Jason Devitt

Dignity, dignity, above all else dignity.

At the Mae Sa Elephant Camp, near Chiang Mai in Thailand.

"Over there is Luang Prabang," said Doua, our guide. "It’s so noisy!"

We were standing on top of Phou Luang, the highest peak in the area. Straining to hear the sounds of the bustling metropolis of Luang Prabang in the valley below, I thought I could just make out the putt-putt of a long-tail boat on the Mekong.

Not many travelers come to the Hmong village of Phou Luang Tai: a few each month in the high season. You can only get here on foot, and it’s a five-hour walk from Luang Prabang that ends with a steep 700-meter climb, the kind that hurts your calves on the way up and your knees on the way down. On this day it was over 30°C (86°F), which didn’t help. But the last stretch was beautiful, as we rose above the treeline and saw hills rolling to the horizon, covered in virgin forest.

We arrived near sundown at a burnt clearing near the summit. Thirty-five thatched huts were scattered across the slope below us. We sat on a bench next to Doua’s parents’ house and watched the sky turn as red as the clay, then fade to a deep, deep blue. The moon was almost full. To the South, in the valley below, we could see the lights of Luang Prabang, a town of 25,000 people that to the Hmong seems vast and remote.

There’s no electricity in Phou Luang Tai and inside the house it was utterly dark. Hmong houses are simple: wooden walls, thatched roof, dirt floor. Typically eight or nine people live, eat, and sleep together in one room. The toilet is a bush out back and there’s a bucket of cold water and a plastic scoop in one corner if you feel like a shower.

Doua’s brothers and sisters have all left home, and his parents don’t know what to do with the extra space.

A clay pot was propped over an open fire that was also the main source of light. The family lit some candles and had a torch as well. We shared a meal of beef noodles that we’d carried up with us. People here can seldom afford to eat meat (they trade their pigs and chickens for clothes and tools) so the meal was much appreciated.

The Hmong are subsistence farmers. They grow corn to feed their animals and dry rice to feed themselves. These are the only crops that will grow at this altitude, on a thirty-degree slope, in an inch or two of soil. And to grow even these crops they have to slash and burn the forests. Each family must find a patch of land large enough to support them for one year. They strip the trees, plant and harvest their crops, and then have to leave the that patch fallow for at least three years. Next year, they start again. Doua’s parents are both in their sixties, and won’t be able to keep this up much longer.

Once the meal was over, it was time for sleep. Lao radio carries two hours of programming in the Hmong language each day and people in Phou Luang Tai can listen on battery-operated radios, but there are no other distractions. People here still go to bed and wake up with the sun. Doua’s parents gave us their own bed, a wooden platform in one corner with some blankets laid over it. 

We woke at dawn, and I slipped out the back door to wander around. Three pigs were blocking the front door, waiting patiently to be fed. A rooster was marching around the village like a town crier. Men and women were already heading out to roam the surrounding countryside, looking for suitable places to slash and burn. Doua’s parents fed the pigs, the chickens, a very small horse, and finally us.

Around 8 am we heard the slow beating of a gong. The Hmong are animists, and the village shaman was beginning his morning ritual. We stood outside the shaman’s hut respectfully and peered in. He was sitting on a table with a cloth wrapped round his head, chanting steadily and jangling bells that were strapped to his wrist. Behind him, a second man was beating a gong. Doua explained that the shaman was riding into the spirit world to beg favors on behalf of the villagers; his self-induced trance would last an hour or two. Then he too would head out in search of forest to burn. No surplus here to pay for a layabout priest.

Nearby, Doua pointed to a hut with leaves hanging over its front door, a sign that the house was taboo. Probably because of an illness, the shaman had decreed that no-one should leave or enter the house for a week. (Quarantine; a good idea in the case of minor illnesses, successful enough to convince everyone - including the shaman - that the shaman knows what he is talking about.)

We walked through the rest of the village and saw people weaving baskets by hand, mending clothes, grooming a cock to lure a few wild hens.   

At the far end of the village, we came to the primary school, a shack about the same size as one of the Hmong houses with two blackboards and some very beat-up old benches.

As we walked up, there were fifty schoolkids playing outside. They will spend most of their lives in that shack, all ages in one classroom with one teacher and three or four books between them. Their chances are not good. Doua grew up in the same classroom, also with 50 other kids. Every year a few more dropped out. He was one of only two to finish high school.

Doua told us that many of these children have not left the village yet; they are too young to go with their parents. All they know of Luang Prabang are the ghostly lights in the valley below. They have no TV or internet, few books and magazines, only the two hours of Hmong radio to connect them to the outside world. They were both excited and afraid of us, as you can tell from the expressions on their faces in the photo above. One little girl burst out crying and would not stop.

