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16/07/06 A week in the villages, towns and ADRA projects in northern rural Laos |
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 I’ve now experienced life in Laos outside of the commodious environment of the capital, Vientiane. Hours travelling on rough roads and swollen rivers, trying to communicate with villagers who barely spoke the national Lao language let alone English, crowds of shy but excited children, being offered dog meat, and meeting some fantastic people are among the highlights of the last week.
Having arrived back from Europe a couple of weeks ago, I’m back into my new life here in Laos that is filled with adventure, opportunity, more needs and responsibility than I sometimes think I can meet. But the God I serve is bigger than my small faith, so I'm sitting tight to see what He has planned.
This last week just gone I spent in a rural province to the north of Laos (quite close to the border with China). We were based in the small town of Luangnamtha. Three of us from the central ADRA office in Vientiane flew into the town in a 15 seat plane - landing at a tiny one-flight-a-day-or-less airport. We spent about half the week visiting remote villages which our projects are targeting.
One day stands out in my memory - Thursday of last week. We drove for about 5 hours along a very rough road to a couple of villages only 70 km away where ADRA Laos had rehabilitated the elementary schools. Remoteness is not always determined by distance in terms of kilometres to the nearest airport! Many people were saying that this 70 km trip required 2 days and that we would have to stay overnight in the town of Nalae, but we were keen to get back because we had other things we needed to do the next day. Hence we left at 6am, and ended up arriving back at Luangnamtha at about 8:30pm the same day.
The road was very rough, and made worse by the seasonal rains (we're going into the wettest part of wet season right about now). Anyway, we got to Nalae town, and then from there we had to go a further few km by boat along the river to the villages. You'll have to look at the photos on my website to see what we saw there. The people are sooo poor, but also very friendly.
School rehab projects are very small - e.g. $2,000 - but still this meant a lot to the village people. There was quite a formal ceremony at each village, with government representatives, the village chief, and our team from ADRA including the Country Director. And the villagers put on their best possible meal for us, which (at the 2nd village) meant dog meat. We assume they killed one of the village dogs just beforehand. They also offered us rice beer (home-brewed). We took a bit of a risk of offending the people by kindly refusing the dog and beer, although we ate the rice and fruit they graciously provided. Development work (especially in the context of ADRA as a Christian organisation) involves a constant tension between educating for behaviour change and being culturally adaptive and sensitive.
 The kids were great - they were quite shy at first but we would take photos of them and then show them the picture on our digital cameras. They would crowd around chattering and pointing at such amazing technology. 'Pictures speak a thousand words' - and right now they're the only words I can speak in that situation, so I'm getting impatient to learn the Lao language. I haven't started taking lessons yet, but will do so soon.
In some areas even Lao won't do any good as the people speak their own ethnic language, and without any formal education and little interaction with others from outside, they have not been exposed to Lao. In a Mong village we visited on Tuesday, some people didn't even seem to recognise the usual Lao 'Sa Bai Dee' greeting! (The Mong ethnic group has Chinese heritage.)
So this last week was quite eye-opening to me, and tiring, but also very rewarding! It was also great to spend time with the field staff, and even though the conditions aren't so nice as Vientiane, I was a little sad to say good-bye on Friday (yesterday) and take the 1.5 hour flight back to Vientiane. |
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