To read the rest of this article,  follow this link over to the mommyhood memos where I had the honor of  writing as a guest blogger this week. If you’re visiting from the mommyhood memos… Welcome! Here are some posts from our archives that you might be interested in:

On Cross Cultural Pregnancy, Parenting & Kids:

• My Akha Pregnancy Guru
• The Birth Story
• It takes a village
• A Million Butts Can’t Be Wrong: Elimination Communication
• Diaperless Update: 3 Months
• EC Update: 1 Year
• Our Trilingual 2 Year Old
• A Different Kind of Milestone: Noodles and Chopsticks

Or if your interested in learning a bit more about the Akha people, our work, or our crazy life in the village, here are a few posts you may like:

• About the Akha
• Traditional Akha Vocals
• Vernon Vidcast #1: Our most recent ministry update
• 5 Minute Documentary about the Vernons
• The Akha and the West: Relevantly Traversing the Cultural Divide
• Pulling teeth on our own
• How to take a village shower
• The Rat and the Cat

Whether you’re an old friend or a new visitor,  thanks for stopping by! Leave a comment below and let us know you were here!

This image was created for an introduction/update printing we are about to do, but we thought that it would be a great thing to share with all of you here as well.

FOOD FRIDAY: EAT LIKE AN AHKA

Posted on 29. Jan, 2010 by April

As we’ve mentioned more than once, last month we went up to an Akha village for a few days to experience their culture.  Part of that was, of course, their food.  My favorite part was using chopsticks to eat it all.  Since we only ate Akha food a few times, we decided to bring in an expert to tell you all about it. Lori Vernon graciously agreed to be our guest blogger today to teach us about Akha food and even share a recipe!

Guest Blogger: Lori Vernon

Akha food is fairly simple compared to Thai fare. Most Thai dishes seek to find the perfect balance between many different flavors (sweet, sour, spicy, salty, etc) using a multitude of ingredients like coconut milk, curry paste, lemon grass, chili peppers, fish sauce, sugar and lime to name a few. Most Akha dishes, on the other hand, are savory and have very few ingredients. Akha dishes rarely use more than salt, garlic, chili pepper to flavor the main ingredient. However, this doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that Akha food could be considered bland. Quite the opposite, Akha food is very flavorful and spicy!

Of course, rice is the main staple for the Akha people. At a meal, each person has their own bowl of rice, and the accompanying dishes are served family style. There are 5 categories of Akha food; a traditional meal would include at least one dish from each category.

1. STIR FRIED:

This category can vary greatly. Any combination of vegetables, eggs, meat or beans can be stir fried for an Akha meal. An Akha favorite is a spicy stir fried minced pork dish called sa byeh which is the exception to the “simple-ingredients-list rule” and has many herbs including a special type of tree bark. It is almost always eaten for special occasions like weddings, funerals and festivals.

2. PICKLED:

Greens can be pickled when the crops are in abundance and preserved for use at a later time. Often pickled greens are also dried and reconstituted when ready to eat, increasing their shelf life even further.

3. BOILED/SOUP:

Greens, squash or potatoes are boiled with pork and bones to create a savory broth soup. The Akha also make a thick rice porridge soup with chicken that is eaten to celebrate the birth of a child or to feed to an invalid unable to eat rice.

4. DIP:

The Akha use a mortar and pestle to create very spicy dips to be eaten with fresh vegetables, or spooned directly onto the rice. The most simple version would contain tomato, salt, chili peppers, green onions & cilantro. However, we have tasted many variations of this dish including ones that contained crushed peanuts, sesame seeds, fish, dried beef, and bamboo worms. This is a dish that is different at every house, because each family has their own secret recipe.

5. RAW:

The dip mentioned above is generally eaten with a variety of fresh greens and vegetables. Some commonly served items from this category include cabbage, green beans, sweet pea greens, cucumbers, mint, thai eggplant and other herbs. (which I don’t know how to translate into English.)

Eating Akha Style

If you’d like to taste a bit of Akha food, here’s a simple recipe you can try at home:

Spicy Akha Peanut Dip

This is normally made with a mortar and pestle, but since those tools are not commonly available in American kitchens, I’ve included instructions on how to make this using a Cuisinart (a blender may also work.)

