Tag Archives: village

Research at the 0$ Ranch

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Of the many things I learned working in villages in Yunnan, the skill that transfers most directly to my current work on West Texas Interlude is how to do field research in a rural setting. Efficiency has a completely different meaning in a rural setting, and a task that could feasibly be accomplished in 2 hours elsewhere might be better finished in 24 in the country — people tend to want to talk to you more if you’ve spent a little time helping out around the house or have stopped for groceries in town before you start peppering them with questions. Or if you bring them fresh tamales.

I would never expect to set a 2 hour appointment for language surveys in a village in Yunnan and have a tea farmer actually keep to that schedule, and neither do I expect my grandparents to stick to such a timetable. Instead, I know that I will enjoy the process of interviewing them a lot more if I go into it expecting to spend 4 or 5 days in order to get a few hours worth of decent recordings. Inevitably, the phone will ring and Bob D will have to go out and help the guy fixing the fence, or Ann will suggest we bake something. Or the physical therapist will show up at the front gate. Or someone will fall asleep in their recliner.

And so, I’ve spent the past few days living life with my grandparents and experiencing their daily reality on the ranch 25 miles out of town.

I have attended the monthly ladies’ luncheon at the Boonsville Community Center, where I have vague memories of my grandmother taking me to eat potluck suppers with her friends and neighbors when I was a kid.

I have driven Bob and Ann into Jacksboro and into Weatherford, to doctors’ offices and the Rexall drug store and the bank and the dollar store. We have driven slowly on back roads, the fall foliage golden and russet lining our path, my grandfather telling me where he thought I should slow down for curves or drive on the left side of the road to avoid potholes. I have become an expert at parking the big old Mercury Grand Marquis.

I have stood in the front yard watching a yearling deer in the late afternoon light, while the yearling stared and pondered me in return.

I have gone on walks with the dog, a border collie mix, along the gravel road leading from the house back out to the public road, stretching our legs for half a mile after a few hours of being cooped up at the house. She likes to trot out ahead of me 50 yards or so, venturing to the right and the left off the gravel, sniffing in the brush at evidence of a deer or raccoon or who knows what that had wandered through the night before. After a couple minutes I call her back, just to watch her run — I call, she starts towards me, running flat out, and every time, just in time, she veers to my side and skids in the gravel, just before the collision point. Maybe one day she’ll miss and knock my legs out from under me, but so far she’s right on, and I love to watch her build up speed and create a cloud of dust behind her.

I have woken up at 3am to the sound of a pack of coyotes piercing the dead silence of night with their yipping and howling. I don’t know if you’ve woken up to that sound before, but in those first few seconds of hearing it I always think they must be right outside my window, probably 30 or 40 of them, and fear mixes with wonder at the thought that I’m sleeping close to something wild. In the less groggy moments of later in the morning, I realize there were likely less than 10 of them and they weren’t in the yard, after all, but the fear and wonder remain.

And I have recorded 4 1/2 hours of talks with my grandparents, in 15 or 20 minute segments. The days have been peaceful, isolated from my daily routine, but they have been filled with much thought — and will be followed with much work as I transcribe the recordings and organize them by date or by topic. I’ve been through this routine before, when I spent a couple of months interviewing Lydia in the evenings after she got off work, and it’s a daunting task. But I love working on book-length projects like this, and when I get overwhelmed with the mass of information, I remind myself that these interviews aren’t about being precise in the first go-round, but about honing in on an idea over a period of time. I still have the next week and a half to finish this first set of recordings, and then we’ll have another couple of weeks at the end of January to do follow-up questions after I finish the transcriptions.

Next up is a day trip to San Angelo and the little town of Paint Rock, where my grandfather worked in 1956 and took a tour of Indian rock paintings on a nearby ranch. The private tours still operate today, and I have an appointment with an 84-year-old tour guide tomorrow. I love my job.

