After a couple of days in Chiang Mai, which consisted of lots of temple visiting, dinner with an American man from the train, and a ridiculously fun 'magic dance' workshop (kind of like freestyle, expression movement to music), I headed for 'Happy Healing Home'. Caught a yellow songthaew, with 12 people crammed into the back, 6 of which were also volunteers headed in the same direction. The ride was beautiful and stomach-turning, climbing progressively higher and slower into the hills. We arrived in the rain, when everyone was very quiet and sleepy. The farm is set on a hillside surrounded by jungle. The main area is a little house with a big communal room (the only part with some real walls) and an adjoining outdoor kitchen.
We were a bit confused to begin with, as no one really explained anything until someone gave us a tour. But by the end of my 8 days, I felt completely at home and very sad to leave. Everything is done collectively, for the group. Pinan Jim and Pinan Tea are the lovely couple who live there - 'pinan' means ex-monk, but is used here in front of everyone's name to mean 'brother' or 'sister'. When I arrived there were 18 volunteers, which went down to 8 at one point, all coming from different countries..France, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, but everyone spoke English too which was rather useful for me. There was also pinan Tung, the 11 year old ball of fire, and pinan Maria, a wonderful woman who has been staying for 9months! We lived in bamboo huts raised off the ground, very basic, with thin inner walls made of dried leaves, and a piece of cloth for the door. We had mattresses, duvets (it is a bit cold at night) and mossie nets, and ours had a proper tin roof, which was much appreciated during the daily downpour. I love the smell when it rains in the jungle..so exotic and fresh. And so welcomed - it was about 40°C! The loos were a similar sort of bamboo affair, normal Thai squatters with a water tub for flushing, and you could either shower using that and a cup, or go in the river, which was nice and refreshing but a little muddy. We made organic soap from the leftover fruits, which looks like mud and smells like vinegar, but it's fine to use outside. Absolutely everything was recycled, composted, or fed to the pigs then composted. The lifestyle there follows traditional Lanna tribe culture and beliefs, which are based on Buddhism. Pinan Jim was a monk for 15 years, and is a fountain of knowledge and inspiration. There were basic rules - no stealing, lying, alcohol, outer-relationship sex or excessive talking. (Everyone smoked like a chimney though and went to the village to buy tobacco for 5baht, so my week of abstinence is going to have to wait.) We were all expected to be helpful, considerate, inquisitive and act as a family. There were what seemed like hundreds of chickens, baby chicks, ducks and roosters, which constantly cockadoodledoo everywhere including right underneath the hut at 3am. Apart from them, it was a very calm place to be, and without internet access, even more so, you're not distracted by anything in the outside world.
We met at around 6am to have coffee, having done any yoga or other exercise before then (6 was early enough for me!), then worked for a couple of hours before breakfast. I mostly worked in the garden in the mornings, weeding a particular area that grows salad leaves, little onions, papaya, mustard and parsley. It was so lovely in the misty mornings, as it's so cool and the soil was still damp, not dried out by the sun. Other morning tasks, or when it's not too hot, were preparing the rice fields up on the hill (very tiring work with a huge, heavy hoe pulling out really deep grass roots), building a new hut or clearing land for the chickens.
After a couple of hours, the bell would be rung, calling us all to breakfast. There were always 3 or 4 helpers in the kitchen, whenever you felt like it, preparing the food for everyone. 4 (or less) little tables were laid on the floor in a line in the front room, with cushions, a cup of water and a spoon each. All the different food was split into 4 bowls, one on each table. The last to be distributed was the sticky rice, present at every meal, which Pinan Jim passed down the one side of the tables, each person giving a one-handed wai to the next. When everyone was seated and ready, we all took a prayer position and Jim said something along the lines of 'every pinan please go to the mountain, eat a lot, go for it, namaste and have a long life', and we said 'Kop khun kha'. I learnt towards the end that 'go to the mountain' means go to the bowls of food, i.e. don't move them, which is significant as the eating culture is that we all share from the same bowls, not selfishly have our own. All the food is communal, and we ate with our right hand and the spoon or a ball of rice. The food was amazing - all from the garden pretty much. There was always some fruit, like banana and a sort of grapefruit drizzled with honey, a curry, jackfruit, salad with loads of cucumber, chilli-onion-garlic paste etc. There was once a fish that pinan Tung caught in the river (with his bare hands! he is the real-life kid from Jungle Book), but most people were vegetarian.
When we were done eating, everyone helped to clear the tables, wash up in a conveyer belt of steel dishes, reorganise the room and sweep the floor. Then we made coffee, or after dinner, some sort of tea from the garden..lemongrass, mint, mulberry (full of antioxidants to remove fat from your bloodstream) some leaves I don't remember, and had a cigarette. The food was cooked on two wood fires contained in thick terracotta pots, in big black pans. There was no refrigeration obviously, and things are generally kept and reused, but no one gets sick. There is sometimes far too much worry in the Western world about things like that.
After breakfast we did another couple of hours work. The first day, I helped to prepare coffee beans for roasting. They had some coffee plants here, but they also bought big sacks of the yellow beans. These have already had the outer layer removed, but we still needed to extract the little green bean from inside. We bashed them up in a pestle and mortar until they cracked, then tipped them into a woven bamboo flat bowl thing, and shook them around whilst blowing the husks away. That part was really fun, to begin with, then I started getting lightheaded. I think it might have been because of the altitude, because it happened a few times. Any that hadn't been cracked enough, we put back in the mortar, or used our hands. We were then left with the green beans, which were roasted for about an hour and half, turned dark brown and swelled a little to become coffee beans as I know them. These were ground in a little manual machine and hey presto!! I loved working with the coffee, even though I can't drink it, though I did try a little each morning and it was amazing.
