Can Oxfam Really Help Thailand's Rural Poor?

Home to a large family, this house in our Surin village is quite typical around here.

Once their modest rice harvest is threshed, many of them will leave to find work in the cities as there's no livelihood for them here during the long dry season.

An old hunter gatherer enjoys the luxury of his new kitchen.


The wealthier old men spend every day out in the fields looking for grass for their two or three buffaloes. By feeding up and selling one calf a year, their notional annual income is thus about 10,000 baht or 200 Pounds Sterling.


[This blog is long but please scan down it and you’ll find my appeal for your Comments and thoughts on the wider issues below.]


Tackling rural poverty...

Lifting Thailand’s rural poor out of poverty is the key to the country’s future, but how to do it? I for one don’t have any real answers.

My efforts to promote egg production at our local village school (that I wrote about in the previous blog article) reminds me though of my long-standing interest in the small scale development work of Oxfam, the well-known NGO based in Oxford in the British midlands.

Their philosophy always seemed so very right and principles of sustainability chime so well with the more recent ideas of integrated farming and sufficiency. But how effective can this really be for solving the problems of rural Thailand?

Oxfam still has the right approach but the huge limitation that I see from living in a rice growing village in Thailand’s North East is that with a large population in the countryside there just isn’t enough land to go round. Agriculture is thus only a part of any possible answer to rural poverty.

My wife, Cat, has vividly described for me her childhood in a poor landless family here in the North East of Thailand where they lived essentially as hunter gatherers. Papa rarely if ever had any paid work and so they lived by foraging in the forests and hunting for insects, frogs, fish and rats and whatever else flew or crawled on the face of the earth. Her experience is quite typical of how life has been but now in some respects it’s even more difficult today.

In this way they raised a family of seven children and all the aunties and uncles had similar large broods. All of them eventually inherited parcels of rice land but these are small. When Papa gets old and the land is again divided among the seven children, the tiny plots hardly provide enough rice for their own consumption let alone a surplus to sell for cash. Most families do not have enough land to provide even a marginal living. To add to the problem, the forests that Cat describes as their main source of food are now all gone. The harsh truth is that the countryside can therefore no longer support its growing population.

Agriculture is of course still hugely important and governments and NGOs such as Oxfam can work to make it more efficient but any suggestion that the land is the sole or principle answer to rural poverty would be highly misleading.

I was therefore interested recently to learn something more of Oxfam’s approach to this conundrum as Oxfam and I go back a very long way and I have a lot of respect for its development work. If in my life I’ve done anything of permanent value it was being instrumental in establishing Oxfam Hong Kong, now a major independent Oxfam.

In the mid-seventies when lecturing at the University of Hong Kong I joined the local Oxfam group which ran the usual small shop selling second hand clothes. I then persuaded the committee to allow me to start general fund raising based on articles I wrote for the South China Morning Post on development issues and Oxfam’s work in the developing world.

When Pearl and Dean, the advertising agents for the new mass rapid transit railway were failing to fill their huge advertising hoardings, I persuaded them to let us have some space for free. We splurged on quality posters depicting classic images of starving Africans and the money came pouring in. This way we raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to send back to Oxfam’s head office in Oxford and when the Somali famine hit, we employed a full time fund raiser. Millions came in through the generosity of Hong Kong people, many of whom could remember poverty, and the rest is history. Now Oxfam Hong Kong is a huge independent organisation with its own extensive development programs throughout the region.

For me it was an exciting time. Every year I visited Oxford and had meetings with the Oxfam big wigs, including Frank Judd, then the director. And they in turn visited us in Hong Kong, always staying in my large university flat. At the time China was opening up and there was a steady flow of Oxfam staff planning new projects there. They were interesting men of the generation who’d gone through World War Two and had later found new and exciting work with Oxfam. I best remember Bernard Llewellyn and Guy Stringer, the deputy director, both larger than life characters sprung from a very turbulent era.

Bernard’s wartime experiences with The Friends Ambulance Service in China became the subject of a book he wrote and I’ll never forget Guy telling how he took the first shipment of emergency aid into Phnom Penh after the overthrow of Pol Pot. The stories of a barge being loaded in Hong Kong and towed up the Mekong (where they were charged customs duty on the shipment!) and how their engineers worked on getting water supplies going and restarting the cotton mill are worthy of books in themselves.

Guy and his wife Mary later stayed with me in Singapore when we tried to perform the same miracle again, to launch another new Oxfam, but sadly we hit a brick wall. The Singapore government refused registration of ‘Oxfam Singapore’ with no reasons given and despite the strong support of many individuals that was the end of a great idea.

Only this summer I was saddened to see an obituary notice for Guy Stringer in The Times, Mary having died a few years ago. Characters like these pass one’s way but rarely and I’m grateful for my involvement with them and with Oxfam.

In April I was thus very pleased to see on the agenda of the FCCT (Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand) that staff from the Bangkok office of Oxfam were to make a presentation of a new Oxfam report entitled “The Right to Survive: The Humanitarian Challenge for the Twenty-First Century.” The key point of this paper is that because of climate and environmental change the number of people affected by natural disasters will double and plans must be made to mitigate the impact and to provide additional emergency relief.

I of course went along to the meeting at the FCCT in Bangkok where one of the three Oxfam staff also presented information about work they are supporting in Yasothon promoting the growing of organic rice. According to the hand-out, one farm had actually doubled its yield of rice as well as presumably getting a better price for the organic rice produced. How this was achieved was not explained and while I stood up and asked some questions of the Oxfam panel, I am still intrigued and perplexed as I thought that organic yields would be lower.

