A Rural Lifestyle By Jeff

[This article is obviously written by a Chilip married to a Thai girl and living in a Thai village. The story depicts a rural setting similar to that of a Bhutanese village. That is why I posted the articale here. ]

Well, I just want to stay in touch and let you know how I am and how you can get a hold of me to let me know how things are there. To start, it's HOT here, and humid. My first 3-4 weeks here it was 100+ and humidity near that, but lately we've had rain enough to cool things off into the 85-90 range, although it does cool off nicely at night. I do live in a jungle, so what can I expect. I live in Northwestern Thailand in a small, rural village where they grow rice and raise chickens and Brahma type cattle. You know, with the humps on their backs. On a map just find Chiang Mai, the largest city in Northern Thailand. We're about 150 miles south of that. If your map is detailed enough, find Phrae, or Lampang. We're close to those.

People are very poor here, living on a subsistence level, but we have built a very nice house, and thanks to my retirement money and savings, have everything we want, mainly because it is quite inexpensive to live here. I could never have retired and stayed in the states. I live with my wife and her two children, a boy and girl. Thom, the boy is 16 and Thai the girl is 10.

There's not much to do here, in our village of Pah Mo, but we can drive about 20 minutes to a small town that has a market and about a 6 block long main street holding bank, and a number of small stores. About a 40 minute drive takes us to the next larger town which has many more stores. It probably has about ten to fifteen thousand people, and has pretty much everything. including a fairly modern looking supermarket, a department store, a business district of about 10 - 12 square blocks, and a few schools. If we want to travel an hour and half, there is a pretty big city with a movie theatre and mall complex that has a few restaurants, including a Burger King and a store called Big C which is like a Big K-Mart.

I'm slowly picking up the language with the emphasis on s-l-o-w-l-y. It's a hard language to learn, especially hard to write, since the characters are totally different from ours. Here's a sample: ???? Very cool looking, I think, but, hard to learn. As for the food, that's just as difficult. In the village here they gather, fish or hunt a great deal of it. I have personally eaten food containing snake and snails, mostly because I want to try everything, but I stop at raw meat in a bowl of blood and the occasional dog that gets eaten. Two entrees that my wife does not eat or prepare, thank God. Much of what she makes is quite good, and there is a small local restaurant that prepares a few really good noodle dishes. It's a stretch calling it a restaurant. It is open on three sides , has a concrete floor, picnic type tables and benches. Chickens stroll through as you eat. The cook often has to shoo them off the counter, and I eat with one hand and shoo flies with the other, but.. the food's pretty good. Thai cooking usually combines sweet, sour, and HOT! I'm talking 5 alarm fire here. I literally cannot touch some of the dishes to my tongue. Some of the fruits are very exotic and delicious, but many of the vegetables, leaves, stems and roots they cook with are very different flavors from anything I have ever experienced. Oh, did I mention rice? Well, there's plain white rice, and sticky rice, which is eaten with your hands out of a community basket, rolled up in a ball and dipped into various bowls of food. There's rice in the morning, rice at noon and rice at night. Like westerners, they eat three times per day, but make no distinction between the three meals in what they eat. There's nothing like eggs or cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch and meat and veggies for dinner. You could just as likely have a bowl of fish head soup, sticky rice, and a plate of leaves and stems for breakfast as for lunch or dinner. It's all dinner to them! By the way, I've started preparing some of my own food. I buy a large can of Quaker oat's at the supermarket when we go into town, and eggs are abundant, all "free range"! Chickens are running all over, and I can make western style meals from some of the same ingredients used in Thai cooking, except for the snakes and dogs. We were driving home from town one day when a rather long snake, I would say about 6 foot, was crossing the road in front of us. My wife, Thom and Thai all pointed excitedly at it shouting "gnu, gnu" or snake, snake. I didn't know if they wanted me to brake so I wouldn't hit it, or if they just wanted to make sure I saw it, until my wife said "can eat", "aroi", delicious. They wanted me to run over it. I did, no preservation of wildlife here, and Thom leapt from the car practically before I could stop, in order to capture it. Unfortunately, yeah right, it got away into the jungle growth alongside the road, sporting a new set of tire tracks.

Many of the local women bathe and wash clothes in the river. We are without water about 1 day per week for about 6-10 hours, and electric has gone out on us twice now in the 6 weeks I've been here.

I know some of this sounds a little crazy / dismal, but the benefits far outweigh the negative.

To get away, we can go to Chiang Mai, which is about a 3 hour car ride on a decent road, or a 6 hour train ride on a train circa 1930, that stops at every little village on route. Chiang Mai is a pretty large city, with a good selection of very nice hotels, to downright 5 star and a zillion restaurants. It is a real cultural hub for northern Thailand, mixing Chinese, Laotian and Burmese cultures. Maybe you've heard of the "Golden Triangle" notorious for it's drug smuggling. Well, this is it!

