Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Arrival at Lisu tribe festival

The next morning after more rice, greens, dried soybeans, and of course more tea, we said goodbye to our hosts and moved onward into the hills. Tee’s father came along, as he wanted to visit some relatives and friends in the hill village. On the way, we stopped to pick up a village resident friend of Tee’s father. Both older individuals shared a fondness of chewing paan, had their teeth blackened, and talked animatedly in the Akha language.

On the way to the Akha village Tee spotted a cloth sign fluttering in the breeze that promoted an annual festival of the Lisu hill tribe people. Able to speak some Lisu, he was able to inquire of some Lisu people walking alongside the road that the festival was indeed happening today. It was the last day of the three-day festival, but there should be some things going on. Traveling on a narrow hilly dirt road, we passed by some trucks with Lisu people in the truck bed who were traveling away from the festival location. Tee explained that some Lisu people would have traveled for over five hours to attend the festival, with some perhaps even coming from Burma (Myanmar). Yesterday, over 3,000 Lisu were in attendance. The school grounds in the village of Ban Doi Lan (meaning “million mountains”) was the site of the festival. Tee introduced me to one Lisu woman who spoke fairly good English. She was one of the organizers of the festival and saw it as a key opportunity to celebrate and promote the Lisu culture. Like Tee, she expressed a concern for the disappearance of her culture and language. One of her ambitions involved utilizing the internet as a tool for educating others about the Lisu culture and as a way for Lisu people to keep in touch with each other.

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