last email from laos

Hello friends and family,

So after my horrific ordeal with canine comestibles, elderly ninjas, and tropic bedrooms, it clearly took a few days to recover. Also, the follow-up interviews here in the capital, Vientiane, have been non-stop. I’m to finally say that all the data collection for the Lao portion of the project is completed!

While it’s certainly been a blessing to be on this project, I realize that my role, as is the role of most graduate students, is the data monkey/coffee retriever/note taker. I’m a bit exhausted from coding 20+ interviews and I’m hoping to finish them all up before I leave for Manila tomorrow night.

But enough of my research woes, the real reason I’m sending this email is to continue retelling the crazy experience that is my time here in Lao PDR.

After returning to the highlands of Phonsavanh, where I was in an air conditioned hotel room, things quieted down. I was eating normal Asian food, luckily my group tired of the pho as well, so for the first time in a while, I had a pancake for breakfast. Mind you, I say PANCAKE, singular, because here in Laos, they interpret what we American would eat as a short-stack, as ONE ENTIRE PANCAKE. Yes it was a huge pancake, about a foot in diameter. And in a country with no maple trees, what do you top your ginormous pancake with? Sweetened condensed milk, duh. It was glorious. And so is my resulting Buddha-belly.

After more meetings with village authorities and being asked my age and marital status by a group of young Hmong ladies, who weren’t a day older than 18 but breastfeeding a child, the team wanted to check out a local silk factory that produced silk products from none other than silk worms, fed by local mulberry trees. Hm, mulberry, sounds familiar, I thought, meh, whatever, continue on. The tour didn’t seem too excited, but I figured, when in Rome… So we reached the factory, aptly called ‘Mulberries’ where we sampled Mulberry tea, saw the process of silk production, and watched young silkworms devour mulberry leaves. Slowly but surely, my eyes began to water and the sneezing initiated. Mulberries, I thought, why do I know this word so well? We continued to the Mulberry farm, a row of trees, reminiscent of Don Corleone’s deathbed, with tall branches. And like Don Corleone, I start to weeze and my mouth starts to feel dry. Mulberries. Ah, mulberries. One of the three plants (Walnut trees, Bermuda grass, and Mulberry trees) that I am DEATHLY allergic to. Upon this realization I run out to the car, insist that the driver turn on the air conditioning as I sit, quarantined from the deathly foliage, popping Claritin like TicTacs. Crisis averted.

Before I depart from the Mulberries experience, I should comment on the tour guide. A young woman, who is most likely around my age. As she and her coworkers welcomed us onto the farm, what struck me first was the shape of her face. Having shot pictures of almost all my friends for various photo projects throughout college, the shape of one’s skull has always intrigued me. What was striking about this young lady’s face were the strong features, jaw and cheekbones, that weren’t altogether unattractive. As she described Mulberries and the founder (who was nominated for a Nobel peace prize for creating sustainable employment for Lao woman), I began to notice the androgynous quality of this tour guide’s face. A common thought in portraiture and modeling is that androgeny, while most of the time is quite freaky (think of the devil person in the Passion of the Christ movie), has characteristics of beauty and symmetry. But something was different about this woman, her look went beyond androgeny and bordered on….




TRANNY!

As she got up to lead the tour, I sought to verify my thoughts. Hands – check. Definite man hands. Adam’s apple – negative. Win some, lose some. Boobs – check. These were definitely not boobs. Something was very off, almost conical – stuffed bra, I speculate. Hips – check. Since the only other women to reference were my middle-aged companions, I figured well these old ladies gave birth, so even they have hips. Tranny-tour-guide had none, no hourglass there. And finally, feet – check. Homegirl was peepin some pretty big feet, more Hobbit-like than dainty. And with that, I decoded my first tranny without the Crying Game experience! Clearly the Mulberry farm could not hold my attention span, so I took my triumphs where I could find them.

Later that day, the team told me about a sauna/massage service at the local Red Cross. Yes, I know, who knew the Red Cross provided this service. Had I known, my youth volunteer days would have been completely different. Either way, as it was the entire trip, I found myself sitting awkwardly among a group of adults, my parents’ age. Except this time, we were pretty much naked and in a sauna. Exaggerations aside (we were wearing towels – except we were all nakey underneath!), the sauna was pretty awesome. The Red Cross places herbs to make it an herbal sauna – some aromatherapy thing for which explanation was attempted and I Americanly smiled and nodded. As I sat in the sauna, part of me thought, “Okay, THIS is the part where the team drugs me and trafficks me as a Lao sex slave to a European country. Alas I was wrong, but I have to say, the massage did feel like a large Swedish woman named Olga was stepping on my back.

So, friends and family, I realize this email is vastly more tame than the last few, but I hope it was equally as entertaining. I’m currently sitting in a Japanese restaurant on a padded cushion on the floor enjoying the town fall into nighttime. It’s so hard to believe that I’ve been here for 3 weeks – I’ve just started to get used to living an expat life. There’s definitely something novel (yet after a while, exhausting) about being in a place where no one speaks your language. I’ve found the Lao people to be incredibly hospitable and the countryside to be some of the most beautiful sites I’ve ever seen. I debriefed (haha) with a UNICEF director today about my experience here and as we sat by the Mekong river, looking at Thailand across the water, I discussed how my perceptions of Laos have been completely changed. Development literature cites Laos as the most underdeveloped Asian country and for those people that actually have heard of the country, it’s simply a land mass near Thailand and Vietnam. What I have realized though is the richness of this country and the promise of development that’s inherent in every sector. The country seems to have a lot of hope, but at the same time, it still lacks most resources. Obviously, the work we’ve done here is meant to address that, so only time will tell what we produce.


And there I go again with my research reflections.