It also came as a surprise to me that Oxfam was doing development work here but their website tells me (www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/regions/eastasia.html) that though Thailand is a middle-income country, pockets of poverty exist. Their work here focuses on achieving sustainable livelihoods through crop diversification and developing organic standards and practices. They also promote training of farmers on soil improvement and ecologically friendly pest-control as well as rice breeding and seed selection. Finally, it says, they aim to achieve community marketing so that farmers can get a better price for their crops.

After the FCCT meeting I chatted to a couple of the Oxfam staff and expressed my dismay at the struggle the people in my Surin village have trying to make a living from the land. One of them was distinctly upbeat though and, he said, with a few relevant tweaks from Oxfam they could soon change their lives for the better.

I am still unsure what these ideas might be though and felt frustrated that my questions could not clarify what exactly Oxfam had in mind. I therefore wrote a long ‘stream-of-consciousness’ memo and emailed it to the three Oxfam staff who had made the presentation at the FCCT.

Understandably, all I got was an ‘out of office’ reply from one of them (on 21 April 2009), but I received nothing more. Though I realize public relations is not the focus of their work and that they’d have no time to read a long memo from a nutty enthusiast, I admit I was a bit disappointed at their silence.

I have therefore added the text of my Memo to the end of this blog in the hope somebody reads it and, needless to say, I long for your Comments on the issues raised here, whether you be a Thai or a farang who loves rural Thailand and are concerned for its people.

Middle class urban Thais (who of course run this country) may often know little of the lives of the rural poor on whose cheap labour they rely for their comfortable life-styles. At least Thaksin Shinawatra when prime minister, made an effort to get into the villages and to inform himself, even if this was political grandstanding. Even so, he had no real answers other than pouring in money and, for example, his million ‘rent-a cow’ project lifted nobody out of poverty, except perhaps the overpaid administrators who spent huge sums for each cow put into the scheme.

In strange contrast there are many farang who live, as I do, deep in the Thai countryside who become knowledgeable about country life and farming. I would especially love to receive some thoughts and comments from you. So do please post a Comment and tell me your thoughts on the future of the Thai countryside.

The memo that I sent to Oxfam in April now follows on…


Some Reflections on the OXFAM Global Warming Report

From: Andrew Hicks
Surin
arhicks56@hotmail.com


1. Your report is impressive and covers a vast canvas. As I have lived for some time in a small rice village in Surin, the case study on organic rice in Yasothon was an interesting focus. I am still perplexed though how it is possible to produce as good a yield as rice chemically fertilized. The number of buffaloes has fallen substantially in recent years and as they are already grazed in the fields over the dry season and the manure from their stalls is used on the fields annually, I do not see where any additional natural fertilization comes from. Mangorn, my brother in law also ploughs in the stubble soon after the crop partly to avoid the scourge of neighbours burning theirs off and the fires spreading so I am not sure what else he can do to improve fertility. I also wonder how pests are controlled.

2. The land in our village is very flat and water seems well managed with the water courses canalized by weirs, so there seems to be little further run-off and water loss that could be reduced. Being flat there is also little opportunity for reservoirs. Small ponds cannot contribute to rice cultivation so I’m not sure how water management can be better achieved. How about seed types that need less water?

3. Mangorn produces good quality khao hawm mali rice and I’ve always thought that the way to improve his income would be to cut out the middle men. If only he could be part of a co-operative or fair trade association that would allow the rice to be bagged and retailed or even exported (value being added locally) without the intervention of so many middle men. How can he do this without getting murdered by the millers?

4. Things are changing fast even in the six years I have been in the village. There is now a labour shortage so that some small farmers cast the seed rather than pricking out each seedling which leads to lower yields. For the first time this year Mangorn used a combine harvester as he despaired of finding labour. The full story and pictures are on my blog at www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com. The Tyranny of Rice, 23/11/1008. (See also There’s Fish in Them Rice Fields, 19/1/2008, Harvest Home, 15/12/2007 and Whither the Rice Harvest? 12/7/2007, and many other blog articles on the local economy in the village.)

5. I’m not sure that talking about food security in the context of Isaan is relevant any more. This is now as much a remittance economy as an agricultural one. Families of my wife’s generation typically had seven children and as Papa divides the farm between them, land holdings become pathetically small. The fit thus have to leave the village to find work leaving behind children and grandparents and creating a massive social problem of which you are well aware.

6. How can economic activity be created to keep people in the village? It is hard to see how to improve the efficiency of such tiny land holdings. The ‘modern’ way that tends to occur is that the successful buy up the farms of the failing farmers and larger and more efficient holdings result. This also means more landless families, bringing the problems of poverty and an increasing wealth gap, as for example is so stark in the Philippines. It’s what may gradually happen in Isaan too, unless there is strong official intervention to keep the local economy intact. However, when officials talk about Isaan they tend to focus only on agriculture which is a big mistake.

7. The problem is beyond the scope of small scale development assistance which nonetheless still has a role to play. What is fundamentally needed is an official policy of regional development, devolving official agencies out of Bangkok and more importantly providing infrastructure and incentives for small industry in the regional centres. This would bring jobs and the modern wage economy to the people rather than uprooting them and cramming them into an overcrowded capital and Eastern seaboard. As a stimulus package and a populist policy, regional development going beyond agriculture is an opportunity that is sadly being missed.

8. In our local market town, Sangkha, there is one small garment factory employing a few hundred people that has been set up recently. With lower land and labour costs I hope it is a success as it could be a model for this sort of development. Could Oxfam study it and present it as a model for policy makers? (In passing, Khun Mechai of Cabbages and Condoms fame has promoted a small industrial estate, called T Bird as I remember, in Nang Rong, Buriram and this is a great experiment, but how to build on its success?)

