The Rhythm of the Dam Building Dance

Megan Kerins, a recent 3-month Fellow with the Border Green Energy Team in Thailand, shares her experience building a micro hydropower system in Ta Po Puh, a Karen village in the hills of Thailand.

We have come to install a micro hydropower system we’ve been thinking about for several weeks. But all the calculating and diagrams could never have related to me the gritty feel of rebar on my neck and shoulders, the heft of in my hands, the way the earth slid away from beneath my own two dancer feet today, leaving me a clumsy, bumbling “galawah”. That’s Karen for “foreigner”. I feared coming here, feared the realness that I knew I would encounter. I didn’t foresee that while I am here, I have the luxury of being exactly who I am, doing essentially what I feel, and doing no more or less than I am capable of.

Lying on our mats in the morning, ambient sounds begin to build in volume and wake us. The loudspeaker shouting indecipherable things, pounding of rice outside, voices of our friends mixed with those of strangers in Thai and Karen. As on every morning, we eat beautiful food for breakfast. The same tomato-sardine sauce on rice, a green and golden veggie stew. Cross-legged on a cool wood floor, the sun casts golden pillars across our faces through gaps in the walls. We soon make our way to the pile of supplies under the house opposite ours. Would we carry the enormous blue PVC pipes or the 50-kilo bags of cement or the remaining rebar? I go for a 90-degree el, sling it across my shoulders, and up I march. It’s only when I see the photo Salinee took later that I realize it was about as big as me. I’ve been working my body harder than I have in, perhaps, the past five months or so – walking up and down steep hills, often toting 20kg or so on my back, throwing rocks, mixing concrete, shoveling sand. I feel the ache in my legs as we ascend the usual drier path toward the dam. At the top, I turn around to gaze at other hills, overlapping like waves and disappearing into haze. Then the path makes a descent into a shadowy, treed lagoon. It is not until I nearly reach the top of this hill that the waterfall can be heard, crescendoing dramatically with each step until it comes into view, its noise a nearly constant assault on the ears after that point.

The men are already on the hill moving huge boulders, clearing a path with their machetes, felling banana trees like they are blades of grass. Lunch has been brought up to the powerhouse site for us. Sardine stuff again? Yay! We are so hungry. After eating and a short snooze on the hill, we carry more bags of sand and rocks to the dam site with which to block the flow of water on one half of the riverbed. I station myself for almost an entire afternoon in the small waterway we have dug. When we are mixing concrete, I’m handed huge bags of sand on my shoulders, which I carry the brief distance to the other bank as it drips icy water on my shirt. When we are passing concrete, I grab a full bucket from Ba Hanh and pass it to a Karen woman whose name I never learned. I pass an empty bucket from the woman to Ba Hanh. Sometimes someone isn’t paying attention, doesn’t see an oncoming bucket, has to be called to. We all smile at each other and laugh. It is wonderful, the rhythm of it, everyone working in unison, like a dance that just happens to build a dam.

We head back to the house at around 4pm, carrying tools, the boys laughing and running fast so that they can get to the soccer field as soon as possible. I try to imagine having so much energy after such a day and cannot. After each day of working, I am bodily exhausted, emotionally raw, and wanting nothing. Nothing more than to be quiet, alone, and motionless. So I shower, change, and sit on the sunny stairs that face the north to eat a snack and watch the sunset. My friends wave to me as they pile into the truck headed for the soccer field, all jaunty and wide-eyed. For most of the refugee students we are working with, this is their first time away from their camp in many years. Later that night they return all wobbly and sweaty, and we hang around the house playing guitar and talking. We watch the sky darken, as a few villagers drop by, some without speaking at all. As more arrive, it becomes apparent that there is to be a village meeting here. During the meeting, I watch people’s faces and listen to the way they speak with such little self-importance that I sometimes couldn’t even tell who the voice was coming from.