Kents Guide

A GOURMET'S GUIDE TO AUTHENTIC THAI CUISINE, Course Two

By Our Intrepid Gastronome, Kent Whitaker

(As in the Saturday morning serials of yore, we join our heroes where we last left them. See Part One for a refresher.)

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It took us less than an hour to drive to Pirrod’s school from the youth hostel. You can’t miss it. Just look for the sign of the steaming coffee cup (with “Java Hut” written in English, which is an oddity worthy of Lewis Carroll and a cultural shock of high order the first time you see it) at the road-side café, and turn left just before the brick wall, then an immediate left through the bush on the dirt road, through the papaya orchard next to the barbed wire fence, and you’re there. Like I said, you can’t miss it.

This is one of the two “Bible Colleges” that Norman supports; we will visit the other one in our last night before returning to Chaing Mai. They are called colleges because you need the equivalent of a high school education to enroll, but they are more accurately described as evangelical graduate schools: although they do teach Bible and theology, the curriculum is heavy on evangelism. This is Norman and the whole team’s focus. They have such a love for the sweet Karen people and have volunteered their lives toward reaching them for Christ; these colleges are preparing the next generation of Karen “Timothy's”. Already, there are young men who have attached themselves to team members as sort of apprentices: they travel with them, eat with them and work with them, all for nothing but the joy of serving Christ. It is impossible to describe how humbling it is as a Westerner to see what can be done with such little funding, but such great faith!

Pirrod’s school and home are probably the nicest physical buildings we saw. Most of the better construction in Thailand is with concrete block (“cinder” block in our vernacular, or CMU to a mason). If you really want to do it up nice, you plaster the CMU with concrete, and that is what Pirrod has for his main school building. Very nice. Before we set out we had food and some papaya that one of Pirrod’s students cut from a tree as we watched. (By the way: I know most of you don’t eat papaya on a daily basis, but the Thai people do. Try this sometime when you are feeling brave, or when you are feeling in a Thai kind of mood: Get some fresh papaya, peel it and slice it into bite size pieces like cantaloupe, and eat a bite or two. Good, huh?! Now, squeeze some lime on it and try it. WOW!!! DELICIOUS!!! I guarantee that you will thank me.)

Once we polished off a fine meal at Pirrod’s place and dozed off a few times on the cool floor while Norman and Pirrod and Pracha visited in Thai, we all loaded up again and headed out on the 5 minute drive to the orphanage. This is a really neat place that Norman’s ministry supports. Most of these kids are AIDS orphans, or have been orphaned by the civil war that is going on over the border in what used to be called Burma, but is now called Myanmar. There were probably 40 kids living here, in buildings that the local government let them use for free – the buildings were empty as a result of some program shutting down, and the locals recognized the benefit of having these kids fed and protected, even if it was by those Christians. The headmaster over all these kids is not much more than a kid himself – maybe mid twenties (the man next to Pirrod in the green shirt). We visited with the kids, and after they ate their mid-day meal, I passed out some of the candy I had brought from the states. It was a hit, believe me! But once we finished passing out the candy, it was time to hit the road for the deep wilds and our adventures in the nearly untouched jungles, so off we went, leaving the young headmaster to cope with 40+ pre-teens on an unaccustomed sugar high.

So, here we are, heading down a paved road, winding our way up and down the junior mountains that will become the Himalayas if you keep going north and west for about 500 miles. Beautiful countryside and vistas everywhere, and little Toyota trucks with about 3,000 pounds of cabbage, stacked within metal cages 4 feet above the bed tops, careening down from the mountainside fields heading to market. We saw many of these trucks: there was no better way to get the cabbage down from the remote village fields, since anything bigger could not navigate the roads, and anything smaller would not be cost efficient, but with the loads they carry it is amazing that they ever get up some of the steep clay pathways, and how they stop at the bottom is an even greater mystery. Unfortunately, the villagers who do all the work raising the crops get very little of what the produce brings at market since they are completely at the mercy of the independent truck drivers; and even they don’t get much because there are so many of them that the markets can dicker the prices down. It is definitely a buyers market, at least at this point on the food chain.