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The American Version of a Village

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“Village” was redefined for me over the past several days of traveling in Connecticut and the Hudson Valley area of New York.  A village in the mountains of the China-Burma border is one thing, and places like Cornwall-on-Hudson, Tarrytown, and Sleepy Hollow are something else all together.

I’ll admit my ignorance:  I didn’t know Sleepy Hollow was a real place in New York.  It is, and Washington Irving is one of several “famous interments” listed on the map provided at the gate of the village cemetery, the others mostly including big names in business from the Westchester area.  My mom and I stopped by to see the place that inspired the legendary story by Irving and were given directions to his gravesite by a man who I swear was a character from another Irving story, Rip van Winkle himself, long white beard flowing down his chest.  Later, after we’d gone across the Headless Horseman bridge and were making our way back to the main gate, we saw old Rip mowing the grass outside the Old Dutch Church.

After spending the weekend celebrating my niece’s birthday with my sister’s in-laws in the Stafford area of Connecticut, my mom and I took our time driving across the state, stopping in downtown Hartford and chancing upon the homes of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  It was an unplanned detour, but a delightful one, as the morning light washed over the hydrangeas in bloom on the lawn.  Twain and Stowe were next-door neighbors in Hartford, though she’d already written her most famous book two decades before Twain moved into the neighborhood and began writing the stories he is most known for.

We were driving across Connecticut to the Hudson Valley to visit a friend of mine who relocated there from Texas, and we found the quaintness of the villages only increases with each mile through those forested hills along the Hudson River.  Stone church buildings and town halls, specialty shops and pizzerias and any number of family businesses give the area a small-town feel unlike what I’m used to in my part of Texas.  Driving through street markets in China prepared me to navigate these old towns, most of which have a narrow central street lined with cars parallel parked at the curb, odd roundabout intersections, and more pedestrians than we typically see in the wide open spaces of Texas.

On the drive through the forest in Cornwall-on-Hudson to get to my friend’s house, we saw several deer and had to make a sudden stop for one as it jumped in front of us.  I found out that the bristly rodent I saw outside our hotel window and dubbed “a beaver without a beaver tail” (for lack of a better way to describe what I’d seen) is actually a hedgehog.

We also toured the campus at West Point (where my friend’s husband is the diving coach), soaking in the history and tradition, hearing stories about founders and alumni, names like Washington, Grant, Lee, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and too many others to list.

There’s a sense of awe that comes with being in such old places, seeing plaque after plaque with dates like “Stafford, CT, settled 1719” or “Washington Irving, born Apr. 3, 1783”—almost a sense of disbelief that I could be standing somewhere so full of history, centuries worth of history.  I don’t know all the stories that lie behind the places I saw, and my time in the area was too short to absorb the atmosphere in depth.  But the time spent seeing the local landmarks made nice brackets around the time spent doing what we really traveled there to do—to visit family and friends.

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Silver

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A while back a village lady about my same age explained to me the significance of earrings for women in her culture. When a girl is in her teens and starting to think about getting married, she adorns her ears with long, flashy, stylish earrings, not unlike what a girl in town would also wear. After she’s married, she tones it down a bit, but still wears whatever is trendy in current earring fashion.

After she begins having children and moves into the matronly category of women in the village, she switches to wearing large traditional silver pieces as a symbol of her family’s prosperity. By the time she is a grandmother, the weight of the earrings has stretched out the holes in her ear lobes to be big enough to poke a finger through. She no longer wears the family silver at this point, the holes in her ears now a sign that she has passed down her wealth to the next generation.

A couple of weeks ago, Fidi and I were at Adam’s house in MN village, getting ready to talk to a village musician later in the afternoon. Adam’s mom passed the time with us, comparing her skirt fabric and ours, admiring Fidi’s carved silver bracelet from Thailand.

“I have silver jewelry too—would you like for me to show you?” she asked.

