FARMING THEIR OWN FOOD
 
Each farmer family grows mostly food for their own needs, with rice being a main crop. In gardens around their homes and fields, they also grow a multitude of fruit and vegetables. During harvest time, families help each other to cut the rice and threshing the paddy. Working together makes the labour easier for everyone.
People also share a communal forest where anyone in the village can go and get food or materials, such as bamboo and banana leaves. If there is a surplus of harvest from the fields and forest, people sell it on local markets.
In the past years, most farmers have started to grow sweet corn and baby corn for commercial trade with agribusinesses (see "contract farming"). Herbicides and fertilisers are mostly applied to cash crops and not to the food that the families grow for themselves.

COMMUNITY FORESTS
 
In their community forests, hill people grow a big variety of plants that provide food or materials. To keep a balance between growing and taking, people need to know how and how much they can take from a plant, so that it will grow back. The use of these forests is settled in agreements with the forest department.
 
Bamboo is a main resource for making constructions and objects, but also for providing food. Young shoots can be eaten fresh and bamboo worms are a rich source of protein. The banana tree is another important plant and has multiple uses. The leaves are only collected from the wild species, because people don’t eat its fruits. The house banana tree gets to keep the leaves so that the fruit will be sweet and full of nutrients. Also banana flowers are a regular part of a meal. Coffee, papaya, pineapple and sugar cane are other common fruits from the forest.

HOW TO MAKE RAIN
 
Hill farmers who believe in ghosts know different rituals to make the rain come. When they already sowed the seeds on their fields but the rainy season doesn’t set in, they collect for example the bark of a special tree and pound it in the river. This will make the fish get drunk and an enormously big fish will swim by. The people can just grab the fish and cook it. As they celebrate in the evening, heavy rain will come pouring down.

HEALING WITH PLANTS
 
Most hill people know which plants to use for basic first aid, such as what leaves to use to stop wounds from bleeding. More knowledgable people in the village can treat also other illnesses. They find medicinal plants in the forest or grow them in their gardens.
For people who still believe in ghosts, plants are the essential medicine, often accompanied by rituals that involves sacrificing chicken or pigs.
 
This woman from the village of Ban Pha Kha Suk Jai is an expert in medicinal plants and a practicing medium between ghosts and people. She hopes that her grandchildren and the future generations will keep the knowledge about how to heal with plants.
 
Today, the government provides a health care system where people have access to regular medicinal treatment in health centres and hospitals.

MAKING THINGS FROM PLANTS
 
Hill people depend more on their own skills than on buying things in a shop. They create many objects themselves that they use everyday, such as cups and bowls, baskets, furniture, and even houses, which they make from bamboo and other plant-based materials. Also children make their own toys, like spin tops and play mostly with things they find in nature.

READING NATURE
 
In which part of the bamboo do all the worms congregate so they can easily be collected for dinner? Hill tribe people know about the cycles of each plant, and when and how much they can harvest, which plants in the forest are edible and which parts can be eaten, what kind of bamboo makes a good support for construction, which leaves of a particular grass can be cut for making good roofs – and so much more...

BUILDING A VILLAGE AND KEEPING THE EVIL OUT
 
When an Akha community moved to another place, it was the shaman who found the right location for building the new village. To identify the right spot, he would drop a raw egg to the ground together with some rice. If the egg didn't break it meant that it was a safe place to settle. When the houses for all the families were built and ready, the shaman decided on the right day for setting up the ghost gate.
Still today, a ghost gate has to be built within one day together with the wooden statues of a man and a woman that will be placed next to it. Located on the path to the forest, the gate creates the border between the people and the world of the spirits, keeping evil and illness from entering the village.
Another main construction is the big swing for the children, which is rebuilt with every new shaman.

HUNTING
 
Hill tribe people keep some animals for food such as chicken or pigs. Sometimes they have a pond with fish and frogs. But they also hunt for any wild animal in the forest.
For catching small birds they conceived a kind of fishing rod: a wiggling worm attracts a bird which then will be trapped in a sling.

NEW WORDS
 
Akha people still speak their own language, however certain things are unknown in their culture and have come with new concepts and products. Words such as garbage, bin, company, corn, fertiliser are borrowed from the Thai language.

ACTIVITY: COLLECTING RUBBISH
 
Together with the children we went collecting litter around the school yard. The kids didn't distinguish much between packages, plastics, paper, bottles, flowers and plants.
In a follow-up session, we identified the different kinds of wastes that we found.

WHAT GOES TO WASTE
 
With commercial products coming to the hill tribe villages, also the waste came along. People in the hills were used to throw their small amount of litter back to nature where it came from, and where it would decompose without a trace. But the shampoo bottles, bags and food packages from plastic and foil do not decompose. You can find these things anywhere around the village, where they also leak contaminants into the soil and water. Often litter gets washed down with streams from higher located villages to lower ones.
Some of the waste can be sold to recycling companies. People collect this rubbish and sell it to collectors. Many things are also reused and put into other uses.

