In the meantime I suppose I will continue my run-down of yesterday (Read the previous post first to bring yourself up to speed). Yesterday was such a huge deal because it was the day of the rice planting. Traditionally, in a Burmese community, everyone gets together and has a party to celebrate the rice planting, and again after the rice is harvested 4 months later (that's an even bigger deal with a correspondingly sized celebration, so I'm definitely looking forward to it). You could immediately tell that the students from the office were ecstatic to have a chance to get outside for the day They were laughing, and joking around (in Burmese), and most of the time when I've caught glimpses of them at the office, they look fairly somber. Also, usually when we go to the office for meetings, all the students (mostly female at the moment) scamper upstairs and aren't really seen. I think that's also a cultural thing, but it hasn't really given me a chance to get to know any of them particularly. That's another reason yesterday was such a valuable time, because I actually got a chance to talk to some of the students. They sort of stuck to themselves at first, but partway through the morning I noticed one (whose name I subsequently learned with Thu-Lin-May (the only name I remember), using a beer bottle cap to scrape the meat out of a coconut shell. I asked if I could help and when she agreed I sat down and set to work. Her English is way better than I had first thought, since she's never really said anything past 'hello' in our past interactions. A bunch of the students english is actually pretty good and the ones with better english could help translate for the others (though they don't all speak the same language...) Two of the girls are from Arakan refugee camps, and I would have LOVED to get the chance to sit down with them and talk to them about their experiences growing up in a refugee camp. Unfortunately there wasn't the time, and I didn't want to seem too pushy the first time we had a conversation. I'll be here for a while though, and hope to get the chance at some point. Anyway, it turned out the coconuts were being scraped into a bowl which would be used to cook a Burmese sweet to be eaten after lunch. The bottle caps cut my thumbs up pretty good, but the ladies seemed to be doing just fine so I stuck with it. After the coconuts were shaved, it was time for lunch, which consisted of this amazingly tasty but insanely spicy dish made with prawns, as well as water spinach and okra. Mr. Khai snapped this picture for me just before we dug in for lunch, and you can sort of see how the food dishes are all in the middle of the table while everyone has their own separate place of rice sitting around the edge. After lunch, Greg and I went into town to get some more drinks for everyone, and when we got back the women were sitting in a circle using a sticky rice ('cao neao' in Thai, 'gai nea'(I think) in Burmese) and corn starch dough to wrap up the coconut (which had been mixed with this clear syrupy stuff) into little packages resembling perogies. When I went to sit down, I turned and looked at the guys, who were all sitting at the other end of the house drinking beers and talking, and suddenly they all turned and started laughing hysterically at me. I turned back to the women to see why they were laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny, which made the men laugh even harder, the women joining in at this point. I turned back to the men and they were hardly able to contain themselves (Greg included), tears of mirth rolling down their cheeks. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on, but the moment passed and we made the perogies. After they were made, they were wrapped in a banana leaf and placed in a pot to steam. Once they were all in the pot cooking, I went over and asked Greg why everyone had been laughing. Turns out one of the girls had made a penis with her dough and was waving it around behind my back every time I turned around. It must have been hilarious to everyone watching.
In recent developments, I've just made friends with a group of 5 Americans who are here teaching english. We're all going to dinner and a movie Friday night. Awesome.
These pictures are NOT loading.
Anyway, after making the perogies it was time to plant the rice, which was SO much FUN. It was basically this giant field of mud, and everyone got in and stomped around while the sprayed water on the field to mix the mud up. Then the fields were smoothed out with this long piece of bamboo and the rice seed was thrown out of this big sack where it had been germinated. I have some awesome pictures/video of all this, but it still refuses to load. After the rice was planted, the logical way to clean off seemed to be to jump in the pond. So we all did. it was kind of smelly, but everyone had a lot of fun spalshing around and generally being silly.
In even more recent developments, remember the students I was talking about a moment ago? Their professor just arrived. He's in the International Development Studies department at Brigham young university in Utah, and he's here for the summer. He knows a bunch of the professors at Mat Joh University as well and he's told me to get in contact with him about my research. This couldn't be more perfect. Anyway, the rest of the day consisted of guitar, singing, playing football on one of the old rice fields, and general all-round good times. I wish I had time to load more pictures, but the internet is painfully slow and the cafe is closing in a few minutes. I'm going to go talk some more with these students and their professor because I think that networking right now takes precedence over blogging.
*Added 24 hours after the original post*
Hey! The pictures loaded after all.
This was a panorama I snapped on my bike trip halfway up the mountain the other day. You can see most of the city, it was really really neat.
On my way back down, the sky got really dark and grey, and I snapped this picture with a storm rolling in fast. You can see it already raining on the right side, but the sky to the left is still clear and sunny. It was eerie. I had to mess with the camera filters and the white balance a bit to make the clouds show up, but I like how it turned out. In case you were wondering, I didn't make it home dry.
We've built trellisses over a number of the field plots since we've been here, and are planning to grow beans on them. This will provide shade, as well as to allow us to get more produce from each square meter.
Things grow INSANELY fast here, and I snapped apicture of these beans as four inch sprouts about 6 days ago...I'm astounded at how fast they've shot up
We weren't sure whether or not the composting bin we started up would be put to use, but it seems to be working so far. And we're taking the fruit scraps from our apartment and using them as well.
This is a picture of a bunch of the guys from the farm transferring some baby snakehead fish (which are really valuable when sold) from the large pond to one of the smaller ones, (all the ponds have filled up with water in the past few days from all the rain)
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