Up Laos Creek w/o a Camera: Chapter 3, across the river.

In an even smaller wooden boat, Song (our Hmong tribal guide), Luisa and I voyaged 25 minutes down the Nam Ou river on Tuesday morning and got out on the far side at a Lao Lum (ethnicity of the lowland Lao farmers) village. There we stopped for a quick pit-stop to eat some bananas, chat to the local women and staring children, ask questions about what we saw, and for Song to buy a couple of packets of sweets (candies) 'to give to the children in the village'.

Luisa and I didn't approve of giving out sweeties to village children on multiple counts (their dental health being high on the list, followed by litter, and the encouragement of begging tourists for treats, and the bad image of tourists being rich powerful providers of desirable treasures that come from outside...etc)---but Song insisted that it was OK, and bought them anyway. As it was, I never gave out any, and it was more often Song himself who did so. As he was a Hmong tribesman and we were going to a Hmong village, I had to give his judgement the benefit of my doubt and go along with the flow.

From that moment onward I became 'Louis' (pronounced as if French) as it was much easier to say than 'Roy', so we were now Louis and Luisa, which of course tickled us.

Children and adults stared at us, but instead of staring back I smiled and nodded, which humanized us and forced them out of the stare into realising that oh yes, we were people too, just people, a little different, that's all. The children usually got shy and smiled back but hid their faces as I personally acknowledged each one; the adults would nod and break into a smile and speak a greeting, if I'd not already done so in their language. Sabai-dee (more or less, 'I wish you ease and well-being') is the generic greeting in Lao language, the lingua franca of the country and mother tongue to most urban and some rural ethnicities; in Hmong you say 'Nyozhong'. But a nod and a smile do the trick just about everywhere, breaking ice with all except the most shy or stunned staring children. But they'll probably smile next time.

We asked about the knitting one woman was doing; she was making a fishing net by hand. Not many places still do that, as they are cheap to purchase in nylon, but time-consuming to make yourself. Even for us to show a respectful curiosity in her craft clearly had an impact that contributed to her self-respect and pride rather than detracted from it, as we were clearly impressed and admiring. Of course, we could have had the opposite effect if we'd interacted differently, as, of course, a lot of tourists unintentionally do. We told her it was beautiful. It was.

I asked Song in detail about the rooves, which have fascinated me whenever I've passed villages ever since entering Laos. From a distance the most obvious sign of outside influence in remote villages is the replacement of (at present usually only some, not all) traditional thatched rooves with corrugated iron ones. I asked Song what the motivation was to replace them, and weren't corrugated iron rooves much hotter and noisier in the rain? He explained that it was a status symbol to replace your roof with a metal one, and that was the only motivation: too keep up with the neighbours in what is apparently already becoming a materially competitive environment, modern things being inherently impressive, possibly mostly because they are costly. Conspicuous consumption (which divides people, of course.) He said that yes, iron rooves are much too hot, and also, they are expenisive: whereas grass or bamboo rooves are absolutely free and 'from the natural'. I told him how thatched rooves are considered very attractive in England, but that people don't know how to make them any more, and so they have become very expensive indeed, and only the richer people can afford to maintain thatched rooves on their homes. He related this to the group of local women and they laughed, seeing the irony. It was a beautiful counter-development moment, where we could show people that they could think differently if they wanted and value what 'progress' is telling them they should discard, despite the fact that it's more practical, cheaper, and ecologically sound.