Rediscovered sadness

The owner and head chef of the buffet

I've been tearing through my house looking for my old map of Vientiane. I'd like to frame it. I've been searching for weeks now; I probably filed it somewhere dumb in a moment of laziness.

I searched through a folder of correspondence with a friend I made in Laos. His name is Souphanh; he's in his late forties or early fifties. I met him at the vegetarian buffet behind the Khuadin market, where I'd go several times a week for lunch. I remember the day he introduced himself. I hesitated when he asked to join me at the table; many people wanted to talk to me to practice their English, and my energy for that kind of conversation was ebbing. I braced myself and invited him to sit. I was embarrassed when his next few sentences were perfect English. He was raised in Laos, fought in the north, trained briefly in the U.S., and had to return to the U.S. during the Communist takeover in 1975. After fifteen years or so he returned to Laos; his children were now grown, and he flew to Oregon and California every few years to visit. He told me about some land he owned outside the city, and about the nearby village in poor shape. He was helping to build their wat (temple)--Did I want to go with him to see it that weekend? Most Americans become wary when traveling in developing countries of being approached for money. There's perfect sense to it, though: I can give up something relatively trivial to me and make a genuine difference in someone else's life. The damage is feeling reduced to a wallet in most interactions. I think I reminded him that I did not have much money to give, and he said no, don't worry, it would be interesting, and he'd like the company.

Weeks later he told me I should think of him as my father in Laos.

That weekend he picked me up at the house I rented. We drove through rice paddies out of the city. I remember thinking how sad it was that I was in a beautiful country with brilliantly interesting people like Souphanh and too lonely and depressed to take much pleasure in it. We stopped at a small market on the side of the road. He bought about two kilos of rambutan. He said he knew a lonely old woman, a friend of his, down the road--if I waited in the car, he would go take the rambutan to her. Five minutes later he returned and we continued to the village.

We were maybe 20 km from Vientiane, but the village felt rural and was surrounded by scraps of jungle. I saw the half-constructed wat and a few houses. When he had told me he was helping build the wat, I asked about the status of the school. Wats educate boys but not girls. The school apparently knew I was coming. Two or three teachers and the vice principal greeted us. I saw the small rooms. The paint had peeled off of the wood they used for blackboards. There was nothing else on the walls. They brought out their textbooks. They were worn and stained with cockroach feces. They had only a quarter to a third of the books they needed for each grade level. Most students shared. Souphanh told me some students in the village couldn't afford the annual tuition for the (public) school, which was about 70 cents.

The Ministry of Education was rumored to be the most corrupt ministry in the government, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (with which I dealt often in my work) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An American consultant who had worked in Laos for several decades told me the only time he had been bugged was during a meeting with the MoE. He says they have rooms and rooms full of textbooks that they had not distributed.

After the tour, we went to the house of the vice principal. The interior was all cement. A 1997 Lao Aviation calendar (Lao Aviation supplied the vast majority of all calendars I saw in Laos) was on the wall. About a dozen bright plastic dishes of food were spread on a plastic "tablecloth" on a strip on the floor. About two dozen of us sat down, and I had the first nonvegetarian meal (except for one snail in Cyprus a year previous) in six years. I remember eating whole salted fish and duck. I tried to help clean up later and was shooed away. For once I couldn't summon the courage to use the bathroom outside (i.e., the backyard)--it was just too small. My Lao was too terrible to have much of a conversation with anyone. I did a lot of sitting around and smiling. Doing that all the time makes you feel like a phony.

On the way back Souphanh told me about his philosophy for giving. He was annoyed he had donated three soccer balls to the wat, and they had all been punctured within months. He didn't believe in giving money, since people wouldn't spend it on the right things. About 5 km from the village, he stopped the car, reached into the back, and pulled out a handful of kapok seeds. This was his land, he said, and he wanted a forest. I watched him toss seeds off either side of the road.

When I returned from Laos, I convinced my mother to match my $150 donation to the school, care of Souphanh. I suggested he spend it on maps of Laos (inspired by my Lao neighbor's complete lack of knowledge of local geography) and textbooks and blackboards. Several months later he wrote back with photographs and an itemized receipt. In the photographs, the teachers were lined up, stone-faced--a typical but unnerving Asian photographic habit--behind stacks of books. Souphanh had written on each stack the grade level that would be using them. I saw framed maps of the country, and then blackboards. In the upper left of each blackboard, my name had been stenciled in yellow paint in English and Lao.

Seeing the photographs again sent the same shock of sadness, shame, wonder--I'm not sure what it is--through me. My name stenciled in yellow for those kids to see while studying is ridiculous. I've been crying this afternoon, as I cried when I first received his letter. In some ways it is ridiculously easy to effect positive change. I don't know why I don't do it more often. I hate how the country, those people, those responsibilities, sometimes feel a world away. I think the tears reflect some deep belief that I have been misusing my time. I wish I were better connected to all I find dear. I've lost that a little while doing research. I've a hard time weighing my current contribution.

I remember watching an interview with Romeo Dallaire, former head of UN peacekeeping in Rwanda. He said that he just wanted to crawl back to the country nameless, living simply in the rural villages, somehow seeking forgiveness from the people.

I don't feel particularly beholden to Lao citizens above others, but I do feel beholden to people suffering for stupid reasons, for whom I could intervene.

It's hard to link these feelings to the work I'm doing this summer.

A practical note: Giving money to the school without going through the MoE was quite illegal under Lao law, but I didn't really care. I don't know how to rationalize delays in stamping out illiteracy, particularly among women, and particularly when a well-informed public is prerequisite for badly-needed political reform.