Word: northeasterly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...engineers, surveyors, drillers and dam builders-trained largely by the U.S. and equipped with $2,500,000 worth of American machinery. Since 1950 the U.S. has granted Thailand more than $290 million in nonmilitary aid. Two years ago, only one-third of the U.S. aid was going to the northeast; today the northeast is getting about two-thirds of the total...
Learning from TV. Much of that money went into a sound, economic infrastructure for the northeast. The newly completed 380-mile "Friendship Highway," with its 500 miles of feeder roads, cuts the travel time between Bangkok and the Laotian border from weeks (depending on the weather) to a mere eight hours, at the same time opening vast new markets for the northeast's cash crops of jute, tobacco and maize. Last week more than 300 vehicles an hour were moving along the highway. And if Communist aggression ever comes to Thailand on the scale of Viet Nam, the highway...
Ironically, the highway has bred an aggression no one expected. With the advent of modern transportation, the northeast's endemic bandit population switched from cattle rustling to highway robbery. The region's 30 holdup gangs now roar down the Friendship Highway in hot rods, pulling abreast of buses and firing shots across their bows, then relieving their passengers of cash and jewelry. Many of the bandits, according to Thai police, learned their holdup techniques by watching U.S. westerns on TV sets supplied to most villages for propaganda purposes...
Although hunger is rare in the northeast (80% of the region's 10 million population own their own land), malnutrition is common due to primitive diets. In language and customs the northeasterners are more akin to the Lao than to the other 20 million Thais. They are fond of hard liquor, consuming vast quantities of a home-brewed rice whisky called lao khao, which burns with a fine blue flame when ignited. Their staple food is rice and pla raa-raw fish that has been allowed to rot for as long as six months. They also eat tarantulas drenched...
Steps Toward Progress. Though the northeast gets less rain than Thailand's lush central plain-the nation's rice bowl, much coveted by Red China-it is bordered by the Mekong and riven by countless streams. The scope for new dams, canals, wells and reservoirs is enormous, and government teams have already built scores of minor waterworks. Still, only 4,000 of the 14,000 villages have enough drinking and irrigation water at hand. Many have to cart water in by ox team from miles away. And the Communists do not hesitate to make political capital from technical...