A visit to Esarn, Thailand's poorest region, some 500 kilometres northeast of Bangkok, confirms that visitors do not go there to look for fantastic scenery, five-star resort hotels, beaches and sensual nightlife which have made Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, and Samui famous.

Bangkok has the perplexing wealth, huge shopping complexes, skyscrapers, grand government offices and its mammoth traffic jams, but Esarn has the heart, so I was led to believe when I read Monsoon Country, a book by an Esarn writer, Pira Sudham. Having seen the region through the writer's keen eyes, I wanted to see the land and its people through my own with him as my guide. So I decided to seek him out.

From Bangkok, I made my own way by bus to Korat and there I waited in a hotel lobby for the author. Looking more or less the same as his photo at the back of his books, Pira sauntered into the hotel, and after a cup of coffee, we headed for his village, 165 kilometres from the town.

"I rarely have visitors, not to mention a lady guest who travels alone," said my host. "So you must forgive me for things that are lacking or things that might displease you."

"Are you fond of snakes, large house lizards, little chekkoes, spiders, wasps?" he asked. "They're quite harmless, really. Some of these animals live in the house and in nearby bushes. Then there're a number of dogs and cats who are not so friendly to strangers."

I knew that the author left Bangkok some years ago to "go back to his roots" and relive his life in Napo village, where he was born in 1942. At the age of 14 he left for Bangkok to become an acolyte, a boy living in a Buddhist temple to serve the monks. There he had a chance to attend a school and later a high school which led him to the Faculty of Arts of Chulalongkorn University, prior to winning a scholarship from the New Zealand government to study English literature in New Zealand.

"The New Zealand tax payers gave me a big break in my life," said Pira. "If it was not for the scholarship, I would have been quite happy to get any manual work in a factory in Bangkok, and would have never written a book. You see, in Napo, I spent my childhood as a herdsboy, looking after the family's buffaloes as well as ploughing the fields in June and reaping the rice in November.

"There was hardly any inkling of wanting to write though all that time I committed to memory what my family members, myself and the inhabitants of Napo went through, in good years and in bad years, the injustice, the corruption, the scarcity, the pains and death caused by diseases, without medical treatment, as well as the beauty of the plain of Esarn in all seasons."

Though its author did not admit, Monsoon Country, a lyrical fiery novel written in English, is to some extent autobiographical. It won for Pira a Nobel Prize nomination in 1990.

That afternoon, at the author's home, I thought I was going to have a long serious talk with my host, but he took me out of Napo by car to a place about 12 kilometres away, on a dirt road. We stopped at a small, thatched shack in a sparsely wooded area. It looked more like a dump than a school. Here, 110 children learn their rudimentary Thai, history, geography, and mathematics.

"At this school I teach the students English two or three times a week," said Pira.

"When there is no teacher to teach English here I volunteer. Children come from several outlying villages near and far, but because the school lacks walls and a hard floor, in the rain, they get wet, and the dirt floor turns into mud, and in the summer, it becomes dusty."

He held a bowl of fried Esarn sausages in his hand and called in vain after a dog, which he had fed the last time he came to teach English there. A scraggy half-naked man appeared and told us that the bitch had just had puppies which she took deeper into the bush so that the school children could not take her young.

"Then she may go hungry because during the weekend, no one would be here to feed her," lamented my host.

Though it might not seem important at the time, I realised only later that the care even to a homeless dog could take him away from Napo. This act of his became an introduction to me to enter the world of Pira Sudham, a solitary figure, who cares for the poor, the downtrodden, the sick, the handicapped and the aged in and around his birthplace.

The Pira Sudham Estate, set up in 1988, is mostly funded by Pira out of his own income from rice farms and other properties and from the royalties of his books. His aim, as he put it, is to improve the villagers' living conditions in any way possible including the improvement of water reservoirs, and the supply of plants and young fruit trees to villagers to grow on their own land as well as providing rice fields and buffaloes to landless farmers.

Pira collects from time to time bags of clothes from homes in Bangkok to be given to the poor in his district.

"I'm not ashamed to beg from the well-to-do for used clothes to take to the people in villages in Esarn. Everything given can help ease their plight," he said. "Though Napo is now better off than it was in the Fifties, in terms of having a tar-sealed road, electricity, a telephone line, and a deep water well that can supply water to the villagers, ignorance and poverty and illness without medical treatment are still their lords and masters."

"I'm talking about dire need, about subsistent living, about the sick who are too poor to pay for transportation to and from a hospital which is over 100 kilometres away in Buri Ram, let alone to pay for the hospital bills which some people who have been brought up in a welfare state may not comprehend.

" My host modestly talked about the set up and running of Sala Witayatan, a school for 260 students and the Pira Sudham Prizes which are scholarships for 110 students of poor families. A bank account is opened for each child with a bank in a town nearest to Napo, and the Estate makes regular deposits in the accounts.

