Written by Sanan Chusakul
Translated by Peera Songkünnatham
Illustrated by Supawich Weesapen
First published in installments on Matichon Weekly in September and October 2004
[อ่านต้นฉบับ “หมาส่วนรวม” ได้ตามลิงก์นี้]
In the countryside, is money king?
Buckle up for Sanam Ratsadon’s longest ride to date. This emotional rollercoaster of a story is written by a community organizer and author from the Thai South who did his life work in the rural Northeast, also known as Isan. Sanan Chusakul (1959-2016) was one of the main proponents of the concept and practice of community culture as a bulwark against the encroachment of big business allied with government authorities. A key example in the 1990s of such an encroachment was the “Green Isan” program to alleviate the region’s proneness to drought and poverty. Another riveting story by Sanan Chusakul, titled หิมพาล (“Ca$$$hew,” 1993), notable for its very thorough postmortem examination of the introduction of cashew as a cash crop to poor cassava farmers, lays bare the paternalism undergirding the promises of a green Isan:
“The government is like a father; the people, his children. The Macrong [‘Came To Possess’] Company here is like a true friend. A father and a true friend will of course only bring good and appropriate things your way. I want everyone to believe and put it to practice, and happiness will be all you find.”
While Sanan’s literary output can be closely identified with his NGO work—he even said in the introduction to his final collection พันธุ์อุดมการณ์ (Idealist Breed, Inthanin Publishing House, 2014) that he had spent more time as a character in his stories than as the author—the following story is more open-ended than what you might expect. Part chronicle, part fiction, and perhaps part soul-searching, “Communal Dog” may be read as a postmortem of another Green Isan megaproject, that of the movement against it, or that of political idealism itself. Whether or not the author intended it, this character-driven story lays bare the utopianism undergirding the convictions of a “green” activist.
Communal Dog
หมาส่วนรวม
Yellow cassia blossoms cascade down on the green backdrop that sprouted previously to await their arrival. The branches propping up the canopy of leaves and flowers are full of knots and grooves, a record of changes through the seasons. Black seedpods from the previous cycle still hang in abundance under this canopy. But it’s late April, and that means it’s time the pods start falling one by one to the ground below, leaving room for replacements to grow from the new flowers. Such is the inexorable law of trees, and of all life.
Hot winds carrying the year’s first rain rip the cassia pods from the branches and scatter them on the ground. The wheels of cars and motorcycles crush the pods flat and crack them open, kicking up a foul, bitter smell that pervades the area. The smell lingers, eventually losing its foulness, and none of the twenty-some people working at this office pay it any mind or care to sweep the ground. To them the tree shade is just a parking space and a path they cross once or twice a day on their way in and out. It’s a common area; it belongs to no one.
Perhaps only E’Boon Lohng uses this space so much that it belongs to her alone. When it’s hot she rests under the cassia tree, where she dug a hole the size of her body so she can curl up contentedly inside. She’s a scrawny dog from who knows where: nobody cares to ask around, and nobody seems to need to know. E’Boon Lohng owns the tree’s shade, but both E’Boon Lohng and the tree’s shade are owned by no one.
The name E’Boon Lohng—Lost Girl—given to her by the people at the office derives from the fact that she got lost and found herself here. It’s a boon to her indeed that she’s one of those dogs with a name. What kind of breed she is, I don’t know; in my understanding she’s a hybrid from many generations of crossbreeding. Like a Farang dog, she has droopy ears and a golden fur with black accents that gets fluffy around the neck and tail. Like a typical Thai dog, she has a slender torso and a long nose.
Speaking of, there’s so much interbreeding between Thai and Farang dogs that it’s a total mess now. No different than humans: you look on TV and all you see are half Thais. Even in the countryside these days you see Thais marrying Farang men and having halfie kids everywhere. The evolution of humanity will most likely follow in the footsteps of dog breeds.
The mange wounds on her neck and hips, the eye secretions and tears regularly pooling on her cheeks—those are the individual markers of E’Boon Lohng.
This morning E’Boon Lohng hobbles her way toward the stone bench where I hang out. She circles the bench while whinging nging nging ngaew ngaew like a huffy baby, telling me she’s bored and hungry. What food will I have today, and from where?
“And what food will I have?” I want to grumble back at her.
“Why are there so few people at the office today? Looks lonely,” she says.
“They all went to a seminar, dummy. It’s just you and me staying behind.” I gaze at her with sympathy.
“Help me, human, for pity’s sake. I’m hungry.” She doesn’t back down.
“Sigh! E’Boon Lohng… poor you. What did you do to net your lot in this life as an office dog without the dignity of having an owner? The office manager doesn’t think of you as an employee. A pet dog is not in their budget.”
I ride my bicycle to where the alley meets the main road, eat curry on rice and order a bag of the same thing to go for E’Boon Lohng. She wolfs it down, then goes to pretty up the hole under the cassia tree, curls up into a bagel, and shuts her eyes dreamily.
If someone asks around at this office, Whose dog is this? Who has a pet dog? Maybe people will gesture in my direction, since from what they see, I hang out with E’Boon Lohng more than anyone does. But to me, she never feels like my dog. E’Boon Lohng came to this office before I did. I’m really her junior, but we’ve grown pretty close, probably because we have things in common, having wandered here without any affiliation.
A student in her seventh year at Ramkhamhaeng Open University. Spends more time at community service camps and political rallies than in the classroom. Tired of the education system. Tired of the university. Has a disciplinary strike on her record from protesting the administration and shutting down a Dean’s Office. Tired of the student movement (which hasn’t been a “movement” for quite some time) that increasingly isolates and distances itself from the people’s movement.
That’s why I followed an alum to this place, where an NGO works in tandem with villager groups in community-level development to fix the problems stemming from state-run development projects. The serious and intense work they’re engaged in has inspired conviction and made student activists like me feel called to join in their work, despite the coursework that remains—quite a few tomes’ worth in my case.
After enrolling in two courses for the semester, I invited a younger student to accompany me; it was an instant yes, and we hitchhiked here with our backpacks. We had run many, many community service camps, but those were merely short-term consciousness-raising activities for students. Sitting in the back of the truck en route to Isan, I told myself that I was on my way to the real work whose stakes were the success or failure of a people’s movement.
I volunteered to stay at the villagers’ encampment in the belly of the Rasi Salai reservoir, the site of the most extensive wetlands in the Isan region. The government is damming up the Moon River, and as a consequence, the wetlands which sustain livelihoods with seasonal fishing, foraging, and animal raising will lie permanently underwater. The villagers are refusing to let them close the floodgates as long as there’s no clarity about preventative or remedial measures. Multiple rounds of negotiations have failed, so they keep on protesting.
My job involves doing whatever I can to help: taking notes, drawing up maps, writing news reports, leading group activities in support of the cause with the children and grandchildren of protesters. But the most fitting job that satisfies both the villagers’ sense of pride and my sense of duty seems to be “being a university student” who lives among them as a witness to the movement.
Only this time around do I fully appreciate how having a student stand by them builds so much confidence and morale for the villagers.
When I’m tired and can take time off, I leave the encampment to stay at the office. My NGO Big Sibs don’t act like humans who let themselves feel tired. Returning from the field they always have sit-down work-related discussions. Sometimes they do sit down for a drink but that only helps them wash down the discussions on development work that inevitably accompany it.