9. Small isolated development projects are of course a drop in the ocean unless they inspire replication and a pyramid effect. This needs the participation of strong local agencies. I often wonder how effective official agricultural extension work is for example. I’ve never heard of it being used in Surin and I wonder if our local farmers’ instead just work traditionally on a hit and miss basis. Language excludes me from a full understanding of what goes on but I do not get the feeling that rice farmers are very professional in their approach. I cannot for example imagine anyone reading a conventional manual on converting their farms to organic rice. How about therefore developing handbooks on integrated or organic farming or whatever in the cartoon style of story book found on every news stand in Thailand? (In the eighties Singapore was having an economic downturn and presented its pay cuts and stringency measures to its populace by means of cartoon books… and why not.)

10. Local schools are another opportunity to promote development aims if you could get local education ministries on side. In our village school, my wife and I are working on a very small scale assistance scheme with the generous help of a friend in Japan, starting first with a free lunch programme… 45% of the children are under their correct body eight and otherwise eat only rice during the school day. (See www.adoptavillageschool.org and www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com, Do They Know It’s Christmas, 12/12/2008.) My daughter in UK has just given us 50,000 baht (sadly not tax deductible) for a project in the school. The teachers who are most impressive, immediately proposed a chicken/egg house which is now newly built and when I get back to the village I will photograph it and post a blog of the story. It is a dream project if done well. The children will do all the work of running the project and I think the teachers see the potential for integrating the project into the curriculum with teaching of mathematics etc.

11. Formal employment is limited in the rural areas so most people start small businesses. Sadly they have limited expertise in managing the money so most businesses should never be started or unnecessarily fail. Nobody does a business plan even on the back of a cigarette packet and they seem to have a limited concept of profitability. If their business generates a flow of cash they just spend the money and have a good time, keeping no accounts. Teaching basic business skills as part of the early curriculum in schools could thus make a huge contribution to poor areas, helping to avoid the many hopeless projects that people throw themselves into, miring them in debt. Within a few hundred yards of our home three of the poorest families bought brand new Nissan pickups (top of the range of course) as these were on offer for a deposit of 9,000 baht. Within a year all had failed to use them to generate sufficient income to pay the finance and all the pickups were repossessed, leaving the families with massive unpaid debt. One of the families has fled the scene and disappeared, probably beholden to loan sharks, leaving their house derelict.

12. I do not yet know if the chicken/egg project would actually be viable as an independent business. Eggs may be so cheap that the capital cost and inputs such as feed will make it unprofitable. At present local chickens are free range scrawny things, but at least they cost nothing to feed. If hopefully raising chickens under cover is viable, a generation of children should leave the school with a grasp of how to do this and most essentially how to manage the money and of the concept of profitablity.

13. A development agency could work on a project such as this and create a blueprint on how to do it, with costings and designs for the building and equipment, feed and finance and with classroom materials such as maths and accounting and cartoon style manuals on how to run the business. Then it would be essential to promote the idea to school authorities and to assist them to launch multiple projects in rural schools. Our school runs from age five to twelve and this is a good age when the children are receptive to ideas such as this. A new generation could be given essential small business skill that at present are lacking.

14. Our school has a large fish pond but at present there is no money for fish food. They want to develop this as the next project, perhaps using organic methods of creating a sustainable eco-system in the pond. They are already trying, but no big fish I think result.

15. Returning to agriculture, in the last six years in Surin I have seen a big diversification into rubber, cassava and sugar cane. Rubber is a long term risk but the story about cassava and sugar that I usually hear is that prices fall during the growing period and money is lost. Farmers generally have no money to put into diversification and when the hoped for profits fail to materialize, they fall further into debt. Rather than focusing on farming, the only answer is for the men to go and work in the factories and building sites and the prettier girls go off to Pattaya, Patong and Patpong. All very sad.

16. Are there no new magic crops that can be pulled out of the hat? Is there anything the Israelis do that does not need heavy irrigation or capital inputs? How about ground nuts, cotton, sorghum and cassava that are key cash crops in the savannah of Northern Nigeria which has a similar climate of rainy season followed by a six month drought. Indonesia grows black pepper and vanilla which are called ‘green gold’ and I wish there was something new for us here in Surin. One can talk glibly about integrated agriculture and growing vegetables to lift people suffering drought out of poverty but in reality it is desperately difficult. Plants shrivel in the heat and even if successful they sell in the market for very little.

17. Raising pigs, frogs, insects, mushrooms and cat fish are all possible projects but it isn’t easy to be successful. Inputs such as feed usually deny a profit.

18. On my blog at www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com there are numerous articles and photos about Mangorn and his struggle to support his family through farming. Also about our efforts at the school and about social problems in the village generally. If OXFAM can use any of the text or photos in any way, I’d be delighted.

19. I have also written on these subjects in a book now widely available at all bookshops in Thailand, called MY THAI GIRL AND I. This is my story of meeting my wife, Cat, and coming to live in our Surin village. (See www.thaigirl2004.com) It is also a vehicle for me to describe in a popular style the crisis in agriculture and for example the struggle of Cat’s brother, Mangorn to feed his family. There is one mention of OXFAM in it. During the late seventies and early eighties I lived in Hong Kong and with my then wife, we joined the local Oxfam group which ran the usual shop and persuaded them to let us begin general fund raising. When we managed to raise many hundreds of thousands of pounds a year Oxford showed great interest and support, we employed a part time fund raiser and the rest is history. Hong Kong was a ‘virgin’ community for such fund raising and I’m sure you know much more about the success of Oxfam Hong Kong than I do. I’m proud though to have been instrumental in getting it started and for several years Oxfam was a big part of our lives.

It is good to have made contact and I shall in future follow your work here more closely.


Andrew Hicks
April 2009

A Quick Trick Thai Chick Factory!

Children enjoy Guides and Scouting at our village school

Cleaning teeth after the lunch we've been providing for them.
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With a big donation we've just built the school a new chicken house

Headmaster and staff inspect the eighty new chickens.

The headmaster signs for the first 20,000 baht towards the costs.

A record is kept of money paid for lunches and capital items.

