Silent Fall

May all beings be happy...
May all beings be free...
May all beings have access to and ipods and facebook during vows of silence.

(This last affirmation being our group's request to modernize Buddhist practice).

We just finished our 5 day intro to Buddhism and meditation retreat which ended in a full day of nobel silence. Nobel silence redefines silence as inadequately quiet, requiring abstinence from speaking, reading, writing, or attempts at non-verbal communication, such as body language, peace signs, or smoke signals for help. As many who have attempted noble silence before may attest, nobel silence is not quiet at all. Instead, it amplifies the noise inside our head, prompting an optimal mental state for mediation and, for many, intense self-reflection.

To ease the intensity, the retreat center chef cooked organic Thai vegetarian cuisine that would drive any Top chef judge into silence--mushroom stews, green papaya salads, tofu coconut curries, tapioca and corn deserts drizzled with sweetened coconut milk. Nearly all of the ingredients were harvested from the organic garden sprouting around the facility grounds. The bamboo and earthen huts were literally perched over the irrigation canals of a rice paddy, leaving us to feel like we were growing like grains of rice, emerging from the mud, sprouting towards the heavens, flowering with ancient wisdom with each meditation, and more appropriately for us, enduring a sickle's worth of leg pain after attempting the lotus position for a day.

Everyone departed in various states or relaxation or anticipation of mattresses to come. Stay tuned for student tales!

The Real Bpra-Te:t Thai

Hello family and friends! If you read the title, you just learned the Thai word for Thailand! But before you lucky readers learn more Thai, let's go back a couple weeks.

Bangkok was a great way to release the angst of the Mokken Village. Great shopping, (bargaining is the name of the game) and hot showers (OH MY GOD!) We even spent one night at the Lava Club night club where we drank tons of M150 (Redbull, our nonalchoholic alternative) and danced the night away with British Columbian studs and ladyboys and all sorts of exotic people! We left Bangkok about a week ago and survived the 16 hour sleeper train to get to our homestays 30 minutes outside of Chiang Mai.

Right now we’re kickin’ it in Mae Rim, a sleepy northern district with comfy rural villages and 3 internet cafes (that have made a whole lot of profit this last week) and an immesasurably nice group of friendly Thai folk kind enough to take us weary foreigners in! The days here look pretty slow on paper, but they’re exhausting nonetheless. We wake up with the chickens at sunrise and eat breakfast with our lovely Thai families (Khrop Khrua Thai). For some of us, breakfast (gin khaao dtok chao) is a full 4 course meal: chicken soups and sticky rice and grasshoppers and worms (luckily not for all of us) and a whole mess of delicious (occasionally fishy) entrees. For others, every meal is shared by the family, with all members SHARING THE SAME BOWL OF SOUP AND THE SAME GLASS OF WATER. Didn’t mean to type it in capitals, but Charley feels that the caps are appropriate.

A week of Thai classes has left us with a surprisingly decent Thai vocabulary. Everyday I have a little bit more to say to my Thai family. Yesterday we had a great big laugh about how ridiculous I sounded 6 days ago.

Thai family: Khun yaak gin khaao mai? (You want to eat meal?)
Ben: Pom chuu Ben. (my name is ben)
Thai family: Rao ruu. Ben, gin khaao? (We know. Ben eat?)
Ben: Pom chuu Ben!

It’s amazing how quickly you can pick up a language like Thai when you are forced to speak it right after you learn it.

Besides a community of English speaking people, the rest of the conditions are incredibly tolerable. Showers without hot water, toilets without seat, homes without central air conditioning, bikes without brakes (this one was a little harder to manage on downhill streets). All these things have become a typical way of life for us. A couple people visit the X Center on occasion, which is a tourist-friendly 'extreme' sports center several miles down (on bikes, a good 20 minute trip) and tried some pseudo-American cuisine, complete with Dave n’ Buster’s-quality pizza and burgers and chicken nuggets. I sometimes attend these excursions, I’ll admit, but the adaptation to Thai rural life has otherwise been relatively smooth here. For the most part, Thai food is the name of the game, and I know I am not the only one who goes to sleep thinking about the next day's breakfast.

Probably the most distinct part of Mae Rim is how cozy it is. Everyone, from the 8 year old kids to the 68 year old farmers, takes a motorbike when he or she wants to go out. Going out often means going to the farm for a day’s work (something I can proudly say I did) or to a neighbor’s house for beer or noodles. Rarely do the villagers even venture out past the main street to Chiang Mai.

