New Adventures at Dawn Kiam - 3

(third installment)

Day 4: Wednesday 6 May 1998

The big drama today was less about the fires and more about Ms. Pikul's bad mood. She came by in the morning, the first time since the fires started three days ago, to see what had happened. She wasn’t happy about the damage to the trees on her land but didn’t seem so unhappy. After all, the land would now be easier to cultivate, if anybody could be found to do it. Farmers have made a habit of burning down forest to open up land to cultivation since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago (see Ismael by Daniel Quinn) and are far from giving up fire as a convenient tool, as evidenced by all the fields being burned around here. She showed no interest, however, in Dawn Kiam or Janpaa Hill, which by the way is public land. She said she didn’t care. "I didn’t start the fire."

This isn’t the place to go into the details of personal life which has been a rough one. It isn’t for me to splash other peoples problems across the Internet. It would be easy to scapegoat her, but fortunately the fires have been dying out even without her cooperation. Let me simply observe that it is easy to understand why she is wrapped up in her own troubles, and I don’t mean the burnt land, without concern for others. Sadly, there are a lot of people who end up this way after adversity strikes, which has been repeatedly in her case.

What is pertinent here is that she is stubborn about a few things:

She claims the ditches between the road and her land were dug out of her land. She refuses to let us deepen and enlarge them.
Somehow she got the idea that we want to dig a pond on her land and is upset that we would think of such a thing. (We don’t know where this came from.)
She complains that she should have gotten a better price when she sold Dawn Kiam to the Dhammadana Foundation ten year ago.
She complains that her permission was not asked for when the road was made with a swerve to the east onto her property.
Due to the last two points, she feels she has given enough to the monastery already and is annoyed that we are asking for more.
She has wanted to sell this land (and we want to buy it) but is asking to high a price. Further, a few years ago when we were close to buying the land, for complicated family reasons, her daughter asked us not to buy it from Ms. Pikul.

Let's go through these points one-by-one:

As mentioned yesterday, Ajarn Poh had these ditches dug when Dawn Kiam was first purchased from her and he built the road from SMI. He insists that he was scrupulous to dig only on our land and probably end up erring more in her favor than ours. This is consistent with his habits of many years and I trust him in this completely. Khun Metta (who handled the purchase) supports this as do the land deeds. She has no legal footing, but that isn’t the point.
Khun Metta insists that he never mentioned and ponds. All we want is to deepen the ditches and push dry, dead brush inwards towards the already burnt sections of her property. When Mr. Chaub, Mr. Daun, & I talked with her, we repeatedly tried to correct this misunderstanding, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She pretty much ignored me, the strange farang monk. We had never met before.
This is most unreasonable of her. When she sold the land there was no road leading to it, the foundation had to build the road. Without a road nobody wanted to buy the land. The foundation actually paid her 20% more than the going rate. Once the road was put in, the monetary value of DK's land went up. (Ecological value may have gone down.) It also enhanced the price of the land that just went up in flames. Over the years of rampant price speculation — until the bubble burst last year — these prices inflated further. She has confused these later values with what was fair back in 1989. Just one example of her confusion, which appears to be a pattern in her troubled life. She actually received a fair sized sum from the purchase in 1989.
Ajarn Poh insists that this is not true and supposes she has forgotten, since it happened nine years ago. Yes, a bend was put into the road rather than cutting it straight from DK towards the back of SMI. Yes, this swerve cut into her property. However, there was a good reason for this and the benefit was hers! There are some hot springs coming out of the base of Janpaa Hill. While the water is nice to soak our bodies in, most tree roots don’t like it. Ajarn Poh intended to dig a ditch on the hill side of the road to drain away this salty water, but ran into a large slab of rock. To continue the ditch, the road had to swerve around this rock slab into her property. When Ajarn Poh gave her the choice between no swerve but salty water draining into her land and swerve without the salty water, she chose the later and gave permission for the road to make a brief (100 meters long max) swerve into her land Less than two rai of her land ended up on the hill side of the road.
Ajarn Poh wonders about this because she has continues to seek his help over the years. Yet another contradiction in her story?
Maybe much of this is a ploy to get more money for her land, although I can’t understand how letting it burn to a crisp will enhance its value for us, the only potential buyer. We want it to expand the forested area under our protection.
I suspect that there are fears about security coming in here. Her life has faced a lot of insecurity and she is now around the age of sixty. Perhaps worries about her old age mixed with old sorrows are confusing matters.

Whatever the case, it is not appropriate for us to use the legal, financial, and other power at our disposal. We can do so, but maintaining a decent relationship with her, no matter how troublesome, is more important. Anyway, as the days pass, it seems we can manage without her cooperation.

I mention these details because life in this parts isn’t always easy. Harmonious relations with neighbors can’t be taken for granted now that the market economy has severed the mutual dependence that used to bind people. With the middle-class buying out the land of the poor, who a year later find their new truck being repossessed, neighbors are even antagonistic. Some smile when they see their neighbors land going up in smoke.

For example, a fire that started near us in early April, on the land to the southeast where a local police sergeant grazes cattle, has steadily moved west to the point that it is near the highway in front of Suan Mokkh. Seems nobody has done anything to stop it, including us. (I figured the sergeant had somebody start it to clear his land of dry grass so that fresh grass would grow better when the rains come and this sergeant is not to be messed with.)

To our (monks of Dawn Kiam) surprise, the back-hoe showed up after lunch and started enlarging the ditch along our northern boundary. This is part of the ditch claimed by Ms. Pikul. The result was rather ugly but renders the danger of fire more remote. Somebody decided that Ms. Pikul's claims weren’t serious enough to risk the dangers of fire spreading.

The fires smoldered throughout the day but no large blazes. The main threats remain the eastern side of Ms. Pikul's property where lots of dry debris lies piled up near Mr. Daun's coconut palms. And the southeast corner of that area is close enough to the northeast corner of Dawn Kiam, and piled with enough dry kindling, that a strong wind stirring up a blaze could still spread into Dawn Kiam, despite the newly enlarged ditch and road.

We remain vigilant and continue our night patrols.

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