Children look after the chickens and record the eggs laid each day.

Three months' feed has cost 21,420 baht, eighty chickens 16,000 and cages 7,500. We now need to raise donations to pay off the 45,000 baht borrowed to pay for them. (Approx US$/Baht 34, Euro/Baht 48, Pound Sterling/Baht 55.)


Helping Out At Our Village School

Times are particularly hard at present for the people in my rice growing village in Surin province in Thailand and as a wanderer from a wealthier world I’d really like to do something to help.

It’s Thai children who have the simplest needs and so the village school in Ban Mahachai is the obvious place to try.

In my blog called, “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, 12 December 2008 I told you about the plan set up through the generosity of a Japanese friend to benefit the school. You can find the details on www.adoptavillageschool.com in which our key project has been providing the children with lunches during the school day.

My blog of 19 January 2009 called “Thai School Girls Are So Appealing” tells how your generous response enabled the lunch program to be continued.

At first our idea was to provide the school with IT equipment but on hearing that almost half the children were below the recommended body weight, we started with something more basic, to make sure they have at least one proper meal a day.

The teachers tell us that the childrens’ general health and their concentration in the afternoon has improved since we started and we are keen to raise more donations to keep the lunch program going. In response to my appeal, readers of this blog gave us many donations for lunches, though more funds are still needed of course!

The new school chicken factory!
The big news now is that we have recently had a major donation of 50,000 baht which has been used to build a substantial shed for raising chickens for eggs. When news came of the offer, the teachers leapt at it, had estimates quickly drawn up and within weeks a substantial shed was built, using that money.

Now eighty chickens, cages and feed for three months have been bought and eggs are being produced. The bad news is that the cost of these was 45,000 baht which has been borrowed and we now have to raise the money to pay off the loan.

At present the shed is at half capacity and on the same figures (ignoring the cost of additional feed) a further eighty chickens and cages for which there is plenty of space would cost about another 24,000 baht. In the longer term this should be our aim.

A first donation of 20,000 baht has already come in to reduce the loan, collected by an energetic friend from his contacts and colleagues in Thailand and Europe. This money the new headmaster received and signed for a few days ago.

However, to pay off the rest of the loan we still need 25,000 baht and perhaps as much again if we are to expand capacity with a second purchase of eighty more chickens. The aim is therefore to raise 50,000 baht if the project is to reach its full potential.

Like the lunch program, I therefore hope the money will come in as it’s a dream project that has everything going for it. All the hard daily work with the chickens is done by the children themselves. Every day a team of three kids are responsible for measuring the feed and putting it in the bins for the chickens, ensuring the water is flowing, and collecting the eggs and putting them in trays. They then have to report to Khun Thongchai, the teacher in charge and account for the number of eggs collected and for any eggs broken, and make up and sign the accounts book.

Another book records sales of eggs to local people and already shows the money slowly flowing in. All this provides a valuable discipline to the children in demonstrating how a business should operate with proper accounting. It always strikes me that as there is little formal employment in rural Thailand, this is an essential skill for the poorest of people running small farms and micro-businesses in the countryside. No accounts are generally kept and nobody knows what if any profit has been made.

At present the eggs being laid are small but their numbers are increasing and the chickens should be productive for about two years. When laying at their maximum, I hope that the eggs will provide sufficient income to make the project self-sustaining and allow a surplus of eggs to be used for school lunches. If the teachers could then include calculating the profitability of the business within the school math curriculum, the project would feed both the childrens' bodies and minds.

That’s why it’s such a perfect school project. Chickens round here are scrawny free range things and this experience of how to raise eggs properly in an efficient commercial way should be immensely beneficial for a generation of children.

We now need some donations to ensure that all the hard work that the teachers have put into the project comes to full and long-term fruition. They are very proud of their achievement so far and immensely grateful for what has been given to the school.

Every Little Helps!
Donations for lunches or the chicken project can be made in any currency to my Paypal account at www.paypal.com with reference to Andrew Hicks at arhicks56@hotmail.com.

Or do please email me at arhicks56@hotmail.com if you prefer to do an ATM transfer in baht direct to the project’s account with Kasikorn Bank.

Why Donate?
Most people round here are pretty poor. Farming is marginally profitable and there is little paid work. A daily wage is perhaps 150 baht or three Pounds Sterling, yet things such as medicines cost much as they do in the West. That’s why the needs are great and hy a small project such as this can really help the children. Because it’s still small, donations are not tax deductible though every cent, penny and satang is used effectively as there are no expenses or deductions before the money is spent.

Small surely still is beautiful!

Andrew Hicks

The “Thai Girl” Blog August 2009

Cook Chilli Sauce Burns Pork Frame Uncle

A new line in paints? Good cover, I hope.

Can anyone identify the dishes on the menu?

Cook the menu, yes but who's believe this one!

Infectious enthusiasm for a photo shop.


The saga of Mama’s sickness looks like it’s going to run and run.

The crisis recurred only a day or two after holding the spirit ceremony to stop the shade of her grandmother calling her back to the spirit world. (See the blog article below.)

Since then she has been completely inert, unable to move from where she was lying on the floor and refusing to do anything for herself, clearly still in a state of emotional collapse. Then early one morning I heard noises down in the wooden house and could see the lights were on and that Saniam, who’d been attending her overnight, was up and about.

When I saw him coming up the garden, I went out onto the verandah and asked him what was up. Mama’s ‘mai sabai maak’, very sick indeed and needed to be taken to hospital immediately. Suffering from very bad back pains, she almost had to be carried to the car.

Still hardly light by the time we got to the local hospital, they quickly admitted her to a ward. Clearly her condition was critical and only intensive care would pull her back from the brink. Or so everyone seemed to think.

