Sports Weekend

A few weekends ago I had the chance to travel down to Chiang Dao(a city half way between Fang and Chiang Mai) with everyone from UHDP for the annual sports weekend event organized through the Palaung Village Network. It’s a pretty big event because Palaung villages from all over Northern Thailand come to Chiang Dao for this event, and there were even two Katchin villages that came for the first time this year. There were fourteen different villages represented at the event with a total of around 500 villagers all together. The sports weekend is a really big deal for the Palaung villages because it provides an opportunity for the villages to all come together as one big community, embrace their culture, compete against one another, and cheer for their village’s football team.

The football games were the highlight of the event, and were taken very seriously by most of the villages (hilltribes aren’t allowed to sign up for Thai football leagues, so this village gathering is one of the times that they can get together to compete against other teams). The guys at UHDP had been practicing quite a bit leading up to the games, and they would play football every day after work. I made the mistake of playing with them after work because they were able to gather that I was pretty bad at football, and I didn’t make the cut for sports weekend. I had a lot of fun playing with them, and I think I got a little better from playing with them, but that still doesn’t mean much. It would have been fun to play with the guys because the games often got very intense with players having to be carried off of the field, but I still had fun watching and cheering on UHDP’s team.

I wasn’t left out of the games completely because I had the chance to compete in some of the relay races that they held. There were races on stilts, races where you had to balance things on your head or carry chunks of banana trees in baskets, and also a race where you had to role a tire with a stick, which is the race that I was a part of. I was on a relay team with Ruth, and neither one of us had ever been apart of a relay race where you had to role a tire across a field, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out. We definitely didn’t win the race, but it was just a lot of fun to be a part of all the games that were going on.

I uploaded some of the pictures I took throughout the weekend for everyone to check out. It’s little events like this that have been one of the best parts about living in Thailand at UHDP, and that weekend is something I will never forget.