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!