My Life in Our Village

Our Remote Rice-farming Village in Northern Thailand

Life in our village began for me in 2005. We stayed in Mum’s house at first, but had a room to ourselves, which I assumed was the house Temple… a bit like the front room used to be for laying out the dead.

How wrong I was. We stayed in that lovely room for about a year while waiting for our own house to be built over the lane.

It was ten years after that that I learned the truth about that room. It was my wife’s brother’s, and he had been sleeping on the kitchen floor for twelve months. I have often thought about that act of kindness, because I don’t know anyone in my homeland who would have done the same for me or for whom I would sacrifice my room for so long.

Village Celebrities

In those days, we were invited to all the parties going. It seemed that everyone wanted to make me feel at home, and welcome Neem back home too. I got to know a lot of people very quickly. One odd thing about being in so many family homes was that I met all the children. Most of those under ten were very frightened of me, and younger children still would run screaming into their mother’s arms on sight of me.

Thankfully, that rarely happens now. I have often wondered whether parents used to scare their kids into doing things by threatening them with big white giants or ghosts, and then I turned up – a six foot, 120 kilo white guy with a full-set. Just like Western parents would invoke the Boogeyman.

I have asked, but no-one will admit to it. Don’t forget that these old remote villages were usually surrounded by forest as recently as the 1960’s, so parents had to say something to keep their kids from wandering off. In those days, the forest had 30 foot constricting snakes, 12 foot tigers, eight foot crocodiles near the water’s edge, and six foot slavers.

Life was very dangerous in villages only 65 years ago!

Daddy’s Hobby, volume one in the Behind The Smile Series