Ingredients:

• 1 small clove of garlic (optional, depending on how much garlic breath you’re willing to tolerate)
• 3 medium plum tomatoes or one large American Tomato
• ¼ cup of roasted peanuts
• 1-5 Thai chili peppers to taste
• ½ tsp of salt (or to taste)
• green onions, chopped
• cilantro, chopped

Instructions:

1. Boil/blanch tomatoes and chili peppers for several minutes… until the tomato skin splits. Remove from water and let cool.
2. Chop peanuts roughly in a Cuisinart.
3. Peel skin off of tomatoes & add tomatoes in with the chopped peanuts.
4. Add blanched chili peppers and garlic clove. Use the pulse setting to chop/mix.
5. Add salt to taste
6. Remove from Cuisinart.
7. Stir in chopped green onions & cilantro to taste, reserving a small amount for garnish on top.
8. Serve with raw vegetables or over rice.

- Lori Vernon

An Akha baby girl discovering her tongue... or the recently born daughter of our friend, who humbles us by her perseverance carrying her daughter as she walks 2 miles to church each week?

During our time at the Emerge Network training center, the program directors showed a number of pictures that they had taken while visiting Doi Mae Salong, while sharing the importance of discovering the story behind the images. As the pictures of scenery, daily life, children, and elders flashed across the screen I began to realize that I perceived each picture so differently than the 30 other people who I was in the room with.

When they saw bamboo huts, I saw my home. When they saw jungle and winding paths, I saw my neighborhood. When they saw cute kids, I saw their stories. When they saw headdresses and smiles, I saw the strong, endearing, hardworking characters of our village family.

Lori hit on this point a little when she wrote a post earlier this month about some photographer friends who came to visit. In her post she wrote “After looking at their pictures, we’re reminded how differently we take pictures now that we’ve been here for 5 years. For example, we NEVER take pictures of the chickens anymore because we’re so used to them, but they really are a very important part of the village ambiance!”

Shortly after we arrived in our village in 2005, we posted these photos sharing images of our village kids. Looking back now I see each of those kids very differently because I have laughed, cried and shared in their life stories. The best parallel I can draw to this experience is a comparison to a classroom. As a teacher (or student), during the first days of a new class or new school the people around you are a conglomerate unknown, a shapeless mass. Slowly names are learned and faces are distinguished, but it is not until experiences and stories are shared that those acquaintances become connections, community, and friends.

Now, many of our posts are stories. Individuals. Friends. This post was originally going to be a mass of photos, but I couldn’t get myself to post just the images without the incredible stories that go beneath the skin (which is what excites me about this video team that is coming up this weekend). So, instead, I’m starting a new tag, called stories, where we will intentionally share more than just a face.

We hope that you all enjoy these glimpses into the lives of our Akha friends, because we truly love sharing our lives with them.

Anyone who has visited our village knows A-Paw, 8, is the younger of the two siblings. She is a beautiful and truly remarkable child. She is so smart and has a personality that just lights up a room. Her older brother, A-Wa, 15, is a handsome young man with a lot of confidence and potential, as well as a certain knack for getting into mischief.

Unlike many deaf children in America, these two have very little opportunity for “success”. Without any method of communication (they have had very little exposure to sign language) they have no opportunity to succeed in school (the Thai / modern definition of success) and very little opportunity to find someone to marry (the Akha / premodern definition of success).

The, in June 2009, we were honored and blessed to host Kristin & Dave – who came halfway around the world just to be a blessing to this family. Kristin is an audiologist and is currently working for the Denver Public School system. They not only brought the expertise to diagnose these kids, but they also brought first class equipment and top of the line hearing aids which had been donated to give to this family!

It was an extraordinary experience to see these two children hear for the first time ever. Both children have very minimal hearing, so much so that if you were standing right next to them, yelling their names… they wouldn’t hear you. But with the hearing aids they could hear even quietly spoken words!

After being fitted with her aids, we “spied” on A-paw as she was tried them out on the real world. She went outside, and was standing 50 meters from some of her friends who were playing with a bamboo stick by hitting it on the ground. As she heard the hollow, echoing sound of bamboo floating across the distance, her eyes grew wide and she looked back at us in amazement as if to say “Hey… that makes an incredible sound!”

We are so grateful for the opportunity that has been given to these kids. We know that the path will not be an easy one, as special needs education cases are largely ignored in rural Thailand. Also adding to the difficulty is the significant cultural and emotional adjustment as a child goes from a silent world to an audible one. We are hoping to get them some speech therapy (we might even do it ourselves if need be!) and help them to catch up in school, but these things will take time and patience.

