4. Xieng Khouang Day 2. A Water Source,
Village 3, Lao Kang's Mom
Thursday morning following breakfast we had a
meeting with the local government, headed by the Vice Governor of
the Nonghet District, Dr. Jao Lau. Dr. Jao Lau talked about
the district government’s work to improve the lives of children
and their communities, and the strong partnership between
ChildFund and Nonghet district.
We headed to visit a local school, but not only was it closed
(this was a week off school in Laos), but the teacher was working
in the field with the key.
With the school closed, we went to visit a gravity-fed water
source supported by ChildFund. The water system is a large
concrete container, which stores water that has flowed down from
the mountains. Every community member has the right to
collect water from that source or to use it right there for
washing, bathing and brushing teeth. Along with collecting
firewood, farming, taking care of siblings, and cooking, water
collection is the responsibility of female children and youth, and
until this central water system was built, girls would have to
walk close to an hour in the hills to collect water.
A Colorado Olde Girl (Sara Edwards) is one of the visitors to the Water Source
The ChildFund-supported Water Source on the
right
Users at the ChildFund-supported Water Source
Village 3. From the Water Source, we started our trip
back out of Nonghet, driving an hour to a roadside village, where
we set off for another ChildFund partner
community (Village 3), the most remote of
the villages we visited. The only way to reach this village is
either to walk about 40 minutes up and down (mostly up) steep
narrow roads through jungle-like terrain or take a car up and down
a one-lane road. On days like this – pouring rain till just
before the trip – only 4-wheel-drive vehicles could make the
trip. I didn’t ask what would happen if 2 vehicles were
going in opposite directions – but I’m sure one would have had to
back up a very long way! Maggie’s got a couple of horror stories
about vehicles on these roads.
As it was raining (in dry season), those who did choose to walk
(most of the players) started up a very slippery hill, till they
reached the school at another village that participates in
activities with the LRF and ChildFund. From there, the
walkers headed up into the forest, which took them back to Village
3.
The following video represents about 3 minutes of what was about a
10-minute car ride – the transport for the rest of us - from the
main road to Village 3.
Through the windshield, 3 minutes of the car
ride to Village 3
Click Image to see
Village 3 is isolated not only in difficulty of
transportation to/from the village, but also it has no
electricity. (Many other tiny villages, isolated and primitive in
so many ways, do have electricity and thus satellite dishes and
cell phones, but not Village 3 and many
others in the same situation.)
Here are a few views of Village 3.
First, our van at the entrance to the village followed by two
views of aspects of Village 3 that have been around for centuries:
two thatched roof houses and a woman stooped over her cooking.
ChildFund van in which we spent so many hours Our van arrives at Village 3
Two buildings that we
saw on our entry to Vllage 3
Woman cooking
On the other hand, we also saw a brand spanking new schoolhouse,
in large part sponsored by ChildFund.
Brand new school in Village 3,
courtesy of ChildFund
Among the villagers we saw was this young boy with what appears to
be a homemade skateboard. Not sure, however, just how much speed
he can get on the rough surfaces of Village 3.
Boy with homemade skateboard
Closeup of skateboard
We got to meet several people, but except when we had a translator
with us, it was all eye contact and other nonverbal cues.
There was one guy that was everywhere; in my mind I was thinking
of him as “Ubiquitous Man.” Here he is with Dot, Ray and and
Chris. He hung out with me for a while too.
Ubiquitous man and three of
our party
Everyone who was wearing sneakers increased their weight by about
5 pounds as the heavy rain (BTW in the middle of dry season) did a
number on the ground, and the clay stuck together and to our
shoes. It didn’t in the least inhibit the kids from having
fun running around in their flip flops or bare feet, however, as
several mini-games between the little kids and our players were
breaking out into fun fests. One of our players got so
fooled by one of the kids’ moves, I was in stitches.
Dot’s footwear got a bit of mud attached to it
As is the case with most of these mountain villages, the amount of
flat space is at a premium and nothing near a full rugby field can
be laid out. Our time, then, consisted of various
“razzle-dazzle” rugby games (e.g. what many of us know as
“ultimate rugby”) – passing in any direction, rules based on the
terrain and made up to combine some level of organization with
participants’ creativity and ingenuity providing the rest.
I was pleasantly surprised – no, amazed! – yet again at what soft
hands (from a ball-handling perspective – i.e. they can catch!)
the little kids in the villages have; the handling on both days
was way better than what I’d expect from their age-grade
equivalents in the US.
Here are a few pictures from our little rugby adventures in
Village 3. Atlantis and children – I believe they were all
girls in all the exercises here – gather for some games; their
mothers watch from the school. We were playing a game of
freeze tag with the ball, and there was a long contest between
Hoop and one of the girls that ended up in a scene that had
everyone laughing. I didn’t get that on video, but there are a
couple of still clips and a video of another part of that game is
also included.
The schoolyard was the largest open space in
Village 3
A bunch of mothers gathered at the school
entrance to watch the proceedings
Hoop was being chased by the girl in the green
jacket
Not sure exactly what the resolution was, but
everyone cracked up
Click
on the image to see another part of this game
Heather: “My experience playing rugby games
with the youth of Nonghet District will remain one of the
fondest memories of my time in Laos. I hope I am able to return
one day and see the continued impact of the LRF’s and
ChildFund’s rugby outreach in Nonghet: children enjoying sport
and playing on a safe, open field with no yellow poles in
sight.”
The villagers gathered the chickens we were to have for lunch and
showed them off just before taking them behind the house to kill
them. We were then formally greeted in a Hmong ritual. They
blessed the food and performed some traditional rituals for the
benefit of a community youth participating in the ChildFund
Connect project, where children and youth use flip cameras to
capture scenes from daily life to be shared with other children in
Australia, Vietnam and Timor. He wanted to capture some of
these rituals and share with his friends. (But not,
sadly, with us.)
