Bang Land Da: an Introduction to the Village

The project is taking place in the Krabi RAMSAR site, southwest Thailand. RAMSAR is the convention that promotes wise and sustainable use of wetland resources. In Thailand RAMSAR site status does not confer protection, but denotes the importance of the ecosystems covered. Krabi's site is approximately 21,000ha, and including 9,000ha of mangrove among other features.
The village of Bang Land Da (BLD) (lat 8.006851, long 98.978647) is within the Krabi RAMSAR site. It was actually our third attempt to secure a site to rehabilitate (top right pin). The first two fell through due to either unsuitability of the site or a land ownership issue (to be covered in a later blog). My colleague Khun (Mr if you’re a Buddhist Thai) Donnapat knew people in the village from a previous project and discussed with them whether they had an area of inter-tidal land that could be reverted back to mangrove with our help.

That is how we came to this village. BLD is a small Muslim community of approx 300 people. Some people fish. Some rear crabs in crab ponds. Some make products from the local natural resources, like roofing sections from Nipa palm leaves. Krabi town is sufficiently close by to allow villagers to work there. So there is a variety of occupations. We have formed a good relationship with Bang (Mr is you are a Muslim Thai) Don and his family. He runs the crab producing and selling group, and is something of an elder statesman of the village.
At our initial meeting with the village, in what they called a sala, we explained what we would like to do; that, though wanting to involve them as much as possible, we were going to teach ourselves how to rehabilitate a pond; that we didn’t have bags of money to distribute but that certain capacity-building activities or training sessions could be arranged and run, if the community felt the need for them.
In response to the question of what they felt were the community’s challenges, no burning issue came to light. So during the course of our relationship with them we will continue to explore the livelihood / capacity building question from different angles, and at different times.

In an effort to bond with the community we’ve spent time talking with them, sharing a coffee and eating together. Sadly my Thai linguistic ability is terrible but one thing that has gone down well is printing out some of the pictures we have taken during the course of our time in the community, as well as laminating some Google Earth images of their community. These were cheap to do and greatly appreciated by the people.