Lately things have picked up quite a bit. Olivia’s house is a virtual cooking school/petting zoo. One can learn to make delicious sticky rice and coconut snacks, allow beetles to crawl on his arms, even hold a rooster high into the air while singing the prideland theme from lion king!We’ve also discovered, through the wonderful generosity of Jackie and Alex’s homestay mama Pii Laa, the taste sensation sweeping the Thai nation that is Rotee. Here’s how they make it:

1: put a crepe like puff pastry on a wide black cooking surface with (canoli?) oil.
2: (personal preferance) once it has reached a light brown, craqck an egg into the concoction.
3: after the dish has reached a delicious golden brown (personal preferance again, but you’d be crazy to forget this step) slice up some bananas into the newly fluffy pastry and fold the sides to make a thick square pie.
4: Slice into 25 or so pieces, and (oh my lord) POUR CONDENSED MILK ON TOP AHH!
5: enjoy.

I don’t know if I can ever go back to french crepes.

Between going to internet cafes, eating delicious ROTEE, studying paasaa Thai, and hanging out with homestay families, there is certainly a lot of time to ponder. One can’t help but be humbled by the rural lifestyle. The lack of easy communication, the early-to-bed, early-to-rise sleep schedule, the unbelievably hospitable people, the difficulty of transportation (for us without cars or motorcycles) - all of it calms the soul and allows for great introspection. One can only wonder what 10 days at a Buddhist monestary will contribute to our self-exploration. We're gonna be soooo spiritual when we get back to the states! Spiritual and fat if they don't stop feeding us sticky rice.

Missing you crazy falang (meaning foreign or guava, depending on context) westerners with your strange western ways,
Ben, Charley, and the SE Asia crew!

Images Maak Maak

Check out our SE Asia Carpe Diem semester album on Flickr!

It's a hard knock week

Ahh, sweet mysterious of the Mokken Village we have uncovered thee! Upon arriving to the Mokken bay tinted with broken red bull bottles and climbing inside the Village Cheif’s house, nothing more than a living room sized shack with open windows and harsh, unshaven bamboo branches, we quickly and abruptly came to a single conscious realization: We aren’t in America anymore.

Different problems arose quickly for different people. What will heal these bug bites? How does one shower with a bucket? Why is there no toilet paper to wipe my tuchus?

Yet amongst the myriad of cultural shocks and physical dillemas, none could count the Mokken’s treatment of us as anything but a comfort. A relief for some, and a shock for others, the Mokken’s certainly did not act as one would expect. While we may have thought our purpose in the dispossessed refugee camp was to supply labor, we found that our services were only half as efficient as the villagers, who put up the infrastructure of the community center that we funded in little under a day. One could not help but feel that, when we were finally allowed to hammer nails into the carefully laid boards of the community center floor (and what a pile of bent nails we left) that our efforts were less helpful and more to feel like we helped. In the same way we desired to feel the joy of contribution, the Mokken’s wished to hold the prize of ownership. Unlike many of their houses, which the Thai government built without the Mokken’s needs or wants in mind, the Mokken’s wanted their community center to contain within it the craft, labor, and pride of Mokken culture.

This left most of us with 3 hour work days and immense free time, so we were happy to oblige.

After leaving the Mokken village, filled with mixed feelings about our laborious if not limited contributions, our difficult living conditions and our comparatively luxurious treatment, a trip to a nearby beach and actually mattress covered beds with real running showers was more than a welcomed holiday. It was paradise. -Ben Greene

A picture of the dock outside of our sleeping quarters at the Mokken village at low tide.

The conditions at the Mokken village were in stark contrast to the well-resourced surroundings of the ashram where we conduted our orientation. The Mokken people traditionally lived at sea on self-made fishing vessels, small boats that look like large canoes tents on top. In fact, the first Mokken sea vessels were carved out of solitary large trees akin to the construction of Native American dugouts. The Mokken traveled up and down the coasts of South Asia, following good weather and better fishing. Though completely nomadic, the Mokken were (and still are) community oriented, spending all of their lives at sea grouping, dispersing, and regrouping. The leader of the Mokken village told us, “[The Mokken] only came to shore to deliver a baby or to weather a bad storm, where they would climb up into a large strong tree.” The Mokken have a tough time with the concept of personal possessions, know how to read subtle clues in nature and, more than anything, love the sea.

Modern society, with political drawn boundaries on our oceans, fishing licenses, natural park regulations, and coastal development rights have put an end to the traditional Mokken way of life. Approximately 30 years ago the Mokken started to settle in the beautiful islands on the southern coast of Burma and off the west coast of Thailand. They built stilt houses made of sturdy branches and thatched roofs. The floors, also made of branches, were placed just a few inches above the level of high tide, so occasionally a higher than normal tide washes over the floor of the house. In fact, a full moon tide during our stay in the village washed over the floor, causing us to move our sleeping bags into a missionary-built church standing about one foot higher. Though the islands are breathtaking, the Mokken are squeezing out their existence in an area few people would even consider camping at over a weekend. Freshwater is collected from the rain and stored and cisterns, the toilets empty directly onto the ground (low tide) or into the water (high tide) below, the waste-strewn paths between houses are covered knee deep by the tide, and much of their food must be caught daily.