And walking up and down near the drinking group will be the ownerless dog E’Boon Lohng.
I have no clue who keeps E’Boon Lohng fed and hydrated when I’m not around. I keep an eye out when I’m back here but I haven’t seen anyone take care of her. She makes do with what she can find: bits of food in trashcans or outdoor kitchens in the back of residences nearby. Then she returns to the tree shade in front of the office to sleep.
She’s friendly to everyone here. A stray like her might just want a safe place to rest, sleep, and stroll around. That the owner of the place doesn’t hurl curses or objects at her probably counts as permission to stay in the vicinity of this building—maybe that’s what she thinks.
So do I: the idea catches me unawares. I’m not a staff member belonging to one of the four or five organizations that share the rent here. I’m just a volunteer who works, eats, and lives with villagers and then comes here to work away at one of the desks that happen to be unoccupied before spending the night under that desk. From time to time a gig comes my way: data collection, audio transcription, youth camp speaker, whatever my Big Sibs in the office will think to delegate to me so I can earn some cash.
I think back to E’Boon Lohng: she actually has a job here as well. Her job is to be a security guard who barks and howls, but that’s not really considered a remunerable service, is it?
And nobody values E’Boon Lohng enough to think of her as a volunteer doing her part just like I am with respect to the villagers.
Several years ago, ordinary villagers of the Rasi Salai basin began making complaints to District-level officials to stop the plans to dam up the Moon River. When that failed, they traveled to the provincial seat; the Governor said that he had no power, that he could only be a postman who’d deliver people’s complaints to the central authorities. So they raised funds for travel to the Government House to make their complaint. The Complaint Receiving Office accepted their letter, then mailed them a reply stating that they would forward the complaint to the Damming Department responsible for the project.
Then, a construction company brought in machinery and truckloads of steel, gravel, cement, and sand and began construction. The police and the military entered the premises and stood guard, preventing locals from going near the headworks of the dam. The community staged protests in the district center and the provincial center, and traveled again to Bangkok multiple times. The response they got was similar to before, except now there was an explanation from the Damming Department: that the Rasi Salai dam would be a small-scale rubber dam that stored water only up to the riverbanks without flooding the wetlands and forests that sustained villagers’ livelihoods, and that the importance of this project lay in making the Isan region fertile, with enough water to grow rice twice a year; may the people trust in this governmental project which had been thought through and which was modeled after Australia, a country with an excellent track record in dam constructions.
The government sent officers to be stationed in several villages whose residents objected to the dam. They helped with local development, paving roads, making fences, cutting kids’ hair, teaching job skills; they coaxed some of the leaders into abandoning the protest by earmarking jobs at the dam for their children and grandchildren.
The officers left the villages once they managed to divide the villagers into two camps, one anti-dam and the other pro-dam. The two camps have been quarreling ever since. Whenever the anti-dam group staged a protest, the pro-dam group would follow and stage a counter protest. This went on until the dam finished construction, and it turned out to be neither small nor made of rubber but an enormous concrete dam.
The leaders who remained steadfast in fighting the dam were accused of being haters of government-given progress. Some were personally targeted, threatened with arrest or possibly with their lives. In the end they fled to Bangkok to find work and refuge there. Some took off frantically, uprooting their family without any idea of what to do to put food on the table.
After the dam construction was complete, the Ministry of Ecology sent in academics, development experts, and civil servants to do an impact study and make visits to the villagers. They talked about the colossal impact that would result from damming up the Moon River. They also said that the construction of this dam failed to follow the proper legal steps. They mentioned that the community had a right to compensation in case of impact from a large-scale governmental project such as this.
That was the spark of confidence the people of Rasi Salai needed to mobilize once again. They demanded remedy from the government in the form of monetary compensation and natural rehabilitation plans for what was going to be destroyed.
After yet another round of failed demonstrations at the City Hall and at the Government House, they had a tense meeting where they decided to build a protest village inside the soon-to-be-flooded wetlands in order to build negotiation power against the state.
In front of me, I see the scene of the masses’ struggle, an uprising against the corrupt powers that use their superior status to expropriate the source of people’s livelihoods without any semblance of fairness. I call this struggle a highly honorable one, certainly! I used to be a mere reader of this kind of story in the newspapers, and only got to learn about great deeds of the oppressed from the pages of literature for life’s sake.
But right now, I am walking, sitting, and working as a character in just such a literary work being written by ordinary villagers, and I’m ready to live through joy and sorrow with them.
In the scorching sun, in the violent rain, I volunteer to do nearly everything that’s needed to be done around here. I’m getting to know the hearts and minds of villagers who are willing to give their all to protect their ancestral lands—for themselves today and for their descendants tomorrow.
I am inspired by people like Mae Püng who, despite having just one rai of farmland eligible for compensation, does everything in her power for the sake of more than a thousand people in the movement. Mae Püng—Mother Bee—is a widow who’s forty-seven years old; she’s pretty, small-framed and energetic, a natural leader. She wakes up before everyone in the protest village of fifty-some huts. She takes some of her neighbors to buy groceries at the market and then returns to staff the central store.
At any time of day she’ll be occupied with work for the community. Some days she has to travel to a negotiation with the authorities; once she comes back she’ll go on stage to report the negotiation’s results to dozens of other protest leaders. Everyone is dedicated to doing their part in this historic mission. Over the course of the dry season, the villagers clear the area surrounding the encampment to grow vegetables and upland rice. Alluvial soil is magnificent for plants; that’s why the people of this river basin are so protective of this land. They’ve been living off it for a hundred, two hundred years; its very fate hinges on this fight.
Upland rice, verdant vegetables, lines of bamboo huts with a thatched roof, a tight-knit group of people living and fighting together—I so want to be an author who gets to write about this scene of beauty and grandeur.
All dry season, the government shows no sign of yielding to the demands, meaning the protesters must continue standing their ground. Sometimes thugs are sent in to harass them. Other times messengers are sent in to “leak” news about upcoming arrests of the leaders on charges of encroachment on public land and incitement, calling them recipients of foreign money who behave like anarchists. But the protesters’ resolve remains unflagging.
Occasionally a delegation of academics, university students, and NGOs makes a visit to give moral support to the villagers. Graduate students, too, in doctoral and master’s programs both inside and outside the country come here to use the villagers’ struggle as a case study for their theses and dissertations.
Over a thousand people living together, enduring sun and rain together, thinking and solving problems together—it’s an excellent crucible for solidarity and oneness of the fighting spirit. It is also an opportunity to know back to front the true colors of the rulers and the politicians.
Near the end of summer, I fall so ill I have to go to the hospital. And now I’m on bed rest at the office of my NGO Big Sibs.
Everybody inside the office is occupied with work, lots of work. I feel intensely lonely. At a time like this I think of Mom, who’s willing to drop everything no matter how pressing to take care of me when I’m sick. Tears start flowing, and I discover that the closest soul to me at this hour is E’Boon Lohng: she walks up to the bed-bench where I’m lying helplessly, sticks her nose out and sniffs my legs, whines nging nging, and skips around the edges of the bed-bench.
“Have you eaten something, Boon Lohng?” I ask.
“You rest,” she says. Go figure: more than anyone around here, it is she who watches me.
“Have you gotten sick before, Boon Lohng?”
“Nging! Nging nging nging.”
