12/21/2002 - Elephants, Loy Gratong, Thanksgiving

Happy Christmas, Everyone!

We're running a bit behind on our updates, so this update covers most of November. Let's start out with the animal count here at the house: the water buffalo have disappeared, a stray dog unfortunately killed our kitty, SuperRat had babies in a kitchen drawer, and the ants are a constant reminder not to leave food out.

For those of you who remember our update from last year (#13), the third weekend in November is the Elephant Festival in Surin. So, we headed into Surin and met 16 other PCVs there, including three from Peace Corps in the Philippines. The show was pretty much the same as last year, but the weather this time around was much nicer. (Last year the field was covered in mud due to heavy rains just prior to the festival). Our favorite part was still the little guys playing soccer (the big elephants don't like to run - can't say we blame them. If we weighed 5 tons, we're not sure we'd want to run in 90-degree weather either). Actually, it was sort of a combined soccer-rugby, as the elephants can pick up the ball and run as well as kick it. The elephants are usually about 5-10 years old, and it's actually a lot like watching 5-year-old humans play. Some of them "get it," and some of them just watch the ball roll straight between their legs.

In addition to soccer, one elephant is picked to play tug-o-war against 80 guys. So far the elephant hasn't lost. They also have relay races for the elephants, as well as reenactments of catching wild elephants, and how elephants were used in battle. For the truly brave, you could volunteer to have an elephant step over you - it's supposedly good luck.

The "half-time" show was just as impressive as the elephants, as about 200 high school kids came out and danced traditional Thai dances. The part that was most amazing was that they found 100 boys willing to participate. In most shows, even the minor ones with only 5-10 dancers, you see only women dancing, even the male roles (a reversal from a time long ago when men used to dance all of the roles, including the female ones).

The full moon in November (this year, November 19th) was the holiday Wan Loy Kratong. A kratong is a cross-section of a banana tree trunk, about 2 inches tall and 8 inches in diameter, which has been decorated with folded banana leaves and flowers. Wan means day. Loy means "to float." So this is the day to float decorated banana tree cross-sections (clever, huh?). You add a candle and three incense sticks to the flowers on your kratong and place it in a river or pond. Or, for the vast number of villages with no river or pond, you can simply float them in the rain-water urn. The kratong floats away, and you make a wish. There are several theories behind this tradition, the most common is that you are thanking the river for the water (the rainy season just ended) and apologizing for polluting the river. The ironic thing is that nowadays, many people use Styrofoam instead of a banana tree as the base of their kratong, and use nails instead of toothpicks to attach the leaves and flowers, thereby apologizing to the river for polluting it, by polluting it more.

The day before Wan Loy Kratong, Lisa went over to a teacher's house and made a kratong, along with the teacher's son, Kim. Then, on Wan Loy Kratong, she went with the teacher's family to float the kratongs at the local pond (a former municipal water reservoir). The place was swarming with people and there was a stage and sound system set up, because you can't have a celebration without broadcasting it to the entire known universe. It's actually a beautiful ceremony (if you ignore the acts on stage) and the pond gets filled with shimmering lights, all floating around. In case you didn't have the time (or the talent) to make your own kratong, there were plenty available for sale at the pond. There was also a kratong-building competition, and although the entries were too big to be floated successfully, they were impressive to look at.

This is a big enough holiday that it produced traffic jams for us in Bangkok last year, and this year Denny participated in the holiday even though he was at a seminar in a completely different province. We even got to share our experience of painfully loud music thanks to the power of our cell phones. We have a couple more Loy Gratong pictures here.

November wrapped up with a conference in Bangkok where we got to have Thanksgiving Dinner with our Peace Corps Volunteer family. The Peace Corps Thailand director had everyone - including the current U.S. Ambassador to Thailand (who was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand in the 1960s, we might add) - over to his house for an honest-to-goodness turkey and mashed potato dinner. One of our fellow volunteers shared the following prayer from her family's Thanksgiving tradition, and we thought we would pass it on to you:

There are those who hunger for food and are not fed.
There are those who have food and do not hunger.
May those who hunger for food be fed.
May those who do not hunger for food hunger for justice.
- Dorothy Day

Denny and Lisa