The Rain in Laos…

…falls mainly on our walk to work. This morning I awoke to the sound of rain outside our window. I had woken once in the night (woken in the sense I was in that strange space between sleep and waking where you’re aware and yet not aware at the same time) and heard the rain start. During our orientation yesterday Rick had mentioned that the rainy season had truly begun here in Laos, but that the rain mostly falls at night from around 6 pm to 8 am. This proved mostly true last night, although the cut off time was a little off and the rain did not fully stop until a little after noon today. The roof of our house is made of some sort of sheet metal, so the rain sounds loudly in our room. While this amount of noise would normally bother me when I am trying to sleep, there is something comforting about the sound of rain and I found myself enjoying it as I woke and got ready for my first day.

I awoke early, ready and eager for my first day of work at VFI. I wanted to get to the office early to get some internet time (we don’t have internet at our house, which is a huge bummer), but by the time everyone was ready to go and we left for the office ( a quick five minute walk) we had almost no time to even check e-mails when we arrived. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

There was no competition for the bathroom this morning, which is a fairly amazing fact when you consider that there are four girls sharing one bathroom. I got all ready for my day, looking very cute in my little skirt and white blouse. The rain falling outside made it impossible to wear my cute black flats to work (there is the dirt/mud road outside the office that we must wade through to reach the office) and so I sucked it up, put on a pair of socks, my tennies, my bright blue raincoat, and whipped out my wonderful green ginko umbrella. I looked so funny! (Pictures are available for sale.) We walked over to the office, got some free coffee and tea at the small coffee area outside the office (which is really nice and is made available to anyone who wants to use it, even the traveling monks!), and then went the office to begin our work.

We had a short introductory session with Rick and the coordinators of the different projects. The background on the company and Laos (which was extraordinarily brief) was interesting. The two main projects pertaining to law that we will be working on focus on land rights and human trafficking. These two areas, which seem very different at first, are actually very connected in Laos. People who lose their land rights, are thrown off their land by the government, or who have no opportunity to get land in their villages because of overpopulation are sent out to find work in cities, often to Thailand, where they are unsuccessful and end up in the human trafficking trade (brothels, etc.).

It is a horrible cycle and one VFI is determined to help end. One of the main ways to stop the cycle is to inform rural villagers of their rights. I will be starting on the more proactive end of the process, by working on updating a legal Guidebook that informs villagers of their rights under the current system of Laos law. The Guidebook was written several years ago, but major changes were made to the law in the past year, which necessitates updates. The Laotian version of the book has already been updated and now we will be working with local Laos legal students to translate the Laos into English. We will be working on several other projects as well, including helping the others a bit on the Human Trafficking side of things (It is technically called a Women and Children’s Empowerment project), as that project does not yet have a Guidebook (which the others will be writing this summer).

The work all sounds fascinating and is made even better by the possibility that we will be visiting the Southern Provinces where our Guidebooks are utilized in two weeks. Rick is working to get the government to okay our visit to the Salavan Province in Southern Laos so that we can visit a village community where VFI teaches about legal rights regarding land ownership and the importance of villagers claiming the title of their land from the government. I hope that we can visit soon as the visit will make the entire project more real to us and will help motivate us for our work if we can see where it is making a difference.

After our morning meeting, we broke up into the different project groups to go over our objectives and plans for the summer. In the land project, Rights-LINK, we will be working in a group with each person taking small pieces of the project that we will put together to create the whole. It should be a lot of fun and the area of law is very interesting, a mix of property and environmental/resource management. During the afternoon, the two students, Tatip and Sam, who will be helping us translate the Laos Guidebook into English, came and we were able to discuss our plans of attack for the project, which mostly consists of reading the old manual and getting ready to start the translation process.

For the rest of the afternoon we read some materials concerning our project Rick and Talia (a woman from South Africa/England who works at VFI) accumulated for us to give some background on Laos law and the projects we will be working on for the summer. Tomorrow we will spend more time reading the materials and getting up to speed on everything. At 4 pm we went out to the coffee area to teach English to some people who come to VFI to learn everyday for an hour. This needs a bit more explaining…as part of the mission of VFI, Rick wanted to create a space at the office where people from all over the city could come to congregate and discuss rights, get free coffee, use the internet, and generally have a place to meet and discuss. The coffee bar is open air, with a large covering that provides shelter from the sun or rain. Small tables dot the surface of the raised wooden floor, which provides a welcoming atmosphere, encouraging people to stay and chat for a while. The entire program seems to have been a success (although one of our jobs this summer is to further publicize its existence to local NGOs, schools, etc.) as the area attracts everyone, from other office workers to students at the law university, to the odd monk or two.

