Well, back to my past unit. On October 22, I left for Rasi Salai Dam. The Rasi Salai Dam is different from the Pak Mun Dam in that it was commissioned by the Royal Irrigation Department of Thailand (RID) in 1989, and it has no connections with the World Bank. However, it has caused just as much destruction to the lives of the villagers in the surrounding area as the Pak Mun Dam. It was built without an Environmental or Social Impact Assesment, which has caused it to be completely ineffective in providing irrigation to the surrounding areas because it was built on a salt dome, which means that the water kills all of the crops because the salt is too concentrated within the water. Hence, there is now a huge, concrete Dam that continues to close, and yet it serves no purpose. However, unlike Pak Mun Dam, 80% of those who have been negatively affected by the Dam have been compensated, in part because those who protest the Dam are much more organized than those at Pak Mun.
The first day, we were given a tour of the Dam and the surrounding area, which was quite depressing because the environmental impacts of the Dam were so evident. Many of the rice fields were flooded, and therefore unusable (wetland rice farming has dropped by 77% since the construction of the Dam). Sadly, many villagers were unable to harvest their rice before their fields were destroyed by flooding, so they not only lost a large amount of their food source, but they also lost a lot of income. In comparison to this solemn sight, we all loved being on the Hua NaDam, which we visited next…I know, vey strange. The Dam had these huge slabs of concrete jutting out into the river, and it was so peaceful. We all sat out on these, soaked up the sun, and just took time to think
However, it’s not as bad as you may think because the Hua Na Dam has not affected anyone’s life. The Dam was constructed, but it was successfully protested against by the villagers, and has never closed its gates. It is one of the few success stories of villagers successfully confronting the government on a social and environmental issue.
Ana, Haley, and I all roomed together, and we stayed in an absolutely beautiful house. We had a paw, meh, and 2 seouws (sisters)! Our paw loved to shape shrubs (I have an odd obsession with shrubbery!), so we had a giraffe, elephant, and deer in our yard! Our family was outrageously kind, and I had such a wonderful time with them. Plus, the food was alloy (Thai, or sep in Issan/Laos)!
The next day, we ate breakfast and then went with our meh to feed their 10 water buffalos grass. Afterwards, Haley and I went to our family’s rice fields, which luckily, weren’t submerged under water. We helped our meh and paw gather grass that grew by their rice fields to feed the water buffalo tomorrow. I love going to the rice fields or even just seeing them because they’re always a vibrant shade of green that I’ve never seen in the U.S., and it’s just the most beautiful sight. After 2 hours spent in the fields, we met up with Ana and fished in a little pond! Everyone else was having such success, but I wasn’t able to catch anything…I think it may be because P’Joy (the main driver for CIEE and everyone’s friend) gave me a piece of banana at the end of my hook instead of fish food! Then we had lunch, and as soon as we finished, our paw and little sister (nang seouw) took us to a really, really flooded area. If our paw hadn’t told us it was flooded, we all would have assumed that it was simply a river! Ana and Haley swam around, and then we returned home. To end the day, Ana and I decided to take a really long bike ride, and it was so much fun! One of us peddled while the other one sat on the back seat. It was tough going for a little while (quite wobbly, and lots of times where we careened off the road and into someone’s fields), but then we got the hang of it and were able to keep ourselves on the road!
On October 24, we got into the vans and drove to the protest village in Rasi Salai, which began in July 4, 2009. It was created to protest the Dam from closing its gates, and it is also in solidarity to make sure that the 20% of villagers who have not yet received compensation. The protest village is basically tent city with only two squatty potties, and it seemed to be in a more primitive stage than the Kon San Protest Village. However, the people that we met there were beautiful, courageous individuals fighting for to get their lives back.
That day, there was a wedding going on for 2 older people who had met while protesting the Dam, and it was the most beautiful ceremony. All of their friends, family, and CIEE students crowded around them, and at the end there was a huge bi see ceremony! After the wedding, we had an exchange with the villagers, during which we were told that RID had first told the villagers that the Dam was actually going to be a rubber weir, but it then turned into a huge concrete Dam. Furthermore, villagers from the Hua Na Dam joined us, and it was wonderful to hear them say that they continued to fight for others because they don’t want anyone to have to suffer as a result of a Dam. Even though they were able to stop the Hua Na Dam from closing, they still fight alongside others to make sure that there is justice.
Afterwards, we had an exchange with an NGO working with the Rasi Salai Dam, but she basically told us everything that we had already known from the readings we had done in preparation, which was disappointing. However, I felt much better when my meh and nang seouw showed me the baby buffalo that had just been born earlier that day! It was so cute, and I named it: Wictor!
The next day, we left to go to Pak Mun. While I was sad to say goodbye to my family, I was excited to return to Pak Mun Dam. We started off by having a boat tour of the Mekong River, which was beautiful! Soon after we boarded, the boat began filling up with water, so we got out on what looked and felt like a mud pit while we waited for another boat to come get us. We were sliding around, having races, and all enjoying ourselves until we realized that at a certain point the mud turned into someone’s bean garden. Luckily, we didn’t ruin any of the beans! During the boat tour, we got off at Laos, which is on the other side of the Mekong River. I was so excited to get a peek at Laos, but sadly, it was just like Tijuana in Mexico, and was a touristy area for Thai people to get knock-offs. Yet it was still cool to go to a different country, if only for an hour or so.
Hilary and I roomed together this time, and I was really lucky because Hilary speaks Isaan (she spent her senior year of highschool in Thailand), so she was able to communicate with our family! I liked my family, but they laughed at me a lot because my Thai is pretty bad, and so I felt kind of bad about myself, but Hilary reassured me that they weren’t doing it in a malicious way, so I felt better about it.
The next morning, we went for a walk around our village, Wang Sa Bang, and we saw the dry irrigation pump and canal. It was burning outside, so we used banana leaves to shade ourselves from the sun. When we got back, we had lunch and then went to see the Pak Mun Dam, and it was perfect timing because the gates were closing that day, so we were able to see and document it. That night, we had an exchange with an NGO who worked at Pak Mun, and it was interesting because he originally worked with Rasi and then came to work at Pak Mun after 2 of the leaders at Pak Mun unexpectedly died last year.
Later that night, we had an exchange with the villagers, and it was so clear that EGAT and the Pak Mun Dam had devastated their lives. They had so much anger towards EGAT, and it was sad to see how human beings come to hate each other to a point where it consumes their lives. Yet at the same time, these people have been fighting for 30 years with very little progress made. A loss of livelihood and culture is a loss of life for these people, and it enraged me to see that they had been deprived of everything that had once been their lives.
On October 27, Hilary and I said goodbye to our family, and we then made our way to EGAT, where we had a great exchange! We asked them all about the struggles that the villagers faced and why they hadn’t been doing more, and they were very candid in saying that they had given millions of Baht as compensation to some villagers, but that all the compensation in the world might never give them back what they’ve lost. However, during other times, they outright denied that EGAT hires people to support the Dam during protests. We then drove to RID, which was a hilarious exchange because they hired a radio host and 2 farmers to tell us why RID is such a good company, and they then tried to explain what irrigation is to us, but we were able to get a lot of questions relating to the Rasi Salai Dam by not allowing them to ever speak except for answering our questions. Their answers were really evasive, but I’m glad that we met both EGAT and RID because I realize that these companies are getting orders from the government and royal family, and they have to comply with those commands. There’s a lot more to it than simply blaming EGAT and RID; there’s a whole chain of corruption and power that one must climb to find all of the sources of the problem.
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