Despite external pressures on local rural communities, some have struggled to be different to avoid falling victim to the capitalism yardstick. How do they do it? The Nation reports in the second in a series on Rural Thailand.

Casual visitors to rural villages might get the impression that wealth and development are spreading -- although at different rates in different areas -- in tangent to Bangkok. Many households now boast modern facilities such as radios, televisions, refrigerators, videos, dining room sets, motorcycles, pickup trucks and even washing machines. Yet, there are many ironies in this so-called ''wealth'' and ''quality of life'' that development has brought about.

Many villagers may have dinner tables but rarely use them, preferring instead to sit on the floor the way they always have. They still eat with their hands because it is more convenient than forks and spoons. Many keep only one bottle of water in their refrigerators and bathe in canals, although their homes have modern bathrooms. They are, however, buying material possessions they don't need with money they don't have, said Thon Phengdee, a farmer's wife in Phetchabun's Khao Kho district.

''People here have every kind of convenience, including washing machines, even though they have the whole day to wash clothes by hand. Their income is small, but they buy the things that put them into debt,'' she said.

She admitted, however, that she herself owns a washing machine; she did not wish to be left behind.

The external pressure to keep up with the ''Jones's'' is real, and this kind of materialism has come to symbolise a better quality of life for people in rural areas, Dr. Aphichai Puntasen, a professor in the Faculty of Economics at Thammasat University noted. On the other hand, their spending patterns are the result of limited government programmes that have given no thought to the people themselves. The Thai government, he said, aims only to develop people so they can increase their earnings by working in factories or selling single crops to agro-industrial companies, but it has never tried to help them handle life with more money.

''The impact of income development is making them lose confidence with their lives; and without confidence, they aren't strong enough to stand up for themselves. Instead, they just copy the lifestyle of city people and rely on other people with a higher status like bureaucrats and businessmen,'' Apichai said.

And yet, groups of people in rural areas have begun to find alternatives to mainstream development. In some cases, it has taken just one pioneer to lead the way.

In Chachoengsao province, village headman Vibun Kamchalearm has been practising self-sustained farming for nearly 20 years. Close to his home, Lek Tongtemphad, 62, has used Vibun as a model -- as well as the lessons Lek himself learned from his many failures in engaging in rice, cassava, vegetables and chicken farming, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of baht in debt.

The lessons he learned were hard. Unable even to buy a pack of ice when the debt came due, he finally realised that his life became more difficult when he expected a high income that he could not get. When he saw that his neighbours also suffered from the same high expectations and low returns, he decided to look for an alternative lifestyle that would help him avoid falling so deeply into debt.

''Then I thought that I should raise what would not bring in much but would help me live happily so that I wouldn't have to worry about any debt cycle. That would be enough,'' he said. Now he and his family have their own integrated fruit farm, which they started without outside help, and the debt was paid off a few years afterwards. Today, he said, his income is steady and his life is peaceful from working on the farm.

All these success stories seem to have a common thread: a person who has the opportunity to learn from outside and use those experiences to correct past failures to push their lives forward -- rather than to join the mainstream lifestyles. Success stories like Lek's show that a person who has the opportunity to learn outside his society and use these experiences to understand past failures by himself can select new ways to survive out of the mainstream lifestyles.

''We call that 'the power of analysis', which plays a significant role in an individual's road to knowledge, bargaining power and a good quality of life,'' said Dej Pumkacha, a director of the Volunteer Foundation for Social Development, which trains thousands of people to staff hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Thailand.

NGOs in the country once tended to promote income generation and health care. Some projects failed; some succeeded, but from these experiences, a number of NGOs changed direction, concentrating on ways to improve decision-making for disadvantaged people in rural areas.

''The world is constantly changing. How can farmers adjust so that they can survive in different situations if they haven't had a chance to develop their ability to reach decisions logically?'' Dej said. NGOs, according to Dej, try to encourage people to learn how to analyse before they make a decision to improve their quality of life. To broaden people's knowledge, the organisations also provide lectures as well as opportunities to share experiences with other groups of people.

If people in rural areas have the chance to group together, to meet their own needs, in order to assess their own strengths and potential to deal with whatever the issue -- political, economic, or social -- they will have the confidence to face any situation that arises, Naiyana Waikham, chief of administration of the Grass-Roots Integrated Development Foundation (GRID), said.

''Grouping is a concrete method of helping local people increase their ability to analyse, since they can share their experiences with each other. In addition, if they can learn what is happening outside their society, it will act as a trigger in helping them learn how to adjust. With this basic knowledge, they will have the self-confidence to negotiate for what they want. In the end, they will understand the difference between a better quality of life and materialism,'' she said.

In Surin, for example, hundreds of rice farmers have jointly set up an integrated rice business, from growing their own paddy to milling in their own rice mills and then selling the rice directly to their own customers in town.

''In the past we had to sell our paddy to the big rice mills, but we couldn't negotiate reasonable prices. And some of them cheated us, paying much lower prices than they should have,'' Pean Ngamchaleam, a manager of a rice mill in the group, said.

NET, an NGO in Surin province, then introduced this group of farmers to another group who were running a successful integrated rice business, and the farmers, impressed by what they had seen, pooled their money to set up their own rice mill three years ago. ''Now we sell our rice to slum people in Surin,'' he said.

According to Pean, the farmers' group never thought they could run a rice business by themselves. Since it was so complicated, they felt that they should depend on vendors to sell their paddy. ''After the NET staff discussed with us our reasons for relying on other people, we realised that because we didn't have a rice mill, we couldn't sell rice by ourselves. Then we agreed that building our own mill and selling directly to consumers would let us have more profit and freedom than selling to vendors,'' he said.

After a visit to another farmers' group, Pean's group has begun laying plans for producing non-chemical organic rice, which can command higher prices because the number of producers is lower. The farmers, he said, are looking to expand the group and raise funds for the expansion. So far, a number of farmers' groups, such as groups producing organic rice in Suphanburi province and others in Phayao, have set up the same kind of integrated rice business by themselves without government help but with support from NGOs.

In another successful venture, 1,532 farming families from four sub-districts in Tung Kularonghai, which covers five northeastern provinces, set up a group producing fragrant rice, which they sell directly to customers.

Even slum-dwellers are learning the power of numbers. People living in slums in the Kao-seng community in Songkhla province, for example, had very little money, nor could they borrow. Banks wouldn't lend them money because they lacked collateral, and they did want to go to money-lenders because of the high interest rates. Since 1989, however, after NGO staff discussed with the people ways of raising funds to invest in a small business, the people designed their own system to collect Bt20 per week from their members for investment.

''We don't depend upon businessmen anymore since we have our own funding source. We have also agreed on interest rates, and now we are bringing some profit to develop our community too,'' Lek Sae-eiaw, chairman of the group, said. "Now we can expand this type of savings group to other slum communities in other provinces near Songkhla. We can bargain with commercial banks to give us special interest rates because they want us to deposit our money. Even with the economic downturn, our group has about Bt12 million so far,'' he said.

Poor people in 16 slum communities covering five provinces in the South, two slum communities in the Northeast and one community in Chiang Mai have already set up savings groups by themselves to raise funds. Now all the savings groups are planning to link together soon into a slum savings group network. Self-confidence is growing, and along with it, the ability and willingness to speak out -- and the ability and willingness to use the slowly accumulating financial resources to improve living standards.

The third part of the series will focus on the topdown directives from policy makers and bureaucrats which resulted in suppression of knowledge and bargaining power.