Banana flowers, ferns, and kerosene lamps

Here I am in the deep dark center of southeast Asia! Well, it really IS dark. This town, along with many others, is experiencing rotating brownouts. It seems that nation wide the government owned power company is having trouble keeping its act together. The brownouts are daily and anywhere from 6-20 hours long at all kinds of different times but most likely during peak hours.

So what do you do when you are stuck all evening in a guesthouse in a town you don’t know with only a candle and a kerosene lamp for light - and your computer battery is already dead? Why you sit and talk with the night watchman/janitor, what else?!

Since he couldn’t do his job either being as how he couldn’t see to sweep the floors or clean he shared a bit of how he copes with life here. The rise in oil prices has prompted changes even in this remote area. The government has been trying to wean the people off of kerosene because kerosene is cheap while some other kind of fuel (aviation?) fuel, which is made from kerosene is expensive. If kerosene use can be decreased, there will be more available to make the other kind of fuel. So people are being encourage to use gas (LPG). Anyway, July was telling me that his wife still uses kerosene for cooking, since LPG is exensive and often difficult to find here. But now they are limited to 10 liters of kerosene a month. They have to show their family ID card to get a coupon and can only get it in the district in which they reside. So he gathers firewood to supplement the family’s kerosene ration. They boil their drinking water on a wood fire as well as anything else that takes a long time.

We talked about food. He said he raises his own chickens and a couple of pigs. He said a lot of people are now feeding special growth formula to chickens so that they mature fast and can be sold at an early age. He didn’t think that was a good thing so he avoids buying chicken at the market unless it’s live and he knows it was free range. He was suprised to hear that in the third of my worlds people buy special growth feed for their piglets. He didn’t know of anybody around here using that stuff though he had once heard that it existed. He said some people buy chicken guts in bulk at the market for their pigs because apparently the leftover chemicals in the chicken tissue stimulates growth in the pigs too.

He talked about how a lot of people spray pesticides on the “sweet” vegetables (I guess things like green beans, carrots, etc. that you have to plant) just before picking them to sell even though the instructions plainly say you must wait several days before it is safe to pick, much less eat. He said he won’t buy or eat it. They grow stuff in their yard and he described many of the traditional edible leaves and plants that grow by themselves or can be had for free. One of his favorites is banana flowers, another is ferns that grow wild near his house. He said the river used to be full of fish but some people nowdays use fish-stunning chemicals so they can make bigger catches and so the fish population isn’t like it used to be. He said that 20 years ago you could easily have ½-1 kilo of fish with only about 10 minutes of fishing. But now it can take hours. He doesn’t like spending that kind of time so he prefers to “fish” at the market.

We talked about formalin and how it is being used with wild abandon as an all-purpose food preserver. In addition to fresh noodles, soybean curd, and ocean fish, he said even people selling wild pig meat they hunt in the forest are starting to use it.

From there we discussed the recent fuel crisis and on and on. By ten I decided to go wear out a flashlight and try to get at least a little paper work done. The lights came on after 11pm just as I was nodding off over the papers, but by then I was too sleepy to finish...