Since April 1992, a total of 355,000 baht has been put into the children's bank accounts. "The children keep their own bank books so when in need, they can withdraw the required amounts without having to ask me for permission. Once the money is in their bank accounts, it's their own. Very few of them abused this trust by making large withdrawals for parents to spend. But mostly they use the funds to pay for school fees, uniforms and food.

" He personally goes to see each family and each student to ensure that the support, whether cash, food, clothes, or medicine reaches the people who are truly in need of help.

"I don't feel that it's an obligation to make routine visits to the old and the young in Napo and other villages. But I do go out to see five or six persons a day, particularly the very old men and women who are not in good health to find out what they need, and then return with food, medicine and whatever they require. Though some people may object to giving cash to the poor, the old and the sick, I do it most times. With some money available, they can buy what they want.

"Yes, one has to be careful, firstly that one doesn't run out of money, and then one doesn't create dependency on their part. I've been very poor, so I know what it's like to be in dire need.

" I can now see for myself that it is not easy to pull a living from Esarn's arid soil. In the hot dry months hardly anything can grow; existing plants and trees wilt in the searing heat, and the land, where water collects in the rainy season, cracks in countless fissures. The plain lays empty and bare in most parts.

According to Pira, prices of commodities have drastically increased since July 1997, largely due to the economic crisis. Worse still, more and more workers return to their home villages with little or no money on them after having been sacked or laid-off by their employers and factory owners. Being laid-off, they don't receive their severance pay, but instead they have been given hope that they would be called back to their jobs when the situation improves.

Living in hope with some money in their pockets or none at all, the former cash earners have become the unemployed, dependent now on those who till the soil. Meanwhile, more and more burglars prowl villages at nights, stealing chickens and things they can lay their hands on.

"It's sad to see how the economic crisis Thailand is going through has hit the poor so hard that many of them had to turn to stealing to survive," he lamented.

But worse than the on-going economic downturn is a perpetual scarcity which not only Esarn but Thailand as a whole has had to face - and that is the inability to think and think critically, according to Pira.

"It is understandable when the entire education system is to make students learn by rote, using only their ability to memorise texts and what the teachers teach. And what is taught and how it is taught make no room for discussion, opinion forming, or asking questions. On the contrary, it is memory, obedience, and submissiveness that are demanded.

"Hence a lot of Thais grow up to be in need of an inquiring mind, a mind that has not been maimed by such an education system, and most of all a mind that can think and think critically.

" This is why Pira has set up his own school to teach children in Napo, using English learning to foster the thinking mind. First, he helps the children to learn how to ask questions, how to be inquisitive, using words like "where", "why", "how", "what", etc, then allows them to find answers to each question. The question and answer sessions are underlined by periods of discussion and reasoning. The school also provides the lessons, textbooks, notebooks, pens, and one meal a day free of charge to the students.

In time, the learning process at this school may produce a number of young Esarn men and women who have minds of their own, becoming thinking individuals.

"I consider this as one of the best gifts one can give to a human being," said Pira. "But then our classroom may pose a challenge to the age-old Thai classroom or the educational authority which aims at using education - the Thai way of education - as an apparatus to cripple the minds of the young, so that most of us are what we have become today - the unthinking, mindless, obedient mass."

Is it greed, then, that brought down the Thai economy in July 1997?

"It's not only greed but also rampant corruption, not only in financial institutions, banking, government and high offices, but in all walks of life," Pira lamented.

"As a writer, I find this period, this phase in history, very interesting. It is rich with materials for me to use in my writings, for I perceive a tree, rotten to the core, falls of its own accord. How can one cure a rotten core to prevent the fall?" asked Pira.

In time, the learning process at this school may produce a number of young Esarn men and women who have minds of their own, becoming thinking individuals.

It seemed that he knew the answer to which he alluded in all his books. Pira has written three books. Apart from the novel, "Monsoon Country", he has published "People of Esarn", and "Tales of Thailand", which have reached more than a million readers worldwide.

As for a new book, the author said it is in progress. "But I have not had anyone to put pressure on me to produce a book in one or two years. I'm playing for time. I've been waiting for a strategic moment. I'm waiting to cover the end of an era and the coming of the new in my next book," explained Pira

"If I spread myself too thinly, I'll dilute the essence of the message. I don't intend to be prolific. When I've finished what I have to say, I'll shut up and lead even a quieter life, if it is still possible to do after the new book is published.

" The last evening I was with the man who wrote Monsoon Country, we were sitting on an open porch of the house, There was a loud crash from the next hut, followed by a voice of a woman scolding a child.

"That's Toon shouting at May, her grandchild," Pira said.

"Toon, one of the main characters in the novel, remains utterly poor; she has lost most of her front teeth, but could not afford to go to a dentist. She has aged so much, looking haggard and worn out.

"How, then, can I drink a glass of expensive wine here and enjoy it?" Pira lamented as if in a dilemma.

Aaiel Cooke

Translation: John Pohl