“Fine! You’re worse than sick. You’re a dog without an owner. That’s the worst kind of pain for a dog. But you’re looking good now, aren’t you?”
Looking into her eyes I can see that she’s no longer a lonesome dog. Her mange wounds have disappeared. Look over there—she doesn’t live alone anymore. Two male dogs follow her around everywhere. Doing well for yourself, huh?
Perhaps E’Boon Lohng used to be pampered in a well-to-do household before something bad happened: her owner may have died, leaving her all alone so she had to run any which way she could and ultimately became a stray stripped of all luster by mites and fleas.
I’ve heard that, out of all animals, dogs are the most loyal to their owners and carers, that a pack animal’s born instincts make it so that a dog respects its owner or carer as its “alpha.” Once it loses the one it can count on, loneliness and depression take hold, as there is no longer an anchor in its life. That’s the number one reason for pet dogs becoming strays.
The same likely goes for humans. If the thing we hold on to crumbles away, we’ll be left feeling adrift and alone, with no moorings to keep us secure.
E’Boon Lohng has been restored to health both mentally and physically. What did the trick? Her male companions, for one, and plenty of food from a kind family nearby—I’m pretty sure it’s not anyone here at the office. My experience tells me as much. Maybe, on occasion, some people here might gather up fish bones or leftovers for E’Boon Lohng, but none that she can truly consider her alpha.
Probably too much to expect, isn’t it, for a stray who doesn’t officially belong to this office, when the restrooms, the coffee station, the plates, the spoons, and every other communal item also go unattended by everyone. The lawn and the flowerpots are littered with cigarette butts and club soda bottle caps. I wonder quietly, Is there a blind spot in people’s minds? I do believe in the ideals, the fostering of fairness, the safeguarding of nature and the environment, and the myriad other slogans from the lips of conservation activists. And yet, the trash collecting right under their hands and feet gets completely ignored. Some of them look so well-put together with stylish outfits and impeccably painted faces, but they leave their desks and workspaces caked with dust and disgusting cobwebs. Or perhaps it’s human nature to only want to look after the space of one’s own body and one’s own mind?
So who will look after communal spaces?
What about “communal” dogs?
Of my Big Sibs here, for the most part I have no doubts about their ideals. It’s just that those ideals may be placed too far above daily life and seen as too big to apply to the little things that one can do every single minute of the day.
Would it be a stretch to draw a comparison to such “communal spaces” as village temples? Villagers come together to maintain and renovate the buildings; they also regularly sweep and scrub the grounds clean.
And when these villagers stood up to the peril on their doorstep, they readily jumped in to share the responsibility for the communal spaces of their struggle.
Yes! I’m convinced now. Middle-class intellectuals are precisely the ones who’ve gotten buried deep under an individualistic mindset. From stability in life to daily routines, it’s every man for himself, every hand for itself, without much thought for reliance on one another. Maybe that’s the blind spot.
Hey! E’Boon Lohng! You’d better watch yourself there.
“She’s pregnant,” a shrill voice shoots out from the office. “I’ve had it with her. Chase her off all you want; she just won’t leave. And the males trailing after her butt are nothing but lowlifes. They’ve dug so many holes the lawn is ruined. How many pairs of shoes have they chewed through? How many have they carried away in their mouths? Those damn dogs! I’m near the end of my rope with them.”
I dare not say anything on the matter. I might fall under the same charges myself, Lost Girl…
The black seedpods from the previous cycle have been shaken loose from their stems by wind and rain; also gone are the cascades of yellow petals. The cassia tree starts another season of growing new seedpods and filling out the canopy with new leaves.
Under the cassia tree lies a heavily pregnant dog wagging her tail. Two male dogs take turns sniffing her butt. One of them runs to pee with one leg lifted on the trunk of the tree before returning to bristle and raise his tail at the other. The other strides to the trunk of the same tree, lifts one leg and pees over the mark of the first before strutting back to bare his fangs and growl. Before long they’re grabbing and biting at each other in a frenzy.
The shrill voice yells out from the office, “Keep at it! Fight to the death, all of you, so we can be done.”
Oh, Lost Girl, you take good care of yourself. Keep on living with what fate has given you. One thing I know for sure is that you’re living in a time of human turmoil much like what you’re witnessing. You must find a way to survive on your own instincts.
Me? I have nothing but sympathy to give you; I know myself all too well. Now I have to leave you once more… to go back to the villagers. The villagers and you, I’ve been wanting to say, are facing similar fates, so very similar fates.
Well into the rainy season, the villagers take turns going back to their home village to do their share of communal rice farming, leaving a contingent of under a hundred at the encampment. Communications and negotiations with the government yield no progress. The Damming Department refuses any compensation to the villagers, arguing that the tens of thousands of rai in question are public land. The villagers, meanwhile, lay claim to their ancestral right to land use, an individual right upheld by one another in the community according to local mores—a right that merely lacks government-issued documentation.
Stridently, the Damming Department asserts that the country is governed by law. If compensation were to be given to citizens who have violated the law, then going forward over ten million more who encroach on state land will also demand compensation from the state. Where are the funds to pay them? Nevertheless, the government concedes that citizens may face some hardship, and that the state must provide assistance to alleviate some of that hardship where feasible.
However, those facing hardship are a minority; as such, they should practice self-sacrifice for the majority who will benefit from the dam.
Before the encampment is flooded for the season, Mae Püng leads the remaining demonstrators to harvest the upland rice in the surrounding area. I get to learn about the lifeways and foodways of people of the Moon River basin that those in power never comprehend. Even the Damming Department who came to turn this place into a reservoir with a budget of over one billion baht has absolutely no data on the matter. I’d venture to say that they approved this billion-baht project without a care in the world. Or if they did have some data and some understanding about this land, their greed must have led them to keep their ears and eyes completely covered.
Right here in the soil and the water of the wetlands flanking the Moon River is the most fertile place in Isan — the image of parched earth conjured up with every mention of “Isan” doesn’t apply here. Locals use the wetlands to grow rice in various ways during the dry season: in the swamps as the water drains in April, for off-season planting around January, and for upland varieties on higher ground. Each of these rice fields is harvested before the flood season. Throughout the year, locals have some use for the area, be it grazing cattle, boiling salt out of the soil, picking mushrooms, digging for bamboo shoots, cutting firewood, making charcoal, fishing, shrimping, crabbing, clamming, or foraging for vegetables and herbs.
These are wealthy people. Even though they have little money, they live comfortably and eat their fill year-round.
And now this place will be turned into a reservoir, and electricity will be used to pump water uphill for sale to farmers on bad lands in higher elevations, enabling them to grow off-season rice.
When talking to visitors, and when telling the story to younger students at the university, I feel the urge to say, “The Rasi Salai Dam, part of the Mekong-Chi-Moon Project, was not conceived in someone’s brain, but pulled right out of their napes or ankles.” But I hold back, fearing that it might be too much of a leading statement with too coarse a language, so I just leave it unsaid as long as I’m unable to come up with a smoother-sounding phrasing.
I take part in the communal rice harvesting to the end. We carry the sheaves up to hang on wooden racks, leaving them to sun-dry before the work of threshing.
I’ve participated in countless community service camps that involve rice harvesting with villagers, but the activity was never intense the way it is here: as they work they’re also engaged in dissecting the government and sharing what they observed in this or that negotiation. This communal harvest doesn’t involve the drinking of rice whiskey or rice wine as is typical, since intoxicants are prohibited at the encampment.
