Sowers in Ban Maejo

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At 6:30 in the morning, I woke up to the radio in the village. These radios conveyed policies and news to the countryside of Thailand like nerve endings, echoing with the crowing of cocks in the early morning. After washing up, I walked to the kitchen of the B&B to help make breakfast. Aom, the daughter of the hostess, was lighting a fire in front of the stove. She first turned on the gas valve a little, then put a lighter into the stove and lit it, then put a pot of porridge on the stove. Breakfast usually includes porridge, salad, boiled eggs and some fruits, and sometimes sweet glutinous rice dumplings with banana leaves bought from the market as dessert. Around 8 o'clock, breakfast was served on the long table, and the tenants came to the dining room one after another, sitting at the same table and chatting.

A few days ago, because Aom's mother Thongbae was going to the south to receive a student group from a Waldorf school, and Aom was busy with her studies, she asked me to help take care of the house. In addition to drying the dishes, changing the water on the zinc plate for washing dishes, and filling the thermos with hot water, my main tasks are to help cook three meals a day and take care of the animals and the vegetable garden.

After breakfast, I would take the kitchen scraps to feed the chickens, release the more than 20 chickens and a rabbit in the chicken coop from the cage, and change their water and food. Chickens lay eggs every day, and we always have a reserve of nearly a hundred eggs.

Around 12 o'clock, Aom and I prepared lunch together. At 3:30 in the afternoon when the sun was not so strong, I started the watering operation. It takes about 1-2 hours to go from the herb garden at the door of the kitchen to the greenhouse behind the house, the peppers and aloe vera outdoors, and the various plants along the roadside, while watering them and harvesting and weeding them. At 5:30, we feed the chickens and rabbits again and put them in cages. At 6 o'clock, prepare dinner with Aom. At 8 o'clock, everyone finished eating and washed the dishes, and the kitchen finally returned to a calm state.

Most of the guests here are tourists who stay for two or three days, but there are also 4-5 guests who show up regularly. In addition to us, there are slow-moving people who enjoy retirement life, and there are also digital nomads who come to the cafe regularly every day to work and write papers. These long-term residents will stay here for at least a few months. Three generations of the host family live here, including the hostess Thongbae and her husband, daughter Aom and her husband, and a young grandson. At every meal, the whole family will sit at the long table with the guests to eat, creating a strong family atmosphere. If a tenant is not feeling well that day, Thongbae will go to the kitchen, squeeze a lime, mix it with honey and salt, and make a special cold drink. After 9 o'clock, everyone will return to their cabins one after another. After the street lights are turned off, you can see the cold stars in the sky, and if you are lucky, you will also see shooting stars passing by.

The huts where the tenants live are made of adobe bricks, which is why it is called "Earth Home". Each cabin has a different shape and layout, nestled among lush tropical greenery. Water diverted from a distant dam flows here, bringing an abundant water source that is particularly luxurious in the dry season and nourishing a small oasis. There are cobblestone paths, large trees covered with dendrobiums and orchids, chicken coops, greenhouses, fires on the grass, and earthen walls covered with murals. Every furnishing seems to have grown slowly from the soil over a long period of time. out of the plant.

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Earth Home is located in a small village called Ban Maejo, which belongs to an area called Mae Taeng in the north of Chiang Mai, 1.5 hours' drive from the center of Chiang Mai. Like other nearby villages, there are longan trees all over the mountains and valleys, rice is grown in the fields, and there are traditional Lanna House cabins on the roadside, and tall barns can be seen from time to time.

In the eyes of Permaculture/ecovillage practitioners in Thailand and even Asia, this humble little village is an important stronghold - within a 10-minute walk of the village, there are three ecovillages and learning centers that have been operating for 20 years. . 200 meters away from Earth Home is the eco-village Pun Pun Organic Farm, founded by Jon Jandai, a pioneer in organic farming in Thailand. Another 300 meters away from Pun Pun is Panya Project, another eco-village that was once prosperous but has now declined. The Thai countryside is vast and sparsely populated, and such density is rare. There is an endless stream of people coming here from all over the world to study every year.

Nowadays, local creation has become a prominent idea, but 20 years ago, returning to one's hometown would have been regarded as a weirdo, and few people discussed environmental protection and sustainability. It is hard to imagine that in that era, locals who returned to their hometowns and people who moved to cities all chose to settle in this small village. They had similar ideas and formed a community that supported each other.