Through this experience, however, we are again reminded and awestruck by the way our God lavishes his love upon the poor and the needy.

It encompasses every aspect of their lives.  Preparing the fields, planting, harvesting.

every meal
every day
every month
every year

It’s no wonder that rice is the center of religion, culture and celebration in the Akha world. But, if there is a secondary symbol of importance in the Akha community, it is bamboo.

Bamboo provides tools and toys. Secular and sacred objects.

If rice is the focus of the Akha way of life, bamboo is the function of that life.

In our village the children learn at a very young age how to turn scraps of bamboo into functional creations. Boys of three and four years old create woven masterpieces to complete the homes and tools of their minor kingdoms. Their education in the vegetation and animalia around them is extensive, any Akha child of age can easily forage a meal while walking through the jungle.

This interaction with the world around them builds a community and identity among the Akha people, and will continue to be important to them wherever the evolution of their culture leads in the years to come.

The Akha Hilltribe originate from Tibet and Mongolia, but currently live in the mountainous area of the Mekong Subregion in Southeast Asia. Although the Akha live in five countries, including China, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam and Thailand, they speak a common, tonal language classified as Sino-Tibetan / Sino-Burmese.  Akha villages are generally located in the mountains, although many are moving closer and closer to the cities, due to economic, educational and social pressures (especially in Northern Thailand). Although the numbers we have seen vary, there appear to be approximately 80,000 Akha living in the northern provinces of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai in Thailand, and 2,000,000 Akha in the world.

The typical Akha village is unique among the hilltribes, distinguished by their ornate headdresses, hand carved wooden gates, raised bamboo houses on low stilts, and hillside farming methods. A typical Akha man is able to recite his ancestry up to 60 or 70 generations. Also distinguishing the Akha from other hilltribes in Southeast Asia are the headdresses, adorned in coins and other silver craft, worn by Akha women.

Unfortunately, there are other distinctions. The Akha are also the most at risk of being exploited by the sex industry and the drug trade. They are poor and are often not granted full rights of citizenship in the nations in which they live.

The other day while Lori was out in the village she came across another incredible sight. Our Akha grandma had picked cotton off of the tree behind her home and was spinning it by hand into yarn.

Here are a few moments of her incredible skill:

It’s truly a blessing to live among these people.

I’ve often been asked how I bathe in the village, so I thought I’d give you a step by step tutorial on the process! When I first arrived in the village, I had no idea how to shower at the public wells and had to walk about a mile to our Akha mom’s house to bathe in her indoor bathroom. Luckily, some of the young women in the village took pity on me and taught me all the ins and outs of bathing modestly in public! Of course, with our new house (We promise a video tour of the finished house is coming soon!) we have an indoor bathroom, so indoor bucket showers are also possible. However, I actually enjoy being outside and have become quite accustomed to showering like this, so I still prefer sarong showers (weather permitting).

Remember to click on the pictures below in order to read the captions and view the full size photo.

You heard it right, our truck is broken again.

A very similar problem to all our other vehicle issues, actually, as there seems to be a crack in the feed from the radiator to the engine.

She has the baby, Esther and two German visitors – (one of whom is a doctor who just helped out with a free clinic in a local village, I’m sure that’s another cool story that we will fill you all in more on later) – so her hands are full.

Please pray for peace for them, for safety and for a tow truck that actually can tow a vehicle (as opposed to the rope/bamboo contraption we dealt with before.)

Don’t worry, we’ll leave the vehicle in Mae Salong before we have Lori do anything dangerous.

Thanks for your prayers.

We have visitors and teams coming beginning tomorrow through the remainder of this month, so that gave me today to get caught up on some of our communication to all of you.

We mentioned a few months ago that we were building a new home in Mae Salong. The home that was built for us upon our arrival was built to last 3-5 years. With our three years up, we decided to build a home that will last us closer to 10 years as we continue to live and work with the Akha.

Once again, our village was incredibly generous, donating their time and expertise to our need. Our new home features such ammenities as cement on the floors (it’s not level, but it’s not dirt!), an indoor bathroom, indoor running water (when available), and electrical outlets and lights in each room. These modern conveniences are still coupled with bamboo walls and a grass roof, which we love and will probably never go away from (it’s so much cooler!).