Every morning, there is an assembly before the flag like in school. After the singing of the national anthem and the protest’s own marching song, there’s always a guided prayer and a reiteration to observe the Five Precepts.
I get a sun-blackened skin as my certificate of completion. Mae Püng says to me and the others who took part, Look, if a stranger from far away has the conviction to come here and do all this to help us, our fight won’t ever be lonely, and we’ve got to strengthen our commitment more and more in turn.
I know full well that the person speaking is actually in a tough spot. At home, all sorts of responsibilities fall on her, from tending to a large herd of cattle to raising her grandchildren so that her daughter and son-in-law can work the fields and take on odd jobs, not to mention the social duties at village ceremonies and festivals. But none of these things saps Mae Püng’s will to fight.
“I actually didn’t have much schooling,” she tells me, “Writing and doing math, I’m not good at it. But I’ve got life experiences, from working in Bangkok when I was young, and from doing labor union work when I was at a factory. Most importantly I made an effort to listen in on words of guidance and proverbs from the old folks. Those with little schooling—we aren’t easily distracted.
“Whatever issue comes my way, I chew on it until I’ve cracked it, and I have a good memory.”
I wonder, Is it because university students like myself—the “intellectuals”—have had too much schooling that we turn out to be confused thinkers with a faulty memory?
“The majority of people here fear the authorities and don’t assert themselves,” Mother says. “I reckon that if someone like me doesn’t give it their all, then our people who are taken advantage of will fare even worse. The key is that we survived together, and we’ve got to keep surviving together.”
The people staying at the encampment move the work they usually do at home to here: harvesting reeds and grass to weave mats, picking mushrooms, digging for tubers, boiling salt out of the soil, casting nets and baiting hooks. These products are transported home for occasional sale at the market: a fitting substitute for the time that they could have been there for their families.
I ruminate on Mae Püng’s point, “The key is that we survived together and we’ve got to keep surviving together.” It rings true, and reminds me of the phrases “For the Masses” “For the People” “Serving the People” belonging to a previous generation of student activists that still leave a faint impression on my generation.
Mae Püng’s words are so alive, so immediate; there’s no need for thinking against the grain, semantic deliberation, nor fussing over how best to back up the arguments the way words work for the people of my tribe. Mae Püng backs up her arguments by putting her hands and feet to work, and by leading her people to rise up and break free from the deep-seated fear of “the authorities.”
Which reminds me of the word “communal.” The ground under the cassia tree, the lawn, the restrooms, the coffee station, the office: these are communal spaces that aren’t taken care of, because the people at the office don’t think the way the people here do. Here, the communal is everybody’s business; everybody comes together as a communal body, fights and works for the common good. There, the communal is a floating thing; it exists, is palpable, but nobody owns it, and nobody has the kind of ties that make up a communal body.
And the dog that sits around, runs back and forth, and howls the night away also belongs to nobody in particular, nor does she belong to some communal body.
Dog business isn’t complicated like people business: they just live, eat, reproduce, raise their young, bark, howl, play, and go through good and bad smoothly or roughly depending on the times.
Being back this time around, I notice E’Boon Lohng’s flat belly, and know instantly that she has given birth. Nobody at the office knows where she went to give birth; I asked, but all they saw was her dashing in and out of the office grounds—nobody cared to look beyond that.
Just by paying attention and following her tracks, I learn that she goes off to the overgrown garden behind the office. Somewhere behind the tall grass is the nest she’s made for her young to keep them away from people. That means she doesn’t trust anybody here, human or animal.
That is another communal area neglected for so long that the grass reaches up to your chest. The ground is sloshy; nobody wants to walk into or deal with it. Sago palms and elephant ear plants compete fiercely for space occupied by hairy grass. I follow E’Boon Lohng’s track on the trampled grass until I find her nest. She opened a patch of grass on dry ground that sits higher than the waterlogged area, cleared just enough space in it to snuggle up with her pups, dragged out clumps of grass with her jaws, and fully covered the outside of it. But I don’t see any pups inside. I strain my ears for a good while before I hear a pup’s cry from another direction. Slowly I make my way there through the grass. Soon enough I see the pups, four of them, pawing away and suckling on E’Boon Lohng’s teats, in a nest of grass like that first one, which I now presume to have been built as a decoy.
“Boon Lohng… Boon Lohng…” I call out softly.
“Hae!!!” she growls. Don’t come closer—that’s what she says.
“There, there, Boon Lohng, it’s okay my friend. I come in peace. It’s me!”
“I don’t trust anyone! Don’t come in here.”
True, Lost Girl, you probably can’t trust anyone. I also don’t have what it takes for you to trust me. We only met recently and our relationship is off and on. In your lifetime, maybe there was only one person you trusted, the one who raised you when you were young, the one who may have died or disappeared on you.
Boon Lohng, relaxed, closes her eyes and licks her lips as her four pups loudly engage in a suckling competition. Seeing it makes my lower belly flutter, and with that comes a violent surge of sympathy for dogs without an owner: it’s not just you anymore, Lost Girl, but also your pups who may grow up to be communal dogs trailing after their mother and pawing through trashcans in dirty alleys of this desolate town. Maybe your pups will find someone to adopt them out of the kindness of their heart, but that’s a matter of luck, a chance encounter that only happens once in a blue moon.
As I unroll my mat under the desk to lie down, I hear the wind gusting and the rain crashing on the roof of the office. How are Boon Lohng and her litter going to handle all this rain? I walk down from the office, hurry my steps through the rain to the dog nest, thinking that if the momma isn’t there I’ll carry the pups to shelter under the eaves of the office. At about ten feet away, I hear E’Boon Lohng growl and bark, “Hae!… Hohng! Hohng!”
I call out, “Boon Lohng! Boon Lohng!”
She responds, “Hohng! Hohng! Hohng!”
So I stop there. The strong rain blows in my direction. Trying to look through it I don’t see a thing except darkness.
Keeping my eyes shut, I finally fall asleep around one or two in the morning after the rain thins. E’Boon Lohng probably warded off the rain as much as she could to protect her pups, while I lay there trying torturously to ward off my own thoughts and feelings.
As soon as I wake up in the morning I rush to the back garden. The path to the dog nest is one long puddle. As I sigh to ready myself to step forward, I hear the sound jom! jom!—the splashes made by E’Boon Lohng as she trots out from the dense hairy grass.
Holy…! In her mouth is a pup. The momma dog shambles to the back of the office, puts the pup under the eaves, and runs to and fro.
That pup is dead. It is soaked from head to tail. Its small tongue hangs limp on its lips. Its belly is bloated; its eyelids, fully closed.
I don’t know if dogs grieve the way people do, but her carrying the dead pup to the back of the office… I want to understand it as an intentional act to convey something to me, a human being.
I bring out an old cardboard box, lay it on one side, and push the bottom to a corner on the back wall of the office. I layer it with newspapers, then rags. I wait until E’Boon Lohng goes on one of her trips before I go pick up the three remaining pups and put them in the box, hoping that the momma will be happy to move here and snuggle with her pups at a spot sheltered from rain.
But she’s not happy. Returning to the empty nest, she’s agitated. Sniffing about, she walks to the cardboard box and carefully fetches the pups back to the nest one by one by the scruff of its neck.
