hello family and friends,
this is a long one, but the past 48 hours necessitates an appropriately lengthy regaling of events.
i write to you tonight under what seems to be complete divine intervention. if not for the clever thinking of our driver, i would, for the second night in a row, be stuck in the Mok district - where I last describe to only have electricity from 7am to 9pm. Correction: the Mok district has electricity from never to never....
Thinking the weather would be as cool as it is here in Phonsavanh, sorry my emails are starting to sound like a menu from Pho 78, imagine my horror when I stepped out of the car and felt the intense sun and humidity in Mok, for what would be a two night stay. Instead of thinking of my impending interviews, instead my mind went to a chain of rationalizations: no electricity, no air conditioning, no fan, no light, uncomfortable roland. i stuffed my whiny thoughts away as we made our way to interview the district health and education directors.
The interviews went well, they're all starting to meld together. As we waited for dinner at the neighbor's house next to our guesthouse, the lack of electricity hit me when i realized that we were all just sitting there: no light (luckily the sun was still out) and no obnoxious african horn noise coming from that world cup, whose balls everyone and their mom are on top of. As we waited for dinner I wandered around the thatched home compound and found them cooking dinner on a stone grill, I Americanly watched in amazement (yes, this is a new adjective) along with the little children of the household as they grilled some foreign meats that would resemble beef jerky when i later ate them. To kill time, I turned to the children and taught them how to play hot hands. Never before had I seen a group of kids so enthralled by hot hands and the ability to slap palms (I then thought about the boy's slow reflexes and possible stunts in motor skill growth because of the lack of preprimary education in his village - SEE HOW THIS PROJECT IS MAKING ME CRAZY?).
anywho, dinner was fine, they cooked mainly fish, so i was limited to the beef jerky-like meat and sausages. after dinner i made the fateful trip to what would be the most uncomfortable bedroom on the face of this earth. seriously. i googled it.
imagine a sauna. with no lights. and mosquitoes (luckily i had a mosquito net - a bright pink to be exact, so that if the net didnt repel the bugs, the sheer fabulousness of the net would). so take that image of lightless, bug-ful sauna and put it in the rainforests of southeast asia, with no ventilation or fan. i laid down at 10pm fully clothed. for about 4 hours i sat under the barbie's dream mosquito net, fanning myself with my TDL-riddled notepad. as i would fall asleep, the intense heat would wake me up as i shifted in the bed and the comforter stuck to my skin. i awoke hourly and finally at 4am, about 13,213 rooster cockled and doodle-dooed until 6am when I had to get ready for today's interviews, which were about 2 hours away on an unpaved road. after a rain storm. (during the night there was a brief shower of rain, during which i went to the window thinking a breeze would come in, instead i got drenched by the sideways rain. to get back at nature, or for some reasons that only my dehydrated sleepless self could reason, i also peed out the window - don't ask).
we travel to some village that sounds like KangKong or KingKong or DonkeyKong, something like that. Aside from the intellectual enlightenment I received as I observed (and rather, incited) an argument between the Lao ethnic residents and the Hmong ethnic residents as they argued about why immunization rates were so low in the village. Curiously, the Hmong are strong believers in first impressions. For them, fool them once, shame on you. If you affect them negatively the first time, that person, their family, the Hmong villagers AND the next generation will not trust you or your descendants. Pretty intense, huh? Anyway, the way this ties into immunization is because, particularly among the Hmong villagers, immunization is low because of the short term side effects of first-dose immunizations. Once their children break into fever or have headaches, the immediately caution against any secondary exposure to vaccinations.
Now that was the smart stuff. The funny part was before the meeting. As we were waiting for the villagers in the central hut, i was Americanly sitting on a bench, surrounded by my camera bag, my laptop bag, and my 13-gallon jug of water. i would swat away mosquitoes as they came, but apparently i didn't notice the HUGE pho-king bug hovering by my forearm.
all of a sudden, literally like a ninja assassin, an elderly hmong woman basically does a somersault-triple-roundoff-cartwheel-lutz-double-axel across the hut and smashes the bug against my arm. while i was moreso disgusted and about to vomit from the squashed bug on my arm, i couldn't believe the physical prowess of this little old hmong lady - i'm convinced she was once a chinese gymnast banished because of her misleading age.
so now we go to lunch. and we're sitting in the thatched hut of one of the health workers. fish, again, is the main course, so i'm relegated to eating the mysterious beef jerky and sausages. as i quietly eat (since this entire trip, after my professor pia has left, all conversations are in lao, as I Americanly sit there smiling and chewing), i notice that the beef jerky has a funny taste. a meaty taste, but not one that i've ever tried before. i ruminate, both with my teeth and my brain, going through all the types of meat it could be. beef? no. chicken? definitely not. pork? too tough. lamb? doesn't have that bloody taste. venison? i have no clue what venison tastes like.
i turn to soulivanh, my interpreter and quietly whisper, what kind of meat is this? his answer:
woof woof.
...
...
...
yes, my family and friends, i have been eating roasted dog meat for two days. again, i Americanly smiled, swallowed the dog (how often do you hear that?) and made the sliced cucumbers my main food item.
after dinner, as we sat like caveman rubbing our bellies and me thinking of my future dog, ralph waldo emerson, and how i'm eternally scarred, the driver decided that he could make the drive back tonight. and i here i sit. back in ponsavan, with electricity and an a/c.
well, this was definitely a novel, but i couldn't help it, the past two days were just chock full of novel proportions.
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