Anyway, about a half hour after we leave the orphanage, Norman does a 320 and heads up into the hinterlands on a rutted dirt path, climbing into the sun. We will stay on this for about 15 miles (or about an hour) getting our fillings rattled loose before we get to the first village, but it is too cosmopolitan, so we press on, and after another 30 minutes or so we get to our destination: a village with no name and no plumbing, no running water, and no electricity. (Just three months earlier the government ran power to the other side of the mountain, and routed the lines through our village – there were new concrete power lines right outside the door of the hut we were to live in – but because the village could not afford to have a meter put in, electricity remains 15 feet out of reach.) We piled out of the two trucks and looked around.

Details flooded our senses: First, were the people. Everyone had come out of their homes to look at the visitors; there were probably 70 or 80 sets of eyes looking at us as we tried to act cool and not look too out of place or too Western (all without much success). And the smells: There were animals everywhere (chickens, roosters, dogs, pigs of various sizes and breeds, birds, and up the hill, a herd of cattle) so the accompanying smells were everywhere, too. Sewage happens, and out here it happens everywhere. And dust: everything was dry and the dust kicked up by all those living creatures was on everything. I figured the fecal cuneiform bacteria count was in the stratosphere, but nobody got sick or even seemed too worried about it, although we outsiders usually watched where we stepped. The huts were made of every available material, but most were primarily bamboo, since it was the least expensive building material. (The government made using bamboo illegal since so much bamboo had been cut making furniture that the forests were in real danger, but as was the case with many of the Thai laws, they wisely looked the other way when the end user was a local just trying to keep dry. I was really impressed with the common sense way the government operated: make laws to promote the general welfare, but turning blind eyes to infractions that were obviously also promoting the general welfare. An American bureaucrat would go nuts because it made so much sense.) Anyway, the homes were all built above ground, probably because livestock (i.e., pigs) were tied up under the house at night, and because this way you didn’t have to have a watertight flooring. Most housing started out like a tree house, with major branches as a starting point and bamboo framing for the walls floors and roof. The floors and walls were usually split bamboo woven together by bamboo or palm strips. The roofs were thatch panels braided to bamboo structural members, although the one we stayed in had a corrugated metal roof over much of it. Everything was tight enough to slow down rain and larger bugs, but there was a real elegance about how well everything was done according to needs. In a world without electricity, the design was world class and quite comfortable. We slept on flooring of split bamboo spread on bamboo joists, with only woven mats, and they were remarkably comfortable.

We were brought to a village home and met our host family, one of nearly 10 Christian families in this village of perhaps 60 families, and went into the “kitchen”: a room with an open fireplace within a wooden frame on which dried vegetables and a small fish or two hung. There was no furniture, so everyone either squatted or sat on the floor. We had all taken our shoes off and left them on the first level of steps (an act of courtesy practiced everywhere in Thailand), so we all sat around in our socks in the very near dark (although it was bright mid-afternoon outside, the cook fire had gone low and very little light penetrated the tightly woven bamboo walls) and listened as Norman visited – and translated – with our hosts.

There was one older man whose face almost looked like a wooden caricature of a grinning puppet [red pants and cap]; I don’t think I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He told Norman that he wasn’t as old as he looked, but that the Opium to which he had been addicted until he became a Christian had been “hard on him”. He had so much joy, now. There was another man [blue pants] who reminded us so much of a Thai Muhammad Ali – even down to the terrible palsy shake in his hands. He, too, usually had a smile on his face, but it had not always been so: For 60 years he had been the village’s witch doctor, a position of great importance. In fact, he was a third generation witch doctor and had much power in the realm of demons. But he was so grateful now to be free of them, because although he was powerful, so were they, and they were not nice; sometimes he felt he was holding on for dear life to a hungry tiger by its tail. It was all he could do to keep from being consumed. He was especially grateful now that his wife was a Christian; it seems that when he “retired” his wife was horribly bent out of shape as a result of their reduced stature, lack of income, and sudden change in security status. Sort of like the wife of an unemployed CEO in corporate America, and many might identify with the plight of being surrounded by demons. But after two or three years, she literally saw the light.