She fears people more than she fears water.
At the moment, the Rasi Salai encampment is progressively being taken over by the rising Moon River. The people work to elevate the bench-bed inside each hut above water level by fixing it higher on the columns. Scorpions, centipedes, and venomous snakes also move in to find refuge from the water. Small children are sent home. Those going in have to leave their motorcycles and cars on the riverbank, where security guard shifts are organized, then take a boat to the encampment more than a mile away.
As I hitchhiked my way here this time, I thought that the water was going to submerge everything, making the villagers relocate or put a pause on their protest, to be resumed after harvest season. But I was wrong.
The cool waters have made people even more fiery and determined.
They keep to the morning assembly before the flag, with the national anthem, the marching song, and the guided prayer. Now, where they stand gathered for that sacred ritual, the water has reached everyone’s waists.
Quite a few academics and NGOs come visit and suggest that the protest be paused. However, the villagers refuse to pause or relocate the protest; they insist that the government make it a priority to show up and resolve the issue for once. They stay ready and steady in the fight. They’ll make their stand on the roofs if need be. Since birth they’ve lived with the river and will have to do so until death—what’s there to fear in a flood?
But then a tragic incident demoralizes the protest: a teenage boy gets a cramp and falls in the water. Helpless, he drowns. People attribute his death to the work of all sorts of guardian spirits and ghosts. While some continue the protest, many who go to the funeral don’t return; they transition to supporters from home, happy to deliver food and water and pitch in money to help cover expenses that come up.
The protesters use the incident as a teaching moment to galvanize resolve: that we hold fast to peaceful tactics, which is to say stand on what’s right, insist on our rights deriving from traditional mores, refrain from violence, and with patience and forbearance express to the world the hardship we’ve been experiencing.
On the front page of several newspapers appear images of four-to-five-hundred people standing in rows with their fists raised from the water at their chest or neck level. The media are abuzz with commentary and critical analysis.
The Governor, entourages of high-ranking and petty civil servants, news anchors and journalists all take a trip on flat-bottom rescue boats to the encampment, bringing blankets and dry food to give to nearly every protester. Then they say to the people, The government will never abandon the people, and the Damming Department is alert to the problem and will solve it in no time. To which the people reply, Then why in the past three-to-four years have the people’s demands been put off from consideration time after time, not to mention discredited by the claim that they aren’t actually affected? The Governor then says, They only appointed me to this office four months ago, please give me some time; from now on things will move faster, as I’ve seen with my own eyes how badly affected the people are by the dam construction project. Speaking of such projects, people think them up just by looking up water levels on maps in an air-conditioned room in Bangkok, then after a cursory field visit they draw up construction designs without ever consulting the locals. From now on the bureaucratic tradition of planning from the center must finally end: I will push for a reform of politics and of the bureaucracy. How do you like that, my people? You agree with me?
A long applause resounds in the river bend.
The people are given a date for a meeting and negotiation with government representatives a month away. The Governor is given the spotlight on TV; images of him handing blankets to people are printed on national newspapers and captioned, “Local Chief Lulls Mob.”
All of E’Boon Lohng’s pups have found potential adopters. Not sure whose good luck that is.
Of course, every puppy is cute—the fluffy body, the round shapes, the floppy ears, the zoomies, the friskiness. They drink the milk produced by their mother, who eats the leftovers from trashcans and from homes around here.
The puppies can now eat some solid foods. Solid foods from where?
Every morning and evening, Boon Lohng goes looking for food and fills her stomach to capacity. When she returns to the back garden, her pups trot behind her, and she retches, extending her neck and squeezing her stomach to regurgitate the food in her stomach into a pile on the ground for the three pups to share. Some time after feeding her young, she’ll run out to find more food for herself.
One morning, I wake up to see the three pups fighting to suckle joop jahp joop jahp at their mother’s teats like every day. Boon Lohng’s milk seems to be in short supply, as all her pups keep detaching from one teat to suck on another. Boon Lohng lies still as her pups go to and fro to feed. Only when I walk up to her do I realize that she is wheezing füd! füd! in a state of exhaustion. Blood oozes from a wound across the middle of her back. It’s a knife wound, about ten inches long, deep enough to expose her ribs. The more the pups paw and tug at her, the faster the blood trickles out. Boon Lohng’s breath rasps in her throat.
Tears moisten the hair around her eyes.
At the same time, tears stream down my face.
I hold out my hand to pet E’Boon Lohng; she doesn’t resist or growl the way she used to. Just like a human’s, a dog’s stubbornness and ferocity melts away once they find themselves in a grave condition.
I can’t come up with anything beyond fetching a wound disinfectant to pour on her back wound. The pain, likely sharp and burning, sends Boon Lohng bellowing. She springs to her feet and runs away.
I’m sickened by the people loudly speculating about who and which household hit E’Boon Lohng with a machete. Their speculations don’t ever delve into the core issue: that E’Boon Lohng needed more food to produce milk for the cute pups they’ve been so eager to place holds on.
“Little sister, can I borrow a puppy? It’s for my son to play with a while. I’ll give it back.”
A woman neighbor shows her face through the fences to talk to me.
I am bewildered. Is a dog a personal belonging one can borrow? It’s not a ruler or an eraser or a pen that schoolchildren borrow from one another. It’s not money that adults take out on a loan. It’s a dog, a living thing.
I want to reply, “Take it. It doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s a communal dog.” But I’m frozen in confusion.
“I guarantee you, I won’t let the kid play rough with it,” she says, “My house has a lot of milk in cartons. The nursery school handed them out, but my son doesn’t want them. You’re welcome to take some for the puppies.”
The three puppies now look healthier. Half a cardboard box of milk cartons, as a start, have been brought over to feed them to their fill. In exchange, the puppies take turns going to play with the neighbor’s son for a few hours each time. I have somewhat made peace with puppy lending after feeling queasy about it for a day or two.
But the momma’s condition worsens every day. The wound on her spine is now crawling with maggots. Sometimes, when she shakes her body, they fall off in bunches. That wound is in a spot she can’t lick or scratch. When she lies down, flies buzz around her and walk on her.
Then one morning, I find her curled up dead by the water jar behind the office.
Boon Lohng’s fangs are still bared, her mouth foaming. A massive swarm of flies whir like bees over the wound, the nose, the mouth, the ears. Nobody in the office offers any condolences about Boon Lohng’s passing when I share the news with them. Almost nobody goes further than asking, Have you buried her? Where’d you do it?
The semester passed without my touching a single textbook. No plans even to cram for finals with a friend’s help. My only hope is that next semester I’ll be able to block out some time for study and for exams. Schoolwork is a big load I carry on my shoulders alongside the load of ideas and idealism. My parents, like typical parents, want me to finish school quickly so they’ll get to stand and smile in the family photos on graduation day, followed by my finding a job with a good salary, starting my own family, having a child, sending them to school, attending their graduation, followed by their finding a job, starting their own family, having myself a grandchild, sending them to school, attending their graduation…
It’s a bit of a relief that I don’t have to rely on my parents for money. Since my fifth year I’ve been supporting myself through school with whatever jobs are available, making enough to survive but not enough to spread around to help anyone. After all these years studying and doing activism, my parents’ demands for me to behave like other people seem to have grown quiet.