It’s a huge blessing for us as a family and also for the village who are now using our first home full time as the village community house.

We have a video of the entire construction process – take a look…

Click To Play
or
Download .MPEG (High Quality)
Download .FLV (Low Quality)

For those of you who are wondering, the song (Big House by Audio Adrenaline) is an homage to our old Campus Crusade days at the Colorado School of Mines. Good times, good times… but you probably had to be there.

I’ll get a video tour of the “lived-in” house up on the site next (who knows when, but it’s my next project).

Thanks for following our lives here at the Vernon Journal!

Unfortunately, I just do not have the time right now to completely update all of the pages on the site (the entire site has needed design and code changes for some time), but I have been able to get our ministry blog (Journey Notes), our prayer and praise blog and our personal blogs (Lori’s, Abi’s and Mine) up on crutches for the time being.

As for the rest of the site, our info, media updates, partner pages and the upcoming Mae Salong Project pages, they will not be updated for a little while. We are heading back to the village today and will not be back in Chiang Rai for any significant amount of time until the end of the month.

We are also waiting for some developments from the server over at Foursquare Missions which will allow us to begin receiving online contributions toward our ministry. As these features become available over the next months our site will be updated accordingly.

~~~~

Here are our current updates…

We are planning on building a new home in our village in Mae Salong:
This was actually not our idea, and was difficult at first, but as we have thought more about it we are getting very excited about the prospect. The village leaders want to move us away from the center of the village and use our current house as the village home for cooking, hosting and storing things as needed. Actually, our home has always been used for these purposes, but now that we have a growing family they want us to move to a home with a little less foot traffic.

We are hoping that we will get an internet connection in our new home:
We still will have a bamboo house and grass roof, but because of the proximity to the Chinese town of Mae Salong we might be able to put DSL into our new hut. It’s still just an idea and there are a few development issues that might stand in our way, but if we are able to set up an office with full internet connectivity in our new home it will allow us to more effectively communicate with all of you as we spend more and more time in the village compiling the data we collect from the Mae Salong Project.

Visa Travel:
After we receive our 1-year visas at the end of this month we will have to travel to Bangkok to apply for a 1-year visa for Abigail. If we cannot get this visa in Bangkok we will have to travel to Singapore to purchase a visa there. We are planning on traveling to Singapore at the end of April anyway, but would love to have all our visa issues worked out before that trip.

School Break Plans:
School break has begun in Thailand and will continue through the beginning of June. Other than our visa needs and ministry travel plans (we have some exciting developments in the works that we will update you on if they work out) we have some plans to minister in our village as we build our new home and settle in again for the year.

Around the Thai new year we will treat our entire village for stomach worms (ourselves included). Although we will all be sick for a few days, the village is really looking forward to this medication as they understand that when the stomach worms are dead, the food (and therefore, the money) goes much further for the family.

We will also be “teaching english” through some sign language videos that John donated for the deaf family in the village. This way the kids will all learn sign language while learning english words and will be able to communicate with the deaf children as they are learning to sign.

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Thanks for your patience with us as we deal with the site changes and please keep our energy and health in your prayers as we enter these very busy months.

October belongs to the Colorado Rockies.

I have to say, I am really sad not to be in Colorado. To have a chance to watch our home team play in the World Series from a seat at Coors field – that’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity.

Coors Field : I would love to be back there this October.

Then I remember: every day I spend in Thailand, among my Akha friends, in my bamboo hut. These are rare opportunities as well, and I am incredibly blessed to live a life full of these moments.

Doi Mae Salong : Actually, I guess I would rather be here.

So I guess I’ll just enjoy the World Series whenever I can catch bits of it in the city. Go Rockies!

Last week we went with a number of them to an Akha church here in Chiang Rai and at the beginning of this week we brought them down for a construction project in Wiangpapao (about 1.5 hours southwest of Chiang Rai). They were great workers and, partnering with the Akha from the village, were able to pour the foundation footers and floor for the new church in two days!

Lori was obviously not allowed to do any work, so we stationed her at the Akha Clinic and behind the camera. Here are some of the moments she captured:

There is a lot to be told about this event, and for Lori and I there is still a lot to be learned about this event, but today I just want to share some pictures of a young Akha bride and groom from a wedding ceremony in our village. Specifically, I want you all to see the long, involved process that is the donning of the traditional Akha headdress and attire.