Bangkok is further, about a 10 hour train or 11/2 hour flight, but is a city of 8 million and as you might guess has everything you may desire, and then some. It's a very fun place to visit with Moo Thai boxing, floating markets, Buddhist Temples, Thai massage, movies, malls, commuter rail system. It's sort of an Asian New York or Chicago.. We can eat at small open air restaurants for about 85 cents a piece to rather nice restaurants for about $3 to $6 per person. In other words, a very reasonable holiday getaway can be had.

Southern Thailand is surrounded by the Bay of Thailand, the Andaman Sea and the South China Sea, and has a plethora of beautiful tropical islands and beaches in resort type settings.

Thai people are, by in large, a very happy, open, loving people. They don't call this "The Land of Smiles" for nothing. As a matter of fact, Long, a local lady who sells the lottery tickets stopped by the other day, and my wife, Pin, who she had stopped to see, was working in her sister's rice field. That didn't bother Long one bit. She sat down with a big grin on her face and we spent an hour smiling, laughing, and trying to speak to each other. She doesn't speak a word of English, and my Thai is severely limited, but we did a lot of smiling, nodding, and laughing at each other's attempts at communication. I finally showed her the flash cards I had made to study Thai from and she had a ball showing them to me one at a time and correcting my pronunciation. You try pronouncing a word that starts with "ng" !!

Note: This was a letter written to me by my good friend a few months ago. I went to his wedding last January in this hill tribe area, and it was insane, and I wondered what he was doing. He is now staying with me in San Diego for 6 weeks, taking care of business. When he showed up I couldn't believe how thin he had gotten. He just couldn't stand the crap they were gathering in the hills to eat, and didn't have the nerve to tell his wife that either he or she had to start cooking some other food. He's been grocery shopping every day here, and gained over 15 pounds his first 3 weeks here and is back in good health.

I'm going to his village to visit him in a couple months, and promised I would go shopping before I go up into the hills and bring something that wasn't gathered in the forest. Just a reminder folks, you don't have to lose yourself or your personality when you are in Thailand. Don't depend on the woman to make everything you like all the time. You can shop and cook your own food when you want. And for God's sake learn the language. My friend feels like such an outsider in his village and losing his personality, because he can't joke around and participate in the conversation. Thailand is lovely, but don't lose yourself there.

Top 10 Japanese universities

I have often been asked to name good universities in Japan. Here are the top 10 Japanese universities. While University of Tokyo (UT) is usually ranked as #1 in Japan and also in Asia, Kyoto University has produced more nobel laureattes than UT. There are also some other good universities, which are not in the ranking due to their small size compared to those given below, but offer good education. Hitotsubashi is on such university.

1 University of Tokyo
2 Kyoto University
3 Osaka University
4 Tokyo Institute of Technology
5 Tohoku University
6 Keio University
7 Kyushu University
8 Nagoya University
9 Hokkaido University
10 Tsukuba University

Why Third World countries are poor (By Luc Loraine)

[This article tries to reason why some countries are rich while others are poor. This map is very interesting. It may serve as a basis of racism .]

Most rich countries are in the North of the globe, and most poor countries are in the South, but it’s not geography that causes wealth or poverty. After all, Australia and New Zealand are part of the Southern hemisphere, and both are doing fine. You couldn’t say this of Papua New Guinea, which is the Asian country closest to Australia and New Zealand.

A superficial view is to blame racial differences. Black Africa is the poorest and most disordered part of the world, and Haiti, with an almost entirely black population, is the poorest country of the Americas. But the coincidence is accidental.

What makes some countries rich, and others prone to poverty is not related to skin color or racial factors. Many immigrants from poor nations do very well in the US and Canada (though one has to admit that both countries are likely to make immigration easy only for the best and the brightest of those who hail from Third World countries).

It is also not the presence or lack of natural resources what makes a country rich or poor in the long run. Japan is a country with very limited natural resources, and it has been the richest country in Asia for a long time. On the other hand, it is easy to predict that some Third World countries that currently are rich because of immense reserves of natural wealth while not being burdened with large populations, will slide back when the natural resources are depleted.

But why are the people of some countries doing well, in spite of the destruction brought by lost wars, and in spite of the lack of natural resources, or an unfavorable climate?

It’s wrong to search for just one answer. There are many aspects that determine how well, or haw badly, a country will fare economically.

Some aspects relate to the attitudes of people. Other aspects are just of a matter of the political system (think North and South Korea). And I assume that in the coming world, with an ever higher degree of globalization, providing a favorable political and social environment will become ever more relevant.

Educational systems certainly play a role. Richer countries typically have better educational systems, and the discrepancy normally reaches back more than just a generation or two.