This past semester, I have taken a course on protesting; the villagers are my professors. If there were an exam for me to be graded on like in other courses, I probably would score no less highly than anyone. But I know that such a subject probably won’t be found in any university’s course offering. The subjects that might bear some relation to it, like Law or Political Science, are only aimed at producing experts of the law and of governance, people who’ll come into contact with the poor only as… someone who throws the book at them for making a living on public lands without rightful documentation, and therefore without the right to demand any of what they demand; or, in the case of governance experts, as someone who coaxes the villagers into not protesting because it disrupts the country’s peace and harmony, and if that fails to persuade, they’ll move on to the psychology of making threats to the leaders or the methodology of dividing and turning people against one another. The courses on offer seem to conceive of this country as a place without any actually existing villagers, or if their existence is somewhat acknowledged, then they’re cast as minor characters who hold no real significance.
If the small protests at the local level and the hard work so far are equivalent to the villagers’ course material, then the upcoming demonstration in front of the Government House and the scheduled negotiation with government representatives are probably equivalent to a final exam.
The exam date for the courses I enrolled in falls on the exact same day as that of the villagers’ demonstration in front of the Government House. It is a big protest coordinated with other villager groups throughout the country to join forces in pushing for solutions to issues affecting them. My NGO Big Sibs and I have to take on a rather long list of responsibilities, as this is an unfamiliar terrain for the villagers: from sourcing the sound equipment, the stage, the first aid medications, to coordinating with allied organizations and with the mass media for press conferences to publicize and clarify the villagers’ demands. As for food, there’s no need to worry: the villagers already came prepared with rice, fish, foodstuffs and all the cookware from home.
The demonstration draws out for more than twenty days. The government promises to pay for the damages from the dam construction. Other groups similarly receive a commitment to resolving their issues. The next step for Rasi Salai is the creation of a joint commission between the government and the people; the commission will review the facts of the problem and of the properties that will qualify for compensation. The villagers decide at a meeting to pack up and return to the old encampment and keep protesting until the issue is resolved all the way.
For next semester I enroll in the same courses that I missed the final exams for. Before rejoining the protesters, I take the opportunity to return to the office of my NGO Big Sibs.
E’Boon Lohng’s pups have exploded in size. None have been adopted from what I see. They like to scamper to any human walking by and nuzzle their legs begging for affection: typical behavior for cute and pitiable young animals. All they get are scraps of food from time to time. Their mother died before she had a chance to show them how to find food in trashcans.
From the looks of it, they will most definitely grow up to be ownerless dogs just like their mother. Of the people in the office, none will be able to keep pet dogs. They’re all travelers and nomads, constantly on work trips to a village here and there up to several days at a time. And when they return, they have to do documentation and financial report work at the office before going to their rental places to sleep.
If E’Boon Lohng and the pups can be called communal dogs, then my NGO Big Sibs and I might also fall under the term’s umbrella. Our organizations work for the common good. We work hard but don’t make much money. We have to be initiators and dreamers, writing project proposals for grants that will sustain us for a year or two at a time. Once the project ends, the money runs out and we’re out of jobs, unlike civil servants who have guaranteed salaries and benefits all their lives.
I’ve heard my Big Sibs say that there’s an upside to this: it makes for committed workers with clear goals who must stay active to survive.
It seems that helping other people plus taking care of themselves is already too much work. They probably don’t have the bandwidth to take good care of communal dogs.
I decide to take the three pups with me one night when a villager comes to pick me up to the encampment. They’ll probably fare better there than here. I don’t tell anyone at the office, and when I return to the office not long after, nobody asks about them. Perhaps this is a fitting solution: no more dogs to bother people here, no holes in the lawn, no shoes going missing, tidier trashcans, and no nging nging ngang ngang noises to distract people from working.
Every hut at the protest village has been damaged by the seasonal flood. Now that the water’s gone down, sediment stains show on the structural bases and on the ground. Debris carried by the current hangs stuck to anything that blocked it. The thatched walls of the huts are soggy and disintegrating. About a dozen of the huts are burned to the ground: the villagers know all too well that it is most likely the work of the pro-dam people organized by the authorities. The hut owners are enraged, but they comfort one another with the saying “Without the Devil’s harassment, you won’t reach Enlightenment,” and with the important fact that this time they’ve secured a Cabinet Resolution in their favor.
Together they repair the huts and plant beans, gourds, corn, and all sorts of vegetables in the surrounding area. The abandoned feel of this place turns to liveliness once again. Every day, the land-surveying commission and the land holders make a field trip to review the facts with government representatives. Come evening, the commissioners return and summarize the day’s work to the assembly. The protesters organize various activities depending on the day: sometimes it’s fishing, ratting, vegetable foraging, firewood cutting; other times when there are visitors, be they villagers from elsewhere, academics, or university students, it’s community discussions and exchanges.
The encampment is a magnificent educational institution for the villagers. Visiting scholars, development NGOs, and even some government officials bring helpful information and ideas about social development to share. It is a space for seminars and trainings that doesn’t need the hand of any organization to write grant proposals for hundreds of thousands of baht in travel, accommodation, food, and venue. And the results are superior. Many community leaders are able to describe the effects of globalization, the influence of transnational corporations, and give a point-by-point critique of government policies.
The three pups look a little nervous in this new place. They come from the city, with concrete floors, concrete walls, well-dressed people, and a dearth of food for them. Here, they encounter only thatched huts, boggy ground, and strange-looking people. At the office, they used to hear people speak Thai to one another, and to them as well, but here they speak Lao at them. That probably leaves them utterly confused.
But an abundance of food awaits them here. Every morning and evening, wherever the dogs walk up to, every household will gladly bring them something to eat. Soon, they get fat.
They aren’t anybody’s pet dogs, and nobody volunteers to be their owner, but everybody in this place seems to take part in caring well for them. So the villagers call them “mob dogs,” or alternately, due to the fact that I brought them here, “university student dogs.” But to me… they’re still communal dogs.
The villagers have a wicked sense of humor. They name the black pup after the Director-General of the Damming Department, the brindle pup after the Head Engineer of the dam, and the black-and-white pup after the District Chief. Those three are the bane of the villagers’ existence, and have been since their first protests.
Some villagers tell me the dogs don’t understand Lao; they need to switch to Thai. “Befriend these dogs and the base of your tongue is going to hurt from the talking.”
The land survey proceeds in fits and starts. The pro-dam people keep showing up at the scene to make their objections. They accuse the protesters of not actually having land and making baseless claims. But when a claim to ownership is corroborated, they hit back by saying that they also have land adjacent to it but they never demanded the government to compensate them for it. If the government agrees to pay the claimants, then they must also be paid, and paid at the same time.
Most of these people arrive drunk. Sometimes they carry guns or knives. Sometimes they start a fire in the nearby woods, covering the area with smoke until the technicians and commissioners can’t do their job. I learn from the protesters that the other side has detailed plans on who will disrupt what that were drawn up in the District Chief’s office. So two months on, the land survey still hasn’t reached the halfway point.
I accompany the commission almost every time to observe and assist. Inevitably I become a target of harassment. They call me a “meddler” who encourages locals to do illegal things.
“If you want to serve the people, I recommend that you finish your studies first, then take the exam to join the civil service,” they advise.
“You’d better be careful, little girl. Or else…” they threaten.
