Secondly, a good friend in Hong Kong has just sent me a photocopy of THE HEAD MAN OF NA ANG, by Jack Reynolds (his writer's pseudonym), sourced from the library of the Northern Illinois University. I'd seen reference to this, guessing it to be a wry fictional story about villagers having to build privies, then still using the bush, but it turns out to be exactly what it says on the tin, 'An Exploratory Study of Environmental Health and Sanitation, Behaviour and Attitudes in a Northeastern Thai Village'.
So why was Jack, poet and novelist, writing a technical report of this sort?
A densely written paper of nearly sixty pages of text and statistical findings, it is a sociological study of a single Thai village assessing the success of a Village Health and Sanitation Project, launched country-wide and fully implemented over a five year period in this specimen village. In addition to monitoring the single safe water source for the village and the new privies built for each home, Jack's key role was to discover whether the crucial health education programme conducted at the grass roots by the project leader, the Royal Thai Ministry of Public Health, had been successful. Had it given the villagers a reasonable comprehension of the fundamentals of disease transformation and had it stimulated a positive change of attitude and behaviour towards sanitation and hygiene?
Over half a century later, the report stands as a fascinating historical study of a typical remote village west of Udon Thani near Nong Bua Lamphu with eighty households and about 550 inhabitants. It had no electricity, newspapers, postal services, market, proper shop or health centre and with only limited literacy especially among the women, a poor excuse for a school. It also provides another insight into the extraordinary man that was its author, Jack Jones.
In his early fifties, a Jack of all trades, a transport officer or glorified mechanic with no formal qualifications of any sort, how did Jack manage to produce a fine research report requiring considerable anthropological, sociological and scientific skills of sufficient standard at least for a masters thesis in these disciplines if not more. And what's more, why on earth was he of all people chosen to do a complex research project that required three months' field work in the village, supported by a Thai translator?
This wider national public health project was part-financed by the United States Operations Mission to Thailand which also provided expertise through American personnel, including twenty five Peace Corps volunteers. These men and perhaps women, having served their three score years and ten, must now look back nostalgically to those halcyon days of rural Thailand, privies and parasites.
Jack's report itself was financed by the East-West Centre based in Hawaii and it has an introduction by the Bangkok based Chief Sanitarian, John H. Brandt, MPH (Master of Public Health), presumably also an American. It was Brandt & Brandt of New York who had been the literary agents that placed Jack's novel, A WOMAN OF BANGKOK, with the publishers, Ballantines, though it is unlikely that there was a tie-up there. More probably Jack was well-known and repected in Bangkok as a man of many parts in the world of NGOs and development aid. As a former transport director with Unicef based in Bangkok from 1951 to 1959 he certainly knew his way around. Having run a clinic for the FAU in Chungking, he was also familiar with all the devastating bowel and other parasites that were endemic throughout rural Thailand.
Yet appointing a transport specialist to undertake this very technical research project is still a little bizarre. One might think it more obvious to appoint a Thai than an unqualified foreigner with limited language skills. Yet perhaps no educated Bangkok Thai, the only probably source of educated specialists, would be prepared to head off into the blue for three months in 1965. Jack had to live in a rough wooden house on a very limited diet of rice with no meat, only fermented fish, topped up from time to time with inedible American combat rations.
If the current condescending attitude of privileged Thais to the primitive clod hoppers of the North East that remains one of the symptoms of Thailand's political instability is anything to go by, their likely condescension might have made them very unsuitable as local researchers. Nor could they communicate much better than Jack as the villagers spoke no Thai, only a local variety of Lao which are not mutually comprehensible.
In contrast, Jack, with his warm empathy with rural people and his social skills with them learned over his years in China and in Thailand with Unicef, was in fact the perfect candidate for the job. And I guess they knew it too.
I can imagine him arriving in the village with his jeep and translator, getting to know the head man first, sitting up late into the night, proving his fine brotherhood as a serious drinker and immediately becoming an honoured guest. With his gentle demeanour and modesty he would have been immensely liked. It would have been solitary and tough but Jack had the capacity to enjoy that.
