A St. Louisan learns contentment in Thailand

James Van Camp went off to volunteer, cocky about the need to go high-tech...

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For months, James Van Camp lived in Thailand. He'd arrived to do a volunteer project chronicling the Thai struggle with western-style modernization. He wound up humbled, feeling far more a student than a savvy observer.

Many of the people Van Camp met radiated a contentment that, in his own experience, was rare. He learned about intriguing subcultures whose members didn’t even speak Thai, yet had lived there for centuries; frightening environmental problems (air thick with smoke from the crop burnings, because the mountains trapped it); odd blotches of western influence, like the ubiquitous 7-11s. But mainly, he learned how people lived, and what mattered most to them.

“The narrative soon became less linear,” he says. “More just me interacting with them and taking photographs of what I saw.”

The result? A book titled Phrao, all about that place, and hardly at all about its contrast to this one. (Check it out here or at Subterranean Books in the Delmar Loop.)

My neighbor, Pon, strikes a pose in front of her well-kept home. She spends hours working on her garden and stops to talk to nearly everyone that passes.

A woman pokes her head up from the middle of a field of pepper bushes. The crops are a deep green after a heavy morning rain.

Spectators take cover as a rocket prepares for takeoff. The homemade rockets are launched at a festival where teams gather from all over the region to compete. The rocket that flies the highest and straightest earns prestige for their village.

Fog lingers over one of the largest hill tribes in the mountains surrounding Phrao. Ban Mae Poon Luaung is only 20 miles away from the town center, but it takes more than an hour to travel the windy and steep roads. During the rainy season the roads are often washed out, making the route impassable.

Passengers cling to a truck as it speeds along the main road. It’s time for harvest so farmers plan for efficiency rather than safety.

A woman stands in the middle of a smoldering field. Burning excess growth to make way for the new season is a common practice, but it raises health concerns: The combined fires from farmers across the region create a thick haze that lingers in the valley for weeks.

In honor of the queen’s birthday, groups from dozens of hill tribes and villages in the Phrao valley strapped on their rain boots on a Saturday morning to plant trees.

A farmer pauses to take note of his field as the day’s work comes to an end. In the distance, mountains rise abruptly from the Phrao valley.