Keeping the army marching on its stomach

Mencook rice in a large wokat a shelter in Ban Khok Klang in Surin province’s PhanomDong Rak district. They work from4amto10pm every day to prepare food for thousands of evacuees and troops on duty at the border. TAWATCHAI KEMGUMNERD

To ensure Thai soldiers and evacuees don't go hungry at the border, 12 men toil every day in a makeshift kitchen at a shelter to cook them rice

30/04/2011

King-oua Laohong

Bangkok Post

From early in the morning to late at night every day, 12 men toil arduously in front of five giant woks in an open-air makeshift kitchen.

Their duty is to ensure the Thai troops stationed at the Cambodian-Thai border and about 3,000 evacuees at Ban Khok Klang shelter in Phanom Dong Rak district of Surin don't go hungry.

Each day, every wok is used 10 to 12 times to cook rice alone and it takes a dozen men to cook the steamed rice.

About 350 boxes of cooked rice are prepared and then delivered to the troops at the front line once in the morning and then again in the evening.

The rest of the rice that is prepared is for feeding the evacuees.

The food to eat together with the cooked rice is prepared by a number of female villagers.

The rice and food are bought with money allocated by the provincial office. The general public has also given cash donation which were then spent buying food. Ready-to-eat food and ingredients have also been donated.

A week ago, about 2,000 villagers living near the battle zone were evacuated to live at the shelter which is actually a school. The number has risen to about 3,000 now.

In the makeshift kitchen, the stoves are made of 200-litre tin barrels.

Using the extremely large pans to cook the rice is no easy task, said Ad Koisamran who is one of the 12 rice cookers.

It is a really physically demanding job to wrestle with the extra large pan and a spatula about one metre long which is used to stir the rice for hours a day, not to mention coping with the fierce heat, he said.

Aside from physical strength, the task also requires certain special methods to cook such large amounts of rice in the giant woks.

Sud Chaikla, a rice cooker, said it was important to put enough water into the wok and add some vegetable oil before leaving the liquid to boil.

After that, he puts the rice into the pan and keeps stirring the mixture to prevent the rice at the bottom of the pan from burning while the rest of the rice gets half-cooked.

Most importantly, he said, liquid in the pan must be drained at the right time before covering the well-cooked rice with a thin sheet of white cloth soaked in water.

Onsa Chaikla, an elder brother of Mr Sud, said he is responsible for finding firewood supplies for cooking the rice.

Due to the large amount of rice that needs to be cooked just every day, a lot of wood must be used, he said. He normally leads a team of teenagers in his village to look for dried logs such as those from dead mango trees.

Somphong Laksanasi, another member of the rice cooking team, said in the past week he arrived around 5am to cook rice at the shelter. He returns home late at night after work.

"We might be tired from waking up at three or four in the morning to cook. But the soldiers on the front line are on duty day and night and they must be far more exhausted then we are," he said.