Burning to Tell

So, I haven’t been very good about keeping up this blog lately.

The problem is that I have this backlog of things to tell you – big things that will require extensive posts, and little anecdotes that would seem strange to just post on their own – and every time I go to talk about what happened last week, I end up feeling like I can’t do that until I tell you about what happened three months ago first.

But you know what?  Screw it.  I’m just going to tell the stories I’ve got – in order, out of order, any way they come.

So let me tell you about what happened last week. :)

On Wednesday, I had a meeting that was a Very Big Deal:  I presented the paper I’ve been working on for almost six months to the other members of the network, many of whom I’d never met before. 

The meeting was held first thing in the morning at a farm that’s a good hour’s drive outside the centre of the city, rather than at my usual office (which is more central and has an air-conditioned meeting room), because… reasons?  I dunno.  However, I have to admit that it ended up being a good decision:  I think that the participants probably felt more relaxed out there than they would in a more formal environment.  Also, we got to have lunch on the farm (spicy fish stew, steamed eggplant, lots of locally grown everything – mmm), and I got to check out their model ecohouse.  “Ecohouse” is one of those words that, to Americans and Europeans, suggests something sleek and high-tech out of the German passivhaus movement – geothermic heating and intelligent photovoltaic paint.  (Yes, it exists; no, none of us can afford it.)  This place, on the other hand, is a straight-up traditional mud house with a few modifications.  The walls are made of compressed straw bales and mud, sealed with a thin sheen of concrete to defend against flooding, and the roof is thatched.  It is ABSURDLY cool under the Thai sun.  There’s also a biogas digester, which is an elaborate way of saying “plastic tube of buffalo shit and water”.  As low-tech as it is, though, the digester does two immensely cool things:  It gradually breaks down and purifies manure, removing harmful chemicals to create an excellent fertilizer (the plants around the end of the digester looked like something out of Little Shop of Horrors), and it extracts methane gas to power an outdoor stove.  (That also means that the methane doesn’t go into the atmosphere, since it’s a potent greenhouse gas.)  So, ultimately, meeting on the farm was cool, even if the temptation to just curl up on the veranda and go to sleep after lunch was enormous…

As for the meeting itself, I think it went well.  There was a lot of good discussion afterwards concerning the information in the paper, ways to follow up and make sure the information reaches people inside Burma, and what the next stages of research should be.  (It looks like I might be teaching a couple of workshops on sustainable development eventually – whoot!)  It was also a good chance for me to meet everyone ahead of the network-wide meeting in May, when, hopefully, I can negotiate a way to split my time between the office where I’m currently based and one of the other organisations.

There were some moments, though, when I felt very awkward about just how new to this area and these issues I am, and deeply uncomfortable with the way some of the people I’m working with tend to default to white foreigner = expert.  The worst was when a senior official at one organisation asked me, “In your experience, what is the best way to ensure land rights in conflict areas?”

What I said was:  “Well, in X case, it seemed that Burmese activists found Y useful, but the ways you can use that are limited because blah blah blah.  Z can also be helpful, but some communities in Burma have found that etc. etc.…”

What I wanted to say was:  “In my experience?  In my experience?  Dude, I’m a white chick from New Jersey.  Six months ago I was printing brochures and organising working lunches for members of the UK House of Lords.  I’ve never even been inside Burma.  I’ve never farmed, and I’ve never had to fight to defend my family’s land from government troops.  You, on the other hand, have been working in this field for ten years, and have been dealing with these issues your entire life.  I’m humbled that you want my opinion, but I’m terrified that you seem ready to defer to it.”

I understand that there is expertise I can offer in these areas.  I’m just acutely aware of the limits of it.

Speaking of farming, politics, and really good food, though, on Thursday, I went with some of my colleagues to see the water filtration system at Pun Pun farm.

Pun Pun is an organic model farm, created by Thai farmers who were feeling caught in the cycle of more and more expensive pesticides and fertilizers to use on increasingly degraded land.  There’s kind of a revolving door of Asian and Western experts who come to live on the farm and trade practical knowledge and skills.

Photos are from my first visit in October, which is why they look so overcast and cool.  Sigh.

Pun Pun is stunning – it’s right at the base of the mountains, and at this time of year, all the flowering trees are out, so there are these patches of blazing red-orange everywhere you look.  We walked up the long way, across the rice fields, which was hot, but a nice way to get the full tour.

