The Land of a Million Elephants, the Land of a Million Irrelevants
Elephants
You are sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, next to a small fishing village. The haphazard collection of open-air, bamboo shacks have no electricity, no running water. You are eating spicy green papaya salad and breathing in hot, humid air. Even in the shade the temperature hovers around 35 C and you welcome the slightest breeze. The river is a pale shade of blue, diamonds and dolphins dance on the surface. The sky is a perfect blue dotted with perfect white clouds, the sun is above you, you are surrounded by more green than you thought possible. You are in a postcard.
The Mekong does not appear to move and it is a perfect metaphor for the passage of time. What day is it? You realize with a start that you haven't the faintest clue. You haven't known since you arrived. It doesn't matter, the marking of time is unimportant; Laos is attuned to the changes of Nature.
Look behind you, onto the dusty, unpaved road. A dozen school girls ride by on old, rusty bicycles, holding colorful umbrellas to protect themselves from the heat of the noon sun. They are wearing standard Laos uniforms; white button down shirts and dark blue, silk skirts, embroidered at the hem. They swerve to miss the fattest pig that you have ever seen in your life. It's approximate dimensions are 1m by 1m by 1m, and its swinging belly nearly scraps the ground as it sluggishly walks forward, head to the earth. It is followed by a family of ducks and almost runs into an aimlessly wandering cow. In the distance behind this scene of rural wildlife, you see rice fields, glistening. They are a vibrant green and thick like an astro turf carpet.
Take your attention back to the river, a boat is pulling in. It is built for a maximum capacity of about 25, but you stop your head count at around 45. Take a closer look and you're sure to see the pre-requisite rice sack It's an unwritten rule: every transport in Laos must contain at least one sack of rice before it can go anywhere.
To your right you watch a group of small girls hauling water up the steep hill back to the village. Their bodies bend and strain under the weight, but they still smile and wave. On your left is standing an older, wrinkled man wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs T-shirt. He is smoking tobacco rolled in a banana leaf and chances are, he has never seen a hockey game. A group of women appear from behind you, their mouths bright red from the betel nut they chew, and descend upon the boat. They are carrying bar-b-que sticks of rats, bats, beetles and frogs. And something that might have once been chicken, but you can't be sure. Yum Yum! Do you want to try some chicken hearts? How about some cockroaches. No? Are you sure? OK, we continue.
You've been sitting for about 10 minutes, lost in reverie and contentment, but I have left out something vital. Ah, here they are, the kids. About 2 dozen of them surround you, daring each other to touch you. They are wide eyed with amazement at your paleness and point to your arm hairs (the Laos have little body hair and all foreigners are hairy beasts) with merry disbelief. Your eyes are blue and that makes you a complete freak. You say "sabay-dee" a million times. They laugh. You laugh. Everyone laughs and you give airplane rides to all.
This is Laos, the nation that calms and embraces you. It is under your skin and you don't remember when you changed, but you are a completly different person than when you arrived. You body is unaffected, unencumbered by the weight and concerns you carry around with you in the "developed" world. Laos has cradled you, settled you and made you aware of the things you normally overlook: like smiles. Everyone smiles here. You smile, they smile back. Easy. You want to remain on this island of simplicity and contentment forever and wish you had more time on your visa. You want to remain out of reach, you hate Nike more than ever and a mobile phone smashing party is something that you think might solve a lot of world problems.
But you have to leave paradise behind. You are in one of the few places in the world where people are still satisfied with what they have, where the children are more happy playing outside, rather then fighting over who gets more time on the gameboy. Where in over a month you have not heard one person raise their voice in anger or frustration. You know when you return in a few years time, it will be gone. Progress will move in and consumerism will become the new idol. It's partly your fault but you have to learn to live with that.
Irrelevants
In the early 70's
Laos was more bombed than any country in the world in the entire history of warfare. Half a tonne of explosives were dropped for
every man, woman and child. The people most affected by the continual bombings, rural farmers and peasants, had little or no understanding of concepts such as "
nation", "
communism" and "
new world order".
Millions of UXO's remain to be found by
unwitting villagers and children. We all know what happens when you try to play baseball with a mortar ball.
The majority of the UXO's that
litter the country side were deposited there by the
overzealous American airforce, who still claim that there was never a war in Laos.
NGO's like MAG (Mines Advisory Group,
England) and CMAC (Canadian Mines Action Council,
Canada), with the sponsorship of international donors are doing their best to clean them up. Not one dollar for mine removal comes from the USA, whose army willingly spends 2 million dollars to remove the remains of 1
MIA. Furthermore, the USArmy sends only the most
obsolete information on the hundreds of models of bombs, landmines and
bomblets, because most of them were
prototypes at the time and are in use today to
dismember children and innocents in other parts of the world. The men and women today who work in the field are often left with little information on the things they find. This makes their job doubly more difficult and dangerous.
Imagine trying to defuse a 500 pound bomb, that is rusty with
no information on how it is put together.
In the press Laos has been referred to by its second name, the Land of the Million Irrelevants, since there has been little international attention to this small, landlocked and very impoverished nation and its plight apparently seems forgotten by those that created it.