Wedding And A Funeral

This is a picture taken 4 or 5 years ago.  The lady in the flowered shirt is Yai Bao.

 

She was my housekeeper, when I was in the Peace Corps.  I'm still not sure how I could afford a maid on only 250 USD/ month.  I think I paid her 30 USD/ month, which was not a lot for all the work she did, but she also used my house as the local casino. 

During the day, while she was cleaning or doing laundry, villagers would stop by to buy tickets for the underground lottery.  Other times, she would organize a game of cards in the evening with some of the local high-rollers - usually, a group of old Thai-Chinese ladies. Yai Bao and I would serve them snacks and drinks and at the end of the night (sometimes 3 or 4am), she and I would get a cut from the dealer for letting them use my house.  The idea was that the police would never suspect an illegal lottery or gambling operation to be going on in a foreigner's house.

Here's another picture from the same day.  I had a bit of a shock just before this picture was taken.  Before I arrived in Chaiyaphum I had asked my friend, Supot, how Yai Bao and her husband were doing.  He told me that her husband had passed away.  It was sad news, of course, but not too much of a surprise because he seemed to be about 20 years older than Yai Bao.

What was a surprise, and caused Supot and I both to choke on our whiskeys was a few minutes after we had arrived at Yai Bao's house, her husband came out to greet us.  I guess Supot got some wrong information - or we were seeing ghosts.

There's the ghost smiling in the background.

Here's a picture of Yai Bao's husband and I during the water festival.  For some reason he was dressed up like an old lady.

Well, fast-forward to a couple weeks ago when I drove up to Chaiyaphum for the wedding that I blogged about previously.   Similar to my last trip - when I arrived, Supot told me that Yai Bao's husband had died the day before, but this time he was not mistaken.

So, the day after the wedding, I stopped by my old village to attend the funeral. 

I didn't take a lot of pictures, but here is the path leading to the temple. 

here is Yai Bao and some of her friends waiting for the monks to arrive.

After the funeral, I stopped by my old house.  This is the view looking out across from the casino.