Five years ago, A. and I came to Thailand for the first time. We hardly knew each other when we arrived, but by the time we left, we had become close friends. A few months later, we would fall in love with each other.  But by the end of our semester abroad, we had already fallen in love with Asia, and especially with the simplicity of village life we had discovered while living with the Karen hill tribe.

          We’ve stayed in touch with many of the friends we met in Thailand back then, and this week, we were able to fulfill a long-standing hope: we returned to that village with one of our best friends from university to attend our Karen friend’s wedding!  It was amazing to see the whole village and extended family come together to cook and decorate the church with fresh flowers from the market. Everyone brought rice wrapped in little banana leaf packets to contribute to the ongoing feast (it was hard to distinguish one meal from the next since there was always food around!), and everyone took home leftovers at the end. Without being told what to do, everyone seemed to naturally flow into potato peeling or flower arranging or whatever it was that needed to be done at the moment. We also appreciated how casual and low-key everything was—the priority was spending time together with family and friends rather than putting on a show for the guests, so the schedule for the wedding day wasn’t even decided until the day before, and nearly everyone who was invited had also contributed to the preparations beforehand.  Even during the ceremony, various small groups of people sang songs to the couple while kids played on the floor in the middle of everything. And just a few hours afterward, a bunch of us went with the bride and groom to play in a nearby waterfall.

          Five years ago, it was 2008. That year marked the beginning of our life together, and the beginning of a long searching that has continued ever since—the pursuit of simplicity, of community, of justice for small, beautiful communities all over the world whose existence is threatened by prejudice, indifference, power, and greed. 

          In the last five years, a lot has changed in Thailand. The city where we lived has gone a lot more “upscale”, looking less distinctively Thai and more like sterile shopping districts plastered with the same multinational brands that you see all over the world.  There are more touristy bars and gimmicks than we remember. Even in some of the village areas that seemed so remote when we first visited, there are now paved roads and even high-speed internet! At the wedding, too, we saw signs of change: young hipsters who have moved from the villages to the city for work wandered around taking pictures with smart phones while older members of the tribe slaughtered animals and prepared food in ways that this youngest generation may have never learned. Most of them were wearing bits and pieces of their traditional tribal clothing over skinny jeans and t-shirts.

          In the last five years, a lot has changed for us personally, too.  W­­­­­­e dated, got engaged, got married, and moved to Asia. We’ve collected more stamps in our passports; we’ve collected more battle scars, more hopes and dreams, and more questions than answers. So much has changed since 2008.  But in many ways, our slum community in India is just another village that has invited us in as part of the tribe.