Saniam stayed with her while we went back to the village to find her younger sister who would surely want to be with her at this difficult time. We drove out to her village and found God, for such is her name, (though as nobody can pronounce God it sounds more like ‘Got’). We then returned immediately to the hospital and to our alarm found an ambulance about to transfer Mama to the big hospital in Surin, the provincial town an hour away.

It was a relief when Saniam and God went with her in the ambulance as we had children to look after back home that we couldn’t leave behind. And yes, the X Rays showed that her spine had collapsed and was crushing her kidneys which perhaps, explaining her incontinence. So as she believed, her transfer to the Surin hospital was a last desperate hope.

Cat and I made it to Surin the next day, having arranged things so that we could manage a bedside vigil for at least five days. That’s the Thai style… the whole family camps out at the hospital, perhaps sleeping on the floor under the bed, though as we had a four year old with us we found ourselves a small hotel and Saniam did the hard overnight shift.

As it turned out, Mama was discharged within forty eight hours and now seems as right as rain. The nice doctor seemed to know one word of English and that was “osteoporosis”, though he was totally lost when I asked about ‘HRT’. I often wonder how Thai doctors can qualify without apparently absorbing any English whatsoever, but nonetheless I had confidence in him and the diagnosis wasn’t very difficult anyway. Thankfully Mama’s kidneys are fine and she now has about six packets of different medicines that she’ll almost certainly fail to take and an appointment for follow up in a few weeks time. So that’ll mean another day trip into Surin which probably won’t advance her state of health one bit but will be useful as therapy.

We did manage a few amusing moments while in Surin though. Slipping away for an evening meal, we went to the Hua Moon Steak restaurant near the Tawan Daeng nightclub that I’d highly recommend for its menu. (082-156-7651.)

The food was imitation farang food of the kind that makes you feel at home but then subverts the cuisine with bizarre anomalies… the mayonnaise covering the salad is sickly sweet, while the steak is massive but with a garnish of only about five chips. Euro-food in Thailand is often a bit different, more confusion than fusion, but what was really good was the menu itself.

For 59 baht you could have, “Cook chilli sauce burns pork frame uncle with rice”, or “Cook the vegetables Yes, pork frame uncle with rice”. Our sides were splitting not from overeating, though I had a generous fish steak (with five chips) and so never discovered what these culinary delights might be.

Can anyone suggest what they could possibly be? A result of misusing a dictionary, though I cannot begin to identify the errors.

I also stopped off at a builders’ merchants to get some paint and discovered that the CIA has moved into the market with an attractive brochure. Remembering that they ran an airline, ‘Air America’ to support their illegal activities in Indo-China during that ill-fated war, selling paints should be no surprise and is much more benign.

Meanwhile, in the hospital everyone was wearing face masks, swine flu being the obsession of the moment. I even saw a photographic shop with a picture of a white looking bunny and a white looking baby on the front called “Virus Studio”.

Perhaps H1N1 is not a virus at all but is really a football score… ‘Huddersfield Town 1, Newcastle United 1’.

Though I remember the economic damage to Thailand caused by the international media playing up the threat of SARS as a good news story. The rest, as they say, is hysteria.

Anyway, on the way back from Surin I insisted on stocking up our little shop that Mama used to sit in all day before she so dramatically withdrew from life. It was fun for her handing out alcohol to the old boys on tick and my losses on the shop were far better value and more therapeutic for her than any medicine. So I’m more than happy to see that Mama is more herself today and is now back in the shop as usual, enjoying the long vigil between customers.

She’s had a hard life and, being a few years older than me, is very old indeed and deserves a crisis or two. I just hope she doesn’t have too many more though. It’s not the first time I’ve seen neighbours dragged away to die, only to be seen wandering down the soi with their buffaloes a day or two later, so perhaps this is normal behaviour.

So how do we now help her deal with osteoporosis and all the problems of ageing?

Should I have a late life crisis myself and how should I now face up to the problems of living in Isaan with an extended family of farmers whose health beliefs are so very different to mine?

Life is a constant process of substituting one problem for the next and I never know what’s just around the corner, living here in Thailand.

At least the mower’s running okay now!


Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl Blog” - Retirement and Relationships in Thailand.

August 2009

The Spirits Are Calling Mama Home

Older sister and older brother light the joss sticks.

Then they all make an offerings to the spirits.

It seems that the spirits like lao khao and Fanta too.

The faces are all serious though because Mama really is ill.

Her luck for the future can be divined by examining a chicken's gizzard.

And older brother says it's looking better for her.



Mama firmly believes that she is about to die.

The spirit of an ancestor has come to her in a dream and has been calling her to come over to the other side. She now is in a state of collapse and seems to have given up all hope.

A few days ago we’d packed up the car and were about to go to Peter and Laylai’s for a few days as we hadn’t seen them since getting back to our Surin village from England. I backed it out of the drive and Cat locked the gate and went to say goodbye to her mother who wasn’t looking too perky. She was complaining pitifully of a distended stomach, so we abandoned our trip for the moment and instead took her off to the local hospital in Sangkha.

We were received by two nurses wearing white gauze masks who quickly found her name on the computer. Though was this really right because although she now looks well into her sixties, their records were showing her as aged forty four? There then followed some banter with the nurses about another possible cause for her swollen stomach during which I discovered that almond eyes can laugh without any help from the rest of the face.

There followed a long wait before Mama saw the doctor and eventually came away with a bag of about six different medicines for treating a gassy stomach. At least we were assured that she wasn’t at death’s door, even if she persists in thinking she is. She’ll almost certainly fail to take the medicines and nature will take its course in any event.

Sadly though Mama has continued to decline and has been sitting doing absolutely nothing all day long in a state of abject depression. Which, let’s face it, is how anyone might feel when the spirits say you’re are about to die.