Is there any special charm here? If there is any difference between Ban Maejo and other villages, it is that its location is too remote, close to the forest of the national park, so it does not develop as fast as other villages. Even though Chiang Mai tourism has radiated to surrounding areas, it is still quiet. . In the past 20 years, it has basically not undergone any major changes. There has been no land enclosure to build large-scale resorts, and there has been no large influx of foreign people.

The forest brings clean and pollution-free water, the soil here is fertile and the air is pure, making it a good place for farming.

A different kind of outsider gets time and space to grow slowly here.

One night we were walking to a friend's house for a party. On the walk, we turned off the flashlight and relied on the light of the full moon to identify the path in the forest. Fireflies flew around us from time to time. My friends are a Canadian couple. They lived quietly in a small wooden house in the village for a year and a half, growing vegetables and drinking well water. The cabin was built many years ago by another foreigner. We slipped into the bright cabin from the night, feeling warm all over. The party was full of volunteers or sojourners, and it was like an underground party for outsiders.

What I feel in Ban Maejo is generally a kind and spacious life. The rural space is vast, and the presence of outsiders is not strong. It seems to accommodate all kinds of life, various types of intersections and experiments. But I also vaguely feel that this sense of spaciousness may be just a conditional offer, provided that each of us goes our own way. People who have lived here for a long time, when they delve deep into the fabric of the countryside and seek some real level of solidarity, will eventually encounter the moment of encountering the traditional village concept.

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41 years ago, when Thongbae was 15 years old, she left home for Bangkok alone. She was the first woman to leave her village. Her mother kept crying and begging her not to leave. She couldn't bear the poor living conditions of women in the village and told her mother, "I will die soon if I stay here." She only had a primary school education and only had 200 baht when she arrived in Bangkok, but she was very perseverant. She worked 16 hours a day, working in a factory during the day, selling clothes at the night market at night, and organizing worker tour groups during holidays. She gradually accumulated savings and her annual income reached 150. 10,000 baht, which was considered considerable at the time.

Twenty years ago, when the 36-year-old returned to the village from Bangkok, she was also the first woman to return from outside. Her mother still kept crying and asked her why she didn't continue to make money in Bangkok. She said that she had a friend who made a lot of money, but eventually got cancer and died early. She had seen enough of people in the city making money and working hard, only to die with nothing, and she wanted to live a healthy life. But she just came back and had no idea how to make a living, so she opened a canteen in the village.

Four years later, a man named Jon Jandai also came back from Bangkok, went to the village and bought a piece of the most barren land on the hillside, built a farm called Pun Pun, and lived with a group of people. They built earthen houses and established seed centers in the hope of preserving local seeds and combating climate change and monoculture. The people in the village thought they were rich at first, but when they saw those people walking barefoot and wearing rags, they all changed their minds and said they were a group of weirdos.

Thongbae thinks so too. She was most afraid that her daughter would go to Pun Pun, fall in love with someone there, and have some unclear relationship with those weirdos. Turns out, she was the one who kept going there. At that time, Jon Jandai was experimenting with natural building techniques. She fell in love with it when she first learned to build an earth house. It turned out that a person could own a home on his own without spending too much money. They were not very skilled in building the house at first, so they knocked it down and started knocking it down again, until they could do it, she went home and built the first house by herself.

When she first started building her first house, no one in her family supported her, saying that the earthen house was not durable. Only Jon Jandai came with volunteers to help. The first house still stands intact in the green garden of Earth Home. Glass wine bottles are used to create circular light-transmitting patterns on the walls. It can be seen that a lot of thought was put into the design.

Thongbae slowly built 8 earthen houses, named them "Earth Home", and started a home stay business. As Jon Jandai received media attention in China, Pun Pun received more and more volunteers. However, they wanted to focus on seed saving rather than receiving visitors, so they introduced volunteers to live at Earth Home. As a result, Earth Home has gained a steady flow of customers.

Earth Home has also begun to receive children from international schools and holds classes on Permaculture and natural architecture. At its busiest time, Aom hosted different school groups for two and a half months, taking care of 20 students every day and holding bonfire parties every week. The walls of the restaurant in Earth Home are covered with flags of various countries and their names drawn by children.

