A good chunk of the kids living on site speak to each other in a language that is not Thai and is not English. Not understanding a word of this language, I used to get really discouraged when I’d hear what I thought was Thai, but was actually Akha. Now when I hear them speaking to each other, I know what is Thai and what is Akha because Akha sounds kindof like, “Mebula mebula bula bula, acheepadtengya mebula.” And Thai sounds like a more conventional Asian language.

Akha is a language and hilltribe situated in this region. Hilltribes are not acknowledged by the Thai government, thus the Akha kids, as well as many other kids on site, do not have any kind of citizenship. This means they don’t have a lot of normal rights, and they can’t get passports; they can’t cross the border. According to one girl on site, the waiting list to acquire citizenship is something absurd like 20 years.

Yesterday I was playing games with some of these kids when I noticed a few of them had bruises around the necks and collar bones. They looked like whip marks, so out of concern, I asked one girl what happened and what I caught from her response was something like, “I haven’t been feeling well. I’ve had a fever and so I dtoong dtoong dtoong.” I didn’t understand this dtoong word and so I just knit my eyebrows and repeated, “dtoong…?” And she replied, “Yeah yeah yeah, dtoong,” and then she demonstrated and act of sadism on her friend sitting next to her.

With two fingers she plucked at the flesh of her friend’s neck; the same spot over and over for a good minute until it turned purple. In the midst of all of this, I asked her, ‘Um, that doesn’t hurt?” and she replied, “No really! It’s good for you, here let me show you.” And so she came over to me and started the same procedure on the side of my neck. With every pinch from her knuckles, I’d react saying, “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow, OW!” growing louder and louder as she progressed, forgetting that “Ow” in Thai means, “Want.” So to her this sounded something like, “Want, want, want, want/more more more!” and so of course she wouldn’t stop this nonsense of producing a bruise on my neck until I grabbed her hands and pleaded with her to stop.

I’d google Akha hilltribe remedies and figure out what exactly this whole rapid pinching treatment is supposed to accomplished, but frankly, I have a hard enough time writing emails and blog entries over the last couple of weeks. Besides, I enjoyed having other people discover Malayan Sun Bears for me when I couldn’t figure out what that monkey bear was supposed to be.