A sweet young American guy showed us how the filtration works – basically, it’s a system of tanks and pipes, allowing the water to run through gravel, sand, and charcoal in turns.  The charcoal strips out pesticides and chemicals, while a thin layer of microorganisms that grow on the top of the wet sand eat harmful parasites and bacteria.  It’s a great system, because there’s very little you have to do to it once it’s set up (the one at Pun Pun is running well after four years of “benign neglect”).  I think my favourite part, though, is that when you’re initially constructing a system like this, the charcoal takes weeks to absorb enough water to make it sink to the bottom of the tank.  At first, it floats, forming a layer so thick that it allows you to walk on top of the water.  That is, until you get your first hint that the charcoal is finally starting to sink… which usually comes when you put your foot down on the layer of charcoal, and you fall right through.  Clearly, you’ve got to have nerves of steel to be a hydraulic engineer.

I was way more interested, though, in the process they use for making charcoal.  The guy who showed us around, Josh, explained that you need a very pure, high-quality kind of charcoal to filter water.  Traditionally, this would be made by putting a stack of wood chips next to a very hot kiln; the wood chips basically burn through without actually burning up, kind of like steaming food.  The problems with that approach are that it uses up two sets of wood (one for the charcoal, one for the fire) to make one batch of charcoal, and that it belches out smoke (a serious health issue).  So what Josh and his friends have done is to, basically, take the whole setup and turn it on its side.  You take a metal drum, punch holes in the bottom (one of my colleagues asked, “Did you drill those?”; Josh, deadpan:  “No, I shot them with my .38,”), and pack it tightly with wood chips.  On top of that goes a chimney, which has large gaps in the sides and space at the top for the fire.  Essentially, with this system, you use the wood that will become the charcoal to also fuel the fire, cutting the amount of wood you need in half.  You light a fire at the top of the drum, and the holes at the top and bottom, combined with the packed, airless environment in between, keeps all the wood from bursting into flame.  Once the wood has burned through and turned into charcoal – this is the coolest bit – the flame goes from orange to blue-purple, at which point you haul the chimney off, slap a lid on the drum, and seal all the gaps with mud to starve the fire, so that it doesn’t then reduce the charcoal to ash.  There’s even a special device called a Jolly Roger chimney that lets you “pirate” heat to make a second, small batch of cooking charcoal at the same time.

Lighting stuff on fire with SCIENCE, man!

My colleagues weren’t quite as impressed, mainly because they were disappointed to find that you need at least two metal drums to make the kiln – drums that are relatively cheap in Thailand, but pretty much impossible to find or buy in the ethnic areas of Burma.  Still, it was pointed out that if you can set up even one of these at a central location, it’s pretty easy to lug the charcoal itself from village to village.  Me, I was still transfixed by the whole “this is when the flame suddenly turns blue” part. :)

You can read about this process (the charcoal-making, not me going all googly-eyed) here - by the way, check out the stunning picture on the cover of the manual – or see a video of Josh and the founder of Pun Pun taking you through the process step-by-step here.

We had lunch at the farm (fantastic fried rice, veggies, and a searingly hot coconut and spinach curry that they warned us about in advance, and I then ate a double helping when no one else could finish theirs, just to be obnoxious :)).  Then we started the long drive back to Chiang Mai…

… except that it was now mid-afternoon, the hottest time of day.

All of us who’d been in the air-conditioned cab of the truck offered to swap with the guys sitting in the back, but they told us they were fine; they were macho, they’d tough it out.  About halfway back to the office, there was a little tap on the back window.

“It’s really hot out here,” they pointed out.

“We know!  That’s why we offered to switch with you!”

“Yeah, but… it’s really hot.”

So we pulled over and swapped places, and wow.  I don’t think I’ve ever actually experienced heat like that.  It wasn’t humid, the air didn’t feel thick or stuffy – it was just that the sun was merciless, and it felt like you were two inches away from it.  I tried fanning myself, and it only made it worse, like I’d turned on a radiator and aimed it at my face.  The only thing that helped was pulling my headband down over my forehead, which made me feel a little like I was about to head into the final battle of a martial arts movie, but remarkably, shading that one part of myself made all the difference.

And then one of my colleagues who was in the air-conditioned part of the car made us pull over so that he could get a slushie.

We were all too lethargic to smack him. :)