Living an Isaan (Part 12)

The Inquisitor now has a unique opportunity to follow the average life of a small Isaan family. Sweetheart's brother. A typical Isaan life, the ups and downs, probably with the main question: how to build a life in this underprivileged region? Time for a sequel, The Inquisitor takes you to the past, in a modern age, in what calls itself a modern country.

Living an Isan (12)

The heat has gripped Isan. It came suddenly, the day before there was still a warm but pleasant summer temperature, only to strike without warning. No wind, not a leaf on the trees that moved and the temperatures went over thirty-five, in the afternoon even up to thirty-eight. Then a person falls silent, even if you were born and raised here. Piak, Taai and PiPi have to adapt and look for shadow places. They had a rickety fan, but it broke, air conditioning is priceless to them, of course.

But they are inventive. They contemplate the animal world that also groans under the heat. Dogs, for example, instinctively find cool places, sometimes somewhere on a moist piece of ground, or under a tree against which low undergrowth grows. Places where the sun never comes and the earth is slightly less warm. The family also regularly settles down there, on a bamboo mat. PiPi gets a large sink with water, the little guy brightens up. But the daily routine has to continue.

Through Taai's family they have large tubers of the obtained at a low price. Piak has borrowed a kind of grinding machine in the village to make the fruits small. They then spread it on a large plastic sheet in full sun. The shredded tubers must be allowed to dry out for about three days before being sold. They regularly have to turn everything around a bit, even a job in full sun. Towards evening they pile everything up again and cover everything with an extra tarpaulin, you never know if there will be a shower now and that is detrimental to the tubers. In the morning they repeat the whole ritual.

Piak is building a bean field on the neighboring land. Tough job, this piece of land belongs to his youngest sister who lives in Bangkok. And used by various contractors as a dump for all waste during the construction of De Inquisitor's house. And to be honest, afterwards also by De Inquisitor himself to get rid of all the unusable stuff. Little by little, that is, working for an hour and cooling down for half an hour, he clears away the mess. Manually. Everything that can burn is set on fire, rubble and others are buried in a deep pit.

Then he gets to work with that typical "push" tractor. The soil is rock hard, it is also full of roots and it takes a lot of effort for Piak to turn the earth over. Two days of pushing, pulling and struggling. In full sun, the temperature must be well above forty degrees. Piak has dressed himself up as a desert nomad. Not a piece of skin is visible, only eyes and mouth. With endless patience, he still manages to transform the plot into a beautiful piece of farmland – something that De Inquisitor admires, he had already had the idea of ​​renting an excavator and having it transported away by truck. An Isaaner simply does that by hand….

The heat continues to prevail, ergo, it is gradually getting warmer. De Inquisitor's wall thermometer now indicates thirty-five degrees from nine o'clock in the morning, in the afternoon it quickly goes to forty. In the shadow. In the evening it hardly cools down. Taai and Piak continue. They cut branches in the forest and stick them neatly in rows into the welled up soft earth. Then the soil is fertilized – which they scrape together in their own cow shed and mix with black soil. That manure is spread between the branches, and then they sow the beans. And now have to water, daily, a lot.

In between all that work, they also have to take care of their two cows, but those animals also suffer from the heat. Apparently they get the hang of it because for three evenings in a row they refuse to walk back to their stables as sluggish as ever. They even put it on the run every now and then, Piak has to go after it every time. The Inquisitor first thought it was because of his three dogs, they can't resist teasing, barking and threatening the animals. To himself, when such a mastodon finally lets go of his gentleness, jumping happily to blow the retreat for a minute. But Piak says no, the dogs have been doing that from the beginning. It's the heat, he suspects. The sheet metal roof absorbs the heat and continues to radiate it well after sunset, they no longer cool down. That drives the cows crazy, once in the barn they can't get out of the heat.

The family's only time to cool down is when they take a shower. Pouring cold water over your body refreshes you. They do that several times a day. But after the last evening shower it's moaning again. Going to sleep at thirty-five degrees is no fun. Piak's house also has a sheet steel roof - it heats up enormously all day long. And now there is no more cooling. PiPi, just under three years old, can hardly sleep. , So tough, then blow a cloth over him when he wakes up again drenched in sweat.

And all those days The Inquisitor is looking for coolness. Or in the fans of the shop, nice and in the shade. Or under the roof of his new warehouse, where there is a slight breeze because a kind of corridor has been created with the pump house. He often watches the family from here. Inflamed by Piak's zeal, he also sets to work, finishing the warehouse. Paint walls, drill shelves up. Which he gives up after a day and a half. Too hot. Even if he took a fresh shower every two hours, even if he cooled down in the air conditioning for an hour during the hottest part of the day. Even if he could sleep blissfully cool in the artificial twenty-five degrees. The Inquisitor can just laze around, fight the heat with no strings attached.

Liefje-lief and De Inquisitor have let PiPi sleep in the house for the last two nights, with the air conditioning. Because the little guy was dead tired during the day, because of the heat and hardly slept.

To be continued