Travel with Tillan

One day when me and Yellow were out on her motorbike heading to a pagoda, her sister calls her and says that the military is back in the village to confiscate more land. This is something that has been happening on and on here for years, basically since the DSEZ project began and Yellows' family is fighting against it. We turn the bike around quickly and go to the area where the military is, we meet her brother and her cousin as well as the family whose land is being confiscated. Yellow gets off the bike and starts arguing with the military while photographing them confiscating the land, her organization uses it as evidence that the military does do this without permission from the village people who live there.

I start taking photos as well and then the military said 'no photos!!' but agreed that we would all sit down and talk about it (apparently it had a lot to do with my precense, when they see a foreigner they get scared that this will go to the media, Yellow told me. When there is only the local farmers there, the military don't care.) After a while Yellows' two sisters came too and they were arguing for hours. I was watching all of this in silence, thinking so many things... For one, these poor local farmers who keep losing their land that they've owned and depended on for generations, I saw the poor man keep smoking and biting his nails during the whole talk. Second, Yellow and her sisters are so incredibly strong, standing up for their rights even though they are far from rich (which is usually the way to get respect, crazy enough) and also they are women. It was the three of them who kept arguing for the man's right to keep his own land and how wrong all of this is. The military had so many papers that said they got permission from the government to confiscate this land, but what about the people living here?!