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Before working as a "temporary housekeeper" at Earth Home, I took a food class at Pun Pun and then stayed there as a volunteer. The sense of community life is stronger when volunteering at Pun Pun. Everyone takes turns cooking and working together for several hours every day. Friends from all over the world chat while working. In Earth Home, I am managing a B&B. My workload is much greater than in Pun Pun, but when there are not many tenants, my life is quiet and regular.

More than one person has told me that Pun Pun and Earth Home have different energies. Pun Pun is an intentional community, where people come and go, the energy is active and changeable, and we interact with the people there. Earth Home is a family business that has been running for 20 years. Three generations have lived here, and there is a sense of permanence that will not change no matter how hard it is. An interesting phenomenon is that during the day, Earth Home tenants like to go to Pun Pun’s cafe to work, and there are always people coming to chat with you; after night, Pun Pun volunteers like to come to Earth Home to play cards or board games, and there will be food on the dining table. The host’s company.

Thongbae has her own views on communities like Pun Pun. She always tells me that no one can live in an experimental community forever, and it is more important to have your own family business. But I think that for a small place, there is never an optimal solution to the type of community. The coexistence of multiple differences is more important. Just like big trees in a forest that are independent but connected by their roots, they will form a more resilient ecosystem. . Over the past 20 years, Earth Home has received countless visitors/volunteers from Pun Pun and has become a buffer zone for new arrivals. For newcomers who are not ready to join a radical experimental community and are not used to wooden beds and cold showers, it is a safe choice to spend a period of time at Earth Home with a little distance from the crowd and with soft beds and hot water. As a result, Earth Home has gained ever-changing energy.

The workload makes a huge difference whether you are hosting visitors as a family or as a community. During the few days I worked as a "temporary housekeeper" at Earth Home, I realized how heavy the workload of Aom, as the core labor force of the family, is. In addition to being responsible for three meals a day (and taking into account the tastes of different people) and taking care of animals and plants, there is even more invisible labor - during holidays, she will drive us around and have almost no private time of her own, from morning to Stay with me all night. 37-year-old Aom is the mother of a 5-year-old boy. She is also like everyone's mother. She spends money at the market to buy delicious food for everyone and peels off fish bones for tenants who are not good at eating fish. I asked Aom if he wasn’t tired like this? She just laughed at herself and said this is my life!

Aom didn't decide to come back and inherit the family business from the beginning. She studied Food Technology in college and made "high-tech" food. After graduation, she worked as an office worker in the city for several years. It wasn't until she was 26 years old that she decided to return to her hometown when she got sick due to busy work. She described it as an "awakening" process. Her past city life allowed her to better understand the visitors who came to Earth Home for healing. It has been 10 years since she returned home, and she is studying for a master's degree in agriculture and sustainable development from a local university, hoping to promote agricultural transformation in the village.

On the eve of the arrival of the international student group, I followed her to the town for shopping. We visited several markets and loaded more than ten kilograms of meat, boxes of fruits and noodles into the trunk. That day happened to be a Dutch tenant who wanted to visit local farmers for her dissertation. Aom acted as the convener and translator. After she returned to Earth Home, she started greeting seven or eight other farmers non-stop. At the end of the visit, Aom prepared a thank-you gift for each farmer (a row of paper drinks, a pack of biscuits, and a small envelope containing the desired money), and quietly taught the foreign tenants how to thank everyone and send gifts in Thai. As I listened, I felt that she was no longer just the host of the B&B, but the local key person that anthropologists dream of, diligently putting everything in place and bridging the gaps between cultures without leakage.

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There are 50 longan trees in Earth Home, and a circle of lemongrass-shaped weeds is planted next to the trees. This is an experimental farming method in organic orchards. This weed, called Yafa, has lush roots that can reach a depth of 10 meters. It can help loosen the hardened soil around fruit trees, allowing nutrients and water on the soil surface to seep into the ground along the veins of the roots. Sometimes I feel that Earth Home itself plays the role of this kind of weed in the village, taking root, going deep, and loosening the hardened soil.

For agricultural villages like Ban Maejo, clean water from the forest is a unique blessing and a lifeblood. 20 years ago, Thongbae realized the importance of protecting forests. Without forests, there would be no water. At that time, the price of longan was high, so villagers cut down the forest to plant longan. To no avail, Thongbae came up with a way to use the power of monks to protect the forest. Thai monks have a tradition of practicing in the forest. She invited the wandering monk to live in the forest and built an earthen house for him as a residence. The monk's status is so high that the villagers dare not cut down the trees in the forest over there. Now, walking north from Earth Home/Pun Pun, you will reach a dam. There is a forest Zen temple in the mountains behind the dam. It is the Wat Tahm See Nin Buddhist temple founded by the monks at that time. The longan forest gives way to Towering ancient forest trees.

