McDaniel packed his family into a full-size tour bus in March and, beginning in Salem, Ore., hit the road in hopes of turning a few heads his way.
With “Ride For Freedom” inscribed in tall white letters on both sides of the bus – “a submarine on wheels,” McDaniel calls it – and jaunts through town on horseback, the man intends to stir up sympathy for the “disappearing” people.
  
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“To see the world in new ways is just good, and that’s what Matthew is trying to do,” says Gail Evenari, who offered her home in Higgins Canyon to McDaniel’s family during their stay on the Coastside.
While McDaniel canvassed local thrift shops for size 10 cowboy boots – he’s worn through two pairs walking Hampton, the family foal, up and down the highway – his wife and two oldest sons stood on the corner of Main Street and Kelly Avenue handing out fliers and soliciting donations for their cause.
“The coast seems a real good place to come,” McDaniel said as he sat inside the bus on Johnston Street. “There’s a kind of counterculture here that pays attention to sustainability and the environment – farmers and people concerned about water. Those are the people. The more they’re aware, the more they tend to help.”
The horse and bus are a showy way of calling attention to the situation in Southeast Asia, McDaniel admits, but he says the problem merits an unorthodox approach. Such is his mode of operation, says Ellen Bruno, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose catalog focuses on ethnic cleansing and sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia. She met McDaniel in “seedy, black market, crime-infested places” in Thailand in the 1990s.
“He’s very bold and determined and committed,” Bruno said of McDaniel’s passion for preserving Akha culture. “He’s the kind of guy who I’d look at and shake my head, thinking, ‘What are you doing now?’ But I have to respect him. Whatever he’s doing is always helping someone.”
After ditching a career in construction in 1989 and traveling abroad to try his hand at exporting Asian goods, McDaniel became disturbed by the treatment of Akha villagers in the Burmese mountains. During his stay near the Thailand-Burma border, he witnessed government seizure of Akha rice farms and other atrocities that spurred the cross-country endeavor. Without land, homes or civil rights, thousands of Akha died from typhoid infections in the streets of Thailand while residents turned a blind eye, McDaniel says.
“I saw the Thai police beating children with nightsticks and decided I had to do something about it,” McDaniel says. “It was just the plain meanness of it I wanted to stop.”
Bruno, a San Francisco resident, teamed up with McDaniel on what she calls “guerilla aid style” missions to usher medical supplies across the Thai-Burmese border to Akha people. Both were fighting a common enemy – exploitation and oppression – one with a knapsack full of medicine, the other with a video camera. She remembers watching McDaniel motorbike across the border alongside black market traders and sex traffickers, wearing a leather cowboy hat and shouldering a knapsack packed with bandages and ointments for homeless Akha.
“As best he could, he’d give them whatever he could,” she said.
Before the family heads home to Laos, McDaniel will have made his mark on cities and towns from the West Coast to New York. Right now the family is en route to the Royal Thai Consulate in Los Angeles, where they plan to picket for land rights for displaced Akha farmers.
“We’re starting to get into a rhythm … If we do the whole thing, it could stir into a brew, and then we’ll see where we are at the end of it,” McDaniel said.
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