Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

Yet the traditional lifestyle was becoming less appealing in general. “As Akha are increasingly incorporated into the Thai nation-state,” wrote anthropologist Cornelia Kammerer, “Akha men who in bygone days would have jovially competed with one another to gain knowledge of their zah instead eagerly attempt to attain as much education in the Thai school system as possible.” More children were receiving a formal education, which meant learning to be literate in Thai, not Akha, and many of those children were educated in lowland schools, often run by Christian missionaries.

  Missionaries were also having an impact up in Doi Chang. In 1992, Akha headman Aso’s younger brother Alae had converted to Catholicism. Aso consequently forced his own brother to move outside the village gates. Yet in 1995, Aje, who had graduated from Mahidol University in Bangkok with a degree in public health and had become a missionary, convinced his father, Aso, to become a Baptist and burn his ancestor shrine. Aso refused to move, creating resentment and friction. Three years later, when he fell to his death from his balcony, the villagers concluded that the angry ancestors had toppled him.

  Tooker discovered that there were now five distinct Akha factions in Doi Chang, in addition to the remaining Lisu, Chinese Haw, and Thai government employees.

  One traditionalist group, including Piko’s family, would no longer permit addiction or drug dealing. One of the paradoxical results of the end of poppy cultivation was an increase in heroin addiction, since homegrown opium was no longer available. Smuggled from Burma, heroin was relatively cheap, convenient, and highly addictive. Methamphetamines were also being made in Burmese labs and were becoming popular, called Ya Ba, or “crazy medicine.”

  A collection of essays critical of the impact of development projects on the hill tribes—Development or Domestication?—was published in 1997 and included a chapter on drug abuse. “The age group of highland drug addicts is shifting to younger people,” the authors wrote, “especially among the heroin users.” Young people were more likely to sniff glue or solvents and to use amphetamines. More women were also becoming addicts. Why? “People’s difficulties in coping with the extremely rapid changes in their socio-economic environment, including pressures on them [to] alter their lifestyles, have led to psychological and spiritual stresses, which in turn are a major cause for addiction.”

  Missionary Positions

  INDEED, ACCORDING TO anthropologist Cornelia Kammerer, the economic hardship of those animal sacrifices was one motivation for Akha conversion to Christianity. In 1968, a frustrated missionary had described the Akha as “deeply steeped in their own animistic religion and apparently well satisfied with their own complicated culture, language, and society.” But by the 1990s, Kammerer estimated that “roughly one-fifth to one-third of the approximately 200 Akha villages are fully or partially Christian.” The main reason, she concluded, was poverty. “I had no chickens; I had no pigs [for sacrifices],” an elderly Akha woman explained as her motivation for conversion.

  Christianity offered an alternative that the canny missionaries called the Jesus Zah. A typical Protestant missionary skit showed an Akha throwing down the heavy burden of the Akha Zah in order to accept Jesus. “Most Akha converts to Christianity are simply seeking a replacement zah that is cheaper and easier than their own,” Kammerer concluded. Yet many converts in Doi Chang denied that economics had anything to do with it. Their children who attended mission schools influenced them. Kammerer also noted that Catholics allowed the continuation of many Akha rituals, whereas most Protestants spurned them and banned rice liquor.

  Still, the transition to either form of Christianity could be relatively painless. Like the traditional Akha, Christians buried their dead in coffins, while Buddhists practiced cremation, and new Christian converts could continue to wear their Akha clothing, speak the Akha language, and maintain their patrilineal affiliation.

  While the missionaries meant well and did help in many ways—encouraging education, bringing medicines and vaccines, discouraging drug addiction, helping to sell tribal handicrafts, providing help in acquiring Thai ID cards—they also clearly disrupted traditional beliefs and lifestyles, especially by encouraging parents to send their children to Christian boarding schools. In her memoir, Without a Gate, published in 1990, Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) missionary Jean Nightingale wrote that she and her husband, Peter, “both loved the Akha,” but they thought that the Akha belief in spirits meant that they practiced “demon worship.” They demanded that converts burn their ancestor shrines, which they called “demon shelves.”