If helping to prepare a meal, we were usually sent to collect some sort of veg from the garden or surrounding trees. I loved learning about the garden. It was all a mishmash and very confusing to begin with, as everything was planted together with certain other complementing crops. But I quickly got used to it and it was a very calm environment. One day I planted a little chilli plant in memory of my Grannie Beth.
During my time there, I often hung around the kitchen, watching or helping Pinan Tea and asking things about the food. I learnt to make sticky rice (the Lanna way), Som tam (Thai papaya salad), Konumtien?? (very sweet balls of rice flour and green bean mixture wrapped into triangular parcels with bamboo leaves) amongst other things. We always made a chilli paste with dried chillies, garlic and onion as the base, then tomatoes, sesame seeds, peanuts, soy sauce etc. We had curries with whatever vegetables we had...banana flower (the giant purple flower, you can eat the middle, said to be beneficial for breastfeeding mothers), pumpkin, baby eggplant (very little white ball-shaped, or sometimes fuzzy and yellow) and sometimes potato...which would be tomatoey and spicy, or creamy with coconut milk and yellow with turmeric. We always made a soup, steamed or sometimes stir fried some greens, like mimosa (looks like the magic plant that closes which dad and me used to plant in the greenhouse), 'say-ooh-tay' or sweet potato leaves. We'd have a salad with leaves, cucumber, or sometimes green mango salad which was my favourite (thin slices mixed with tomatoes, crushed peanuts, soy sauce, liquid sugar, chilli paste and mint), and almost always a fruit salad.. banana, watermelon (from the market), mango, papaya and mulberries.
On my second to last day, one of the three pigs was killed. One of the females had become pregnant, and so his time was up. It was completely unexpected and I involuntarily watched him being carried through the kitchen as I was innocently chopping vegetables, and heard the whole affair. Now, I didn't have too much of a problem with it in principle, they had looked after him very well, he was happy, and they used the whole animal - if meat is eaten this is how it should be done. But it still made me feel incredibly sick, uncomfortable and sad for the day, and completely reaffirmed my choice of vegetarianism. What I thought was funny was a couple of other people freaking out about it, who were then quite happy to eat the meat the next day. I strongly believe that if you choose to eat meat, you should know and accept that it comes as a result of an animal being killed. You cannot be ignorant to that, or turn a blind eye, that's the fact and if it makes you uncomfortable then don't eat it. We are so far removed from the source of our food these days - not knowing where it comes from, how it was produced.
After lunch it was always very hot, and everyone would be pretty knackered. When the kitchen was done, we usually napped, read, lay around or went to cool down or do our washing in the river. Pinan Jim didn't want us to work if it was too hot, as we needed to conserve our energy for when it was most useful. So whenever it was too much, we usually did jobs in the shade. In the afternoon I usually helped to prepare dinner. I absolutely loved the way we ate there. It was very peaceful - we ate slowly and considerately, until we were full, and always very quietly. We sometimes had whole meals in silence. In Lanna culture they don't talk too much, because then there's too much going on in your brain, and it's harder to focus and think clearly. It's all about staying in the present, not wasting your mind's energy, so that you can use your wisdom when it's important. Then after dinner we would sit around the main room on the floor or benches, talk, listen to Pinan Jim play the guitar and sing Lanna songs, or most nights he would teach about Buddhism in his slow, quiet and gently humourous ways.
He taught that the most important thing is happiness, and doing good for others. We should always try to do good things, because we are what we do, and it makes our minds strong and happy.
We all went to bed at a sensible hour, before 10pm.
One day it was announced that we were having a little trip to the local temple. Pinan Jim didn't say much more than that, so I didn't know what to expect. We all piled into the pick up at 7am and drove to the village, picking up members of family along the way. We arrived at the beautiful little temple which was very quiet, and stood about for a bit, before being led quite far down the road to a monk school/house. An open room was filled with young monks in white robes, women arranging flower displays, and men drinking and smoking outside. We nervously hung around for not 5 minutes before they made us go in and sit at some tables, then giving us salted nuts and beans, and slamming bottles of Hong Thong (lethal local whiskey), warm Leo beer and glasses of a home-brewed red liquor that tasted very strong. We were told it was rude to refuse the hospitality, so we all had a bit of a drink...at 8AM!! Very very bizarre. Everyone seemed very jovial, and we worked out that it was a monk ordination ceremony, when they receive their orange robes.
Before we knew it, everyone was moving outside to begin a procession that surrounded the young monks (seated on plastic chairs in the back of a pickup) and we were being handed tall wooden poles with colourful flags. A lady gave me a steel bowl of flower petals and rice, and instructed me to throw handfuls over the monks and the younger kids with amazing bright costumes as we went. We all happily got involved and walked to the temple, laughing and smiling with the locals, not fully understanding what was going on. It was very funny and lovely to have Thai people and even monks, taking photos of us, I think we were a bit of a novelty. When we reached the temple, there was a ceremony inside, but not enough room for everyone, so we ate from the huge buffet and sat around listening to some music being played on a little stage. The whole thing was so wonderfully special..a unique experience of being accepted into a cultural celebration that you would never usually get the chance to be a part of. Really lovely.
