Laos [part iii]

The School

While we were visiting dTan, she took us to the village school. It had around 35 students in grades 1-5. If a student wants to study past grade 5, they have to travel into the city. 

[The entrance to the school]

[The school yard where the kids played]

[The school and the classrooms. There were only 2 teachers for the 5 grades, so they move back and forth between classes.]

We taught the kids "The Hokey Pokey", sign language to "Jesus Loves Me", played some games and then shared the Christmas story with them (dTan translated our English into Laos). After sharing about Christmas, which none of them had heard of, we gave them gifts. We had brought gifts for the students with us (pencils, erasers, rulers, mini globe-balls, candy, and matchbox cars/hairbows) and the kids loved them. Even the teachers liked the mini-globe balls... We were able to show them where Laos was and ended up teaching them a mini-geography lesson! Laos was a closed country until recently, so they know very little of the world. One of the teachers didn't realize that South and North America were different continents, so having the globes were very helpful in explaining!

[Playing a simplified version of "Simon Says"]

[Claire handing out gifts]

The kids singing "The Hokie Pokie"

[The 1st graders with their Christmas gifts]

[dTan in the middle, and the two village teachers on her right and left]

The first grade class was a little shy in the beginning. I don't think they knew what to expect, and dTan warned us that the kids might be scared of our pale skin and think we were ghosts! By our visit to the 2nd/3rd grade classes, they all started to warm up. And by the time we got to the 4th/5th graders, all the students from the other classes were peeking through the windows and cramming in the doorways to see what was happening!

After we shared in all three of the classes, we went outside and played with the kids. The students don't have any equipment, so the balls we'd given them became their entertainment. I turned into their circus seal... the kids would lob the balls to me and I'd bounce them off my head. Then we played soccer, but really it was just "keep-the-ball-away-from-the-farang." Getting to play with the kids was really the highlight of my time in Laos. It's awesome how far a smile goes when you don't know the language! I couldn't tell them all about Christ's love, but my prayer was that through the Christmas story and interacting with us, they would begin to understand God's great love for them.

[dTan walking back with the students after their morning classes]

This ends the "Laos" blogging trilogy :)

Laos [part ii]

My apologies for the delay... I was hoping to make a video to tell the second part of the story, but it ended up being as primitive as our time there. So, I'm sticking to words and pictures instead! Here's "part ii"...

The Village

We were the second group of foreigners ("farang") to ever visit dTan's village... it felt like stepping into a museum exhibit, or an early Native American village. The heartbeat of the village is the river, it is where you get water for drinking/cooking, wash your clothes and bathe. The village had 60 homes, raised up on stilts. This provided a bottom level of shade for afternoon naps, outdoor work, and the animals to rest under. Here are a few pictures from our "orientation walk" around the village.

[The entrance to the village. They have a temple, behind us, and a 1st-5th grade school.]

[Some families propped bamboo between nooks of trees as a clothesline, others made use of the ir fences]

[A rice-planting tool and a child's toy]

[dTan and Claire playing with the village puppies!]

[Everything was dry; a few sparse palm trees provided limited shade and greenery to the yellow and red dust.]

[This is the river we had to drive through, not over, through, to get to her village. It was also where we bathed , swam, and did our laundry. The adults would be down at the river in the mornings and the evenings, while the children would leave during their school lunch break to splash and cool off.]

[If you want food, you have to grow it or make it. Everyone in the village has sticky rice that they grow and then store for the year. The fields had already been harvested when we arrived.]

[The villagers occasionally sell a chicken or pig to get money for their families, but their biggest "export revenue" comes from yams. Here's a pile of yams that some of the women worked at chopping up in the shade under their home.]

While we were in the village, dTan introduced us to her family and friends. One of the couples in the village asked for her to come and visit, and we were invited to tag along. The husband has been sick for years. He was the skinniest person I'd ever seen, with only a papery layer of skin stretched over his bones. He couldn't walk, so he had to scoot everywhere... when he had the energy to move at all. It saddened us, because the village medicine is mostly superstitions and old wives tales. He currently only drinks beer and coffee and rarely eats because he thinks that water makes him sick. Which, is hardly a good combination for good health. dTan talked to them in Laos, and we just sat and smiled. This visit was such a good reminder that we (Claire and I) were not the missionaries to Laos. We don't know the culture, although some things are similar to Thailand, we don't know the language. But dTan is. This trip, we didn't preach or hold revival services, but I hope we did encourage dTan in her mission to reach her people... and also make Christ look attractive through our actions and countenance.