  This attitude appalled Matthew McDaniel, an American who in 1991 had moved to the remote northern Thai town of Mae Sai, just across the border from Burma. He bought glass trade beads to sell back in the States. In his first week there, McDaniel heard two old women speaking in a strange, poetic-sounding tongue. He asked a young woman what it was. “Akha,” she said. “We are Akha.” He learned that their villages were up in the mountains. Another day he noticed a little malnourished Akha boy with an ugly open sore on his shin, so McDaniel bought some antibiotic powder, gauze, and tape.

  With no medical training, he found himself regularly tending to such minor wounds. “When I had the money,” he later wrote, “I bought vitamins, lots of Band-Aids, salve ointment for scabies, and anti-fungal cream for cradle cap.” He would also escort women and children to the hospital on the south end of town. If he hadn’t gone with them, “the police would shake them down.”

  Disturbed and intrigued, the American began to seek out the Akha. “I made my way into every Akha village I could find, high in the mountains,” visiting over 200 of them. He brought food and medicine and sometimes paid for a well or pipe from a spring to the village. In the hills, he found that Thai soldiers or Royal Forestry Department officials were forcing some villages to relocate. Border Patrol Police and “Black Shirts” (criminals conscripted into military service) could do anything they wanted. “As a common practice the police arrested Akhas on trivial charges,” McDaniel recalled. “Some Black Shirt commandos raped Akha women in remote regions.” Sometimes when McDaniel took the bus from Mae Sai to Chiang Rai, the police would stop the bus at checkpoints and make Akha without ID papers get off.

  “I then discovered there were missionaries working with the Akha. At first this came to me as quite normal, a good thing,” McDaniel wrote. “But as time went by, I found that not all was well. The missionaries were clearly critical of Akha culture and were removing the children from their families.” The missionaries claimed that they were helping orphans, but often parents had given their children to the missionaries, hoping to give them a better life.

  McDaniel, who later married an Akha woman and founded the Akha Heritage Foundation, became a fierce critic of all missionaries, somewhat unfairly lumping them all together. For instance, he claimed that Paul Lewis, the Baptist missionary and anthropologist, was committing “genocide” against the Akha by offering birth control services, including tubal ligation, which McDaniel called forced sterilization. Yet Lewis helped only women who already had four or five children and were eager for the operation.

  Among other places, McDaniel visited Doi Chang, where he put up some of his “Missionaries Suck” posters. He was particularly harsh on Aje and his Akha Outreach ministry, claiming that Aje required new converts “to dramatically turn their backs on anything Akha… Aje wanted anything that endeared him to Western missions.” On the contrary, Aje insisted that he valued and sought to save Akha culture, which is featured on the Akha Outreach Foundation website.

  In 2004, Matthew McDaniel was expelled from Thailand after numerous run-ins with authorities, including a class action suit against a project initiated by the Thai royal family. In Thailand, it is strictly forbidden to criticize the royal family, although it is acceptable to protest against the government. After a sojourn in Laos, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to highlight the plight of the Akha.

  Prostitution and AIDS

  ONE UNEQUIVOC
ALLY GOOD THING that a missionary accomplished was the establishment of the New Life Center in Chiang Mai in 1987. Paul and Elaine Lewis were increasingly concerned about hill tribe women who had come to the lowlands, desperate for work, and who had become prostitutes, euphemistically called “service women.” Two years before the Lewises retired and returned to the United States, Elaine founded the New Life Center to provide an alternative lifestyle, including education, vocational training (mostly making tribal handicrafts for sale), health care, and “a wholesome Christian atmosphere with emphasis on worth and dignity” for young women who had either been prostitutes or were at risk.

  A 1993 survey of 225 hill tribe villages in northern Thailand showed that of 1,683 women employed outside the village, 610 of them—well over a third—were prostitutes. “Tribal girls and young women, with little education and a near total lack of knowledge of the world outside, became prime targets in the sex industry,” wrote two Lahu women who worked with the New Life Center in 1997. “Some of the girls are knowingly sold into prostitution by their families, which are extremely poor, often addicted to opium or heroin, and feel they have no other alternatives for survival.” But those were a minority. “Most are either lured into prostitution with the promise of paid employment in urban areas, or seek out such employment on their own… All too often they are tricked into what appear to be good-paying jobs in restaurants, private homes, or businesses. Knowing little Thai language and having little education, villagers are relatively easily fooled in this way.”