In the West we’d dose her up on Prozac, but here they go to see the ‘mor doo’, the soothsayser, the village spirit ‘doctor’ who can foresee everything. He tells them that out in the spirit world granny is hungry and is pining for company. The family should therefore hold a ceremony to keep her sweet and offer her chicken and alcohol and some sarongs and maybe then she’ll be happy and not call Mama home.

So early this morning a chicken was killed and cooked and everyone gathered at the front of the house. Mama’s older brother and sister and her youngest sister were there and also Mangorn her oldest son, Yut her oldest surviving daughter and of course me and Cat.

The offerings were displayed on a mat and a long ceremony began in which each of them was blessed in turn and offered up to the spirits, accompanied by low chanting. Then older brother broke off the chicken’s head and tore out the gizzard. If the forked tendons are nice and straight (they always are) everything will be okay.

We then move off to the wooden house to tell Mama that all is well and to tie white threads round her wrist in an age old traditional gesture of solidarity. Mama had been unable to make it up the garden for the ceremony and was sprawled flat on the floor in the uncomfortable way people in Thailand often do. She looked distressed and ill. Apart from the usual aches and pains and an arthritic knee, she’s in reasonable health with normal blood pressure but a long and hard life has left her in a fragile mental state. I only hope she now rallies.

Once again on watching this ceremony I was struck by the power of the spirits over peoples’ minds. There’s no question that the people here strongly believe in their malevolence and that this must quickly be countered with the necessary ceremony. I only hope Mama thinks this one will work for her as it’ll be immensely damaging if it doesn’t.

All societies hold a range of beliefs, whether in the spirits of nature and the ancestors or in the delusion of a monotheistic god. We do all have to ask ourselves about the meaning of life but for me it’s better to draw a blank than irrationally to build my life around the wrong answers.

In the meantime I can only look on and say nothing and of course pay for the alcohol and the other offerings to the spirits. I only hope it does the trick and that Mama is soon well again.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog July 2009

Two Men Went to Mow!

Our 'garden' in a mess when the house had just been built.

Looking better when the soil had been laid a second time after the rains.

And looking at its best with the lawn resplendent some time ago. I can't even bring myself to photograph it again for this blog as it now looks so dreadful and neglected. Here's the story!


Two Men Went to Mow!

Do I still suffer culture shock when returning from a trip abroad to our home, a small rice growing village in the North East of Thailand?

After a couple of months away, this time visiting friends and family in England, Sweden and France, getting back to our house in the village has taken a little adjusting to. Having lived in my wife, Cat’s, Isaan village for several years it’s not culture shock exactly but on giving up all that London and the South East of England offers, I realize I do lose something by living here.

Not only that, but once here in rural Thailand, I again face the challenges of getting things done across an ocean of linguistic and cultural hang-ups. Apart from the fact the spiders and mildew have taken over, as always much in the house is broken… the upstairs shower and tap hardly flow, the roof is leaking again, light bulbs are broken and not replaced, switches not working, the gutters blocked and overflowing and as always when I go away the lawn mower is tragically injured and in a serious condition.

By living here I am of course excluded from my own language and culture, I have no newspaper, no television, no foreign friends nearby, nobody except Cat I can talk to (even the English teachers in the school who I know well have never uttered a word of English to me), and I have no farang food to speak of. I could happily get by on Thai food but here it’s invariably Lao and Suai food which are viciously hot and bitter. So I’m now really missing the fine foods of France, the cheese, the red wine, the confit de canard that Cat and I so recently indulged in.

Big C in Surin, our nearest proper shop, does have bacon and a few small packets of cheddar cheese (when not sold out), but it’s half a day’s expedition to go there and for the few pale imitations of western foods on offer it’s really not worth the effort. Better that I do without the pizza full of sugar and chilli, the cake whose icing is so greasy you could pack a bearing with it and the sweet pastry that’s surprisingly filled with pork. Quite rightly it’s all aimed at Thai tastes and so I’d better forget about my own cuisine and get by without any.

There is thus much cultural self-denial for me living out here, though in spite of that the one thing I do insist on is having a lawn.

It’s a strong cultural thing that Englishmen do generally love their garden and over the last few years I have duly tended the grass around the house, constantly pulling out weeds and cutting it weekly until I have what looks now just like an English lawn. Mow the grass and the place looks crisp and wonderful. Neglect to do it and it looks just awful.

Trouble is whenever we go away it’s impossible to get anyone to cut the grass properly as it’s just not important and when we got back, once again it’s long and overgrown and the ‘garden’ is in a total mess. They’ve cut it a few times while we were away, but just as I asked them not to, they’ve let it get far too long which doubles the work and it’s now more than my small suburban mower can reasonably cope with to cut it back again.

As always happens whenever we’re away the grass at the back is only half cut (yes, the petrol ran out) and the mower’s a basket case, and I’m the one who’s going to have to sort it all out.

But ‘mai pen rai’ says Cat’s brother Saniam who’d promised to keep it cut while we were away, he’ll now get it cut for me in no time.

He owes me one does Saniam as it’s not so long ago I paid heavily for his ‘get-out-of-jail’ card when they slung him inside for three months for being drunk in charge of a Honda Dream. Though I know I’ll still have to pay him for whatever work he now does and that I’ll be clearing up everyone’s mess around the house for the next few weeks anyway. But yes, he’s dug this hole by not keeping the grass short so why shouldn’t he sort it out.

First thing is to get Saniam to cut some of the longer grass with a sickle as the mower’s simply not going to cope with it that long. I ask him to do this but he goes and does something else instead. He spends half a day cutting the undergrowth on the vegetable patch and he looks shifty each time I ask him to spend an hour or two to make it possible to run the mower over the ‘lawn’.

Next day old uncle appears and on about my tenth request he and Saniam cut back the longest grass which uncle puts in sacks for his buffalo. Then unbidden, Saniam starts clearing all the cut vegetation from the veggie patch and spreading it across the lawn where I know from bitter experience it will stay indefinitely. Even an unused veggie patch is more important than a lawn which has no utility at all.

