Sweet little Laos

So now I finish up with my last stop (aside from 10 hours laid over in Bangkok, then 8 in Korea...blech). I am in Vientiane, Laos and have just returned from the South where I was visiting some projects. The area, Salavan, is full of numerous hill tribes living in the mountainous uplands. These ethnic groups each have their own language, spiritual traditions, and belief systems. Their populations are small, numbering only a few thousand each. They have been extremely isolated from the outide world (a 10 hour truck ride along the bumpiest possible "roads" helped me understand why.)

In fact, this road is the former Ho Chi Minh trail, and was bombed every day for 8 years during the U.S. Secret War on Laos during the Vietnam conflict. Considered a "threat to national security" by the geniuses in the U.S., the peoples were bombed to hell and their mountaintops destroyed with Agent Orange. To this day, no trees grow on the vast, poisoned lands.

The biggest irony is that the people had absolutely NO idea why they were being bombed. The word communism means nothing to them. They still don't know...most of them don't think of the world as a big planet like we do...don't think about how it is round and multicultural and crazy. They are just hungry and spend most of their days searching for food in the forest, as well as for scrap metal from bombs, which they sell to Vietnamese traders and loggers who come to illegally sack Laos' still-abundant timber.

When our Laos director came on a speaking tour of the US this year, she asked the villagers what they wanted her to ask the Americans. One man said, "Can you ask them to drop more bombs? We are almost out of metal to sell to the Vietnamese, and that is our only income." Yet these are the people who were thought to be a threat to the American way of life, for whom so many young soldiers and civilians died. Cultural misunderstanding kills us!

Puja

When I visited Subiksha I was taken down down down into the deeps of real Indian worship. Twice actually. A puja is "the act of showing reverence to a god, a spirit, or another aspect of the divine through invocations, prayers, songs, and rituals." Basically, any intentional spiritual act. An essential part of puja for the Hindu devotee is making a spiritual connection with the divine.

This photo is of a village holy man, who led me and a temple full of women in a long chant where we continuously chanted Om Shakti-e! (power) between his verses. The chant started out slowly, light-heartedly enough. Naively I looked around the room, smiling to the women staring at me, trying to establish visual connections and alliances.

Eventually, the repetitive chanting grows louder and hypnotic, trancelike from all the repetition. Some voices begin to crack...hands shake....eyes squint...I stop taking pictures and join the collective mood overtaking the tiny temple.

This photo is of the other holy man and the women lighting candle after candle after candle. the more candles in the puja, the better. The flickering lighting is calming and secretive, reminding us devotees that the gods we worshipped were whispering to us and we only need listen.

The other puja I was part of happened in a woman's house, in her tiny common room. It was organized by a self-help group of women. The groups are organized by Subiksha, and which I help find support for. They take part in microfinance activities, local leadership, empowerment...basically anything to improve their communities! So inspiring, I am so honored to witness Subiksha in action. Anyway, this particular self-help group of 30 women decided they wanted to do a semi-fast for 30 days, for peace, unity and to honor Muruga, the rain goddess who was having her festival at that time. For Muruga one wears yellow and saffron, bright as the sun. Each night they were holding puja at a different woman's house, then eating a light meal together.

These are photos which I was graciously invited to take. Privacy is not much of a concept in crowded India, and having sacred moments photographed is, in my experience, seen as an honor rather than an intrusion. So I was able to save the images and share them now.

To the left you see the Amma, the mother, the spiritual leader of the group. She was leading the chant, Om shanti, om shanti, om shanti (peace)...Again things started lightly...women and children coming in and out, smiles and chatting arising casually. But sloooowly, the chants became more urgent, more real. Amma's voice took on a strong, soulful quality as the other women's faces contorted with the look of not just faith and devotion but of the invoked spirit itself taking over, displacing their composure and making them stand up and sweat and weep. Amma arose, swaying, and went to the altar to greet the gods. Her legs buckled and other women held her up her collapsing body.

