Bureaucracy of Thailand
But lets get back to my day trip with the land department. We already paid the fee of 2,100 THB to have our land measured and we have informed the land department as to who owns the land next to us so that they, our next doors neighbors, can come and sign the land agreement. The procedure to book the time made me think of Thailand as a very bureaucratic country and when you think of that the bureaucrats in Thailand have the most holidays in the world (more than 200 day offs), you start to wonder if they ever get anything done. First, you have to book the time, bringing all the papers and I mean all the papers. If you forget any, you will have to go back to Bangkok and get a new one. Then you wait for one more month and then come and pay and I mean come and pay. You can not send them money by bank, you can not ask some friend to come and pay, you can not write a cheque and of course, you can not pay the money there and then. You simply have to come back to this office and pay that person later. My girlfriend had gotten an advice from her mother to tip each guy 500 THB or something when they have finished their job. I thought that was a good idea IF they turned out to be nice and good people. I am always in to tipping honest people in Thailand but as soon as farrang money comes in the pictures, it always goes sky high. If you tip Thai people too much, they just think you are stupid and they want to get more from you. Try to be moderate with tipping so they can make a better service next time.
Two months from that day, we got our booking and we were told to pick four people up from outside the land department office. That made me think, this is not going to be ok – this is going to be hell. Some guys who had been measuring lands around this area all their lives do not even know how to get to our place and we have to lead them to it?
Normally you do not need to measure the land if someone has done it before. There should be concrete blocks or pillars showing you where the land starts and ends. However, sometimes when you are not there the blocks disappear and your land can shrinks from year to year, making it impossible for you to say where the original land starts and stops. If you are doing rice farming maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but if you making a fence around your house and the fence ends up of the other side on the not so nice neighbors, then you are in trouble.
Do not want to get dirty
When the four people in the pick up stepped out of the car, you can see that the boss was not a happy man, this was not his day. I can understand him; the land was like a moon landscape but with water. Grey clay and mud as far you can see. Of course, I did the only right thing and went barefoot, but the land department person did not even have that in mind.
What did he expect, it had been raining for 5 days and this was a new land, of course it was going to be muddy. He was lucky we had made the road otherwise he would have to walk through the rice field full with water. He sent out his staff to go look for the poles, as I understood. He did not move an inch from the safety of the car. Of course they did not find the first pole, they did not find the second pole and they thought the third pole was in the middle of an ant nest or at least that’s what one of the beetle juice chewing neighbors said. She also mentioned that boundary could be set on our side of the ants nest, that was very nice of her, but I told her that in the middle would be much better. However, she was sure it was on our side.
The land people left that pole as well and found another one. And if I draw a straight line from that pole to the ants nest, then to the next pole, we would be all set and according to the map that the land people had done 20 years ago.
Thai witch from hell
Then the youngest of the 3 beetle chewing ladies turned up. Her mouth was dripping with black gunge when she said the words “I know the line is on this side of the kun nah (a dyke to separate the different rice fields). If you were looking on the map, the line was straight, it was just to make some new poles, and we should have been done. The dripping mouth continued “I saw the guy who filled up their land, he took the pole away.” (I could swear that she took it away herself the night before). Everyone was only standing a few feet from each other and she, the three neighbors with beetle juice dripping down their mouth were screaming to everyone. They were not angry; they just talked this way, screaming normally. You might have seen them sometimes, selling stuff on the street screaming at each other. You can be sure they are not from Bangkok they are upcountry girls. Personally I hate it, I can not stand the way they scream at each other (sorry talked). I was wondering where the amazing and smiling Thailand had gone.
The land department person was ready to go home after accomplished absolutely nothing. More beetle juice down their clothes and lots of arguments later with the rest of the village (by then there were 20 people screaming at each other when I could normally whisper); the neighbor said that we could draw the line on the side of the dyke and not in middle, as we should normally do. All the villagers start cheering her on even my girl friend’s staff (she happened to be from this village). I was getting very tired of the staff and told her that she put mak (talk too much or shut up in a rude way). If she was my staff, I would fire her on the spot. The problem was the staff. She has some kind of debts (kreng jai) to pay back to her own village and it will always push them to say and do things they normally would not do back in Bangkok.
The Neighbors chewing beetle nuts part I
The Neighbors chewing beetle nuts part III
Uthai Thani
