Village life in Laos

It’s been over a month and three countries ago that I last updated the blog. We were in Thailand when I last wrote and since then we visited Laos, Cambodia and are now in Vietnam. And it’s hard to believe, it has been 4 1/2 months since we left Seattle, which also explains why many of the details and timelines are feeling blurry to us.

I will recap some of the highlights from the last month.

Thailand: After leaving Bangkok, we split our time between a preschool in Chiang Mai and exploring coffee in Chiang Rai. We spent some of our time volunteering and getting to know the staff and directors of a village preschool where they teach a bilingual program (English/Thai). It is an amazing and happy place for students, staff and families in the community. They let us hang out and learn about the culture, learn to make yummy snacks, learn to play chair ball and try and help where we could. I had the opportunity to teach a phonics lesson to the teachers and some of the parents from the school and Jim worked on many stage props with Tom (one of the directors) to get ready for the holiday celebration. It was such a privilege to be part of the Good Kids Preschool community. We also went to Chiang Rai to visit 3 coffee farms and meet a few farmers who are very committed to growing and developing excellent coffee in Thailand. Western coffee houses are becoming very popular everywhere in Thailand, so the local market is growing. It was fun to meet young farmers who are excited and hopeful about their business and how it’s growing and changing their communities in positive ways.

After Thailand we went to Laos (I’ll come back to this)

Cambodia: Here we were mostly tourists. We were only in Cambodia for 6 days. We visited Phnom Penh, and happened to be there during the water festival which is a huge party. Imagine Fourth of July, seafair and Christmas ships all mixed into one big celebration. It was very fun to experience and about one million local tourists enjoyed it with us. We also visited Siem Reap and Angkor Wat for a couple days. We tried to fill up on great street food and ancient culture. The resilience and joy in the people we met from Cambodia and the stories we heard were very inspiring. We went to a theatre which was started by a man who had lived through the Khmer Rouge era as a child. He had escaped as a refugee and years later decided to return to Cambodia with the hope of teaching the traditional musical culture that was being lost to the younger generations. He dreams of a country (and world) where students carry instruments not weapons.

Laos: I really loved Laos. We were in Luang Prabang for 4 days, which is a beautiful old city on the Mekong river. We stayed next to an organization which pairs tourists with locals who want to practice speaking English. Brilliant idea! It was packed everyday. Many people we met were interested in learning English because it promises them more work opportunities. We tried to learn a little Laos as well (mostly I learned farm animal names). The next 72 hours we had a very local, rural Laos experience which started with 3 bus trips to get to a small village outside of Xamtai in the mountains of northeastern Laos. The bus rides included live chickens, smells of dried fermented fish (I thought it was durian), many more people than seats on the bus (just add a stool to the aisle) luggage that got piled twice as high as the bus, and honking every 5 minutes as we passed a motorbike or truck or group of children walking on the road. It took about 22 hours to get there, but it was so worth it! We stayed one night with Jim’s coffee colleagues family. They live in a village of 60 families. The women weave beautiful clothes, they grow rice and farm coffee. I walked with Hannah to take her boys to school and we stopped to say hi to everyone we met. They were curious about this visitor and many invited us to come sit with them. We stopped on our way home to visit her “village mama” so I could watch her weave. A few women were sitting around talking with a couple little children playing. They offered me bananas and jicama and smiled and talked with me (through Hannah’s translation) for a long time. They grow or raise most of their food and rarely go to town to buy anything at the market. When their is a wedding or funeral or birth in the village everyone stops their regular routine to support the family in need. This might mean the rice or coffee cherries don’t get picked right away, but that is part of communal life together. They share each other’s joys and burdens. I also visited the village school, two classrooms, and I tried to teach the kids “Head, shoulders, knees and toes.” And they laughed as I tried to learn the words in Laos and Tai Daeng (local language). Everyday the kids go home from 11:30-1:00 to have lunch with their families and then come back to school until 4:30. I was so thankful we got to spend the day visiting this beautiful community of people and seeing a very different example of how people live life.

In Laos we also learned about the UXOs (unexploded ordinances) left over fro the Vietnam War which have devastated much of the countryside. We visited some of the caves where the villagers lived for nine years during the war. There are still 80 million unexploded bombs left in the countryside that injure people, many of them children, regularly in Laos and Cambodia. While we were in the country a coffee farmer in the south was killed on his farm when one exploded. Seeing and hearing these stories was hard and I was often surprised that we, as Americans, were welcomed by anyone who lived through this history. The people in Laos we met were very kind and gentle.

Vietnam:

So from Laos we went to Cambodia then we flew into Ho Chi Minh City. It was a little shocking to be in such a huge city again. We spent 2 days taking in the sights and sounds and trying to get used to another currency. We started traveling North, up the country and the weather started getting cooler. Someone pointed out that traveling through Vietnam is like going from Florida to New York (now it made sense to me). We have visited coastal cities on the China sea and mountain towns where more good coffee is being produced. One of our favorite stops was in Hoi An. I believe it was the first place the French settled. The architecture, narrow streets of shops and beautiful silk lanterns made the city along the river very picturesque. We also experienced our first real weather there. After two days of solid rain many of the roads were mid-calf deep in water and all the taxis were helping families on the river move to higher ground (more rain was predicted). This isn’t even monsoon season and the locals didn’t seem bothered at all. We continued north to Hue and Ninh Binh and are currently in Halong Bay, on a rare sunny winter day.

We will be home in 9 days and both of us are looking forward to spending time with family and friends and being in one spot for a little while (17 days) before we take off for Kenya!

Merry Christmas to all

With all our love,

Michelle and Jim