Pics in Exhibition

Three of my pictures from Thailand were accepted to a photography exhibit at Columbia called "Views In--Undergraduates Photograph a Year in East and Southeast Asia." Submissions were supposed to reflect key themes in the societies and and cultures of the region. The exhibition is taking place on the fourth floor of the School of International and Public Affairs building. The photos will be on display until November 13th. Also, one picture from each photographer is online at news.columbia.edu/global/1760

One the pictures is shown above, and the captions are:

FISH: Wheels of dried fish are sold at a riverside market for six Baht. Fresh fish, fish paste, and other fish products are a key component of Thai cooking in both coastal and inland communities. Global fisheries collapse threatens to undermine this important source of protein for southeast Asia.

[not pictured here]
RAPID DEVELOPMENT: Riverbank erosion upstream of the infamous Pak Mun Dam has led to serious infrastructural problems. Here, a paved walkway in a public park threatens to detach and collapse. Local communities face other hardships such as fish shortages and declining water quality.

FAMILY: Members of the Duangputtan family of Chiang Mai share sliced guava and mango on a Sunday afternoon. Kinship ties are the glue that hold Thai social life together.

Sawadii ka, NYC

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in downtown NYC in my red Karen skirt and a couple of strings of beads I acquired in Baan Nam Hu. I don't feel at all uncomfortable, which surprises me. I got a compliment on my skirt while waiting for the subway, but other than that it feels pretty normal to be walking around in these fine threads.

What I keep wondering is if anyone recognizes them. Are there any anthropology professors roaming the streets with a history of working in Thailand? Did they silently register the Karen patten on the skirt and remember that the red color is for married women? Has a Thai woman passed me on the street with memories of her home village washing over her?

This city has so many secrets...

Waste

Every morning with my host family in Baan Jow Mai, I would get up and stumble off to the back deck for my first shower of the day. The back deck is raised on stilts above a channel where the tides come and go. If you look through the cracks in the back of the bathroom wall, branches of the mangrove forest that back up the house are at eye level. The prop roots of this mangrove forest are twisted and souped in garbage. The channel is the neighborhood garbage dump.

From our first night in Trang Province, trash was a striking presence. Every coastline we had the pleasure to visit was full of dumped or washed up bottles, Styrofoam, light bulbs, shoes, bags-- any and every kind of discarded item. After seeing my family's attitude toward dumping in the channel, the amount of trash we saw on the beach no longer surprises me.

What did surprise me was when the recycling guy came by a few days into my home stay. I had not noticed the huge bags of recyclables laying around in the yard. The recycling guy pulled out a big scale to weigh the plastics, aluminum, glass, and broken sheets of tin roofing offered by my Ma. He tossed all the stuff in the back of his truck and handed Ma 100 Baht. My family says he comes once or twice a month, so they save up materials to earn a little extra cash. The recycling guy told me he drives the stuff to Pattani and it is then taken to Bangkok.

I didn't ask specifically, but I get the feeling Ma was recycling for the money and not out of a sense of the need to conserve resources. Recycling can be incredibly lucrative. In NYC, the mafia is tied up in the garbage/recycling business. During the recent economic recession, though, recycling programs were one of the first things dropped in municipalities around America. The materials were being treated as a commodity, rather than a moral imperative. Programs were dropped as soon as the value of the commodity plummeted and recycling became a money-sucker rather than a money-maker. I imagine the recycling guy in Jow Mai would stop driving around the province collecting recyclables if money were not involved.

What options do we have for our waste? Nothing seems ideal. Ocean dumping, landfills, incineration-- all have major drawbacks. Even recycling could be deemed problematic because of the massive amount of energy required to reprocess materials. An oft-cited solution is to replace packaging and containers with biodegradable materials made from corn or other crops, but this has its own set of problems like the proliferation of monocropping. There's little chance we will do away with garbage altogether, especially with the health codes in the U.S. that require food and other items to be sealed and packaged in certain ways. Of course, packaging isn't the only problem. We live in a world full of cheap stuff that constantly breaks and is often cheaper to replace than to fix. The huge number of cheap, broken plastic shoes we saw on the beaches is testament to this.

I'm not sure what the answer to the waste problem is. But I do know that I cannot judge the disposal methods of my Jow Mai host family because tossing stuff in the channel may actually be no worse than any other form of disposal.