She has a sweet and welcoming demeanor, but is always busy with some cooking or cleaning task around their wooden stilt house. I was glad for her to take the time to sit down and talk with us.

She brought out several bracelets, thick and weighty. One was a broad, carved wrist band; the others were snake-like coils for the upper arm. We passed them around and tried them on, and then she handed me something I wasn’t quite sure of. Two long, thin strips of silver wound loosely in a spiral. “My earrings from when I was younger,” she explained.

So this is how they did it, how they expanded the holes in their ears. The spiral is wound tightly to begin with and gradually loosened, causing the hole to grow. Eventually the silver strips are removed, but the skin is permanently stretched. I tried winding the strips as tight as I could, just to see what the smallest size of earring would be—even at their tightest, it would take a great deal of effort and a period of time to get them inside your ear lobes.

Adam’s mom assured me it didn’t hurt, though I’ve had enough ear and nose piercings (we’re talking double digits) to question her honesty. The price of beauty and status in the village—not so far off from the price I’ve been willing to pay.

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Family Portraits

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When you print pictures at a photo shop in many parts of Asia, the technician automatically assumes you want one copy printed per person in the photo.  Especially in smaller towns and in villages, cameras are still a rarity, and printed photos are treasured possessions.  I try to print copies to hand out to friends in villages, and some of the ladies in MN are aware of this and asked for an impromptu photo session on a recent trip up there.

The first in line was a tiny, weathered grandmother with teeth blackened by betel nut.  She straightened and rebuttoned her thick black jacket, while I dripped with sweat in the blazing sun waiting for her to be ready.  Because I had used the minority language to ask her if she wanted her picture taken, she had decided I was fluent.  It took a couple of minutes of her chattering on about who all she was related to in the village before she realized I was smiling and nodding out of politeness, not comprehension.

Next up was a middle-aged lady and her daughter and two friends.  The mother declared that everyone needed to wash their faces before the photo, and her daughter responded with the universal language of teenage girls—she rolled her eyes.  Mom didn’t stop bossing the girls about which parts of their outfits needed straightening the whole time she splashed her face clean with water from an outdoor faucet.  Still giving advice to unlistening ears, she pulled her head wrap down, wiped her face dry with it, and retied the damp cloth over her hair.

I took several configurations of that group picture before moving on to Julie’s two-week-old baby boy.  He slept through the entire photo shoot, obviously unconcerned that his older relative wanted a picture with him to mail to her sister in a province on the east coast.

And so I came back to town with several photos that I will take on a thumb drive to print in a local shop before my next trip up to MN—where the process will begin again.


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Coffee Fields

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Our main tasks in the coffee fields during our three day trip were to pull weeds and plant soybeans for fertilizer.  My supervisor asked me to go along as the driver of the second half of the group, but when I heard what the job was in the coffee fields, I volunteered to work alongside the others and help get the job done faster.  I’m not much of an agriculture type person, but pulling weeds and dropping seeds in the ground is something I learned to do as a kid in my grandparents’ garden.  Surely the skills would come back to me after all these years.

They did.  The act of pulling weeds is not hard—the difficult part is making sure you only pull weeds and not anything else.  Once I could tell the coffee trees and neighboring tea trees from the various other small trees, grass, bamboo, and vines, it was only a matter of bend, pull, throw, pull, throw, pull, throw, until my row was clear of all but the coffee trees 60 inches apart, lined by nitrogen-fixing soybean plants along each row, with piles of uprooted weeds on the space between the terraces.

In the first piece of land, taller nitrogen fixing trees already lined the terraces where the coffee seedlings were planted, so the weeds weren’t too bad.  The other two fields, however, were only recently cleared to be used for planting, and the jungle is threatening to take back over before the little trees have a chance to establish the land as their personal territory.  Grass had grown up high enough in some places to block the trees from getting enough sun, and in other areas we had to gently unwrap vines from the coffee seedlings to keep them from being strangled.  After the tree is removed from the clutches of the vine, though, the gentleness comes to an end—I would then rip up the vine from the ground, sometimes having to pull for several feet to find its origin.  Seeing how tenacious those vines were in keeping their grip on that mountainside, I began to imagine them becoming animated and grabbing me in their stranglehold, angry at my act of war against them.  Good thing I had friends with machetes within shouting distance.