  In one case, a man posing as a teacher visited a tribal village, offering urban educational opportunities for girls. Some families jumped at the chance, paying 700 baht apiece for seventeen girls to go with him. All were then sold into sexual slavery. Once in a brothel, it was difficult to escape, since the local police, subject to bribes, would frequently track them down and return them. “Some Akha and other prostitutes, better labeled sex slaves than sex workers, are shackled and imprisoned,” observed one anthropologist in 1993. As the Lahu New Life employees wrote:

  The prostitutes themselves face considerable danger if they fail to service enough customers or try to run away. Physical beatings, including on the head, are standard. Another method is to dunk the girl’s head under water until she complies. We have met girls who have been beaten on the legs with rods, beaten on the face with high heel shoes, who have lost all of their teeth from beatings, and some who have gone deaf as a result.

  By this time, many “service girls” were contracting AIDS, which reached epidemic proportions among prostitutes in Thailand during the 1990s. The HIV infection rate in brothels in northern Thailand ranged from 30 percent to 90 percent. Until they began to show clear signs of AIDS the girls were forced to continue to service customers (and transmit the disease), but then they were thrown out to die alone. Some returned to their home villages, pretending to suffer from another disease, since they were ostracized if their AIDS infection was discovered.

  Doi Chang Approaches the Millennium

  BY THE END of the 1990s, the village of Doi Chang was in the midst of a chaotic, troubled transition. While Thailand had been experiencing robust economic growth during most of the 1980s and 1990s—part of the so-called “Asian Miracle”—the boom had only marginally impacted remote hill tribes, and even then it often had a negative impact. Because of the expanding economy, the government was able to pay for agricultural extension efforts and eventually brought electricity to the village, but it also contributed to lowland Thai expansion up the mountainsides and higher prices for the consumer goods that more and more Akha were forced to buy as part of their new lifestyles. Then in 1997, the Thai economy collapsed after the baht was cut loose from its fixed exchange rate with the US dollar, which rippled outward to cause a global recession.

  No one in Doi Chang followed or understood any of these developments, although villagers were impacted when various services were curtailed and employment opportunities in lowland towns dwindled. What the Akha did understand was that their lives were changing. The traditional Akha way of life, with rotational farming based on rice cultivation, was gone. The rituals that they still clung to seemed more and more anachronistic. Most villagers were poor in the midst of a land of plenty and could not figure out how to do any better. Extended families were fragmenting as young people sought jobs in Chiang Rai and elsewhere. Village elders no longer commanded as much respect and power. The future held little hope.

  Yet despite all of this, the Akha remained philosophical and essentially upbeat. They had survived worse. They would find a way to survive this. In December 1997, near the end of a visit to Doi Chang, Deborah Tooker had a three-hour conversation one night with a few Akha. She asked them to reflect on their past and present situation:

  With the backdrop of beatings, torture and misery in Burma, the Akha were willing to accept that changes, even the loss of Akha identity, were inevitable and even positive. After dwelling long on the sad past of the Akha in Burma, one man turned the conversation by saying, “Ma mui-eu je neh jaw mui je do la-eu” (“Good has come out of all our hardships”). After this he elaborated by saying that despite the mixed turn of events in the last 30 years, he appreciated the region and land of [Doi Chang], and he was happy in his present circumstances… Despite the dramatic social changes the Akha had gone through, we (this small group of 7-8 people, including Akha, westerners and Thais) would not [otherwise] be sitting here, enjoying each other’s company.

  But leaders of the younger Akha generation were not so willing to accept their poverty and powerlessness. Surely, there must be a way to maintain their autonomy even if they had to find a way to make money and fit into the Thai economy. Adel, the young Akha who had replaced Beno as the headman in Doi Chang in 1998, when he was only twenty-eight years old, pondered what could be done.