Mangrove haikus

Octopus garden

Mangled mangal suction cups
Neoprene graveyard

Lives in mud footprints
Three-eyed rippled elephant
Turning worlds to slime

Snorkels gasp for air
Holding tight as water drains
Dribble castles grow

By Acadia Roher and Stephanie Roussel

Nameless, Nationless [Missive 6]

Dear All,

This is your final installment. To continue your subscription, please fill out the enclosed post-marked card with your credit card number and drop it in the nearest mailbox. Ha. But seriously, if anyone wants to sponsor me to write more I'd certainly appreciate it!

As many of you know, I've been back the States for a little over two weeks now. I never had time to be jet-lagged or grumpy about my sudden re-existence in Western culture because my excellent mother, brother and sister kept me busy and full of laughter. Rebecca also deserves honorable mention.

The last month of my program was focused on oceans. The breadth of issues that coastal areas face runs a breathtaking gamut from climate change to pirates. We traveled to Trang Province in southern Thailand to spend a few weeks in the Andaman Sea. Some of our activities: kayaking, snorkeling, struggling through knee-deep mud in mangrove forests (AKA mangals), wandering around the intertidal zone at low tide, living in a Muslim fishing village, swimming in bioluminescent water at night, visiting a commercial shrimp farm.... just to name a few. Coastal areas are highly complex ecosystems, so to make the ecology more manageable our program focused on seagrass beds, coral reefs, and mangroves. Academically, this course was probably the least challenging, but was very rich experientially.

The emphasis of the first part of the course was on coral reefs. We snorkeled on some of the most amazing reefs I've ever seen, filled with a great diversity of coral, fish, sea cucumbers, anemones, sea urchins, worms, etc. There were iridescent colors I've only ever seen in aquariums, plate corals as big as a truck, schools of fish that shimmer and sway around you, glowing limestone tunnels to go through underwater. The reefs we visited were at the base of limestone towers sticking out of the shallow Andaman Sea. Their bases had been so eroded from constant wave action that is seemed they were floating above the water rather than in it. I had never been snorkeling with a scientific purpose in mind, clutching a dive slate. It really makes you see things differently. Rather than just floating around taking pleasure in looking at random stuff, one is forced to size the reef up, to pull back and look at it as a system and a structure, but then also to zoom in carefully to identify different species and take note in the details. I gained a much greater appreciation for SEEING with a purpose-- observing a fish in order to look it up in a field guide later requires you to scan it's body shape, colors, tail and fin shapes, and take in as many subtle features as possible. Just being in the ocean shifts your perspective... it's like being in another world. The dimensions of the ocean are unfathomable when you have paused underwater above the reef shelf, the last visible portion of the sea floor before it begins to slope down into the dark unknown depths of the deep ocean. One of my friends described how refreshing it is to experience the shifting perspectives of the ocean... "you get tired of looking down on the world all the time. It's nice to look up... to the bottom."

Seagrass beds are prime feeding spots for dugongs, a marine mammal similar to a manatee. There are only about 200 of these creatures left in coastal Thai waters. Needless to say, there were no dugong sightings during our trip, though we saw quite a few feeding trails on our survey of a seagrass bed. "Dugong" became my new nickname because of my playful antics on one of the beaches. Apparently my cartwheels and somersaults into the surf were a "little too awkward" to warrant naming me after something sleeker like a dolphin.

Magroves are incredible places. To describe them, I give you a short poem-- a haiku, to be exact:

Octopus garden
Mangled mangal suction cups
Neoprene graveyard

Because it has been over two weeks since my return and I have been trying to craft this email since then, I'll just have to direct you to my blog for more. Apologies for the abrupt ending. I must say, however, that this cycle of naming has come full circle. I went from Alice to Sapbalot to Naessa to Dugong... but then an instructor reminded us of something important about Thai culture during our last week. Names are much less important than the relationship of someone to you. It is completely appropriate to refer to someone simply as "older/higher-up than me" (Pi) or "younger/lower-down than me" (Nong). It is rare that you even know someone's real, full name. What matters is whether you are older, younger, boy, girl, father, mother, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, grandma, grandpa. In the U.S., I might get offended if an acquaintance forgot my name... but maybe Thai people have got it right... as long as your relationship to someone is clear, do individual names really matter?