Furthermore, in some cultures, parents and the society put more value on education than in others. Societies that have been influenced by Confucian teaching, from Singapore to Korea, will likely feature more educational drill than, for example, Islamic societies.

I cannot, and don’t want to attempt to, list all the aspects that determine whether a country is relatively rich or relatively poor. I really only want to discuss some aspects that have come to my mind.

THE COMMON GOOD

One aspect that determines the likelihood of economic success in a given society is the emphasis, or lack of emphasis, that is put, on the common good.

A cultural mentality that emphasizes self-sacrifice for the common good has played a major role in the economic development of Japan and other East Asian nations in the second part or the 20th century.


From the perspective of the individual with advanced self-cognition, emphasizing the common good (and therefore solidarity) sometimes makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. When emphasizing the common good results in an advantage for the individual during his life time, it is philosophically sound for the individual to act in solidarity. When such an advantage cannot be derived during a person’s lifetime, or when such an advantage cannot be realistically expected, it makes better philosophical sense for the individual to emphasize his own good, an not the common good.

ETHNIC HOMOGENITY

Psychological factors depend, for example, on the ethnic fabric of a country. If a society is ethnically homogenous to a very high degree (as are, for example, Japan and South Korea), it will be more likely that individuals will strongly identify with the community, and thus be willing to emphasize the common good.

The lack of ethnic homogeneity, to a certain degree, explains why the economies of countries of sub-Saharan Africa fare so poorly. Africa is by far the ethnically most fractionated continent of the earth, and practically no country there has boundaries that match ethnic territories. The people primarily identify with their clans, and beyond their clans, they identify with their ethnic relatives (by and large those who speak the same language). People don’t identify with their central governments, and not even with the organizational structures of the town they live in. This creates an atmosphere that isn’t conducive to economic development. Hence, these countries are poor and will likely stay poor.


IDENTIFICATION WITH TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES

Countries with respected traditional authorities are in a better position. In countries like Thailand and Japan, where old monarchies are revered, they contribute to the identification of individual members of society with a common good, represented by the monarchy. By contrast, many of the poorest countries of the world are so-called republics where there isn’t even a respected presidency.

Yes, there are numerous other factors that determine economic success; but other factors being equal or just comparable, the degree to which the individual members of emphasize the common good reliably predicts how well a society will fare economically.

ROAD TRAFFIC AS INDICATOR

One can measure the degree to which, in daily life, the individual members of a society value the common good through a simple indicator: road traffic

When a large number of participants in road traffic are willing to give way because it makes sense for traffic flow overall, people uphold the common good versus individual advantages. The opposite is a me-first attitude, even at red lights. Traffic chaos indicates little respect for the common good, as well as the inability of the authorities to implement rules of the common good against me-first traffic participants. Either way, traffic chaos indicates a decreased likelihood for successful economic development, while countries in which road traffic discipline is observed will usually do much better.

Traffic discipline is excellent in Northern Europe and North America, which goes hand in hand with countries in these locations being the richest in the world. Traffic discipline is better in Bangkok than in Manila or Jakarta, which is in line with the development progress in the respective countries over the past decades. Traffic rules are largely ignored in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

OVER-EMPHASIZING THE COMMON GOOD

I have indicated above that societies are all the more likely to prosper the more its members are willing to emphasize the common good over individual advantage, even to the point of self-sacrifice, which, from the perspective of self-cognition, is wrong.

Unfortunately, Christianity and Islam have both heavily benefited from the willingness of its disciples to give their lives for the ideals of their religions.

Where the Third World is first (By Anonymous)

There are plenty of statistics about childhood in the Third World, showing that the struggle for survival is long and hard. But in the rich world, children can suffer from a different kind of poverty –of the spirit. For instance, one Western country alone now sees 14,000 attempted suicides every year by children under 15, and one child in five needs professional psychiatric attention.

There are many good things about childhood in the Third World. Take the close and constant interaction between children and their parents, relatives and neighbours. In the West, the very nature of work puts distance between adults and children. But in most Third World villages mother and father do not go miles away each day to do abstract work in offices, shuffling paper to make money mysteriously appear in banks. Instead, the child sees mother and father, relations and neighbours working nearby, and often shares in that work.

A child growing up in this way learns his or her role through participation in the community’s work: helping to dig or build, plant or water, attend to animals or look after babies –rather than through playing with water and sand in kindergarten, building with construction toys, keeping pets or playing with dolls.

Third World children are not usually shut up indoors, still less in highrise apartments. Instead of dangerous roads, "keep-off-the-grass" signs and "don’t speak to strangers", there is often a sense of freedom to wander and play. Parents can see their children outside rather than observe them anxiously from ten floors up.

Of course twelve million children under five still die every year through malnutrition and disease. But childhood in the Third World is not all bad.