A Burmese Feast

While in Mai Sot we 'adopted' a family. one of the family members, Ngwe, was in my English class and the classes were held at her home. The entire family of 5 lived on a$200 per month and half of that was rent. You can imagine that after you buy toiletries and laundry soap and pay your power bill there is not much to live on. When they first fled Burma seven years ago Ngwe, who I call little monkey, was 13 years old. She had to leave her family and go to work in a factory in which she also had to live. It's really slave labour. The rich factory owners pay for permits for the Burmese to stay and work and they must live at the factory and work long hours for low low wages. She was one of the lucky ones as she had a nice man as her boss or as she called him her 'teacher'. You can imagine how vulernabe a young girl would be in that situation. She got through working there for many years with her mind and body intact.
We walked through this market everyday on the way to her house and it's where we bought the food for the feast. We were a bit reticent to take close up pictures of the food or people so the pictures don't really convey what it was like. It was probably one of the most exotic markets I've ever been in. These were some of the things for sale: 8 knids of insects, live frogs, mice and rabbits, many kinds of fish including live baby eels and what looked like tadpoles, fruit and veggies galore, nuts, seeds, grains and many many things I couldn't identify. There was an array of prepared foods or people cooking right there. The smells and the racket were overwhelming in intensity.
Then there were the people. There were many kinds of ethnic groups in the market and just as many ways of dressing. Men in sarongs, women with all different kinds of traditional dress and western style clothing too. If you look closely you'll see in the front of one of the pictures, women with a cream colored paste on their faces. This is the bark of a tree ground and made into a paste. It is used as a sunscreen and can be rubbed in like makeup. What was really interesting is how it was worn. Some women wore it in big circles on their cheeks and sometimes their foreheads. Sometimes it was patterned and looked like a primitive tattoo. It looked really cool on some of the women with browner skin.
When we bought the groceries for the family we didn't mean for them to cook for us but on retrospect of course they would. You can see all the dishes they prepared. The Burmese curries are fantastic and the only disappointment was that they toned down the spices for our western pallete so we didn't get to taste the way they usually spice it. Almost everyone over here thinks westerners don't like hot spices so they adapt many things to what they think our tastes are.
When we got to the house we didn't get to take a picture of everyone because they were ushering us to our seats. I think they had been waiting for us and were excited to share the food they had made. All of the guests that weren't family were seated first. The table could hold seven of us. They told us they had already eaten but we knew they were just being polite so we tried to limit how much we ate. This did't really work because every step of the way they were urging us to eat more. We were so full we had to go home and take a nap!