Some westerners have a very romantic idea of peasant life. The Hmong don’t. For a thousand years, people in South-East Asia have dreamt of being ‘rescued from the mud’: getting work as a bureaucrat, a monk, a concubine, anything but toiling in a rice field. As far as most people in Phou Luang Tai are concerned, development can’t come fast enough.

Ironically, environmental activists feel the same, but for a different reason. Forests act like reservoirs, soaking up water in the rainy season and releasing it slowly during the dry season. Burn them down and you alternate between floods and droughts. In the worst cases, as in America during the Depression, the topsoil dries out completely and blows away. Things are not yet that serious in Laos, but river levels are falling and habitats are being lost. The Lao government and its international sponsors want to change the Hmong way of life, resettle the people to the cities, and restore the forest.

In ten years Phou Luang Tai will probably be gone. And though the pictures are pretty, and it was a privilege to come here, and even though I know that many of the people here will go from rural poverty to urban poverty, few will be truly sorry to see this little village die.

More photos from our visit here.

Phou Luang Tai: N19°59.976′ E102°08.899′ Z1023m

And now for something completely different.

In the People’s Democratic Republic of Lao, near the little town of Vang Vieng, there is a river called the Nam Song that you can float down in a rubber tube while drinking beer. This seemed like a very silly thing to do. Summer and I could hardly wait.

Tubing the Nam Song costs about $3. For this you - the ‘tuber’ - get one tube, a ride to the starting point, and if you are a miserable coward, a lifejacket. (In the dry season for most of its length the river is one foot deep.)

The tubes are old inner tubes from tractor tires: about three feet wide, black but heavily stained, patched and repatched, each patch presumably a mute tribute to a tuber who didn’t make it. A six inch-long steel valve pokes out of the tube wall and tries to get into your shorts. You throw the tube in the river, climb in so that your arms and legs are splayed across it, and let the current take you. That’s it.

We were about to travel four kilometers in four hours; an average speed of one kilometer per hour, if you need help. Occasionally we would slip down ‘rapids,’ where rapid meant two kilometers per hour. At other times the river broadened and deepened and we seemed to stop completely.

Where the water was deep enough, there were swimming holes with makeshift bars, dance music, jumping platforms, and even ziplines. Backpackers taking a break from the spiritual part of their South-East Asian journeys could strip off, tank up, and ride a zipline that stopped dead halfway across the river, sending them belly-first into the water.

The biggest party was just a few hundred meters from the starting point. There, at the foot of the stark grey limestone cliffs that line the west bank of the Nam Song, someone had hacked a clearing in the jungle and built a bar, a restaurant, and a terrifyingly flimsy-looking forty foot-high jumping platform, all out of bamboo. A loudspeaker powered by car batteries pumped out hip-hop and dance music that could be heard from hundreds of meters away, and dozens of mostly twenty-something kids were drinking and diving.

What a wonderful location for a slasher movie, I thought. There is even a perfect Lao backstory. Forty per cent of the population are animist and believe that dozens of spirits govern our minds and bodies. What if the spirits of a dead sociopath had taken refuge in the jungle at the foot of the cliffs? At that very moment, over the crackling loudspeaker, Dolores O’Riordan began to sing Zombie. I saw kids being decapitated by ziplines, crushed as the bamboo towers collapsed, sucked out of their tubes into angry frothing water …

We drifted by. Dolores slowly faded. I explained to Summer that the strangled cry that she and her highschool friends had tried so hard to imitate - "Zuh-Om-Bye, Zuh-Om-Bye, Zuh-Om-Bye! Ay-uh! AY-UH!" - was not a clever vocal trick, but a dumb Limerick accent.

Around the next bend there was a much simpler structure, a wooden platform with a flat roof. A group of locals were enjoying a day off; one had a guitar and they were singing in Lao. When they saw us coming, they switched to English and shouted to us to join in. Only then did we realize that they were singing "No Woman No Cry."

Picture a nearly naked chalk-white Irishman floating in an inner tube, channeling Bob Marley, backed by a Lao choir. Summer paddled away frantically.

Presently (seems like the right word to describe a vague interval of time on an epic riverine journey), we saw three children standing by the river bank, waving and shouting ‘hello,’ as little kids do all over South-East Asia. We waved and shouted back, but something was wrong, because the kids were getting irritated. Then we realized that they were calling out ‘Beer Lao, Beer Lao,’ and trying to sell us booze. Thirsty, but reluctant to buy alcohol from schoolchildren, we floated past in a disapproving manner.