Our English lesson consisted of a wide range of people, including: a monk, people from VFI, local law students, and many others. Today, we stuck to vocabulary and taught the people words for different foods. As we taught the words in English we would repeat them in Laos, thereby teaching us Laotian at the same time. Double win! We will be doing community service hours and learning Laos! We finished our workday a little after 5 pm and headed home to rest for thirty minutes before Talia and Wa (another woman we are working with) came to pick us up to go to a Buddhist wake ceremony for a local family (somehow connected to VFI I think).

At work today we were invited to a special ceremony/party being held by one of the girls we work with. In Buddhist culture, a few years after someone has died, you hold a ceremony to honor the spirits of the dead through mass monk prayer, loved ones bringing gifts to honor the dead, food, and laughter. It really is a beautiful way to honor a lost loved one and you could see the happiness on the faces of the family that so many people had come to pay their respects to their family members and to pray on their behalves. When we arrived, we sat in a pavilion area at some round tables and watched a ceremony being held inside. A long line of monks sat against the left wall, praying and providing blessings on the people (the family members and close friends of the dead) kneeling before them. Behind these people, small coffins draped in bright yellow cloths and affixed with banners were covered in photos and money. It was an interesting sight and something very different from anything we have in our culture, although Zenia tells me there is something similar in Indian culture.

The ceremony ended with a loud gong strike and the monks departed (in a very unmonkly fashion – riding away in a large four door truck). We then chatted a bit with some of the family members, who thanked us for coming and had a lot of questions about us and where we were from. We were soon told it was time to eat and were ushered toward a large buffet table covered in wonderful Laos cuisine, including Pork laap, soups, sticky rice, a strange fix-it-yourself noodle dish, deep fried chicken and pork, etc. I took a little of everything I saw, sat down at my table and dug in. The food was an incredible adventure. As I tried each dish, I was informed that it was a traditional Laos food and was instructed that I was eating it all wrong (using chopsticks instead of hands at certain parts and vice versa). I had a fun time and there was lots of laughter and fun during our dining experience.

We had an incredible time and soon I was too full to move. I was sitting next to Talia at this point, when she opened something wrapped in banana leaves. She had been told it was steamed rice and banana, but it turned out to be pork, which she doesn’t eat (she’s a vegetarian). As I was sitting next to her I offered to try the dish and am very thankful I did. It was incredible! A traditional Laos food, it is steamed rice, mashed very fine with a Laos green bean to form a paste. The paste is then wrapped around some cooked pork and folded up in a banana leaf and tied with a bit of torn leaf. The small creation is then steamed until done and eaten fresh. It was a culinary delight, tasting like a cross between a tamale (those familiar with the tamale making process will recognize several similar elements in the creation of these delightful pork thingies) and a Chinese bun. Even though I was completely stuffed, I managed to eat the whole thing.

I am now sitting in my house, stuffed to the gills and ready to sleep. While I still have work to do, my extreme happiness in my fattened state leaves me with no desire to do anything, but sit here and contemplate my contentedness. I think my time here in Vientiane will be excellent. I am feeling very positive about work and excited about exploring this new region and traveling on the weekends. Life is good in Laos. If this is what the rain brings, then I say, let it pour.

General Thoughts about Laos and Vientiane:
1. This is a city built for cars and everyone here drives. Unlike Chiang Mai, where the principle source of transportation was red truck, here, most people own their own car and have a debilitating fear of walking. Our statement that we intend to walk each day from our house to the office (a walk that takes less than five minutes time) was met with horrified stares and gasps of shock at the office this morning and the further news that we intended to rent bikes for our stay here and bike around the city was so shocking to the people from Laos that they had absolutely nothing to say. Our first day and we have managed to silence an entire room of natives.
2. Vientiane is a large-small city. It is about a tenth of the size of Chiang Mai, but very spread out. The city feels large because it covers such a large area, but is not very densely populated and has few people in the city proper.
3. The people of Laos are excessively nice and polite. Take the polite and friendliness factors of the Thai, multiple it by 100, and you might begin to reach the degree of both qualities the Laos people have achieved.
4. Food in this city is more expensive than it was in Chiang Mai. While living in Thailand, we could buy a meal for around 70 cents or so, but here, we have to shell out around a $1.15 per meal. Outrageous! :) I have truly become a money monster here in SE Asia. Something about the cheapness of it all makes me even cheaper than I am at home in the States.
5. The money in Chiang Mai is ridiculous. The local currency is called kip and the rate of exchange to the US dollar is somewhere around $1 = 8,270 Kip. I had just become accustomed to the difference between the dollar and the baht and am now having to learn an entirely new currency too. In addition, the kip is not very well marked for non-natives to show what value each bill holds. Bills must be flipped back and forth as the poor unsuspecting foreigner looks for the one spot on each bill where the value is written plainly. The one good thing about kip – no coins. The entire currency system is based on bills, with the smallest denomination 500 kip. It is nice not to have to deal with the constant jangling and insanity of coins that have almost no real value (hello 1 baht, I’m talking to you).