My family just moved to a new location about 60 miles from our old place in Northern Thailand. We are now in a Lue village that has a similar dialect to the one we were studying before. The new village has about two hundred homes and is located near a major river. We do live in a flood plain and the neighbors keep pointing out five foot high flood lines from a deluge that came through four years ago. Yikes!
We are blessed with many friends from our old village that helped pack up moving vans and the came over to help unpack too. We couldn’t have done the move without them. After all our stuff was unloaded, the village headman’s wife made a wonderful meal for us and everyone that helped out. What a great welcome.
Boat races are popular here and happening all this month. Our village won second place out the 143 other boat teams last weekend. I’ll write more about the boat races in another post.
My survey responsibilities are over and I’m back to studying Lue culture full-time (or I should say after we get settled in). The next season of study will mainly be focusing on the covert aspects of the Lue culture (beliefs and values). I’m hoping to learn to speak at discourse level in the next year or so.