Sea Gypsy Village

I wasn't able to post last night because I finished the day too late. We went out to Laem Pom (lam-pom, like pom-pom) first thing in the morning and I started in on the construction site. I had a job that's known among the volunteers as "sandboxes." These are beds of sand laid down so that a concrete floor can be poured on top. Our job for the day was to shovel the sand into wheelbarrows, move it into the partially-built house, and level it out. A hard day of shoveling sand, but it felt good.

The women of the village provided lunch for us, and I learned some more about the situation of the village. The history of the place is that it used to house a tin mine, and many Sea Gypsy families settled there to work in it. About 30 years ago the mine closed, and about 50 families remained. The many holes in the ground from the mine created a number of small ponds, and the Thai mafia, which has connections with the resort business, decided that the village would make a lovely 5-star, 18-hole golf course. They came in the night and bulldozed a restaurant and some bungalows, then covered them up with earth. I suppose this was a way to deprive the villagers of any tourist dollars, as well as intimidate them.



At any rate, when the tsunami came, it was 10:30 in the morning, and about 100 of the 200 villagers were either at work or at school, away from the village. (The similarities between this disaster and 9/11 are striking--the mid-morning disaster that wiped out everything in its path and left personal effects scattered everywhere. Only the luck of the moment determined who lived and who died.) One group of elephant herders were taken aback when their elephants started to run toward the hills--they followed the herd and so were saved by the elephants. This seems appropriate, as it's the sacred animal of Thailand. The rest of the village, and all the remaining people (mostly women, probably) was completely wiped out. No one knows exactly what happened that day.

The Thai mafia thought this was a great chance to get the land they'd been after all along. They immediately moved in, and by the time the villagers returned they had cordoned off the place and had armed guards who would not let anyone through. The villagers are convinced that there were survivors under the wreckage, but when they finally got into the village everyone was dead. One woman whose daughter was in that wreckage decided that she would not be intimidated by the mafia. She went around showing everyone a photo of her daughter before the disaster and a photo of the body afterward--not unlike Emmet Till's mother. Eventually the Bankok post published the story and it got some publicity. This woman, who is now the village headwoman, gathered as many people as she could--everyone who was not either paid or scared off by the mafia--and decided to start rebuilding. They have been fighting the mafia ever since.

The importance of the construction project is this: since the villagers had only common-law rights to the land (no official title) and the mafia has a fraudulent title, the case is now in court. Apparently property rights in Thailand have a lot to do with who is living on open land and how long they've been there, so the sooner the villagers get the houses up and can start living in them, the stronger their case will be in court. Volunteers are 1orking with the Thais to put up 30 houses, and the site has gone from nothing six months ago to lots of houses in various states of completion and a projected finish date of 2 months from now.

The Thai mafiosos have not stopped trying to seize control, of course. Today I learned that although they have electricity in their own building nearby, they have paid off the electric companies not to restore power to the village. A few months ago workers from a company who laid irrigation pipes were all arrested (the mafia connections are far-reaching). The project manager told me today that there were not even any companies willing to bring in construction equipment, so they literally had to go out and buy their own backhoe. However, the presence of the Westerners throws the mafia off their feed. They can't hurt Westerners without drawing attention to the whole situation, so they have stopped skulking around the village during the day. Meanwhile, the houses are going up.



Here we are at the end of the day with the sandboxes finally filled.
I was really pleased to have helepd put in the foundation for one of the larger houses yesterday. I must have moved 8000 tons of sand! It was fun, though. The people I was working with are great, and the Tsunami Volunteer Center is a really awesome organization. (They are affiliated with Save the Children UK) They are adamant about letting the villagers call the shots and decide what they want done and how they want it done. Then the volunteers come in and do the manual labor, freeing up the skilled laborers to do what they do best. I'm happy to shovel sand for that!