses, which is aparently nine years old…so I might get to help build a bamboo hut! complete with thatching! Is that cool, or what???