Thailand Mission Team Construction Project at “Ban Kohn” Akha Village

On Monday, February 8, three of our Thailand mission trip members (Karen, Beth, and Kerry) traveled by truck with Mike Mann and an ITDP staff member (Somsak, who is Karen and a former pastor in Bangkok) to an Akha village named “Ban Kohn” about four hours northeast of Chiang Mai. We were first shown the construction site where the next day would be helping men and women from the village to hand-mix and lay a concrete floor for a building that’ll be used to house first-stage coffee-processing equipment brought there in March. We were also shown the garden near the site where the villagers are planting tomatoes for their meals and to sell for income.

After returning to the village, we brought our sleeping bags into the home of our home-hosts and got our beds arranged on floor mats in their “living room”, the “headman” (or mayor) of the village and his wife. Mike then showed as around the nearby homes where the villagers stored their newly-picked coffee beans, and later on the same day put them through a “hulling machine” (powered by electricity and connected to a water supply). The machine separates the “nut” of the coffee bean and the hull, where the hulls are funneled into a bin for later use as mulch in the tomato gardens. Because of the high productivity of coffee in the village through their ITDP training provided by the Mann’s, we saw many stacks of coffee beans picked earlier that day waiting to be hulled. The new building site for a larger hulling machine we’re helping to construct will provide a central place where the villagers can instead bring their picked beans to be hulled by a much larger hulling machine.

The following day, Beth, Karen, and I worked alongside 15 of the villagers, Mike, and three ITDP staff members to help construct the concrete floor for. We passed buckets of sand, stones, and water to the Akha workers who built “volcanoes” of these items then mixed by hand to spread into the new floor area. Each “volcano” made enough concrete for an area about 4 feet by 4 feet. After the concrete was shoveled into a new area, other workers used wood “floats” to smooth the floor surface. By continuing this process, the new floor was completed in about four hours.

We had lunch with the headman and the ITDP staff in a makeshift “tent” covered by plastic sacks, with again delicious food prepared by our home-hosts brought to the site. We said farewell to the headman, and then saw the areas nearby where the women from the village were picking beans that day. This is a difficult job for them since they climb up steep slopes to pick the beans, and the straw baskets they carry on their backs weighs over 60 pounds when it’s filled with picked beans. This area is nestled in mountain valleys about 4000 feet high, and the views from the fields were quite nice.

This construction project coordinated and managed by Mike and Becky’s ITDP coffee-growing project was largely paid for by $3500 in 2010 ABCRM Mission Team funds set aside for our ABCRM Thailand mission trip that were EFT’ed to the Mann’s Chiang Mai bank account before we arrived. Mike and Becky and the village headman very much appreciated this donation that will help many of families in the Ban Kohn village.

Kerry Hassler