Confronting this issue, I ask him to clear all his mess of cuttings off the lawn so we can make a start mowing the whole area but he goes and does something else instead.

This stand-off lasts overnight until, realising that the dry weather is about to break, I become more insistent and again ask him to clear the lawn of the mess he’s made.

Over the next few hours I ask him perhaps another five times, each time varying the request as if it were for the first time. Finally I gather up the bulk of the cuttings myself and put them in a pile on the overgrown vegetable patch where they can happily remain or be burned.

I then miraculously find the rake (my tools are usually scattered and hanging hidden in trees) and finally clean up the lawn and suggest to Saniam that it’s time to start the mower.

I smell something sharp on his breath and as he pulls the starter, comically he topples and falls over onto his back. The Briggs and Stratton engine starts first pull for me and I try a run through the grass but all is not well. Pushing the machine in front of me it’s impossible not to notice that the exhaust system is rattling all over the place and is about to fall off. One of the two fixing bolts has shaken loose and disappeared while the remaining one is about to do the same.

Which is exactly what happened last year with the petrol tank. This is likewise secured by two fixings and one of these had come loose and had fallen off so that the tank was rattling around and as a result had split along its top. I replaced the missing screw and someone had now wedged a stick tightly under the broken tank to support it.

But why do they let bolts fall off like this… a turn of the screw, as they say, saves nine. But no, it seems normal around these parts to watch a machine as it disintegrates, to wait until the bolt falls off into the long grass, to allow it to self-destruct and then shove it away in a corner to moulder. Why tighten anything up or do anything if it’s still running?

In my book, “My Thai Girl and I”, on the advice of a friend, I removed a cynical chapter about the incompatibility of man and machine in my village. In fact I published the chapter on this blog (see Is This Chapter Unduly Negative? 9 Feb 2008) and asked you for our opinion on it. Despite almost all the twenty or so opinions that reached me being positive about it, I nonetheless decided to omit the chapter as I didn’t want to take any risks.

Instead I included a section called, “Mai Pen Rai and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” about how motorbikes are unmaintained and lethal and only get attention when they stop… and these recent experiences with the mower now bring all my cynicism flooding back.

Anyway, back with the story… the exhaust is now fixed and I give the mower a quick run but it’s cutting very poorly. The height settings on all each wheel are set at different heights, far too low, but soon this is fixed. So the problem must be the blade itself.

To get underneath the mower, Saniam tips it up the wrong way and black oil pours out of the sump. I then show him to tip it spark plug side up and I gaze in horror at the blade. It’s battered and bent, bowed upwards like the prop of a crashed Spitfire and even worse it’s been fitted the wrong way round.

Six months ago I’d had it serviced in Surin at a place apparently specialising in mowers. He’d managed to change the oil but failed as asked to sharpen the rotary blade, to clean the filter and plugs and replace two of the bolts holding the engine to the chassis that my helpers had watched fall off into the grass. And he’d then told me the blade was on the wrong way round and said he’d correct it.

The net result is that it’s now fitted wrongly, spinning round upside down with the blunt side cutting or not cutting the grass and the sharp side doing nothing as the trailing edge. No wonder it’s not cutting properly.

Saniam gets my tools to take the blade off but unfortunately its retaining nut is seized pretty tight. Using the wrong spanner and breathing fumes (which makes me relieved there’s no spark), he soon has the shoulders of the nut stripped smooth and useless and still it’s flatly refusing to turn. I realize it’s time to call for help and I also realize that the sump’s totally dry, the oil hardly registering on the dipstick so we’ll need some more oil.

Eventually the mower comes back to us from across the road, reputedly in working order and I ask Saniam to get it started. But no, he says he’s going to take the pile of cuttings from the vegetable jungle round to the front of the house and dump it all across the road instead.

It’s not for me to tell him what to do as I’m not his father, I’m only paying him, but I tentatively suggest he uses the big barrow that’s standing beside us to carry the cuttings and stuff out of the garden. But no, he says, he’s going to carry it all by hand. This he does, ostentatiously doing it in as few runs as possible, the massive armfuls hugged to his chest meaning he can’t see where he’s going.

Because he’s now carrying far too much, only a small percentage of the grass and foliage actually reaches the front gate. Most of it’s now spread in a swathe across the grass we’re supposed to be about to cut and across the front lawn and entrance drive. Though the barrow would have delivered it quickly and cleanly, it’ll be at least half an hour’s work to clear it all up again.

There’s no use though asking him to rake any of it up so we can start the mowing, even though the main idea’s to give him a bit of work and some cash in his pocket, so I pick up the rake to do it myself and the handle promptly breaks.

In the fullness of time Saniam fires up the mower and does a few runs into the jungle of my beloved ‘lawn’ before the petrol tank finally gives up the ghost when the lug for the securing bolt finally and terminally sheers off. It’s now totally impossible to cobble it together, so a new tank will have to be ordered from Milwaukee.

Until now, I’ve really loved lawns and mowing. It’s really close to my heart and something I should be able to enjoy in Thailand. My Thai family think I’m a little deranged making such a fuss about the grass but it’s the one thing culturally that I’ve tried to cling onto here. I can do without food and English language media and things if I have to, but a tidy lawn round the house should be so easy, so possible, so satisfying.

In England I had a mower with a Briggs and Stratton engine and it was still pegging along after twenty years hard use when I left home to mow eastern lawns, but only a week or two seems enough to destroy them here. It’s not the mower’s fault, though would it be rude to say they’re not entirely ‘foolproof’?

When I’m in the village I do of course do all the mowing myself and I don’t let anyone touch the mower if I can help it, but perhaps I’m asking too much for even trying to have something distinctly my own out here.