After a while we shared a meal. As guests, we ate first, and as could be expected in a culture so poor, there was no protein on the menu, just lots of rice and several bowls of various spicy vegetables. As we had been taught, we dipped our metal “spoons” into the hottest looking dish, swirled it around some in hopes that the heat would sanitize any lingering germs, and then ladled out a little from each bowl onto the rice. As usual, it was all different, all highly spiced, and (to my taste) strange but mostly good. All of us guests ate in one room, and later when we were through, the ladies of the household took everything up and went into the kitchen with the rest of the extended family to eat. We wandered around a little, until it was dark, and Norman and the guys loaded us all unto the trucks and went up the hill to the town’s church for an impromptu praise and worship.

It was a pretty little church, built of bamboo above ground like the houses, and we sat around using candles for lighting, singing Christian music in Karen to guitars – have I mentioned how musically inclined the Thai people are? There are instruments (guitars, tambourines, small drums, etc.) all over. Anyway, as we sang and prayed, about 30 people from the village joined us. It was interesting to hear strange words attached to familiar music, and we asked Norman about it later. It seems that about 40 years earlier the Baptists had come through and translated much of the Baptist hymnal into Karen, so there we were trying to sing along in English to familiar songs being sung by everybody else in a strange language. It was harder than you might think, since I did not know most of the songs that well, and hearing it spoken in a strange tongue kept you off balance, but it was fun trying to keep up. After singing, each of us spoke a word or two, as we had done at the hostel, and eventually we went down the hill and prepared for bed, setting up the mosquito netting and rolling out the bedrolls, and then it was candles out.

Once again, as we had encountered at Nirond’s home, the Thai roosters started caterwauling about 2:00 am, but this time it came in waves. Paul Hicks named them all, based upon their distinctive calls: there was Shorty, whose call clipped off early (“Caw-caw-KAW-ca---”) and Garble, whose call sounded like he was quite hoarse, and Pavarotti, the rooster who lived under our house and often let loose about two feet below our mats – he was named for his clear, perfect, world class pitch and timbre. Not to mention volume. The way it worked, as stillness and silence would settle in, one of these three (or one of the half dozen others farther down the hill) would sound off, which was a signal to one of the others to jump in, which was the trigger for another one, with everyone adding their two cents a few times, no doubt exchanging much important rooster lore, and then finally dying out for about 10 minutes. Or less, at which point one of them would open up with more, fresher news. But eventually things wound down, and by 5:30 or so they would stop and go back to sleep, but by then it was time for the workers to get up, eat breakfast, and head to the village’s community fields to work. Maybe they are so used to it they sleep through it, and only wake up when it gets quiet. Hmmm.

We all got up, and before breakfast, were called out for another praise and worship session when the village’s young pastor called the faithful back to church with several lusty blows on the shofar. That’s right; he had a hollow black goat or cow’s horn just like the Jewish priests of old. After about an hour of praise and worship, we went back down the hill and ate our first breakfast. I say first, because we could have had at least three, if we had wanted. It seems that hospitality required that if you invited someone (like us) to visit your home and pray for you and bless you, the inviting party was expected to offer food. So we ate more of supper left-overs, and as we finished, another person would come by asking us to come bless them. This time it was an old woman who only had a bowl of rice to share, and when she came up the short stairs and saw the feast laid out before us (rice and two bowls of food) she was extremely embarrassed, and half jokingly wrestled with our hostess for showing off. Norman assured her that we would love to share her rice, but that we had already had two breakfasts and would she mind terribly if we just visited her home without eating? She accepted this rather transparent gambit, and we trooped over to her home.

She was a widow, and so was even poorer that most everyone else in the village. But she was a professing Christian, even though she was not really strong theologically; Norman was teasing her about her red-stained teeth that came from chewing the beetle nut, and she admitted she did that because it gave her some relief from her arthritis, but the juice sometimes burned her stomach. Then she laughed that maybe it was the rice whiskey or the cigars from her youth, and not the beetle nut juice! I just loved the spirit of this woman. She was so feisty, friendly, fun, and real, that you couldn’t help but love her. [The young man sitting next to her is the village’s pastor.]