  CHAPTER 3

  Wicha Finds the Way

  ADEL WAS THE son of Piko, an Akha village leader and one of the few Doi Chang farmers who kept trying to grow and sell coffee. Piko had noticed that coffee trees are hard to kill. New growth sprouted from the stumps of the trees that had been cut down, and in a few years, they began to bear fruit. Though untended and unpruned, they produced enough for Piko and a few others to sell, albeit for a pittance. Those frustrating coffee trips to Chiang Mai made a lasting impression on young Adel.

  Like all Akha, Adel has a confusion of names. His real Akha name was Kopeo Saedoo. The first syllable of an Akha person’s name is taken from the last syllable of the father’s name. Thus Adel’s real name, Kopeo, derived from his father Piko’s name. His first nickname as a baby was Modeh, because he was born without hair, like a bald neighbor named Modeh. But as a child he couldn’t pronounce that, and it came out as Adel, which stuck. Since Akha names are either too unfamiliar or otherwise foreign-sounding for Thai officialdom, Akha tribal members also adopted Thai names. Adel’s was Panachai Pisailert. He wasn’t sure of his real birthdate. On his Thai ID, his date of birth was given as January 1, 1972—but all Akha birthdates were listed as January 1. Adel thought he was in fact born some time in 1970, the seventh of nine children of father Piko and mother Bu Chu.

  As a child, Adel recalled picking the beautiful poppy flowers and making garlands of them in December and January, then helping to score the seedpods and collect the opium sap during the harvest in February and March. He watched his father and other men roll the rubbery raw opium into big balls and wrap them in banana leaves, to be sold to Chinese Haw traders. Adel’s family ate the empty poppy pods and used the seeds as seasoning.

  When he was around nineteen years old, in 1989, Adel, who had quit Doi Chang’s inadequate school after the second grade and could speak only a few words of Thai, first accompanied his father to the lowlands to sell coffee. The road was nearly impassable on that first trip. They took the beans down with a horse and cart, then rented a pickup truck to go to Chiang Mai. It took more than eight hours to get there. “Up in the village, a messenger from a trader had promised us 22
baht per kilo,” Adel remembered, “but when we got to the city, they only paid us 12 baht.”

  They returned to Doi Chang that same day, arriving late at night. It never occurred to them to overnight in the lowlands. “We had no idea where to stay. We had no identification. Sometimes we were stopped by the police. We just wanted to get back home.”

  Like the other villagers, Piko eventually cut down his coffee trees, but he was one of the few who resumed harvesting and processing them when the trees grew back. By that time, the price for green coffee beans had gone up somewhat, though Adel had no idea why. In the late 1990s, major cities on the Pacific Rim were beginning to imitate the Western world, discovering the joys of high-grown arabica coffee through coffeehouses that at first catered primarily to foreign tourists.

  By 1998, Adel had left Doi Chang and was living in Chiang Mai, where he had opened a shop selling Akha handicrafts and “antiques,” old tribal items that now fetched cash from tourists. Like many other Akha, he had been forced to the lowlands to make a living. Adel may have been illiterate and missed out on a formal education, but he was shrewd and enterprising, and his Thai speaking skills had improved dramatically.

  He was also recognized by his fellow villagers. In 1998, they elected him the first Akha headman of Doi Chang, to replace Beno, who was retiring. The villagers (the majority of whom were now Akha) chose Adel in hopes that he might be able to bring some of his business acumen and lowland connections back to the mountains. His father, Piko, was well respected, and Adel’s youthful energy could help.

  Adel closed his shop and moved back to Doi Chang, where, as he knew, people were barely eking out a living, in part because most of them had no Thai identification papers. Over the next year and a half, he was able to secure the all-important Thai ID for many of the villagers. Proving to the district officers in Mae Suai, the small city at the base of the mountain, that an Akha had been born in Thailand was challenging, especially when the written records said they had been born in Burma, which was often the case. “I couldn’t read or write,” Adel recalled, “so I could only talk on their behalf.”