Somporn’s Village

By Robert Wilson
This is part of our Window on Southeast Asia series.

Sometimes I think the travel gods are paying attention to me. As I passed through several small villages on the train leaving Malaysia one summer, I resolved to visit an out-of-the-way village in Lampang province to get an idea of life there. About a month later, back in Thailand, I stopped by the local grocery store and on the way out I ran into Somporn, a new teacher who had recently joined the English department. She told me she was going to her home in a village the next day and invited me to come along. Her house is near the town of Jae Home, about an hour north of Lampang. Her village was out in the boondocks about 8 miles from there.

I met Somporn the next day and we boarded the bus to Jae Home, a small town made up mostly of a couple of rows of shops. Her brother was there to meet us and he gave us a ride to the village on a motorcycle. The ride took us through eight miles of lush green valleys and rice fields. When we arrived in her village, Ban Ma Dto, a crowd of kids appeared from nowhere yelling “Hello!”

Somporn’s mother’s house is a traditional northern Thai style stilt-house built of teakwood. Like most houses in the northern region, in fact Thailand as a whole, it is very open and airy. There is a family area stretching from the north to the south end of the house, and no wall on the south side, just a cement fence to keep anyone from falling off. To the east are more private rooms that are closed off, and to the north and west are large, wide-open windows taking up most of the wall. There was a gas stove in the small kitchen but most cooking took place on a cauldron over a cement fireplace with a wood fire. The house had electricity and running water, but not too many other luxuries. Still, it seemed a pleasant place. Somporn’s mother, father, uncle, and two brothers lived there.

We arrived to the sound of her mother pounding some kind of herb and chili peppers in a wooden mortar and pestle. Breakfast was served a little while later with a tray on a mat on the floor. There were two bowls of boiled mushrooms, a bowl of the herb and chili mixture (for dipping), a bowl containing a stew made from bamboo, garlic, fish sauce and some herbs, and a tray of sticky rice. The bamboo concoction was delicious, though I had never really thought of bamboo as an edible plant for anything but pandas before.

Once I was full Somporn took me for a walk around the town. There were only a couple of paved streets, otherwise the “streets” were gravel with bamboo fences on either side. By that time, however, it was getting hot and not much was happening. Many people seemed to be napping in hammocks or anywhere else they could find. So we went back to her house and she spent some time helping to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of the Thai alphabet, then asked if I was getting sleepy. I think the sleepiness of the place at that moment was contagious (or maybe it had something to do with getting up at 5:30am). So she brought out a pillow and I took a nap on the mat where we’d had breakfast. As I awoke, whatever dreams I may have been having were slowly replaced by the equally dream-like sound of a woman gently singing in a nearby house as she pounded food in a wooden mortar.

Returning to consciousness I asked Somporn about the village and its people. She told me that there are about 300 people in Ban Ma Dto, and it certainly is a close-knit community. The houses are all so open that people talk to their neighbors without leaving or even yelling very loudly.

After the nap Somporn wanted to visit her grandmother who lived in one of the wealthier houses, evidenced by a TV and a tiled floor. At one point on the walk there I stopped in a tiny shop for iced coffee and Somporn introduced me to the owners, whom she knew by name, just as she did most people we passed.

Her grandmother was chopping bamboo for dinner while her aunt and another relative were weaving a fishing net. Like everyone else in the village, they worked slowly but surely, chatting and laughing as they worked. I asked her grandmother how much life had changed since she was a girl (she’d lived in Ban Ma Dto all her life). She replied that when she was young they could only leave the village once a week as they had to walk into town (Jae Home). They also didn’t have running water and used to carry it in buckets on a bamboo pole. In fact, Somporn remembered the old days when she did that, and she was only 25! “That’s why I’m so short,” Somporn told me. “I used carry water on my shoulders.”

When I asked if life is better now or way back when, there was a quick and unanimous answer from all present: “Now!” There seems to be very little pining for the “good old days” in Ban Ma Dto. Perhaps that’s because the village is in the perfect spot to take in what it wants of the modern world and reject the aspects of it the people don’t want. After all, the village is accessible by motorcycle (and most families have one) but not much of it by car. Plenty of people bemoan the changes that the modern world have brought, but not here. They have running water, gas stoves, motorbikes, radios, etc., yet the place is quiet and peaceful with the only real noise pollution coming from the chickens. They have plenty of comforts, yet their way of life seems little changed, even the grandmother agreed on that point. I expected her to say that everything had changed, but she didn't. Some people choose to spend their lives there rather than move to the city. In some ways it all adds up, but after seeing places where traditional villages are home only to old people, I have to wonder just what it is that the people of Ban Ma Dto know that so many other villagers don’t? Or, should the question be how did they get lucky where others haven’t?

Walking back to Somporn’s house I saw people working on various small projects like making fishing nets and drying chili peppers, all the while sitting in the shade chatting with their neighbors. I am not trying to suggest that there are not plenty of problems there, but the people seemed content. We left at about 5:00pm and headed back to Lampang. That evening as I ate in the tiny Pad Thai restaurant near my apartment, I wondered how many villagers were as content as the people of Ban Ma Dto, and to what extent it is the exception rather than the rule. I had to wonder how many problems lurked below the placid surface of the village, and if the tranquil way of life there makes up for the hard work?

In trying to find an analogy for Ban Ma Dto, I thought of a tree growing in the median of a freeway. Many people in Thailand are racing into the future, buying up modern technology, wearing the latest modern fashions, trying to keep up with the west, while others are racing to preserve the past, promoting ancient traditions and customs. But the people of Ban Ma Dto seem happy to sit back and watch the world go by, taking what they like from both the modern and the traditional, and letting go of what they don't want or need.

A few days later I told the teacher who gave me a ride to work about the state of Kentucky, where my mother’s family came from, and said that it is beautiful but parts of it are very poor. “Oh,” she said with a dose of surprise in her voice, “It can’t be as poor as a village in Thailand.” Maybe not, but quality of life is another story.