Thursday, 4 Dec 2003

RASI SALAI, Thailand

I feel like a new person now that I have showered. We received a gentle reminder from the organizers this morning not to leave the tap running while showering, brushing teeth, washing clothes; this is a water conference, after all, and we’ve been running short. Cold, short, and wet is far better than dry and dusty.

Mun’s the word: the Mun River near Rasi Salai, Thailand.

I could hear a distant loudspeaker making announcements in Thai this morning as I walked to the canteen area, but I couldn’t make out its message. On the shores of the Mun River yesterday, a similar loudspeaker bellowed in the background as we listened to the villagers tell their story of struggle against the Rasi Salai Dam. I later learned that the loudspeaker was shouting, “Come to the river if you have a boat, come to the river and see the foreigners.” Wooden boats showed up by the dozens to take a hundred of us downstream to visit a freshwater swamp forest affected by the Rasi Salai Dam.

Language is an enormous factor in meetings like this one. At a workshop on community-based research, a Colombian man speaks in Spanish, which is then translated into English for the entire group and then into Chinese, French, Hindi, Khmer, Thai. There is no universal language, or formula, for victory in the struggles against large dams.

Even the workshop on conducting community-based research emphasized the differences in the ways local knowledge can be presented and used. Collecting ancestral knowledge in Colombia has been invaluable for unifying the anti-dam movement. Community-based research in Thailand posed a hefty challenge to the government’s promised dam benefits. Local wisdom in Senegal provided more effective and efficient solutions to health problems caused by large dams than any research produced at a university.

Just as each river’s meandering path is unique, fluid, changing, so too are the struggles to keep them flowing. The participants are here to swap success stories, strategies, and even resistance songs. In order to strengthen the international movement, a participant from Brazil said it best: “We need to celebrate our allies’ victories and their enemies’ defeats as our own.”

Each struggle faces different foes — the World Bank, an electric company, a neighboring country. Dam-affected people in Cambodia, for example, have little voice in their struggle against the upstream Vietnamese dams whose sudden and unannounced releases have claimed Cambodian lives.

By the fourth day of this meeting, I think I’ve heard every variation on the “damn dam” theme and I’m mildly dreading this evening’s cultural presentations. I can’t sing, but the American contingent seems obliged to sing a Moon River medley in honor of the nearby Mun River.