Village Basket Weaver artwork

This Kruk Village basket weaver, U Hrung Ma, has been a fixture in Kruk for longer than even he can remember. When I met him, he began laughing and telling me that I needed to cut my mustache and beard because it would keep me from being able to eat. I laughed and pointed to my rotund body and told him he must be wrong, and we had a great laugh together.He said he had survived three wives and all of his children. After we had talked for a while, he told me I looked like a man he once knew who had hidden under his house for fourteen days. This surprised me since I had been told no “white people” had ever been to the village. Locals were touching my face and examining me like an alien, so I believed them. So I asked the weaver when a man had hid under his house. He responded, “When the Japanese were here, long ago,” obviously referring to the 1940s during World War II. He said he had been a boy at the time and his family had fed the man and hid him from the searching Japanese.