4,000 Islands

Wow, the pressure. Thanks Phor lae Mae (Mum and Dad) for telling all your mates about this blog. Now they all write and ask why I haven’t updated. And so do my friends. I just can’t handle it anymore. I’m fine everyone, I swear. Just fine.

Thanks, by the way, to all who wrote to me when they saw my poor bruised face below. I have recovered quite well, except for a small scar as though someone has buried their fingernail into my cheekbone during a particularly nasty catfight. Those bastards.

I suppose I’ve just been busy, which is why I haven’t updated in over a month- atrocious!
I have been here just over four months now, which is crazy. The three month mark was celebrated on my 27th birthday in April, by which time my scars had almost healed.

So I’m thinking of becoming a Buddhist…
I have a Lao boyfriend now, whose name is 4,000 Islands, and this post is dedicated to him. The rest is irrelevant- I only bring him up because people have been asking, and also because he relates to the story I am about to tell, so gather close everyone.

We visited his parents recently at their makeshift house under corrugated iron where their old house once stood. They tore it down then ran out of money- a classic Lao tale.
Anyway, his mother has been sick. "Unspecified abdominal problems", which doesn’t surprise me given she’s had eight kids. She has been to the doctor and to hospital, been given medication, and the pain hadn’t gone away. She was pale, losing weight and generally unwell.
On the night I went there, she and two of the daughters prepared a tray with soup, some of the grapes that I had brought, some sticky rice and a whole cooked chicken.
Then she and the father and some neighbours sat around with scarves or towels hanging over their left shoulders- a Buddhist custom- and began rocking and mumbling and chanting, and some of them took balls of rice and touched them on her neck and body, looking to the sky and chanting some more.
I asked 4000 Islands later what it was all about and he sighed and explained that his father had been to a witch doctor, who read some cards and announced that the mother’s dead father had asked for some chicken, which is what the chanting was all about.
I mean really, the woman probably needs a hysterectomy or something. I didn’t know what to make of it.
Anyway, I don’t want to bore you with my thoughts on all this, except to say we visited again a week later, and she was glowing with good health and was feeling much better.
Isn’t that annoying?
It’s quite annoying, actually, for an avowed atheist like me.
It means there might actually be something to this whole “faith” thing.

Spring clean, visit nine wats and beg your parents for forgiveness
Mind you, I shouldn’t talk, given how superstitious I’ve become in the past few months. There was the whole snake thing, and then my Lao teacher Phitsamai told me how a monk came to her in a dream and told her to buy a lottery ticket and 2 of the 3 numbers he told her turned out to be right.
A lot of it has to do with ‘cultural sensitivity’, and not wanting to ruin things by accident. So right from the start, I’ve found myself adhering to Buddhist custom to the very letter. We are told not to cut the baci strings off our wrists for at least three days after we receive them, and I never have, not once. I have bowed and prayed with everyone else at all the death-related ceremonies I’ve been to, and I was careful to take my boss seriously when a witch doctor told him his brother, who was on life support, had a 70 percent chance of survival, even though the doctors had said there was no hope. The brother died, but that’s not the point.
Kate and I have decided that this is the reason why things have gone so well for us both this year, which is why we celebrated Pi Mai- Lao New Year, a few weeks ago, again to the letter, which was actually kind of fun, although I have to say, there comes a time when, if you’ve seen one temple, you’ve seen them all.

“Wicked”
This post is also dedicated to all the backpacker tools swarming the streets of Luang Prabang over New Year.
Not long after I got back from Luang Prabang, I was going to tell you all about Pi Mai, and how everyone throws water on you everywhere you go, and how we climbed the 300 steps to Wat Phousi with hundreds of locals who left balls of rice and chocolate bars everywhere as offerings, and how the street kids just followed everyone and collected the chocolate bars as you put them down and then sold them at the bottom of the steps again at a profit, and then I realised I was sounding like my own worst enemy: the British backpacker.
So you know what? I’m just going to post a selection of photos, so that you can look at them and say “wicked” a lot, in your own time.
Honestly. So many things I love have been destroyed by the mutual love of fools: the Shins, Napoleon Dynamite, Pi Mai Lao.
Then again, I’m probably just miffed at feeling like a tourist in Laos, which of course I was up in LP. I kept wanting to explain to restaurant staff and even people on the street that no, in fact I was not a tourist, I LIVE HERE…

Anyway, about the photos. The Boys in Black were prowling the streets of Luang Prabang, and despite their age (young), I actually found them quite fearful.
There's also some from the Rocket Festival at a nearby village this week. All very phallic. Perhaps I'll describe it in a later post, although I fear it may be more of the "wicked" variety.

