Dogs, Logs, and Loud Noises

While I was in the process of building a house for my girl-friend of the time, I lived in a small village with the girl-friend and her mother for perhaps 6 months. It was an interesting experience, and to say that there was some serious culture-shock involved would be putting the situation into mild terms. It was a real eye-opener for me.

There were so many shocks that a lot of them have fallen into the “forgotten” parts of my memory, but there are some which, by their very nature, I remember vividly.

Children, by their own nature, are curious about nearly everything, and sometimes, that can get them into trouble of one sort or another. I have a son, born in December 1997, who lived with us in the village, and he managed to wander to a house about 50 metres from where we were living. As with most village shacks, there were dogs which lived there. Of course the little boy had to find the cranky dog to pull a tail, and he got a bite for his stupidity. We all know what dog-bite means in Thailand, don’t we? To me it means a lot of trips to the local hospital to get the series of anti-rabies injections. One would also hope that the child would learn a lesson from the bite and the follow-up injections, but it doesn’t always happen that way.

But... But that dog was so nasty that it met a suitable end. I believe in kamma [that’s the Pali version of the Sanskrit word “karma”].

Something that I saw often in this village were the utility vehicles [called pick-up by our US cousins] which appeared at one end of the village and crept through to the other end while either the driver or passenger held a monologue over a loudspeaker mounted on the cabin roof. They are all trying to sell something. Well, nearly all of them. There was one that came around about half-way through the little boy’s series of injections which offered to take away any unwanted dogs, free of charge. The dog that gave the little boy the bite got taken away, free of charge. At least twice a week, a similar ute would crawl through the village offering to sell dog meat. I was never tempted.

While I am still talking about dogs, in the village, they are a genuine noise pollution nuisance. At perhaps 3 AM, a cock will crow, and that sets the dogs off on a yapping chorus that seems to last for about 20 or 30 minutes. If you can manage to sleep through that cacophony, the next aural hazard is the poo-yai baan [village head-man, a petty position which holds a small amount of authority which invariably goes to the head of the holder of the position] and his loudspeaker tower. This is a formidable adversary in the battle for a decent night’s sleep. The man in the job rarely has any concern for the sleeping habits of a normal, peace-loving farang, his concern is to get the message across to the villagers before they go to work in the rice-fields for the day.

Unfortunately, the poo-yai baan is not like the hawkers in their utility vehicles, and certainly not like brave Sir Robin in Monty Python & the Holy Grail. The hawkers and Sir Robin “bugger off”; the poo-yai baan will not.

The guy who lived across the road from the girl-friend’s mother had a utility with the loudspeakers atop the cabin, and one of the features these setups seem to always have is the ability to play music through these speakers, a feature that I can do without. So, one night the guy with the ute comes home drunk, and as he is in the process of shutting the works down, he accidentally tuned the music to the loudspeakers, then his voice, and that was at about 10:30 PM. The noise awakened the little boy.

I saw red, and picked up the [now crying] infant and headed out to confront the oaf. With gestures to add meaning to my words, I told him that he had come home, made a noise to awaken the baby, and now I did not expect that I or the infant would sleep much in the night left to us. He was cowed, I felt a little better for having vented my spleen, but the baby still did not sleep.

I think that what I am trying to say is that the average Thai seems to not care for the feelings and needs of other people, they do their thing regardless.

One of the things that I have seen done is [dare I say it?] illegal logging.

The girl-friend would answer any questions that I had about the region, and I always had questions. One of the answers that I got told me that all of the teak growth in the vicinity of her mother’s village was on land that “belonged to the King”; the implication being that the land and the teak both belonged to the crown.

It was surprising how much teak turned up in the village when someone needed to build or repair a house. Here’s how it happened:

A house needed repair, and this became public knowledge.

2 mornings later, a quantity of teak logs about 15 cm [6”] diameter, usually enough to effect the repair, would appear in a small block of land well off the main road. I christened this plot the “sawdust pit”. By the thin light of dawn, men from the village would assemble at this place with their tools.

And without any assistance from power tools, those logs would be sawed into planks in a very short time. If there was not enough wood to complete the job, more logs would be there the next morning and the process would continue.

From the time that I lived in Canberra, I learned a little about forest management, and something that I know is necessary to ensure the good growth of a forest is thinning of the trees as they get bigger. I like to think that this is where the teak logs came from, but I just can’t quite manage to convince myself that this is what was happening.

I don’t know what money – if any – changes hands when this happens, I don’t know whether what happens is legal or not, and I certainly don’t know if I should have done anything about it or not. Fortunately, I’m not there any more.

I don’t live in an Isaan village, that’s not where I belong.

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