Working on my own row in the field, head down, on my hands and knees in the dirt, I remembered my dad telling me that the part of farming he enjoys is being outside and having time to think.  I understand more now how riding the tractor to sow wheat on the weekend can help him unwind from the previous five days at his desk.  I’m not saying I want to become a farmer, by any means, but for a couple of days the change of scene was good, getting dirt under my nails was good, letting my thoughts wander was good.

Wander from imagining the vines reaching up to choke me—to trying to figure out what song it is that those birds crying out from the nearby rainforest remind me of.  Is it the Beatles?  Yes—they sound like George Harrison’s guitar gently weeping.  And speaking of him, does that burst of light after the rain make anyone else think of “Here Comes the Sun”?

It rained off and on the first afternoon and next morning, but not enough to make the work more difficult.  The hike from the village to the fields was steep, and the mud was slick, but I managed to only fall once.  We had to cross a river twice, but since the log bridge no longer has a handrail and involves a balancing act when walking across it, I opted to wade across, shoes and all, at a spot where the highest point came to my knees.

The feeling of soreness in my legs and back at the end of the day was light compared to the satisfaction of looking across the rows of baby coffee trees, free of weeds and with newly covered lines of soybean seeds running parallel.  Evidence of a hard day’s work.

Somebody will come back to check on the fields in a couple of weeks, and the weeds will have reemerged.  The process will begin again, until the rainy season is over and growth slows back down.  I came to the coffee fields to help for a couple of days, but for the people who live on these mountainsides, farming by hand is a daily reality.  Evidence that Genesis 3:17-19 is very much literal.


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An Acquired Taste

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Shortly after our group arrived in MN village for a three day visit and time of working in the coffee fields, my young friend YGS spotted me on the path to the public outhouse and waved me over towards her.  She was sitting on the second floor porch of a neighbor’s house, chatting with two other girls between 6 and 9 years old.  After finishing my business, I climbed up the stairs to give my greetings to my young friends.

YGS rambled and giggled on and on, catching me up on all that I’ve missed in the past few months since she had seen me—her dad going off to work in a factory in the east, her getting hepatitis A and spending several days in the hospital, her dad coming back because of the illness, their selling the family dog as meat to help pay the hospital bills, her eagerness to start second grade the next week.  I didn’t have to do much prompting to get her to tell me about her experiences in town when she went to the hospital, the older of the two sisters with us adding a detail here or there when YGS left something out.  The younger sister sat between us, her eyes going back and forth from face to face as we talked, like she was watching a tennis match.  She’s too young to have started school yet, so she can’t speak much Chinese, but she did her best to keep up with our conversation.

I was feeling drained of energy from the drive up the Mountain and from our first afternoon of pulling weeds on the coffee terraces, so I suggested to the girls that we have a cup of coffee together, knowing they wouldn’t enjoy it, but wanting to be polite and offer it.  YGS eagerly accepted, and the other two followed hesitantly.  I made myself a cup from one packet of 3-in-1 instant coffee, sugar, and creamer, and I used a second packet for the girls to share in two cups between the three of them.

We sat on a low bench together, looking out at the village path ahead of us, watching as people came in from the fields.  We held our improvised coffee mugs (one metal tea cup and two plastic cups) gingerly around the rims to keep from burning our fingers, blowing on them as we made small talk.

Soon my cup was empty.  The three girls were still passing their cups between themselves, pretending to take sips and making excuses about how hot the coffee was.  I caught a glimpse of the youngest making an overly dramatic gagging face after she tasted it, before “accidentally” spilling half of it on the edge of the porch.

