A Cool Heart

Area native Rupert Nelson travels by elephant to a tiny Karen village in the mountains of Thailand. Karens are one of the ethnic minority groups found in Burma and Thailand. A few Karens have resettled in the Storm Lake area.

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It means "Keep a cool heart," in the language of the Hmong mountain tribes of northern Thailand, a wise but simple people with whom Alta native Rupert Nelson lived for 33 years.

Jai Yen. It is also the adopted philosophy by which the longtime missionary still lives his life, in retirement becoming an author and novelist - releasing his third book this month. His writing draws deeply from lessons he leaned in a one-room schoolhouse and the family farm in northwest Iowa, as well as in his mission work in Thailand.

"The Thai people don't like anger or people who are overly exciteable," Nelson says. "They call it a hot heart. Keeping the cool heart is their way."

Nelson's heart was changed forever when he was drafted to go to war in Korea as a young man.

"In Korea for the first time in my life I saw starvation for the first time - people starving right in front of my eyes and children freezing to death in the winter. It changed me. I came back wanting to do something."

That something that Nelson knew how to do best was farm. Growing up in drought and Depression years, farming with horses and picking corn by hand, Nelson had his education from Fairview school north of Alta and a couple of years of college he had logged before being drafted.

He went back to school majoring in agronomy, and then earned a master's degree in ag extension education - all along preparing himself to be an agricultural missionary.

He had met a girl in college, Dee, and planned to spend his life with her - but it was not that simple. She was a Hawaiian American citizen of Chinese ancestry, but the state they lived in at the time, South Dakota, had outlawed "interracial marriage." They finally had to travel to Minnesota in order to wed.

The Nelsons first went to Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana, a place Rupert describes as "a blank space on the map," where he worked in extension and his wife as a home economics teacher for a few years. Finally, word came that they had been assigned to a missionary project by the American Baptist Churches.

"With a pregnant wife and a three-year-old daughter, I knew there would be some changes in my life, but I had no idea how great those changes would be, and how much the people of Thailand would change my world view," Rupert says. "I learned to be jai yen."

And, the things he was learning began to form the groundwork for what would become a blossoming writing career many years later.

He worked among the mountain tribes, roaming the rugged hill country, trekking from village to village over fragile foot trails.

The people were entirely unsophisticated, but also amazingly open. They accepted him as a teacher and a friend. There were six tribes sharing the region in which he worked, each with a unique language, separate dress and customs.

Rupert drew on skills learned on the family farm and in college. "The hills were not productive as we think of Iowa soil being productive, but I taught them conservation farming, improved crops, how to raise animals and plant fruit trees so they could improve their diet - we even stocked fish into their ponds."

In return, the people he had come to teach were educating him on how to live, give and share in peace.

"I shared their shelter, their food, their joys and their sorrows," he said.

He had found his jai yen.

The years passed qucikly, and happily. The couple raised their two children in that mountainous society, and felt they were contributing something - they never got around to asking to go home.

Only age changed their minds. At 65, it was time to retire from full-time missionary work, according to the rules of their program, and the couple decided to return to the United States, where they have now settled in a retirement community in Claremont, California.

After 33 years away from the country, living with the Hmong tribes, modern American civilization came as something of a culture shock.

"When I was growing up in Iowa, there wasn't any TV - people talked to each other. That is still done in Thailand - the people of the little villages gather, sit and talk. We discovered that people in this country don't do that anymore. In some ways, we miss the life that we found in Thailand."

Read more of this story in the November 28 Pilot Tribune.