Before going any further, let me share some details of the village’s water delivery system. There was a stream that ran through part of the village, and someone had stuck one end of some PVC pipe in the river and had run several sections down hill, ending in a spigot valve. The rush of the stream and the drop in height gave the system enough hydraulic water pressure to function as an adequate water source for the village. Women would carry several one gallon plastic containers (most of which looked like they had started life filled with anti-freeze or motor oil - ugh!) and fill them up for the day’s water needs, from cooking to drinking, to washing. I figured that the containers were so old that any petrochemicals had long since leeched out and the water was as safe to use as it would be coming directly from the stream, so what the heck; and, anyway, we used bottled water for drinking. The toilet facilities were identical to those everywhere else in Thailand: porcelain “squatters” using dipped water to act as a flush, with the waste disappearing into the surrounding soil.

Also worth noting, each house that could afford it had a rice husking apparatus: a long wooden post with a hammer head attached to one end. The hammer head rested in a wooden bowl, into which the girls each morning would place the day’s ration of rice. Then she would go stand on the other end, grab a cross bar attached to the house or a frame, and push down on the log. Since the log had a fulcrum half way between the hammer head and the end the girl stood on, the hammer head would rise when she pushed down, and when she released the tension from her arms, it would slam down on the unsuspecting rice kernels, breaking some of the husks off. After several minutes of this she would scoop out the bowl’s contents and lay it into a wicker bowl and flip it around; the kernel husks would be blown away as chaff, and the good inner rice would be available for cooking. Uncle Ben’s would be impressed. Paul pointed out that any crickets or beetles unlucky enough to get into the rice would add a little flavor variation to the day’s meal. We all appreciated the observation.

Anyway, all morning we had noticed people coming by dressed up in their finest clothes. It seems that the word had gotten out and Christians from a couple of other villages had walked three hours to join us for church. (To a Karen, if you can get there in less than 3 hours walk, it is neighborhood.) Since there were now more church-goers than the church could hold (must be time for a capital campaign), the Powers That Be decided to hold church under the school/hospital in the village. We didn’t even know the village had a school and hospital, but sure enough, smack dab in the middle of this dark ages economy, the Thai government had built a modern concrete structure for the surrounding villages; school was held here up to the 6^th. Grade, and a government trained and paid nurse/teacher taught and dispensed minor medical care.

Church sort of got underway in spurts as people walked up the hill to the school and took their place on the concrete slab, women and kids on one side, and men on the other, which was how everyone did everything there. The women wore their brightest colored clothing, predominately red and purple which were the colors of married women; the maidens wore white with slight trim of red. We sang songs with lots of clapping and raised hands and vigorous guitar. Pracha led a lesson, and Pirrod kept everyone in stitches by pulling 8 men from the crowd and had them act out the entire book of Daniel in less than 12 minutes. I just shook my head in amazement because I had just finished up spending 3 months leading a study of Daniel for the men's group that Paul and I attend. Proof once again that less is more. Then it was time for the Westerners to do their 5 minute mini-lessons. After about an hour and a half of church, it looked like things were going to wind down, but then somebody asked if anyone in the group wanted us to pray for them. Naturally, every last person there wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to have someone from the United States of America, half way across the world, and no doubt Jesus’ first cousin pray over them. They formed two long lines, and John, Pracha, and I took one half, and Norman, Pirrod, and Pirrod’s “Timothy” took the other half.

Talk about humbling. These people looked at you with eyes of such trust when they asked for healing of their arthritis, or migraine headaches, or protection from demons, or fertility issues, or tooth aches, and we prayed earnestly in the recognition that God grants prayers, especially to those whose faith is large and whose resources are small. I know that of myself I have no healing powers or anything, but I truly pray that God would honor their faith with His mercy and healing. Norman and the team said that it happens all the time, and I believe it. We are just so insulated from God’s power by our wealth and ability to take care of things ourselves that we seldom see the kinds of things that happen over there every day. Our loss.

We headed back to the village and loaded up the two trucks, in preparation to go visit another remote village somewhere down the line.

(This ends Part Two. Stay tuned for the Exciting Conclusion!)

Coming Soon from the Same Author: “For Dessert, Swensons Sounds Good”

Photo descriptions:

033 – A rice field on the way to Pirrod’s school

034 & 037 – Pirrod’s school

038 – Kent, Piarchi, John, Pirrod, Norman and Paul at Pirrod’s home

039, 040, 041, & 043 – At the orphanage

047 – The Road to Adventure

048 – Magnify this and find the 3 roofs in the forest to the right of the dark hill line; this is the first village that was not rustic enough for Norman. We are still about 30 minutes away from it.