And then boom! Like many things in India it ends abruptly. Amma comes right back to us fully composed but with a lighter expression on her face. The women clear their throats, smooth their saris, and ask me questions, thank me for coming. I attempt to express my incredible gratitude but they say no, no, thank YOU for visiting. Namaste namaste and goodbye.

These invocations are commonplace here.

Preserved thoughts

After a week in an airport graveyard, my pack decided to pick itself up and come find me. I know it wasn't such a big deal to lose it, its just that I was feeling like a snail with no shell. So I'm glad it decided to return.

I can't blog fast enough to keep up with my experiences. I've already trundled out to a far corner of the bumpy Earth and back since my last post, but I'd like to memory-capsulate India first.

Here are some thoughts I trapped with my thoughtnet. Most slipped out but these were the fattest ones, so I saved them:

...Like one who looked wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in the city. With sea-secrets in his eyes. (From Arundhati Roy's beautiful and sad book The God of Small Things)

Then there is the hardened heart's confrontation which each bump on each bumpy road...infinite patience-testing...and the shouting, Indian men bellowing from behind their mustaches. I do not know if one can bellow out of a kind place. But they may be.

All words take on different, sometimes opposite meanings in a country of strange speakers. Realities reverse similarly.

Then there are the distant, almost non-existent women but for their ornaments, who show up just to prove their servitude, then tiptoe away as if they could ever go unnoticed with anelts jingling like that. They speak too softly for me to hear, and smile too demurely for me to comprehend.

But indeed, here there are the brightest smiles in the universe, which can blind you because you know the despair they disguise and the pain they override, crowd out.

People here are unkind and loving. Loud and gentle. Aggressive and non-violent. Fat and hungry. Exhausted and still dancing. I hate India and love it and do not understand it and notice every little clue but miss many of the big details. Except the ones that explain and paint the ways in which this is the land of the soul, the spirit, the Om Shanti!

I am the foreigner but this is the strange, specific land where a billion people all follow the same obscure traditions, the random ones which still stand because no one could find reason to reject them. Culture's natural filter. There must be rhythm to the randomness but what, and how can I learn?

Flowers and coconut oil in the hair. Spot on the third eye. Head wobbling emphatically. Burping loud and proud. Pissing anywhere. Wiping ass with hand. Eating food with other hand. Small clues.

G.O.D. Generation, Operation, Destruction. I am living in the O and trying to stick around. I invoke Os big and small. Ds can wait for me, though they push through quickly in places where quickness and agression are expected from everyone, including the cousins of death.

Losing the anchor

When you spend months traveling with only a backpack to accompany you, strangely intimate connections develop between you and your possessions. So when you suddenly lose all of them, it is uncomfortably uprooting, like losing part of your diminished travel identity. Not to mention the painful pang of knowing that all the sentimental little items and memories you have painstakingly collected over the last three months are gone, vanished.

I guess this is the universe's (or Bangkok Airport's) way of telling me, "You're moving too fast, at a faster pace than your tired old pack could keep up with. Now it's just you kid, no inanimate backpack as a buddy, no comforts to pad your heavy, constant landings. You get to keep your wallet, passport, computer - all the important, costly stuff. But you lose everything you could cuddle up next to."

So this is my newest obstacle on a challenging course. I am being challenged to cut those materials bonds, which only exist because I am privileged in the first place. I can increase my weightlessness and its wisdom, which unifies in solidarity with the possession-less masses I encounter on this assignment. It is out of my hands so I have to figure out how for it to be a blessing, this dangling in the empty-handed from a wire over the middle of the planet.

