Housing crisis in Thamuang. Today we built a chicken shack!

The Chicken Shack - made from re-cycled materials (or what was left lying around!)

One day last week, Khamma nipped out to the shop at about 10am on the motorbike for some yogurt and orange drinks. She returned five minutes later having met a man carrying three large cardboard boxes strapped to the back of his motorbike. Inside the boxes were chickens, I would say about a week old. After a brief inspection, Khamma bought thirty chicks! There had been no previous discussion, or even inkling, that she would like to add to the eighteen chickens (minus two recently eaten) already occupying the two hen houses in the garden. This is Khamma at her impulsive best behaviour. She even forgot the yogurt and the orange drinks.

Chicken's eye view of the, err, chickens

The chickens seemed healthy enough, not that I am expert. They made glorious chatter, looked lovely, but where did she think she was going to keep them?

Swift re-arranging of accommodation was required and the chickens from hen house two were transferred to hen house one and in the process given a little more freedom to roam around the garden. It seemed they had come of age and could be trusted a little more; but in reality, they are one-step closer to becoming a tasty meal, poor things! This is Thailand, remember!

Hen house 1 - under the rice house

Hen house 2 - at the back of the rice house

The new clutch was Khamma’s new babies and she watched over them most of the day. One of them was weaker than the rest so she decided to give it some extra tender loving care by isolating it in a sort of chicken intensive care unit. Dehydration was taking a grip on the poor thing, but after drinking from its personal water supply fashioned from a throw away plastic bottle with half its side cut away to make a miniature trough, restoration to normal chicken life was complete. Remarkably though, the mother hen, who was looking after six of her own chicks in hen house three, adopted the ailing chick. By dusk all the chickens were merrily ‘cheep, cheeping’ away accompanied by frogs, toads, lizards and goodness what else, in an improvised musical cacophony that was a symphonic masterpiece of rural Thailand.

A duck's eye view of the, err, ducklings

Soon enough life re-adjusted to a new routine of feeding the animals. Nevertheless, not content with thirty chickens, Khamma could not resist the offer from a neighbour of twelve ducklings also about a week old. These are lovely little birds with the softest yellow duck down and darkest eyes you can imagine. I can understand why she wanted them, but it did present a bit of a housing crisis for the bird population of Owerrrouse. Summing up the situation, we had sixteen chickens in hen house one and twenty-nine chicks in hen house two and eight baby chicks (including the adopted chick) and the mother hen in temporary hen house three. This is fifty-four rapidly growing birds. Oh! I forgot the eleven ducks roaming free in the rice fields and staying in the duck house about fifty yards from the back door. A grand total of sixty-five birds, most of them destined for the cooking pot.

Eventually this became duck house 2

I found Khamma sat on a footstool gazing at the birds and contemplating the crisis. She had partially solved it by adding the eight baby chicks from hen house three to the twenty-nine birds in hen house two. The twelve ducklings were now resident in temporary hen house three. However, this is not a long-term solution, and so the next day she started to build a chicken shack next to the duck house. By the time I arrived, she had cut various strips of bamboo into poles to support the walls. She then split more bamboo poles with a machete, into half-and-half again, to make thin strips that were to become the walls. It was my job to weave these strips in to the first set of poles and make sure the gaps were not too wide for the chickens to escape. It was a pleasant way to spend Sunday, and I even had the feeling that Ray Mears (the survival expert) would learn a trick or two from the bush people of Isaan (Khamma and me).

Duck house 1 on the right and new chicken shack on the left

Intricate bamboo lattice work is the main feature

The chicken shack is a temple to re-cycling. All the materials had previously been lying around the yard and they lashed together with bits of thin wire and string. The exception was the roof, which is the ubiquitous corrugated iron sheeting, and cost about 20GBP. The final appearance has a ‘permanent temporary’ feel about it, but I am sure the chickens will appreciate their new shack. They move in tomorrow, all fifteen of them.

The concept of 'permanent temporariness'

PS: If you have calculated the maths and think this should be sixteen, not fifteen, Khamma is cooking the missing chicken as I write.

