Water guns douse heat wave worries

Colourful celebration to mark New Year festivities draws thousands

This article was written by Aniruffha Ghosal and Jintamas Saksornchai, and was published in the Toronto Star on April 14, 2024.

A bucket of water is splashed on a reveller during the Songkran water festival to celebrate the Thai New Year in Prachinburi Province, Thailand, on Saturday. It’s the time of year when many Southeast Asian countries hold nationwide water festivals to beat the seasonal heat.

It’s water festival time in Thailand where many are marking the country’s traditional New Year, splashing each other with colourful water guns and buckets in an often raucous celebration that draws thousands of people, even as this year the Southeast Asian nation marks record-high temperatures causing concern.

The festival, known as Songkran in Thailand, is a three-day shindig that started Saturday and informally extends for a whole week, allowing people to travel for family celebrations. The holiday is also celebrated under different names in neighbouring Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, which like Thailand have populations that are predominantly Theravada Buddhist.

Songkran is immensely popular — predicted this year to attract more than 500,000 foreign tourists and generate more than 24 billion baht (more than $900 million Canadian) in revenue, according to the state tourism agency. Past Thai governments have been reluctant to call for dialling down the fun even during crises such as droughts and the pandemic

Though the festival originated as a way to pray for a rainy season that helped crops and included activities such as cleansing images of the Buddha and washing the hands and feet of elders, Songkran these days is often associated with public drunkenness, sexual assault in the guise of merrymaking, and a spike in traffic fatalities, noticeable to the point that the holiday has been dubbed the “seven dangerous days.”

The festival usually falls at the hottest time of the year when temperatures can creep above 40 C.

But this year, the unusual heat wave, with expected record temperatures for the next few months, has triggered apprehension. The United Nations Children’s Fund warned Thursday the sweltering weather could put millions of children’s lives at risk, asking caregivers to take extra precautions.

The UNICEF statement said in the Asia-Pacific region, “around 243 million children are exposed to hotter and longer heatwaves, putting them at risk of a multitude of heat-related illnesses, and even death.”

Last week, the Philippines suspended classes in more than 5,800 public schools and shifted to homebased and online learning to protect millions of students from the scorching heat.

Author: Ray Nakano

Ray is a retired, third generation Japanese Canadian born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. He resides in Toronto where he worked for the Ontario Government for 28 years. Ray was ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2011 and practises in the Plum Village tradition, supporting sanghas in their mindfulness practice. Ray is very concerned about our climate crisis. He has been actively involved with the ClimateFast group (https://climatefast.ca) for the past 5 years. He works to bring awareness of our climate crisis to others and motivate them to take action. He has created the myclimatechange.home.blog website, for tracking climate-related news articles, reports, and organizations. He has created mobilizecanada.ca to focus on what you can do to address the climate crisis. He is always looking for opportunities to reach out to communities, politicians, and governments to communicate about our climate crisis and what we need to do. He says: “Our world is in dire straits. We have to bend the curve on our heat-trapping pollutants in the next few years if we hope to avoid the most serious impacts of human-caused global warming. Doing nothing is not an option. We must do everything we can to create a livable future for our children, our grandchildren, and all future generations.”