On Poverty

These two pictures were originally posted on Face Book.  They were taken at a Thai Wat sort of in the outback of Chong Khae which has an annual party to bring good luck.

These Thai Wat parties have a little drummer boy motif.  No matter how poor you are, you can bring something to the Wat for the community to enjoy.  Chunky and her friend put out over a hundred dishes of Guy mon chow (rice and chicken:  a bed of rice with boiled, boneless chicken on top with a finger-bowl size of chicken broth and an even smaller one of hot pepper sauce (measured out by the college age boy of her friend as carefully as if he were in a meth lab).

Most people brought food, but an old woman simply brought hot water and Styrofoam cups with sleeves of Nescafe, Olvatine, and cocoa.  But there were people with fried dough, ices, and kanomes (sweets), chicken noodle soup, pork balls, fried fat and so on.  If you go to a Thai party and they run out of food, look out because the world is probably going to end.  Everything was free and the operative idea is that bring what you can afford and good luck will bring it back to you and more (I’m guessing here). 

Some people wearing Thai costumes played Thai music using a portable PA run by truck batteries.  There was a game of chance that required a ten Baht purchase (the only money I saw).  For that you got to pick a tag off the branches of a ten-foot leafless tree.  Take the tag to the counter and you won a prize by the number on the tag.  Chunky won sea faring-theme mantle clock (???), Boom got an umbrella, and five year old Beam got two packets of noodles. Beam was a loser, I’d say, but she didn’t care.   

There were two busses from Bangkok – it’s sort of old home weekend, too.

Around noontime fifteen or so monks started chanting under a big tent -  the day’s highlight. This is when I went across the street from the Wat wall picture to a thatched roof, no door, dirt floor shop that did have an upright cooler with several cold Leo beer cans in it.  There I sat in the cool shade and listened to the monks pray for about an hour (a long playing version in my experience).  It’s amazing how hypnotic these chants can be when you are happily half-buzzed, which is probably why I like the Wat wall picture.

These gatherings (in fact all the Thai parties for death, marriage and sending a twenty year old son off to the Wat to be a monk) are not sophisticate affairs to a westerner’s eye, but then sophistication has nothing to do with these rites of passage.  

It’s odd, now that I think about it, that there are no people in these two pictures, I didn’t plan it. It just happened.  There were over two hundred Thais milling around, but . . . .  It galls me that Chunky seems to know everyone at these parties, and I know, well the people in these two pictures.  It’s as if Buddha told the adherents to move out of the way so the farang could take a picture of what he brought and Buddha could then give him back . . . so much more.