But why’s it so difficult to get people to complete so simple a task for a few weeks without wrecking the machinery?

When paying someone for a day’s work is it offensive to tell them what you want done? Should I just let them do whatever they feel’s most important in the garden? Have I been unduly pushy or made unreasonable demands?

I’m really not sure why I get into these intense psychological games with Saniam in which he tries so hard to do the opposite of what I want him to do. Of course it’s partly that he hits the bottle too early in the morning, but the situation’s far from unique… I remember I had a very similar problem with a pleasant guy called Boat who’s a cousin of Cat’s.

I’d got him to paint the wall at the front of the house. From upstairs I could see that the top of the wall had never been painted and so I’d been to some trouble to take a hose and ladder and scrub it clean for painting. I therefore wanted Boat to paint the top so I took the ladder and asked him to do it.

Throughout the day I noticed that he hadn’t yet done it and I gently reminded him a couple of times. Later in the day I saw that he’d put the ladder away and I asked him if he’d done the top and he said he had.

But no, he hadn’t painted the top of the wall and it still remains unpainted today!

Perhaps I should give up trying even in small things, and as Kipling famously said, “A fool lies there who tries to hussle the East”.

Such are the setbacks every time I return to the village when once again I face the realities of living in a culture where I definitely do not call the shots.

Or am I over-reacting to my own frustration? Is my portrayal of the people around me unduly cynical or unfair, like the chapter in the book I was persuaded to remove. In living here should I instead give in on absolutely everything and, as I postulate in the book, take a Buddhist stance, stop striving and ‘go with the flow’?

Having myself lived in West Africa far too long ago, I very much enjoyed reading a series of novels about the colonial era by Joyce Carey. One was called, ‘Mister Johnson’ and was about the fraught relationship between a colonial District Officer and his eponymous clerk in Northern Nigeria. The books were hysterically funny but the big controversy about them is whether they fairly depict the predicament of a D O trying to cope with his cultural entanglements (Carey himself had been one) or whether the novels are a racist diatribe that mocks the stupidity and cussedness of their African characters.

Now writing about living in a small village in Thailand, I face the same dilemma. I want my stories be funny and to evoke the frustration that’s sometimes felt, I think, by many expats when trying to get things done here. To balance any possible negativity though, I have to exploit the humour of the situation to create an affectionate portrait of my life in the village.

I wonder therefore how my book, ‘My Thai Girl and I’ and this story about the miseries of mowing now come across to you, my reader.

Do you have any thoughts or Comments about this or on your own experiences in Thailand? I’d love to hear from you.

(For info about the book, see www.thaigirl2004.com.)

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog July 2009

Just Like a Rolling Stone

This festival in the south of England is always a big adrenalin rush.

The Audi 'sculpture' in front of Lord March's family home.

Noises in the front garden... a Merc goes up the hill.

Tony Dron who I well remember at school far too long ago.

But who's this? Answers please by posting a Comment below!


Tomorrow Cat and I fly back to Bangkok.

It's been an amazing couple of months during which we've stayed with friends and family in Petersfield south of London, in Taunton, in Lapford near Exeter, in Stockholm, in the Charente, the Correze and the Morbihan in France, up north near Leeds and finally in Shrewsbury and Kidderminster. In total we've driven three thousand miles so Papa really is a rolling stone.

They call me Papa in Thailand and I'm not sure I like it too much and I'm dreading the day somebody stands up for me on the bus or Skytrain. Meantime I'll keep travelling and I'll take inspiration from one of the drivers at the Goodwood Festival of Speed who's still going fast at eighty years old.

The festival is an amazing celebration of motor sport and the car and I always love it for being so in-your-face. Burning clouds of carbon and truck loads of cash, it's so non-PC but such fun.

Cars from every possible era of motor sport in the hands of drivers equally historic tear angrily up the drive in front of Goodwood House, the home of super-toff and petrol head, Lord March. They push them hard though it's not too serious, just an excuse for the sounds and the smells and for the world's greatest gathering of the motor car made fire breathing monster and art.

It's good too that you can get so close to the cars and I managed some good shots of Tony Dron at the wheel of an eight cylinder Mercedes-Benz of 1937. My contemporary at school, he's had an exciting life as a motoring journalist and racing driver and at six foot five looks every bit the part.

Even more exciting was to see and hear one of the heroes of my childhood in another pre-war Mercedes, now aged eighty. His picture appears above.

Bearing in mind what a rolling stone fails to gather, do please post a Comment and tell me who he is.

Andrew Hicks The 'Thai Girl' blog July 2009

A Pretty Couple.. Who Are They?

This is one of me after a good night out nursing a massive hangover.

... and of me having problems with my computer.

More seriously, can you tell me where these carvings come from?


On my travels through life I love to collect things along the way, things that remind me of my experiences and of the special qualities of the place.

This often means buying attractive artefacts and handicrafts, though it's increasingly dificult to find something that's old but not just made for tourists. Anything that's more than a few decades old usually comes with a high price because the locals know its worth.

Strangely some of the nicest ethnic antiques that I've found have surfaced not in their place of origin but in Europe. As a result they weren't so expensive as nobody knows what they are or where they come from.

In an antique shop in Topsham, Devon I bought a delightful pair of wooden carvings of a husband and wife in traditional dress, at a broccante in Auray in Brittany a baleful red mask and at a car boot sale in Taunton, Somerset a fine tribal mask.

All are old, all are of good quality and none of them is mass produced for tourists as far as I can tell. My problem is I don't know exactly what they are or where they came from.

Of course I do have some idea, but can you please add a Comment telling me their origins. Someone out there knows or can suggest where I could send the images to have them appraised.

They are all beautiful things but they would mean much more to me if I knew exactly what they are.

They might even be worth something!

Andrew Hicks The "Thai Girl" Blog July 2009