“ I want to plant bananas, mangoes, sweet potato, tapioca, taro....My dream is to provide for my family, especially my daughter and her husband and four children. Organic food. Natural food. We were planning to live over here and have the children learn about farming. Now we have twelve turbines operating already over here. And last night when I was here and only a couple of turbines were working, I already could hear the sound. Twelve going and eight more coming in. I’ll be surrounded. I just think how disastrous it will be for me. So my dreams right now are on hold becuase of the possible health effects. AES will build the turbines, collect the subsidies, go home to their comfortable homes...I’m pretty sure they will not live by turbines...and leave us hanging, and we have to go through it against our choice.”
“The worst thing was, they said they had meetings with the farmers....They never had meetings with the farmers who live closest to the turbines, so when I found out about it, I said, “Hey, you guys never met with the farmers.” I got this text. Since you required this meeting, we are going to offer to meet with you. We are going to meet with FARMERS ONLY. I said, “Let me think about it. At this point already, if you meet with us...we need back up.” Then we’ll meet with SOME farmers in groups. “No, we cannot just have some farmers. It’s just not right to just meet with some farmers. Especially, I worry about those that don’t speak the language.” The final text was, It’s ok. We changed our mind. We are going to meet with farmers individually. And that’s the end right now. No meeting. They are going to meet with farmers individually. I am thinking they just want to break us up and clamp us down totally. Most of the farmers here are so scared...They cannot speak up. Their voice cannot be heard, and they will not speak up because of the oppression already. We are really at a loss for what to do. We know the ill effects, it will be there. But there is nobody there helping us. It just feels so hopeless.”
“AES has the right of ingress and egress using our farmers’ road. Before time, we could just go in the road, and we wave “Hi,” and say, “These are my friends,” and we go right in. The next step was, they wanted the ID’s of my friends. OK. Then I have them give ID’s. Now, they are limiting me to the lots I can go to. You can only go to lot 7. I am the representative for the farmers, and now they are limiting my activity. I cannot go to the farmers to check them out? Then after that, when I tried to bring KHON, they let me in, but the guards stopped the KHON car. Right now, I don’t feel safe coming in by myself. To me, they are taking away my rights to use this road, because all farmers have rights to this road. I feel that AES is so afraid that the proximity of the turbines to peoples dwellings is so close that they don’t want to expose to the world that “Hey, you are doing something that is not socially responsible”- Chai Yoshimura