Rural life forty years ago
If there is anyone whom I pay my respect to, excluding my parents and grand parents, it is my geology teacher, Mrs. Niyom Nilpueng. I asked her for an interview and she was very willing to talk about it.
For information background of the interviewee, Mrs. Niyom Nilpueng is my school’s geology teacher. and has been teaching for almost forty years. She lived in rural part of
I asked her how she used to live; I thought forty years is a short period and there should be only little differences from now. She laughed and said that there was no electricity and tap water back then, and the lifestyle was very different from what it is now. Her house situated near a river so that it was easy to deal with water supply; what she needed to do was carrying water from the river to her home every few days. Back then, most popular fuel used was charcoal. All homes had to make it themselves. Husk was also used for cooking. At nights, she had to light up lamps to do homework; the lamp fuel was paraffin which was relatively cheap. She also said that candles were expensive, so paraffin lamps were more popular. Teacher Niyom also mentioned about something very interesting; she said there was a refrigerator that used paraffin as energy supply! It needed to be lighted up all the time so it is very paraffin consuming. It is only for very rich people, so expensive that there was only one in her district.
She stopped to think a little and continued about meals. As her family did not have refrigerator, all meat had to be conserved by frying, salty and spicy. The salty meat was eaten with rice and the spicy ones were made into various curry. Her family grew vegetables so there were plentiful.
I said thank you to her, planning to leave when she came up with another interesting story, not very related to the topic, but I decided to put it here. She mentioned earlier that her house was situated near the river so in rainy season where were a lot of otters swimming in the river band, but there are none when she returned home last visit and the river was so dirty that water cannot be consumed anymore. She strongly believed that technology comes at a price. People destroy nature to develop technology. She said that it is the time for us to realize the Earth is very dirty and we are responsible for it. I agree with her.