“Let the people here fix the problems here. You should go back and fix the problems where you come from,” they shoo.
“Who hired you for this? Can’t you get a job? My village has openings for an industrial sewing job. Want to do it?” et cetera.
These words, coming from the mouths of villagers, bear the self-superior speech and thinking patterns of a civil servant. I can understand why, but a girl like me can’t help but cry myself to sleep sometimes. I discover that actually I’m fragile and highly sensitive. But maybe that’s precisely why I can easily understand the villagers’ hardship, precisely why I tremble with indignation at injustice. I make an argument in my own favor: not being sensitive is actually what will visit horrors upon this world.
In the middle of this chaos and commotion, I receive bad news from home… Mom’s ill.
A stray like E’Boon Lohng passed through the sorrows of being abandoned. Eventually, she found respite in the freedom of frolicking and flirting with new dog companions, in claiming the cool shade under the cassia tree as her home base, with food in nearby spots for her to find one meal at a time. Without the honor or dignity of a pet dog bestowed on her, she lived worthily by dog instinct. And when she had pups, motherhood bound her: fiercely guarding her little ones from what she didn’t trust, finding more food to produce enough milk for them, and filling her stomach with food just to come back and regurgitate it for them.
I miss E’Boon Lohng so very much right now. One very important load on my shoulder is weighing me down so much I can’t walk on.
Mom has been living with diabetes for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Now the disease has spread to the brain and caused a stroke. Both of her hands are weakened, unusable. Someone needs to stay with her to take care of her, and it should fall on me, her youngest child who also hasn’t finished her degree. My older siblings have all gone on to become a teacher, a policeman, and other kinds of salaried workers.
Mom used to say, every time I came home, that I’d better hurry and finish my studies. But this time around, she seems to want to say that it’s a good thing I haven’t, so I have time to stay with her. But I know that deep down she wants her youngest daughter to graduate already. The question of who’ll take care of her may be a smaller concern.
I promise Mom that this upcoming semester I will finish the two remaining courses and pass both exams. I know full well that entering the eighth year—the last possible year of being a student at this university—will prove to be the most stressful, especially for Mom. Dad seems to have made peace with any outcome. I’ve gone three years past the normal time to graduate, and every year he’s cut me a lot of slack. This time, he only says, The common good is good and all, but one’s own big task must be seen through first.
I keep abreast of the fight of the Rasi Salai villagers from the newspapers and from telephone calls with a Big Sib of mine who assists the protesters. The land survey is finally completed thanks to the Governor’s intercession; it sounds like the Governor has a pretty good grasp of the problem. Also, the government has been ripped into by the press for using the divide-and-rule approach until locals shoot each other dead, the whole thing spiraling into a national scandal. But the District Chief has a long history of taunting the protesters; he even vowed, “If you people receive compensation, feel free to bring a knife and slit the throat of this District Chief on the spot.” So, he refuses to back down. He’s behind the recruitment of two thousand villagers to stage an anti-governor demonstration. Knowing who did it, the Governor demotes the District Chief to one of the districts on the Cambodian border.
My Big Sib tells me through the phone, “Nowadays your little ones are a force to be reckoned with. The Director-General, the Head Engineer, and the District Chief: they’ve done very well for themselves. They’re taken to practice hunting rats in the wetland woods every day. And boy do they hunt.”
Oh, Lost Girl… your little ones have made it. I’ve stopped holding my breath for someone to adopt them as pets. I can’t wait for them to be howling hunters—isn’t this a much more dignified thing for dogs to be?
My teacher sister is now on school break, so she takes over staying the night and caring for Mom. I travel to Bangkok to take the two finals for my seventh year’s second semester, but I can’t focus at all. I know that at the moment the villagers are camped out in front of the Government House. I also know specifically that the three little creatures are so blessed as to get to travel all the way to Bangkok.
The land survey may be over, but the matter is still being stalled and opposed at every step by the relevant authorities. What’s really at stake for them, a villager told me, is the Mekong-Chi-Moon project, of which the Rasi Salai dam is but one of fourteen. All the other dams pay no compensation to the locals who own the land without rightful documentation. If they allow for indemnification for the Rasi Salai dam, the locals elsewhere will demand it too. And that’ll really knock the wind out of the sails of over two-hundred-thousand-million-baht’s worth of projects lined up for the next forty-two years. So they don’t give up trying to oppose it every way they can.
The villagers had to stage more protests and fight until their blood was spilled before the government was forced to approve the compensation package totaling over three hundred million baht. But on pay day, pro-dam villagers surround the local administrative office, preventing them from paying out.
The claimants decide not to engage with the conflict and travel to Bangkok to make a complaint. But the other side also invests heavily in their opposition: they charter buses to Bangkok to make their stand with the financial backing of an opposition MP.
I arrive at the Government House when the demonstrators are on their fifth day camped out waiting to hear back from the government. On the same day, the pro-dam people make it here as well. They mean to spread out, surround the encampment, and shut down traffic in order to pressure the government not to pay out. But they fumble it. They’ve never organized a demonstration to address problems they suffer from, so they don’t know how to conduct themselves the way seasoned demonstrators do. They get drunk and proceed to throw the liquor bottles all over the road. Only half an hour goes by before their leaders are arrested and taken to the police station while the rest of them are put on their buses and sent home. The Director-General, the Head Engineer, and the District Chief run up to me, tails wagging, from quite a distance. They wrap themselves around me, lick the front and back of my legs, whine nging nging—such kiss asses. It seems that Bangkok so unnerves them that they don’t venture out anywhere, staying exclusively in tents of the villagers they’re familiar with. Only when I walked in here did their fear go away for a while.
In hard times, people turn to one another, pooling their brains together as one to solve their problems. The shared experience of struggle is a crucible of fellow feeling. That’s why people live together in hamlets and villages even if they aren’t blood-related.
But in good times, people turn their backs to one another, going their separate ways to indulge in pleasure.
I have a chance to return to Rasi Salai two months later. The encampment in the reservoir has been torn down, leaving only scraps of wood, thatch, ashes, and debris all over the place. In the vegetable garden stand some withered, desolately hunched-over corn cobs and dried-out chili and eggplant stems and branches with no leaf nor life. Offshoots of giant sensitive plants seize the opportunity to crowd out the clearing on which no foot now falls. One of these days they’ll extend their branches over this place of struggle, blending it with the surrounding area.
This upcoming season, with the indemnification all paid out, the Rasi Salai dam will close the floodgates to store water. The land and water that sustained people’s lives for many generations, an inheritance bequeathed to future generations, will be sunk in the depths forever. The protest village becomes a slice of legend that will be retold for a while yet before fading away with time. People will be corralled into the currents of money carrying them toward a mad frenzy of change.
The three hundred million from the government was paid to the individual accounts of each respective villager. Traditional assets in the form of rice grain in the barn, fish in the river, mushrooms and bamboo shoots in the woods, are stewarded to be replenished throughout the year. But money is something that quickly converts to something else as it travels to another’s pocket. Just two months post receipt, I see new cars going to and fro on village roads. Many villagers carry mobile phones. At a meeting, movement leaders do a count of newly purchased motorcycles up to over one hundred. And what’s depressing is that four or five kids have already died crashing a motorcycle into a car, a pole, a wall.
It’s a punch to the gut to listen to. They’ve devoted their lives and struggled so hard for this?