Back in the U.S., I'm on to other things. I just moved into an apartment in Fayetteville, Arkansas. My summer project is surveying the natural and historical features of the Williams Woods Nature Preserve, GIS mapping the property, writing a land management plan, and seeking out as many swimming holes as possible. This project is for the Centennial Scholars Program at Barnard. I've started a blog about this project... check it out at www.arcountrymouse.blogspot.com

Thanks for your wonderful audience-ship this semester!

Love,
Acadia

Control = Surrender?

As we came back to our guesthouse on Ko Mook from snorkelling off Ko Chu-ah, the tide was very low, exposing the extensive mud flats offshore of Ko Mook. Our boats went in as far as they could and we walked the rest of the way in to the island. While a long pier juts out a little ways down along the road to remedy (partially) this problem, it is not used much by local residents. Instead, they walk and haul their catch sometimes 150 yards, preferring to leave their boats cradled in the soft intertidal zone. Thinking about another extreme, NYC, where every shoreline has been extended with landfill and concrete piers, it seems in many ways the villagers on Ko Mook have got it right.

The night before, students reflected on how people here seem to have stronger relationships with natural cycles and phenomena than we do in the U.S. This has been a recurring theme throughout my time here in Thailand. In part because of the favorable climate, folks are able to incorporate a lot of outdoor space into their primary living area and seem to like this set-up despite the bugs and rain and critters passing through. Nature still has the upper hand in the local community on Ko Mook, as well. Low season for the tourism industry occurs during the monsoon season when the channel is too choppy for the island's small boats to safely transport visitors. On a stormy day, the fishermen stay on shore and talk with their friends or do chores around the house rather than brave the elements as larger trawlers are able to do. Women follow the tides out and collect clams on the mud flats, only one example of how intimately their lives are tied to the moon cycle.

I thought about the 2004 tsunami in terms of this flexibility people exhibit in their relationships with non-human cycles. While the tsunami did cause considerable damage up and down the Andaman coast, imagine the scale of damage that would have occurred if the massive waves had hit D.C. or NYC instead. From a view of the global economy, the destruction of property and productivity on the American east coast would be much higher (monetarily). In non-monetary terms, a natural disaster might be just as devastating to an island community in Thailand as to downtown NYC. But in this case, might flexibility in relationship with nature mean more control, more resilience, more power?

When learning tai chi last semester, my instructor told the class how what is often seen as weakness can be strength. She mentioned a tai chi master who uses "yielding" in brilliant ways to outdo an opponent during a martial arts competition. Often, a display of force can be outdone by yielding, and the opponent falls. Transferring this idea to natural disaster preparedness and the ability of communities to bounce back after a disturbance, perhaps yielding to non-human nature is a good path. Allowing some of those resorts to revert back to mangrove swamps, rehabilitating the wetlands around NYC-- in short, seeking to work in concert with nature rather than impose our every will on it-- will result in stronger, healthier communities.

The Intertidal Zone

In only two days-- once on the beach of the peninsula where we camped the first night and again on Mook Island-- I was mesmerized by the surprises that the intertidal zone holds. I explored the limestone formations of the peninsula at low tide and found brain corals, sea cucumbers, clams, barnacles, and fish all holding on for a few hours until the sea would cover them again. On Mook Island, the expansive mudflats were a veritable traffic jam of crabs, starfish, clams, and creatures of all kinds. Walking out at low tide was not at all the peaceful exploration I imagined-- sea creatures crunch beneath your every step and the clacking and tapping of the clams and crabs is quite loud. I have never seen such productivity (in terms of animal life) in the wild. It was surprising in part because I expected the intertidal zone to be a stressful zone and therefore sparsely populated. For example, holes dug by the crabs during low tide are quickly filled in at high tide. But day after day the millions of crabs of all sizes continue to rebuild their shelters in the moist sand.

It was not only the ecology of the intertidal zone that impressed me, but the way the local people used it, as well. At low tide on the peninsula, several women appeared on the beach with buckets and digging/scraping tools to harvest clams. A man with them was stringing gill nets between the limestone formations. As we pulled up to Mook Island with our pod of kayaks (endearingly named "Pad See-U"), a group of women had already assembled, tools and buckets in hand, to follow the tide out and collect the bounty that low tide affords. Anna and Rebecca went out to make friends and see if they could help harvest, while I took pictures of them digging in the sand for clams. I don't know how much local people rely on this resource for their daily lives, but the intertidal zone seemed to be an extension of their world every 12 hours-- women harvest, children play, men haul things to and from their beached boats, even motorcycles navigate through areas of compacted sand.