His key to discovering the success of the health project, was that he mustn't arrive as a lord high representative of government, as an official checking up on the villagers; that would ensure he'd only hear what they thought he wanted to hear. He had to be more subtle than that. So he dreamed up the wizard wheeze that he was an English entomologist interested in insects, bugs and parasites. 'By posing as a butterfly collector I was allowed to roam in and out of compounds at will, not unnoticed, but not classified as a health inspector either.'
Jack's conclusions in the report are detailed and technical but underlying them are many ironies that he would have much enjoyed. The little people of the rural backwoods were not going to be pushed around by big officials set above them, nor be told how they must live their lives. Thus, he reported, they had successfully absorbed and were able to parrot many of the public health messages that the education programme had fed to them, but they were resistant to changing their habits and pleasures of many generations. They adored the rare luxury of eating laab, a bloody and fiery concoction of diced uncooked meat that has confronted me to my regret on many occasions. They'd never actually seen any of these alleged parasites in the food, so why should they give up on eating laab. Why must they wash hands after defecation and before eating? They couldn't afford soap and there was no clean water accessible anyway. And if they kept shitting in the privy, that would make it awfully dirty whereas the vast countryside is capable of absorbing anything.
Jack reports that many of the bamboo and wood privies that had been constructed five years previously were rotted and collapsing and the habit of using the bush was proving hard to break. In truth, much had been achieved towards better sanitation but it was going to take increased prosperity and at least a generation or two really to move things forward. And so, in my experience in the region, it has proved.
This is a fine report, Jack made an insightful contribution to public health in the villages, and he earned a useful fee to help him feed his family. Presumably not long returned from his posting as transport officer with UNWRA in Jordan, he was (not atypically) between jobs and he just had to take on this very demanding project to keep the wolf from the door.
Giving me a new insight into Jack and his life experiences, I genuinely enjoyed reading the long report for this reason, but also because I can relate so very closely to the particular place and to its people. Having myself lived in a Thai village in the North East for some years (qv MY THAI GIRL AND I), while much has changed over the last half century and huge progress has been made, things also stay pretty much the same in so many respects.
One of the objectives for the national sanitation project Jack reports on was that all villages should have at least one source of safe water, namely a well with a pump. Yet so very recently my village in Surin province still had none. Exactly as described by Jack, the first choice of the villagers for drinking water was rain water collected from the roofs. This is the house of my next door neighbour, the dragon pots being carefully placed to catch the water.
I myself was unable to use bottled water, though it was available some seven kilometres away, because the many tens of locals who wandered through my house daily would all first go to the fridge and help themselves, so this just wasn't possible for me. Refusing my family or neighbours a mere sip of water or hiding bottles in the bed would have brought down odium on my head and branded me as truly kee nieo, as mean as sticky shit. Thus I too had massive water casks sited at the guttering downpipes of the house and drank this water daily without filter or boiling. (Again, putting boiled bottled water in the fridge was a lost cause.) Nonetheless my bowels remained serene, though when I later learned how clogged with dirt the gutters were when 'gutter man' climber his bamboo ladder in bare feet to clean them out, I did feel a little queasy.
Inevitably it only took a naughty kid to open the tap on the water storage cask during the long dry season and our supply would be lost, though usually we just ran out. The next option was then to get water from the local pond, a particular favourite that was everyone's second choice for drinking water. The procedure was either to take a push cart with a dragon pot on it and fill it up with scoops, or, plutocrat that I was, to pay a farmer to get it for me behind his rot tai and to pump it into my big casks.
That local pond was important for the village as a primary water source, for which the unusually high water table was crucial. The next village was not so fortunate and when their pond tended to dry up during the dry season, they would come and steal water from ours. Our pu yai ban, the village head, then went over to demand reparations but he did not succeed. One morning it was discovered that our pond had been deliberately contaminated with some generous quantities of shit.
Our own pond on our land was not suitable as potable water as we had built our pig sty over the water; all the pig excrement would drop into the water and feed our fish. Like drinking from a somewhat robust water supply, the fish were delicious so long as one didn't think too much when eating.
Yes, those were the days and in comparison today the supermarket check-out does now seem a little dull. At least though, I can still travel with Jack Jones to China and Thailand as his writings never fail to remind me that there are exciting worlds out there other than mine.