“I obsess over it myself, so much that my head’s splitting,” Mae Püng tells me. “People like us, if given the option, would’ve said no to the construction of the dam. Our lives were not ruled by money. We live with the land and the water; we know the earth and the sky; we know the river, know every little thing. But my child, we aren’t wise to the ways of money.”
The compensation rate of thirty thousand baht per rai of land amounts to no small sums for many claimants: five hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand, one point five million, two million, three million, depending on the person’s holdings. The widow named Püng had one rai of farmland. Years of energy and effort invested as one of the core drivers of the movement netted her only thirty thousand baht. Pay off little debts here and there, and it’s gone in the blink of an eye.
NGOs and academics suggest to the villagers that they should do a social campaign encouraging future-oriented investments, for example, agricultural land improvements, industrial set-ups in the household, and recommending everyone to pitch in to create a communal fund for a future fight. But compensation money has a life of its own; it has the wings and tail feathers to fly as it wishes. And quickly, much of it flies to rich people, merchants, and big retailers.
I make a suggestion in one of the meetings that we should collect data on where the compensation money goes and break it down by category so we can draw some lessons. But I get the pushback that we shouldn’t interfere in people’s business, that it’s within their rights. And if we were to do it, who would be responsible for data collection? Seems tricky.
It looks like their struggle has come to an end, and they’re tired, too tired to think further. Someone makes a suggestion that we should stay organized as a group to do self-improvement and environmental rehabilitation, but the only response is, We’ll come up with ideas bit by bit.
As for myself, I came here with convictions in movements of the people’s sector, since modern lessons said that we needed strong grassroots organizations in order to effect social change for the better. All this time that I’ve joined and been a part of the movement, I convinced myself that Yes! This! The people’s politics that is the substance of social movements.
Of politicians and office seekers, we’ve already concluded once and for all that they aren’t the people’s hope. They are like a layer of scum we can’t eliminate. They remain perpetual traitors to the voters. People of the middle classes, meanwhile, are sucked so deep into the cycle of development-derived comforts that there’s no reaching them. Who else will turn the wheel of cutting-edge struggle? The student movement I broke away from was already neutered and uncoupled from the people’s movement. More worrying is the fact that students are uncoupled from the reality of society and set adrift, far away even from their own parents.
Who else to expect? NGOs that the government’s afraid of and bent on destroying? From what I know, the NGOs are already struggling to manage their own affairs on top of their social movements that are scattered and disunited.
Right now, my convictions are seriously being tested. The people’s movement I so admired and brought myself along to be a part of, has shown its face to be a single-issue circumstantial movement. The party’s over, it’s time to go—is that so?
Huh! I’ve got time to take my investments of faith elsewhere so it can prove itself further.
When I press the issue in a meeting, asking the people about future directions of the movement, the room goes quiet. Instead of dialing back, I make lengthy remarks about it, until I receive an unforgettable comment.
“People here will have to come up with ideas bit by bit . And you… you’ll have to return to your studies and graduate first.”
That stops my remarks. I retreat from the discussion and sit with my back to the wall. Tears well up, warm in my eyes. I miss E’Boon Lohng, the communal dog who died of the gaping knife wound on her back…
What about her three young—what about their fates?
Mae Püng tells me. The black-and-white dog with the same name as the District Chief was taken in a tuk-tuk by some people from Dahn Village the day the demonstrations were over. Once at the village, which to the dog was a foreign place, it refused to jump down. The people tried to carry, pull, drag it down, but it wouldn’t budge. It stayed on the tuk-tuk until nightfall; come morning it was gone.
The black dog with the same name as the Director-General of the Damming Department has been gone since during the demonstrations. People surmise that it must have been killed by some of the protesters’ teenage kids and grandkids for food. It was a “bear dog”; someone had mentioned to her previously that it might not survive being around dog-eating humans.
As for the brindle dog, it was adopted by Prahn Noy, the rat hunter of Nohn Sahng Village. During the demonstrations, Prahn Noy was the one to take the three dogs out to practice rat hunting. Seeing the brindle’s knack for hunting that could develop into greatness, he took it home to raise it.
I travel to Prahn Noy’s home, determined to spend some time with the one pup of E’Boon Lohng that’s still with us. Prahn Noy received no small payout, and he’s renovating his home. On the previously rundown upper floor, the walls have been redone with high-quality wood panels. The zinc roof has been changed to red tiles. On the lower floor, light-filtering glass walls have been installed on two sides with a glass door like a house in the city. The man quickly and courteously unrolls a mat on the bed-bench and brings a bowl of water to welcome me, all while complaining about not having much time to go anywhere and missing meetings, occupied as he is with home renovations for over a month now.
I glance around the place. I don’t see that university student dog/mob dog/communal dog—probably can’t call it a communal dog any longer, since it was fortunate enough to find a bona fide owner, unlike its unlucky siblings and mother.
“You aren’t going back to finish your studies?”
Prahn Noy asks the question that makes me so very uncomfortable. It needs no reply from me.
“My son is about to enter his last year of secondary school. He wants to continue into higher education, so he’ll get to be a boss man. My oldest only finished sixth grade and works at a textile factory. The next oldest went to a teacher’s college but didn’t graduate; she got a husband first. My hope lies with this third one. This year I received more than one million from the compensation package; I’ll save some for him. So far I’ve already got him a motorcycle.”
I still don’t see the brindle dog. Maybe it’s out running, or lying in the shade somewhere.
I think of people like Mae Püng again. They don’t get to repair their rundown houses, and their daughters and sons likely won’t fare better than what their expectations were.
Prahn Noy reaches into his pant pocket and pulls a thing out: a purple banknote. He rolls it up tightly and stuffs it in my hand, “This is for you. For the trip.”
I’m befuddled, not sure what to think. I worked long, hard hours in the villagers’ movement; it never occurred to me that I’d get any money from the payout. I want to hand it back to who it belongs to; I don’t know how to; I can only keep my hand closed around it.
“I heard that you adopted the brindle dog?” I broach the subject.
“Oh yes! Yes! But um…”
“The dog’s probably a great hunter.”
“Yes! Yes! I’d take it to the wetland woods. On the way back we’d be carrying a whole bunch of rats.”
“Where is it now?”
“Here’s the thing. Lately I’ve gotten very busy. I had to stop ratting, so Mr.” he says the name of the Head Engineer of the dam, “went chasing after ducklings and chickens in the village, and ate quite a few of them. One day…”
I stare at Prahn Noy’s face, my mind imagining its fate—did it get knifed like its mother?
“One day, a traveling truck from Sakon Nakhon passed through. They offered me buckets in exchange for the dog, so I exchanged it for the buckets. Two of them. The black ones over there at the bottom of the column.”
Yellow cassia blossoms cascade down on the green backdrop that sprouted previously to await their arrival. Black seedpods from the previous cycle still hang in abundance under this canopy. The end of dry season this year, the black seedpods have grown more packed than the same time last year. Today, under the tree shade, no communal dog crouches there to get away from the heat like the old times.
After saying goodbye to the villagers, I swing by this place to thank my NGO Big Sibs. I joke to them, Your office looks a mess, why don’t you guys get together for a cleaning day?
It’s time I went back to my studies. On my return trip I probably won’t have to hitchhike… the five-hundred bill sits warm in my pocket.
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