All along the river we heard the cry of ‘Beer Lao, Beer Lao,’ echoing off the limestone cliffs. Some people had rickety waterfront bars, some just had a sixpack and a cheery smile. As inner tubes are not very maneuverable, the bartenders each had a rope tied to a bamboo pole which they cast into the water for us to grab. Then they hauled us ashore, sold us a beer, and shoved us back into the water. Truly, these were Fishers of Men.

At the next liquor-stop, we bought a bottle each. 640 ml (just over a pint) of beer cost $1. We drifted on, into the Heart of Bliss.

Up to a point. Spending a few hours with your toes in the hot sun and your ass in cold water is one way to learn about the principle of refrigeration, with your blood playing the role of freon. And a bladder full of Beer Lao should not be immersed in cold water, if you are too old or too uptight to pee in your shorts. By the last hour we and other tubers were trying to speed things up.

Techniques of propulsion include kneeling or lying face down on top of your tube while pulling yourself through the water (not wise if you are losing your hair and self-conscious about it); the one-handed side paddle (illustrated above, with a foot-tow); the backstroke (recommended); any of the above while wearing flip-flops or sandals on your hands; and of course free-riding, or getting a tow from another tube or passing kayak. Combinations are also possible, where couples and very close friends lock arms or legs and paddle simultaneously (may cause bickering).

At the finishing point, young kids appeared again, up to their waists in water and offering to drag us ashore. A white adult being hauled up a beach in an inner tube by a team of Lao children is a strange little parody of colonialism. While we were watching this, a Lao man stepped into the water, took off all his clothes, yawned and began to bathe. All around him tubers drifted by, and children played or touted for business. His scrawny ass is the last thing I remember before we touched land.

This is a picture of a nine hundred year-old dam with a very big breach in it; a breach that has brought a lot of suffering to almost 20,000 people.

The rulers of Angkor did not just build temples. They also built very large-scale irrigation systems centered on dams like this one. Tens of thousands of slave laborers heaped earth to create the walls of reservoirs that were relatively shallow, but very long and wide - this dam held a reservoir seven kilometers long. Angkor’s economy was based on rice, and her irrigation system enabled three rice harvests every year. One rice harvest per annum means subsistence; two mean profit. Three and you can pay for Angkor Wat.

Remarkably, people in this area - Balang Commune - were able to maintain the dam for almost a thousand years and consistently produce two rice harvests every year, if not three.

Then in the 1970s civil war and famine came to Cambodia. To supplement their diet, local people began to drill holes in the dam to help them catch fish from the reservoir. This was not a good idea. In 1994 the dam broke, and about one thousand families in Balang Commune were thrown back one thousand years, to one rice harvest per annum, subsistence, and poverty. Two neighboring communes were also affected - almost 20,000 people in all. They made several attempts to repair the dam, but it was beyond them.

Mean Someth, a Buddhist monk at Wat Phreah Enkosa in Siem Reap, is trying to rebuild the Balang dam. He and ten of his fellow monks started an NGO called Human Resource and Natural Development, or HRND. With a budget of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year, they have developed several successful education and training programs to alleviate poverty in Balang and to deal with its effects - poor healthcare, drug abuse, domestic violence, and more. The best solution would be to fix the dam. But that would cost $60,000.

So why can’t 20,000 people come up $60,000?
The people in Balang are regarded as very poor even by other Cambodians; and the average income in Cambodia is less than $1 per day.

Families typically own a hectare of land - why don’t they borrow against that? Like 80% of the land in Cambodia, theirs is not registered. No title, no capital. And while international organizations have helped Cambodia set up a land registry, most people can’t afford the miscellaneous transaction costs that the staff demand.

Why doesn’t the government finance this project?
Probably because it is too expensive in terms of dollars per vote. For $10,000 they can build a road that is highly visible to a hundred thousand people, whatever its real economic value. It’s not as if this never happens in the US.

They could borrow against future income. What about the World Bank, and in particular the Asia Development Bank?
I suspect that this is too small. The World Bank won’t lend you $60,000 for the same reason that your local branch of Bank of America won’t lend you $60. I may be wrong about this.

Ah, what about microcredit? Like Grameen Bank? I suspect that this is too big. That suggests a form of market failure, and again I may be wrong. There certainly aren’t enough potential sources of credit.

Summer and I have made a contribution to the Balang dam project through Humantranslation.org, the charity that introduced us to Mean Someth. If you’d like to do so, there’s a PayPal link here. Specify that it’s for the dam project. (It’s a very new charity without a full range of payment systems yet; if you don’t have a PayPal account, get in touch with me directly.) And if you have any other suggestions about how to finance  projects like this - market-friendly or market-distorting - please let me know.