“I know coffee can taste bitter,” I said, despite the fact that 3-in-1 packets are about 95% sugar.  “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it.  I won’t be upset.”

YGS made a couple more attempts at being polite by drinking it before asking me, “Do you think pigs like to drink coffee?”

David and Julie’s pig pen is directly under the porch we were seated on.  The temptation to pour her cup over the edge into their trough was visibly creeping across YGS’ face as she gazed down on those pigs.

“I don’t know.  I’ve never given a pig coffee before,” I replied.

She thought about it a minute more, then shook the idea out of her head.  She dumped the two cups of coffee on the ground next to the outdoor water faucet and gave them a cursory rinse before handing them back to me.

(I took a picture of YGS and myself last year, and now she asks me to take one of us together every time I visit.  My wet hair was no excuse not to take one on this recent visit.)

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Nujiang (pt 2)

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The house also had no facilities for bathing.  The village was located a 20 minute walk from the main public road between Nujiang and the capital, and on the side of the road by the village path was a hot spring where an enterprising local had set up four or five individual stalls for showers.  Celia and I walked down to the road and paid about 25 cents to take a shower at the midway point of my week in her village.  It was one of the loveliest showers I’ve had in my life.

One of my most bizarre village memories comes from that week.  Celia had a little radio that she would use to pick up English language broadcasts of programs from the BBC and Voice of America.  For several hours one day, as we sat around the courtyard of the house, she listened to a station that continuously played the song “Rhinestone Cowboy.”  I sensed my sanity departing after the first couple of times we listened to it, but at that point in my overseas living experience I was too polite to tell my hostess that I didn’t relish hearing that song even once, much less endlessly.

A couple of days before my departure for Kunming, Celia and I had to go to the main town in Nujiang to buy my bus ticket.  From the head of the village path into town was a 45 minute drive on the public road.  We caught rides there and back in the trucks and vans of local drivers, my first (though definitely not last) hitchhiking experience in China.  I don’t remember much about the town except that we bought my ticket, ate a most undelicious ice cream bar, and visited a tiny bookstore where Celia browsed for Chinese reading material and I searched unsuccessfully for anything in English.

Celia and I remained friends throughout my time at the university in Kunming, eating dinner together regularly and shopping and the like.  I had her parents’ number when I left school, but lost it long ago.  Few local students used email in 2001, so I’ve had no way to contact her these past several years.  I thought of her and her family in Nujiang as our team drove north to get the seedlings, wondering if she’s an English teacher now in the town where we overnighted before visiting the coffee farm.  I may never know.

Next in the “A Different Trip” series:  ”Adam’s Journey“

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Nujiang (pt 1)

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This was not my first trip to the area, named Nujiang after the mighty river flowing south through these towering mountains.  I came here in the summer of 2001 on a trip of several firsts.  My first ride on a sleeper bus.  My first stay in a village for longer than overnight.  My first time to eat an entire mango straight off the seed, juice dripping down my arm.

I had also just completed my first full semester of Chinese study in the provincial capital, and a friend from the English department invited me to her village during the summer break.  Looking back, I’m surprised I went.  Really, I’m sure I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Starting with the 17 hour sleeper bus from Kunming out to Nujiang.  Ahh, the sleeper bus.  Imagine the sleeping compartment of a train, and then shorten the bed by at least a foot.  And back in those days (did I really just say that?) the beds were arranged differently.  Now, there are three beds across the width of the bus, with a tiny aisle in between, four or five rows to the back of the bus.  But in 2001, they were configured in only two beds across, with two people per bed.  If you knew (and liked) the person you were traveling with, great for you.  If not, it would be a long trip in that little bed.

On the way out to my friend Celia’s village, she and I shared the very back section of the bus with three other girls.  One big bed across the back of the bus, five girls, a 17 hour mobile slumber party.  What Celia didn’t tell me before I got on that bus was that she wasn’t coming back with me to the capital in a week like I had expected.  I found out a couple of days later that she was planning to stay longer, and I would be making the return trip alone.  Well, me and the stranger (a lady, thank goodness) I shared a bed with.