As villagers began growing longan and prices fell, the longan industry was less profitable than expected, leaving farmers in debt and more reliant on fertilizers and pesticides to ensure yields. The longan forest in front of Pun Pun is the area hardest hit by pesticides. Different pesticides are sprayed throughout the year according to different growth stages. Whenever pesticides are sprayed, the villagers have no choice but to close the door of the Cafe and tell their children not to go out and wander around. A villager was sprayed with pesticide on his face when he passed by. After returning home, he had a headache and nausea for several days. For 20 years, Pun Pun is still the only organic farm in the village. Like other organic farms, it is helpless to deal with the problems of pesticide spraying and air pollution in neighboring areas. Longan is made into dried longan and sold to China and other places, at the expense of the health of farmers and villagers.

Thongbae and Aom believe that the only way out for Ban Maejo is to transition to organic farming. This village has the natural conditions for organic farming, with sufficient water resources and a clean environment. Aom invited agricultural professors to hold meetings with villagers, and also invited an organic farming village that was operating successfully in Chiang Rai to share its experience. When people from that village came here, they said that if organic farming is carried out here, because the natural conditions are favorable, it will Much more successful than they were in Chiang Rai. However, farmers’ response was very lukewarm, which is understandable. It is difficult for debt-ridden and elderly farmers to have the motivation to switch to the unknown organic farming without precedents and yield commitments.

Over the years, Thongbae has approached several farmers in the village who are interested in experimenting with organic farming, established a communications group, and allocated 10% of Earth Home's operating income to fund the group. The forest in the village has been unmanaged for a long time. They hope to promote the cash crops in the forest, but they are gossiped by the villagers that they are using public property to make money. There are many plans of this type that have been shelved due to disagreement among villagers. Currently, the number of members of the communication team remains within 10 people and has not been expanded.

They realize that only when young farmers enter the field will there be an opportunity for change. Aging villages around the world are also waiting for such an opportunity. After all these years, they and Pun Pun are still a "different minority" in the village. Both gave up their ambition to "change the village" and instead focused on doing their own thing and connecting like-minded people, even if they were from far away. Jon Jandai describes this mentality in one sentence: I only serve people who are hungry. The only way to survive is to not let the surrounding environment sap your fighting spirit.

Fortunately, as time passes, in recent years more and more villagers understand what they want to do. Aom's graduate project is the "Food Forest" project, which will work with universities to turn forests into a food resource pool shared by villagers to prepare for possible future food crises. Aom hopes to plant edible plants in the forest on the nearby hills, such as beans, papayas, sunflowers, etc., especially a tree whose fruit tastes like potatoes (I don’t know the name of the tree yet). She is saving seeds during this dry season. When the rainy season comes, she will make seed bombs with children from the international school and throw them into the forest. Seed bombs are small pellets made of seeds wrapped in clay. After being thrown into the forest, the soil will melt when it rains, and the seeds inside will germinate. During the meeting, some villagers were still gossiping, and the village chief said loudly: "If you don't do something, shut up!"

No matter how many responders there are, someone still has to plant the seed. During this dry season, while Aom was collecting seeds, Jon Jandai also sowed wheat seeds in the fields to test the possibility of converting rice fields to wheat to cope with the possible crisis of water depletion.

And a turning point may be not far away - after covid, many Thais have lost their jobs in cities and returned to their hometowns to work in agriculture. Ordinary consumers have become more sensitive to the source of food. Pun Pun receives twenty or thirty letters every month requesting to share locally saved seeds. The seed stock is in short supply and is even sent to Malaysia and Vietnam. Perhaps these seeds will take root and sprout in rural areas everywhere and grow their own resilience.

As I write this, students from Waldorf schools have just arrived at Earth Home, and the atmosphere is suddenly very lively. The teacher who leads the team said that he brings different students here every year. "The top of the mountain is not connected to the bottom of the mountain." In difficult times, people on the top of the mountain need to walk around and connect with each other.

Someone has to start walking the road, and then more and more people will walk together.