Dear Friends: Well, first off, the Akha Village in the USA grows bigger. We have added a daughter to our family on Feb. 26, 2007. First child born in the US. Ah Pymm Elisabeth McDaniel --- Tiny picture on home page. Or shall we call it, "The Queen's Regiment"? :) Now the fact that the hospital did really naught treatments to her without our consent, and to Michu, without her consent, is more rubbish we have to deal with. But daughter is home and safe and growing and keeping all the children happy and busy and sometimes giving mom a tiny bit of rest now and then. Ok, now there has got to be a lot of stuff happening, like the case of Ms. Wongsa in Singapore, that fight goes on, and takes new dimensions, mostly of the positive sort. We wait for more results before having better news. Hopefully she will be released and allowed to stay in Singapore and marry. Now a very big event is that day and night I hammer the parts and pieces into the 3rd Akha Journal like as if I was building the Titanic with a hammer and rivets and postage stamp size pieces of steel, to say nothing that it is about to sink one corner of the house and myself. Document, articles, storys, submissions, and of course more than 700 photos that I have now scanned in. The table of contents alone will take up a couple of pages I fear. It is madness, that is for sure, but I have gotten high enough up on the hill that now I feel I can see where the hec I am going with it and getting a bit of a sense of hope that it might actually have an end, as well as a published form. Scary. The case of Hooh Yoh Akha is of course at the UN and won't the Queen of Thailand be surprised one day to find it in printed form, waiting at morning tea. Not so nice taking people's land. And to make things worse, the Queen has now expanded taking land to other nearby villages, taking land and tea plants. Then on land she has taken, she tells people, get it ready for goodness sake, its your land, least you can do is be the one to terrace it for me! Its your JOB. David Stevenson now, he continues to have hundreds of Akha children in his detention center. Explaining to a people that he is their only hope, no hope with mom and dad of course, and no mention of land rights or how he got them all, but he is sure he has legal documents on all of them, like some kind of chaff. But we and a few other people are giving Rotary International hell about it, and so maybe they see the folly of their ways soon enough and quit hyping the colonial event on their very white website. Remember, it was Rotary Taiwan that helped pay for the construction of the steep mountain village that Hooh Mah Akha was suppose to move into before we got that stopped. Last year some of the mud did fall off the hill and killed one woman and her baby, a Chinese family that had moved in. Well I am blurry eyed and got a lot more to do on the journal before sunrise. Matthew McDaniel
The Akha Heritage Foundation. http://www.akha.org Akha Heritage Site. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Akhaweeklyjournal Discussion http://groups.yahoo.com/group/akha Donate Via Credit Card Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=akha%40akha.org PO Box 6073 Salem, OR. 97304 USA. --------------------------------- The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing.