ACTIVITY: WHAT GOES TO WASTE?
 
The trash we collected around the village was separated together with the children into four groups: compostable, sellable, toxic, rest. The different kinds of litter with their risks and possibilities were visually and theatrically demonstrated, making the children part of the story. Then the whole group made compostable cookie wraps by folding banana leaf packages.

CROP ROTATION
 
Traditionally, farmers left a field for several years before planting crops again. Like this, the soil had time to recover, receiving nutrients from other plants. Today, farmers keep growing the same crop every year on a field and use artificial fertilisers, even though the yield in the old days used to be higher.

CHANGE OF EDUCATION
 
Elder villagers used to tell stories to the young ones. All tribal knowledge was conveyed through storytelling, and none of these stories were written down. Also, the names of all the fathers for 50 generations back were memorised by heart. With the introduction of schools and public education programmes, this tradition disappeared and many stories have been lost.

ACTIVITY: MAPPING THE VILLAGE
 
Together with younger and older people of Lhor Yo and Suan Pa, we made geographical and temporal maps, documenting the present and the past of the village.

CONTRACT FARMING
 
Middlemen approach hill farmers to grow corn as commodity. They sell genetically modified corn seeds, fertilisers and herbicides to the peasants. Later, the middleman will buy the harvest back from the farmers, selling it to factories that produce food for humans and animals. The whole system is mainly owned by one corporation called CP, which owns also the licenses to the omnipresent 7-Eleven shops in the country.
 
The system is attractive to farmers because they can sell their corn at a fixed price. At the same time, they become dependent of this supply chain. They are not allowed to keep seeds for growing in the next season, but have to buy the seeds from the middlemen every year. This system also adds more chemicals to their soil and groundwater.

IRRIGATING STEEP FIELDS
 
Much of the Thailand's freshwater comes from the hills and the forests.
For growing food on the hills, people have engineered a system that brings water to their crops even on steep slopes.

LUNCH GARDENS
 
When farmers go work in the field, they only take little food with them. They grow a lunch garden next to their rice, so they can go pick fresh vegetables for lunch and cook it right there in the field huts.

LOCAL MARKETS
 
When farmers have a surplus from their harvest or have collected extra food in the forest, they go sell it at the local markets. Often they also sell handcrafted jewelry, tools, textiles and decorative items.

VILLAGE SHOPS
 
A few generations ago, there were no shops in the villages. People just made almost everything by themselves and traded what they didn’t have with others. Like exchanging food for a knife. But once people started to travel regularly between the village and the city, money became the medium of exchange. Then, the first shop was opened. Today, the small village shops sell mostly things such as snacks, beer and candy.

GENERATIONS
 
Unlike urban citizens, hill tribe people start raising a family early. Women often have their first child at the age of 17. At the same time, life in the hills is shorter than in the lowland, and people often don't get much older than 70 years.

COMING DOWN THE HILLS
 
Many hill tribe people have spent some time working in other countries around Asia and have brought new ideas and experiences back to their villages.
Often it is them who initiate changes in the community towards a better economic situation or infrastructure.

ACTIVITY: CRAFTING PACKAGING
 
Working with craftsmen to redesign the non-compostable packages that are found as litter around the village, and remaking containers from compostable material such as bamboo. Examples of a shampoo bottle, snack container, bag, and travel mug.

GARMENTS
 
With a unique embroidering technique, Akha patterns colourfully depict the tribe’s believes and values. They are influenced by nature: flowers, butterflies, tiger’s eyes. Akha women have been passing this knowledge from generation to generation. In villages where their belief has changed, Akha patterns often no longer represent their connection with nature anymore, but are replaced by symbols of their new religion.

NGO PROGRAMMES
 
Government officials and NGO representatives have come to villages to inform people about methods of organic farming and how to make compost. However, these sessions happen only on a one time basis, and are not followed up by other support or materials and have therefore no long-term effect.

KNOWING WHAT'S DANGEROUS
 
Kids who grow up in the hills know exactly what animals are dangerous and don’t hesitate to kill a centipede or poisonous snake. Like this, they also know what they don’t have to worry about and can enjoy their adventures in nature.
This knowledge is mostly related to risks that appear in the fields and forest. They are unaware of risks that come for example from commercial products, such as the use of chemicals in agriculture or the artificial ingredients in industrial food or in waste products.

MAKING NEW FROM OLD
 
Anything that could be reused will find a new place and function in the life of the villagers. An old basketball could become a toolbox and an old fertiliser bag might be turned into a shoulder bag or even a pillow. Often things are used forever, until they really fall apart.