I spent the week visiting with her family and friends in the village, sitting on their porch, watching the clouds and sunlight change throughout the day on the surrounding mountains, basking in the serenity of a week away from the city.  I walked in the nearby forest with Celia and her younger brothers and sister, using banana leaves as umbrellas when it started raining.  One afternoon we walked two hours one way to see a waterfall, the banana leaves no help in keeping us from getting soaked on the way home.

The bathroom situation left much to be desired and was a bit of trial by fire for me in getting used to village stays.  There was no toilet, only a small shack over a pit right outside the courtyard of Celia’s parents’ house, two planks to squat on, with a space in between.  Think Slumdog Millionaire.  I did a lot of praying that week that I wouldn’t trip and that the planks would hold.

Next in the “A Different Trip” series:  ”Nujiang (part 2)“

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Handicrafts

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One of my teammates is thinking about starting a small business to make and sell handicrafts locally, and I’ve been sharing some of my own design ideas with her lately to help her think through what might be good sellers.  For years now I’ve been collecting pieces of traditional fabrics from Asian markets, with the hopes of one day having time to design my own bags and skirts.  Now I can make the time to do it, all in the name of helping a co-worker get her business up and running.

We have also been talking about teaching our friends in the villages how to make bead jewelry so they can sell it here in town for some extra income.  One of our main problems for now is finding the supplies to make large quantities of jewelry.  Beads are abundant in larger cities in Asia, but in our small town they are hard to come by.  So when a local friend told me I could find wholesale beads in the Thai import market near my apartment, I went to check it out.

I easily found the store she told me about, but was disappointed when I realized that the vast majority of their stock was Buddhist prayer beads.  I did find one small bin of simple jade beads of various shades, though, and decided to buy a few as a sample.  As I was digging through the bin and haggling with the Chinese shop owner over the price, I glanced up and realized the only other customer in the store was a Burmese Muslim jade dealer who was sorting through a stack of threads for making necklaces and bracelets.

It was one of those odd moments in life where I catch myself thinking, “How on earth did I end up here?”  A Christian girl from Texas, shopping next to a Burmese Muslim man wearing a long beard and a longyi, in a Chinese Buddhist shop of imports from Thailand.  Surreal.


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Village Water Splashing

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Our friends in MN, both the old village and the new, asked us to come up to the Mountain to celebrate Water Splashing Festival this year, so on the second day of the holiday we piled in both the truck and the jeep to make the drive up to the villages.  Road construction continues to improve the travel conditions, and we’re hopeful that the trip will consistently stay at around 2 1/2 hours or less in the days ahead.

We made our way from house to house, eating meals with friends and leaving them gifts of fresh baked goods, candy, and instant coffee.  It was a good couple of days of visiting families our team has come to love.

But as far as Water Splashing festivities go, the trip was a bust.  We had been told by numerous people that there would be a big village dance the day we were there.  We heard a village spokesman make an announcement on the loud speaker that could be heard in every house, that everyone should come to the center of the village so the dancing could begin.

We went to see the excitement.  I was ready to join in, wearing my new holiday dress and my dancing flip-flops.

But no one was there.  A couple of sleepy guys half-heartedly banged a drum and cymbals, while six or seven girls made an effort to dance to their less than enthusiastic music.  There was obviously no life in this party.  We heard later that all of the other guys in the village were too drunk to show up and play for the girls to dance.

To top it off, I barely got splashed with any water.  I didn’t relish the thought of a bucket being dumped over my head, but it was hot enough outside that I would have appreciated a couple of squirts with a water gun.

A surprise visit from Colleen, home for the holiday from her job across the border, made the trip worthwhile.  The photo above was taken with Colleen and two American girls at her grandparents’ house.


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