One of our guides told us of her story, of why she was doing what she was doing. She said she ran away from her mom in the city because she liked working with the Akha tribe. Her mom apparently wasn’t very happy that, as a result, she wouldn’t get a university education. One of the organizers, which we met at ‘base camp’ before we took that long hike to the remote village, was an American guy. He got a masters degree in engineering, but didn’t want to work in engineering. So he moved to Thailand to help with the NGO. He also seemed to speak intermediate level Thai. His job was to teach the children how to use computers (really old computers with flaky slow as molasses internet speeds).

Anyway, later that day we walked to a little school house to teach the village children. It was actually in that little school house in the middle of no-where that I first learned the very basics of how to write Thai. As part of a government and NGO initiative, teaching Thai and teaching about Thailand is a means to help the tribal people integrate into Thai society. As the tribes aren’t ‘Thai’, and have no central authority, they are a powerless minority that’s been historically abused by native Thais and the Thai government. They aren’t allowed to own land, and many don’t have citizenship, and so people who want their land occasionally evict them by force. As the tribes crossed into Thailand illegally, they are often considered illegal immigrants. We asked the tribe why did they come to Thailand. They said their last home was overrun by dangerous drug gangs/smugglers, and had to flee for safety about 25 years ago.

This reminds me of a story they told me. NGO’s been working on filling out the paperwork for years to give the hill tribe people official Thai citizenship. They would ask for names, and then create a Thai spelling of the name to go on the citizenship paperwork. However, one particular boy had a very unfortunate name. It was the sound of a tongue click. No one knew how to spell that one . . .

I don’t know if tongue clicking is an actual word or not in the Akha language, but I heard it occasionally in the village. For example, they’d use it to scornfully scare the dog out of the hut. Then one day, when their 20-something year old son came into the hut, they used it on him until he left, too . . .

image: Photo taken on the last day of the trip. The man and woman in the center are hill-tribesmen. I looked much younger back then . . .

 vocabulary: