COMMUNITY

Travel Writers: A Perfect Day for Banana Feet by Samantha Miller

Location: Mountains near Chiang Mai, Thailand

As I slip down a mud-soaked hill, groping for banana trees (which I soon discover secrete some sort of primal ooze), I hear my mother’s voice reverberating in my ears; reliable Jewish guilt returns to haunt me. “Break in your hiking boots before you leave for Thailand,” she warned repeatedly. Knowing full well that she was right, I convinced myself that I could wear them once I began this international excursion— a quest to find a missing part of me. Now I can feel it in my heels. As I gaze upward at the mosaic of light seeping though the dense canopy, I stumble over a rock and slide through the muck, my downward adventure halted by a decaying purple banana flower.

Saturated in filth, I am shocked to discover myself laughing hysterically. The entire notion that I’m 9,000 miles away from home in the jungle and I’m complaining about my feet seems utterly absurd, so I peel off my boots, tie them to my backpack, and continue on my journey— barefoot.

Thai culture traditionally considers feet the lowliest and most ignoble part of the body, so when I trudge back to my host family’s village, nestled in the mountains outside of Chiang Mai, I see the shock pierce through my “Mah” when she examines my battered and grimy feet. She grabs my hand almost before I can lay down my tattered belongings in the modest house, which consists of one large room, no doors, and basic cable television. My bubbly six-year-old “sister,” Som, giggles while she scurries to a roofless concrete shack. Though this seems an unlikely candidate for a bathroom, I
have learned to embrace each new situation openly, for Thailand constantly requires the foreigner to redefine the way in which she perceives the world.

Mah drags me into the bathroom after her, instructing me to sit on a cinder block next to Som, who is busy splashing water and trying to tickle me (yet my real younger brother has rendered me tickle-proof). Pouring a bucket of frigid water down her back, Som tugs at her long braids, which begin to unravel. Next year her long obsidian hair will become a short bob— the government mandates that every Thai girl entering the first grade wear the same haircut, the same clothes, and the same shoes.

Something scraping against my toes shifts my attention to Mah, who fastidiously scrubs my toes with a brush designed to remove grease from outdoor grills. I extend my arm and place my hand on the brush so that she understands she doesn’t have to do this, but she swats my wrist and smiles. Before I can object she is nurturing my tattered cuticles with special cream and bandaging my various wounds. My inhibitions about living in an alien country with people who speak a radically different language wash away with the dirt on my feet. Not yet realizing the Biblical allusion of her kindness, I suddenly see a facet of human nature which my waning cynicism and teenage-angst had previously obscured. Not everyone would wash the mangled feet of a near-stranger, but somewhere within each individual lies the capacity for compassion. I know I must spend my life seeking out this
ineffable quality and documenting it, proving its existence to the world, so I reach back and hand Mah the soap.

Floating markets in Bangkok

All photos and images of Thailand © Samantha Miller

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author