The second day, dTan's family gave us sarongs to wear so we'd look more "Laos." These are 2 meter swatches of fabric that are sewed into a tube and then you fold over the extra and tuck it in. I've never paid more attention to when I stood up than when I was wearing these!

A brief tour of dTan's home!

I had a lot of firsts in Laos: first time bathing in a river, washing clothes in a river, learning how to make home-made noodles, living in a house with no furniture, prolonged use of a squatty potty... having my fresh river-washed clothes being infested by ants as they dried (No one tells you about these things. Puts new meaning to "ants in your pants!")

It really makes you see how much you don't need to survive. These people had to grow their own trees to get wood for their homes. They eat sticky rice, that they grow themselves, for every meal. They have mats on the ground for their "kitchen table" and a coal fire to cook over. The coal is made by them as well. There aren't trash cans in the homes or the villages, because there isn't much waste. Everything is reused, and water is the universal cleaning agent... if your pantless child poops on the floor, just wipe it up and rinse it through the floor cracks. Problem solved! (Also, true story)

We, myself included, can get so easily bent out of shape if things aren't what we are accustomed to, or if a place doesn't have our favorite conveniences. But being here helped readjust my perspective (yet again!) and realize that I can live with a lot less than I think. It also gave me a new empathy for the disciples, who really were at the mercy of the hospitality of others... and were always walking into unknown places, languages, situations and cultures.

Please be praying for dTan, as she is the only believer and missionary to her village. Pray that her people and family would see the hope she has and seek the truth. Pray that the stronghold of false religions and superstitions would not hold them captive, but that Christ would give sight to their spiritual blindness.

...to be continued

Laos [part i]

The Journey

Our friend, dTan is from Laos, and works at the little coffee shop in the cafe area of the BSC. If you've ever eaten at the BSC, you've probably seen her smiling, laughing or sitting down at the tables during lags to talk with people. She is so sweet, and is also the only believer in her hometown.

She invited Claire and I to spend some of our Christmas holiday in her village (Yes, I do mean "village"). She left before Christmas and we followed her a few days later. It was our first "big trip" without a Thai guide, and needless to say, I was a bit nervous. dTan had given me some general directions: take an overnight bus, and then take a songtaew, then a van... I think. I could only follow about 75% of her directions. And in all fairness to her, Claire and I really didn't know what to ask, either. Everything happened so quickly, one minute we were at Immigration buying a re-entry stamp, the next minute we were making trips back and forth to the Mo Chit bus station to get our tickets (Yes, trips. It took us three tries... We were such newbies).

We boarded the overnight bus to Ubon, the only farangs, and left promptly at 8:30pm. This really was the last point during the trip when time really mattered. After this, time became a blur... and in true Thai/Laos fashion, irrelevant also.

Claire and I dosed up on our sleeping pills (I'm not going to become an addict, don't worry Mom) for our 8+ hour ride. I'm so thankful for one of my new friends here in BKK, Joanna, who warned me that the overnight buses stop periodically throughout the night for mandatory "get off the bus and stretch" breaks and "noodle stops". Without her heads up, Claire and I would have been completely at a loss when we were awoken from our drugged slumber every two hours with shouting and bright lights. Because we were the only foreigners, no one bothered to explain anything in English... so we never really knew what was happening. Halfway through the night, true to Joanna's words, we stopped for noodles. Buses full of people, dumping out in this little pavilion where stands were set up serving noodles and sausage balls. We tore off the stub of our ticket in exchange for a bowl of noodles and proceeded to stumble to a table to slurp down our noodles before being herded back into our bus. That's not actually true. There was no one herding. And no one head counting. Which, to my American thinking, was quite disconcerting. But Claire and I always made it back to the bus, and eventually we arrived at Ubon.

