The sun just arises. It is 5:30am or perhaps 6am. In each family of the village, it is a new day which starts. The women are always the first to wake up and they already are cooking the breakfast: usually rice with vegetables, and sometimes fish or pigmeat... and then, a soup of ant eggs as the dessert with their adult red cousins on the side. It is also necessary to keep the monks' offering. The monks of the wat (Buddhist temple) will come soon to have their food for the whole day, as every morning.

Men have more difficulty to wake up. Some are hardly sobered up from the day before. But they will soon start their daily occupations at their own pace too.

The children slip into their immaculate uniform to go to the elementary school, their small portfolio under their arm. None of them knows yet if he or she will have the chance to continue studies out of secondary. Many kids do not even attend the primary classes, because their parents do not have enough money to purchase school clothes and stationery. The other kids are sick; they cough, have stomach aches, and that one has lice.

In the Thai countryside, one remains peasant. But some daring ones decide one day to leave their village and go in a big provincial town, in the capital city or elsewhere, to try their luck there. Hazardous destiny. Nobody is stupid enough to believe that leaving the countryside is the sure path from rags to riches. And yet, it is necessary to try. It is the children's duty, as soon as they are able, to help their family. They are the life insurance and the old-age pension of their elders, as the older sister who returns from Bangkok or Pattaya two or three times per annum for the principal Buddhist festivals with money and gifts for the whole family... and alas, perhaps with a terrible disease one day. But "It is a very good girl!", as the grannies say. It does not matter how her money is earned. She is rich from now on - according to the local standards - and contributes widely to the increasing expenses of her relatives.

The loans must be refunded, such as the monthly payments for the second-hand pick-up, the motorcycle or the lawn-tractor. She does her best to help her cousin who would like to open her own hairdressing salon or the uncle who would like to acquire a young heifer to increase his small herd.

The brother is a taxi or a truck driver in Bangkok, or works on construction sites. But he does not send money. He is a man, so, it is a normal behaviour here!

Is the Thai peasant unhappy? Not at all. Nature provides the essential things. The fish from the rivers or the basins, the frogs that one hunts with a torch-lamp when the night has fallen and the mice that one traps and whose roasted meat is cooked and eaten with sticky rice. Moreover, the cycle of rice cultivation regulates the rural life. Tilling the fields, planting, irrigation, replanting, harvest, drying and beating: many tasks which usually mobilise the whole family. It is better not to suffer from rheumatism! The ground is low and rice plantations are wet, but the workers are happy and believe that they are doing the most useful task in life. In Thailand, people "eat rice" when they speak about food even - but it is very rare - when there is no rice on the menu! It is indeed this expression which is used in Thai language most of the time for everything related to food and meals.

But it is soon the end of the day. The night falls quickly at this latitude. Electrical failures are frequent. The dwelling is modest; portraits of the royal family decorate the walls, almost no furniture inside. One sleeps and one eats on the ground, on a straw mat. The insects invade the habitation after the rain. The fan is broken, but there is a television - a new model of a well-known brand - obviously acquired on loan. Twice a month, one gathers around the television set to attend the national lottery broadcast. And between two electrical outages, there are also the daily soaps, which almost always take place in the Thai high society, and which make the poor people dream. Beautiful villas, sumptuous limousines, young jet setters... Love and confrontation played by the Bangkok superstars.

And because nobody here will ever be able to have this kind of life by working, one bets, gambles and risks the small amount of money saved with the various forms of lottery, official and clandestine, without thinking about the low probabilities and joyfully forgetting that Buddhism, the largely most-practised religion here, condemns gambling. It is "sanook" (amusing, pleasant) and if one loses, "mai pen rai" (nevermind, it is no big deal!).

Yes, a happy mood still prevails, always present at the end of the day, whatever the circumstances. The rows and quarrels with the neighbours or the family: they occurred in the morning, at the small market of the disctrict, it was an eternity ago! When the evening comes, they are already forgotten, a thing of the past. And tomorrow is another day...