1st July
Oh My Jao. Today was the day of ultimate success! I interviewed an Urak Lawoi person – for three hours! Granted she spoke english; which was extremely conducive to the length. I kept thinking it was going to wind down, and the she would ask: So what else do you want to know about? Or say.. you know the thing is… And off we would go again. Eventually, I had to give my thanks because if I stayed any longer I might have passed out from fatigue and I knew I still had to walk an hour home and eat dinner and type it all up tonight.
Lets see. From the beginning…
Either attack spiders or bed bugs CHOWED me last night. It was the worst night I’ve had so far. I went to be paranoid about the Dengue mosquitoes and woke up itching like mad. I thought I was just imagining it until I felt these big swollen lumps on my elbow and shoulder. Then, I couldn’t find my light so I was digging around in my bag in the dark trying to get out my spare. My first guess was mosquitoes biting me through the mesh, but they were big swollen bites with a deeper more burning itch, not like a mosquitoes frantic but sizzling itch. I saw that they seemed to be places that might be touching the surface of the bed while I slept. I can’t really remember what I did at what point, but I went back to bed and work up two hours later with more. Seven on my back, on my stomach one, arms. Then I thought, SPIDERS ARE ATTACKING ME! Then I went into hyper mode and pulled all the pillows off the bed, swept it with a broom, changed all my clothes and put on long pants and a shirt, tucked and tied down the net, sprayed everything with bug spray, got my sleeping pad, inflated it and put it onto of my mattress, got a fresh sweatshirt for a pillow…. with a while of thinking about it I realized it was probably bed bugs not spiders. Even so, I couldn’t fall asleep for another hour and a half because I was thinking of them. In the morning I was fine. The itch stuff brought down the swelling a lot. I talked to Pi Solep about it and he seemed to think about the same thing and said change and wash your sheet, so I hope that will help.
I ate breakfast with my Burmese friends again. This time Solep kept saying Mai arroy “not delicious”, but it was pretty good. I had coffee, read some poetry, wrote “Marine Preservatives”, and typed it. In the late morning, I passed John and SomSak who were talking about me and were like “hey there she is, come over’ and it turns out SomSak had asked John what “before” and “after” meant and wanted to know the difference between “after” and “later”. This turned out to be pretty hilariously hard to explain. I left them learning vegetable names together, and went out to the bay for a swim. There were huge waves and I only went out a few minutes before I realized the tide was going to be very strong and swam back. That is when I discovered it was excellent body surfing!!! The Thai guys on the beach were laughing at this loco chica (who was trying very attentively to make sure her shorts stayed up) and was getting pounded into the sand now and again and dumped up onto the beach laughing more often. A mask and snorkel make body surfing about ten times as enjoyable as without, I learned.
I decided after several days of emotional recovery from the noodle makers incident, it was time for me to overcome the awkward and venture back into the village. I found the same women playing cards, and sat with them for a while. When I asked if I could take a picture of them playing, they all immediately and fervently said “no!”. So that was that. While I was sitting with them I saw some kids playing. The biggest boy (12-14) was swinging this tiny boy around. Then the girl grabbed a big piece of Styrofoam and started sort of beating/fighting the large boy, only where the girl was using foam for her sword, the big boy was using the small boy. At one point he just threw him towards her and the boy front planted in the dirt. He didn’t look mad, although it looked painful, and he ran and tried to jump back on the big guy again. When I said bye—deciding to give up on the card players for photos or information, all four women said bye back and they might even have smiled. This confused me, but was also pleasing to an extent.
Three kids ran up to me and started introducing me to the dogs that were with them. When I asked them questions about themselves, they ran away. Then I just walked along smiling and saying hello to everyone I saw. One woman who was washing clothes gave me a warm hello back, and my “interest in me sensor” went off. Yippee! We started talking a bit, and then her daughter arrived. I wasn’t expecting an interview or anything, but when I was just tangentally explaining why I was there, to get permission to take her photo she said “ oh yeah, what do you want to know about?” and off we went. About 10 or so minutes in, I found out she spoke extremely good english and well. That was that.
Gosh, what to say though… I don’t want to paraphrase her interview because so many of the topics are sensitive, and I don’t want to misrepresent anything. Topics included: corruption, kids at the school selling and doing drugs; the fragmenting of the community over time, parental abuse and neglect, health problems from the trash problem, drama about land, history of land ownership in the island, “new growing and healthy coral” (in quotes because I’m not sure she wasn’t calling the white coral, new growth of the coral instead of very sick coral), all of the animals she’s taken care or nursed back to health in the last year (cats, puppies, sugar glider, bald eagal, sea turtles…), her dad working for a fishing ship in Burma and having to jump overboard to escape the Burmese military and live stranded on a island for weeks….
Quotes coming.
Love,
Gigi
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