I wish I had taken a video of what it was like to get off the bus at Ubon. It was still dark and there were at least a dozen men, some in ski masks, crowded around the entrance of the bus. My sleeping pill had not yet fully worn off and as I exited the bus, trying to collect my thoughts, I was assaulted by "Hi, where you go??" "Tuk tuk ma'am?" "Where you going?" "I take you, only *** baht." Frantic, and overwhelmed, I looked around for Claire, clutching my purse and backpack tightly. I didn't see her. Walking away from the bus, some of the men followed me, repeating their questions. I could barely retrieve enough Thai from my foggy brain to respond to their barrage of questions. Finally, after realizing I would not be scammed by their over-priced transportation offers, I located Claire and we started to walk around to figure out our next step.

I knew we needed to get to Chong Mek, but wasn't sure how exactly we would get there. A nice Thai man directed us towards some vans which were 100 baht to our destination. I vaguely remembered dTan mentioning a 100 baht van, so we happily climbed in, ready to get to Laos. The van ride was not particularly comfortable, but it was (thankfully!) uneventful. The only delays were passport checkpoints by the police on the roads and letting passengers off.

At Chong Mek, we were again greeted with a barrage of transportation scammers, but still being in Thailand, we were able to keep our heads about us and avoid them. Chong Mek was where we expected to get our Laos tourist visa and cross the border. However, the place we were dropped was just a normal bus station, and no one spoke enough English to help us. They just kept telling us to walk down the road or get on a motorcycle. With all of our bags, we didn't want to brave a motorcycle, and there was no way we were walking. After checking my meager directions from dTan, I decided that we were at the "take a songtaew" part of our journey, as we'd already taken a bus and a van. This was the final mode of transportation until we were reunited with her (or so I thought).

We found a songtaew that took us to the border for 20 baht, went through Thai customs, crossed the border (through an underground cement tunnel), and proceeded to buy our visa stamp in Laos. (Which, should have been $35 USD, but as we had only baht, it cost us 1,500 baht, equiv. $50 USD). We also didn't have extra passport pictures, but they let us off the hook for an additional $1 USD. Sigh. Hello Laos. That should have been warning enough about how Laos people view farangs... as walking money bags.

We looked around for dTan... she told us she knew where we'd be dropped off and would be there waiting for us at the Laos Duang Market. I try to engage some people to find out the name of the nearby market was. Of course, though, we're in Laos, so they speak Laos... not English or Thai. Without going into detail about all the looks and head shakes I got, there we were. In Laos. No dTan, no phones, nothing.

At this point, I'm starting to panic. Which may be why I let the first Laos man to approach us help us... as he spoke a little Thai and brought a woman over who let us use her phone. We called dTan's house number and her dad answered. He spoke a little Thai. From our conversation, I could only understand "Pakse, dTan... Pakse." So, going on a limb, I decided we needed to find a way to Pakse. The woman who let me use her phone offered to get us a taxi. I should have been suspicious about the whole operation, but being a little lost and a lot concerned, I was just happy to have someone take care of things. We boarded the taxi and she informed us that it would cost 1,000 baht. For comparison, the most I've ever paid for a taxi in Bangkok is 200 baht... and things in Laos are much cheaper than Bangkok. Immediately, I realized we'd been totally scammed. Unfortunately, at this point, we felt a little out of options. So, after talking her down to 700 baht, we departed for Pakse.

Once arriving in Pakse, we called dTan's dad again and had him talk to the taxi driver in Laos. The driver dropped us off at a bus stop and informed us that our friend would be there soon. Then he left. We had no other options, so we set our bags down and waited, hoping that dTan was indeed on her way and that she had not given up on us coming and gone back home. Thankfully, though, she arrived in no time, and after apologizing for our tardiness and re-capping the journey, including our expensive taxi ride, and learning that there were 100 baht vans that made the same trip every 30 minutes (whoops) she took us via tuk-tuk to her cousin's home nearby to rest before heading to her village.

[A: Mo Chit, B: Ubon, C: Chong Mek, D: Pakse]

...to be continued