Village Life

When we arrived in Paka Samatkri we had no idea that there would be two funerals, a water buffalo sacrifice, a village celebration (which included eating the buffalo) and yet another Akha tradition - AwooBaloo (or something along those lines) which intailed a mostly naked man marching around the village trying to touch people with a large phalic object. (You could pacify him with a small charitable donation). Women were said to get pregnant and men would be cursed if touched by the... uhh, well, were touched. A great evening of entertainment.

It was the Shaman's mother who died (of natural causes) so there was quite a lot of pomp and circumstance around the whole event. The mourners went to the hospital to retrieve the body, brought it back to the village (many kilometers away) only to realize that they brought home the wrong body. Oops, it was back to the hospital to bring home the queen mother. Friday morning, the village water buffalo was sacrificed (that was something else - maybe another blog) and Friday afternoon it was a giant barbeque. Saturday we marched down to the cemetary, paid our respects while the poor villagers had to undergo a great feat of engineering to get the body down the steep embankment and into the ground. It was all quite incredible.