Workin' Hard

It is rice harvest season in Northern Thailand. And the NGO I'm volunteering for wants me to help out. I think they are trying to break me in. Last week I arrived in time to help cut the rice. Once the rice is cut it has to dry for 3 to 5 days. Then the rice has to get thrashed off the stalks, bagged and put in storage. Yesterday I joined a crew of 15 Thai laborers and farmers for a long hard hot humid day of work. Keep in mind that for the Thais I’m working with this is the cold season; they’re all wearing jackets and wool hats.

Step 1: stand in the middle of a giant tarp with special bamboo sticks. Step 2: wrap bundles of rice stalks and beat them against a slotted wooden platform until all the rice comes free. Step 3: pile the stalks for the cows to eat. Step 4: repeat steps two and three until the whole field is clear. After I finished I thought I was off the hook for a while. The men and I sat down for a break. They smoked their cigars and drank rice whiskey. The whiskey is a lot like sake, only quite nasty and the cigars are made from rolling tobacco and broken bits of tamarind shell rolled into dried banana leaf, also quite nasty. They say the tamarind is for vitamin C. During our break I watched as the boys and women on the crew used large fans to blow out of the giant rice pile all the stray bits of stalk and empty rice husks. Then they bagged the rice and tied up the bags. Then everyone stood up. Apparently the rice doesn’t just carry itself.

This is a photo of me carrying a 50 kilo bag of rice. It's my second bag of dozens I carried yesterday. They had to get from the field up a narrow muddy path through the jungle to the road 400 feet above the field. Then the crew and I filled the back of a pickup truck with the bags and drove the bags to storage. Storage is little shack, just one room, on stilts, about 5 feet above the ground. So we pass the bags from the truck, up the ladder and dump the rice out into the little room. When we are done, the room, about 50 square feet, is filled with 3 feet of rice. It’s enough to feed one family for one year. The empty bags get passed on to the next family. Tomorrow the crew will thrash and bag another field. I’m looking forward to getting back to the city to work on my NGO’s mapping project. I’m also going to shower and get a Thai massage.