Hanging out Note Ubiquitous Man in background
This picture taken from the house that would
later host a welcoming ceremony Sadly, we weren’t allowed to film the ceremony
The cooking took quite a while, as they wanted to make sure it was
perfect. Everyone was given sugar cane for eating.
Sugar cane has a hard shell that can either be hacked away with a
machete-like knife, or torn away with teeth. After the
fibrous inside of the sugar cane is exposed, you take a bite and
chew until all of the moisture is gone, and then spit out the
remains on the ground.
Lunch in Village 3
Lao Kang shows the right way to eat sugar cane
Group picture prior to leaving Village 3
Hannah, Maggie and Lao Kang cresting a hill on
the way down from Village 3
View from the road on the walk down from
Village 3
A pig on the side of the road, his neck in a
yoke
Woman weaving in village on road down from
Village 3
Village 1 again. Following this visit we
headed back to the Hot Springs where we were to spend the
night. On the way, however, we stopped back at Lao Kang’s
village where we were looking forward to
interviewing Lao Kang’s mother to see what she thought of Lao Kang
playing rugby.
Legacies of US bombing. This was clearly among those
villages heavily bombed in the Vietnam War as remnants of the 60s
and 70s were everywhere – houses standing on stilts of shell
casings, pigs drinking from bomb casing water troughs … Life goes
on …
View from where
we parked in Village 1
House built on bomb casing stilts with motorcycle
Another house built on
stilts made of shell casings
L: Water trough for pigs made from bomb casing
R: A pig gets some nice sleep
among the bomb casings
Sarah walking by bomb casing stilts
The continuing visual reminders of the bombing of Laos had a lot
of impact on our party.
Chris Ryan: “I thought that I knew about
Laos, I was wrong. The devastation that remains to this
day and that will never be fixed is truly astonishing.
580,000 missions and over 2 million tons of munitions were
dropped on a country we were not at war with. And almost
all of these were dropped so the planes did not have to land
with full payloads. “
I was originally surprised by the nearly universal reaction to
these revelations, similar to Chris’s. I knew all this
stuff. Then I realized that a lot of this was new
information to just about everyone on the tour, except for Ray,
Aileen and me. Had I not flunked my draft physical I would
surely have been in the Army during the Vietnam War, very probably
been over there. I had lots of friends who were there, some
not just in Vietnam, I found out – at the time to my surprise –
but also in Laos. To my cousin, who – just after returning
from a stint in Vietnam - told me he
had been in Laos, I remarked, sincerely but suspiciously, “I
thought we weren’t in Laos.” He rolled his eyes and said,
sarcastically, “We crossed the border by mistake.” His
expression said, “Don’t ask what you don’t want to know.” A
fraternity brother of mine from MIT became a jet fighter pilot and
was shot down and killed over, I later learned, Laos.
I suddenly realized just how cynical I had become about that
entire era. “Those who forget history … “ And then it bothered me
that for years I have been able to shrug off how much it bothered
me 40 years ago.
It’s funny – funny peculiar that is – that this is still referred
to as the secret war, and even that some of us actually believed –
at least briefly – that it wasn’t happening. Because
everyone that was over there seems to have known what was going
on.
For a moment – a very brief moment – I wished that I had been
there during the war so that I could have compared the eras.
But that moment passed. Quickly.
Ray: I think I’ll wear my wrist strings to
remind me to stay angry about the unexploded bombs.
Misha: “At times I felt embarrassed by the
legacy that we, as Americans, have left largely unresolved for
so long, but I was grateful for the chance to pay it back in a
small way by spending time doing outreach with ChildFund and
LRF…. "
But I forgot again: we’re at Lao Kang’s house in 2013.
With our shoes not yet free of Village 3 mud,
we left our footwear at the door.
Atlantis’ footwear at the entrance to Lao
Kang’s house
What we didn’t expect when we entered to say hello was another
meal – it was wonderfully prepared (boiled pumpkin, rice, fried
tofu and vegetables) and we all found room for it. Several
local girls performed a dance in Lao Kang’s living room for
us. Click on the image below to see it.
Neighborhood girls (and Luna) dancing at Lao
Kang’s house Neighbor peeks in and smiles Click on the
image to see dance
We interviewed Lao Kang’s mother, who seemed pleased that her
daughter was learning leadership skills during her work with the
Lao PDR in Vientiane. Based on other discussions, however, it
seemed clear that she would rather have had her daughter living in
the village with the rest of her family. (As would I, had I
been her parent.)
Lao Kang and her mother answering our questions
We headed back to the Hot Springs where we had yet more food and
while some people enjoyed the hot springs again, some others, i.e. at least me, stressed out till the wee
small hours of the morning preparing our videos for tomorrow
night’s “show”.
As we prepared to leave, we realized we had had a pretty busy 3
days. Here is the map of our tour through Hmong country,
annotated as much as I'm allowed.
From the
airport to the Vietnam
border is about 50 miles, as the crow
flies.
Map of our 4 days in Xieng Khouang We arrived Tuesday at the Xieng
Khouang airport (far left) and spent the night at the Hot
Springs (mid-map) Wednesday night we were in the town of
Nonghet/Thamxay (just a few miles from the Vietnam border) and visited ChildFund Wednesday & Thursday we visited 3 villages in Nonghet
District (between the Hot Springs and the Vietnam border) Thursday night we again stayed at the Hot Springs Friday morning we headed to the Plain
of Jars, then flew back to Vientiane from the Xieng Khouang
airport Scale: as the crow flies, from Phonsavan to the
Vietnam border is about 50 miles; by road it's about 80
miles