And wow, oh yeah, damn, I am in Laos. I love this quiet country. 5 million countrypeople now, not 1 billion. The silence confirms the lower number of lives. Here is one of the few non-overpopulated places on the Earth, where one doesn't get the feeling that humans have totally conquered and where drastically beautiful birds, frogs and bugs don't feel quite so endangered. My org's work here focuses on enabling tribal people to protect and manage their precious traditional lands, as greedy Chinese business men and toothless Vietnamese loggers encroach daily to rape some of the still-bountiful resources in vulnerable little southern Laos.

I will visit these places for the next few days and collect stories, information, songs. It hurts that my voice recorder, along with the legends and melodies it has been capturing in so many tongues, is gone. Sorry, but they will have to live in my memory and in the mouths of those who still speak them and keep their flames alive. I'll write to let everyone know how the visit goes. Just me, no junk and no trunk.

Then there are bumpy roads and head pats...

And I feel degraded...patted on the head, my ass sore from torturous roads not meant for vehicles...

Photo journey

I am finally able to upload some travel photos!

This one is from Battambang, Cambodia. I was visiting a project where university students get to stay with villagers and learn about the rural life.

This next one is from the beautiful area in Andhra Pradesh where tribal people live...the whole area is going to be dammed to power a steel factory, including this gorgeous site. This area is also where I got severely depressed and almost had to come home....(but didn't)

This third one is a movement class at Bob's House of Rock, where we have a project for kids vulnerable to pedophiles to come and get creative. I have to get on a plane now but will try to post more photos in a couple days! I am going to the land of good (better) internet connections...SE Asia.

Rural celebrity

It's been a long week of signing autographs, being generally worshipped, and shaking hands with the cheering masses. Such is the unintentionally glamorous life of the NGO worker. I work to raise money for grassroots Indian NGOs, which work in some of the most remote villages to be found. When I visit, I am taken out out out to the countryside to see the projects being undetaken by the villagers.

It's amazing work -- organic agriculture, household biogas production systems (scoop in the poop and capture the gas, then cook the food!), small businesses started by women finding personal and financial freedom (who were previously rarely allowed out of the home, many didn't even know the name of their state or country)...

Many times, I have had the honor to be the first foreginer to visit. I am greeted like this: I am approached as I enter the village by 2 or 3 ladies holding a tray of red liquid which is lit on fire and the smoke blown around my head. Another lady comes up with two little cups, one with a yellow turmeric paste and the other a bright red powder. I dip my finger in the yellow cup, touch my third eye, then do the same with the red to give myself a colorful bindi. Then a lady or little girl comes up with a lime, or two or three, and hands them to me. Then yet another person comes up with a rose and puts it in my hair.

I should mention that this happens even when my organization hasn't found any funding or anything for their projects - it's just a random visit! I am brought inside the school or temple and made to sit in the one plastic chair behind a table which bears a tray of flowers and fruit with 10 smoldering sticks of incense stuck in a banana. All the villagers sit on the floor while I sit facing them. I am introduced by my local NGO partner in Tamil, and asked to address the village. By this time they have usually presented me with a shawl or plastic flower or some other trinket and everyone claps wildly every time my name is mentioned.

I have to stand up and think of something to say. Mostly I complement them on the beauty and peacefulness of the village and say that I am actually a normal, average person in my country. I say that I have come because I admire what they are doing to strengthen their community and that I hope my community can learn from it, for we lack such beautiful organization. They love that and clap and smile hugely. I ask them questions and finally it is time to go. I standup and the whole crowd of 200-300 women and children races towards me, holding out their hands to shake and pens to get autographs. The NGO partners act like my bodyguards and get me in the jeep to take pictures of the village projects (necessary to document for my job), go to another village and repeat.

I have to repeat this torturous proces up to 8 times a day. I loathe it with my whole heart. The race/class barriers so enforced, my inability to interact with people on a human level, the overly-ceremonious circumstances which are totally uncomfortable. I don't really want to visit India alone again - this kind of work would be a lot better with a partner because at least we could commiserate and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

But I am alone for now, and have gotten through it in one piece. I hate being treated like I am special.