Giving Thanks

It is thanksgiving and thanksgiving always means a lot of food even in Thailand. Normally, Thai people don’t celebrate thanksgiving at all, but since there are four foreigners at UHDP right now, we made sure to have some sort of thanksgiving together. We had a mixture of American and Thai food at our meal such as sweet potato casserole, pumpkin pie, and pad thai. We weren’t sure if the staff would like some of the American dishes that we prepared, but they all said that they liked it and all the food was eaten. It was a much different Thanksgiving than I’m used to since I wasn’t with any family members at all and there was no football game afterwards, but it was still a great feeling to see everyone enjoy food that is very rarely eaten here.

I love the times when we all get together to eat food at UHDP, and when we get together, we eat a lot. Every now and then UHDP hosts groups that come to learn about the work that UHDP is involved with on site and in the surrounding communities, which means that we end up having to feed the groups of people as well. The food is a lot less spicy when student groups come, but the food is still very tasty. So far, we have had two student groups from ISDSI and one group from Payap University come and study at UHDP. The students come and learn how to gather food from the forest, make feed for the animals, make compost, and kill and prepare a pig for dinner. By coming to UHDP, the students get an idea what it’s like for the hilltribes to live and survive in Thailand.

The hilltribes of Thailand are a very marginalized people, and entire villages are often given just enough land to grow the amount of rice needed to make ends meet. Occasionally, the hilltribes are told that they will only be able to live on a certain piece of land for a little while and that they must move when the Thai government tells them to. The Thai government can do this because the hilltribes lack citizenship rights, and the lack of ownership of the land that the hilltribes live on often leads to significant ecological damage of the land, which is one of the reasons UHDP works so hard to provide citizenship rights to the hilltribes in Thailand.

The hilltribes in Thailand do not have the luxury of going to the store to buy a packaged piece of meat nicely cut up for them. The hilltribes have to raise their own food, kill it, and cut it up themselves, so that is one of the things the students get to partake in. A pig for the hilltribes is one of the few sources of protein available to them, and it is also a great source of income for the hilltribes if they choose to sell the pig in the market. The pigs that we have killed at UHDP have all been from the village of Huay Sai Gaow so far, which is where Apot, Geut, and Nong Pon are from. The entire activity of killing the pig, cutting it up, and cooking it only takes a few hours.

It’s really unsettling to eat the meat that I saw scream in pain as it was being killed only a few hours ago. There is no getting around the fact that I’m eating the meat of a pig. I eat pork all the time, but after watching the pig get killed, I know I’m eating pig and, and I don’t think of the meat as just being pork. I’m sure the same would be true if we killed cows here too. I wouldn’t think of the meat as beef. I would think of it as cow meat. It takes a minute or two for the pigs to be killed, as they are first clubbed in the head to knock them out and then stabbed in the heart with a knife. It’s not the most humane process in the world, but it’s the only and most efficient way of killing a pig the hilltribes have. I’m definitely more appreciative of the meat that is on my plate at the end of they day now, and so in this thanksgiving season, I have a much different idea of what it means to be thankful for my food.