Sabaidee! Today we traveled 30 kilometers outside of Luang Prabang into the countryside to a small village called BanOu, where we participated in a community service project with the village elders and the village children. We brought trees and flowers to plant around the village school. We planted about 10 trees and several dozen flowers around the school property and built a fence to protect the flowers after planting. We had a lot of help from the village children and the village elder and the school’s teacher. The children were delightful and clearly got a kick out of watching this motley group of “falang” (foreigners) digging holes and hammering nails and trying to be productive. Every plant I put in the ground drew a horde of children around me to help fill in the dirt and pack it down around the new plant. The children were all barefoot and they managed to get around in the muddy terrain better than those of us with sturdy shoes on! It was raining pretty hard a lot of the time and all the paths and fields are exceedingly muddy at this point. After a couple of hours of hard labor, our young people played a came of catorb with the local children. It’s a game that is a cross between volley ball and soccer. Our guide had purchased team jerseys for the village children and our young travelers and when the game was over we gave our jerseys to the village kids for their school to use. Then we went into the classroom for a language lesson, which was truly hilarious as we tried to struggle to converse with our extremely limited Lao and the children’s limited English. It was good fun however, and the children were simply delightful.
We couldn’t help but observe the difference between the life these children live and the lives our own kids have known. These kids have very little material wealth – their clothes are old and ragged in many cases, the have no shoes, they live in small huts with an entire family sharing a room smaller than most middle class American living rooms, they obviously lack dental care, and yet they are cheerful, resourceful, well behaved, good humored and hard working while also playful and creative. During the catorb game it started raining quite hard and, lacking umbrellas, the children ran to the nearest almond tree and pulled the very large leaves off the tree to use as umbrellas. It was very funny to see them sitting there watching the game holding their almond leaves aloft! And in the catorb game, our side were all wearing athletic shoes and socks and the village kids were playing barefoot.
The difference in socio-economic development between Laos and Thailand is striking. Thailand is clearly fast becoming a “first world” country, at least in its major cities. Laos, however, is still very much a developing country with widespread poverty, lack of sanitation and potable water and villages dotting its rugged countryside that are truly living in another era altogether in terms of development. The country is 70% agricultural workers with the primary crops being rice, corn and bananas. They also do a booming business in traditional handicrafts and silk weaving which they sell to the tourists. The Laotian people, however, are gracious and beautiful and very proud of their country and their culture. The food is similar to Thai cuisine, but somewhat less spicy.
After our visit to BanOu, we went to a nearby waterfall, which is huge and magnificent and had a picnic lunch (actually about 6 courses of hot food, with the usual curry, stir fried rice, fish, pork sausage, baguettes, glass noodles with veggies, vegetable curry) next to the waterfall. The vegetation in the forest there was incredible and I was spellbound by the birds of paradise flowers all over the place. We then made our way back to Luang Prabang for a few hours of free time.
The downside of visiting a developing country is the risk of gastrointestinal ailments which took two of our party down in the past two days. Sam succumbed yesterday and spent the day in bed and today in the hotel recovering and another of our group didn’t appear at breakfast this morning having been felled in the night with the same problem!! Another member of our group incurred a deep cut to his arm on Monday and his first stop in Luang Prabang was the Emergency Room of the local hospital for cleaning the wound and antibiotics! I’ve been on antibiotics since the fourth day of our trip so we are really falling like dominos here!! We’re hoping we’ve had all the medical calamities we’re going to have for awhile now. And last night, when Sam was still in the throes of his distress and I was up and down a few times after him in the night, we discovered a rather large visitor in our bathroom – a COCKROACH of considerable proportions – whom neither of us was in the mood to meet in the dead of night! He appears to have moved on to other quarters at this point, but we both approach the bathroom with due caution even now, charting the territory before stepping into the room!
This evening a local family hosted us in their home for a traditional Lao dinner. Lao people eat sitting on the floor which we falang folks found rather uncomfortable as we are not all that limber! We have been learning some Lao while we’ve been here but it was still rather difficult to try to converse with our exceedingly limited vocabulary and their lack of knowledge of English. It was the usual extravagant spread of food – sticky rice, steamed rice, a fish dish, soup, a chicken curry, a chicken and peanuts dish, spring rolls, stuffed vegetables and fruit for dessert. Sam came along and ate the rice and some soup broth while the rest of us had our second huge meal of the day. Still it was a great experience to be in a Lao home and have a chance to see real people up close. This family is pretty well to do by Lao standards and they were gracious and generous hosts.
That’s it for today! Pop kan mai!
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