Thamuang Update

Returning to the village is, I have decided, the perfect antidote to Hong Kong’s stressful living. Even though my project work is suspended, I felt stressful. I find this hard to explain, but because the objectives of my daily work are to improve systems so that managers can make better decisions which leads to improving the working lives of the people who have to use them to produce the reports because they working more effectively. Suspending the Hong Kong project was the correct decision made for the right reasons, but re-adjusting from strategic thinking to passive, everyday, thinking takes a lot longer than you can imagine. I take this personally by feeling I have let the local people down, especially those required to churn out information using very antiquated and, for the most part, inaccurate methods, often working long hours for no extra reward. Promises made easily, succeeding so many made before.
Therefore, it was with some relief I arrived in Thamuang where I hoped I could relax and recover from the mini burn out I was experiencing in Hong Kong.
This time of year is one of the busiest for the northeast Thailand rice farmer. The heavy rain showers are a welcome relief after the long hot dry season that has left fields baked stone hard, leaving water scarce. Ideally the farmer wants a prolonged period of steady rain that is readily soaked into the soil and not short sharp showers where the rains runs off into the rivers. This year was perfect and long showers with mostly cloudy conditions made it ideal to work in the fields.
Ploughing the fields is the first priority, even though some of them are under water. In the old days, this was the job for the water buffalo and hand held plough, but nowadays the tractor makes lighter work, it is still arduous work. Khamma keeps reminding me that it was not all that long ago that she in fact ploughed the fields with a buffalo!

Khamma's brother ploughing the field at the back of Owerrrouse

Khamma’s brother was busy for a couple weeks ploughing the family’s land that consists of about thirty fields. Soon after spreading chemical fertilisers, some of the new fields will have rice seeds scattered by hand and left to Mother Nature, and good luck, to take root. These fields look patchy with dominant random patterns. In the established fields, small armies of workers dressed in colourful clothes from head to toe, can be seen transplanting seedlings throughout the day row after row after laborious row. These plants usually yield more crops and, in the end, managing them is easier. However, for everybody it is hard work from dawn to dusk and dominates domestic duty and daily rhythm. Once the seedlings are established, they can be more less left to grow until harvest time in late November and early December.

The rice is starting to come through and changing the landscape

During the week, Khamma was often working at 5.30am through to 11 or noon when the sun made it too hot to do any more. I was very impressed with her commitment but even more so with Yo who had to be out of bed by around 6am to get ready for school. Like any other kid he was entirely enthusiastic about this, but he stuck by his task to get the school bus on time at 7am. He was back home at 5pm and eager to eat noodles with his friends in the village before completing his homework. I thought that might be enough for him, but as soon as this was finished he had two hours of dancing practice in the village. Eventually at around 9.30pm his day was complete and he fell into bed exhausted.
Yo is just as distracted by youthful modernity as any other twelve-year-old boy anywhere else in the world. He knows about fads and fashions, he has a haircut that is familiar on the streets of Manchester and he knows all the latest pop songs. So do his friends. However, he lives deep in the heart of rural Thailand where it is easier to know but is less likely to participate. There are no shopping centres to lurk around and domestic reality dominates his life. Nevertheless, he is uncomplaining in his situation.
I am not sure what his equivalent in England is. Certainly they will taken to school by a parent in a car, they will be few if any ‘out of home’ activities like dancing and boy scouts and youth clubs to occupy their minds between arriving home from school and going to bed. There is nothing like Thamuang’s nature where learning to live and play within the natural surrounds is the main option. Yes, he does have access to TV and console type games and really enjoys playing with them, but is equally content climbing trees and playing outside.
Yo and his friends are extremely well behaved and polite and there is hardly ever any occasion where they are disciplined for lack of respect to their elders.
Who between the typical English twelve year old and the Thai equivalent is the more adjusted? Who makes the most of what surrounds him? Who has the most self-discipline? You know my answer by now.
However, the opportunities available to emerging youth in Thailand are very limited. Whatever the socio-economic climate in England it is apparent that emerging youth can get a foot on the ladder. In Thailand Yo will be lucky to find a ladder by the time he leaves school! In general, this bothers me because I can see that Yo and his friends are the most delightful kids. There will be an abrupt change as they leave school because the ‘system’ cannot support them. They will need luck and will need to be ‘well connected’ if they are to find the ladder leading to escaping the poverty trap of rural life.
In the UK, the transition from school to work is not as huge and eventually everybody makes it, with or without student debt, one way or another. The ladder is visible and there are even people willing to help put the feet of the next generation onto the first few rungs. However, underneath are these young people as qualified in the life skills of their Thai counterparts? This is an interesting question, but I fear many answers depending on your point of view.
Yo, I think has the right idea to give himself the best possible chance. Even after a busy week at school and dancing practice each evening, he was up at 8am on Sunday morning for his special English lesson. This is an additional voluntary activity provided by his teacher, at his home, school during term time and lasts for four hours. Not many and teachers, and even fewer children, would give up a day in bed to go back to school. Neither is he alone, as the class has twenty pupils.
I am going to this miss thirst and eagerness for knowledge and education, and I can only hope everybody’s hard work is fruitful in a country so deserving of much more than it is capable of delivering now. The prospect of England’s disaffected youth led by ineffective politicians is depressing.