Dear Friends:

 

Due to a server administrator glitch our website www.akha.org will be down a couple more days.  For the meanwhile post all messages to me at akhazauh@...

 

It is amazing that such could happen in this day and age, but so it goes.

 

******

 

An Akha woman and her daughter came to me because their father had been taken by the army from the village of Bpah Mah Hahn.

 

The entire region is in opium detox, poorly managed.

Adicts are buying diazepam and injecting it to induce sleep and take away the smoking urge in addition to some kind of tonic the government is having them drink. Only problem is that there is not enough of the diazepam available and there are not enough needles so they are sharing needles.  There is little to no doctor involvement. 

 

Mr. Ah Nay was sleeping from his last injection and the army came to his house and searched it and found some old smoked opium crystals that are often kept about for stomach ache.  They kicked him away, took him away to a base, beat him and put him in an earthen hole in the ground.  When his wife came and told me that he had been beaten we went to the army base Huuh Gkhah and asked for him so they got him out of the hole and sure enough his face had been worked over, but the swelling was down.  From the size of the bruising around his eye one could see he hadn't been able to see for a day. The army told me he would be released July 13.  He is sleeping in a wet hole 8 feet down, no bigger than a well.

 

There is little to celebrate in the Akha villages as the beatings and killings go on year by year.

 

Crop substitution.

 

Matthew McDaniel