Beautiful, is it not? We were honored to take pictures for two weddings in our village just before Lori became sick, and promised to put together a video slide show of the pictures for both couples’ families. We are planning to head back to the village this weekend to give out the finished videos.

It is a strange world the Akha live in today – they sit on dirt floors in their bamboo huts and watch family wedding videos on their televisions. Talk about an ancient-future experience.

We will fill you in on all our adventures when we have computer access, so stay tuned!

Up until now, I’ve avoided thinking too much about “preparing for the baby”. I’m sure, in some ways, there was an element of self-protection involved; if we had another miscarriage, I didn’t want to have too many “baby things” hanging around making the grieving process that much more difficult. However, on a lighter note, probably a larger part of my procrastination was just that - procrastination; nine months really feels like a long time and it’s easy to say to yourself,”There will be plenty of time for that later.” But like I said, with just four months to go it’s time to start getting ready for the baby!

Now, the process of “getting ready for the baby” can mean very different things depending on what culture you’re in! For instance, when an Akha baby is born, the only “supplies” needed are a few sets of clothes and some fabric for an Akha baby sling. Sometimes the Akha will make a baby hammock out of an empty rice sack strung between two bamboo poles, but other than these few simple items, the arrival of the baby doesn’t require too much preparation. In our two years living in a village, we’ve seen many children grow up happy and healthy with just these “bare necessities” to carry them through their first months of life. In America, however, “getting ready for the baby,” takes on a whole different meaning! Just look at everything included in a traditional American nursery checklist, not to mention all the fancy gadgets & accessories available to today’s parents, like baby-wipe warmers, cribside mp3 docks and even “pee pee tee pees“!

During the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling really caught between these two drastically different worlds! On one hand, there’s no denying the fact that I’m an American. When I think about preparing for a baby, my mind immediately finds itself in the land of cribs, changing tables and rocking chairs! On the other hand, we are working with the Akha and we desire to understand the Akha culture and way of life not only through observation, but through experience. So, we find ourselves in that familiar, yet tricky, situation of finding a balance.

Right now, we’re trying to narrow down all the options out there and decide what items will really be useful in simplifying our life with a baby. This is where you come in! I want to hear from all you parents out there, those of you in America as well as any missionary parents on the field…. What is your #1 “must-have” baby item?

A couple weeks ago, everything in the village just seemed especially beautiful, so I set out to capture all the little things that I love about the village.

Of course, it’s just not an Akha village without multitudes of children about! And since I’m trying to show you the “all little things I love about the village“, it seems appropriate to introduce you to a few of the munchkins in our village. The first picture is baby Ma-li who was born last December; hasn’t she grown?! Next is sweet little A-nm carrying her babydoll strapped to her back, Akha style. Next is A-paw, A-ga and Sopida climbing a tree like the three little monkeys they are! Finally, a herd of toddlers chasing a grasshopper.

While our village home is literally a bamboo hut (thatch roof, dirt floors and all), the house we live in when we’re in the city has concrete walls, tile floors, an internet connection and even air conditioning in a couple rooms. Still, we run into a surprising number of bugs and critters in our city home. We are constantly fighting (what seems to be) a losing battle with the ants, cockroaches and centipedes, which is, oddly, not something we deal with in the village. Also, in the city home w e generally live in peace with about 5 geckos who pretty much have free run of the house. I say “generally”, because we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t even notice them, except for when we occasionally find a gecko dropping in an inopportune location (like on the clean dishes drying on the rack! Gross!) Geckos (at least the ones in our house) are usually about 4-5″ from nose to tail, but we’ve noticed that July and August must be “hatching” season because lately we’ve seen several “baby geckos” who are only about an 1″ long.

As I said, I don’t really mind the geckos, but I don’t particularly like them either. However, these baby geckos are so darn tiny and cute that I always find my self saying, “Oh, look at the baby gecko!” and running for my camera to snap a picture. I’ve taken lots of pictures of baby geckos, but they never seem to turn out because most of them lack a point of reference. You see, a picture of a baby gecko on a white wall looks pretty much like a picture of a full grown gecko on a white wall. But the other day I went to turn on the light in the kitchen and there was a baby gecko right next to the light switch, so I finally got a picture to show you how cute these little guys are! I photoshopped a tape measure in to show you the scale.