The Lao Soft Drink Company
This post will also be dedicated to the Lao Soft Drink Company, aka Pepsi.
It's funny, there are many random products that seem to have taken Lao by storm, for no apparent reason. The main ones I have noticed are:
-Ovaltine
-Strepsils
-Ponds facial care, although here most moisturisers, or “skin milk”, have bleach because “dark skin not beautiful”
-Streets Icecream
-Pepsi, which is a major sponsor of many many sporting events and community projects throughout the country.

Why, I wonder?

Ngam Lai
Now, I know that you will all be on my side when I insist that I am not being conceited when I tell you that I am actually considered quite beautiful here. There, I’ve said it for posterity, because I very much doubt I will ever be in a position to utter those words again.
I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about my hair (not black), eyes (also not black), skin (lately dangerously dark from the daed ork, or sunshine, but still relatively light) and figure (not emaciated) that makes the boys sit up and take notice. Honestly, it is absolutely stock standard for otherwise cool-as-ice boys to watch me as I go past and say “ngam lai’ to each other, which means “very beautiful”.
Mind you, I'm no Kate, who has pale skin, freckles and white-blond hair- she's practically a circus freak!
Some days it can get to you, being stared at openly wherever you go. But because the attention is rarely sleazy, the way it would be back home, it’s actually quite refreshing. Girls are just fascinated, rather than bitchy or judgmental, and boys never wolf-whistle or make immature frat-boy comments about your breasts.
Actually, the boys here are quite vain and girly, almost as much as the girls. Why, 4,000 Islands himself has almost as many beauty products as I do, and most of them mention “foam”, “pores” and “skin soft” somewhere.

Weather update: daed ork, fon tok
Or, the sun shines and the rain falls. There have been quite a few storms lately, but the sun dries it all up. Soon, though, the rain will fall faster, the sun won’t be able to catch up, the holes will fill with water and the streets will be flooded. And the storms will cause electrical surges, the lights will flicker on and off and the water will switch off for hours on end. Damn this country.

Which reminds me of something funny. We had our garden ‘landscaped’ the other week. There’s an Australian man living here who has set up a landscaping business, and only employs boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. We have hired them to tend to the garden each week. Last week, one of the boys accidentally cut our water mains with a whipper-snipper, causing water to gush out for hours and flood the lawn. I’m not sure how it happened, but I suspect that, like many people here, is was just singing to himself and got into a bit of a trance. Anyway, it was so ridiculous that he just giggled helplessly, and so did everyone else, including the boss. In the end, they had to call urban services who had to cut off the village water supply while they fixed the pipe.

I hope the President of Laos wasn’t at home- he lives right across the road. It’s convenient actually, because his protection guards all live in barracks just near our house. There are about thirty of them living in this dormitory, all young men from Phongsaly, a poverty-stricken northern province. They have a different dialect up there, which is why I can never understand a single goddamn word they say to me, even though I have been learning Lao for four months now.
Kate and I discovered this during Pi Mai, just before we flew up north, when we took them a crate of beer as a goodwill gesture and still couldn’t understand them. Like most coppers here, they play volleyball a lot.
Anyway, we like to think that the President would be terribly, you know, embarrassed, if we were to get broken into like most of the other Aussie volunteers have, being so close to his house. We also like to think that the Boys from Phongsaly are watching over our house to ensure that such embarrassment does not ensue.
If you know what I’m saying.

Anyway, those boys are yet another shining example of the government’s approach to poverty reduction- take fit young men from their hometown, bring them to the Capital and train them as cops.
Like the desperately desolate roadside villages in the mountains up north. Here’s how it works: according to the government’s Poverty Eradication Strategy, everyone must be well-fed and able to generate an income, but must also be literate and have access to education. There doesn't seem to be any particular priority among these criteria, which is why many communities up in the mountains, who have no electricity and no schools, are shifted against their will further down and plonked smack next the main road that cuts through the mountains, where they just sit all day long, metres away from the passing traffic, with absolutely nothing to do. But dammit, at least they have televisions and the kids can go to school.

Anyway, that's enough from me. The pic of 4,000 Islands will only be up for a limited time to 'protect his privacy' as it were, so drink deep of his image while you can...