Lunch for the rice cutters

Everybody loves a baby

The rice harvest is underway and we had lunch today with Waree's sister Rat at one of her farms. There are many small farms scattered around Ban Pho and Rat has four. The rice is cut by hand with sickles and left to dry in bunches in the field. Everybody seems to enjoy cutting the rice even though they only get paid 100 baht (about $3) for a day's work.

Its still early in the season and the rice they are harvesting is in an area where there is little water so it ripened quickly but with poor quality rice and low yields. The return on rice farming is so low that I wonder anybody does it at all but like many things in Thailand people do it because they have always done it and maybe there is nothing else to be done with the land.

Rice is central to the community and is used as a currency and for gifts to the temple, monks, ghosts etc.

Rat prepared the food and we all sat up on a first floor ramshackle farm building made out of rotten timber. We had noodles and sticky rice rolled into a ball by hand and dipped into hot chili and beef dishes plus many other bits and pieces. I am becoming more acclimatised to the hot food and had no difficulty eating although it is still difficult for me to abandon a lifetime of Western hygiene and share eating utensils.

This lack of hygiene doesn't seem to do the people any harm and I am always very fit when I am here. I have had my hep A jab (+BJ) or course. When Adam was born the doctor gave him a hep B injection (which I believe is common in Western hospitals now) and when I asked why not a hep A he said that 80% of the population had antibodies to hep A anyway, which is not surprising given the sharing of food utensils. I suspect that this is healthier than our obsession with germs in any case. I have long thought that one of the functions of kissing is to spread immunity amongst communities. Why else would people press their lips together?

It was a very pleasant lunch with many jokes about the Farang of course which the Farang didn't fully understand but enjoyed just the same. Adam was also a great attraction as you can see in the photo above. Waree’s mother had been concerned that he should come into contact with people who had been harvesting rice as it makes you itchy, but Rat had been cooking so she held him.

After lunch the remains were swept through the cracks in the floor and Rat washed up the dishes in cold water. Some slept under a tree before going back to work.....and we went home with Waree holding our 2 week old baby on the back of the motorcy.

Shade after lunch