Girl's Life in Moon River Village, Thailand

Ted Gugelyk

Description

Village girls torn between two worlds indulge in sex at a very early age. Teen age pregnancy, drug use, dropping out of school and running away from home have become common. Extended families once dependent on young people for labor are left on their own. Young people escape from the villages. Some will return, to die of HIV, privately, hiding their illness silently, adding more shame to their family's lives. Fathers and mothers and grandparents, illiterate but hard working and honest, are left wondering - How did all this come about so quickly? Why did village life centuries old break apart?

Sujets

• Development studies
• Developing country

Informations

• Publié par: First Edition Design Publishing
• Date de parution: 10 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781622874255
• Langue: English

Extrait

A GIRL’S LIFE IN MOON RIVER VILLAGE, THAILAND
Ted Gugelyk


First Edition Design Publishing
A GIRL’S LIFE IN MOON RIVER VILLAGE, THAILAND
By
Ted Gugelyk
A Girl’s Life in Moon River Village, Thailand
Copyright ©2013 Ted Gugelyk

ISBN 978-1622-874-25-5 EBOOK

September 2013

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com



ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .


Ted Gugelyk, Hawaii and Thailand.
E Mail: [e-mail]
Publisher, Anoai Press
Chapter One - HAPPY
“Happy” is named after her father, Kuhn Hap Son Happy Joe, a nickname he received during the Vietnam War when he worked for the Americans at Ubon Air Force Base. Today he does construction work around our picturesque village located not far from Ubon Rachathani, the administrative center of North East Thailand. Moon Village (Ban Mei Nam Mun) is twenty kilometers east of Ubon, and thirty kilometers from the Laos border. Bangkok is four hundred miles south, a world away. Moon Village is a quiet rice growing and fishing village beside the Mei Nam Mun River in a rural area Thai’s call Isan.
His only daughter “Happy” was seventeen when she gave birth to her first baby. Seventeen is considered old to be a new mother, because in rural villages girls are mothers by thirteen or fourteen years of age. At fifteen or sixteen, girls may have two or three children, and by then they are undesirable to the older boys who ride around at night on motorbikes looking for fresh young girlfriends.
Motorbike boys are aggressive like feral “soi dog” predators looting the village of its innocent girls; the boys are not liked by parents but little can be done to stop their nighttime roving forays into Isan villages. “They break no laws,” the Head Man of our village says, and the police agree. “Keep your daughters at home.” Today most older village boys are unemployed but sell “Yaba” crack cocaine for a living. What spare money the boys earn goes not to the children they sire but to proudly adorn themselves with more tattoos. The boys sleep during the day and nighttime ride through the villages on their motorbikes looking for inquisitive preteen age girls anxious to be initiated into womanhood. The Village people call these young men “soi dog boys”. In the Thai language “soi” is a street, and stray dogs lounge in the streets all over the country. Village people compare indolent boys to the lethargic stray dogs that live in the streets sleeping, eating, copulating, and waiting for a handout of food.
“Soi dog boys.” At first I made fun of these boys riding around on little seventy-five cc bikes like wanabe Hells Angels. “They are skinny neonates,” I said to my wife. “Look at them, baby pimple faced devil punks all puffed up trying to be tough and manly. If the boys think they fooling anyone they are wrong, they are not Hells Angeles, more like still born abortions” I said.
Young village girls define themselves by these men, if you can call “soi dog boys” men. So does Happy, but she held out longer to have a child. The child’s father? Forget him. He is just another “soi dog”, a thug in his mid-twenties, a young man at loose ends and no skills heading into adult oblivion.
A few months after the birth of her first child Happy found one of the plentiful jobs not far from our village. She worked as a waitress in a pleasant Thai restaurant located on the busy main highway going from Ubon Rachathani to the Lao border. But that job did not last long. After two months she disappeared from our village to take a dream job as an entertainment girl in a Karaoke bar in the south of Thailand.